Velvet Queen: A Film about Patience, Observation, and also Snow Leopards

Tags

documentary, france, tibet

Velvet Queen: Snow Leopard (Munier/Amiguet, 2021) is a documentary about snow leopards and also very much not about snow leopards. It’s a film about nature photography and about film making, about observing and being observed, about what it means to be a human in a wild landscape, both part of and separate from nature. The snow leopards are kind of a metaphor for a bigger theme about dreams and the modern obsession with ticking off experiences but they’re also very really creatures, beautiful, shy and dangerous. It’s a gorgeously shot, dreamy film, that lulls the viewer into a very meditative state of mind, while at the same time peeling away the glamour of filmmaking to show just how much of nature photography and film-making involves sitting very still and very quietly in one spot for long periods of time, making your peace with the fact that the animal may not show up at all, while at the same time staying alert so you don’t miss it if it does appear.

Probably my favourite part of the film was the way that it gradually revealed increasing amounts of detail as it went along. At the start of the film, the cinematography focused almost entirely on the landscape; all dramatic landscapes and vistas. We know there are humans in the landscape too – the very first scene of the film is an exchange between two of the local Tibetans being mildly concerned these odd Frenchmen are going to get eaten by wolves – and occasionally nomads drive their domestic herds through the valleys below but always from a distance. At first we only see birds of prey soaring over peaks and packs of wolves chasing herds of yak and antelope on distant slopes. Gradually as our protagonists begin to get their eyes in, we start to spot the smaller animals: the pikas, Tibetan foxes and antelopes, Pallas cats and smaller birds of prey. At one point Vincent tells a story of a previous photography trip he’d taken into these mountains, where he hadn’t seen any snow leopards, or rather thought he hadn’t, until looking back at a photo he’d taken of a falcon discovered that there was also a snow leopard in the photo, just peeking over the ridge, almost perfectly camouflaged looking straight at the camera. He hadn’t seen the snow leopard, but it had certainly seen him. As the film progresses Sylvain becomes increasingly adept at spotting the signs of the larger animals, at one point, they explore a large cave, identifying the preferred spots where various predators of varying size have made dens over the years. There’s some particularly lovely shots late in the film of yak charging along the horizon, where the combination of light, movement and distance, gives them a beautiful lack of definition that makes them look like animated cave paintings, as though we’re looking into the past and seeing something both metaphorical and true.

At the same time as the landscape becomes increasingly populated with a whole food chain of different animals and birds, the sheer remoteness of the landscape is undercut, most particularly by a delightful scene where they spot four young Tibetan children out exploring who – despite their careful camouflage – spot the camera crew easily and clamber up to find out what they’re up to. Unsurprising really, if these mountains and valleys are your world, the locations of both play and work, then being able to spot that something is observing you from above can be the difference between life and death. Knowing when to hold your ground and when to run away when it comes to dealing with predators is a recurring theme throughout the film. As is the idea of being unknowingly observed by thousands of birds and animals every day, not just in this remote high landscape, but every day in the rest of the world, even in the places we think are most under human control, the natural world is constantly butting up against and around us.

We don’t actually see the snow leopards themselves until quite late in the film, when both Sylvain and the viewer have almost given up and made our peace with never actually seeing more than a brief glimpse via a trail cam of the central creatures. However, when they do show up, they are well worth the wait and as much as the film is almost the epitome of ‘the journey not the destination’, the confluence of patience and luck that gets us to the destination is pretty satisfying as a viewing experience.

Film Festival Highlights @Invfilmfest

Tags

denmark, documentary, france, iff, morocco, nablopomo

For once, my favourite films at the Inverness Film Festival were largely in the ‘Highlights’ thread of the festival programme. Given how circumscribed by events beyond my control my film selections were this year, I’m amused to note that my favourites all turned out to be films I’d made a note of during the preview screening, as things I particularly wanted to see.

At some point over the course of this year’s festival I came to realise that the festival had a theme, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not, and that the theme was hope. Back in 2019 I concluded that the festival that year was full of brilliant films, but my goodness they were grim. This year, that was not the case – and honestly after the way the last couple of years have panned out, I don’t think I could have coped if they had been – perhaps this year’s films haven’t been quite as ‘blow you away’ good as the 2019 selection, but no matter how dark or sad things got in any film, there was always hope remaining. I didn’t walk out of any feature film at this year’s festival without hope for the future in my heart.

