Golden Dawn: a Personal Affair

Partiality is central to journalism. Even if you have strong ideological convictions and political affiliations, you should report facts from an unbiased and neutral perspective – or at least to pretend to do so – for the sake of credibility. Journalist and filmmaker Angélique Kourounis entirely shuns this principle when doing the documentary Golden Dawn: a Personal Affair. She establishes in the beginning of the movie: “how can you stay impartial, when your husband is a Jew, one of your sons is gay, the other one is an anarchist and you are a left-wing feminist and the daughter of immigrants” – all of these groups are despised by the deeply racist Greek far-right party Golden Dawn, the subject of the movie.

The extensive material, reaching a total of a 100 hours of video and audio, on which the film is based, is the byproduct of Kourounis’ survey and research into Greek far-right politics over the course of five years. The international media have often described Golden Dawn as a neo-Nazi and fascist party, though the group rejects these labels. Leading members have expressed admiration of the former Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas and of Hitler. They have also made use of Nazi symbolism, and their logo is strangely similar to a swastika. They are openly nationalistic and firm believers of Hellenism (a belief in Greek superiority: a party member cries out “Greece will cover the earth”), but they attempt to deny racism and xenophobia. A party member who was an aid volunteer in Africa explains the twisted rationale: “I like foreigners, I even help them, as long as they don’t come here”.

Before the economic crisis, Golden Dawn was just a small cult, with less than 0.2% of the vote. They have since seized the opportunity to donate food and blood to the poor under one condition: they must prove that they are Greek by showing their ID. This apparent Samaritanism combined with an inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric catapulted Golden Dawn to parliament, where they currently hold 17 seats, and are the third political in the country. They believe that the right-wing party New Democracy (the second largest in the country) has failed the nation, and that soon Golden Dawn will overtake them.

Golden Dawn uses both verbal and physical violence in order to get their message across. Most of their members are loud and boisterous, and they have attacked and killed both Greeks and foreigners – most notoriously the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas. Many of their members, including their leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos, were consequently arrested. Once again, Golden Dawn seized the opportunity and played the victim card, thereby energising their membership and increasing their popularity.

The film makes some very concerning revelations: the Greek media has kept their silence and mostly refuse to denounce these violent crimes of Golden Dawn. The police are strangely complacent: they even arrested an Afghani victim instead of helping him claiming that the man was drunk. Korounis makes the bold assertion that Golden Dawn “lend a right hand” to the police by carrying out the dirty work that they do not want to perform.

The movie also investigates the dark past of the party, when leading members proudly boasted pictures of Hitler. Many Nazi values are still compatible with the party, such as the racism, the hierarchical structure and the use of classic Goebbels’ tactics of deception in public discourse. Their modern members dismiss Nazism as German, but they are not afraid of translating the ideology and values to the Greek sphere.

Despite setting out to be a “personal affair”, this movie fails to tell a personal story. Apart from the claim in the beginning of the movie, Korounis does not explain how the rise of Golden Dawn could affect her. We never learn where the director and her family live – even whether they are in Greece. Instead, the film feels like a straight-forward piece of investigative journalism. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was supported by Reporters Without Borders.

Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair is currently being exhibited in film festivals across Europe and the world. You can find out more information by clicking here.

You can support their crowdfunding campaign by clicking here. This effort will cover the costs of completing the production itself as well as submission of the film to festivals and offline distribution.

View the film trailer below:

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I Shot Bi Kidude

Gender disparities are an increasingly popular topic, and so it is good to fly the flag of women’s rights. Some activists dedicate their lives for this cause, such as the Chinese activist Hooligan Sparrow (click here in order to read the article about the eponymous documentary). But some women do a silent revolution through their own personal life choices. Bi Kidude is one of them.

Kidude grew up in the village of Mfagimaringo, Tanzania, where her father was a coconut seller. She was a pioneer in Zanzibari society, as she was one of the first women to lift the veil and sing in public. Bi Kidude was a singer with a daunting voice and a mesmerising presence at stage. She died at the age of 102.

Her music – Taarab – is an Arab-Swahili fusion that combines violins, flutes, drums and Arabic instruments, such as oud, a central stringed instrument of Arabic music with origins in Persia 3,500 years ago. Her performances include dancing and throat singing, which are associated with war and hunting. In Southern Tanzania, there is also the Makonde tradition, in which all-women groups play the drums. Bi Kidude’s significance to African music is comparable to Fela Kuti’s, who created the Afrobeat in Nigeria. Afrobeat uses music to broadcast political opinions against the dictatorial Nigerian government of the 1970s and 1980s. The informative documentary Finding Fela! (Alex Gibney, 2014) explains this in more detail.

