Summer Documentaries

Tags

canadian, documentaries

We’ve steamed straight past the half-way point of the year, which means it’s high time for another documentary review post. I started off the year quite well seeing a documentary a month, but that somehow fell by the wayside, so with the return of the Storyville strand, this summer has been all about catching up with the backlog.

Over the Limit
There’s something about certain types of sports documentaries that I find strangely compelling. Something about the kind of person who pushes their body to such extremes that makes for a compelling protagonist. Rita (Margarita Mamun, main representative of the Russian Olympic Gymnastic Team and gold medal winner at Sochi) is no exception.

Her main coach Irina Viner, makes much play about Rita’s eyes, about her sad eyes working in her favour, and they really do. For a documentary in which the protagonist almost never speaks directly to camera, she tells us a great deal with only her eyes. She has trained the muscles in her face not to give her away just as strictly as she has trained the muscles in the rest of her body. But her eyes always give her away, which both makes her training harder, and makes it far easier for the viewer to empathise with her. We can never forget how young she is, how much of her young life has been devoted to this work, and how much of an emotional and physical toll that has taken on her. That she is not a robot to be programmed to perfection, but a person with thoughts and feelings, desires and fears and ambitions.

There’s something about the mixture of care and cruelty in the way her coaches treat her, that is at once utterly compelling and deeply disquieting. There’s something quietly triumphant about the end title that tells us that she’s retired from rhythmic gymnastics, a satisfying feeling of closure knowing that she got out on her own terms. That she was truly working towards the end of her career and that whatever she goes on to become is in her own hands.

City of Ghosts
At the end of last year, I talked about changing my focus on documentaries from the Oscar winners and nominees to the Bafta equivalents. So this was the first of this year’s nominees – other than An Inconvenient Sequel which I saw on its release – I’ve managed to track down. I’m glad that I did. It’s not an easy film to watch, but it is an important one. It follows the work of the young citizen journalists behind the website Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered. Originally started to counter the narrative coming out of Raqqa after ISIS invaded in 2014, it has transformed into the major focus of internal attempts to resist within the city. Almost all of the original members are either dead or in exile, but the continuing determination of Daesh to try to hunt them down even in Germany, speaks to the impact and importance of their continuing work.

The film makes a fascinating comparison to Rouge Parole about the many other untold stories that have unfolded from the Arab Spring. (It’s so strange to be back there at the start of the film. It all feels so long ago, yet less than a decade has passed, there seemed so much more hope in the world back then.) But the most deeply unnerving part of the film for me is watching the propaganda war unfold in Raqqa. The evolution not only of a bunch of rebellious students, from citizen journalists into what is essentially the main alternative news media for their city, but also watching ISIS learn the value and power of propaganda, and the terrifying slickness and professionalism of their own media output. (Not just recruitment videos shot with all the slickness and budget of an actual country’s military, but also execution videos shot like Hollywood blockbusters.) Working in news media, I’ve grown accustomed to their triumphalist propaganda, its uses and dangers, but this was something else entirely.

Rumble: The Indians that Rocked the World
This one wasn’t a Storyville documentary, instead it happened to be screening at my local arts centre last month as part of a ‘new Canadian cinema’ strand. (Despite being a music documentary and, based on the blurbs, the film I would have most expected to be well-attended out of the whole strand, I was one of a whole two people in the audience. I blame the weather.) It’s a documentary on the role and influence of Native Americans on the wider North American musical culture.

It’s a lovingly detailed documentary about the role and influence of various musicians, both those whose native ancestry was known and those were it wasn’t. The contrasting approaches of those who hid their identity in order to get work and those whose identities were erased for political reasons. (One Canadian musician puts it best when he talks about being taught from a young age to ‘be proud of who you are, but be careful who you tell’ which I think sums up the experience of being part of any ‘minority’ culture even today.) A story of forgotten, hidden and erased histories, and some really good tunes.

One Deadly Weekend in America
Is a documentary about gun crime in the US, focusing in tightly on gun crimes that took place over the course of just one weekend, and the impact of those crimes on both victims and perpetrators. The variety of crimes considered – from self-defence to cold-blooded murder, attempted suicide, police violence and one awful accident – and the uneven and seemingly arbitrary application of justice, is quite the eye-opener.

