Other Pleasures @glasgowfilmfest

Tags

china, france, gff, japan

While the majority of the films I saw at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival – and isn’t that a lovely phrase to write, normally I’d only manage a couple of films at this festival in total – were firmly within the confines of two of the festival strands, I did see a small assortment of films that didn’t fit into either of those categories. Films that I didn’t pick for logical reasons but instead because something about them – the description, a post on the GFF twitter feed, the trailer, or even just that this might be my only chance to see them on a big screen.

One Second

I have a funny feeling that this wasn’t the film that I meant to see, that when I was flicking back and forth between the schedule and the film blurbs I mixed it up with another film, because this very much wasn’t the plot I was expecting. It’s a good movie and I’m glad I watched it, but I ended up watching a historical drama – does it count as a period piece when the era is the 1970s? – when I was expecting a crime thriller. As much as the film does feature an escaped prisoner, this being the Cultural Revolution, he’s quite clearly in prison for political reasons, rather than for the ‘fighting’ for which he’s supposedly doing time. Also, given that the film was apparently originally selected for the Berlinale and then withdrawn for ‘post-production problems’ that seem to have been code for censorship reasons, I’d be interested to know what subtler political statements the film is making about present day China that are not obvious to the less informed viewer. On the surface it’s as much about children paying for their parents mistakes as it is about anything else and no less moving if that’s all that really is going on.

It’s a film that really illuminates both just how vast China is as a country – the dessert between the two ‘work unit’ locations we move between in the film seems like it could go on forever – and how claustrophobic life in that time was – everyone in the film is trapped within their assigned role to a greater or lesser extent. After all who needs walls or guards or fences when you have gossipy neighbours and miles of dessert?

I had presumed early in the film that the circulating films were meant to sugar the pill of the propaganda newsreels, that they showed first so that people wouldn’t leave as soon as the film finished. But it turns out that the townspeople are so desperate for an escape from their lives that – regardless of their grumbling about having already seen the film many times – they will watch it over and again if given the chance. Just as our fugitive, Zhang Jiusheng, could happily watch the damaged fragment of newsreel featuring his daughter, over and over, in a loop all night, so the audience would watch anything the projectionist screens for them just as long as they can escape their day to day lives for little while longer. Finding a little freedom in the only place they can.

Love, Life and Goldfish

This film is a delight. Probably my favourite film of the festival, this is a film that commits utterly to it’s concept. I should make clear that the concept is completely ridiculous, being a musical comedy set in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere where the vast majority of the population are obsessed with goldfish. Specifically goldfish scooping – a part of Japanese culture that had totally passed me by but that much like the film both baffles and delights me.

The film is gorgeously shot, the colours are so vivid, the sets and locations are a visual treat – the contrast between the crushingly mundane and the vividly fantastical is perfectly handled. More generally, the film walks the perfect balance between playing it’s concept straight and not taking it too seriously. Both characters and cast seem to have the attitude of yes this is very odd, but this is our life deal with it. In fact of all the things that our ‘hero’ Makoto Kashiba does that his new colleagues find to be ‘odd’ the bursting into thematically appropriate song is the very least of it.

Fascinatingly to me, our hero, the character that we follow throughout is not the ‘romantic hero’ of the film. He absolutely thinks he is and resists that furiously – he is repressed to the point of comic disaster – but it turns out that he’s the catalyst for change both in himself and for the people he meets. His happy ending is absolutely what he was hoping for, but really not what I was expecting from the genre. Perhaps I’ve just seen too many old-fashioned Hollywood movie musicals, because I definitely had narrative expectations, some of which the film played with in a pleasingly meta fashion, but others it just totally ignored. It turned out to be something stranger and better than I was expecting.

Cleo from 5 to 7

Showing as part of the GFF’s Winds of Change Retrospective Season – where they’re screening great films from 1962 in the early morning slot, for free, you just turn up on the morning and if there’s space you get in! – this was the one film of the season that I was really excited to see. Like most film students, I got a little obsessed with the Nouvelle Vague films for a while though it was more through the medium of Cahiers Du Cinema than the films themselves as the films I could see were limited by the choices of the university library and what fellow film students had that they were willing to lend me. As a result I’ve always known Agnès Varda’s work more by reputation than in actuality.

When the Film Festival’s Co-Director Allan Hunter did the film’s introduction, he pointed out that Varda’s work has more in common with that of film makers Allan Resnais and Chris Marker than it does with the work of the more famous Nouvelle Vague directors like Truffaut and Goddard that she’s so closely associated with in most people’s minds and I have to agree, there’s an intimacy and a painterliness to this film that fits better with those films. More Left Bank than Right Bank if you like.

So when the opportunity to see probably her most famous film – on film even – I couldn’t resist, and it was well worth it. Apparently Varda herself called this film a portrait of a woman painted over a documentary about Paris, and I can see what she meant. It looks very much like an observational style documentary, just the protagonist we’re following as our guide through that world is an actress, interacting with other actors, saying scripted lines. You can really see Varda’s experience as a photographer and a documentarian here, her focus on faces and spaces, letting the story tell itself and giving things space to unfold ‘naturally’.

This is definitely one of those films where I felt that I’d seen a lot of the ideas and style choices before, but that also came with the knowledge that most of those films were in fact referencing – or at least influenced by – this one. The cliches aren’t cliches, this is where those cliches came from originally.