I Shot Bi Kidude is a documentary about the final days of Bi Kidude. The British director and radial presenter Andy Jones, who had toured with her previously, received an email stating that Bi Kidude had been kidnapped. He promptly flew back to Zanzibar in order to “solve the mystery”.

In his attempt to reconstruct what was happening to Kidude, Jones described the events with his very own words. He interviews Kidude’s relatives, people who used to play with her, music festival organisers and her former manager. This is in reality Jones’ version of the story. It is a tale from an observer narrated in first person. In that sense, I Shot Bi Kidude is akin to the famous TV series ‘India seen by Rossellini’, in which the iconic neo-realistic Italian filmmaker presents India to the general public in 1956. ‘India vista da Rossellini’ is not about India; it is how Rossellini saw India, and it is very clear that it is a subjective documentary from its title. Likewise with I Shot Bi Kidude.

The film becomes more interesting in the second half, when Jones finally captures Kidude singing and express her art, feelings and opinions more extensively. Then the documentary speaks about Kidude’s personal liberation – she was after all an African woman who had no children, and whose art has always been exploited. The story turns into a report of an aging and lonely woman, whose only happiness is music.

The film will be screened in early July as part of East End Film Festival in London. Click here for tickets and information about the Festival, and watch the film trailer below:

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Versus – The Life and Films of Ken Loach

This 79-year-old English director from the small town of Nuneaton is the most recognisable face of British political cinema worldwide, in all of its working-class realism. The controversial filmmaker has a career spanning more than five decades, with more than 60 films for both cinema and television. He also counts two Palm d’Or awards in Cannes under his belt: The Wind that Shakes the Barley in 2006 and I, Daniel Blake this year.

The documentary Versus – the Life and Films of Ken Loach is an opportunity to experience the power of the director’s work in just 93 minutes, even in the unlikely event that someone has never heard of him. The movie is fun, engaging and informative. It presents stunning clips from throughout his 50-year career combined with statements from the director, his associates and even his family. The result is a very colourful and vivid picture of a very left-wing man full of contrasts, who consistently challenged the media and government apparatus in his country and beyond.

The film examines Ken Loach’s realistic approach to cinema, and his constant attempt to depict the profound social wounds of his country – such as poor working-class conditions, housing problems, homelessness, poverty and a social care system which often abuses its users. Loach says to his actors: “being realistic is right, everything else is wrong”; he always films chronologically and never reveals the script to actors, thereby capturing their honest reaction as events unfold.

Two realistic moments are remarkable: when boys have their hands caned for real (without their prior knowledge and consent) in a school scene in one of his early films, and when the Blanca (Icíar Bollaín) is unexpectedly shot and killed in Land and Freedom (1995). Bollaín at the time expressed her indignation to the director: “I wanted to live longer”.

Ken Loach struggled to get funding for his films, despite their critical and commercial acclaim, particularly in the first decades of his career. The British right-wing media and government detest him, conflating realism with lack of patriotism. Daily Telegraph film critic Simon Heffer summed it up when “reviewing” The Wind that Shakes the Barley: “He hates this country, yet leeches off it, using public funds to make his repulsive films. And no, I haven’t seen it, any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was.”

Ken Loach is left-wing and yet very “conservative”, the film claims. This is because Loach is very “well-mannered”, dislikes phones, loves cricket and 18th century architecture. Despite its celebratory tone, the film seems to endorse a prejudiced and flawed dichotomy: the “polite right” versus the “boisterous left”. Loud and rude right-wing leaders such Donald Trump and Winston Churchill are a testament that this contrast is wrong. And nowhere does Marxism mandate rudeness.

The film, however, succeeds to reveal that a quiet and soft-spoken man, with an apparently conciliatory demeanour, that uses his art to very confrontational purposes (therefore the “versus” in the film title) to very effective results.

This intimate and riveting movie about Loach does not document the filmmaker’s latest achievement in Cannes and its implications for his career because the Festival took place just two weeks ago – after this documentary had already been finished. The award-winning film tells the story of Daniel Blake. The fictional 59-year-old artisan in the North-East of England falls ill with heart disease and so applies for the out-of-work sickness benefit Employment and Support Allowance. DMovies would hazard a guess that I, Daniel Blake will shake England to its core, and that Ken Loach has far more to offer even past his 80th birthday (in just a few weeks on June 17th).

Versus – The Life and Films of Ken Loach is out in cinemas on Friday, and tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis. Just click here for more information.

