@AiMfilmfest – Short Film Competition

Tags

africa in motion, african, brazil, egypt, film, nablopomo, namibia, nigeria, short films, south africa, sudan

I keep thinking that one year I’ll actually make it to some screenings at the Africa in Motion film festival in Edinburgh, to attend some screenings and discussion panels in person, rather than catching a film on tour when the films tour the country. (Though to be honest, that is one of my favourite parts of this film festival, that it tours its films round more provincial art cinemas.) I did not expect that in this plague year of ours, I would see more AIM films and events than I normally do by virtue of the film festival having gone entirely virtual. This was my first attempt at attending a virtual film festival and I must confess it took me a while to get the hang of it – films were mostly available for 48 hours after their ‘showing’ time, but keeping track of what was available until when and lining them up with what I was in the mood for on any given day was a bit of an adventure.

This is the thirteenth year that the Africa in Motion festival has a held a short film competition. The short-list this year comprised of 15 films from 12 different countries, from across Africa and further afield throughout the diaspora, whittled down from over 450 entries. There is both a jury prize and an audience award so all the online viewing pages have an option to rate the films.

I was working from home for most of last week, so I took advantage of that to watch a couple of short films each day on my lunch-break.

Ser Feliz No Väo (Happy in the Gap)

This is a documentary about Afro-Brazilian culture, assembled almost entirely from archive footage. It’s got some really nice use of archive to weave together several different themes regarding recent Brazilian history, but while I do feel like I got an insight into something I know very little about, I felt that the film itself needed a stronger narrative through line to hold it all together. It started off strongly but then drifted away a bit and I got lost.

Sun and Moon

A short but sweet little stop motion animation about a man playing chess with himself, alone in an Egyptian coffee shop – an ahwa. After he stares at the board for too long the pieces seem to come to life and enact an epic battle of good versus evil, seemingly playing out some internal conflict of the man’s own. The little plasticine characters we follow seem a little rough and ready, but that quickly becomes part of their charm. It’s a rather enchanting little film all told.

Roger

This one is a dreamy little piece about a jazz musician – Roger Kosa – as he struggles through the frustrations and mundaneness of life to find the transformative escapism of playing the piano. According to the film’s summary there’s a lot of other things going on in this documentary, but honestly I don’t think you would get any of it from just watching the film. Which isn’t to say that the film isn’t any good. It’s a dreamy and enjoyable watch, but it feels like the opening to a much longer documentary – or perhaps the trailer for it, and if it were I would definitely like to see the rest of that documentary.

Kauna Pawa (Invisibles)

This was hands down my favourite film of the shorts available to me – the first competition short that I rated five stars – a magical realist, surrealist fable. The score is excellent, almost doing the work of the absent dialogue, cueing us into the mental and emotional states of our two taciturn leads. It is beautifully shot, the use of colours, the shot composition – all the little perfect details – and the cinematography are just stunning. Doubtless helped along by the stunning dramatic scenery of Namibia – I always forget until I see it on film again how gorgeous those landscapes are, and wonder why more films don’t shoot there – and I loved the visual referencing of Mad Max: Fury Road which did in fact film there. Much like that film this one has an excellent line in show not tell – I don’t think there’s a single line of dialogue in the film – visually taking us on a journey with our protagonists, as they carry their literal and metaphorical baggage through the dessert and find closure together. It’s dreamy and strange and lovely – highly recommended.

Days, Nights: Queer Africa Shorts

These films were not were not in the short film competition but as short films on my lunch break was the order of last week I managed to squeeze in most of these too. These four films could not have been more different in style, tone and genre but they were all excellent little films. (I’d have given them all four stars at least!) From the sci-fi dystopia of 2064, to the London gangster buddies of Mandem, through the Sao Paulo scene kids of Bonde, and onto Ife which navigates the difficulties of being a lesbian in contemporary Nigeria; they all have very different perspectives on what being LGBT in different parts of Africa and the African diaspora means today and might mean in the future.

Serotonin

This one is a straight up art film. That’s not a criticism in the slightest, the film knows exactly what it is and fully commits to it, so while I was at times not really sure where it was taking me, the confidence with which it moved forwards allowed me to relax and just enjoy the ride. It’s beautifully shot, mostly in black and white, but with certain scenes in colour, and it really makes the most of that, to illustrate shifts in tone and mood. There’s also some lovely use of sound in the film, from the opening sound bridge to the recurring motif of the train coming ever closer.

I think it’s about the protagonist’s struggle with his mental health, choosing to pursue and hold onto the small joys in life, and not to be consumed by the struggles and darkness of life. I think. It’s all very metaphorical, but in an appealing way, rather than an irritating way, which given how many shorts I’ve seen that cover the same ground, is considerably harder than you’d think.

Lasts and Firsts @EdenCourt

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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