Take One Action! #TOAFF19

Tags

documentaries, nablopomo, take one action

The Take One Action Film Festival returned to Inverness, once again falling on a weekend that I’m working so I could only squeeze in two films again this year. Handily, I’m once again managing to add to my documentary feature film tally with these films even if I wasn’t able to lean quite as much towards the environmental films as I would like. Though Ghost Fleet is secondarily about environmental issues because it is over-fishing of waters close to Thailand that caused the boats to have to go out further and further out for longer and longer periods in the first place.

Facing the Dragon

Facing the Dragon follows the parallel stories of politician Nilofar and broadcast journalist Shakila, in post-US-withdrawal Afghanistan as they struggle to balance the responsibility they feel to the people they represent against the need to keep their children safe from harm. Both threads of the film really underline the fragility of democracy and the position of women in Afghanistan, alongside the constant danger that all politicians and journalists in the country face but which is even more intense for women in public life.

Director Sedika Majadidi is an Afghani woman herself, so understands intimately the pressures both her subjects face as women in public life. (This creates a certain solidarity and trust between director and subject that makes for a much more intimate portrait of both women.) Having spent a substantial part of her childhood and youth in the US she also has enough of an outside view to allow her to step back from the details of these lives and show how they fit into the bigger picture of life in Afghanistan.

My only real criticism of this film was that the copy that was screened in Inverness had terrible audio quality. There was a coating of hiss and crackle over almost the entire film that hung over it like an aural cloud of dust.

Ghostfleet

Ghost Fleet follows the work of the Thai NGO Labour Defence Network whose work started in trying to protect children from being drawn into sweatshop labour, and has evolved through helping men who’ve escaped from slavery in the fishing industry – mostly getting compensation for horrible industrial injuries – into straight-up rescuing people. We mostly follow Patima Tungpuchayakul one of the organisation’s co-founders, as she travels to various islands in Indonesia to try and bring home formerly enslaved fishermen home. Patima has this really calm presence – perhaps born of her certainty that this is the work she’s meant to do – that makes her a very reassuring presence, both to the former fishermen and to us as viewers. One of the strengths of her work is the trust built with the communities of those islands, the people who live around the predatory companies bases, who know how dangerous they are, often disapprove of them but feel helpless to stop them.

There something utterly heart-breaking about those men who’ve escaped from enslavement only to be stranded in Indonesia for decades, who’ve built lives and made families, yet remain desperately home sick. Their longing for home is almost palpable, but having lost most of their native tongue, many of them feel that they cannot possibly go. The question that comes up time and again is ‘do you want to go home?’ The three men they bring back from one island demonstrate the range of reactions to that question, the first man seems resigned as though he has nothing to lose either way, the second man is conflicted – reluctant to abandon the family he has made there, desperately longing for the home he left behind – while the third man is eager and delighted – literally jumping at the chance to return home.

The director of the Take One Action film festival does little introductions before all the films and she was careful to warn us that this film would be distressing and that we might find it hard-going. As a film about modern slavery it was indeed a distressing topic, and a deeply moving film, but I also found it to be an intensely hopeful film. I’ve had quite an intense couple of months documentary wise and while I’ve seen a lot of very good films many of them left me feeling sad, angry or both at once. This film however, left me feeling inspired and empowered, which I guess is the whole point of this film festival in the first place.

IFF19 @EdenCourt – Highlights

Tags

france, iff, nablopomo, usa

Last but not least, we come to the ‘Highlights’ thread at the Inverness Film Festival. I only saw two of the films in this section, for all the reasons I’ve talked about before, but they were in fact both definitely highlights of the festival. Films that I’m unequivocally glad that I went to see and that I’ll definitely be disappointed to not see collecting some gongs come awards season.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la Jeune Femme en Feu)

This one most definitely deserved to be categorised as a festival highlight. The festival programmer introduced it as his favourite film of the year, and while I wouldn’t go that far, I’d certainly expect it to be a top five contender.

The film is lit beautifully, with at least half the film taking place at night and being lit by candlelight and firelight. There’s something about that golden light that gives the film a particular intimacy. As though we’re stepping into a hidden world, the world of eighteenth century women that only exists when men aren’t around, when they don’t have to perform. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that was quite so much about the female gaze. Marianne is forever gazing at Héloïse, first as an artist, then as a lover, but Héloïse is always gazing back, learning the artist as the artist learns her.