Glasgow Film Fest: African Stories & Documentary Edition

Tags

african, angola, documentaries, south africa, uganda, uk, usa, zimbabwe

In a change from your regularly scheduled film festival blogging, I’m sending you dispatches from the Glasgow Film Festival this month. Early in the pandemic I had the idea that I’d celebrate the end of the pandemic with a wee trip to the Berlin film festival, but as things have continued to make international travel unwise, I decided to take the safer option of the Glasgow equivalent. Despite having lived in the Central Belt for most of my life, and even worked in Glasgow for a while, I’ve never really done the full festival experience. (I used to do the Short Film Festival instead, cramming as many screenings of short films into a weekend as was reasonably possible.) Unlike the Berlinale, this festival is only spread over two cinemas, both of them just off – opposite ends of – Sauchiehall Street, which significantly increases my chances of still making the screening in the not unlikely scenario where I turn up at the wrong location for the screening in question. With so much choice on offer I decided to focus on two of the festival’s threads – African Stories and documentaries – in an attempt to narrow down my options, and several of the films I saw qualified for both categories.

Blind Ambition

This was the first film I saw at the festival and also the first to qualify for both categories. It was introduced as a ‘feel good documentary’ which I feel set it up for failure. It’s an interesting and quite charming underdog story certainly, but this was also a film with quiet undercurrents. The film follows the fortunes of a team of Zimbabwean sommeliers as they prepare to compete in the World Blind Wine Tasting Championship. (I should clarify that the tasting is blind, not the tasters, the wording of the blurb was not as clear as it could have been.) All four of the team members are charming and compelling on screen presences, and for all that they’ve all been through some fairly harrowing experiences, it only shows in how determined they are to succeed against the odds. They seem to worry most about letting down the people who crowdfunded their trip to the competition, but the pride of their sponsors in both Zimbabwe and South Africa that they got as far as they did, is the biggest endorsement of both their countries that the film could possibly give.

In a lot of ways, this is a film about telling stories. The four young men at the centre of the film, are all of them trying to reshape their own stories. All of them are refugees from Zimbabwe, determinedly building new lives in South Africa, yet they are all of them immensely proud to be representing their homeland, pleased to be able to upend some assumptions and prejudices about Zimbabwe both in South Africa and beyond. There are also a lot of other people in this film trying to tell other stories through and around these young men. One of the wine experts interviewed in the film, Jancis Robertson, explicitly comments on the overwhelming whiteness of the culture and that if they want the industry to be more diverse and less insular they can’t just talk about it, they have to do something to attract new blood to both the competition and the wider industry. It’s also nice that we see that their story doesn’t end with the competition, we see little bits of their post-competition lives, the doors that its opened for both those competing in the competition and the careers of the team members themselves.

Rebel Dread

If the intro to Blind Ambition promised a ‘feel-good’ documentary and the film itself didn’t quite deliver on it, then Rebel Dread was the opposite, the intro gave the impression it would be a serious, slightly worthy documentary and it turned out to be an irreverent and delightful journey through Don Letts’ life and career. Thankfully the audience clearly got what they were expecting – a not insignificant chunk of the audience were clearly there because they’re a fan of his 6Music radio show – and the packed house laughed, cheered and heckled along as appropriate.

The film definitely benefits from having the man himself front and centre, narrating his own life story in a disarmingly honest and unpretentious fashion. Possibly I’ve seen too many documentaries lately where the documentary makers have attempted to render themselves invisible, to create the impression that we are watching reality and that could have really done with a voiceover to keep the structure in place, so it was quite a relief to have a strong narrative voice to guide us. All documentaries about individuals are in their way dialogues between the story the people making the film want to tell and the story the subject(s) of the documentary want to tell. Perhaps inevitably with a film about someone as involved in the music and media industries as Letts this was a film that acknowledged that and even played with it a little. He comes across as quite the raconteur and something of a jack-the-lad – and how often is that a role working class Afro Caribbean blokes are allowed to play in the narrative? – but also as someone who has had to work hard to be taken seriously and respected professionally, and having achieved that, doesn’t need to take himself too seriously personally.

This is a film made with a great deal of affection for both its subject and the wider musical scene of the time, but without having rose tinted glasses – or if it does have rose-tinted glasses, this film is looking at us wryly over the top of them.

Once Upon a Time in Uganda

You may, if you’re the kind of film fan who spends a lot of time in the more esoteric parts of YouTube watching the delightful weirdness that exists in the parts of the industry where people have much larger imaginations than budgets, be familiar with the films of Wakaliwood. In which case the characters of this film will need no introduction. If you’re not, then the important thing to know is that Issac Nabwana is a Uganda low budget action film director who has become something of an internet sensation. The film is the story of the unlikely friendship and working partnership between him and his producer, displaced New York film nerd Alan Hofmanis and their attempts to take Nabwana’s films to the next level.

I was reminded somewhat of a film I saw a few years ago The Prince of Nothingwood about an Afghani film star and producer, making films on a tiny budget largely through force of personality. And perhaps this film would best be described as a cross between that and Talking About Trees a film about Malian film club trying to put on one of their members film in an old abandoned cinema. Another film about people who love films and filmmaking so much that they will try to build a whole film industry/culture in their home country against the odds largely through sheer force of will. It’s also a fascinating look at the reality of what the ‘democratisation’ of film making the digital revolution is supposed to facilitate actually looks like outside of the major film-making centres. There’s something both poignant and defiant about watching a film crew roll out an immaculate green screen backdrop over a set that is simply a blocked off street strewn with rubbish and bordered by an open sewer. (Also Dauda the one man props department is an old school ‘mad engineer’ making props, models and occasionally who vehicles out of cobbled together parts, I can only imagine what wonders he could create with an actual budget.) The electricity may be unreliable and the sanitation non-existent but they’ve got themselves a couple of decent digital cameras and a refurbished laptop that will run editing software and the world is almost their oyster.

(The film makes a couple of explicit digs at the wider international film industry and its snobberies, noting that they’d have an easier time getting funding if they were making ‘serious’ films – about the horrors of the civil war or the grind of local poverty – aimed at the film festival circuit, rather than making fun overblown action movies – primarily aimed at a Ugandan audience and secondarily aimed at an international action movie audience. Apparently cartoon violence is more offensive to certain funders than poverty porn.)

