On the occasion of the UK release of his latest movie Where to Invade Next, DMovies talked to Michael Moore about his film and politics. His last documentary is an expansive, hilarious and subversive comedy in which the director from Flint confronts the most pressing issues facing America today. With his typical humour, Moore drives into this new kind of vérité road movie “invading” foreign countries and “stealing” the best ideas, in order to reintroduce them back in the US. He goes to eight European countries and Tunisia.

This is a highly effective, extremely funny and entertaining movie. Most importantly, it serves a dual purpose. Firstly, it educates uneducated Americans about the enormous shortcomings of their country. Secondly, it allows foreign audiences to reconcile with the US by telling them that Americans too can recognise their failings.

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Brexit and Corbyn

The UK is not one of these countries. Moore explains why: “We’re not over Tony Blair and Bush yet. We’re not over the damage of the war. The UK is a toxic place and now you want to leave EU. You sacrificed in the 1930s and 1940s to save Europe, why do you want to leave?”

He emphasised that the tour he made with the film was a playful way to tell what is wrong with America, and how Americans can learn from Europe. Moore remembered that “Britain was the first country to abolish slavery” – the Slavery Abolition Act dates from 1833; the US abolished slavery 32 years later with Lincoln 13th Amendment. DMovies observed that this claim is controversial, as slavery was abolished more for financial than moral reasons. Moore insisted that “for whatever reason, history was changed”.

Moore believes that Jeremy Corbyn is “a wonderful step-forward in the [British] Labour Party, which is now getting back to its roots”. He would probably reconsider the decision of not taking any good British idea for his movie, if Corbyn were to be the next Prime Minister.

The interviews in Where to Invade Next are witty and sobering, while the film title is a joke about the American imperialistic attitude, as well as its the habit of invading sovereign nations and meddling in international affairs.

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Nothing beyond Carnival

Nearly everyone on the planet has an opinion about the American way of life, because most countries are consistently bombarded with American values and culture. But the opposite does not occur. It is true, though, that Where to Invade Next is majorly centred in Europe and in the US. Moore did not travel to the Southern Hemisphere. It is hard to understand why someone as well-travelled, cultured and critic as Moore never looked beyond the equator.

So DMovies decided to stoke the flames.

We asked the filmmaker whether he was aware that a coup d’état took place in Brazil last month, and that the US government tacitly expressed their support – the American Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon met with a key perpetrator of the coup during the process. Brazilians politicians now in power openly show their loyalty to Washington. Moore nodded, confirming his apparent knowledge of the procedures.

So, do the US plan to invade Brazil next, we asked. He replied: “The majority of the American population remembers Brazil exists once in a year, during Carnival time. That is pretty much all we know about the country.”

He then finished off, tongue-in-cheek: “Of course the US never supported any coups in Latin America. Our history tells so!”

DMovies often discussed the coup in Brazil by raising awareness of films such as the British documentary Beyond Citizen Kane (Simon Hartog, 1993) and The Shock Doctrine (Mat Whitecross/ Michael Winterbottom, 2009) – click on the films names in order to accede to the respective articles

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So, where to watch the film?

Where to Invade Next opens Sheffield Doc Fest on June 10th, with a screening broadcast simultaneously nationwide in 127 movie theatres. Moore is very grateful that people in the UK understand satire. He concedes that he is influenced by British black humour and the traditional ways BBC produces documentaries.

Click here in order to read our review of Where to Invade Next – DMovies watched the film earlier this year when it showed at the 66th Berlin Film Festival.

And watch the film trailer below:

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“Year 2014, 51 days, 18,000 houses and 500,000 dislocated” – the documentary Ambulance summarises the toll of the Israeli offensive against Gaza that year. The film is a first-person account of the event, as director Mohamed Jabaly takes the passenger seat in an ambulance helping the victims of the tragedy, transporting them from the rubble at the building hit by Israeli missiles to the local hospital.

