Glasgow Film Fest: African Stories & Documentary Edition

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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.

Netflix Docs

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brazil, documentaries, south africa, uk, usa

With cinemas once again off limits for a fair chunk of the start of last year, I decided to make a concerted effort to catch up on at least a respectable chunk of the documentaries available on Netflix while I had the chance. As dubious as I’ve been about Netflix having gone on a campaign to make a name for themselves in both funding and distributing documentaries, I accept that the main way that most people see documentaries is on television. Even for a dedicated documentary feature film fan like myself, who regularly seeks out documentaries at film festivals, or even just my local art cinema, the vast majority of my documentary watching is on the small screen. (And realistically, as someone who doesn’t own a television that’s mostly been streamed, since around about the dawn of the iPlayer.) There are definitely documentaries that really benefit from being viewed on the big screen – Free Solo comes immediately to mind, and while I certainly enjoyed The Dawn Wall on the small screen I did wish I could have seen it full size – but in general it’s a genre that I’m happier to watch on the small screen than most others.

As the vast majority of US documentaries don’t make it to UK screens until they’ve been nominated for a major prize – in most cases unless they’re a break out hit, or they get an Oscar nomination, it’s unlikely they’ll show up here outside of the film festival circuit – my opinions on the Oscar documentary category will be shaped mostly by whether or not I liked the one nominated documentary I’ve actually seen, and catching up, despite my best efforts is often a frustratingly lost cause. But now, theoretically it should be easier to do, though I suppose I won’t really know until we get a ‘normal’ Oscar season where I can got hunting ahead of time and prepare to have opinions.

I’m delighted that feature documentaries are starting to gain their own cult audiences on streaming services. My Octopus Teacher was an utterly charming nature documentary that would likely have passed me by had not it been the topic of delighted water cooler chatter.

Oddly enough one of the best documentaries I saw all year was a 2004 film about percussionist Evelyn Glennie, Touch the Sound which had some genuinely gorgeous sound design. (Definitely worth putting the good headphones in for, though it’s quite an immersive, almost overwhelming experience through headphones, it’s well worth it, just maybe turn the sound down a bit to start with, that big drum at the start is a lot otherwise.) It was a really compelling look at an artist at work, and one of the best attempts I’ve encountered at using sound design to get the audience inside a musician’s head. I stumbled across it quite by accident while looking for something gentle to watch while feeling rather burnt out from the news cycle and it fit the bill admirably. Understated and very good at what it set out to do, highly recommended.

In the middle of December, I realised that I was five documentaries short of my target for the year – twenty feature length documentaries – and given that it’s become something a tradition for me to spend the last week or so of the year trying to cram as many feature documentaries in as possible, I decided to make a determined go at it. I ended up watching a run of documentaries that proved to be accidentally on a theme. This is particularly easy to do with Netflix as once you’ve finished a particular film it will immediately offer you more films that you are statistically likely to watch. In this case they were all already on my mental list of documentaries I wanted to watch, in what I thought of as two separate streams, but that proved to be interconnected.

The first stream was a three film run of films about social media manipulation. I started with Coded Bias which is largely about facial recognition and the problems of systems in the US being programmed by a largely homogenous group of programmers – mostly white and male – meaning that they often struggle to identify faces that aren’t widely represented amongst that group. It travels through the dangers of these supposedly ‘impartial systems’ simply absorbing the structural bias and discrimination inherent in the the data that they are trained on, onto the utterly dystopian ubiquity of facial recognition systems in China and their tie in with their social capital system. Then we had The Social Dilemma that was consuming so many column inches with arguments and counter arguments last year. It’s a bit…simplistic in it’s arguments, very didactic and a bit overdramatic – subtle in making it’s points this film is not – but it definitely makes it’s points clearly. Though for me, the real power to the arguments was in the number of interviewees who’d worked for these companies and left, lining up to admit that they’d tried to create something good and made a monster. There’s a particularly depressing sequence about a time when one of the contributors had essentially laid what they were doing wrong and the harms they were causing, his essay/manifesto had essentially gone viral within the company – with people all across it contacting him to thank him for saying ‘out loud’ what so many of them were thinking/fearing – yet within a couple of weeks everything was business as usual, corporate inertia winning the day. Which as someone working in news media, watching scandal after scandal be exposed to no real impact is relatable to a painful extent. The third film of this thread, that really tied both threads together for me, was The Great Hack on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It’s a film of many different faces, that clearly evolved as revelations from various whistle blowers come forward and investigations revealed further information that seem to sideswipe even the whistle blowers. At it’s heart its a film about the way that power and money corrupts and co-opts people and the dangers of hubris when combined with powerful new technologies. Taken together all these films feel like a parable of the dangers of thinking that you’re too smart to be fooled and that you can manipulate people to make them/society ‘better’. That is, after all the story of so many politicians, you start of wanting to make a better world and get co-opted into the system. Why would we think that political systems wouldn’t learn to co-opt social media to it’s own ends? The problem with ‘move fast and break things’ is that while sometimes you break things for the better, but sometimes you break things for the worse.