Watch the film trailer below:

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The Measure of a Man (La Loi du Marché)

Late Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini stated in an interview in 1974 that “Fascism . . . had not been capable of even scratching the soul of the Italian people; this new Fascism, armed with new means of communication and information . . . has not only scratched the soul of the Italian people but has lacerated, raped, and besmirched it forever.” The filmmaker and poet was obviously referring to consumerism, a phenomenon that imposes its own models and values and destroys thereby many aspects of society. That is exactly what happens to Thierry (Vincent Lindon), the main character in The Measure of a Man.

Thierry, a middle-aged labourer in France, has been unemployed for two years. He is trying to get back into the job market while doing his best to make his ends meet. He goes to meetings at the French equivalent of a job centre, only to find out how atrocious market laws are and how humiliating the process of getting back to work can be. He travels a long distance in order to sell his mobile home to a couple and gets stuck while negotiating. At 51, he begins to understand why stupid, shameless and shallow people make more money than him.

He then takes a job as a security guard in a big supermarket, a situation that will force him to face in a moral conflict. Will he be on the side of poor and exploited people, co-workers and customers, or will he embrace corporate values? He confronts an elderly man who steals meat and has no money and relatives; he watches on CCTV a cashier taking discount coupons for her own personal use; he takes part on the stupid parties for the senior workers. This is a laconic depiction of mankind.

Director and scriptwriter Stéphane Brizé (Mademoiselle Chambon, 2009) paints the screen with the colours of cinema verité – it is all very, very true and cruel. Lindon is simply superb and his performance granted him an award in Cannes 2015. The dehumanising effects of unemployment at first and then at the workplace later become evident in Thierry’s acts and words: it is a performance of restraint. Self-control, self-discipline, moderation, prudence in the name of family integrity. Thierry is also a father of a teenager with mental problems.

In the end, Thierry realises that a person’s dignity becomes the material for a squalid spectacle. French novelist André Malraux once wrote that “The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell”. The Measure of a Man is more than a comment on French society; it is a bald interpretation of our human condition.

Measure of a Man is out in cinemas. .

Hooligan Sparrow

It is not easy being a woman, particularly if you live in China. In this new documentary, a group of human rights activists protesting the rape of six girls by a school principal soon become fugitives, as government officials attempt to muffle their protests and intimidate the women in every possible way. They are constantly threatened with violence and arrests, and they fear for their lives. Filming their endeavour is seemingly the only way of avoiding the worst possible outcome.

One of these activists is the filmmaker Nanfu Wang, who has lived abroad before, and narrates the events in clear English. The most famous activist is Ye Hayan (nicknamed “Hoooligan Sparrow”), who previously campaigned for sex workers by offering sex for free. She became a prominent activist in China and the world, as well as the subject of a BBC documentary. The Chinese establishment loathes her extremely controversial acts.

Campaigning for justice in the name of raped children may sound almost like a human duty in most countries around the world, but in China this is a very dangerous and subversive deed. Chinese officials routinely offers child sex as a means of bribing, and the practice is even “fashionable”, the movie claims. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese establishment unofficially monitors and oppresses all of these activists, and sometimes even their families. All of them – including a human rights lawyer – are eventually arrested and convicted of various made-up offences.

The verve and resilience of these women are remarkable. At one point, Hooligan Sparrow posts a picture with a sign: “you can kill me, but you cannot kill the truth”, while others say to the camera that they will not commit suicide (so that people know they have been murdered in case they show up dead). They also insist in taking the police to court for their unlawful arrest, despite knowing that they will lose the case. Their objective is instead exposing the flawed justice system in their country and the plight of women. They claim that “to remain silent is to be an accomplice”.

In Hooligan Sparrow, the camera is much more than an artistic tool, it is a lifesaver instead. It is the immutable register of the extremely dangerous and liberating battle that these women are fighting against possibly the most powerful and authoritarian government in the world. The oppression is such that at times the movie feels like a horror flick. At one point Wang talks to the camera, not knowing whether she will survive or anyone will ever see the material. This fear is akin to that experienced by the characters in The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez/ Daniel Myrick, 1999) – the difference is that here their predicament is real.

The outcome of the film is not entirely negative, as in the American horror movie. Despite the prison sentences, the footage (mainly memory cards) leaves China, and Hooligan Sparrow’s furniture left on the street when she is evicted is eventually reconstructed by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei for his New York Exhibition.

This is not the first time that a film has to be made in secrecy in order to denounce human rights or a social issue in China. Earlier this year Inside the Chinese Closet (Sophia Luvarà, 2016; click here in order to read our dirty film review) revealed the uphill struggle that gays and lesbians face in a country where marriage is borderline compulsory.

Hooligan Sparrow is currently showing in film festivals around the world, including the Sheffield Doc/Fest (click here for more information about the event). You can contact the film team directly in case you want more information about distribution rights or upcoming screenings – click here in order to accede to their website.

