Take a leisurely stroll through the dark corners, derelict clubs and genuinely underground scene of one of the most sexually-progressive cities in the world: Berlin. You will come across proud punks, freaks, gay, lesbians, plus everything in-between and beyond. Sexual identity knows no bounds in the German capital.

This star-studded fiction movie is directed by the young and debutant American director Yony Leyser, and it features short appearances by music artists Blixa Bargeld, Nina Hagen, Peaches (pictured above) and also the legendary Chantal, a transsexual night life icon of Berlin. If you are a fan of indie music, glittery clubs with graffitied walls and a farmland of exotic nightlife creatures, you are sure to be pleased by this movie. A character sums it up: this if a place where “the smell of poppers floats down the sidewalk”.

The movie is based on the director’s own life as an American living in the city, and it does often feel as a foreign gaze at the city. The film is so personal that at times it if difficult to say whether it’s a fiction or a documentary. It follows Ezra (played by the filmmaker himself) on an adventure through Berlin’s subcultural life, where is joined by his Nazi-paraphernalia obsessed best friend Catharine, and his Russian boyfriend Sasha, whose relationship with his own sexuality and gender is more complex than it appears at first.

Desire Will Set You Free attempts to include every thinkable sexuality and group in the movie, in a borderline didactic fashion. It is never ageist, misogynous or body fascist: people of all shapes, colours and ages are an integral part of the story. Mama Hagen explains it in a very light-hearted fashion: “don’t be a lemon be sweet like tutti-frutti”.

Yet the film lacks cohesion in its narrative, plus the acting is lukewarm. It’s cute to watch, but it can get monotonous after a while. And despite its age, racial and sexual inclusiveness, it is too focused on one scene: the hedonistic Berlin queer world. It’s a touching and genuine film for those inside or at least familiar with this self-contained hedonistic universe, but it lacks appeal for a broader audience.

Desire Will Set You Free is showing this week as part of the East End Film Festival in London – click here for more information about the event.

You can watch the film trailer below:

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Vinyl is seeing a revival in the UK, particularly amongst music collectors: sales grew for the eighth consecutive year to reach more than 2.1 million last year. But who thought the same could happen to cassette tapes? A new factory has now opened in the US – not even Lou Ottens, the inventor of the compact cassette, could anticipate a revival of his creation. Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape unveils some aspects of the new cassette cult.

After three years collecting interviews of cassette lovers, DJs in the US and in Britain, bands and radio presenters, Zack Taylor had enough material to make a documentary. He thought of making a film just on cassette piracy, and another one on bands that cannot afford the costs of a studio and still use cassette as a medium to market their songs. But then Taylor found out that the inventor of the cassette was still alive in Netherlands. Lou Ottens is central to the film narrative.

Still very active, despite being an octogenarian, Ottens tells the filmmaker why he had that idea: “I am always driven by frustration, by things that don’t work”. Before 1963, the magnetic tapes were enormous devices and not very practical to use. Often recordings were damaged and tapes enrolled in a complicated maze. A year after Ottens created the compact cassette, Japanese technicians were copying it. So Philips and Ottens worked together to develop a standard medium in which everyone could easily personalise their recordings. It took 50 years to die; and maybe it is not entirely dead.

Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore explains that “for him the cassette has to do with the sonic atmosphere. It sounds best. I feel the sound more emotional [compared to CDs]”. Another aspect that conquered many collectors was that for the first time people could record their favourite songs in the order they wanted. They would dedicate it to lovers and family members too. Besides, it was possible to decorate the cassette case individually. It is clear that the nostalgic movement has more to do with people and memories than with the technology itself. In fact, when asked if Ottens misses his invention he denies it. He misses the team of people he used to work with.

A single factory in Missouri has now replaced Philips, Sony and BASF in the once thriving cassette business, and its workers may seem lunatic and nostalgic. Henry Rollins, an American musician, actor, radio host and formerly frontman of the California hardcore punk band Black Flag disagrees: “CDs sanitised the world of music”.

A similar nostalgic and obsolete technology in the entertainment world was explored this year in a documentary. The Lost Arcade (Kurt Vincent) visited the few surviving video game arcades in the US – click here for our review of the film.

Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape is part of East End Film Festival, which is taking place currently in London – just check our their website for more information. The film is currently seeking a distributor in the UK – click here for more information about the movie.

