When Irish director Lenny Abrahamson finished reading the best-selling eponymous novel by Irish-Canadian Emma Donoghue a few years ago, he knew he had to shoot it. At that time, he was still mostly unknown. He had directed Garage (2007) and What Richard Did (2012) but he hadn’t yet launched Frank (2014), the movie that would catapult him to fame. Frank is about an eccentric pop band led by an enigmatic creature wearing a fake head. The role was magnificently played by Michael Fassbender, who had most of the time to base his acting in physical resources other than his facial expressions. So, how would Abrahamson acquire the rights to film Room?

He wrote a letter to Emma Donoghue, emphasising his fascination with the book. He had to convince the author that he would be capable of telling the story from the point-of-view of five-year-old Jack without overdoing voice-over. In other words, he had to achieve the veracity without a narrator. He also had to prove he would shoot in very small setting without making viewers feel claustrophobic — after all the room was Jack’s and his mother’s liberating fantasy world. So he avoided easy genres techniques, and instead Abrahamson was determined to stick to the book.

The narrative recounts the story of a mother and child escaping from the captivity in which they have been held for several years. Born as a prisoner in his room, Jack (Jacok Tremblay) knows nothing of the world beyond the shed to which he and his Ma (Brie Larson) are confined. Ma was only seventeen when she was locked away to this grim place, where her only visitor is Old Nick, who is both her kidnapper and Jack’s father.

The lead actors were asked to compromise in different ways in order to achieve the results desired by the filmmaker. The charismatic child actor had to wear a wig throughout most of the movie without complaining, while Brie Larson went through a seven-month-preparation period, when she would avoid sun rays at all costs. The chemistry between Ma (Larson) and Jack had to be naturally built. Larson says at the London Film Festival premiere: “I never wanted acceptance so badly as I wanted from the kid.”

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Even if Abrahamson had promised all his best intentions to the writer and his crew, it would lead to nowhere if the movie didn’t keep the same poetry of the book, which it does. The film is considerably light and digestible despite its tense plot; Ma’s desperation and depression for being kept captive in a small room by her partner do not intoxicate the film. When the kid finally escapes, mother and son go back to Ma’s parents house, it is the time for Ma to face her ghosts. She tries to commit suicide because of the loss of the “safety” in the room. She then isolates herself again, though she is free, as she cannot handle the pressure of the media. To the public opinion, she was after all a bad mother. This gloomy reality, however, never prevails because the movie is a child’s tale, and Jack does not grab all the social complexities of his predicament.

Room is an audacious and violent story intertwined with maternal love. Brie Larson won the Academy Award for Best Actress. The film won several other awards, including BAFTA, Critic’s Choice, Golden Globe and Grolsch People’s Choice Award at TIFF 2015. The film is out now and can be seen in the best cinemas across the UK.

In a tragic evening in 1986, the police of the Brazilian Federal District invaded a black music ballroom in the suburbs of Ceilândia and viciously beat up revelers. An officer shouted out the orders: “white out, black in”, in reference to the colour of the skin of those who should face the police violence and those who should be spared. DJ Marquim da Tropa and party-goer Shokito belonged to the former group, and the sequels of that night are still with them. The two black man saw their lives changed forever, one being now wheelchair-bound and another one wearing a prosthetic leg.

White Out, Black In is a ‘docu-drama’ with the real DJ Marquim and Shokito in the main roles. A third fictional character Dimas Cravalanças (Dilmar Durães, who is also black) time travels back from the future in search of evidence of the Brazilian government’s brutal and savage ways.

Violence in Brazil is deeply institutionalised, and the police routinely kills drug traffickers, the homeless and even innocent civilians. The colour of the skin is a prominent criteria in their victim choices, and most of these crimes are unaccounted for. Prosecution of police is Brazil is still very rare. The 2003 film Carandiru (Hector Babenco) is a very realistic dramatisation of the massacre of 102 prisoners by the police in a Brazilian prison in 1992. None of the officers involved ever faced jail time.

Unlike Babenco’s film, White Out, Black In does not portray the actual police massacre. Instead, it shows some photographs of an apparently merry and peaceful party, before the police invaded. The film takes a very realistic approach in capturing Markim and Shokito’s lives in the derelict houses of modern-day Ceilândia. These dilapidated buildings are powerful and fascinating in their poverty and their monotony. Markim is undaunted by his handicap, his economic and social woes, and so he passionately continues to deliver his DJ set over radio from his own house.

The camerawork is mostly static or very slow-moving, just like the rusty parafernalia in Markim and Shokito’s studio (such as piles of broken radios, old computers, an elevator for Markim’s chair and many prosthetic limbs sitting around). Just like most of the country they live in, these people have been rushed into the digital age without regard to more essential needs, such as basic infrastructure.

White Out, Black In was presented in February 2016 at the BFI South Bank as part of the African Odysseys strand. Keep an eye open for further screenings this year in the UK and Europe. Unlike the characters in the movie, DMovies believes that both the film and the young filmmaker have likely a bright future ahead.