And you can watch the film trailer below:

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Electroshocking Brazil

Forcibly implementing deregulation and free economics – the guiding principles of the American economist Milton Friedman – is almost synonymous with disaster capitalism, military intervention and widespread poverty. The US has used extreme tactics in order to inject instability and then neo-liberalism in several countries around the world – more notoriously Chile, Russia and Iraq. This is according to the 2009 documentary The Shock Doctrine (Mat Whitecross/ Michael Winterbottom), based on the eponymous book by Canadian activist and filmmaker Naomi Klein.

DMovies has identified a common pattern between what happened in these three countries and the political developments in Brazil. We hope that this piece will raise awareness of the current situation in the Latin American country. The ‘shock doctrine’ includes war and sometimes torture as necessary steps towards economic change. Brazil should not become another country on the list.

The Scottish-born psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron infamously conducted intense electroshock in patients in the US without their informed consent in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of these patients were left permanently comatose or unable to live unassisted. Klein reveals that Milton Friedman conducted a very similar experiment in many nations around the world in order to test his free market economics principles around the world, and he even used the word “shock” in order to describe his tactics. The results were equally disastrous, except that here the victims were entire countries.

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Three countries, three wars

The US played a pivotal role in overthrowing Allende’s democratically-elected government in Chile in 1973. It helped to end 41 years of peaceful rule in favour of neoliberal model delivered through mass arrests, widespread torture and murder, all personified in the military figure of General Augusto Pinochet (pictured above).

These tactics ‘shocked’ the country into chaos by concocting a war narrative against alleged Marxists. The premise was “saving the country from the chaos of communism”, but it clearly had precisely the opposite effect: the country plunged into horror and poverty, with the Allende’s social achievements quickly dismounted and inflation reaching 375% in 1974, the highest one in the world then. It became evident that free market was incompatible with personal freedoms and social prosperity.

Margareth Thatcher happily lent a hand or two to the US in the 1980s, helping to destroy the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader Mikhael Gorbachev intended to implement gradual change to the Union, which aimed to establish a Scandinavian socialist model, but instead he was forced into radical reforms by his Western “friends” (the unabashed Friedmanites Thatcher and Reagan). His successor Boris Yeltsin was even more aligned to neoliberal interests, and the the US supported him as he literally waged a war against his parliament.

This war – which included tanks attacking the Russian White House (pictured below) – ‘shocked’ the country into accepting Yeltsin’s deeply unpopular reforms. As a result, nearly half of Russia’s population was left living under the poverty line in just a few years, while Moscow enjoyed the highest concentration of millionaires anywhere in the world.

The ‘shock’ in Iraq was equally belligerent. The US and the UK waged an illegal against the oil-rich Middle Eastern country, toppling Saddam Hussein and establishing a highly volatile regime, which they called “democratic”. The two invading nations routinely arrested and tortured anyone they saw fit, and many were sent to the legal limbo called Guantanamo Bay – only three people held in the infamous Caribbean prison were ever convicted of a crime. These prisons, systematic abuses and malpractices were remarkably similar to Pinochet’s, the documentary explains.

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The richer get richer

Friedman (pictured above) was adamant that his deregulation and free market economics implemented through ‘shock’ were successful, despite contrary evidence everywhere. Shortly before his death in 2006, he suggested that the aftermath of Katrina disaster in New Orleans should be used in order as trigger to fully privatise the education system everywhere in the US. He was a staunch believer that profound pain delivered gain, but he never recognised that such gains were confined to a few oligarchs.

The negative impact of neoliberalism is not restricted to the countries that suffered from ‘shock therapy’. It also opened up the economic gap in the very social of the perpetrator, the US and the UK. The film reveals that before Thatcher-Reagan a CEO in the UK earned just 10 times more than the average worker, compared to 100 times in the 1990s. In the US, the same figure soared from 43 to 430 in the same time period.

The neoliberal warmongering machine created other economic opportunities. For example, the Homeland Security industry (pictured below) in the US is now bigger than the Hollywood and music industries combined, which the film described as “a new economy built on fear”. Meanwhile, oil continues to fuel the car industry, and the war feeds the arms trade everywhere.

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Moving backwards

We would like to believe that mankind is consistently moving forward and evolving, but sadly this isn’t always the case. History has proved that we should never take progression for granted.