There’s also something decidedly gothic about the whole endeavour, the lies and misdirection, the mysterious death of Héloïse’s sister, the resolution of Sophie’s personal problem, the doomed romance and all those intimate moments in flickering light with dancing shadows. Thwarted love and old obsessions abound.
The acting is superb throughout, with the four central characters putting in very different but very nuanced performances, although Adèle Haenel is particularly compelling as the enigmatic Hèloïse.

It was also, oddly enough, one of the very few films I’d heard anything about before the festival programme was released, and the trailer only made it look more intriguing so it became a must see. I’ve never seen any of Céline Sciamma’s other films, but on the strength of this one I clearly need to track them down.

The Report

This film could quite easily be seen as a companion piece to Official Secrets, although it didn’t make me anywhere near as angry as that film did. I guess that over the years I’ve seen enough documentaries and fiction films that tell parts of this story that seeing it all laid out in one place was just depressing rather than enraging.

It must have been around late 2007, early 2008 when I first heard about ‘enhanced interrogation’, those weasel words that allowed both the US intelligence services and the US administration to tell themselves that what they were doing wasn’t actually torture. It was an innocent enough email with a link to the advert for Amnesty International’s new anti-torture campaign. It wasn’t, as I expected aimed at somewhere in South America, or perhaps one of China’s infamous minority crack-downs. Instead it was much closer to home. (If you feel up to it, look up ‘Waiting for the Guards’ or ‘Stuff of Life’ on Youtube, they burned themselves into my brain at the time.) So the hardest part of this film was not that the CIA did these things, it’s the way that they cling stubbornly to the lie that these techniques work, despite the overwhelming evidence, even in the face their own reports to the contrary.

Over the intervening years more and more details have trickled out into the cultural zeitgeist, so that it feels like old news, that we already know that the CIA has done – and doubtless continues to do – unspeakable things. Guantanamo Bay has been abbreviated to Gitmo and become a byword for the sins and failings of an administration – a particularly paranoid and jingoistic period in US history – and extraordinary rendition a veil that allows the maintenance of the lie that the US doesn’t use torture.

Over and over in the film we hear variations on that early legal justification the CIA gets: it’s only legal if it works. It’s both fascinating and horrifying just what can be justified if the stakes are high enough. The ends and the means indeed.

IFF19 @EdenCourt – New World Cinema

Tags

australia, nablopomo, south africa

I presume the ‘New Australian Cinema’ strand was originally intended to have more than two films in it, otherwise I’m not sure quite why it wasn’t folded into the ‘New World Cinema’ strand. (Does Australian cinema not count as ‘world cinema’? Apparently not, apparently it needs to be in a language other than English. In that case consider the emphasis changed here not ‘New World Cinema’ but ‘New World Cinema’.) However, the only film I saw in the ‘New World Cinema’ strand shared a lot of thematic similarities with the two films from the ‘New Australian Cinema’ strand, so I’m reviewing them all together.

The Nightingale

This film is a lot. It also needs pretty much every trigger warning imaginable. (Rape. Murder. Child Harm. Casual Homophobia. Pretty much every last white character is racist to a greater or lesser extent.) I was expecting it to be brutal but it was so much more brutal than I was expecting. Several people – maybe as many as half a dozen – walked out of the film and I was very nearly one of them. (I spent a good twenty minutes holding my coat in my arms, braced for the final thing that would cause me to lose faith in the film completely.) The first forty-five minutes or so of the film feel about twice as long as the rest of it, and if you can get through that then the rest of it is merely hard going as opposed to harrowing. When faced with the festival voting slip for this film I felt the need for a whole new category – how do you sum up a film that was clearly very good, and probably quite an important film, but which nonetheless you didn’t enjoy? That perhaps the whole point of the film was to be un-enjoyable.

All that said. It’s a beautifully shot movie. The forest feels like a character in it’s own right, dangerous, fickle and indifferent. It’s pretty rare to see an Australian film that’s not set in either urban Australia or in the dust of the outback. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Australian film where the weather was so unrelentingly grey and wet, and I’ve definitely never seen a film set in Tasmania.

Clare and Billy are the emotional heart of the film, both complex and flawed characters, they hate each other on sight, but over time and through adversary come to form a somewhat co-dependent friendship. Which sounds pat and heart-warming, but is actually much messier and far harder won, given that both characters have been thoroughly traumatised by their uncomfortably similar life experiences. (They’ve both been forcibly taken from their homes, relocated in a new life they have little control over, and seen their families murdered in front of them.) We’re reminded throughout that neither of them are speaking their first language – Irish and Palawa Kani respectively. The decision not to subtitle either of them when they’re not speaking English is an interesting one, that emphasises the use of shared minority language both to include and exclude, along with acting as a reminder of just how wide a gap in experience and culture Clare and Billy are communicating across.