At it’s heart I feel that this film is about two men in their early forties from opposite sides of the world, facing up to the decision of whether to keep pursuing their dreams or settle down. It’s a mid-life crisis of a movie and it absolutely shouldn’t be as charming as it is. There’s just something about the pair of them, their odd couple dynamic, their unswerving devotion to making these charming B-movies that charmed me against my will. And maybe, just maybe they’ll manage to charm the rest of the world, if only just enough that none of them have to give up on the dream.

Sambazinga

This one swings in the opposite direction to Rebel Dread being the only film I saw as part of the African Stories thread that wasn’t also a documentary.

Sambazinga is a 1972 film – though it was banned in Portugal until after the 1974 Carnation Revolution – set just over a decade before at the start of the Angolan War of Independence covering the inciting events that led to a prison raid in the eponymous part of Luanda. It follows to contrasting paths of a married couple, first following construction worker and secret revolutionary Domingos as he is arrested, beaten and taken to jail to be ‘interrogated’, focusing on the solidarity between him and his fellow prisoners, and the capricious violence of his captors. The other path we follow is his wife Maria, as she travels from prison to prison occasionally being helped, occasionally being outright abused but mostly just being lied to and sent from pillar to post. As you might imagine from a film about events that prompted the kind of protests that when crushed start widespread civil unrest, this doesn’t end well for Domingos.

(There’s an interesting moment during one of the interrogation scenes where it becomes quite clear that the element the white police officers are most upset about is that one of the members of the revolutionary group – and we only really see them producing leaflets, they seem as interested in forming a workers union as they are in overthrowing the colonial government – Domingos is part of includes one of his white colleagues on the construction site. It seems to offend them on some deep level that they can’t articulate and at some points it feels like they’re attacking Domingos less for what he himself may or may not know or have done, but as a substitute for his unknown colleague.)

One Take Grace

This was my final screening of the festival, and I think both the film and I lost our way somewhat about two thirds of the way through this film. It started off promisingly, dark, strange and compelling, with a strong narrative voice courtesy of it’s protagonist Grace. Grace is a magnetic presence, drawing your attention and holding it. She’s a woman with the kind of history that could make her the subject of pity, but she has no interest in being seen as a victim. She doesn’t want her audience to pity her, she wants them to listen to her, to give her space to her story in her words. I don’t know the story behind the documentary but it felt as though director and subject had met in a professional context – Mothiba Grace Bapela to give her her full name, is an actress having changed careers in her forties – and decided her colourful life-story ought to be a film. There are various points in the film when we see Grace on film sets and stages where she seems very much to be in control – there’s a whole sequence where a younger woman that I think is the director is playing a younger version of Grace while Grace gives her direction – so it very much feels like a collaboration between the two of them. Even the POV shots of Grace at work as a cleaner, just the fish-eye body camera view of the inside of a house, with Grace’s lightly scathing commentary are both clever and compelling, adding to the sense that the documentary wants to put us in her shoes. There are some brilliant visualisations on past events, spare, hand-drawn animations that provide just enough distance from the awful reality of the stories, that the whole process seems therapeutic for, instead of exploitative of Grace herself.

At some point, around half way through the film we discover that Grace has been diagnosed with cancer and as her treatment progresses, so the film begins to, not quite fall apart but to lose focus. As though the film cannot quite hold together without Grace’s drive and creativity, it becomes a documentation of her illness and recovery, but the story they were trying to tell in the first place has got lost somewhere along the way. (Understandably subsumed in Grace’s energy being focused on surviving and being there for her children.) The documentary is fairly experimental in style throughout, but it seems like it needs Grace in the driving seat with her full attention on the project to keep it being good weird rather than bad weird. As it is the film sort of drifts to a conclusion, seemingly a little bereft now that Grace’s attention has moved on to other projects.

Stranger Than Fiction at the @Glasgowfilmfest

Tags

documentaries, films

As regular readers of this blog will know, I always try to organise myself for an epic day of film watching at the Glasgow Film Festival. There’s always so many things I want to see and even when I worked in Glasgow there was never enough time to see them all. This year I decided to pick a theme as my more successful previous trips have had that in common. Given my avowed desire to watch 25 feature documentaries this year, choosing the Stranger Than Fiction documentary strand seemed the obvious choice. So, on Saturday I headed to Glasgow to see three documentary films back to back at the CCA. As I tweeted on the day: ‘Yes usher, I would most DEFINITELY like a cushion.’

First up was a little bit of a strange choice, Burroughs: The Movie a documentary about William S Burroughs from 1983. I’m not a great fan of the beat poets and the romanticism and mythologizing that goes on around them and their work. I’ve been trying to read On the Road on and off for years and mostly having to leave off because I wanted to smack Jack Kerouac round the head with the book. (I did enjoy the film of Howl but I suspect that the less I know about the people involved personally the more I like their work.) It’s really quite an odd experience to watch a documentary about a man who comes across a delightfully eccentric old gay man, when previously the main thing I knew about him was that he killed his wife in a drunken game of ‘William Tell’…

Second up was the rather more modern and more kitschly strange film Electric Boogaloo: The Untold Story of Cannon Films. For the uninitiated Cannon were responsible for such gems as Superman 4 and Masters of the Universe…oh and Zefferelli’s version of Othello. The driving force behind the company was a duo of Israeli cousins who moved to Hollywood and set about making the oddest mix of films. I get the impression that they wanted to be the kind of Hollywood studio that hasn’t existed since the 30s, churning out historical epics, action adventure films and musicals – without the Hayes code restrictions. What they actually made were closer to a cross between 1950s B movies and 70s exploitation films. The interviewees are an odd mix of actors who almost all despise them and technicians and other former staff who are an odd mix of affectionately loyal and despairingly frustrated in the ‘we could have had it all’ mould, The bittersweet outcome of the film is that some of the team that worked with them mostly learned what not to do and now make slightly toned down version of exactly the same kind of films to much greater success. They were pioneers and trailblazers, and good taste was a stranger to them, but as a lover of terrible 80s B movies I salute them. Some of us like Masters of the Universe.