(There is something terribly, unarguably damning about listening to the testimony of one of the victims, one failed suicide attempt behind him, attempting suicide by cop. This is America, if I’m armed they’ll kill me. Made worse by the knowledge that its not the cops that shot him that are doing twenty years in prison, but him for ‘attacking’ them.)

I think the most effective part of the documentary is the way it flips the perspectives back and forth, aligning the viewer with different parts of the stories, so that everyone involved becomes a person to be empathised with, rather than an outline to be judged. The repeated sentiment that the presence of guns had accelerated situations, to make bad decisions worse – arguments that might have been settled with a fist-fight, ending in death. It’s a remarkably un-polemical film, determinedly non-judgemental in its narrative voice, giving its subjects space and a voice to give their testimony. A gentle rebuttal if you will, to the polemical and fear-mongering voices objecting to any revision of gun laws in the states, with the reminder that where there are rights, there need to be responsibilities too.

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Docs of 2017

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documentaries

It’s the last day of the year, so arguably the best time to make a review of the year’s documentaries. This year’s documentary watching target was twenty documentaries and in the end I made it to eighteen. (I could, perhaps, have squeezed in another today as part of my time-honoured Hogmanay tradition of documentary watching but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.) So near and yet so far! However given that I only watched 34 films in total that I hadn’t previously seen, 18 documentaries was reasonably impressive.

For a change, a decent number of the documentaries – eight of them – were actually from this year, so I’ll be interested, when the awards season nominations roll in at the start of 2018, which of them – if any – show up in the documentary categories. For once, I’ll be able to have an informed opinion.

I didn’t see any ‘classic’ or even just old documentaries this year. All of this year’s documentaries were from the 21st century with the earliest instalment being 2001’s Oscar winning Murder on a Sunday Morning. On which note I saw three Oscar winning documentaries this year – the film that I almost watched today would have made it four, as it was Bowling for Columbine – but I don’t think I’m any closer to figuring out what makes a documentary award-winning than I was two years ago. Over the last few years, I’ve been quite successful in my quest to see more documentaries and while I tend to see documentaries a bit behind the curve, I usually see a fair survey of the previous year’s documentary films each year, and yet looking at the Oscar winning and nominated films for the last three years I’ve only seen two of them – Citizen Four and Last Days in Vietnam, winner and nominee respectively – and while I’ve heard of a few of the rest of them, most of them I never even heard of, let alone saw a review of, much less got a release here. The documentaries that did get a wide release here, or proved popular/influential on a wider stage are almost entirely absent from the listings. Is it purely a sign of the inevitably US-centric nature of the Academy’s voting or simply a matter of taste? For example, I think that Roller Dreams was far and away the best documentary I saw this year, but I’ll be truly amazed if it shows up on any awards nominations lists in the new year. Whereas I suspect that 78/52 will do, as too I suspect will Ex Libris, which I missed, so can only go by the trailer – which was a little Oscar-baity. Perhaps fundamentally, the BAFTAs documentary award is a better metric for my viewing.

If this year’s documentary watching had a theme it was systematic injustice and corruption. It wasn’t intentional, but that seems to have been the theme that emerged, perhaps also the lies that we tell ourselves: about ourselves, about each other and about the world in which we live. Obviously not all of them fitted into the theme – one of the most recent instalments, The Furthest (about the Voyager probes) and Lost in La Mancha and 78/52 really don’t – but overall that would appear to be the thread that wound itself through this year’s documentaries.

Take One Action Double-Feature #TOAFF17

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documentaries, kenya, norway, take one action, usa

Continuing my quest to watch a year’s worth of documentaries in the last quarter of the year, I went to see a double-bill of films showing as part of the Take One Action film festival.

This year mark’s the festival’s tenth anniversary, as a project to get more people to see more films about issues of social and environmental justice and concerns. And through this inspire people to make changes in their own locale, empowering them to feel like they can make a difference. (Their slogan being a nice riff on the over-quoted ‘be the change you wish to see in the world’.)

Bending the Arc
Bending the Arc is almost a bio-pic of a NGO. It’s as much a profile of Partners in Health as it is one of the people who founded it. But in a way that’s fitting, because however charismatic and committed those central figures are, they appear united in a certainty that the work is by far and way more important then any one of them. There’s a refreshing honesty about their past failures and mistakes along the way. Along with a willingness to stop and reassess why things aren’t working and try something different. They all – particularly Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim – seem viscerally aware that their successes and failures are counted in human lives. That the price of losing these battles and campaigns is paid in the lives of patients and colleagues and friends.