The film is a damning indictment of colonialism in Australia, both the convict transportation and the treatment of the various aboriginal peoples who were there first. The colony where we start in the film mostly contains soldiers (who are brutalised by their superiors, each other and the whole structure of the military), convicts and recently freed transportees (who are brutalised by the soldiers, the forced labour and the precarious nature of what few rights they have) and the aboriginals (who are brutalised by both the other groups, have almost all been taken from their families, forced to live by white rules but must live outside white society) and who almost all drink far too much in a vain attempt to cope with the grinding dehumanisation of the whole situation. When we get to Laurenceton it may look much more shiny and ‘civilised’ – with it’s neat houses and cultivated fields – but scratch the surface and whatever colonisation has brought to the area it sure as heck isn’t civilisation.

Judy and Punch

Judy and Punch (Foulkes, 2019) manages to both deal with some overlapping themes (revenge, child murder, violence against women, murderously toxic communities) while being a completely different film in tone and message. Set in some nebulous time frame – possibly Elizabethan – and equally nebulous location – probably England but no two people have the same accent so who knows – but fundamentally none of that really matters. (The soundtrack for this film owes something to A Knights Tale (Helgeland, 2001) in attitude if not quite in sheer gleeful anachronism.) This is a Punch and Judy show so the characters are mostly archetypes, fleshed out and made human and messy. This is a morality tale. It’s twisted and strange and very funny. It is, in short: a delight.

It’s a film that is both very old fashioned and very much of the present moment. An exploration of what the casual brutality of the traditional Punch and Judy show might be teaching the children watching it, and also a mirror held up to the dangers of mob rule and trial-by-social media. As a film with actual witch hunts, it forces its audience to consider whose voices are being amplified and whose are being silenced. And it does it all while making the audience laugh and cheer along with it.

(Oddly enough, both The Nightingale and Judy and Punch share a Sound Designer, Robert MacKenzie, who has done excellent work on both films.)

Flatland

How to describe this film? It’s a film about love and about loyalty, what it means to belong and what it means to be a family. It also deals with the open wound that remains around the ‘Rainbow Nation’ and how much that really exists and for who. It’s a film about violence – both sexual and racial – and power. Who has it, who doesn’t and what the changes in those dynamics mean in real terms rather than pretty idealised words.

It’s a film about who we think we are and how close to or far away from that image we actually are. About what it really means to be free. It’s a very good film, but it’s not a film that offers easy answers for any of its characters or any of the questions it raises.

(All three films can be seen as having the same theme, but whether you read that as ‘men are terribly poor stuff’ or three different women declaring that that which does not kill them makes them stronger – or for that matter both at once – is very much left up to the viewer.)

IFF19 @EdenCourt – Documentaries

Tags

documentaries, iff, italy, scotland, syria, usa

This year’s film festival was a rather more spread out affair than it usually is, which for me had one main impact: it meant that although there were more than double the number of documentaries showing than there were last year, I could see almost all of them! Despite being minorly thwarted by a screening copy not turning up in time, I still managed to see a pretty varied selection of documentaries this year. If this year’s documentaries had a theme, it was telling stories that were more complex than they initially appeared. Documentaries that let you think you knew where they were going – that you knew these stories or recognised these archetypes – and then turned around and showed you that they were much messier and complex then they at first appeared.

The Cave

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve seen too many documentaries about Syria in the last few years. This one is about an underground hospital in Ghouta – near Damascus – and the film follows hospital manager (and mostly trained paediatrician) Dr Amani and her mostly female staff as they fight against the odds to tend to their patients and avoid getting blown up. It’s a fascinating concept – the full blown engineering works going on underground in the early parts of the film does more to demonstrate the organisation and extent of the rebellion than any claims or stats could – with likeable protagonists that you can really get behind and emphasise with, told in a compelling way.

I’ve seen dramatic, beautifully shot, drone footage of destroyed cities – of Raqqa, Homs, Aleppo and now Damascus – and the question that fills my head afterwards is no longer, how can the people possibly survive this? Nor even if the rebels still think the uprising was worth it. Instead I have to ask: what on earth Assad thinks he’s going to win at the end of this? Sure, he may win the war but at what cost, what will be left for him to rule over at the end of all this?