(It also ties into Knock Down the House on a different level because it’s star whistle blower had started out doing social media for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Kaiser’s asked at one point how she ended up working for the Republicans and essentially her answer is that they were the ones willing to pay her. Her parents lost their home to medical debt, so she left non profit work and took a corporate job to help, and went down the rabbit hole. And if that story isn’t emblematic of all that’s rotten in the state of US politics I don’t know what is.)

The second stream was kicked off by Knock Down the House about first time candidates standing for congress during the 2018 US mid-term elections. All four of the candidates are women, from a diverse set of backgrounds, part of a wider movement not just to change red seats to blue, but to change the type of Democrat in congress in a bid for wider change. (It was particularly jarring to see Joe Manchin in the news just before Christmas proving just why they were campaigning so hard to unseat him in this film.) It’s quite fascinating to watch how these campaigns work at the grassroots level where they’re explicitly refusing corporate money so they aren’t beholden to anyone but their electors, in a system that is so very reliant on money. Though their use of social media to level the playing field in some ways definitely feels different in the aftermath of watching the other thread of films. And then it felt only right to take another run at The Edge of Democracy which I bounced off earlier in the year, that covers the dramatic upheavals in Brazil’s political scene over the last decade, with historical context. I hadn’t really expected this film to tie in quite so much with the rest of the films, but social media mobs and manipulation, along with creeping authoritarianism turns out to a big part of that story too. I found it particularly fascinating to see how late in the game Jair Bolsonaro came to the fore of the crisis the film depicts given his current prominence. It’s strange how differently both those films seem now after having seen The Great Hack than they would have been before that story came out.

Documentaries @Invfilmfest

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documentaries, eden court, france, iceland, iff, nablopomo, scotland

There were so many documentaries on at the Film Festival this year and I was pleased to note that they were scheduled in such a way that if everything had gone to plan, I could have seen almost all of them. Unfortunately, world events beyond my control meant that I was unable to do my usual full on festival experience and instead had a rather more limited schedule – with the days when the majority of the documentaries were on being almost entirely out of bounds to me. Yet the documentaries that I did see, were lovely and well worth tracking down.

The Last Autumn

My first documentary of the festival, and an unexpected extra film that I squeezed in at the last moment before work on Saturday. It was an extremely autumnal day that matched the mood of this film really well.

The film follows the day to day life of a farming couple on an island at the very north of Iceland, throughout the final Autumn of the keeping sheep. As in many similar communities across Northern Europe the sheep traditionally spend the summer grazing on the hills above the community and are brought down in the Autumn to overwinter in the valley. (One of the last places where they still do this in Ireland has turned this event into something of a festival that acts as a tourist attraction, in order to keep it viable.) As less and less young people from the community go into farming themselves, or are able to come home specifically to help with it, more and more farmers are giving up their sheep as they get too old to tackle the hill. The trick, according to the film, is to give up before you can no longer get up the hill to help. I described this film to a colleague and she said, with a wry smile, that we’d made that film ourselves, in a dozen different ways, in three minute chunks, over the years. It’s true, it’s a familiar refrain here in the Highlands, of young people who go away and don’t return, or if they do return only for the holidays. 

The film has no narration, and very little dialogue, so most of the commentary on events comes from radio programmes playing on the radio from what I presume to be the Icelandic equivalent of Radio 4. There’s much talk on the radio about language, about the steady creep of English into everyday life, especially among young people. That too is an all too familiar refrain here, and for me a far greater worry than the potential end of hill sheep farming – agricultural has changed many times before and will doubtless change many more times in the future. If the way of life is inevitably changing is it possible to unshackle the language from the lifestyle? Can the language survive without it? If the language is to survive it must somehow remain the language of both those who leave and those who stay. And if that is a struggle in Iceland, where the language in question is the majority language rather than a minority language, how much harder is for those of us fighting for minority languages? The film and it’s protagonist remains stubbornly hopeful, despite everything else. 