(An unexpected part of the film, was the advocacy of the – former, but current at the time – Rwandan Minister for Health, Agnes Binagwaho with her big dreams and her enthusiastic commitment to the good they’ve been able to do together.)

In other ways the film is also an explanation for how Jim Yong Kim ended up being President of the World Bank. (The more I read about the World Bank, the weirder an organisation it seems to be.) The film may well downplay how controversial his tenure there has been, but honestly I feel the whole point of giving him the job was for his to be controversial and try different things. Whether they work is a matter for time to tell.

Thank You For The Rain
Thank You For The Rain is probably as different a film from Bending the Arc as its possible to get. It’s a film that grows and changes as it goes along. Evolving from a film about a Kenyan farmer campaigning within his community to minimise the damage of climate change to that community, following him through his transformation into a climate campaigner, into a collaboration between the director and Kisulu as they work together to bring the voices of people living on the frontline of climate change to the people who make the policies and hold the power.

Kisulu’s video diaries prove the driving force to reshape both the film and the arguments within it. His desire to be heard and to make a difference, the determination and optimism that he continues to exude in the face of varied set backs is both inspiring and something of an inditement of the politicians and policymakers. His deeply felt understanding and articulation of the fact that time is short but its not yet too late, is an idea that keeps coming up again and again in recent discussions of climate change.

There’s something slightly eerie about seeing the Paris 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference from a completely different perspective than it appeared in An Inconvenient Sequel. There’s a weird sense of having seen behind the curtain having watched both films, fascinating to compare two very different forms of campaigning and advocacy, but a little weird all the same.

As different as the two documentaries in the double-bill were, they do have something fundamental in common. A conviction, deeply embedded rather than merely paid lip-service to, that in order to really help people in these marginalised communities, you have to work with them and listen to – and amplify – what they have to say and what they actually need. That the solutions to the major issues currently plaguing the world need to be collaborative endeavours to have any chance of making a real long term difference.

IFF17 @EdenCourt – Documentaries

Tags

documentaries, scotland, usa

There were a lot of documentaries showing this year at the Inverness Film Festival – and naturally the two that I most wanted to see were showing during the only shift I was working over the festival and overlapping with each other. However, I did manage to see three feature-length documentaries over the festival. All of them on vastly different topics.

78/52
This is a film for hard-core film geeks. If you’re a film student, former film student or have secretly harboured a longing to be a film-student, then this is the film for you. If you’re not…well unless you really, really love Psycho then this is probably not the film for you.

So, presuming that you fall into the former category, it’s an excellent film. I described it to a friend I bumped into afterwards as like being in a seminar at uni – I did in fact have an lecture on Psycho at uni, although it was about score composing not editing – except instead of my classmates and lecturer, they were famous editors and actors opining on the subject. Due to the aforementioned previous lecture I didn’t actually learn all that much unexpected from it – except, embarrassingly, I’d never realised that Jamie Lee Curtis was Janet Leigh’s daughter – but it was a rather enjoyable ride all the same.

Roller Dreams
This is such a lovely bittersweet little documentary. It’s about the origins of what we now call roller dance or street skating, in Venice Beach, LA. However its also about friendship, music, ambition, loss and black culture in California. It takes the time to provide the cultural and historical background to the rise and fall of the scene. The continuity between cultural appropriation and gentrification in the loss of a community and a culture. It’s a beautiful film and it broke my heart a bit along the way, but mostly it made me want to get my skates on and dance.

What I found really fascinating was something that I’d noticed coming from a roller derby background, that this kind of skating has had a huge impact on how a lot of guys skate. Some of the guys in the documentary talk about it being something they could completely throw themselves into, and how they learned how to turn falling over into part of the act, to make their recoveries graceful and powerful. So many male derby skaters – certainly in the UK – who come from a skating or skateboarding background have some of that same masculine grace – that these guys took to an artform – to throw themselves into the movement and catch themselves as they fall. They’re part of a continuity in skating culture and I hope more people involved in the sport see it and come to appreciate what was lost along the way.