Brazil experienced large economic growth for 13 years, and many social achievements appeared rock-solid. Nearly 30 million Brazilian were lifted out of poverty, there had been massive improvements to the education system, and the country even paid off its foreign debt and ended its dependency on the IMF. Until on May 11th a parliamentary coup d’état was staged, overthrowing the democratically-elected Dilma Rousseff and putting in her place the neoliberal and corrupt Michel Temer. In just 10 days, he aggressively began to dismantle these achievements, such as removing housing and benefits from millions of Brazilians in the interest of the plutocrats, oligarchs and the large corporate system that he represents.

He has the enthusiastic – if tacit – support of the US. Not coincidentally, the current American ambassador in Brazil is Liliana Ayalde: she was also ambassador in Honduras and Paraguay when the two countries suffered a coup. The American oil-refinery Koch Brothers finance pseudo-student movement MBL, which has helped to inject instability in the streets of Brazil, with the support of the Brazilian media. And in case there was any doubt of the American involvement in the coup, the putschist Aloysio Nunes travelled to meet Thomas Shannon – the most senior Washington officer in Latin American affairs – just before the coup materialised, while Obama stopped short of denouncing the coup or even criticising the dark and illegal developments in the country.

The coup earlier this year does not represent, however, an unequivocal victory of neoliberalism. Brazilians are taking to the streets to demonstrate against the recent developments. President Dilma has been suspended, but she could be reinstated in November in case she is innocent of “high crime and misdemeanours” by the country’s senate*. A leaked phone conversation has revealed the plot to oust her, and the suspended president and the supporters of democracy are feeling energised.

Right now Brazil is experiencing enormous social convulsion. Very worryingly, this could become a trigger for ‘shock therapy’ in all of its horror. History has shown that neoliberals are never scared of using military intervention and torture in order to instil fear and implement their desired economic model. This is why champions of democracy and human rights everywhere in world must denounce the tragic developments in the largest country in Latin America – before the country falls prey to electroshock therapy and becomes comatose.

You can view Shock Doctrine for free here:

* This piece was originally published in 2016 and republished according to subsequent events.

With special thanks to Nara RF Jararaca

Sold

It’s very rare that a piece of art or storytelling could really help to change things, but Sold is one of those films”, said Executive Producer and twice Academy Award winner Emma Thompson. Based on the novel by Patricia McCormick, Sold is the story of a 12-year-old girl who is a victim of child trafficking in Nepal and is sent to a brothel in Calcutta, India.

Child labour and prostitution is not a new phenomenon in India. The number of the victims is still very rife, despite the social awareness of the issue. According to a survey conducted by Indian Health Organisation, in 1987, 20% of prostitutes are children, and up to 70% of women are eventually forced into prostitution. The number of prostitutes rose by 50% between 1997 and 2004. Of 200 million women suffering from sexually transmitted diseases in the world, 50 million alone are in India.

The main character in Sold, Lakshimi (Niyar Saikia), represents millions and millions of children. She works hard every day helping her mom in the house in rural Nepal. Her father does not have a job and often comes home drunk. He then decides to sell their child to an Indian woman who traffics children from Nepal to its Southern neighbour. In reality, Nepal has a very large female population and the majority of them are illiterate, very religious and succumb to the promises of being taken to temples in India. There is widespread unemployment in Nepal, leaving young girls and their families highly vulnerable to commercial exploitation.

Jeffrey D. Brown explains that the film is very personal to him: “I have a strong connection with India because my step-father was Indian and I traveled there when I was 10”. Despite this, the film is more Hollywood than Bollywood or Indian art house, as the director tones down poverty and violence through his cinematography. The colours of the photography are bright green, red and yellow, somehow disguising the cruel reality. Even the scenes in which Lakshimi is raped are somehow digestible.

Niyar Saikia is an incredible young actress, selected from a pool of more than 1,000 girls. She can act, sing and dance. She gives credibility to the narrative, and blends in well with the rest of inexperienced Indian actors.

Hope is provided by a real organisation called Head First Development, which fights against child abuse in Calcutta. Actress Gillian Anderson (from X-Files) plays a brave photographer called Sophia inspired by Lisa Kristine, who photographed slaves all over the world. She joins the organisation and finds out that bureaucracy is a stepping stone on the way of justice in India, and that the local police gleefully trade their omission for the free use of the girls. But she is determined not to rest until she saves the little girl, in good Hollywood heroic style.

The result is a beautiful and gripping movie about a very urgent and often overlooked topic, if a little romanticised.

Sold is part of a wider effort to raise awareness and funds to address the issue of child trafficking. The film team is involved in a campaign called Taught Not Trafficked, which you can access by clicking here. The film is currently negotiating a distribution deal in the UK, but it still up-for-grabs in other countries – you can find out more here. Right now, it is showing in cinemas across the United States. The film trailer can be viewed below:

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The Russian master of dirt is in town

The Russian master of cinema Andrei Tarkovsky is back in London 30 years after his death at the age of just 54. During his relatively short life, he made seven feature films that changed the history of cinema forever. He influenced generations to come, from the artistic mind of Alexander Sokurov in Russia to the mainstream genius of Steven Spielberg in Hollywood.