I was reminded strangely of Sleep Furiously – while it’s a very different film from that one, the was something of the tone and the atmosphere that put me inescapably in mind of it. This film felt like an elegy, marking the passing of a way of life, not just for the sheep farmer whose last autumn in the job we’re following, but for the wider community. The film feels at peace with that change, there’s no resentment or anger in this film, just a sense of inevitability, that the world is changing and that that’s okay. Which could be a really depressing outcome, but feels strangely reassuring. 

It was also showing with a Scottish short film, Confluence, about a luthier – that’s someone who makes and repairs violins and fiddles to you and me – Charlie Webster, in Abriachan, above Loch Ness. It’s a film about someone who’s found a new way to make a life and a living for himself in a remote area and that despite the impact of the pandemic, is full of hope. It’s a gentle meditative piece with lovely music that made the perfect accompaniment to the documentary. 

Becoming Cousteau

Unlike many of the audience for this film, I didn’t grow up with the films of Jacques Cousteau, my view of the underwater world was shaped the BBC’s Natural History department, and largely – though not exclusively – narrated by David Attenborough. It’s not that I didn’t know about Jacques Cousteau and his films, but I always knew them second hand, at a distance. Through references in children’s nature programmes, but mostly I think through the filter of Luc Besson’s Atlantis (1991) – which I definitely need to rewatch now, in light of seeing this film. A friend who also saw this film at the festival, enthused to me about having loved Costeau’s films as a child, about how they had shaped her view of the natural world and particularly the underwater parts of it. It very much felt that this film had been made from that perspective, or at least from a place of real affection. That’s not to say that it’s a film which shies away from it’s protagonist’s very real flaws and mis-steps. It just presents them in a very non-judgemental way – probably inevitably given the heavy involvement of the Cousteau Foundation in the film – dealing with them as matter of fact parts of who he was and what he did, without implying that they should undermine his legacy. Which is honestly quite refreshing in these days of extremes in interpretation, many documentaries of this ilk would either completely ignore those flaws, or make them the whole focus of the film. 

In truth, I had no idea how truly groundbreaking those early films were, that time and again they’d had to invent solutions to problems because they were pushing up against the limits of what was previously possible, breaking barriers and records at every turn. How much both marine biology and underwater filming truly owes to Cousteau and his colleagues. That in it’s own way is one of the film’s great strengths, for all it’s a biography of one man, it puts him in context, giving credit to his colleagues and companions without which he couldn’t have achieved so much of what he did. 

This documentary felt both timely and deeply frustrating, with COP 26 taking place down the road in Glasgow, knowing that he spent the last twenty odd years of his life campaigning for environmental protection. 

Take One Action Returns! #TOAFF21

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documentaries, nablopomo, short films, take one action

To my delight, the Take One Action film festival arrives in Inverness and breaks with tradition by not taking place on a weekend that I’m working. Actually it also breaks with tradition by arriving in Inverness at the tail end of October rather than in the latter part of November. I presume this was so that it could be part of Eden Court’s wider ‘Climate of Hope’ season but could equally have been with the aim to catch the audience when they were thinking about environmental issues in the run up to COP26 and were not yet jaded by all the coverage and compromises. Whatever the reason, it meant that I could actually have seen all five films if I wanted. (I only didn’t go to see The New Corporation because – as it’s subtitle an unfortunately necessary sequel implies – it’s really dispiriting to go see a sequel to a documentary you saw twenty years before and know that so little has in fact changed I saw it in a freezing cold and mostly empty screening in the MacRobert Centre when I was a student. Though I imagine its even more depressing to need to make said film.) It was a bit of a treat to be able to be picky and prioritise films based on preference – I usually pick the environmentally themed films, but they were all on that theme this year – rather than when I wasn’t working.

Living Proof

This was an interesting film, that made excellent use of it’s archive source material from the National Library of Scotland. It uses the archive – mostly public information and marketing films with some news reports and community donated footage – to tell the story of the economic and industrial development of Scotland and the Highlands in particular since the Second World War.
The part that fascinated me the most is that the vast majority of the footage is from films that were made with some sort of agenda, whether establishment or corporate, to change minds or otherwise sell some sort of idea – the anti nuclear campaigners are the most explicit in trying to influence their audience, but some of the others are about as subtle as a brick in their own efforts to get their message across. It was definitely interesting to see how large the dreaded issue of ‘development’ has loomed across this whole period, both in the Highlands and across the wider Scottish landscape.

