On the Roof of the World

Tags

documentary, mongolia, nepal, roof of the world, tibet

This a review of a film thread in two parts. It originally ran during the Inverness Film Festival back in November so the first two films that are covered are films that I saw during the festival. The second two films were shown in January this year, films that I wanted to see but that I couldn’t schedule in because they clashed with other commitments. As I’ve previously noted here, I tend to pick my films during the festival based on what I think it’ll be my only opportunity to see. However, Eden Court does seem to use the festival as a test screening for lots of films, so if a film sells out at the festival they usually get it back. While I knew they were getting Eagle Huntress back – the one single film that most people have asked if I saw, or expressed disappointment that they missed seeing, at the festival – but I was surprised and pleased to see Black Hen make a second appearance.

Paths of the Soul/Kang Ripoche

Is a lovely meditative film about going on a pilgrimage. It’s not clear watching the film, whether this is a documentary or a drama and it appears that the lines have been intentionally blurred. (Perhaps as a side effect of the compromises required getting a film so explicitly about spirituality in Tibet past the Chinese censors.) If they’re acting then it’s the most method performance I’ve ever seen.

Not being of any particular religious persuasion, I’d never really given a lot of thought to the physicality of going on a spiritual pilgrimage. Essentially just going on a very long walk to a significant place, which, like any epic journey, gives you plenty of time to reassess your life and place in the universe. Physically tasking but easily comprehensible. Apparently not in Tibet! When the blurb talked about physical pain, I imagined blisters and sores from walking for hundreds of miles in all weathers. Walking is the very least of it. Early on there are fascinating scenes where the pilgrims prepare their equipment, the long aprons of animal skin, the wooden paddles that they wear on their hands. And then they walk, prostrating themselves every few metres in prayer.

There’s something gloriously pragmatic about this act of devotion, tilling fields as payment for food and shelter, washing cars and taking labour jobs when they run out of money. Even the decision to go on the pilgrimage is made without fanfare, several quiet discussions about who will go and why, with each discussion setting off others until the group is formed.

Zud

Is far and away the bleakest film in the series. Whereas all the other films, while showing considerable hardship and poverty, also find a great deal of joy and hope in the lives of the people they portray, Zud is fairly consistently bleak.

Set on the Mongolian Steppe, after the loss of much of his parents livestock, young Sukhbat is pulled out of school and given the responsibility of breaking a wild horse in order to race him, in a last ditch attempt to turn the family’s fortunes around. Ultimately I think the film is trying to say something about the clash of tradition and modernity, or the way that despite the march of progress, subsistence farming is still a brutal way of life. However, it was gloomy to the point of grim and something of an exhausting viewing experience.

The Black Hen/Kalo Pothi

Is a sweet, episodic film about innocence, friendship across cast lines, loss and growing up. Oh, and chickens as a vital source of food, currency and status.

The film has a constant undercurrent of vague threat. Being set during the recent Nepalese Civil War/Maoist Insurgency. There are Maoists lurking about on the edges of the film, but they’re very much an ambiguous presence for most of the film. (The only time we see actual violence, the boys are explicitly somewhere that they shouldn’t be – to the extent that they’ve been warned off by soldiers at a check point – even the one kidnapping is a fairly bloodless affair.) The passing bands of government soldiers appear equally if not more threatening to day-to-day life. The film ends on some stark facts and figures about death tolls, refugees and child soldiers, but the only young people we see actually recruited seem to go willingly – Prakash’s sister seems more motivated by the desire to have a regular wages to support her younger brother. In fact as the film progresses and we see more and more the hardships and indignities that Prakash has to endure because he’s an ‘untouchable’ her decision to join the Maoists seems increasingly understandable.

The Eagle Huntress

The Eagle Huntress is an oddly charming little documentary film. At first it seems like it might be one of those clichéd ethnographical efforts that fetishize a ‘lost’ or ‘dying’ way of life. But instead we’re taken right into the action; the protagonists talk to each other and the camera with a frank and disarming honesty. The film is both a delightful coming of age story and a sweet father-daughter bonding adventure.