Despite its enormous sociopolitical relevance, Ambulance lacks a cohesive narrative. Instead, it feels like an unrelenting A&E register, with little voice-over and artistic significance. The heklmer does not raise his voice above the clamour, and he does not contextualise it either. He never gets behind the wheel – in both the literal and the connotative sense. While very respectful of the victims, does not reflect on the urgency of the situation.

The director claimed that hanging to the camera made him feel safe. Filming is a voucher for relative security and sometimes even a lifesafer for filmmakers. Earlier this year, the Chinese activist and filmmaker Nanfu Wang clung to her device as a means of survival, in Hooligan Sparrow – click here in order to read our review and find out more.

Ambulance is showing at the Curzon Soho in London on June 12th, and it is also part of the Sheffielf Doc/Fest – click here for more information about the event.

Watch the film trailer here:

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The Batman and Robin 1960s TV series was probably one of the campest pop products mass media has ever churned out. Although younger generations know Batman as the dark, glum hero with a painful past, back then he was a riotous, colourful and shrieking creature .

Fast forward to Brazilian cinema, 2014. The aging gay superheros live in a trailer in a post-apocalyptic world. Welcome to Batguano, one of the dirtiest, most daring and off-kilter films to come out of Brazil in recent years. This is how our writer Antônio Pasolini described the film directed by Brazilian filmmaker Tavinho Teixeira and screened in the UK for the first time last night – click on the film and the author’s name for more information about them.

About 50 dirty cinema-lovers showed up at the free event at the heart of London, at the Brazilian Embassy near Trafalgar Square. The Brazilian Cultural Attaché Hayle Gadelha was present the event, as well as an enthusiastic crowd of people from Brazil, the UK, Ireland, the US, Germany, Japan and many other countries. They are pictured below:

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The film director also had a message directly to the public in London: “Thank you so much DMovies for the opportunity to show my film at the Brazilian Embassy in London. Being alive is something exquisite and even marvelous. Capitalism is collapsing, Brazil is a democracy, Japan has cleaned up the Fukushima mess, the Aral Sea is alive and well, the US are not interested in Brazilian oil, and racism, sexism and homophobia – despite not being diseases – have been fully eradicated from this planet.

“Sadly, none of that is true. It is our duty to turn our nightmares into films, books and painting, like a loud cry. I hope you enjoy my film, and get in touch through our Facebook page”

DMovies would like to express its gratitude to the Hayle Gadelha, Fernanda Franco and everyone else at the Embassy. We look forward to the screening of Dead Girl’s Feast (Matheus Nachtergaele, 2009; click here in order to accede to our review of the film) on June 22nd, as well as three more thought-provoking films throughout July and August. Their titles and dates are yet to be confirmed, so stay tuned!

There is so much dirt in Ivan’s Childhood. Firstly, the film has a non-linear narrative with constant flashbacks, intertwined with dream and allegorical sequences. The multi-layered and fluid plots are present in all of Tarkovsky’s films, where nothing is as straight-forward as it seems. The directors plays mind tricks with the audience, reminding them that cinema can be complex, subjective and even deceitful – just like human memory.

Secondly, the film aesthetics are also filthy. Ivan’s Childhood is inundated with haunting images of war ruins and debris. Yet this rubble is the most solid and resilient element of war – because everything else has already been destroyed. At one point, a man waits for his wife to return home, but a door is all that is left of the house – in a sequence symbolic of the power of destruction.

Tarkovsky also uses abundant mirrors and reflections to outstanding results. Often the director films conversations between characters through a mirror, altering the dynamics of the action. Pictured above is Ivan taking to his mother (played by Tarkovsky’s wife at the time Irma Tarkovskaya), filmed through the reflection of water in a well. The director slants, deviates and subverts both the imagery and the dialogue with his lenses. He experiments with such artifices more profusely in his later film Mirror (1975), a movie that served as inspiration for this website – click here in order to find out why.