Chile is one of the most socially conservative countries in South America. It first legalised divorce after a legal crusade against the Catholic Church in 2004, and LGBT civil partnerships only received official recognition last December. This is in contrast to neighbours Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, which fully recognised gay marriage (and not just civil unions) years ago.

You’ll Never Be Alone is the first movie by Chilean musician Álex Anwandter, a fictionalised account of a gay murder. The film is loosely based on the homophobic torture and murder of Daniel Zamudio in 2012, a case widely disseminated by the Chilean media, and a powerful reminder of the country’s ambiguous attitude towards homosexuals.

Pablo (Andrew Bargsted) is an effeminate gay teenager living with his avuncular and shy father Juan (Sergio Hernández). He often has sex with his neighbour Félix, his best friend is a young lesbian, and he seems very comfortable in his own skin. One day he is severely beaten by a group of homophobic thugs, of which Félix is part. He survives, but is left severely disfigured in hospital. The film title refers to what one of the thugs tells his victim Pablo: “we will never leave you alone”.

Juan often boasts that it is a hard-working Chileans like him that help to build a great country. To his disappointment, both the Chilean health and the justice system fail his son: the crime perpetrators are identified but never punished, and Juan has to pay himself for the face reconstruction surgeries of his son. He has worked in a mannequin factory (pictured above) for 25 years, but his boss also lets him down when he most needs him. Juan then resorts to desperate measures in order to obtain the large sum of money required for his son’s surgeries.

It appears that Chile’s health and justice system are just broken as the country’s socially conservative values. Juan’s tragic story is an expression of the country’s equivocal stance towards gays and lesbians, and it will play a significant role in the country’s recent history of LGBT rights.

The film opens with a powerful sequence of a Pablo dancing in women’s clothing in his own bedroom. Private dance is always liberating in cinema, and here it is symbolic of confined gay freedom. In contrast, the rest of the film is bleak and somber, with good performances combined with distant and timid camerawork.

Sadly the film is too short. This, combined with the dark and sinister atmosphere, obscures some of the performances and makes it difficult to engage with the characters, particularly Pablo. Perhaps the film’s photography is not entirely suitable for such a politically and emotionally charged theme.

Also, the movie relies too heavily on music (part of it composed by the director himself) and on the mannequin symbolism. The dummies are as passive to this horrific crime as most of the real humans in the story. Nevertheless, it remains a politically relevant and engrossing film.

You’ll Never Be Alone premiered in Europe in February 2016 as part of the Panorama Session of the 66th Berlin Film Festival. It won a special jury prize, and DMovies believes that it will be taken into the LGBT film circuit in most of Europe and beyond. Watch out for it!

Berlin is a city in motion. Its main landmarks – the signs on the ground of the former Wall, the Brandenburger Gate, the checkpoints of the Cold War – are all symbols of free movement and the cruel reminder of the its divided past. In a way, Berlin is still a city on the border. All attempts of the current German chancellor Angela Merkel to welcome war refugees are a testament of this. Those immigrants arriving in Bavaria are promptly allocated new homes in states across Germany, and in just one day in 2015, 350 were dispatched to the German capital.

Now just move eight degrees of longitude eastwards away from Berlin, and you are in Iraq. The country is home to the ancient city of Uruk, the birth of Mesopotamian civilization and also the largest cities one in the world at the time (nearly 3,000 years ago). At its peak around 4,100-3,000 bC, the wall had 11,5 km and its nearly 50,000 inhabitants occupied an area of 5.5km2. Just like Berlin, this city became famous at the time for its extensive and prominent wall.

People in cities or countries that have experienced recent conflicts have a similar sensibility towards human rights. This is evident in the Berlin Film Festival: the event this year awarded the Golden Bear to a film about boats overloaded with despairing immigrants (Fire at Sea, Gianfranco Rosi). It also gave important prizes to other movies with similar topics: a son that runs away from a proscribed future in the Islamic North Africa (Hedi, Mohammed Ben Attia), and the fight of Filipino people for independence (A Lullaby to Sorrowful Mystery, Lav Diaz). This political consciousness distinguishes European film festivals from American ones, and this is probably because Europeans have experienced war on their own turf.

Telling a different story

Cinema has explored the story of war refugees and warring countries ad nauseam. Examples go from Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) to Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda (2004). Theo Angelopoulos won the Palme D’Or in Cannes in 1998 with Eternity and One Day, telling the sublime story of a man trying to redeem his past errors by rescuing an Albanian boy from gangsters.

There are also plentiful TV documentaries about war, particularly BBC productions. For example, reporter John Sweeney joined thousands of refugees in a dramatic movement of people across borders from the Greek island of Kos to the Austrian border with Hungary. The TV show is entitled Europe’s Border Crisis: The Long Road (2015).

There is third – and far more extreme – way to document war and convey the feelings of those affected: giving them cameras. Now this is very rare, almost unheard of, particularly if you give those cameras to local children and adolescents (pictured above). Life on the Border, an Iraq-Kurdish production, is indeed a very rare – and possibly unprecedented – film endeavour.