Last but not least was arguably the best and most interesting of the three documentaries and the one I most wanted to see. Limited Partnership is the story of a 40-year battle for a US/Australian gay couple to have their marriage acknowledged and accepted to allow them to stay together. It’s a sweet and heart-breaking story of love, friendship, family and state intolerance. In its way it’s a history of the gay rights movement in the US and a lesson in the way that any civil rights movement is not a straight line from intolerance to tolerance, with steps forward and backwards along the way. Tony and Richard are such articulate advocates for their cause, so unflinching in their loyalty to and love for each other that its hard to comprehend that anyone could consider there to be anything ‘limited’ and lacking about their partnership.

Belated Glasgow Short Film Festival Review

Tags

glasgow, gsff, uninspiring shorts

After I made yesterday’s post, I was looking at the blog and thinking, “I’m sure I wrote about some films I saw at GSFF, but there’s nothing on here.” So I went looking through my drafts and there was a piece, I’d just paused at one point to go and look something up about one of the films I was writing about and never came back to it. The review feels pretty complete without it, and honestly the apathy of never having felt inspired enough to come back to it, does rather fit in with how I felt about the films.

The Glasgow film festival is upon us once again, and last week saw the short film festival make its brief but intense descent on the cinemas of Glasgow. After last year’s epic day of film viewing anything else was always going to feel thoroughly half-hearted, but nonetheless despite being ridiculously busy last weekend, I managed to squeeze in a screening on the Sunday. Annoyingly there were two screenings that I fancied seeing on the Sunday, and naturally they overlapped by 45 minutes (one at the GFT and the other at the CCA – GSFF’s usual home) so I could only go to one. One screening was all Scottish films and the other was from the International Competition. Given the choice I usually go for the International Competition screenings, for the simple reason that I’m less likely to see International shorts other places, whereas Scottish shorts are more likely to turn up other places.

Also you get your own little ballot sheet for the International Competition screenings (audience award ahoy!) and I always get excited about getting to vote on the films, makes me feel more a participant in the festival than a passive viewer. Interactivity – it doesn’t have to be complex!

International Competition 6: Writing on the Body

So unfortunately for me, this sounded like it would be a really interesting screening and didn’t really live up to its promise. Clearly this is a wider issue I have with GSFF of having very different taste in short films to that of the people who programme it. As the curator was there to introduce the films and then a Q&A afterwards and announced it as ‘the strongest selection’ which having seen the films I was a bit dubious about.

The first film did live up to the promise both from the curator and description. It was a short but substantial documentary about a deaf Brazilian man, raising his daughter as a single-parent and living with Aids. It was more about his life and passions than the other elements, defining who he was. Being a single parent, being deaf and being HIV positive were portrayed as complications in his pursuit of the things he loves rather than defining features of that life.

The second film was weird. The description of the film was essentially ‘a couple having sex in a car are interrupted by an army of snails’ and yes, they were but there was a heck of a lot more going on and I’ve no idea what it was. I think it was a riff off the idea of the possessed car brought to life by people having sex in it and exacting a bloody revenge. Except that I’m not sure if the car was trying to attack them or join in to be honest. I’m sure the snails were symbolic, but of what eludes me. The sound design however, was excellent, really effectively weird – so kudos to the sound team.

It probably says bad things about the 3rd and 4th films that reflecting on them a week later as I write this, I couldn’t remember a thing about them until I dug out the rather sparse notes I took at the time. Whatever else can be said about the 2nd and final films, at least I remembered their respective plots even I didn’t particularly enjoy them.

The final film was made no less weird for being based on real events, being a riff off events that did in fact happen – as one of the film-makers attested with wry amusement that suggested she’d explained that it had all seemed terribly normal at the time. It was every bit as surreal and weird as I’ve always suspected private schools really were behind the Enid Blyton gloss…

So overall, while yes they were all tied together by a hyper-awareness of the body with the exception of the first film, the bodies in question didn’t really have very much to say whether as protagonist or canvas.

Documentaries So Far

Tags

documentary, film, gaelic

I started writing this at the halfway point of the year, but then life got in the way in good and exciting ways so this post got put in hold. However, then as now, I was doing well on the documentary-watching front. I said at the start of the year that I wanted to watch at least one feature-length documentary a month this year and so far, I have indeed watched one a month.

As always there’s been a certain amount of hold over from previous years as I track down films that came out a while back but that I either missed the one screening round my way or where it has just taken that long for it to make it to my neck of the woods. In my 2013 review I talked about The Act of Killing being much touted but never actually seeing screenings advertised – though I couldn’t remember its title at the time. (It turns out to be about an anti-Communist purge in Indonesia but the events are no less horrific if less widespread than the Khmer Rouge) Turns out that one reason I’d never seen screenings advertised was that it didn’t make it to my local arts cinema until April this year. It was a strangely compelling, somewhat disturbing little documentary and made the oddest contrast with A Story of Children and Film (lovely, lovely film, made me want to watch all the films featured – though a sad lack of mention for Beasts of the Southern Wild and Quvenzhané Wallis’ frankly mesmerising performance in it) that I watched two days later.