Scheme Birds

Often in a film like this the synopsis would say that Gemma dreams of something more than her estate, but Gemma doesn’t. Gemma is happy, Gemma belongs, Gemma loves and is loved, and she can’t imagine leaving this place. Gemma is fundamentally really young, barely more than a kid when she has her own baby. Yet in a way it is that same baby that makes her grow up and look beyond the world she’s always known. We learn early on that her own mother was a drug addict and hasn’t been part of her life since she was about 18 months old. Oddly enough having the baby makes her less, rather than more, empathetic towards her mother because she can’t imagine walking away from him. It’s wanting more for that little boy – more than fighting and drinking and prison and teen parenthood – that motivates her to change things.

(As a side note, there’s something about Amy that unnerves me. I recognise her, not her specifically – her mum’s probably my age – but she looks like someone else, someone I knew years ago. Someone I was at school with, or worked a summer job with, or a friend of a friend. There’s something about the structure of her face, the mannerisms, we never see her cry on screen but I can picture just how she’d look when she does.)

Be Natural

‘Be Natural’ was the instruction that pioneering film director Alice Guy-Blanche gave to her actors so often that she had it put on a sign on the wall of her studio in two foot high letters. Naturalism is in fact the thread that ties all her films together, despite being one of the first filmmakers to use film to tell stories rather than simply documenting activities, there is none of the stage-y overacting we now associate with early films. Her films exemplify the experimental and daring nature of early filmmaking along with the demonstrating the opportunities available to women in cinema before it was taken seriously as an art form.

The film is a systematic and detailed attempt to re-insert Guy-Blache back into the narrative that she has been systematically removed from. The film does an excellent job of illustrating a story that is by its very nature mostly about dusty archives and long-distance phone-calls in a compelling manner. The use of map graphics to fill in the gaps, really helps illustrate how often both the researchers (and Guy-Blache herself) criss-crossed the US and Europe trying to track down her films. The film has clearly been a labour of love for it’s own director, but the finished object is a compelling and convincing argument in it’s own right.

Shooting the Mafia

This was by far my favourite documentary of all those shown at this year’s festival. Photographer Letizia Battaglia is such a compelling presence that the viewer is drawn further and further into the story of her life and work. Having come to photography later in life – she took it up at the age of 40 in the midst of getting a divorce – her life experience straddles considerable political and social change in Italy and in Sicily in particular. Despite being in her eighties, Battaglia remains an intensely charismatic person – with such passion and rage lurking just under the surface – that it is no surprise that she still draws people to her with a fierce devotion. Through both her words and her pictures, she paints a vivid picture of what it was like to live in Palermo under Mafia rule.

The photos themselves have a stark and compelling beauty to them. They confront the viewer with the impact of the Mafia’s crimes. Not only in the photographs of crime scenes but also in the faces of the people around the bodies. The pictures of poverty, deprivation and grief tell their own story too. This is no Hollywood glamourized view of the Mafia, but a messy story of a messy world. One thing that Battaglia seems at pains to point out is that it is a mistake to think of her work as merely a historical artefact. Certainly things are much better in Palermo, but the fight against the Mafia goes on.

Silent Film Double Feature @InvFilmFest

Tags

david allison, laurel and hardy, neil brand, silent film

This year’s film festival featured not just one, but two silent film festival events. I’m not sure if this year’s festival offerings were disproportionately serious in topic in general, or just my choices were not the most uplifting options. However, both silent film events were spots of – much needed – light relief and joy for this viewer. They were both very different in tone and style – from the comedy shorts of Laurel and Hardy to the feature-length ‘historical’ drama of Rob Roy.

Laurel and Hardy

I’ve always had a soft spot for Laurel and Hardy. I’ve no idea how I first ended up watching a Laurel and Hardy film, only that I loved them. (Let us never speak of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, but it probably was the cause.) Their talkies were in pretty regular circulation on the television when I was a kid, burning Dance of the Cuckoos into our collective unconscious. (It was nostalgia watching Laurel and Hardy early one Sunday morning on BBC 2, as a teen that led me to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the first time – for years my favourite film.) But I don’t think I ever saw any of their silent films until I was an adult.

I’d developed a soft spot for German Expressionist filmmaking at uni but I didn’t really fall in love with silent film until I saw my first silent with a live musical accompaniment. It was a grey and miserable Sunday afternoon, in a large tent, in the middle of – I think – Glasgow Green, and Neil Brand was talking about – and vamping along on the piano to – a Buster Keaton film. The General if memory serves me right.