It premiered at 66th Berlin Film Festival two weeks ago in a session dedicated to teenagers and children. Usually the session Generation presents films for teenagers and the audience is also predominantly attended by mothers, children and teens. The young generations are of course the ones that can change a society. In the case of Life on the Border, the film was made by eight children from Kobani and Shengal in refugee camps on the border of Syria and Iraq. They recorded their own life experiences and stories in the wake of brutal attacks by Isis.

In order to produce such an impacting documentary, the Kurdish crew led workshops in four refugee camps. They taught the children how to make their films. Bahman Gobadi, who initiated the project, says: “I have spent several months with the kids in the camps. It was a tough time, full of tragedy, and it took me a while till I was able to watch the film again. We were six filmmakers from Eastern Kurdistan and Iran. We taught the kids how to create the scenario and how to use the cameras. They learnt very fast.”

The original intention of the workshops was to teach them how to shoot so if anything happens they would be able to put the images online and denounce the massacres, rapes and their living conditions. The crew had the support of United Nations.

The film is a collection of short films. The children talk and present their lives in the tents. One of the shorts, entitled “Our film is better”, shows the difficulty to screen American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014) on the refugee camps as there is lack of fuel to project it. Ironically, the children conclude that their film, their story, is better than Eastwood acclaimed production.

The loss of innocence

Despite being children, their gaze is not innocent, and the film feels very realistic. They participated in all phases of production and they are credited as the authors. It was produced by Bahman Ghobadi, but the children are the real artists. It is a vivid testimony that they want to be heard. They are not complaining; they are creating.

The young filmmakers did not get a visa to attend Berlinale screening. They said it would take months to get an authorisation to travel, despite the intervention from the German Embassy in Iraq. The audience at the Berlinale screening was moved by their predicament and joined in a warming wave to the children so that the producers could film it and show it to the children.

Bahman Ghobadi explains why he decided to shoot in the borders. “I came to know the border from childhood. A lot of the stories my mother and grandmother would tell me revolved around the border. Among the neighbours who lived on our alley, there were three girls named Senoor (“border” in their local language). And I always wondered why their names were Border. Then I learned that it was a part of our culture.” (from an interview to Offscreen.com)

He also explained that as he grew older and started reading books, he found out that Kurds live in four countries and that they all have borders, and that there are walls between them. It all seemed to make sense then.

The event ended with a reading of a letter addressed to Angela Merkel. The children pleaded: “Please, don’t send us weapons. Send us cameras”.

Now it’s your turn to do your part, whether you are a filmmaker or producer with new ideas, or human being who cares their fellows. Sadly these young filmmakers still require a lot of help and support of all sorts. You can get in touch with Life on the Border’s via e-mail at or their Facebook page.

Have you heard of any similar film initiatives in Iraq or any war zones? If so, please share it with us!

Anomalisa felt like a windfall at the Toronto Film Festival last year. The success was such that Paramount quickly clinched its international distribution rights. At first, the film struggled to find funding, despite Kaufman’s strong name and reputation. The director then resorted to crowdfunding via KickStarter, and every single individual contributor is credited at the end of the film. He explained: “If things are perceived to have commercial potential, then there is no place for me in the business. It only happened because I went outside of the business”.

This unusual funding route is precisely what allowed Kaufman to make a dirty and disturbing movie, far away from his comfort zone: portraying couples at a crisis. Anomalisa confounded many expectations.

The film was originally conceived as a radio show in which one single actor voiced many parts. The play was then adapted into a script for a stop-motion. In the film, all characters have male voices, except Lisa’s, making her “anomalous”. Due to budget limitations, they recorded all the voices in practically one take.

Anomalisa is a stop-motion animation movie telling the story of two unlikely lovers. Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) is a successful motivational speaker who wrote a book about customer services, which turned him into a very famous author. His personal life, on the other hand, is a failure. He feels the urge to find a woman, but his demeanour is often untoward and deplorable. He is married and has a child but his connection with them seems to be the same as a call center worker and his client. He arranges a meeting with a former girlfriend but it proves to be a disaster. He then meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who came to Cincinnati in order to attend his talk. Lisa could have a positive, strong and lasting impact on his life. But then, to her disappointment, a man is a man after all.

Despite of being a stop-motion animation, the characters seem to materialise into humans. The puppets seem so real that you can actually hear them breathing.

The process of creating, developing and shooting the movie was meticulous and laborious. The team worked only with puppets, dismissing the use of computers. The puppets were caught frame-by-frame. “The puppets are posed in various static positions in a sequence over the course of a series of frames. When the frames are played back in real time, it creates the illusion of movement”, explains Duke Johnson. It can take weeks or months to animate a single shot.

Some of Kaufman’s most recognisable ingredients are present in Anomalisa, such as goofy humour and the constant scrutinisation of relationships between men and women. The first encounter of Michael and Lisa is just as awkward as the one between Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) in Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (2004). Authenticity is also central in all of Kaufman’s work, and his characters are easily relatable.

Anomalisa is an utterly human movie, complete with feelings of good and bad: love, lust, compassion, jealousy and greed. It is rare to see all these elements effectively combined in such a compelling and perceptive way nowadays. The film is out for general release in the UK on Friday March 11th, and there will be a screening followed by Q&A session with the directors Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson on Thursday March 3rd at the Curzon Soho (click here for more information).