You can watch the film trailer below:

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Arcades smell of nostalgia. They embody a primordial memory that is slowly fading away, as most people now play at the solitude of their home, engaging with remote opponents instead. The colourful pinball machines, the old-fashioned video games, the loud music, the boiterous talk and social environment where people play, compete and socialise have almost completely disappeared.

The Lost Arcade opens with the dictionary meaning of “arcade”, which originally signifies “an arched shelter”. This sentiment of protection (of being sheltered) has now disappeared. The vast majority of the 24,000 arcades that dotted the US in the 1980s – providing an explosion of colours to Chinatown and Times Square in New York as well as other metropolises – are mostly gone. This is with the exception of Chinatown Fair (pictured above), one of the few surviving arcades, which thrives on melancholy and a few die-hard fans.

The puerility of some of the attractions is both awkward and fascinating. There were shooting games, racing competitions, Zoltar the future-teller machine and even a real dancing chicken. There is something very distant and eerie about the latter, perhaps because Ian Curtis from Joy Division killed himself after watching a very groovy hen in the Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) – though the movie does not make this connection!

The movie is packed with interviews with old and new users, mostly adults. It notes that today’s teenagers were born after the demise of the arcades began, and so they are not recurring faces at the Chinatown Fair. Interviews with the owner Sam Palmer also help to establish what the business relies mostly on bucolic and old-fashioned users.

The arcade community is hardly there nowadays. It used to be almost like a cult or a religion – minus the strict doctrine. Arcades are now tacky, decadent but still strangely charming. What’s gonna happen next? Watch the film and find out, before the last arcade games can only be seen at a museum.

The Lost Arcade showed last week as part of the Open City Documentary Film Festival in London. You can find more information about the next screenings and distribution rights by clicking here.

You can watch the film trailer below:

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A freezer lorry with tens of corpses resurfaces in the Serbian Danube, while five mass graves are unearthed in a suburb of Belgrade. It all smells of death and impunity in modern-day Serbia, a country that engaged in a war against the separatist Kosovo less than 20 years ago.

In Depth Two, the victims of war are never visible. Instead, it is their voices and the land that are scarred. They narrate their horrific fate in vivid detail, their speech sometimes distorted and breaking down, and their faces are never shown. These voices are embodied in the grey, brute and sad landscape: the cracked walls are covered with bullet holes, most of the buildings are derelict and long abandoned, the soil is muddy and covered with garbage.

The film opens on the Danube near the town of Tekija, at the location where the lorry was pulled out of the water. The words of a government worker at the scene explaining what he experienced firsthand are paired with silent and somber shots of the river location. The words of other witnesses in Belgrade – mainly Kosovars – are also combined with scenes filmed at their respective locations.

There is very little contextualisation in the movie. Those not familiar with the geography and the history of the Balkans may struggle to follow the film narrative. But this does not compromise the impact of the movie. The images and the stories told are so powerful and skilfully juxtaposed that the subject matter becomes universal. The urgency of the drama experienced by these people is palpable to anyone with human sentiments. This is a documentary that speaks directly to your most profound feelings and imagination.

A code of silence still prevails in Serbia regarding the atrocities of the Balkan wars. Depth Two challenges and breaks such code, forcing people to remember and recognise the damage caused by the ancient ethnic hatred in the region. The Serbian director Ognjen Glavonic explained to DMovies that many people in the Serbian film industry simply chose not to talk about the film, instead of criticising it – perhaps as a testament of their tacit complicity. He also thinks that Serbians are not collectively guilty for the horrors, and that individuals are not to blame the killings. “The problem is self-victimisation; we are always pointing fingers at each other”, he concludes.

Depth Two was presented in the Open City Documentary Film Festival in London, which finished yesterday. The film deservedly won the Audience Prize. A similarly non-contextualised, symbolic and aesthetically outstanding film called The Great Wall (Tadhg O’Sullivan, 2016) was also part of the Festival – click here in order to read our review.

You can watch the film trailer below:

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The slaughterhouse echoes fatalism, carnage and struggle. The killing methods for cows have been redesigned in order to reduce the pain inflicted to the animals. But it’s all good news for the bovines: beef consumption worldwide has tripled in the past four decades.

The physical and mental plight of the workers in slaughterhouses is a serious issue with various ethical and environmental implications — and this is what Algerian filmmaker Ferhani explores in his film. The title of the film refers to one of those workers’ statements: “In my head, it is like a roundabout with 99 exits”, even though we all know that a roundabout has no more than four exits.