The film came with an introduction from director Emily Munro so I know there was a lot of other subtler stuff going on in the film that I don’t feel really came through on screen. However, it was in it’s own way an inditement of just how male dominated Scottish public life was during the twentieth century – grey men in grey suits indeed.

Living Proof (Trailer) | TOAFF21 from Take One Action Film Festivals on Vimeo.

The Ants and the Grasshopper

In some ways this film reminds me quite a bit of Thankyou for the Rain, which I saw as part of Take One Action back in 2017. About a Kenyan farmer turned climate activist and his work changing life in his community and taking his story and experience to the Paris 2015 Climate Change Conference.

Something that I liked better about this film was that Anita and Esther felt more embedded in their communities than the other film’s protagonist Kisulu. While he felt more like a lone force of nature changing his community around him, they felt more woven into a wider community of people striving to change their own locality for the better, and the wider world in turn. In many ways Esther is a similar kind of force of nature person, but we mostly follow Anita’s perspective and we see Esther’s impact filtered through her perspective and through the impact that Anita knows Esther had on her own life and work.

There’s no cathartic moment of achieving major change in this film. There are small victories certainly but mainly it is a film about the slow steady work of changing hearts and minds. The drip, drip, drip of a thousand small conversations with neighbours and colleagues, day in day out, to slowly change attitudes and build communities for change. It’s there that Anita’s greatest victories are achieved and in a way that’s the real message of the film, I think. That the rest is up to us, the audience to take up the work and do the slow grinding work of changing hearts and minds one conversation at a time.

The Ants and the Grasshopper (Trailer) | TOAFF21 from Take One Action Film Festivals on Vimeo.

The Last Forest

First up, this film came with an accompanying short film that’s worth noting. Sky Aelans is a film from the Solomon Islands that seems to have been made largely to celebrate the Solomon Islands government acknowledging the sovereignty of the indigenous peoples who live in their rainforests stewardship over their own land and putting appropriate environmental protections into place. It was nice to have, for once, a good news story about rainforest protection. To see joy and triumph on their faces, rather than anger or stoicism in the face of great injustice.

The Last Forest itself follows the intertwining story of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa – who co-wrote the film – and his campaigning work to protect their forest and the every day struggles and conflicts of other Yanomami people. The film mixes an observational style that feels almost documentary-like with what are clearly staged dream sequences that illustrate both the creation story of the Yanomami people and the major role that the spirit world still has on their day to day lives. The film mixes both elements together with ease – at one point a young woman waits patiently for spiritual guidance while Davi discusses the incursions of prospectors into land further up the river with other community leaders over a ham radio. Mostly though it is an ode to community, to their achievements large and small and what they might yet do together. At it’s heart it is a film that deals with what all minority communities deal with in the face of an increasingly global world, what to take from the new world and what to keep from the old one, and whether a compromise is even possible.

The Last Forest (Trailer) | TOAFF21 from Take One Action Film Festivals on Vimeo.

Iorram (Boat Song)

Tags

documentaries, gaelic, scotland

There’s always something about people from outside making films or art about the islands that makes me feel a little on edge before engaging with it. The phrase ‘the first Gaelic x’ – in this case feature length cinematic documentary – is almost always one to be eyed with caution. It’s either lovely or painful to watch with very little middle ground, though there’s definitely a your mileage may vary element. There’s often an unfortunate tendency to romanticise island life, to create a picturesque and elegiac vision of a ‘lost’ way of life. This film is not that. (An Iorram is a boat song, more precisely, a rowing song, to keep the rowers in time. A work song, so more practical than romantic, but no less lovely for it.) If anything this a film which uses the past – recordings made across the mid twentieth century by field workers from the School of Scottish Studies – to contextualise the present. There’s a particularly lovely sequence, where the archive recordings talk about how they used to build lobster pots on Mingulay, contrasted with some young fishermen sitting together in a shed hand repairing their modern lobster pots – the technology has changed but it remains part of the same continuity. There’s also a horribly sad sequence of oral histories of the clearances – greed, exploitation, sectarian violence and dehumanisation – over pictures of abandoned crofts. I could certainly have done with some more contemporary fishermen telling their own stories in Gaelic, but I appreciate that the point of the film was to tell a story solely with the audio archive and modern imagery and consider that both to be a worthy aim and a well realised one. The film avoids the temptation of trying and failing to be all things to all people and there is in fact a nice little aside in the film where two modern fishermen are talking to each other over the radio in Gaelic to remind the audience that this is still a living language for those working in fishing both at sea and on land.