Petite Maman

When I was child, one of my favourite genres of stories, were time travel fantasies. It’s an oddly specific kind of story that there were a surprisingly large number available. These books involved time travel but no time machines, and weren’t portal fantasies because even if the travel involved going through a particular door or geographical location the other place they arrived in was always this world and not another world. The time travel was usually preceded by some dramatic emotional upheaval, a death in the family, a parental divorce or some other crisis that meant the travelling child and all or part of their family had to leave their home and decamp to an unfamiliar locale. They almost always involved the travelling child befriending another child from the other time and helping them resolve some event that either impacted or mirrored a problem affecting them in the present. The other child almost always turned out to be a relative – an uncle, grand-parent or occasionally a more distant ancestor – of the protagonist child. I loved those stories, and they almost never got adapted into films.

I suspect that Céline Sciamma loved those kind of books too – she is, after all, only a few years older than me – and was likewise disappointed that they never got adapted into films. This film feels like a love letter to those kind of books, almost the platonic ideal because it isn’t an adaptation of any one of those books, more a distillation of the best of them. (Casting a set of identical twins to play the central characters is just perfect.) I’m not sure that you could call it a children’s film – though I think the kind of child who loves those kind of stories would love it and there’s nothing in it that makes it unsuitable for a child – but it is a film for adults who loved those kind of books, and longed for screen adaptations that did them justice. It’s heartwarming and bittersweet, and just perfect at what it does.

Flee

I saw this film with an extremely select audience – it was playing opposite Mothering Sunday (Husson, 2021) which looked very heritage and Sunday evening literary adaptation, and suffered for it – but that shouldn’t be taken as judgement on the film, it absolutely deserves to be seen by lots of people. I’m not a hundred percent certain whether I should be writing about this film under the category of documentary or not. Officially it’s an animated documentary about the true story of how ‘Amin’, a former classmate of the director, came to arrive in Denmark as an unaccompanied teenage refugee from Afghanistan some twenty years ago. There’s a certain amount of archive footage used to illustrate the historical and political background to events described, but most of the film is animated and necessarily subjective, it’s about the experience of being a refugee. It’s about how it feels on the inside not about how it looks on the outside. Pseudonyms are used and voices disguised – some of the cast are simply credited as ‘anonymous’ – because the film is in it’s way a confession. The story it tells is one that needs to be told, for the sake of Amin’s sanity and peace of mind if nothing else, but it’s one that could destroy the life he has built for himself, so it is one that needs telling with even more care and caution than that which would normally be required in telling a refugee story properly. It’s a strange sort of comfort knowing that Amin co-wrote the film with director Rasmussen, to feel that it really is a collaboration, and that for at least once in his life, Amin gets to be in charge of his own story.

(Amin is about my age. There are a lot of tiny little cultural references in his story and in the archive pictures that are familiar from my own vastly different childhood. In many ways time moves strangely in this film, but nonetheless, that stuck with me throughout the film: he’s about my age.)

The film reminded me initially just superficially, but as the film went on more substantially, of the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008). There’s something about the way the animation technique foregrounds the necessarily constructed nature of the reality the documentary is portraying, at once creating an intimacy and a necessary distance that wouldn’t be available otherwise. All memory is subjective, being at once intensely personal and collective. Combine that with trauma and the kind of lies people have to tell – whether to themselves or other people – to stay alive, and it becomes difficult to imagine how you could tell the story in a other way.

Apparently there’s going to be an English language dub of the film – possibly with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Riz Ahmed who were both executive producers for the film – but I feel it would lose something in the process. There’s something about how Danish Amin sounds in the film that works on a subconscious level, reminds you throughout that Amin has been in Denmark for twenty years, that it has become his home as well as his refuge, the place where he belongs.

Adam

This was a beautiful tender, heartbreaking film, about family and community, love and grief, pregnancy and motherhood.

There is so much unspoken in this film. At the start both woman are very emotionally closed off – one because of grief, the other from the stress of being heavily pregnant and homeless – and slowly, cautiously, with many fits and starts and a couple of outright regressions, they begin to open up to each other. Food sits at the heart of the film, Abla runs a bakery and while her grudging and eventually wholehearted allowing Samia into the kitchen might sound like a clumsy and awkward metaphor for opening up her affections to Samia, it practice it is both fitting and entirely natural in execution.