One of the best parts of this documentary, as a document of these people and their lives is the way it portrays normal life for them. The practicalities of their existence. The stolid acceptance that this is the way their life is now. (The children all stay in dormitories at the school during the week as they live too scattered and nomadic lives to be able to travel to school each day. The deep sibling-like bonds between the girls formed by having grown up together like this.) The combination of the traditional and the modern – trucks with hand crank engines, solar panels to run electricity off, the transistor radio that is the centre of their connection to the outside world – and the way those intertwine with each other. Modern thermal base layers under more traditional garments, the way they seem to have taken what they need from the modern world and used it to preserve their nomadic way of life.

(I like the way the film carefully phrases her status among the other Eagle Hunters. She is the first woman to compete in that particular competition, but they carefully do not call her the first woman to be an Eagle Huntress. The phrasing suggests a fine line being walked, that enough people have suggested there have been others, whether or not they have been acknowledged as such. An acknowledgement of sorts that they can’t prove they existed but they had enough reason to suspect they did and don’t want to erase them if they did.)

I have to wonder, given the focus on her femininity, the little details of her messily painted nails, her long hair and the hair ornaments, at whether previous Eagle Huntresses have always just pretended to be boys. There’s something defiantly girly about the way she presents herself. There’s a telling little exchange between Aisholpan and her mother, her mother commenting that they should have cut her hair shorter, and Aisholpan assuring her that its fine, because she has girl hair. There seems a wealth of unspoken subtext there, not least a determination that she’s not going to pretend that she isn’t a girl. There’s something determinedly ordinary about how she’s portrayed in the film, yes she’s physically strong and tough but that’s a product of the life she lives. She walks a fine line of being both deferential and defiant in her attitude to her fellow hunters. There’s something about the way she stands at the competition registration table, surrounded by all these men, head and shoulders taller than her, that little raise of her eyebrow at the ‘young girl’ comment combined with a placid smile. There’s something, delightfully unsophisticated about the way she expresses her emotions, her open affection for her bird, her honesty about her nerves before the competition, her infectious joy at her successes and her raw frustration at her struggles hunting in the wild.

The old men, the elders of the sport, are so ridiculously stereotypical in their responses to her existence. It’s not remotely difficult to see why she might struggle to take their approbation seriously. It’s all too easy to imagine them in another documentary complaining about how young people don’t want to take up their traditions. Their sour grapes response to her success makes her victories taste all the sweeter to the viewer at home.

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12 Films Project (Part 3)

Tags

12 films, diversity, films

New Year; new challenges. Plus ça change, as they say. I was looking for a new challenge to keep me writing here regularly, when I remembered about the 12 films project and having felt rather uninspired in my film choices last year, I wanted to diversify my film-watching. Shake things up a bit and try new, or at least different, things.

There’s a considerable part of me that is deeply disappointed that, the best part of eight years after I first did this challenge, this kind of project is still necessary. Yet in these troubled political times, it somehow feels more relevant than it ever was. That we see the world from different perspectives, that we are reminded that people who don’t look or think like us are people too. That their stories are important, and equally deserving of being heard.

To this end, I’m aware that in previous years my challenge films have leant toward those produced outside of Hollywood and Europe, which is both a natural product of my own film preferences and unfortunately plays into certain stereotypes about the kind of films that fit into this kind of challenge. So, this go round, I want to seek out films that qualify but are either in English or from other European countries. Films that you wouldn’t see the title of, and presume that they would qualify.

The Sound of Arrival

Tags

arrival, Denis Villeneuve, films, sciencefiction, strange sound design

Arrival (Villeneuve, 2016) is one of the cleverest and best executed big budget science fiction films I’ve ever seen. To me it is science fiction in its purest form, taking an idea or a theory and extrapolating the consequences.

Arrival is a film that lives in the hinterland where language and science meet. The fascinating mysteries of how our brains are affected by the languages we speak. Thousands of words have been expounded on whether and how our way of seeing the world is influence by the languages we speak. (Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages by Guy Deutscher is a pretty accessible look at the subject if you’re interested.) And the answer is currently, mostly, we don’t really know. Or at least we can’t actually prove anything. Subjectively, I can say that yes, I absolutely do think and see the world differently in Gaelic than I do in English – whether that difference is merely in perspective or an actual neurological change is one for the scientists to argue over, but nonetheless it’s a large part of why this film worked for me on an intrinsic level.