Roundabout in My Head is a study of modern-day Algeria. There are evidently two forces in contrast: Thanatos (the daemon personification of death) and Eros (the impulses for love and desire). Whilst the film contains graphic scenes of animal slaughter, audience is entertained by the workers’ tales of love stories, which are surprisingly naive. They believe in true love and sacred marriage.

One of the most smashing registers of the movie, some butchers are trying to watch a football match on TV while other butchers drag a cow to the killing site, with the animal suddenly obstructing the view of the football fans. Everything looks absurd, and victory, competition and life itself seem futile.

One of the workers shows his employment documents — he started working in the slaughterhouse in 1945. They play domino or watch films in French language on TV. They discuss in Arabic what if Zidane would play for their country, instead of being a member of French National Team. By portraying the daily life in the slaughterhouse, Roundabout in My Head is a reminder of the resistance and pride of the colonised Algerian and Berber, despite the heavy hand of the settlers. The French controlled education, government, business, and most intellectual life for 132 years and through a policy of cultural imperialism attempted to suppress Algerian cultural identity and to remold the society along French lines.

Agonising gigantic and fat cows are killed in order to feed “civilised” people. The colonised are strong and resilient, despite their predicament — just like the cows. This documentary is critique of European colonisation and both European and Algerians should watch it.

Roundabout in My Head received the Emerging Talent Prize at Open City Documentary Festival.

Watch the film trailer below:

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Mix together hedonism, glamour, frivolity, depression and belligerence, and a brand new dirty documentary shows its ugly face. The face of Helmut Berger is a mask, a persona. As he himself repeats: “Life is a stage. Applause!”. Berger was Luchino Visconti’s muse. He doesn’t differ much from Ludwig, one of the most appreciated characters Berger played: a romantic king, abandoned by his lovers and friends, tormented by his homosexuality, who will little by little slip towards madness.

Extremely manipulative, Berger establishes a conflictory relation with Horvath, the director of this documentary. As he slowly realises he won’t have him as a lover, Berger keeps desperate voice mail messages to director – which then become part of the film. When and what to show of this persona is a difficult question. Will Berger allow himself to be interviewed? Is what he says about other stars true or not? Was Brigit Bardot evil? Is he paranoid? Will he agree to travel with Horvath to France and record a testimony?

The Austrian actor hardly leaves his council house in the suburbs of Salzburg. He lives in a messy and dirty environment, in which empty bottles, stylish photos, medicine packagings and kitsch plastic flowers compose a scary scenery. Horvath films Berger’s cleaner, who is apparently the only frequenter of his flat. On her first day of work, she and her husband spent three hours getting rid of the rubbish at the entrance of the flat. The cleaner is a useful counterpoint to Berger’s reclusive lifestyle. She has some logic explanations to it: “Look at all those photos! They are all dead people. He has a lot of stuff. I believe he never forgave his mom for sending him to a boarding school.”

As it becomes clear that the narrative of Helmut Berger, Actor relies more in images than in interviews, Horvath increases the tension he is personally facing by using a frantic soundtrack and scenes of the winter in Austria. Heavy snow and muddy gardens epitomise the tension. The outcome is not a horror movie, though. It is comic.

For the new generations, Berger is known for his infamous and provocative appearances on Austrian and German TV shows. For those who have seen him in the Godfather (Coppola, 1990) or The Damned (Visconti, 1969), this final act is an intimate look at the twilight of a forgotten film star.

Helmut Berger, Actor is part of the Official Selection of Open City Documentary Festival, currently being held in London – click here for more information about the event.

Watch the film trailer below:

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The evening was somber and full of strange surprises, as spectators from many countries including Brazil, the UK, Greece and Ireland discovered the secrets of Santinho in this often overlooked dirty gem of Brazilian cinema. See some of them in the carousel below. The last picture features one of our dirty viewers in front of the freshly-painted mural by Brazilian graffiti artist Derlon Almeida.

The director Matheus Nachtergaele is a renowned Brazilian actor. He played the leading character in The Dog’s Will (Miguel Arraes, 2000), a widely-acclaimed comic and sharp denunciation of religious fanaticism in Brazil. The Dead Girl’s Feast is Nachtergaele’s powerful debut as a filmmaker, which draws religious themes similar to those in Arraes’s film, combined with deeply subversive Hitchcockian elements.