Most of the talking in the film is done by Wardia, Abla’s young daughter. It’s Wardia who first takes an interest in Samia, who acts as go between and says all the things that otherwise cannot be said with a child’s clear eyed honesty. The relationship that evolves between Wardia and Samia is one of the film’s great strengths, with Samia becoming something between older sister and aunt to Wardia as the film progresses. It’s a remarkably restrained performance from the young actress, being both charming and blunt enough to be believable as an actual child – the unspoken asides and facial expressions are priceless and joyful – and helpful to the plot without being either cloying or irritatingly wise beyond her years.

The film may largely be about the importance of having relationships where you can say all the things that society pressures us not to say – about life, death, pregnancy, love, grief and society – and how freeing it can be to finally speak those things out loud, but a great deal remains unspoken in the film. Right up to the last moment you can feel the pressure of all the things that Abla and Samia aren’t saying to each other, perhaps could never say to each other. (It feels like there’s a ghost of another film within this one, where the four of them stay together and form a new family, where the relationship between the two women, whether platonic or romantic is the centre of the film, where it is enough for them both. However I don’t know enough about the practicalities of life in Morocco to know whether either of those outcomes would be remotely practical or believable.) The ending is deeply ambiguous for both women, will Samia give Adam up or keep him, will Abla continue the work of unwinding enough to let in Slimani? Will they ever see each other again? Perhaps that’s the best ending director Maryam Touzani could give the audience, there could be no ending to this story that satisfied every audience, so perhaps it is kinder to leave it open to interpretation, and let every audience member invent their own afterwards for the characters, choose whichever fate makes them happiest.

Other Films @InvFilmFest

Tags

documentary, france, nablopomo, turkey, usa

I normally like to sort my film reviews for the film festival by the festival’s themes. Documentaries, short films, silent film, new world cinema, and perhaps a country or two in focus. However, no matter how organised I am, my taste is ultimately too eclectic to fit neatly into these categories, so there’s almost always an ‘other films’ section for the films I see and enjoy that don’t quite fit. This year that category applies to nearly half the screenings I attended as I wasn’t seeing enough films in any other given category to gather them together otherwise. There’s something about looking at the schedule for this year’s film festival that is short of like looking through a trick mirror. The scattering of themes, French, Canadian, documentary, like ghost trails of the larger, broader film festival that we might have had in another timeline.

Stray

This was a charming and meditative film, giving a dogs eye view of life in Istanbul. There’s both a warmth and a deep sorrow, to how it depicts the lives of both the dogs and the humans living rough on the streets of the city.

In some ways the film felt like a companion piece to Kedi from a couple of years ago, which focused on the relationship between the residents of the city and it’s stray/feral cat population. Istanbul, the film tells us, has one of the largest populations of stray dogs of any city, and despite various civic attempts to curb the issue, there are in facts laws against the impounding or euthanising of stray dogs – such was the public outcry against previous campaigns. This film is much less of a straight documentary than Kedi, as there are no direct to camera interviews, everything we learn about the human characters we meet is picked up in overheard snatches of conversations and arguments. We see the city and it’s humans much more through the dogs perspective than viewing the dogs through human eyes.

Part of the pleasure of the film for me, was trying to work out how certain sequences were filmed. Some sequences were clearly done with a Go Pro or similar harnessed to one of the central dogs. Other’s only seem possible if the camera operator was wearing the camera – perhaps a body camera at thigh height – and in some scenes the camera moves in ways I associate with drone cameras. But the real mystery is how they filmed it without impacting the reactions of passers by to the dogs. With the homeless kids, you can see that they got acclimated to the film-maker and just ignored them but with general members of the public most people never seem to even clock the camera, and when they do notice they don’t look to the operator the way I would expect. The eye-lines don’t work – I dearly want to know how they did it!