In the decade and a bit since then, I’ve seen a lot of different silent films, with a lot of different accompanists, but this was the first time since then that I’ve seen another silent accompanied by Neil Brand.

Watching Laurel and Hardy always makes me feel like a kid again, in the best way, – that giant custard pie fight sequence! – and this was no exception. There’s something so pure and simple about their humour; that means that their humour still works so perfectly and that allowed them to make the transition to sound in a way so few of their contemporaries did. The films may have been silent but I could hear their voices, clear as day, less in my head than in my heart.

Rob Roy

Second up, was the now traditional visitor from the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival tour, with it’s specially written score. This is the second year in a row we’ve had a silent movie with a new score from multi-instrumentalist David Allison and he’s exceeded himself here. I must admit to being a bit of a purist when it comes to silent film scores, if I’m seeing them live, I tend to prefer a live improvised piano score. I find alternative scores a bit hit and miss generally, either they are amazing and an utter joy to experience (the klezmer band that accompanied Salt for Svanetia were particularly awesome), or they just don’t work at all (looking at you, Moroder). But this definitely fell into the former category. It was adventurous, charming and very different – Allison appeared to be using an iPad as a synthesiser at one point – and most importantly it played the film straight. It would have been very easy to make this film seem silly, but instead it drew the audience into the story focusing on it’s earnestness and pathos, so that we were charmed rather than amused by it’s more ridiculous moments.

IFF19 @EdenCourt – Down The Rabbit Hole

Tags

documentaries, iff, nablopomo, scottish

Down the Rabbit Hole (Webster, 2019) is one of the many documentaries showing as part of this year’s Inverness Film Festival, but despite being one of the shorter documentaries I feel it deserves a post of it’s own. Partly due to it having an accompanying photography exhibition but also due to it being so very different from all the rest of it’s compatriots.

First of all, the photography exhibition – which will be lurking around on the 2nd Floor of Eden Court for the rest of the month – which I saw and enjoyed for the first time before seeing the film, but gained a whole new level of appreciation for after having seen the film. For some reason, until I saw this exhibition, I had no real conception that stalactites being wet. Given how they’re formed it makes sense that they would be, but I guess I also thought of them as being wet previously but not currently. I didn’t really think of them as being still-growing, fragile works in progress. Both beautiful and alien, they were created on a timescale beyond human comprehension, like so many things underground they defy so much of what we imagine to be true about the world.

It exhibition location seems unlikely, being up on the first circle where casual visitors are unlikely to pass by, but in fact the location is thematically perfect. Due to the unusual shape of the building, the roof space over the exhibition area forms a sort of cave, especially once the sun has set, placing you in a carefully lit space that only adds to the atmospheric nature of the photographs. If you can, I recommend heading to the middle of the balcony and sitting on the floor with your back to glass wall, looking up at the photographs. It really helps to make you feel like you’re there in the cave with them.

On to the documentary itself, which started as a short about caving and mental health and evolved as the director realised he couldn’t do the subject justice to the subject in such a short run time. The subject of the film – wildlife photographer James Roddie – is refreshingly open and practical, both when he talks about the risks and rewards of both climbing and caving, and especially when he talks about his own struggles with an eating disorder. Particularly when he talks about the way that climbing went from being a respite from his mental health issues to being an enabler of the condition and how he’s recently been able to claim the activity back as something he enjoys and can do for fun rather than in a constant consuming quest for ‘better’.

(Being mildly claustrophobic myself, I’m fascinated by these underground worlds, but would absolutely not cope with going down there myself. That Swiss Cheese crawl is literally the stuff of nightmares! I do love the idea of being a daring adventurer, but I’m definitely not cut out for it.)

The film provoked a lot of the same feelings in me that Free Solo did when I saw it at the start of this year. Although I did always have the reassurance that I’d seen both Roddie and Webster, alive and well introducing the film, those vertigo inducing moments where you genuinely fear for their lives are somehow worse for them being people I’ve actually met. (The creative arts scene in Inverness is pretty small, so there’s a lot of crossover in people you meet and work with over the years.) In a sense it feels like something of a companion piece, bookending a year of documentaries for me. That moment in Uamh nam Fior Iongantais (Cave of True Wonders) where they decide to turn back, feels like a more emotionally honest reflection of the moment in Free Solo when Honnold comes back down off El Capitan. Sometimes you need a friend to give you permission to make the sensible decision.