The Dead Girl’s Feast portrays the life in a small riverside town in the depths of the Amazon forest, where locals venerate Santinho (Daniel de Oliveira), a young man who allegedly inherited divine and healing powers from his mother (played by Cassia Kis). Legend has that she obtained such abilities after receiving the blood-stained, ragged dress of a missing girl from the mouth of a dog. The film culminates in the festivities of 20th anniversary of the event, when the dead girl is able to speak through Santinho’s mouth in front of the large admiring crowd. The film was inspired by a similar real event that Nachtergaele witnessed during the making of The Dog’s Will.

Our writer Victor Fraga believes that the film has remarkable similarities with Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) – click here in order to read his review and find out more.

DMovies once again would like to express its gratitude to the Hayle Gadelha, Fernanda Franco and everyone else at the Embassy. They have been a key partner, helping us to rediscover and divulge thought-provoking Brazilian cinema in the UK and beyond. This week we also held an interview with Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, at the Embassy of Brazil. We discussed immigration, sexuality and the impact of conservative politics on cinema in Brazil and elsewhere – this will soon the available on our YouTube channel.

We look forward to the screening of Rat Fever (Cláudio Assis, 2011; click here in order to accede to our review of the film) on July 20th, as well as two more thought-provoking films in August. Their titles and dates are yet to be confirmed, as well as very special guests and a round-table discussion, so stay tuned!

Do not watch Another Year if you are hungry. The film is 181 minutes long and the people in it never stop eating. It is almost like a proletarian version of The Exterminating Angel (Bunuel, 1962), but instead of portraying posh guests that believe they cannot leave the room, Zhu chose to document a poor family in China.

The film consists of just 13 takes, one a month, in which three children, a mother, a father and a grandmother watch TV, while they are eating. They also argue a lot. In February the mother-in-law succumbs to a stroke and the family routine is broken. Both parents cannot work at the same time, so the mother goes to the rural area with the two younger kids and the sick woman, while father remains working in the city with the teen girl. She is still studying, but soon will suffer pressure to leave school and start working as well.

It becomes clear that there is cruelty in family life. The way mother treats mother-in-law is somewhat disturbing. Another Year presents an aspect of cinematography people sometimes forgets: the audience is passive and powerless.

The director uses a steady camera and changes the point-of-view each month. An aristocratic family in London would be horrified: they do not shut their mouths while eating, they make a lot of noise, they keep a bowl under the table in which they throw unwanted food. They even can sneeze and swallow at the same time. They don’t seem very concerned with hygiene.

It’s June and a hen enters the room. They are all now in the rural area, as work for them is seasonable. There is no job in the factories until the end of the year. Family has discussed a case in the neighborhood. A woman disobeyed The Family Planning Commission and is pregnant of the second child. Will people in the village tell her to move on? Can she hide? Can she tell the Commission she found the baby on the streets? Or will she risk an illegal abortion?

Although China has moved a long way in the eyes of the rest of the world – the country ranked second for capital investment (according to FDI supremacy) -, this documentary exposes the contradictions of an unplanned population growth. Progress and equality do not walk at the same pace.

Sometimes it looks like insanity still prevails in some rural areas of China. Family rules are still very rigid. Because of the One Child Policy, China will have about 30 million more men than women by 2020, according to a report by China’s State Population and Family Planning Commission. Until 2003, couples seeking divorce required written permission from employers or neighborhood committees. Shengzhe Zhu’s steady camera is as rigid and firm as the society captured through the lens.

Another Year is showing this week as part of the Open City Documentary Film Festival in London – check our calendar here for more information about the event.

You can watch the film trailer here:

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This is a documentary like no other. There is no linear narrative, no protagonist and no plot. Neither the places nor the people are identified. A voice-over reads the short story ‘The Great Wall of China’ in German, which was written by Franz Kafka nearly 100 years ago, in 1917. Yet this highly allegorical and metaphorical film remains a documentary because the Europe that it portrays is very real, and – apart from the eerily suitable Kafka – nothing is fictionalised.

The Great Wall is a highly sensory, contemplative and reflective movie about a gigantic and often insurmountable physical and political wall that separates Europe from its poor Southern neighbours. It strongly relies on images and clever camera movements in order to hook the audience, which it does with tremendous success. The movie is never boring. Make sure you watch it in the cinema screen in order to fully immerse yourself.