The film is beautifully shot, just gorgeous camera work. I haven’t previously encountered director/cinematographer Alastair Cole’s work and I was a little surprised to find out that he’s originally from New Zealand rather than from the islands. There’s a care and attention to detail in the camera work that speaks of long familiarity and affection. It was shot over three years, which explains it somewhat, but I see that the director has made films about minority languages in several other cultural contexts so it’s equally likely to be skill and experience in not exoticising or patronising his subjects and maintaining a light touch. (I know from experience that it’s easy to make the islands beautiful in Summer but it’s a much more impressive to capture that beauty in mid-Winter and mist. The colours are rich and vibrant, when it is all too easy to make them washed out and grey.) I was reminded a little of Polaris another documentary film – though a short one – about the Scottish fishing industry, though that one was about the east coast industry and the migrant workers that now come halfway around the world to work in it. (A shared thread between both films, some of the oral histories were recollections of former herring girls and their experiences of freedom and struggles with culture and language differences in the different fishing ports of the east coast including the Broch – A’ Bhruaich being the Gaelic for Fraserburgh where Polaris is set.) I’ve seen quite a few observational style documentaries over the last few years and this is definitely one of the better examples, the oral histories and images have clearly been carefully curated to create a narrative through line while allowing the film to seem to unfold entirely naturally.

I need to take a moment here to express the my appreciation for Aidan O’ Rourke’s excellent scoring work here. It feels organic, stitching together traditional pieces with new compositions, never overwhelming the archive recordings – seeming to weave itself into them in places – nor getting lost under the actuality of the contemporary scenes, helping to tie past and present together into a coherent whole. In one interview I read with the director, he expressed the hope that they’d be able to screen the film with a live band performing the score and I hope that eventually comes to pass. One of the last concerts I saw before the first lockdown back in March 2020 was a screening of From Scotland with Love with King Creosote – and friends – performing the score live and I think this film would really benefit from that kind of experience.

View from the boat – a still from Iorram.

Sheffield Doc Fest @EdenCourt

Tags

documentaries, egypt, scotland, sheffield doc fest, usa

If the arts end up keeping anything positive from these pandemic times, I hope it’s the hybrid model of festivals and exhibitions where they have site specific and online lives. Over the last year and a bit I’ve attended a bunch of festivals – both film and music – online that I would realistically have never been able to attend in person for geographical or time reasons.

Sheffield Doc Fest, is a fortnight long documentary film festival that I’ve been planning to attend in person for at least the last decade and that I finally managed to do in an asynchronous, semi-virtual fashion this year. I’m pleased to see that they’re also following what I think of as the Africa in Motion model, where the films tour the country as well, I think I liked their version better with the remote screenings being the same night as the festival screenings – instead of weeks or months later – so that even if you couldn’t, or didn’t want to be, physically in Sheffield, you could be in a screening with lots of other people. I find the pre-recorded zoom Q&As that are in vogue at the moment even more awkward than their in-person versions but I think they do help the audience feel part of something bigger.

Summer of Soul (…Or When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

This was the first and certainly the best attended of the Sheffield Docs being screened, and it was definitely my favourite. It tells the story of the Harlem Cultural Festival, that took place across six weeks during the summer of 1969 in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park), both the festival and the film about it celebrate Black history, culture and fashion, and capture a powerful and transformative moment in history. It also feels very much a film of this moment, telling a story, a history, that has been hidden, that doubtless many would prefer to remain so, despite, or perhaps because of it’s joy and positivity.

Many of the interviews are with ordinary folks from Harlem who attended as teenagers, and there’s some particularly poignant commentary from them about the importance of cultural history being recorded and taking it’s place in the historical record. (One man talking about watching footage of a concert he attended as a small boy, said something along the line of: its real, I knew it was real I was there, but now I know it’s really real, I can prove it.)