A Stitch in Time
A Stitch in Time is a local film and a very personal one. Although its not the director’s own story, it’s the narrator’s story. (And as such it includes footage that he shot himself at various stages in the story.) Well, more accurately it’s the story of the narrator’s family, specifically his father. If you’ve seen the play or read the book of The Tailor of Inverness this is the story of how Matthew Zajac came to write it.
It’s a strange and moving story about war and grief and re-making your identity. There are a lot of old wounds in this story, both on a personal level of his discovery of his father’s first wife and daughter, and on a wider front, discovering the scars that remain in both Poland and Ukraine from the Second World War and afterwards.

There are joys too though, in the way writing and performing the play have brought Zajac the younger to a greater understanding of his father and their family history and in the new and clearly mutually cherished sibling relationship he has formed with his step-sister Irina. If this documentary is mostly a story about the lies people tell to themselves and the people they love, its also a story of the restorative power of truth.

IFF17 @EdenCourt – Short Docs

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documentaries, iff, short films

The short docs screening is always the short film screening that I most look forward to at the Inverness Film Festival. Mostly because the films are almost always by or about people from or living in the Inverness area. The rare ones that aren’t always have some connection back to the Highlands. It’s always a timely reminder of how many interesting stories there are to be told about the area and it almost always makes me want to get out there and make my own.

Not least because this year, of the five films, there were only three directors between them.

Ethie & Coire Eilde
Both of these were outdoor adventure films directed by Mike Webster and featuring adventurer and wildlife photographer James Roddie. They both felt a bit like being on a guided gorge walk with them, without the danger of getting cold or wet – or injuring yourself! A couple of vicarious adventures through stunning scenery with personable guides. A very pleasant journey.

Woman Up & Riding Through the Dark
Are both films about cycling, though very different ones, by director Katrina Brown. Woman Up is only three minutes long and is that rarity for me; a short film I wished was longer. Eilidh is a compelling subject and her struggle to find her way to fitness and acceptance of her own body was moving and engaging. And just when I was hooked on her story, it ended.

Riding through the Dark feels like a follow up to the previous film, although it features a completely different cast of characters and a very different type of biking – road biking rather than mountain biking. It follows two very different groups of cyclists, one elite long distance athletes and the other a local cycle to health group. However both groups contain members who have – and continue to – struggled with mental health issues and whose continuing recovery is helped both by the physical act of cycling and the support they’ve found from their fellow cyclists. Often documentaries with a philosophical or metaphorical title can end up being a bit twee and pat in their conclusions, but here the metaphor felt appropriate and apt. The longest film of the lot, but by far my favourite.

Alexithymia
This was definitely the oddest film of the bunch. It’s certainly successful in creating a sense of alienation and failure of connection/communication. Perhaps the lack of connection I felt to the interview subject and my failure to really understand what Alexithymia really is – is it a symptom of a mental illness, or an aspect of neurodiversity? – was intentional on the part of director Duncan Cowles. Or perhaps the film just wasn’t very good. Either way, it was a very long ten minutes.

October Documentaries

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documentaries, Keith Fulton, laura poitras, Louis Pepe, Robert Stone

First up for this year’s Nano, we’re continuing the theme of September’s post, as I found myself watching a decent number of documentaries last month. I set myself the target of watching twenty feature-length documentaries at the start of the year and until about six weeks ago; I was pretty much resigned to failing miserably. However if I can keep up the current rate of watching documentaries I might actually make it.

Lost in La Mancha

Lost in La Mancha is a comedy of errors of a kind. It’s also kind of painful to watch if you’ve ever been involved in any kind of filmmaking of your own. The sheer fragility of productions, the brinkmanship and the way that sometimes sheer bloody-mindedness is all that will keep a production in motion is acutely familiar and painful. I spent enough time working on micro-budget short films at the start of my career, that I’ve worked on films that were even more of a disaster than this one – call that a rainstorm, try being in Sighthill in a deluge that barely let up for four days, while bulldozers brought down one of the towers – without the benefit of a director of Gilliam’s calibre and charisma to hold things together. And yes, if you wondered, when the insurance guys decide its over, it really is over. You can fight with anyone else but the only people scarier than the folks from the Insurance Company are the ones from HMRC…

Appropriately enough, it turns out that Terry Gilliam has in fact finally got the film made. It’s only taken him another SIXTEEN years, but apparently The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is currently in post-production and expected to be released next year.