His films are showing as part of retrospective entitled Sculpting Time taking place in some of the best cinemas in London. Some screenings will be followed by talks and Q&As with Tarkovsky’s close friend and colleague Layla Alexander-Garrett and architect Takero Shimazaki, among others.

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Seven films in 24 years

Tarkovsky’s first feature film Ivan’s Childhood is the tale of an orphan boy during WWII, made in 1962. His following movie Andrei Rublev (1966) is a Soviet biographical historical drama loosely based on the life of eponymous 15th-century Russian icon painter. The original film had 205 minutes and quickly became a landmark in the history of Russian cinema.

Six years later the Russian director made Solaris, a meditative sci-fi drama occurring mostly aboard a space station orbiting the fictional planet Solaris, and a powerful metaphor of the tensions of the Cold War. The year of 1975 saw the release of Tarkovsky’s most iconic and radical piece, the also loosely autobiographical Mirror (pictured at the top). This unconventionally structured, complex and multilayered movie featured poems from Tarkovsky’s father Arseny Tarkovsky and his own mother Maria Vishnyakova appears in the film.

His following movie Stalker (1979, pictured above) depicted an expedition led by a figure known as the ‘Stalker’ to take his two clients, a melancholic writer and a professor, to a mysterious site known simply as the ‘Zone’. The film was shot in a few days at two deserted hydro power plants in Estonia. It is widely believed that Tarkovsky was poisoned during this shootings, which caused his death to lung cancer just seven years later.

Tarkovsky made two films outside the Soviet Union before his untimely death. Nostalghia (1983) was made in Italy, depicting the story of Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov, who travels to the Mediterranean country in order to research the life of a 18th-century Russian composer. His last movie The Sacrifice (1986) was made in Sweden, a tale about a middle-aged intellectual who bargains with God in order to avoid an impending nuclear holocaust.

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Our dirty favourite

Tarkovsky lives at the heart of DMovies. His innovative and subversive filmmaking serves as constant inspiration to our writers and is a central pillar for our concept of “dirt”.

Mirror is particularly influential. The film has dirty mirrors that slant, deviate, magnify and intoxicate the stunning photography and unusual narrative of the film. They allow the viewer to engage with the events and the images in the film, and to relate the film to their own experience. Tarkovsky’s Mirror is a profound meditative and thought-provoking experience unparalleled in the history of cinema. Read our article about the film and its influence on our concept here.

Or click here in order to find out more about the retrospective Sculpting Time, as well as to buy tickets. Also note that more screenings are yet to be confirmed.

We are giving away eight posters of the Sculpting Time retrospective to our UK readers. Just e-mail us at info@dirtymovies.org before the end of June – the winners will be randomly selected and announced then.

Watch a remarkable sequence from Ivan’s Childhood below. This is Tarkovsky’s first feature as well as the first one in the UK retrospective:

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Battle for Sevastopol

“I killed 152 people with 154 shots”, boasts a Russian sniper. Lyudmila Pavlichenko quickly outshines him: “I killed 309”. This is how the Russian-Ukrainian production Battle for Sevastopol sets out its mission: to recreate and to celebrate the life and the bloody feats of a real-life female soldier.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union during WWII, university student Lyudmila Pavlichenko (Yulia Peresild) becomes a fighter in the 25th Rifle Division of the Soviet Army. She fights in the Battle of Odessa (in the Ukraine) and then in the defence of Sevastopol (in Crimea). After 309 confirmed kills, she is sent to the United States in order to campaign for American support, where she becomes a close friend of the first-lady Eleanor Roosevelt (Joan Blackham).

Battle for Sevastopol is a very mainstream war movie with few audacious and innovative elements, apart from the topic of a female on the frontline – far more common on the Soviet frontline than in British and American army. The film examines both the personal and war battles faced my Lyudmila, including a rollerscoaster romance and symptoms of post-traumatic stress, all with a very formulaic and aesthetically-conservative cinematic devices. The film is full of trenches, airplanes and sea battles, in very good old-fashioned Hollywood style.

The events in the movie are far from controversial. They depict an enemy common to Russians, Ukrainians and Americans: the Nazis and the Fascists. This probably helped the film to pick up its $5 million budget, a reasonably large one for Russian standards. After all, everyone wants to fight against the evil Germans.