The fact that Kafka’s short story fits in so well is powerful reminder that walls and divisions are almost universal and atemporal. The Irish filmmaker Tadhg O’Sullivan only had to swap around North and South, and it’s almost like Kafka wrote the 1917 piece for the increasingly insular and xenophobic EU in the 21st century.

He describes the aliens from the South: “the cruelties they commit in accordance to their nature” – not too different from how Britain First would describe people from North Africa. Their predicted fate is equally bleak: “they will run themselves lost in the air because our country is so vast”. Refugees portrayed in the movie seen to be in a limbo, in an unnamed camps in undisclosed locations Europe. Migratory birds appear more than once in the movie, perhaps suggesting that migration is an unstoppable movement.

Images of walls in Greece, Spain blend in perfectly with the streets of Canary Wharf (in London) and buildings in Germany – all in their magnificent coldness and soullessness. There are mirrored glasses and metal everywhere, a sharp reminder of threatening impermeability of the EU. Water is also conspicuous: the Seine in Paris, the Thames in London and the Mediterranean in the South. Here water is divider, and bridges serve to segregate rather than to unite.

Yet the Europe (or EU) painted here is very uniform in its gloominess and sadness. The film meanders seamlessly from Greece to Spain to Canary Wharf; the montage is so outstanding that the old continent feels like one place. Human beings here are borderline superfluous, given the vastness of the landscape. The accompanying music veers from classic to some subtle electronic screeching, from peaceful to gentle jarring.

The Great Wall opens the Open City Documentary Film Festival in London on June 21st, and the screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Tadhg O’Sullivan. – click here in order to accede to our calendar and find out more about the event.

Watch the film trailer here:

The film Influx, by Luca Vullo (pictured above), is a convincing testament that immigrants constitute a powerful force in the British economy. The documentary is an emotional analysis of the different waves of Italian immigration to London. It points out how Italians were treated almost like slaves 50 to 60 years ago, and how some of them persisted and found their spot under the sun – well, not quite, in London it rains a lot!

At the beginning, the film sustains that many Italian descendants across the globe claim the Italian passport in order to come to Europe (most specifically London and Berlin). Italians emigrated to the US, Latin America and other countries in huge waves in the last century or earlier. Emigration is an endless process. Many world metropolises have a ‘Little Italy’ district. When Italians decide to settle down in a foreign country, they do not constitute ghettos., they tend mingle into the new society instead.

Many of the Italians coming to London are sometimes naive and unprepared. Usually, young Italians do not have any work experience until they are 24 years old. Compared to the British population, Italians are already old to get into the job market. Young people who emigrate from Italy are often supported by their parents, but this financial aid can run out. If they do not find work quickly, this can become a problem.

Italians live in a constant stage of emergency due to their country’s turbulent economy and the continuous crisis. In a way, this makes them more easily adaptable to new types of work and job markets. They fill an significant gap that the British are often unwilling to fill: they are your cooks, your cleaners, your call centre agents, etc. They forget about their educational achievements and submit themselves to under-skilled jobs that do not require professional qualifications. The film also reveals that many Italians struggle to learn the language and are exploited at work.

On the other hand, the movie is also critic of the flakiness and boisterousness of Italians. Vullo describes with humorous cartoons that Italians can’t make a quiet, orderly queue. They are not proactive, and instead wait to be told how to act and behave.

Despite the bumpy ride, Influx is an optimistic tale about the Italian voices and faces that are now an integral part of London. By constantly filming the bridges and canals in the British capital, the film is a metaphor of a transitional period.

Influx is showing on Wednesday 22 June at 7.00 pm at Genesis Cinema as part of the CinemaItaliaUK programme in collaboration with EM Production. It will be followed by a Q&A with the director – just click here for more information. Watch a promotional trailer of the film below:

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DMovies and the EU referendum

DMovies promotes thought-provoking cinema, and film as a transformational tool. We strongly believe that the UK is stronger in the EU. This country has embraced Italians for many generations, and they have made a very significant social and cultural contribution. Many organisations, communities and personal relations in London thrive on Italians, and these are now at stake. Let’s hope there is still room for Fellinean anedoctes: the EU ship must sail on!

The author of this article Maysa Monção Gabrielli is of Italian descent. She would like to dedicate this piece to all those voters who will decide if the United Kingdom will continue to be part of European Union, or not. As an immigrant who came to London five years ago holding an Italian passport, she will be affected by this decision. Yet she is not allowed to vote. So she makes a personal plea for our readers to vote “Remain” on her behalf. – click here in order to read her words in full.