My first documentary of the year was watched almost immediately after I wrote my review of the previous year’s documentary offerings. I was all fired up and motivated and, while flicking through the iPlayer looking for something else entirely I stumbled across Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair. I’d missed it in the cinema when it came out, but I’d really wanted to see it then so I watched it there and then before I could forget it was on again and it was definitely worth seeking out. How gripping can a documentary about hair be you wonder? Very. Especially when you discover the complex issues around culture, politics and economics that interweave around the issue of African-American hair. Also it’ll be a long while before I can hear the phrase ‘hair relaxer’ without flinching a little.

The most recent documentary that I saw this year was The Bridge Rising/An Drochaid I think, largely because I went to the premiere of it during Celtic Connections. It’s a film about the campaign to remove the tolls from the Skye Bridge – a summary that either tells you everything you need to know about the film or leaves you utterly in the dark. So, essentially, the bridge connecting the Isle of Skye to the mainland was one of the earliest Public/Private Funded ventures in Scotland and as such was massively controversial (such projects, especially in regard to hospitals and prisons remain highly controversial) in its own right. On top of this, the tolls were high and in a place where petrol/diesel is notoriously expensive anyway so a protest movement began – marches, petitions, refusal to pay tolls, legal campaigns, questions in parliament, and the lot. Anyway, the tolls were eventually removed at some considerable cost both financial and personal, and it was really fascinating to see it all gathered together because I was quite young when all this started and we only really got snippets a significant turning points. It’s also an interesting demonstration of how important Gaelic media is in the Highlands and Island, because the vast majority of news footage they have is from Telefios (Gaelic news programme in the 80s and 90s) and lots of the interviews with campaigners are in Gaelic. So I’d recommend it even if you know nothing about the Skye Bridge, purely if you’re interested in grass roots protest movements or minority-language/indigenous media.

I intended to see more documentaries at the Glasgow Film Festival, but most of them were either really popular and sold out, or their alternative screenings started when I was either at work or finished at a time that would see me missing the last train home. I did manage to schedule a documentary double-bill to see The Last Impressario and On The Edge of the World. The first of this double-bill I saw without trouble (well, there was some unnecessary running about to get my tickets in time but never mind) a strange and intriguing little documentary about an equally strange and intriguing man. Michael White was a producer and social butterfly extraordinaire for the best part of 60 years (he’s still alive, just reluctantly retired), putting on a kinds of interesting and controversial plays (including the original run of The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and introducing all sorts of the artists – including Yoko Ono and Pina Bausch – to British audiences. Despite his social butterfly/party animal status, he’s very shy and seems to have spent a great deal of time hiding behind his camera, which has made for some fantastic photos with which to illustrate the stories in the film and fill in the gaps where his memories are now failing him. The second of my double-bill was denied me, as the screening was cancelled – not because the film hadn’t arrived in time but in a new issue with digital projection, the films arrive at cinemas time-locked, so they can’t test the films until the day they’re being shown and thus if they find they either can’t unlock them or there’s otherwise an issue in formatting or ratio or even just that the file is corrupted, its too late to get a replacement or reach most of the people who’ve pre-booked their tickets. So I saw the Japanese remake of Unforgiven instead, which was good but not a documentary in any way shape or form.

More recently, I indulged my DVD buying habit, by getting a double-bill of documentaries from 2010 Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Senna which were both excellent for very different reasons. Oddly enough, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the only Werner Herzog film that I’ve ever seen and based on it I feel I should watch everything he’s ever made, because its essentially a record of the archaeological excavation of a cave in France which holds the oldest cave paintings – the earliest known human art by quite a considerable stretch of time – in the world. It’s somewhere between a museum’s audio-visual display and a mediation on the history of art and what it means to be human. It is fascinating and compelling and if you’re remotely interested in history or art then I highly recommend it. Senna is good for completely different reasons. Whereas CoFD peaked into a world of people whose names we’ll never know and whose lives beyond the art they left behind are a mystery to us, Senna is about someone whose life was lived largely in the public eye, whose words and actions we have detailed documentary proof of and can analyse in great detail, yet still remains an enigma. You know how the story ends from the very start, yet still, somehow, when it does your heart still breaks a little.

Docs of 2013

Tags

documentaries, films

I didn’t watch very many documentaries this year. Just five feature length documentaries, all of them very interesting and worth seeing, but only two of them – Side by Side, on the great film vs. digital debate and Fire in the Night on Piper Alpha – was actually released this year. I’ve written previously about the short documentaries I saw at the Glasgow Film festival at the start of the year, so things certainly started well, but trailed off quite quickly. To be honest, I just didn’t know about documentaries that were coming to the cinema, last year there was all sorts of excitement about films like Searching for Sugarman and, well actually all the other examples I was going to give turn out to be from 2011 rather than 2012 which just goes to show how few documentaries have penetrated the white noise of the multiplex. This year, Fire in the Night caught my eye in the press, but was promoted more as a Scottish film – it’s about the Piper Alpha disaster, and while it was a Scottish disaster, I don’t think the appeal is purely to the home audience, I think the subject has wider appeal, especially in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster a couple of years ago. Other than that, well I’m vaguely aware of Blackfish in as much as its caused a fair bit of controversy around Killer Wales and SeaWorld in the states, and of We Steal Secrets though only in the sense of The Fifth Estate being compared unfavourably to it. I seem to remember hearing about an interesting, if strange, sounding film about former members of the Khmer Rouge but needless to say that I’ve seen none of these films, I’ve not even seen them advertised nor listed as being screened anywhere near me.

