Stranger Than Fiction at the @Glasgowfilmfest

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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.

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Belated Glasgow Short Film Festival Review

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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

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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

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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

Tags

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

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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.