IFF19 @Edencourt – Magaret Tait 100

Tags

art films, short films

The Margaret Tait centenary celebrations kicked off here in Inverness at last year’s film festival, so it seem fitting that those celebrations should draw to a close here almost a year to the day on. Much like last year’s screening my attendance wasn’t in my original film festival plan. This time round I was supposed to be seeing a documentary called Aquarela, which didn’t turn up – or rather it did, but they copy didn’t work and the replacement didn’t arrive in time for the screening – as though the universe had opinions about my cinematic priorities.

Without a doubt the two triptychs by Margaret Tait herself – Three Portraits (1951) and Garden Pieces (1998) – which bookended the collection were the highlights, but nonetheless there were some clever little films in there.

My favourites of the rest of the films were the ones that interacted directly with the source material The Forest of Everything (Carey/Kirkup, 2019) is consciously interacting with Aerial (Tait, 1974) playing with conventions and expectations raised by the original film and also with the concept of play itself by involving a bunch of children in the making of it. (Given that a common complaint about modern art is ‘a kid could have made that’ it feels delightful that here some kids really did make that.) Both The Bravest Boat (Smith/Wood, 2019) and Houses (For Margaret) (Fowler, 2019) feel almost as though they could have been Tait films, despite the fact that they’re the films that most openly interact with the concept of Tait as part of the archive, as part of a film-making and artistic canon.

I also enjoyed Shoe Leather (Storey Gordon, 2019) although more as a work of visual art than as a short film. It was a clever idea, and I liked what he’d done with it, on execution, stylistics and metaphoric levels. The way it pulls back the curtain on the ‘magic’ film-making, exposing the lie of the ‘perfect shot’. I just don’t think it worked as a film.

It was quite interesting to hear from some of the directors/artists in the Q&A afterwards that the original brief had been very open except on one point – they were all supposed to be 1 minute films! They all failed the original brief, though as the curator noted at that point they couldn’t have run the kind of screening they’d just had if the artists had stuck to that. Might have made for an interesting art installation but it would have been something entirely different.

I was interested to note that despite the variety of mediums the films were shot in – HD, SD and 16mm – they almost all had a similar slight graininess to the picture quality that I associate with footage shot on video and mini-DV. Combined with the consistent use of 4:3 picture size throughout, it gave the whole proceeding a very 90s feel. As though all the artists consciously or unconsciously were channelling that era of her work.

As I noted in last year’s review, her short films really highlight for me what so many other art filmmakers are striving for and failing to reach. As a result it was all the more interesting – and a pleasant distraction during the films that didn’t work for me – to see a collection of short art films that wore their influence so blatantly on their sleeves.

IFF19 @EdenCourt – Bridging The Gap: Opportunities

Tags

documentaries, nablopomo, short films

Tonight is the official start of the Inverness Film Festival, so I kicked off my film viewing with my traditional attendance of a short film screening. Bridging the Gap is in many ways the perfect confluence of my film festival interests combining short films and documentaries. (The only real complaint I have about this year’s scheduling choices – given that this year it will allow me to see six out of the seven documentaries showing – is that there a lot of short film screenings scheduled across from documentaries so I’ll be seeing less short films that I would otherwise.) I always look forward to the Bridging the Gap screenings because the quality is always so high, even the ones that I personally consider to be duds are usually well made. As much as I think that five to ten minutes is the perfect duration for a short film, I do give a bit more leeway to documentaries and the ten to fifteen minutes that these span was pretty much spot on. Leaving the audience wanting more time with the more compelling protagonists and not out staying their welcome for the less compelling ones. I’d go so far as to call this a vintage year for BTG documentaries.

Altsasu

Altsasu is a Basque town where during the annual festival, several youths and a couple of off-duty civil guards had a contretemps that ended up with seven youths in prison for terms between two and sixteen years, on terrorism charges. The case is widely considered a miscarriage of justice – and the imprisoned as political prisoners – with sizeable annual protest coinciding with the local festival that marks the anniversary of the events. The film largely follows one of the mothers as she faces the anniversary and campaigns to free her son and his compatriots. The segments shot during the festival give everything else and strange and slightly unsettling quality, underlining in it’s own way the cultural differences between Basque country and surrounding Spain.