What I wasn’t expecting was to be blown away by the sound design. I have a long established pet-hate of the ‘turn it up to 11’ school of blockbuster sound and while some of that can be mitigated by a bit of common sense in the projection box of your cinema – I recently watched Mad Max: Fury Road on DVD and can now appreciate why it won prizes for its sound editing, but in the cinema my ears were ringing too much for me to notice – there is very rarely any deftness or subtlety to enjoy.

The sound department for this film appear to be mostly French and entirely brilliant. I love that they devoted two separate Sound Designers to the aliens. One for the alien’s themselves and one for their shell ship. The world inside the Shell Ship felt utterly sonically alien, the sense of a sealed environment, an initially claustrophobic but later quite sheltering – womb-like, is presumably what they were going for – soundscape, draws the viewer into the subjective view of the scientists. The aliens are rather cephalopod-like and their vocal language owes a great deal to their Earth bound equivalents. A kind of alien whale song that presumes that the gaseous environment that they inhabit would work like water does for sound here on Earth. (A small niggle, our vocalisations, designed for Earth’s atmosphere, and should surely therefore be as incomprehensible to them as their language is to us?) Strange, yet believably, organically so. The soundscape around them feels, rich and complex, yet spare and subtle. It envelops us yet never overwhelms, in a film so much about language it is necessary that there is enough space given to the dialogue and it manages that with such deftness that you barely notice it – a sure sign of the skill of the sound team if ever I saw one.

A related, but arguably odd observation I couldn’t help but make is that the sound felt French. I spent a lot of time expecting people to break into French. I’m not sure quite how to explain why it felt French, given that I didn’t realise that it was directed by Denis Villeneuve going in – and he’s French Canadian anyway – but I wasn’t remotely surprised when I watched the sound credits and saw all those French names scrolling by. Perhaps it was the restrained yet passionate performances from the cast. Perhaps it’s just that film like this could only have worked being filtered through a bilingual director’s vision. Whatever the reason, the film feels like its being experienced through the filter of a language you’re almost fluent in but not quite. A gorgeously alienating experience. The film in general feels like it should be a much smaller film than it is, having the general ambience of a mid-budget sci-fi film – one big enough to afford decent CGI but small enough to actually be about something. It feels like the kind of film you see by accident or have to hunt down one of the only three screenings it gets anywhere near you. (The closest film to it in terms of atmosphere, that I can think of, is the Korean monster movie The Host/Gwoemul (Joon Ho Bong, 2006) which has the most organic use of CGI I’ve ever seen in a horror movie.) Not the kind of thing that will be showing every night for a week and the usher will tell that they’re extending the run for because its been so popular. It’s a rare gem of a film and I’m glad that it’s getting a wide distribution because it absolutely deserves to be seen widely; I’m just a little surprised.

IFF16 @EdenCourt – Documentaries

Tags

cats, documentaries, scotland, turkey

I saw two feature-length documentaries at the film festival this weekend, and I’m not sure they could have been more different if they’d tried. One bittersweet and desolate and the other gentle and hopeful.

16 Years Till Summer

One of the difficult things about living in the Highlands, is that the sparseness of the population means that the six degrees of separation idea is really more like three. It gives documentaries made here about people from here, a certain immediacy that I doubt they’d have otherwise. I’ve not lived here particularly long, but not withstanding that, I regularly know someone who knows someone involved – whether on the production or as a contributor. It’s altogether more unnerving when, as with this film, you recognise someone’s face and cannot figure out why.

That aside, 16 Years Till Summer is a compelling, poetic film about the possibility of redemption and forgiveness – both as something you earn and as an act of compassion. In many ways the film is like an impressionist painting or poem, between the way it has been shot, the long takes and silences, and its hyper-real use of sync-sound and the charming score. Even if, as I found myself discussing with a friend I bumped into at the screening, they managed to make one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland look bleak and depressing.

There’s something almost inevitable about the film’s conclusion, that we spend the duration of the film hoping against hope, along with the filmmakers that our protagonist will make good. Will find it in himself to be the man he believes himself to be, rather than the man he is. Perhaps that’s truly what makes him so familiar, because most of us will know someone like that, a charming dreamer who is great at find opportunities to try and turn their dreams into reality, but even better at self-sabotaging themselves and screwing up those opportunities. It’s just that most of those screw-ups don’t end up with other people dead.