One of the film’s great strengths is the quality of the concert footage. It was recorded with the intent to sell the footage to TV Stations, the director of the original footage talks about pitching it as ‘Black Woodstock’ to executives, hoping they’d be hungry for something both similar enough and different enough to that cultural phenomenon. His baffled frustration forty years on that they weren’t comes through clearly. Whatever their professed reasons for turning it down, it wasn’t the footage quality – doubtless it’s been restored in the process of digitisation but both visuals and especially audio are too good for the originals to have been anything but top quality professional work – rubbish in, rubbish out after all – and it holds up well.

It’s both a great concert film, and an important and accessible film about the a side of the sixties in the US that we don’t hear enough about in the cultural and historical memory of that time.

Lift Like a Girl

This is a strange film. It’s an observational documentary – which does seem to be rather in vogue at the moment – and there are no real ‘to camera’ interviews. Not only is it a film without a narration, but a film that feels like it has no authorial voice. Officially, the protagonist is a young weightlifter called Zebiba following her from ages 14 to 18 as she strives to become a champion weight lifter. She struggles and strives, argues with her coach and watches everything with large cautious eyes. There’s clearly a lot going on behind those eyes, but we never really get any insight into what’s going on behind those eyes, or even really get to know her as a person. It’s obvious that her struggles are less physical than they are psychological, arguably she’s motivated more by the making her coach and the younger weightlifters proud of her than by the prospect of winning itself, let alone medals or prizes.

She does however make the perfect foil to her coach Captain Ramadan, a legend in his sport who trained the first Egyptian woman to medal at the Olympics in weightlifting. He spends the film trying to parle that fame and reputation into resources and success for the girls of a poor neighbourhood of Alexandria. He’s abrasive and aggressive, but also charming and committed and despite how much time he seems to spend shouting at them, it’s clear that the girls he trains think the world of him. He gives what is the closest the film gets to actual interviews, but more in the form of pontificating speeches that are given as much for the girls or their parents as they are for the camera. It seems very much that the relationship of trust is between himself and the director and everyone else trusts and/or tolerates the film-makers because he does. He’s the man with the plan and he dominates every scene he’s in – even in his rare moments of silence he’s compelling, drawing the eye irresistibly. The film feels as though it’s constantly fighting not to be about him rather than about Zebiba.

The Story of Looking

The last of the three documentaries I saw was Mark Cousins latest film, The Story of Looking, which is an oddly elegiac film, full of nostalgia, grief and hope. It’s a film about the power and the pain of looking, of what visual culture means to us collectively as a culture and to him individually as a film-maker and a person. It uses as it’s central conceit, the idea of turning Cousins’ darkened bedroom as a camera obscura, projecting an imagined journey around Edinburgh and the wider world onto the screen in front of the audience and plays with the idea of imagination and objective reality accordingly. (The film is definitely at it’s strongest when we’re watching the shadows on the wall, rather than sitting in the objective reality that is inside the camera obscura with the director.) It’s a strange film, but also compelling and lovely. I saw it in an almost empty cinema – there were two other viewers, all of us there by ourselves on a Saturday night, sitting in opposite corners of the screen – it was definitely a film to be seen alone in the dark, but it deserved more of us.

It’s partly based on his book of the same name and partly on the experience of having a cataract removed from his own eye. (Fair warning for eye harm.) The film features some fairly shocking imagery, but always in a measured and conscious fashion, it’s presented as imagery that pushes boundaries as part of a discussion about why it pushes boundaries and how it impacts the viewer. (Strangely the hardest part to watch, for me, was the small Syrian refugee Adam cry and not receive comfort – it felt the most voyeuristic somehow in a way that surgery or corpses or naked bodies did not.) We even see parts of Cousins’ eye surgery which oddly enough I found morbidly fascinating and somehow captivating, there was no revulsion like that provoked by that clip of Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel/Dali, 1929) – perhaps it’s intent that makes the difference, surgery has intent to heal, whereas the other is an attack however fake the eye might be, the intent of the imagery is to cause a visceral negative reaction. I’ve seen that clip a dozen times since I saw it the first time in film class nearly twenty years ago and every time I recoil from it, however braced for it I thought I was.

This film is only confrontational up to a point, as we face along side Cousins’ the reality of what sight loss might mean to someone like him, whose whole understanding of the world is visual. (As a very short-sighted person who spends a lot of time behind a camera, it certainly made me feel a lot of complicated emotions along the way.) Mostly it’s a love letter to visual culture and to vision itself.