Finally, the director challenges the unthinkable: the war machine in which Russia takes so much pride. Russian identity is intimately linked to war affairs, both as a mighty empire and a resilient victim. In Ivan’s Childhood, the fall of the Nazis and the Soviet’s entry in Berlin is never glorified. Tarkosvky shows real footage of occupied Berlin, including the charred corpse of Goebbels and his family. Ivan’s shocking fate is also revealed. The denouement is far from rosy.

There is no innocence, no celebration and no glory in Ivan’s Childhood. Tarkovsky holds a dirty mirror to Russian/Soviet society and says: belligerence is ugly. The war machine is sad and futile, and victory provides no harmony and reconciliation.

Recently the Russian film the film Battle for Sevastopol (Serhiy Mokrytskyi, 2015) also dealt with the Russian war machine in World War II, but from a very romantic perspective – click here for our review of the movie. It is also worth pointing out that the child actor Kolya Burlyayev is still alive and he wrote a letter to president Putin supporting the Russian military intervention in the Ukraine. Perhaps Ivan is not dead, and he stills wants to avenge his family. He survives in the shape of a country that still has belligerence at its heart.

Ivan’s Childhood showed in many parts of the UK in 2018 as part of the season Andrei Tarkovsky: Sculpting Time – click here for more information about the event and also if you want to win a free poster.

The documentary Where You’re Meant to Be rescues Scottish folk traditions for younger generations to enjoy, which is a very dignified accomplishment per se. It is a warm-hearted journey through the Scottish landscape, culture and music. The problem is that it lacks a little flair and innovation. It sets out to give the old a new flavour, but it doesn’t entirely achieve that.

It features cult-pop raconteur Aidan Moffat (formerly of the band Arab Strap) in a road-trip throughout Scotland. As a storyteller and composer, Moffat spreads dark humour and tends to improvise and change the lyrics of some traditional ballads. His behaviour might be funny for many people, but not for Sheila Stewart – one of the Scotland’s most popular folk singers. She believes that Scotland’s oldest songs should be performed in their pure form. Paul Fegan builds the narrative of this road-movie as Moffat’s late apology to Stewart – she’s died in December 2014 after the two toured together.

Despite Moffat’s tenacious attempt to give folk music a modern look, he named his album “Everything’s Getting Older”. Folk songs are gifts from the ancestors. He tries to give some new breath to old words, so that they don’t disappear in the foggy lochs. Sadly, though, most of the places he sings are small festivals, local fairs and ancient places, such as Barrowland in Glasgow. Barrowland is a ballroom; it has a rich musical heritage, where foxtrot bands have performed in the 1930s. During the 1960s, it was the stage for bandw like The Specials and The Kinks and years later, for The Clash, Simple Minds and other pop rock bands. Now crowds are defecting to gleaming O2 ABC Glasgow and the SSE Hydro.

Fegan beautifully shows the countryside of Scotland, teeming with life, traditions and myths. Moffat takes the boat in the Loch Ness. Stewart prepares a rabbit. It is a tough life that conveys an emotional feeling people are not used to deal with anymore. It is mostly peaceful and conformist to an old lifestyle.

Where You’re Meant To Be will premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest on June 12th, and will be screened in cinemas throughout the UK from June 17th. Click here for more information about the event.

Don’t forget to watch the film trailer below:

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Oscar-nominated Colombian director Ciro Guerra presents a world that is disappearing. As he films the dark past of Colombia, he treads on the forest soil and reflects upon many cultures that are now gone. “The film is inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch Grunberg (1879–1924) and Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001). These diaries are the only known accounts of many Amazonian cultures. This film is dedicated to all the peoples whose song we will never know”, Guerra explains.

For some indigenous people in South America, the serpent isn’t connected to harmful or dangerous feelings. For the civilisation that lived in Machu Picchu, Peru, before Spanish arrived in the Americas, the serpent symbolises the wisdom of their ancestors. Usually, this wisdom manifests itself through the healing power of shamans. It is exactly this mix of wisdom and traditional habits that Embrace of the Serpent evokes. Guerra’s call is entirely respectful to the people of the rainforest.