Citizen Four & Risk

Next up we had an accidental Laura Poitras double feature. Having recently watched Citizen Four it seemed only right, when Risk was showing on BBC 2, that I watch that two and make a theme of it. And having seen both films, its now almost impossible for me to write about one film, without writing about the other, they are indelibly intertwined. Not least because Poitras was working on the film that became Risk when she started making Citizen Four. Having stopped making one film to make the other there is a little bit of footage that is shared between films.

Citizen Four is the more straightforward film. It’s a portrait of and interview with Edward Snowden in the first days of his emergence as a whistle-blower on the US intelligence community. Poitras’ style is very much observational, letting events play out in front of the camera. It seems to be a style that lets the subjects reveal themselves to the camera without fully realising just what they’re revealing. Which works very much in Snowden’s favour, and in Assange’s case…not so much.

Risk is a messier and more complex film, as is befitting its subject matter. It’s a film mostly about Julian Assange, but also about power and privilege within political activism. It’s a little bit like watching a Louis Theroux documentary about a cult where Theroux has been banished leaving a very worried cameraperson to pick up the pieces.

There is a fascinating and horrible streak of pragmatism that intertwines itself throughout the film. There is after all, a point in any kind of committed political activism against the state, where you have to ask yourself what you are and are not willing to sacrifice. That can range from things like anonymity or privacy, through whether you’re willing to be arrested at a protest, to the physical safety of yourself and those around you. I’m not sure that there’s anything or anyone that Assange wouldn’t sacrifice for this project. (One might argue, his own freedom, but I’m not convinced that being trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years counts as freedom in anyone’s book except his.) At the end of the film I came away with the feeling that Assange and the wider Wikileaks project had done important work, but that I didn’t trust either him/them or his/their motivations. Do good intentions matter if, in the end, you do more harm than good? And, I think, that’s exactly the question that Poitras wants us to ask ourselves. The conclusions that we draw beyond that are up to us.

Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst

This is such a strange film about a really odd series of events in the early 1970s. It’s one of those stories that of weird events in America that seems to have percolated its way into our collective consciousness, almost entirely divorced from its political and historical context. I’ve vaguely known the story myself since I was a kid, having Stockholm Syndrome explained to me. Patty Hearst remains the classic example, for many people, of Stockholm Syndrome.

The film was previously known, at least in the states, as Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army and there’s definitely something dreamlike about the film. There was definitely a sense from the interviewees of being caught up in some weird terrible dream or bad drug trip. Adding to the surreal nature of the whole piece, in the middle of the documentary having been made, four of the surviving members of the SLA – some of whom served time for kidnapping Patty Hearst, all of whom had built new lives afterwards – are suddenly tracked down, taken to court and go to jail for a murder that took place as part of a bank robbery gone wrong, from several decades before. It’s a fascinating documentary, but it remains a story that, to me, makes less and less sense, the more you find out about it.

If there was a theme at all to October’s documentary watching, it was documentaries without narrators as, other than Lost in La Mancha, which benefits from Jeff Bridges comforting tones, the other three documentaries were almost entirely devoid of narration. Instead they prefer to use informative inter-titles at critical moments to provide additional context. (In Risk we get occasional extracts from Poitras’ film notes, as she gets intertwined in the story, but they seem more designed to admit her biases and illuminate the points where both she and we wonder if she’s being manipulated.) As though neither of the two directors wanted to pass judgement on their subjects and instead prefer to leave the viewer to make up their own minds.

Autumn Docs

Tags

australia, documentaries, france, usa

Autumn is upon us, and once again, as has become an odd sort of tradition on the blog, I find myself writing about having a documentary binge session. There’s something about the turning of this season that seems to bring on an urge to watch documentaries. And not just because we’re three quarters of the way through the year and I find myself looking at my progress towards whatever target for documentary watching that I’ve set myself that year with mild panic.

Autumn is the season of documentary watching for me, and this year is no exception.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

Here’s a confession. I’ve never seen the film that won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2006. I was aware of it – it was hard not to be – but I never saw it. Mostly because, well, I didn’t need convincing about climate change. We were a recycling, composting, growing our own vegetables, using energy saving light-bulbs type household when I was growing up. In general, I go to documentaries to learn about something I don’t know very much about. So I went to see the sequel – in the cinema no less – pretty much by accident.

The film is both deeply depressing and also surprisingly hopeful. The predictions for climate change from the original film turned out to be underestimations rather than overestimations. Everything has gotten much worse. But on the other hand, the innovations in renewable energy technology are really quite extraordinary, lighter and smaller and cheaper is the motto all round. As with a great deal of life in general at the moment, it could be summed up as: everything is terrible, but there is still hope.