The documentaries I did see though, they were good. Side by Side is, I won’t lie, a little bit pretentious. It’s a film student/geek film, it’s about digital vs. film and while it is fascinating, it’s a pretty niche interest, even with Keanu Reeves narrating. Though it did spark an awful lot of conversations between my friends about why though we’ve never actually made a film on actual film we still think it would be a tragedy if they stop making film stock. Probably the same reason that as a sound person I’ve only ever worked in digital format – well unless you count dubbing music across double tape decks as a teenager making mix tapes and fake radio shows – but retain an inexplicable protective love of vinyl. Man on Wire is essentially the story of the French high wire walker, Philippe Petit, who is best known for having done a high-wire walk between the towers of the Twin Towers in New York when they still under construction. It looks at why he did it and how he (and his small and dedicated team) pulled it off. Though personally I found the footage of him walking between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris more impressive, the Twin Towers adventure got a bit too James Bond for my taste. Bus 174 is a fascinating and despair-inducing look at endemic poverty and horrific prison conditions in Brazil. Officially its about a young street kid, Sandro do Nascimento, who held up the bus in question, held the passengers hostage and was essentially beaten to death in the back of the police van taking him away afterwards. He’s essentially a metaphor for many of Rio de Janiero’s social ills, but while the film does use him as a way to examine wider issues, it also makes him a human, three-dimensional character, whose life and choices were indelibly shaped by personal tragedy and police brutality, beyond the TV footage of an angry young man with a gun. The film caught my attention on the library shelf this summer because I wanted insight into the summer’s riots in Brazil and my goodness it fulfilled that role. Extranjeras (Foreign Women) is an interesting little Catalonian documentary about the diverse immigrant communities that live in Barcelona. From the older Chinese ladies who have lived in the city for 30 or 40 years and worry about their grandchildren having no interest in learning Chinese to the young girls from Eastern Europe and North Africa cleaning offices, struggling with the language and just trying to make it through the winter. The documentary felt like one of those educational TV dramas that you get in language class at school, informative but distant letting the interviewees speak for themselves, giving insight into the communities they’ve left behind and those they’ve brought with them. It was an interesting alternate/more realistic view of a city that I have a decidedly romantic holidaymaker’s affection for. Fire in the Night is a dramatic, heart-wrenching and even-handed look at the Piper Alpha disaster on its 25th anniversary. It’s one of those news stories that I remember from childhood, the image of the flaming rig seared onto my memory, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square protests and the Braer Tanker disaster. It was weird to re-experience it as an adult but of all the documentaries I’ve seen this year – it’s the film I’d recommend most wholeheartedly.

I need to seek out documentaries again. I really enjoyed the challenge I did a couple of years ago where I saw one feature-length documentary a month, the way it made me realise how many excellent documentaries out there if you just looked out for them. It was also quite frustrating to realise how many excellent films would have passed me by if I hadn’t been so focused on looking for them – though that’s more of a film marketing issue. I’m your target audience (I’m regularly one of half a dozen people in a documentary screening at my local art-house cinema) if you’re not reaching me…what are you doing wrong? Time to find out…

Glasgow Film Festival: Short Film Fest Part 2

Tags

films, short films

As promised the second half of my reviews of the Saturday screenings at the Glasgow Short Film Festival (if you missed it you can find the first half here)

Apparently, I stopped writing down my ratings for the films after the 2^nd screening of the day. Which matters less for the 3^rd screening, as I wrote reviews of them during my break for food (Japanese, very tasty). However, as I was tired and all filmed out by the end of my last screening, I didn’t write the reviews at the time…and writing them now I was cursing my lack of star ratings. My opinions about the 2^nd screening were much easier to retrieve with the stars as a guide…

Mutations: International Competition 1
Mutations was my favourite of the screenings. It was certainly strange but a good strange I felt. Half the films were animations and that always predisposes me to view positively. Overall it managed to balance the dark with the light well.
Edmund was a Donkey/Edmund était un âne (2012, Franck Dion, France/Canada)
Edmund was a Donkey is a definitely both the strangest and the saddest film in the collection. A small man, who has been by turns contentedly miserable and quietly happy comes to believe, after a cruel office prank, to believe himself to be a donkey. It’s a film about escapism, madness and more about how we treat those who we perceived to be ‘mad’ or ‘different’ and how thin the line between cruelty and kindness can be.
The Pub (2012, Joseph Pierce, UK)
The Pub is an animation and not an animation, as far as I can tell, it was filmed live with actors and then had animated effects added – rotoscoping perhaps? There’s an ugly beauty to the animation that lends it an extra power. The landlady of this particular pub can see the animals and monsters that lurk under the skins of her punters (and perhaps even under her own) which can be both a blessing and a curse.
Stammering Love/L’Amour Bègue (2012, Jan Czarlevski, Switzerland)
Stammering Love was my least favourite of this set, largely because handsome young man angsting about girl and how they are so shallow and can’t see past X thing about them, got old when I was still a teenager myself. The most interesting thing about the film is the way the central character fights to assert that it is the shallow casual hook-up culture itself that leaves him sad and depressed, rather than his lack of success in it.
Trans (2012, Mark Chapman, UK)
Trans is a documentary of a sort, built entirely of still photographs taken with very long exposures. The film grew from a conversation between the subject Callie and the film-maker, about Callie’s trans-ness. Which evolved into him documenting Callie’s transition to where she is now, which is comfortable. This gives the film’s narration an intimacy that would be hard to achieve otherwise, it feels like someone explaining something quite complex but very close to their heart to a friend, it presumes an audience that doesn’t understand but wants to. The nature of the photographs, always slightly blurred, matches well with the topic of gender fluidity and also serves to disguise a lot of the process of changing that both steers it away from seeming exploitive, and denies the inherantly voyeuristic nature of cinema.
Through Ellen’s Ears/Door De Oran Van Ellen (2011, Saskia Gubbels, Netherlands
Through Ellen’s Ears is a documentary following a young deaf girl, and to a lesser extent her deaf and hard of hearing classmates, as they face decisions about where they will go to secondary school: the hearing school, at hard of hearing school or to a boarding school for deaf children. Having grown up in deaf society she is keen to learn to interact with hearing society to help her cope with wider society once she leaves school. Whereas her parents and classmates are keener for her to go to deaf school where she will have community and better academic prospects. Making the whole process harder is that her best friend (from whom she is inseparable) is hard of hearing so cannot go to deaf school. Can they find a way to stay together and still get their educational needs met?
Fear of Flying (2012, Conor Finegan, Ireland
Fear of Flying is a charming little Irish animated film about a bird with a fear of flying. This, as one can imagine is rather a major problem for a bird in general life but worse when the rest of his kind fly south for the Winter. It was light weight and light-hearted and generally a bit of a relief after the intensity of the previous films in the screening.