This lyrical and historical adventure is divided into two different times of the 20th century, portraying the encounter of a German explorer and a lonely indigenous warrior Karamatake. Shot almost entirely in black and white, the film dissects the estrangement between two cultures, that are dependent of one another in order to survive in the jungle. European white man’s technology – such as a compass – clashes against the Indian’s ability to find his way using his own senses and knowledge. The German consistently relies on a book, and Karamatake challenges him: “The world is huge, but all you see are books”.

Most of the time, the language spoken is one of the endangered languages of Colombia (there are 78 languages in the country). Actors also talk German, Spanish and Portuguese, according to the Missions travelers visit, but rarely English. This film literally gives a voice to indigenous people.

Embrace of the Serpent is impressively beautiful and elegant. Guerra knows where to place his camera like no one else does – sometimes it is all a director needs to know.

Parallel to the anthropological tale, the effects of colonialism, religion and the exploitation of rubber are inextricably linked to present-day Colombia. Indigenous traditions and knowledge are instrumental in environmental preservation, after all they have preserved the jungle for centuries.

The German explorer fails to understand that men should not enter the jungle in search of the unknown, and that there are cycles for fishing and collecting plants. A white man going into the woods is similar to making a film: it is a journey into the invisible.

Embrace of the Serpent is available to watch right here and right now: .

Life, Animated is a documentary about a child, Owen Suskind, whose biggest passion are Disney films. By the age of three, Owen’s parents realised that their second son had some sort of disability. He was not sleeping, his motor skills were deteriorating and his language acquisition had changed to the point he became silent. The diagnosis was autism — the cruel reality is that some autistic kids never get their speech back. The world is too intense for them and instead they simply disengage from social life.

The Suskind family then found out that watching Disney movies was the only thing they could do together as a family. And that continued for many years, until one day Owen picked up three words of a cartoon and spoke up. Parents were thrilled, but they never knew for real if Owen meant to communicate something or if he was just parroting the film.

Autism is a prison. What we learn from Life, Animated is that sufferers of the condition do want to connect with other people, and finding a way of doing that is an uphill struggle.

Director Roger Ross Williams (God Loves Uganda, from 2013) returns with a masterful film about how one close-knit family navigates life with autism. Ross knew the Suskind family for many years, because he had worked with Owen’s father as journalists in a newspaper. Even though Ross was close to the family, he still had to face the challenge of how to interview Owen, now 23. So he hid the camera inside the TV set.

Ross uses animation in order to recreate Owen’s childhood. The film viewers witness significant changes in the child’s routine via cartoons. Owen primarily identified himself with Peter Pan, the Disney character who didn’t want to grow up. He often draw secondary characters. At the time he was bullied at school, he repeatedly watched Bambi, as if saying: “I’m vulnerable, just like the Disney character”.

Eventually, Owen learned how to interact and insert comments of his own in small conversations. Through the years, he graduated from a school for special need teens. He even organised a Disney Club for his colleagues, in which he himself would present the films.

The film documents Owen’s progress as well as shortcomings. Life, Animated is an emotional register of social inclusion. Ross shows people with special needs are not stuck in uni-dimensional existence. By the end of the movie, Owen is facing situations that were not scripted in Disney movies. He now articulates responses to the challenges of adult life as well as manages to comprehend the limitations of happiness. That is the verve of living.

The film was part of both the Sundance London Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest earlier this year. The film is out in cinemas on Friday, December 9th (2016). On Netflix in May (2020).

Who will take care of you when you get old? American film Care investigates a theme that is increasingly urgent on both sides of the Atlantic, as the population of both Europe and the US ages very quickly. More than 11.5 million Americans will be over the age of 85 by the year 2035.

The film denounces the failings of the American health system and the possibly apocalyptical consequences, in a Michael Moore-esque style. It also exposes the collapse of the neo-liberal model by showing irregularities in the American care system, and it sounds the alarm bells about the future of present-day adults. The profit-driven nature of home care organisations is also exposed. Finally, it raises an often-neglected issue: “why don’t we look after our elderly people?”