Hydebank

This was my favourite of all the films in this year’s screening. It’s set in HMYOC Hydebank, which has, for reasons that were never explained, a flock of sheep that prisoners care for as part of their rehabilitation. Our protagonist Ryan is clearly a violent and damaged young man, but the care and tenderness he shows the animals in his care is just as obvious. He’s by far at his most articulate when talking about the sheep. It seems that its as much a revelation to him as to anyone else that he’s capable of something other than destruction. (I suppose, in a way, working with sheep must be oddly cathartic for someone like him, they couldn’t care less about who he is and what he’s done, and screaming and posturing will have pretty much no effect on them.) The scene where he’s working away in the dark, with only a headlamp for company, fellow prisoners shouting abuse down at him from the cells above, that feels terribly metaphorical for the other work he’s carrying out. Learning to control himself in the face of provocation, and equally to face the demon of the crime that put him there in the first place.

My Name is Anik

My Name is Anik is a very sweet and compelling film about a Kurdish woman living in Istanbul and the arrival of her granddaughter from Scotland to stay with her and learn Kurdish. Grandmother and granddaughter are performing a dance throughout the film negotiating the differences between what the younger woman wants and needs from her grandmother, and what Anik wants and needs to pass on to Bircan. What is most obvious in their arguments and stubborn silences, and the quiet tenderness of hair-care is how fundamentally alike they are, however different their opinions and perspectives may be.

There is a great deal unspoken in this film, so much of the politics of being a minority language speaker, of cultural and linguistic preservation and inheritance, plays out in their discussions and arguments without really being discussed head on. There’s also a great deal said obliquely about what it means to be an immigrant and what it means to go home, whether a meaningful going home is possible for either of them.

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

This film was nominated for a BAFTA and I can kind of see why, without agreeing with the decision. On the surface it’s a charming and whimsical film about a man with a traumatic brain injury and his slightly eccentric but warm and cheerful wife, but underneath, it’s a deeply sad film about what love can endure and survive, and the toll that his condition takes on both of them. The slow isolation that is settling around them as the quirks of his condition gradually drive friends and family away, placing more and more of the strain on Lindsay alone.

If comedy is tragedy plus time then this is the opposite, with what at first seems like a funny side effect of Paul’s injury becomes increasingly sad as it reveals how little remains of the man he was before.

Vivir Bailando

The summary of this film makes it seem much more grim and bleak than the actual film turns out to be. It’s a joyful and hopeful film about getting a second chance at love and finding joy in unexpected places. Widowed Cari and her new beau Vincente are the last inhabitants of their village, but instead of this being a source of sorrow or loneliness for them, it’s an opportunity and an excuse to be as eccentric as they like. To play loud pasodobles in the street and dance in the middle of the road, treating their village like their own playground and living life to the full. Dancing their lives away indeed.

I suspect that this is the first time I’ve seen one of these screenings without being handed an explanatory blurb sheet, but as I only tend to read those during screenings if I don’t like the films – a sneaky peak at the duration to see how much longer I need to endure – I really can’t complain that I didn’t notice until I came to write them up afterwards. I did have fun trying to guess this year’s theme – perhaps absence or displacement, there are a lot of people who aren’t where they’re meant to be in these films – but it turned out to be opportunities. Initially I thought didn’t really fit – though the other tag that they have ‘red’ fits even less – but the more I think about it the more it works. To a greater or lesser extent, all the films are about second chances, the needing of them or the getting of them.

Trailers for all of this year’s films are available to watch online on the Scottish Documentary Institute’s website.

Official Secrets

Tags

films, gavin hood, nablopomo, uk

I didn’t intend to make today’s post about the film Official Secrets (Hood, 2019) but one of my colleagues suggested we see it, and having seen it I cannot think about anything else. It’s a deeply compelling film, with some excellent performances that I highly recommend to anyone with an interest in either the topic or whistle-blowers in general. One of the great strengths of the film is the way that it portrays the slow build of frustration and anger that leads the whistle-blower to act and then the slow grinding toll that it takes upon her, her life and her relationships in the aftermath.

My colleague mentioned that it was nice to see Keira Knightly in something that wasn’t a period drama, but in a way it did feel like a period piece, with it’s careful reconstructions of early 2000s technology and websites. But beyond the fashions and the flip phones, beyond the slightly grainy archive footage, the zip drives and the answerphones, it feels like stepping into another world. Post 9/11 but before the financial crisis; before waterboarding and extraordinary rendition were terms that we recognised with resigned familiarity. If Katherine Gun feels naïve in her actions, its partly because with the benefit of hindsight we all seem naïve, in believing that once a lie has been revealed as a lie it would lose its power. (Also the journalists feel like actual journalists, rather than someone’s idea of what journalists are like.) The vast majority of the most damning things said in the film, are not spoken by actors, but are instead news clips of the things that those politicians actually said at the time. The archive usage in general is a clever move, as they’re all people that our protagonist never met and the pivotal information is what they actually said on the news to the public. It also removes that element of distraction and doubt that would creep in if they were being played by actors – focusing us not on the performance but on the words themselves, and removing the potential to be accused of re-scripting the words for dramatic effect.