The film is also a powerful reminder of the importance of Crimea, the island currently under de facto Russian control but claimed by Ukraine. Just last week, the 2016 Eurovision winner Jamala from the Ukraine stirred enormous controversy and was nearly stripped of her title for doing a political song about the controversial region.

Russian films often portray unlikely soldiers. In this case, a female university student, while in Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood a 12-year-old child was sent to war. The difference is that the Russian classic from 1962 examines the pointlessness of war, while the modern war flick seems to celebrate it instead. The Soviet might is inclusive, resilient and enviable, the movie seems to tell audiences.

The acting in Battle for Sevastopol is average, but never remarkable. The cinematography is very beautiful on the trenches, where the red blood and fire are contrasted against nearly black-and-white imagery, but in other parts of the movie it is mediocre, sub-Hollywood. This is a studio film, with some of the cities depicted – such as Sevastopol and Odessa – hardly recognisable. The script lacks dramatism, and the film is not as engaging as the also-Americanised Russian thriller Night Watch (Timur Bekmambetov, 2004). The soundtrack is mostly cheesy Russian pop.

The result is a mostly sanitised film that is interesting to watch for its historical content, but is not outstanding in any way. It is neither electrifying like an action-packed thriller from the United States, nor does it have the breathtaking photography and the auteur trademarks of Russian filmmakers like Alexander Sokurov and Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Arrow Films released Battle for Sevastopol in DVD and Blu-ray in the UK this week. You can buy it by clicking here, and you can watch the film trailer below:

Look me in the eyes!!!

Documentary makers, film lovers and tech geeks will gather in a medieval town by the River Sheaf between June 10th and 15th. The Sheffield Doc/Fest: International Documentary Festival is a world leading and the largest documentary festival in the UK. Founded in 1994, the event has since grown very fast. It now does much more than celebrate the art and business of documentary; it has become a world hub for alternate realities.

In 1993 Sheffield was developing its media production base and its cultural industries quarter was expanding. It also had two universities, strong film journalism and media schools with a growing centre of postgraduate education at the Northern Media School.

Naturally, Sheffield became a hub for scientists and media professionals. The Festival created a world-leading programme of interactive media and virtual reality exhibitions and conferences some years later. DMovies talked with Mark Atkin (pictured below), the curator of Alternate Realities at Sheffield Doc/Fest.

“The basic idea behind Alternate Realities Summit was to get together everyone involved with interactive factual storytelling and virtual reality. We ran workshops all around the world, in Australia, Canada and Scandinavia, but we needed an event where everyone could meet every year. So in 2009 we set the Crossover Summit at Sheffield Doc/Fest”, explains Atkin.

As a former Head of Studies of the Documentary Campus Masterschool in Munchen, Germany, Atkin noticed that documentaries were not the only way to reach reality and hidden truths. “Virtual Reality and science are turning storytelling more powerful and they have been applied increasingly in films.”

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Reality is all around

The Alternate Realities Summit will take place on Sunday June 12th 2016 at Crucible Theatre. It is a whole-day presentation that brings together experts from documentary film and broadcast, theatre, journalism, engineering and neuroscience. Panels vary from Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling to Opportunities and Challenges in Virtual Reality Journalism.

One of the highlights of the Summit is the panel “360 Sound for a 360 Experience”, in which audio engineers demonstrate how cutting-edge spatial audio is being used to create richer and more immersive Virtual Reality experiences. Atkin stresses that “sound design is becoming increasingly significant nowadays. In [the University of] Manchester, they have a center for innovation in sound, space and interactive art. They are developing projects that aims to coordinate your head moves according to the sound reception.”

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I see dead people (and talk too)

The Alternate Realities programme will also introduce a social robot, Bina48 (pictured at the top), who can debate love, war and the universe. Bina48 was programmed to have her own spoken language and she communicates with holograms. There is also a virtual Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, who answers all your questions about his experience in real-time. Atkin says that “we are changing the way we create history”, because in future we will be able to talk with dead people. Future generations will be able to interact with a memory of a Holocaust survivor inserted in a machine.

Alternate Realities includes also 12 Virtual Reality documentaries in the Site Gallery and The Space, allowing a depth of experience far beyond the limitations of the flat screen. Three docs take people on different parts of the migrants’ journey to find a safe haven in Europe. We Wait is Aardman Animations’ first VR film. It is set on a boat with a Syrian family in a desperate bid for survival. Home: Aamir (pictured above) leads the audience into the Calais Jungle, while Invisible is an experience inside migrant detention centres in the UK.

Apart from those activities Alternate Realities organised public exhibitions in two different venues. There is also a specialised market where it is possible to make partnerships and get funding from the international market for interactive, immersive and Virtual Reality projects, within the documentary, factual or hybrid genre.