Mama Weed/La Daronne

This is a utterly charming and extremely French crime thriller comedy. Perhaps it’s just that most of the contemporary French films I’ve seen over the last few years have either been serious and realist or utterly ridiculous comedies that really didn’t work for me, but I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a French film this much in years. It had exactly the right balance of charm, ridiculousness and real threat to work as both a thriller and a comedy. It feels a little as if the director watched all those ridiculous Luc Besson crime/comedies of the late 90s, early 00s and thought, yes but what if we did it properly rather than as a trashy B movie? (No shade to Luc Besson, I’m a fan of his work, but he has made some terrible movies – to the extent that sometimes I think he’s doing it on purpose – he’s good at action but comedy…less so.) But honestly Pedro Almodovar feels like the main influence on this film, and that’s definitely not a bad thing.

Isabelle Huppert, who learned Arabic for the role, is really convincing in the role, both as someone out of her depth just trying to help someone she feels she owes, and as having an utterly ruthless streak buried under all that frailty. The film is full of layers, it takes a lot of digs at the French establishment, the underlying assumptions about police violence and assumptions about immigrants and crime that it both sends up and uses to it’s advantage. (The moments of solidarity between Pauline and her Chinese neighbour Colette are all entirely based on a shared realisation for both women that they are alike, that the only way they can thrive as immigrants is one grift or another, that whether they’re honest or not the state will fail them.)

Nomadland

I think this might actually be the only time, in the five years I’ve been attending the Inverness Film Festival that I’ve actually attended a ‘Closing Film’. I tend to avoid them, as they’re usually films that are already feted and likely to do well on the awards circuit, and frankly there’s usually something else on at the same time that I’d rather see and that is less likely to return. But there was something about Nomadland that just appealed to me, so I snaffled a ticket and I’m glad I did. There was definitely something rather thrilling about seeing a film months before it’s official theatrical release, knowing that the only other audiences to have seen it were those at other film festivals – even if the presence of an actual security guard with night vision goggles on looking out for film pirates was initially a little off putting! This film also had the special feature of an introduction from Paul the programmer, who was doubling up as projectionist for the evening, and has hopefully now seen the film!

The film is a fascinating insight into a hidden part of American culture – that exists just under the surface of the one that most people see. The cast of the film is largely populated by actual nomads, people who live the life portrayed in it, and who make the film possible by their participation. It feels like the film is as much about them as it is about Fern, that it memorialises their griefs and valorises their strength, and that the fiction element simply provides a distance that allows for a more honest and less exploitive experience than a documentary might have provided. (It’s almost the opposite of The Florida Project from a few years ago and everything that annoyed me about that film.) I have to take a moment to just appreciate Frances McDormand’s acting here. It’s very, I guess egoless is the best way I can describe it, she’s method acting I suppose, really living and breathing that character, who seems lost and vulnerable but ultimately resilient. It’s the opposite of a scene stealing performance, more of a self-effacing one, where she makes the other characters she shares the scene with shine instead.

Someone asked me at the start of the week, does the festival have a theme this year, and I blithely told them no, it’s not generally a themed festival. However, looking back on the week’s films, they do feel as though they all share – or at least all the ones I saw – not quite a theme but certainly a common thread. All the features that I saw deal, to a greater or lesser extent, with the idea of what it means to be free. The line between freedom and insecurity; people trapped by debt, poverty, health issues, trauma, addiction or just circumstances outwith their control. (I keep coming back to that Beatles lyric: oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go. The double meaning that lurks within that phrase: both terror and joy.) I wasn’t looking for it, and I don’t know if it was intentional but nonetheless it felt very fitting for these strange times that we’re living through.

The Return of the Take One Action Film Festival #TOAFF18

Tags

documentary, films, liberia, palestine, toaff18

Once again, I seem to be attempting to see a year’s worth of documentary films in the last quarter of the year, in fact I suspect I’ve seen nearly as many documentary feature films this month as I have the whole rest of the year. I’m not entirely sure that it’s just me, I think there’s a definite skew of documentary film release dates towards the latter part of the year. I feel a bit cynical suggesting that it’s anything to do with the upcoming awards season, but surely if it wasn’t we’d see a flurry of documentary releases in the aftermath of the Sheffield Documentary Festival in June instead?