Salute

Salute is a documentary about the background to one of the most iconic photographs of the 1960s – if not the entire 20th Century. That moment at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, on the winner’s podium after the men’s 200 metres final with Tommie Smith and John Carlos standing heads bowed, fist raised with Peter Norman wearing his Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in solidarity with them.

It’s a very Australian film, but the advantage of that is that it doesn’t shy away from showing the civil rights movement in Australia. Nor does it shy away from providing the context of the protests and state violence that took place in Mexico City in the run up to the Olympics. The film doesn’t cover the aftermath of the protest in great detail – perhaps because the director feels that story has already been told – focusing instead on providing both historical and personal context for the three participants actions. Indeed all three men point out in different ways that there were lots of layers of meaning and nuance to the protest, but that no-one seem interest in hearing their reasons or letting them explain, being more interested in demanding ‘how dare they’. Perhaps that’s the driving motivation of the film, of giving them a platform to explain in their own words.

At the heart of the film, is the friendship formed between these three athletes, their shared athletic prowess – as of the film’s release, Peter Norman still held the Australian record he set that day – and their shared moment of protest that destroyed all three of their careers in athletics and agreement that it was worth it. That it made a difference.

It feels particularly relevant in the wake of the recent spate of sports protests in the states and the continuing disproportionate approbation that is being heaped on the athletes involved for acts of quiet, peaceful protest on a public stage. Everything old is new again.

Murder on a Sunday Morning

This one was a discovery from the Storyville archive. When I was looking up which year An Inconvenient Truth won the Best Documentary Oscar, I glanced at the rest of the list for the 2000s to see how many I’d actually seen and spotted this film. The name was familiar and when I went and checked the iPlayer I was pleased to discover that it was one of the films available. Though only until this weekend, which seemed like a sign to watch it, if ever there was one.

Once I got past the weirdness of the cameras in the courtroom element, it was a really engaging watch. It helps a lot that the Public Defender who we follow Patrick McGuiness through the trial is an engaging presence who appears genuinely righteously angry about the miscarriage of justice he’s fighting to keep from happening. (That he keeps investigating after he’s cleared his client to find who really did commit the murder, says a lot in his favour.) It also helps, in a way, that the police detectives on the stand are almost cartoonish in their smug complacency, if this was a docudrama you’d tell the actors to dial back the air of lazy entitledness one of them in particular exudes. It doesn’t seem to occur to them to actually have a strategy to properly defend themselves with. They fully expect the system to protect them.

The boy at the centre of the documentary, Brenton Butler, remains something of an enigma throughout the film – for obvious reasons, he isn’t interviewed – we see him through the eyes of his parents, his defence team and the police reports. The only time we hear his own words are as a witness on the stand, as a witness to his own mistreatment at the hands of the police. He comes across as quiet and polite, and more than anything, so very young. Strangely after all that we now know about the extent of police violence in the US, its not the photos of the bruises nor the testimony of intimidation and violence that was most disquieting, but rather the shots of this young boy – just fifteen years old – in shackles.

One of the toughest things about watching the film, in the light of the current political unrest in the states, and the recent visibility of wider police violence and the way it disproportionately targets African-Americans, is that this film was made in 2001. It’s not an obscure film – it won an Oscar for crying out loud – and yet this topic still gets an incredible amount of push back.

Inside Job

Speaking of Oscar winning documentaries, Inside Job won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2010. Given that I was following the crisis itself fairly closely – I’d not long graduated from university and was working in financial services call centres and watching the number of media jobs available reduce at a terrifying rate – and how much I’ve watched and read about it since, it’s unnerving how much new information I gleaned from this documentary and how furiously angry it still makes me. Perhaps it’s a side effect of having literally watched the value of people’s pensions drop, of having had people cry down the phone at me about their mortgages and being utterly helpless to help them. It’s so strange seeing the greed and entitlement of many of the financial advisors I dealt with on a day-to-day basis all those years ago, writ large on senior executives and regulators.

That bone deep frustration I had back then is evident throughout the film, almost every time we hear the director on camera pressing his line of questioning, as so many of his interviewees squirm and prevaricate, his frustration and incredulity is clear. This is a documentary that is politely and firmly, utterly furious, we should be too.

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.)

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.