Kedi

Is a film about the cats of Istanbul. Thousands of feral cats – I’ll call them feral rather than wild because they are definitely domesticated they just don’t live with individual humans – rather made the city their home for centuries. The film looks at the lives of these cats and their relationships with the humans around them. The film is mostly shot from either cat level – even for the interviews we are mostly looking up at the interviewees – or in aerial views of the city, it really is a largely cats eye view of the city.

At least on the surface the film is about cats, looking at the city from the perspective of cats and through the lens of cats, reveals a very different Istanbul to anything I’ve ever seen before in films about the city. On a deeper level, this is a film about community and how the city is changing and what that means for all its inhabitants whether they have two legs or four. It touches gently on all sorts of issues, of gentrification and class, culture and language, food and family, all of the gently allided by the presence of the cats. People talk about the things that are important to them, that shape their lives and their fears, sometimes poetically and others bluntly, but always under the umbrella that they’re talking about cats. The cats give them a cover for talking honestly about community and the city, about mental health and poverty, and most of all about human and animal kindness.

It’s a lovely, insightful film and, naturally, despite not speaking a word, the cats are the personalities that stay with you.

IFF 2016 @EdenCourt – Short Docs

Tags

documentaries, scottish, short films

I did intend to see both sets of short documentaries that were showing at the Inverness Film Festival this year, but circumstances conspired against me. (I did, however, get a lovely walk in the Autumnal sunshine yesterday morning as compensation.) Handily, the screening that I did see was the one that contained almost all of the short documentaries I was most interested in seeing. If I could only see one of the screenings, I’m glad it was this one.

The Bell Ringers

The first documentary in the collection is a little slice of life film, about people learning to be bell ringers at St Andrews Cathedral in Inverness. It’s an interesting enough little piece as it is, but mostly it made me want a documentary more about the history of the bell ringers, I wanted more than anything to know more. It also reminded me that a couple of years ago I started some research work, towards making a radio documentary about the Bell Ringers at Dunblane Cathedral – now I really want to make that documentary!

Dear Peter

Dear Peter is, I think, the third of Scott Willis’ documentaries that I’ve seen now – he worked at Eden Court for a while which sort of makes him a local film-maker – so I’m starting to recognise his style of film-making. They tend to focus on an interesting character that Scott’s met – and they tend to stand or fall based on the nature of the friendship that forms between film-maker and subject. This one works really well, I found it compelling and lovely, perhaps most of all because I’m also the sort of person who, if they found a collection of art postcards in a bookshop – all addressed to the one person – would want to track that person down and interview them.

Sheepo

The shortest film in the collection – Sheepo is probably the film that I would most whole-heartedly recommend. There’s not a lot to it and it’s certainly not going to change the world, but it was by a long way, the most fun. It was brilliantly shot, did nice things with sound and had an engaging and amusing protagonist and subject. Who knew competitive sheep shearing could be so much fun?

With The Rising Tide

I’m not sure why I like documentaries about boat building, but I really love documentaries about boat building. There’s just something about the type of person who is willing to spend the time to hand build a wooden boat that seems to make them a compelling subject for a documentary and this one was full of those people. Young and old, male and female – and quite frankly the lassie from Plockton neatly articulated everything I love about woodworking – the sense of community, of building something together, something greater than themselves oozed out of every moment of this film.

With the Rising Tide is a gorgeous lyrical film, with an interesting approach to sound. (Even if said sound did make the sound designer in me twitch to get at the sound mix to mellow out some of the more jarring audio cuts.)

IFF 2016 @EdenCourt – Chi-Raq

Tags

film festival, spike lee, usa

Chi-Raq was a bit of a left-field choice for me, as my normal film festival fare is documentaries and obscure foreign language films. (As will probably become obvious from the rest of these reviews.) But it had an interesting premise, it’s set in Chicago – a city I for which I have a soft spot – and its directed by Spike Lee, so it seemed worth a try. The blurb in the festival programme did not do it justice.