Regardless of the above, the end of November marks the annual visit to Inverness of the Take One Action mini film festival. I usually go for the environmental themed films at this festival and this year’s selection looked to have some cracking offerings on that front. (The trailer for Anote’s Ark in particular, looks worth tracking down.) Unfortunately, due to work commitments, those weren’t the films I ended up seeing! Instead I saw a couple of documentaries that could be considered to belong to the genre of ‘one person against the world’. But what they actually do is subvert this cliché, by giving these – often charismatic and also important in their own right – figures and place them back in their own context, showing the support structures and the colleagues that have pulled them up and held them back in turn.

Naila and the Uprising

I knew very little about the film before going in, only that it was about female empowerment against a wider activist movement. The wider movement in question in this case is the first Palestinian intifada.

The film uses animation to portray segments of the stories that by their very nature have no illustrative footage. Including those of imprisonment and torture, which allows the film to address the subject directly without making it feel exploitative of the activists past pain. The animation manages to be almost poetically beautiful without either obscuring the truth with rose-tinted glasses or undermining it’s point with too much gory detail. It’s impressionistic in all senses of the word and all the more powerful for it.

It’s both fascinating and somewhat depressing to see how much hope and activism there was towards real change during this time, even in the face of so much violence and oppression. To hear from all these clever, passionate women who stepped up into leadership positions during the latter part of the intifada only to be side-lined completely during the peace negotiations and within the new government. Lingering underneath all the interviews, is that feeling of an opportunity lost, the ghost of another solution that might have been, and whether that might have been a better more lasting solution.

Silas

Silas in turn is about an anti-corruption activist in Liberia. It’s also a fascinating look at Liberia itself, in the aftermath of a brutal civil war, and in all it’s contradictions. It’s a refreshingly honest look at the compromises and sheer volume of persistence required to make a lasting impact on any one cause. We learn early in the film, that Silas and his colleagues at SDI have been long-term activists, and that their research and activism around illegal logging had been instrumental in helping bring former dictator Charles Taylor to justice. The film’s central focus is on the campaign to protect one particular community from the predations of a multinational logging company, as a prism to look at the wider issues within Liberia, along with the ways in which the international community both interferes with and turns a blind eye towards these issues.

On the Roof of the World

Tags

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

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

Paths of the Soul/Kang Ripoche

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

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

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

Zud

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

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

The Black Hen/Kalo Pothi

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

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

The Eagle Huntress

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

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

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

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

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

October Documentary Catch-up

Tags

documentary, eden court, georgia, nablopomo, spain, uk

I started this year with such good intentions about my documentary watching. After the success of last year’s documentary a month project, I was excited to up my game and try to watch 25 feature documentaries. I got a good start to the year at the Glasgow Film Festival, but then, well life got interesting and documentary watching fell by the wayside. I managed to catch a few documentaries on the iPlayer from the Storyville strand but at the end of September I had only watched 6 feature length documentaries. I needed to up my game.

Thankfully, my local arts cinema (Eden Court) was having a good month for documentaries so I was able to arrange a triple bill of documentaries across October. (I actually ended up watching four documentaries if we count Häxan from my last post, which I do.) If I were only aiming for twelve documentaries again this year I’d be feeling quite positive about the challenge – I was actually at the same stage in October last year before I had my epic four documentaries in two days session – but as it is I’m searching for ways to keep the momentum going.

Salt for Svanetia

Its essentially a 1930s Soviet propaganda film about the state building a road that will connect Svanetia with the rest of the U.S.S.R.. (The Svan are an ethnic minority in the mountains of the Georgian caucuses.) However, other than the last ten minutes or so, you’d never know. The rest of the film feels like one of those odd silent ethnographic documentaries of that period that leave the modern viewer uncertain how much of what they’re seeing is actually an insight into a now lost way of life and how much was made up for the cameras at the time. It’s fascinating in a rather surreal way. The director apparently set out to make a fictional film set in Svanetia but could only get funded to make a documentary/propaganda film, which explains the rather jarring change of tone and tacked on feeling of the ending.

What really made this film for me was the live musical accompaniment. The Bo’ness Hippodrome’s Silent Film Festival commissioned the band Moishe’s Bagel (jazz influenced Eastern European and klezmer music…) to write a new score for it and for my money it succeeded admirably. The music was gorgeous and complimented the images and events perfectly. It did a good job of making some of the more sensational sections more human and real, making the Svan people more sympathetic than pitiable.