Arguably this film doesn’t really tell you anything that you didn’t already know. That the Iraq war was illegal. That the government – both UK and USA – lied to their people. That there were no WMDs in Iraq. Any revelations it might have had to offer are sixteen years too late. And yet, it felt like a revelation, or perhaps more of a reminder that so much of the whole mess we’re in, in terms of politics and journalism and so much more, starts here.

It is in fact a timely reminder to those of us who work within the third estate, that it is our job to not blindly accept the word of officialdom, of press offices and publicists, to instead question and investigate. That there is a world of difference between being a public service broadcaster and being a state broadcaster; that both the press, and the civil servants at all levels, work not for the government of the day but for the people. That the government serves the people not the other way round. Naturally we should commend them when they get things right and improve things; but the other side of that coin is that we hold them to account when they get it wrong. Holding our elected officials to account is both our responsibility and an essential part of the democratic process.

IFF19 – Preview Film

Tags

iff, nablopomo

The Inverness Film Festival opened last night with a bang, in the form of the preview night film, Aeronauts. It’s a beautifully realised film, starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, as a scientist exploring meteorology and the atmosphere, and an aeronaut attempting to break the record for highest flight.

I have a longstanding passion for the early history of weather prediction. The initial blame probably lies with Benjamin Franklin wandering around pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts in thunderstorms with kites; but then I read Pauline Halford’s Storm Warning: The Origins of the Weather Forecast over a decade ago, and made my own pilgrimage to Greenwich observatory and the maritime museum to see the related artefacts. (Seeing our scientist climbing about on the roof of the observatory was like seeing an old friend – I’m very jealous I’d love to get up on that roof.) As Glaishier rightly points out in the film it’s not about divination, it’s about navigation and trade, flood prevention and crop protection. The shipping forecast remains both arcane and important, after all.

The launch sequence is delightful, the contrast between measured scientific process and purely ridiculous Victorian showmanship, is played up for all it’s worth for both the watching crowd and the audience in the cinema. From the start we learn that this is a film about pushing boundaries and making compromises. Additionally, Glaishier and Rennes make a delightfully mercurial odd couple, clashing with and complimenting each other, initial distrust transforming through adversary into friendship and teamwork. Both Redmayne and Jones put in very emotionally controlled performances – their eyes do a lot of work – while at the same time being very physical actors in this, really throwing themselves into the roles they inhabit whether they are verbally sparring or physically wrestling the balloon into submission between them. It’s something of a who’s who of British acting – though Himesh Patel definitely deserves a mention for his charming portrayal of lepidopterologist John Trew.

The only problem I have with this film is that it doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a fact-based drama or a delightful piece of historical fantasy. James Glaishier was a real pioneering meteorologist, who really did make ground-breaking discoveries with an aeronaut in a balloon called The Mammoth that broke the records for highest human flight. They really did nearly die. However, the aeronaut in question was not called Amelia Rennes – his name was Henry Coxwell – and they flew from Birmingham rather than London. Their journey was also somewhat less dramatic than the one in the film, though it was fairly dramatic in it’s own right.

It’s as though the filmmakers started making a delightful historical fantasy, about an early meteorologist and an aeronaut, with an odd couple vibe and discovered a real scientist who’d done something very similar and decided to just fold him into the film. If they’d both been composite characters it would have been fine but the combination of historical people with fictional composite characters replacing actual people makes me queasy in a way the more vertigo-inducing moments in the film never did. (Also, knowing that Amelia Rennes never existed, completely changes the big emotional revelation of their flight, from a satisfyingly devastating moment of catharsis into something that instead feels cynical and manipulative.) I really wish they’d just committed to making a historical fantasy and credited the actual aeronauts as inspiration, instead of the rather deceptive use of the phrase ‘based on true events’. I feel like the filmmakers tried to have it both ways and in the end have made something that satisfies no-one – not the people who’d like a proper biography of James Glaishier, nor viewers excited by the prospect of a film celebrating one of history’s hidden female pioneers, and not the audience looking for some escapist historical fantasy.

I’m more annoyed because I had so loved the film when I saw it and discovering the background left me feeling rather manipulated by the film and the emotional whiplash has been really quite something.