Lasts and Firsts @EdenCourt

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documentaries, eden court, music, nablopomo, sudan, uk

Last week, amidst a news agenda full of grim and saddening stories, a moment of lightness and joy reached me. Eden Court was re-opening. It might sound trite but it’s nonetheless true, having an excellent wee – actually fairly big as these things go – arts centre practically on my doorstop has been high on my list of reasons to counter the puzzled questions as to what possessed me to move to the Highlands and more than that, to have stayed.

So obviously the first thing I did when I read the official re-opening announcement, was book myself in for a pre-work morning documentary screening and lunch afterwards. I was amused to discover that pretty much the entire audience of the screening I was in remained in their seats throughout the credits, until the lights came up fully, as though we were collectively soaking up the previously under-appreciated joy of seeing a film, in the cinema, with an audience.

In a moment as delightful symmetry I discovered that not only was the first film I saw in Eden Court since it re-opened a documentary, but the last film I saw there before it closed was also a documentary. They were also both films made last year that have proved to very much of this year’s moment.

The last film that I saw before Eden Court closed for the duration, was a Sudanese documentary called Talking About Trees. It’s a film about loving film, more about loving cinema, of sharing the collective magic of a film screening. In the documentary four aging cineastes run a small film club, screening classic films for small passionate audiences, so far so average film club story. The difference is that Sudan has no mainstream cinema-going culture to contrast it against. After a coup some thirty years before, almost all the cinemas closed and the film industry collapsed, for nearly two generations, the cinema going that we take for granted – or did take for granted – has been non-existent. The film follows these four as they set out a deceptively simple task, to hold a proper cinema night in an actual cinema. The face all kinds of challenges, from the dilapidated nature of the abandoned cinema they’ve got permission to use, getting the correct permits to put on the screening in the first place – not an easy task between government corruption, religious inspired censorship, and sheer grinding administrative indifference – to the purely logistical difficulty of getting a profession cinema screen and projector delivered to Sudan. Each individual challenge enough to put most people off, but not these four, these are men accustomed to disappointment, and not accustomed to giving into it. All this is interspersed with their day to day lives, running the film club, making their own films – one of the four holds the honour of both having had films screened at international film festivals, and having had most of his films banned by various Sudanese governments over the years – and reminiscing about their memories of the past and dreams of the future for their country. And do they succeed, you may ask? Well that would be telling.

The first film I saw after the cinema re-opened, the morning it re-opened in fact, was White Riot, a film about the Rock Against Racism movement and a film as in your face as Talking About Trees is meditative and contemplative. Though I suppose in it’s own way it’s quite an elegiac film. It’s a film about a particular time and place, about young people coming together because of a shared love of music and hatred of racism. The decision to make the most of the copious archive material by using the visual language of the zines around which the movement came together, is a great one, and really well executed. It really gives a sense of how raw and confronting those original materials were while incorporating lots more archive material than you otherwise could have fit into the film, in a way that keeps it vibrant and interesting instead of dusty and dull. The subject wasn’t exactly new to me, having been a teenage alternative music fan in the early 00s, and part of the induction into being a ‘proper’ punk fan was learning about the politics and Rock Against Racism – or Love Music Hate Racism as they became – was an important part of that. However, it was really good to see a thoughtful, well-made film that both treated it’s subject seriously and as something worth remembering. (The film has also got some cracking tunes, and gave me a bunch of new old punk and ska bands to check out.) The film is partly an arty little documentary about music subcultures in the late 70s, and partly it’s a damning indictment of the evils of the abuse of power, media propaganda and systemic racism. It also draws a whole bunch of unspoken parallels with today’s issues around racial justice and immigration, it doesn’t hit you over the head with them, just lays out the facts and leaves the viewer to draw their own conclusions. This is definitely a film that says: sure things used to be much worse and these folks helped make it better, but there’s still a lot of work to do. But I imagine that message felt a lot subtler and less urgent when the film was made last year than it does in this present moment.

Take One Action! #TOAFF19

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documentaries, nablopomo, take one action

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

Facing the Dragon

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

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

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

Ghostfleet

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

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

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

IFF19 @EdenCourt – Documentaries

Tags

documentaries, iff, italy, scotland, syria, usa

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

The Cave

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

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

Scheme Birds

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

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

Be Natural

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

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

Shooting the Mafia

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

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

IFF19 @EdenCourt – Down The Rabbit Hole

Tags

documentaries, iff, nablopomo, scottish

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

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

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

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

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

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