It was billed as a modern day adaptation of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata – which, for the uninitiated, is the story of one woman’s mission to end the Peloponnesian War by getting all the women of Greece together to organise a sex strike – but it is so much more than that. I was expecting a take the storyline and themes adaptation, but they went the full nine yards – on screen narrator, Greek chorus, everyone talking in rhyme – and made it live and breathe of the streets of Chicago. It’s vibrant and passionate, funny and tragic (in the proper sense of the word) and it does not shy away from what it is or what it has to say. From the moment that Samuel L Jackson turns around to face the camera, freezes time and breaks the fourth wall to talk about a fourth century BC Greek play, its obvious that this is going to be something different. By the time John Cusack shows up as an evangelical preacher – in what I would say is his best performance in at least a decade – soliloquising on systemic racism, it is clear that neither he or the film are in the slightest bit interested in messing around.

Teyonah Parris is excellent as the titular Lysistrata – but its Angela Basset that steals the show for me. Such a controlled performance, this smart political woman, with so much rage and grief banked down under her skin. She’s the one who plants the seeds and holds the fort; the one who speaks softly while Lysistrata figuratively carries the big stick.

The soliloquies are just brilliant. They’re powerful and moving, and really bring out the poetry of the vernacular that they’re written in. The poetry that exists in all really good hip-hop. (I’m sure someone has done a proper hip-hop Shakespeare adaptation, if not, why on earth not, that would be amazing.) What I mean is that a play from 2000 years ago, ought not to feel so vividly relevant and timely. It feels, almost, necessary? As though it was just lurking somewhere in our collective consciousness waiting to be told. If it was, then I’m glad it chose Spike Lee’s brain to filter through because he absolutely nailed it.

There’s something decidedly bittersweet – a little heart-breaking even – about watching this film just a couple of days after the US Election. This film is very much a product of its time, of the administration that is coming to an end. It’s a film that acknowledges that the system is very broken, that the odds are stacked against anyone trying to build a better world, but it is also convinced that its worth fixing and its worth trying even if you don’t entirely succeed. A film both heart-breaking and hopeful. And honestly, in the current political climate on both sides of the Atlantic, I think we could all do with a little more hope right now.

The film had its Scottish Premiere tonight at the Inverness Film Festival, I don’t know if its getting a wider distribution in the UK but if you can see it, I highly recommend that you do.

Silent Movie (with Live Musical Accompaniment) Double Feature

Tags

german expressionism, germany, silent film, usa

Of all the arts activities that I might have expected to be in plentiful supply when I moved to Inverness, silent films with live musical accompaniment weren’t one of them. I’ve seen half a dozen different films over the last year, and rarely has their live accompaniment been anything as prosaic as a piano. Whether a klezmer band, electronica, a woodwind collective or a jazz trio the performances I’ve seen haven’t been afraid to innovate or push boundaries in interpreting silent movies and the screenings have been universally packed.

I’m personally of the opinion that the best way to watch silent film is with live musical accompaniment. There’s something about live interpretation of a film in music – whether in fitting a pre-prepared score to the film as it spools along, or improvising as they go – that gives silent film a vibrancy that seems to get lost in the cold crispness of a DVD transfer and its pre-recorded soundtrack. Something of the mutability and fragile wonder of the early years of the medium restored to the viewer for a short while.

The first film of my double bill did actually feature the traditional piano based musical accompaniment. And what a feat of piano playing that turned out to be. The Thief of Bagdad is a two and a half hour epic in the old fashioned sense. Despite his massively influential role in Hollywood during the silent era, I’d never actually seen a Douglas Fairbanks picture before – I’m generally more of a Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy type when it comes to early US cinema – and this film really showcases his legendary swashbuckling charm. Despite its unconvincing dragon – there was a good deal of sniggering in the screening – the other special effects are really quite effective and the action sequences quite thrilling. It moves at a cracking pace – the accompaniment certainly helped keep the pace up – and honestly you’d never have known it was as long as it was, there was never a spare moment to get bored in.