It follows three home carers from different backgrounds, including their personal lives and the relationship with their patients. Their stories are remarkably similar. On one side, patients struggle to keep up with the costs of home care. On the other, the carers battle to barely survive on very low wages. This gloomy scenario breaks the American dream into pieces.

Care reveals the strong bond between patients and carers, and how their strong relationship can help both sides to overcome their personal difficulties. The camerawork is straight-forward and simple; it seems that Deirdre Fishel does not want to romanticise the subjects of the movie. There is sensitivity and human dignity even in the most vulnerable moments. The powerful images and intimate confessions never feel exploitative. Fishel has a talent for rescuing human values.

Numerous facts and figures are named during the film, perhaps making this 64-minute featurette a better fit for TV than the cinema theatre.

Sadly, the film fails to point to any solutions, and it does not endorse any viable policies. Viewers are introduced to three ageing Americans and their dilemmas, and end up left with many questions and no answers.

Care will show at the next Sheffield Doc/Fest – click here for more information about the event and the film.

Watch the official movie trailer below:

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The Greasy Strangler tastes different to all the other films in the kitchen of Sundance programming director Trevor Groth. It is like giving cinema-goers a messy bowl of jelly instead of popcorn or M&M’s. It is an unpretentious and puerile new flavour and experience.

British director Jim Hosking and scriptwriter Toby Harvard took very high risks sending their first feature to Sundance in the US. First, they are not American Indies; they are also not famous. The Greasy Strangler, a story about a greedy clumsy dad and his alike maladjusted son, was on six screening rooms in last January at the original Sundance Film Festival, a relatively low tally given the dimensions of the event.

It received mixed reactions from the public and critic, and stirred a lot of debate and controversy. It is an uncomfortable, visceral and nauseating ride. Below is the recipe used by the director in case you want to make a greasy film at home.

Recipe: How to bake a dirty movie and become a hit at the Sundance Film Festival

Ingredients

• 175 g (6 oz) of actors you personally know;
• 35 vintage and weird clothes;
• 175 (6 oz) of props, including a small fake penis;
• Pitiful characters;
• 4 tbsp olive oil (avoid the virgin varieties);
• 40 g (1½ oz) real locations in Los Angeles, including a house that hasn’t been cleaned in 50 years;
• 1 producer that has worked with Ben Wheatley (High-Rise, 2015);
• A spice of melancholia and bleakness; and
• A spoonful of horror.

Method

1. Scriptwriters Jim Hosking and Toby Harvard joined forces to write a movie about characters people don’t see everyday.
2. They think about Big Ronnie (Michael St. Michaels) and his son Brayden (Sky Elobar) and preheat the oven to 180C.
3. Both father and son are “funny, sweet, clumsy, interesting people”, who organised a disco tour in the city, says Hosking.
4. Then they meet a “manipulative” – and fat – sexy woman in the tour, and they begin a love triangle.
5. Beat together father and son. They fight for the same woman; father humiliates son and threatens him with eviction.
6. Put father in a separate mixing bowl. Apart from doing the disco tour, Big Ronnie is also a serial killer in his spare time. The greasy strangler is ready.
7. Leave the triangle to cool in the haunted house. The tension grows as if someone had added yeast.
8. Serve it hot.

Don’t worry if in the end neither father nor son learn anything. There’s a big chance the cake will deflate and be very unsavory. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles!

Observation: The Greasy Strangler was the dirtiest movie screening at Sundance London last June. The least you know, the better. It is out now in cinemas across the UK.

Current film lovers cannot escape from facing James Franco. He is literally everywhere. Goat is a movie with dozens of young talented actors, most of them unknown to the general public, and suddenly there is a familiar face. Franco’s single but over-repeated line is “Punch me in the face!” Is it possible to ignore him?