Bottled Up: International Competition 2
This was the last screening of the day, and its late night slot was clearly intentional, as it was more consistently dark and the themes were definitely post-watershed. It was my least favourite of the screenings though whether that was due to the subject matter or if I was just burned out by that point, I can’t be sure. There were some very good films involved, I just got to the end of it feeling a bit ground down by them.
The Curse (2012, Fyzal Boulifa, Morrocco/UK)
The Curse is a rather depressing little film, in which a young woman has sneaked away from her village, to make a last rendez-vous with her older lover who is going abroad for a while. Having been caught by a young boy from her village, she begins the long walk home trailed by an increasing number of inexplicable village children, who taunt her with their knowledge and demand sweets in payment for their silent. Getting hold of said sweets proves more costly than she could have imagined or that they could understand.
This Charming Couple (2012, Alex MacKenzie, Canada)
This Charming Couple is odd and purposefully so. Created from water-damaged, found footage, from an old educational film, it transforms the footage for its own purposes, undermining the original message. But quite what the intended message of the new film is, remains as opaque and unclear as the footage itself.
The Buried/Sepulte (2012, Jonathon Pop Evans, USA)
The Buried is a film about a murder, or at least the aftermath. It’s apparently based on a real-life hate crime, from the evidence of the film, a traditional ‘gay panic’ effort. The film focuses on the awkward messy aftermath of trying to dispose of the body and facing up to the horror of what they’ve done in the cold light of day when the violent passions of the night have passed.
Under the Colours/Zur-e Parcham (2012, Esmaeel Monsef, Iran)
My favourite from this screening, by a long way. A red skirt is found caught on the barbed wire around an army barracks, having presumably blown off one of the washing lines belonging to the surrounding blocks of flats. A group of the soldiers rescue it and attempt to solve the mystery of where it came from and to return it to its rightful owner.
Softly One Saturday Morning/Mollement, Un Samedi Matin (2011, Sofia Djama, Algeria/France)
Softly One Saturday Morning is definitely one of the better films from this selection, even if I remain a bit leery of it for the whole ‘attempted rape’ as metaphor for the state of the country thing. The film is well-shot, atmospheric, and the lead actress’ performance was compelling and her character interesting and intelligent. The best of the film is undoubtedly the confrontation/debate between her and the police chief, I just feel there should have been a better way to get there, but perhaps that says more about the world the director lives in rather than the director herself.

Glasgow Film Festival: Short Film Fest Part 1

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cca, films, gff, short films

It’s that time of year again, or at least it was when I started writing this in February, the Glasgow Film Festival was upon us and with it came the Short Film Festival. Either way, for once I’m not posting about all the interesting shorts I’d like to be watching but am not. (Though last year I did manage to see some Gaelic short films – which given the lack of excited email from FilmG I presume didn’t run this year.) This year I was prepared – ok, actually I was just paying attention when @glasgowfilmfest tweeted that tickets were selling out fast for the Frightfest strand. Having discovered that a high percentage of the programmes had a screening on a Saturday, most of them in the same screen at the CCA (no danger of making over-lapping bookings) I decided to embark on an epic day of short film watching.

It would actually be possible to see 6 of the short film programmes in one day – but you’d probably either need to bring your own sandwiches or be very good at eating very hot soup, very fast. Good sense, thankfully prevailed, I only booked for and I scheduled in time to actually have lunch and dinner.

Hooray for Hollywood: International Competition 7
I’ve been to a few film festivals over the years and while I was nominally aware of audience awards for films it wasn’t something of which I had any experience. However, low and behold, a member of festival staff came round the screening, presented me with a ballot paper and a pen, explained the voting system and there I was, part of the system. So if some of the reviews seem a little as though I’m awarding and deducting points as I go – that’s because I was.
Hollywood Movie (2012, Volker Schreiner, Germany) ****
Hollywood Movie is a construction, or possibly more accurately a reconstruction of an existing text. The text is a mediation on a different way of engaging with cinema and the text is constructed from clips of Hollywood movies to form the monologue from cut up snippets of existing movie dialogue. It’s cleverly done, well edited and the juxtaposition of original and constructed context is by turns interesting, poignant and at times humorous. It’s rather meta and honestly I think its more a work of video art than a short film but the more I think about it the more I think it needs to be seen by a cine-literate audience that appreciates it fully. It really needs being projected in the dark into that shared audience space.
Jerry and Me (2012, Mehmaz Saeedvafa, USA) ***
Jerry and Me is an autobiographical documentary about the relationship between and the impact on an Iranian film-maker by the films of Jerry Lewis. Given that she has been living and working in the US for a long time now and the times that we live in, its also about her wider relationship with cinema and with the US. It’s an interesting little documentary, and the archive footage of Iran is fascinating, but in the end I wasn’t exactly sure what message it wanted its audience to take away from it.
The First Hope (2012, Jeremy White, USA) ***
The First Hope is odd. It looks good, the dialogue is minimal and its a fairly tender view of first love and growing up. It’s also a bit about obsession with movies you watch repeatedly, with your first crush, all the little transgressive pleasures of early teen love/crushes. And I’d probably have like it far better if I hadn’t seen so many art films with implied or subtextual incest in the background…
Warning Triangle (2011, Virgil Widrich, Austria) ****
Warning Triangle suffers from the same issue as Hollywood Movie, except more so because it doesn’t have a clear through-line of narrative. It’s very effective at what it does and I enjoyed it but it didn’t feel like a film? It probably doesn’t help that it started out as an installation in a museum demonstrating autophillia…
Burning Hearts (2011, James McFay, Japan) *****
Burning Hearts is my favourite from this selection. It starts out as a tale of urban ennui and disengagement. A depressed taxi driver mourns the loss of his ambition and dreams, a mysterious woman discovers her lover and her best friend are having an affair. Her tattoo fascinates the taxi driver and her lover promises her will ‘take care of her’ only for her to mugged by a gang moments later. The fight scene that follows is almost comic yet brutal enough to avoid parody. There’s something almost computer game-esque about the fight-scene. And it has the best pause in a fight scene I’ve ever seen. It’s not clear how much is real or fantasy or quite what those linking tattoos on their wrists mean but they’ve clearly found whatever they were looking for and somehow, that’s enough.