The Graeme Stephen Trio appear to have something of a specialism in the works of German Expressionist Cinema. (This year saw them interpreting Faust in Eden Court for Hallowe’en while last year on the same date they were interpreting The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in Perth. They’ve also won prizes for their scoring of Murnau’s Sunrise and recently completed a new score for Metropolis.) The film itself is every bit as dark and strange as one would expect from a meeting of the source material, the director and the general period. It’s set in that weird late semi-Medieval period that I’ve only ever encountered in German cinema – though perhaps it equates to an actual historic period in central Europe, my mainland European history knowledge goes, Rome, Vikings, defeat of Napoleon, German unification so I may be missing some subtleties – and can’t be entirely certain whether or not it actually existed. I’d always thought of Faust as being a story of a scientist/philosopher lead to temptation by a thirst for knowledge. But actually his temptation here is a much more complex affair which I feel made it a much more interesting film.

It’s interesting to note that while I can easily call to mind numerous German film directors of this period, I struggle to name more than one actor – Conrad Veidt for some reason, those compelling eyes probably – whereas in Hollywood at the same time I could reel off numerous stars but the directors names are unknown to me. Perhaps it says something about the different film cultures in Europe and the States a the time, that there wasn’t really an equivalent of the star system that was so dominant in the US. Or perhaps this is an artificial distinction wrought by the perspective of being more used to looking at European cinema through the lens of auteur theory. That we associate genres with particular genres in early European cinema, whereas in early Hollywood cinema we associated them with stars. Or perhaps my continuing interest in German expressionism in film and in film noir has just skewed my perspective towards a focus on stylistics.

The main thing that these two films have in common – other than having been made within two years of each other – is that they are essentially adaptions of earlier literary sources. While The Thief of Bagdad is quite a loose adaptation, it plays heavily on the idea of the existing mythos of 1001 Arabian Nights to allow it to make use of tropes and motifs from the genre as shortcuts that require no explanation. Faust on the other hand is much more of a straight up adaptation of Goethe’s novel – how close and accurate an adaptation it is, I cannot tell, as I haven’t read the book. The other major commonality between the two films is how they function as morality plays, where a protagonist of dubious morality has to face the very real consequences of his sins to someone he cares for and is given the opportunity to redeem himself.

Pumzi Redux

Tags

film, kenya, sciencefiction, short films, Wanuri Kahiu

Several years ago (six, in fact) I stumbled across the trailer for a fascinating little short science fiction film, set in a post water-wars world. At the time the film had not long since screened at Sundance and the director was hoping that they might pull together funding to make a feature-length version. Clearly that never came together, and having finally seen the full 20 minute short film, I can only be sad that we’ve never got to see more of this world. It’s a beautiful and compelling little film as it is, packed full of hope and heartbreak and as much as it is satisfying and complete as is, it feels like a tantilising glimpse into a rich and complex world of which we only ever brush the surface. We get just enough of this world to leave us wanting more, with so many unanswered questions that I would love to see explored further.

PUMZI from Awali Entertainment on Vimeo.

Storyville September

Tags

documentaries, iceland, russia, serbia

So…Summer? That was a thing that happened, right?

Time to dust myself off after the heady whirl of a packed freelancing schedule and get back into blogging I think.

Back at the start of the year I committed to watching 20 feature-length documentaries this year. To say that I’m behind on my target would be…entirely accurate. Circumstances have transpired that I was more behind on my documentary watching than normally. In normal circumstances I watch a lot of documentaries early in the year, have a lull during the summer and then do the bulk of my documentary watching over Autumn and Winter, motivated by both the approaching deadline of the end of the year and the burst of documentaries we always get in the run up to Oscar season.

(Not being in Glasgow for the film festival this year has had more of an impact on my film watching in general than I expected it to. I haven’t completely missed the Glasgow Film Festival in years; last time I missed it was because I was in Berlin for their film festival.)

As so often when I find myself behind on my documentary watching I turned to Storyville for help. My usual experience with watching the Storyville documentaries on the iPlayer is that either there’ll be lots of documentaries I want to watch and I’ll only have time for one, or I’ll have loads of time to watch them and there’ll be nothing at all I fancy. This time however, while the series doesn’t appear to be running right now, there are a bunch of archive documentaries from previous seasons up on their page so I was able to enjoy a few of those.

I hadn’t really given it much thought before, but almost all the documentaries I’ve watched as part of this strand previously have been by or at least about Americans. I only really noticed this time round because the documentaries were rather more skewed towards European topics than I would normally have expected. Given the current political climate, one wonders if this was intentional or just the scheduler unconsciously responding to the zeitgeist.

Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
First up was this odd little documentary about a group of what were, in the early 2000s, essentially the most successful jewellery thieves in the world. Largely by dint of being a rotating cast of criminals – largely from Serbia and Montenegro – working in groups across Europe and the Middle East, having found a formula that worked they applied it everywhere there were high end jewellery shops while the shifting make-up of the teams made it harder for the various police forces to pin down an accurate MO for them. The main focus of the documentary is the campaign to catch them (the Dubai police do not mess around) but there’s a darker more bittersweet undertone to the confessions of members and former members who agreed to be interviewed. (The longing for security and stability almost all of them express, the desperate struggle for survival in post-conflict society, offered not as excuse but as matter of fact explanation of how it was.)

Cod Wars
The oldest of the documentaries on offer, this was a fascinating look at the messy rivalry between the British (specifically the deep sea trawlers out of Hull and Grimsby) fishing fleets and Icelandic coast guard in the run up to and aftermath of the UK joining the European Union. It provides an interesting and really quite helpful perspective on how we ended up with the disaster zone that is the common fisheries policy and just why the east-coast fishing industry has such a fraught relationship with it.

Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer
Despite being on the topic I knew most about, this was definitely the oddest film of the set. A couple of years ago Pussy Riot were quite the phenomena, brightly coloured balaclavas, political punk and show trials all round. Iconic and mysterious. The film is about context as much as anything else, – mostly for the group themselves – explaining the background of the protests and the history of political art and protest in post-Soviet Russia. It also takes the time to give the context of the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state that explains why the protest was taken so badly by that section of society. (Arguably there was no way it could have been taken well given historical context and the chasm of political difference between worldviews.) Interestingly context as an important part of the effectiveness of political protest is something that comes up a lot in the film. The idea that the audience for the protest has to understand the protest; for the protest to be effective and not counterproductive. Weirdly this idea is most coherently and blatantly stated by the prosecution lawyers who come across in their interview as faintly exasperated as though they are carefully talking around saying, we understand what you were trying to do but this was not the way to do it. (Some of which is undoubtedly respectability politics and some of it has merit.) It’s interesting that what they were trying to do seemingly made more sense to an international audience than it did to a local one.

Russia’s Toughest Prison: The Condemned
Black Dolphin Prison is a contender for the most remote and isolated prison in the world. It is a maximum-security prison, exclusively for murders, in the heart of a forest bigger than Germany and seven hours drive from the nearest city. (Just in case you needed a reminder of how truly HUGE Russia remains.) It has two very different facilities. One for death row prisoners whose sentences were commuted to 25 years in prison, who live in dorms and do manual labour and menial jobs to keep the place running. The other for murders convicted since the death penalty was suspended, who are imprisoned in small bare one or two person cells 23 hours a day, and see the sky from not much larger outside box where they’re allowed to take a walk once a day. It’s a bizarre double-system. Unsurprisingly enough, some of the most interesting interviewees are those who are most unrepentant, most at peace with what they’ve done and who they are as people. There’s a great deal of acceptance that they are all terrible people and they deserve to be punished, though where they stand on whether either of these methods or something else entirely is the best way to punish them, varies wildly.

Arguably the most interesting part of all is the way that prisoners from both halves of the prison, despite living under very different regimes, feel equally incapable of reintegration. The shared belief that it would have been kinder to execute them, rather than make them live with the things they have done, that they are without hope of redemption both internally and externally was both fascinating and horrible.

February Podcast Stars

Tags

99pi, gastropod, npr, podcasts, serial

The end of this month has somewhat snuck up on me. I did fully intend to track down some interesting and different sound projects to talk about this month but it never really happened. But what this month did involve was a lot of podcast listening, so having talked about my favourite new fictional podcast discoveries last month, I reckon its high time I talked about some recent non-fiction podcast discoveries.