Not at all. And you also shouldn’t ignore Goat. Ben Schnetzer is Brad Land, a 19-year-old college student who pledges the same fraternity as his brother, Bratt (Nick Jonas). The title refers to a brotherhood in Ohio that tests its members’ machismo in brutal ways. The feature is based on Land’s memoir, and director Andrew Neel was fortunate enough to have James Franco in his team as both an actor and the producer. Franco has had the rights to turn the book into a film for more than 10 years. The fist reached its aim: to knock the audience down. Goat is a manual guide on how to initiate college freshmen in Neo-Nazi torture.

Great part of the film’s appeal is due to the acting. The boys are excellent, both in solo scenes and together. Other features that casted promising young actors include Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986) and The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987), which revealed the then-unknown Kiefer Sutherl and River Phoenix.

Another dirty aspect of Goat is the disturbing behaviour of the senior students. The film was rated R in the US for hazing, strong sexual content and nudity, pervasive language, violence, alcohol abuse and drug use. The psychological scars Brad had to recover from are similar to someone who’s suffered from traumatic war experiences, but Brad was just a regular student who wanted to please his brother and colleagues.

Neel fessed up to DMovies that the environment in the set was a little tense. The filmmaker showed films like Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987) and Dead Poet’s Society (Peter Weir, 1989) to the young actors in order to set the right mood. He also said that the “scene with James Franco was a long improvisation of about 40 minutes in a single take”.

Land has a feeling that we will never be normal again. The most painful and extreme moment in the movie is when he and the other boys are threatened to have sexual intercourse with a goat. Freshmen who belonged to Goat Fraternity were constantly interrupted in their studies and were forced to behave like beasts.

The worst case scenario turns into reality when one of the boys dies. Consequently, members of the fraternity freak out and truth comes to surface. The end is not actual a redemption, but it is close to it. Nonetheless the heritage of Goat points out to a very delicate American tradition which is permissive to abuse.

You have a single chance to watch Goat at Sundance London, on Friday June 3rd. Click here for more information about the event and watch the film trailer below:

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Dogs in film have a loyal following: from Lassie to Benji, from Rin Tin Tin to Scooby-Doo. Last month in London there was a very special season celebrating the canine friends in cinema, in which actual dogs were allowed in the venue. The eclectic selection included the recent features Amores Perros (Alejandro Inarritu, 2000), White God (Kornel Mundruczo, 2014) and Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson, 2015). Given the Todd Solondz’s history, DMovies expected to see a dark canine interpretation of the American dream in Wiener-Dog. Unfortunately, this time the acute cynicism of the American director fails to shine.

A cute dachshund puppy finds itself shuffled from one owner to another. The first family the dog belongs to is a bourgeois American-French couple, whose kid is sick. Father wants his son to be happy again and he brings the dog home for that purpose. But mother, played by Julie Delpy (from Kieslowski’s Three Colours: White, 1994), believes that dogs should be kept in cages. When she was a little girl, her poodle was “raped” by a stray dog.

The next owner is a vet that saves the dog from death. In this part of the movie, Solondz revisits Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), for his previous characters Dawn and Brandon are reunited in Wiener-Dog. Now grown-up, both are still unpopular creatures. Despite their kookiness, they are the only non-stereotypical characters in the whole movie.

The film then has a wholly redundant intermission. Danny DeVito, the following owner, plays a hated College teacher and a scriptwriter who is a loser and cannot sell his film – filmmakers’ favourite cliché. DeVito finds very ingenious and unorthodox revenge for both the dog and himself.

The last owner is an elderly and bitter woman with her visiting granddaughter. The film takes a bizarre and ackward turn that lacks credibility.

Solondz then ends his tale in a miserable way – abstractly speaking or not.

The problem is that the pooch does not tie the film together. In fact, it could have been any other creature: a parrot, a horse, a fish. Solondz could have told the same disconnected stories without the dog, as Robert Altman did in Short Cuts in 1994. Solondz’s achievement persists in his obsession with recreating alienated individuals. His indifference towards modern society is his usual weapon, but this time his gun is not loaded.

Wiener-Dog UK premiered on Friday 3rd at Sundance London Film Festival. Click here for more information about the Festival. The theatrical release of the film is on August 12th.

You can watch the film trailer below:

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