Palio

I think that objectively, this was probably the best of the documentaries I saw this month. Oddly enough it’s a sports documentary about, of all things, a horse race held twice every summer in a small Italian city for hundreds of years. One of the oldest sports events in the world and the only horse race where a horse can win even if it lost its rider. (It’s a bareback race and my goodness those horses don’t half lose their riders in style.) I knew nothing about the race, about the wider sport of horse racing – everything I do know I learned from reading National Velvet as a teenager – and, having bought the tickets at the start of the month, by the time the screening came around I had completely forgotten what the film was even about. Yet, somehow, the film is utterly compelling. The Palio is a horse race that’s largely not actually about the horses. Each rider taking part in the race represents an area of the city (traditionally the jockeys would be from that area but this is no longer the case and the area compete for the best jockeys – the horses are chosen in a lottery) and the wealthier the area the more money they have to spend on getting the best jockey to ride for them. While for most of the population the race is about history, civic pride, a place to play out centuries long local rivalries and a metaphor for life in the city, for the movers and shakers, the powerful and the jockeys, it is game of strategy, skill and corruption. Ever was it thus. In recent years, though, it has recently become much more about the latter element, with average rather than exceptional horses being selected again and again and one jockey coming to almost complete dominance in the race. But all that might change in the face of a young Sardinian jockey ready to challenge his former mentor. Will he take the advise of another legendary jockey and pursue the best horse rather than going for the contrade with the most money for bribes for his fellow ‘assassins’?

There’s a lot of Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack, which does wonderful things for maintaining the atmosphere and plays nicely into the thematics with the young underdog preparing to face off against his former mentor turned competitor. A compelling and almost gladiatorial show down.

The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead

Music documentaries are always a bit of a weird trip for me. Largely because I’m not usually a big fan of the band in question. (I do wonder what these films are like for fans of the band, who aren’t only there for the music and the fallouts. I suspect music documentaries are my reality TV, all vicarious voyeuristic pleasure.) The Damned were no exception. I’ve always been a bit confused by them, they always turn up on punk compilation albums but my mental image of them is more New Romantic than Punk (Dave Vanian and this vampire aesthetic have a lot to answer for). They were the first punk band in the UK to get a single and an album out, but they’ve been pretty much entirely eclipsed but the rest of the movement. The Damned are…essentially more of an argument than a band and pretty much always have been. Watching the film you do wonder how they ever managed to get albums written let alone stayed together long enough for one tour let alone to still be touring. Mostly it occurs that their greatest claim to fame ought to be that they all survived!

The best review I can really make of the film is that, I came away from the film not really liking any of them as human beings, but thinking that if they did happen to tour near me anytime soon, I’d likely make the effort to go see them. Make of that what you will.

Rebel Architecture

Tags

architecture, brazil, documentary, nigeria, pakistan, palestine, spain, vietnam

Recently I’ve been seeing a fair bit of buzz around a new documentary series from Aljazeera called Rebel Architecture. It’s on architecture of all things, but as the name implies, it’s about doing revolutionary things with architecture. I’ve seen the trailer doing the rounds a lot recently, watched it and thought: how excellent and interesting the series looked, how rubbish it was that I wouldn’t get to watch it. (I don’t own a TV so I’ve never been entirely certain whether Aljazeera English is a satellite channel or what the deal is to watch them.) But today, as I poked the internet gently, I decided to actually look at the website and see if I could find out how to watch it and failing that, if it was planned to syndicate it other places that I might have a better chance of seeing it in the near future.

Excitingly, the series page on their site is really interesting in its own right and, even better, the first few documentaries of the series are available to watch free online. It wasn’t initially clear if only the original two would be the only ones available online as a teaser for the rest of the series, or if they were adding one a week as they broadcast them on the channel itself until all six of them were available. As I’d hoped, the later option is the case (Working on the Water was the one that first caught my imagination so I was particularly keen to see that), given that their website offers both online streaming and video on demand services, and I’m delighted to be correct.