99% Invisible.
For years people have been trying to convince me of the joys of This American Life, but I’ve been resisting it. When I first got into podcasts the best part of a decade ago, I really struggled with American podcasts – I found them really disconcerting, something about the accent or the subject matter, I just couldn’t get into them. Listening to podcasts from here in the UK was fine; perhaps because I was used to speech radio as the BBC does it and much of their podcast content is essentially the highlights of their arts and current affairs output. While podcasts from other UK providers in the early days of podcasts, were heavily influenced by – or reacting against – the BBC’s speech radio output. Over time my antipathy to American podcasts has faded – probably as a result of podcasts in general getting more adventurous and coming into their own more – and with my continuing fondness for Welcome to Nightvale and Serial – more about the latter later – I tried This American Life again. I fully accept that this will be considered sacrilege to many podcast fans, but I just don’t feel the love for it. I don’t hate it, it doesn’t annoy me, if I listen to an episode I generally find it interesting, but it just doesn’t compel me to listen to episode after episode.

For me, 99% Invisible fulfils the promise that so many people made me about This American Life. Perhaps its because the podcast started out in its presenter’s bedroom before being pulled into the public radio realm, it retains an idiosyncratic and charming quality that I prefer. (Maybe my interests just align better with that of their production team?) Maybe its because the episodes are shorter, I’m not sure, but somehow they manage to give just enough information to satisfy your curiosity so that even if the subject isn’t fascinating to you, what you learn is still interesting and you don’t have time to get bored. To me they’re little snippets of insight into unfamiliar worlds and the oddities and eccentricities of American life that I would never otherwise have considered.

Gastropod
I love food. My other blog is a food blog. Cooking is my go-to form of stress-relief and I recently became a vegetarian. I have lots of feelings about food.

I’ve been consuming Gastropod irregularly for a while now. Someone recommended it to me and I looked up the website, listened to the soundcloud imbed of the current episode, enjoyed it but had too much of an existing podcast backlog to subscribe. However, I never did close the tab it was in, so over the last year I would occasionally discover it in a tab, browse the latest episodes, listen to one and move on again. I only recently subscribed because I figured that something I kept coming back to and enjoying was worth making time for. It’s the history and science of food and while its not necessarily life-changing, it is certainly perspective changing. The episode titles are quirky, the science is interesting and the hosts are funny and likeable. They get in a whole range of interesting experts and passionate amateurs, and they seem really interested in each topic which I think really helps in terms of making it interesting to the listener.

Serial
Weirdly, given my antipathy towards This American Life, I love this podcast. The same team makes it and the story that kicked it off was at one point intended to be an episode of that show that grew arms and legs. And perhaps that’s the reason that it grabbed my attention. It wasn’t just an interesting real life murder mystery; this story had taken over the reporter’s life for an entire year. (There’s a passion there, that fantasy of the passionate crusading journalist you’re sold as a kid.) There’s something about long-form journalism that I adore. Between the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle we live in, there’s such an overwhelming volume of constantly changing and shifting news. Thousands of tiny sound bites, too much for any one person to take in. Long-form, investigative journalism is expensive and its hard work. Given that the prevailing narrative since I was a student, has been that the internet is killing this kind of journalism; I do take a special pleasure in the fact that actually, the internet has made it much easier for me to find new and varied sources of this kind of journalism and for this kind of material to find an audience. Serial is almost the perfect storm of this, it’s a podcast, its long-form – episodes are anything between half an hour and an hour – and its serialised. The pieces come out week by week, but they aren’t set in stone; the story might branch off in a new direction as new leads come to light. It takes its time, it goes in to detail – in the case of the current series, it will stop and diverge into the history of particular events, places or groups to give the audience backstory that sheds a new light on events in the story, or makes seemingly inexplicable events make perfect sense. It’s not patronising, it assumes that its audience is smart and has a decent grasp of current events, but that this is not their specialist subject. It’s smart, intriguing and compelling listening. Also the presenter/reporter Sarah Koenig has a really listenable, compelling voice. That helps too.

If this month’s listening had a theme, then I think its enthusiasm and passion. They’re all podcasts by people who seem – whether or not they actually are – genuinely interested or intrigued about the subjects they talk about. Whether they’re passionate about discovering the truth or just about learning something new and interesting, they talk to the audience like we should be fascinated too. As though they’re saying to the audience: “You’re smart, but this is complicated, bare with me, this is interesting/important, we’ll get there together and all will become clear.” I like that.