Adrift: International Competition 4
Adrift seems a particularly appropriate title for this programme of short films, as their protagonists are all somewhat adrift in their very different ways.
Echo (2012, Lewis Arnold, UK) ****
Echo has a clever and rather strange conceit, which is hard to explain without ruining the reveal of the film. The reveal comes early on in the film but its worth seeing unspoiled. It’s an interesting take on grief and how we deal with it after the initial shock of it, how it can trap us and consume us if we let it. And that ring tone will haunt you afterwards.
The Globe Collector (2012, Summer De Roche, Australia) *****
The Globe Collector is a charming if odd documentary about an Australian eccentric. A man who collects lightbulbs (light globes) of every kind. He’s passionate about electronics and determined to preserve the legacy of their innovation before they are eradicated to give way to the more ecofriendly energy-saving variety.
Secrecy/Sigilo (2012, Karla Gomez Keep, Argentina) ***
If The Globe Collector is odd in a good way then Secrecy is odd in a bad way. It’s the sort of film people describe as ‘dreamlike’, melancholic or contemplative when actually they mean beautifully shot but almost nothing actually happens. The children are interchangeable, none of the characters get developed, there’s no apparent plot and nothing actually happens until the denouement at which point I was a) baffled and b) keen to follow the small girl’s course of action if it meant the film would end.
Vanishing Point (2012, Abhijit Mazumdar, India) *****
Take all your expectations about Indian cinema and leave them at the door. This is not an India that most people reading this will have seen on screen. There is no Bollywood glamour here, nor is there any ‘poverty porn’ to feel voyeuristic watching, Vanishing Point owes more to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas than anything else (if Hunter S. Thompson had been Indian and smoking cannabis rather than all the psychotropics he could get his hands on and Dr Gonzo had been sane, sober and rather put upon…). It’s the story of two young film-makers – very different people, and arguably friends who are slowly drifting apart – on a location scouting trip in the countryside, they’re in search of the perfect bus stop but they find (and lose) all sorts of other things along the way.
I Am Tom Moody (2012, Ainslie Henderson, UK) *****
I Am Tom Moody is a weird but compelling stop motion film, that’s a bit about a childhood, but definitely not for kids. It’s about pursuing lost dreams, and facing your demons, about facing the little voice that says you can’t and facing up to where that really comes from. It’s touching and sad, and worth sticking with despite the un-promising beginning.

9. Mesnak/Turtle

Tags

12 films, canadian, gaelic, innu, yves sioui desard

There was a strand at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival called The Edge of the World, which consisted of highlights from the ImagineNATIVE Festival in Canada with a sprinkling of Gaelic short films thrown in. This particular film was accompanied by a short called Glen Tolsta (about an isolated and now abandoned community on Lewis). It was particularly nice because both the directors were in the audience so they spoke a bit about their respective films at the start. As is the way of these things Ishbel Murray spoke in Gaelic first before continuing in English, so when it came to Yves Sioui Desard’s turn he spoke, briefly in Innu before continuing in English, which is the first time I’ve heard that in real life.

The film itself is essentially a retelling of Hamlet within a Native community in Quebec (on an interesting cultural/linguistic note, I realised while watching it that I’ve seen more films in Inuit languages that I have in Quebeçois) only with less violence, more drugs and the incest isn’t so much implied as explicit (a woman sitting next to me with two early/pre teen kids got up and left during the drug-taking scene – it was rated 15 for reason…) However it is a really interesting adaptation, sticking close to the original at some points and playing fast and loose at others. For a start Osalie (our stand-in for Ophelia) gets a great deal more to do and a bit more agency. Despite sharing her Shakespearean counterpart’s fate – that doesn’t actually serve as a motivator for Dave/Hamlets’ actions (other events to do with her do, but kind of understandably) at the end so her decision seems more about her than as a plot motivator. It abandons bits of the original that it doesn’t need and drafts in elements such as drug abuse and alcoholism, assimilation versus cultural resistance that make it feel more real and less allegorical.

There’s a lot of highly symbolic stuff with a turtle – who is, I supposed, our stand in for the ghost of Hamlet’s father (his spirit animal was a turtle) – who manages to imbue considerable personality despite being a turtle. There’s less of a focus on the revenge tragedy of the original. As someone says early on to the protagonist Dave, there is more to Hamlet than just revenge – there is grief and redemption and Dave certainly gets more of both of those than his Shakespearean counterpart.

The film is beautifully shot in quite gorgeous black and white. The various locations managing to be both mundane and stunning – the reservation isn’t all one thing it is portrayed like any other rural community with posh bits, normal bits and downright scabby bits.