DMovies will visit the Alternate Realities Market and bring to you the dirtiest novelties firsthand — as well as the best of the Doc/Fest. You can access the full programme of the Alternate Realities Exhibition and Summit by clicking here.

Under the red carpet of Cannes

Security guards at the airport, tickets by invitation only, long queues, black tuxedos, high heel shoes, cameras everywhere. The Cannes Film Festival is so mainstream, so clean, that one day someone might sweep the sand from its famous beaches in order to roll out the red carpet. With such fame and fortune, however, comes a responsibility that goes far beyond exhibition of films by established directors.

Cannes set up an organisation called Cinéfondation almost two decades ago, in 1998, with the purpose of fostering the creation of audacious and groundbreaking films from all corners of the planet. Pictured above are participants (or “residents”) of the initiative this year.

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Three initiatives and a baby

Cinéfondation consists of three initiatives giving filmmakers from every corner of the world the opportunity to make or to show off their baby.

The first initiative, The Selection, is a platform for short films that have already been completed. A jury picks 15-20 innovative pieces, which then form part of the Festival’s Official Selection. These films are presented to the Cinéfondation and Shorts Jury which awards a prize to the best three at an official ceremony.

The second initiative is called The Residence. Each year 12 filmmakers are chosen to write the screenplay of their first or second feature over a four-and-a-half month period in Paris. Most of the filmmakers that are accepted at The Residence and want to develop a feature have participated in Cannes Festival before with a short movie. But not all of them. It is important that your film has not been presented at major international festivals. The full regulations and requirements for the second phase are explained here.

The Residence has welcomed more than 170 filmmakers from more than 50 countries throughout its existence. Recent highlights include Son of Saul (pictured below) by the Hungarian film director and screenwriter László Nemes. Nemes developed his scenario during his Residence in 2011. The film was awarded Grand Prix at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival as well as the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2016, and it is out in cinemas everywhere right now.

The third initiative is The Atelier, where filmmakers can arrange appointments with industry professionals during Cannes Film Festival. This enables them to complete the financing of their films. Fifteen filmmakers are granted a slot at The Atelier every year.

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The lowdown this year

Brazilian filmmaker Gregorio Graziosi is part of The Residence. His first feature film, Obra, premiered at Toronto Film Festival in 2014. He is currently working on Tinnitus, which tells the story of a young woman with an obscure disease. Tinnitus is an invisible monster, or in other words, fear. The film is a bold project in which silence and sexual tension are intertwined. The main character lives in a bubble inside a conservative country which has now collapsed into an economic and moral crisis.

Graziosi described his experience in France as “excellent!”. “We have free time to enjoy the cultural life in Paris. The environment in the house [accommodation of The Residence] is very cool, people exchange experience and I can dedicate myself completely to my project.” The programme grants a 800-euro monthly pay, free-access to a large number of Paris cinemas and French lessons. Currently participating at the Festival, he and the other selected filmmakers have had meetings with industry people from other festivals too, such as Locarno Film Festival. “It is amazing what Cannes can offer. Brazilian cinema [scene] does not promote this level of integration.”

At least two films of The Atelier are innovative and taboo-breaking promises. The filmmakers are selected according to the quality of their project and that of their previous films, as well as on the state of progress of their finance plan. This is different from The Residence in which the films are on the first stages of pre-production and, because the ball is already rolling, they received less money. Graziosi, for instance, has got only 20% of the budget for his Tinnitus.

The Whole-Timers (Pooja Gurung, Bibhusan Basnet) will be shot in 12 weeks in Nepal. It is an account of the final three years of the civil war in Nepal (1996-2006) seen through the eyes of a 13-year-old Maoist guerrilla. During the Nepal Civil War (pictured below), the rebelling Maoist faction had a group of guerrillas whose sole duty was to document the war at all times in order to make propaganda documentaries for their party. The film will show naïve and highly impressionable men, women and children morphing into killing machines.

Gaya Gigi’s My Favourite Fabric will investigate a number of explosive prejudices. Gigi explains: “I come from a country with countless taboos. A country where we cannot talk about politics, religion or sex… especially as a woman. With this project, my wish is to provide an unique perspective on the position of women in the Middle East.” The film is a Syrian production set in Damascus, March 2011. Two young sisters face very different struggles of their own, and they both have to seek reconciliation with their families. One girl is promised to marry a Syrian immigrant from the US, while the other has just moved into a brothel.

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So, how can I join?

Cinéfondation is taking place right now at the 69th Cannes Film Festival, and soon they will accept submissions for 2017. Just click here in order to find out whether your film is eligible and for more information about the selection process.