Guerrilla Architect
Can Spanish self-build legend Santiago Cirugeda turn an abandoned factory into a vibrant cultural centre?
The focus of the documentary was certainly the factory, but the part I found more interesting were the temporary structures, made of brightly painted girders, like giant mechano structures, able to be extended and contracted as necessary. Structures built by the communities they served as temporary solutions while they waited for the slow wheels of the state to move to grant them permission for a more permanent solution (or not in many cases) from a circus arts centre to an extra classroom for a school. Charming and whimsical buildings; full of character and fully evolved to the needs of their users.

A Traditional Future
Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari uses local building techniques to rebuild villages in the flood-stricken Sindh region.
Lari has the distinction of being Pakistan’s first female architect. Her initial career and reputation were built on designing showcase pieces in steel, concrete and glass for giant corporations, but after disaster struck in 2005 she turned her hand to designing disaster relief shelters. However, her shelters are not the flimsy, mass-produced houses of so many international organisations, but built using local material and techniques (like lime and bamboo) to improve on traditional designs to create a more permanent solution that will resist future floods and earthquakes. She also uses the same materials to build shared community resources, like a raised community centre in rural Sindh, which doubles as a community storage facility in times of flood, keeping 30 families’ belongings safe from the flood.

The Architecture of Violence
Eyal Weizman explains architecture’s key role in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the evolution of urban warfare.
Unlike the other programmes in the series, this episode is not about using architecture to improve life in a particular place or even as it initially seems, about how architecture can be used as a weapon of war and colonisation. It’s more about a rather fascinating subset of architecture called forensic architecture. Basically, it involves looking at the damage to architecture caused by battles and wars to reconstruct a narrative of what happened, separate from the unavoidable bias of aggressor or survivor. Allowing arbitration to take place based on what actually happened outside of the justifications and arguments for and against.

Greening the City
Vo Trong Nghia attempts to return greenery to Vietnam’s choking cities and design affordable homes for poor communities.
This one was fascinating in its own way, because its very much about pushing against ‘market forces’ and convincing his clients that once people see what he has to offer they will see that his houses are better than what they have and guy them. He’s essentially trying to build a garden city and the process and attitudes expounded reminded me oddly of both Victorian philanthropists building their model villages and those 1950s public information films about building suburbs in the US. As beautiful as his stand-alone creations are and utopian though his plans may be, I really hope he’s learned from the mistakes of those who came before him. Otherwise he’s just building an environmentally friendly Milton Keynes…

Working on Water
Architect Kunle Adeyemi sets out to solve the issues of flooding and overcrowding in Nigeria’s waterside slums.
This was the first documentary in the series that I heard about, and it was fascinating, not only because of the unique processes involved in building infrastructure buildings on water, but also because of the way the communities they were built for were so embedded in the process. In some of the other documentaries, we see the community building the structures themselves or being taught how to replicate the process of building a structure for themselves. But here, we see the community as clients to the architect, giving feedback and suggestions to help evolve the designs. In the other projects there was more of a sense of the community saying ‘we have x problem’ and the architect coming in and giving them ‘y’ solution. There seemed to be much more give and take here. Also given the struggle these communities have to get the authorities to recognise them as the rightful owners and occupants of the land, it was really nice to see them portrayed as intelligent, informed contributors to the process, raised not only valid but often nuanced concerns, rather than as helpless victims of a faceless power.

The Pedreiro and the Master Planner
Informal builder Ricardo de Oliviera struggles with the government’s plan for the future of Rio’s Rocinha favela.
The film is really the story of two people working to improve the housing and general environments of the Rocinha favela in Rio. Ricardo de Oliviera is a self-taught, highly skilled builder who has built a large variety of buildings (houses, apartment blocks) across the favela. Luis Carlos Toledo is an architect who put together the designs for the government’s radical programme of favela urbanisation, working closely with the local people to incorporate their ideas. Those of his ideas that have already been implemented have proved a hit with the locals, the extra space created having been colonised for gardens and play parks, giving the residents a sense of permanence. However while the people want a school, a hospital and a sanitation system, the government is intent on building a cable car system that will be of little use the residents. Mostly the film seems to be about the contrasting ways of improving the place. Toledo with his grand ideas, hijacked by the government’s desire for a showpiece, Oliviera with his hands on approach to making life better one house at a time, and the residents group, holding public meetings and protests trying to hold the government to account and get what they need from the government rather than what the government thinks they should have.

Documentaries So Far

Tags

documentary, film, gaelic

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

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

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

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

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

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