Argentinian cinema has a strong identity of its own, and Trapero’s Carancho is no exception. The highly prolific young director (he’s just 45 and already with 17 films under his belt) this time created a somber and gripping story of love and violence set against the backdrop of ambulances, A&E departments and the dark streets of Buenos Aires, almost invariably at night. A very well-executed modern-day Argentinian film noir is a fitting description for this flick.

Sosa (cinema veteran Ricardo Darín) is a lawyer recently expelled from the bar chambers, who now works as an ambulance chaser – known as “carancho” in Argentina. He exhaustively tours public hospitals and the police stations in search of potential clients for his law firm of very questionable morals and ethics. This is where he meets Luján (Martina Gusmán), a young and hard-working doctor trying to get an internship as a surgeon. The two start a romantic relationship, but their lives are suddenly under threat as Sosa attempts to leave his barely legal labour. His efforts to break away from his past turn out to be increasingly counter-productive. Sosa’s former bosses attempt to reach Luján in order to exact revenge on Sosa. Gangsters say that they want to “beat sense into them”, in a typical reversal of values.

Carancho is a gloomy gangster tale of love and vengeance, where violence is the de facto currency. There is plenty of very graphic violence both within the hospital corridors and the private lives of the characters in the movie. The sparsely-lit, bleak and distant takes, with very few close-ups – almost Brechtian – render the film uncomfortable and difficult to watch. The performances have depth, ensuring that audiences remain hooked during the 107 minutes of the movie.

The movie examines incongruities in both personal relations and society. Sosa seeks vigour and moral redemption in Luján, while she is looking for emotional support for a very difficult job as an A&E doctor.

There is a very fine line between helping people to seek justice and feeding an exploitative blame culture, where only the lawyers benefit and everyone seems to suffer. The carancho culture is very much alive in the UK, albeit in a different format. Who doesn’t routinely receive phone calls and text messages about accident compensation, even if you’ve never been involved in an accident? These are the more sophisticated caranchos, if equally greedy and irresponsible.

Carancho is showing this Sunday as part of the Argentine Film Festival in London – just click here for more information. The event also includes Pablo Trapero’s latest film The Clan about torturers of the Argentinian military dictatorship – click here in order to read our review.

The film also also available to watch online at Amazon.

You can also watch the film trailer below:

.

What would you do if your daughter departed for good without saying a word? The inability to verbalise feelings and to communicate with your loved ones can have disastrous consequences. In Almodóvar latest flick Julieta, the eponymous protagonist veers from one tragedy to the next, having to juggle blame, guilt, isolation and avoiding making the same mistakes that eventually drove her to depression. Young Julieta is played by Adriana Ugarte, while the older version is delivered by Emma Suárez (who looks a lot like the late German actress Susanne Lothar) – both are relatively unknown stars.

Julieta is above everything else a tribute to women. Nearly all of the movie characters are females and the movie is based on three short stories by Canadian writer Alice Munro. This is the most profound examination of the female soul – in all of its splendour and contradictions – that Almodóvar has conducted since The Flower of my Secret (1995). Almodóvar, who grew in La Mancha surrounded mostly by women (his mother and their neighbours) is keen to celebrate the gender which he seems to admire the most.

Those looking for novel twists and subversive antics, might be disappointed with Julieta. There is absolutely nothing new in the movie, nothing Almodóvar hasn’t tried before. It marks instead a return to the subject of women, after the slapstick I’m So Excited (2013) and the hybrid horror-flick/gender-bender The Skin I Live In (2011). The excellence of Julieta is in the narrative complexity, the multilayered plot, the elegant photography, the lurid and plush colours (particularly red) and the superb acting. Ugarte and Suárez blend beautifully into each other, and both the physical and emotional morphing are entirely credible.

Julieta lives in Madrid and is about to move to Portugal with her partner Lorenzo. During a chance encounter on the street with her daughter Antía’s childhood friend Beatriz, she learns that her estranged daughter now lives in Switzerland. Her life then collapses, as she rekindles the longing for long-gone Antía. The movie then moves back to Julieta’s youth, and we learn of the many tribulations in her life, including two deaths for which she feels responsible.

Julieta is an itinerant movie. Time moves back and forth, so do emotions and even the geography. The movie is so fluid that it travels between three short stories (all three written by Munro), and the final result never bursts at the seams. Julieta is from Andalucía, but she moves to Galicia in order to marry Xoán, and then to Madrid with her daughter. DMovies asked Almodóvar during the UK premiere of the movie at the BFI South Bank the reason behind the constant geographic moves, which are so common in his movies. He explained that, in the case of Julieta, he used geographic extremes of Spain in order to emphasise the isolation of the characters in Munro’s short stories.

Almodóvar’s 20th movie Julieta premiered at the BFI South Bank on August 11th, followed by a debate with Pedro Almodóvar the following day. It will in movie theatres across the country on August 26th.

You can watch the film trailer below:

Immigration has often been an act of desperation but also an act of hope – desperation due to the tough living conditions in the home country and hope for a better future and a promising life. These people have often encountered unpredictably harsh circumstances and unwelcoming environments in their host countries. Such was the case for a wave of Jewish immigrants who migrated to the Israeli town of Dimona in the 1950s and 1960s.

Dimona, a city in the middle of Negev desert, in Israel, was settled in 1955, mostly by Jewish immigrants from the Northern Africa. Michal Aviad’s documentary is an unusual and extraordinary story of migration and settlement through the eyes of a group of women. Seven dynamic female characters tell their exciting and often dangerous stories. Most of them – with the exception of Hana Levinstein who came from Poland – left countries in North Africa – in particular Morocco and Tunisia – in search for the “promised land”. The documentary is structured through five chapters – each of them revealing a different period of life in Dimona. With the guidance of the narrators we explore the extreme circumstances and the difficulties of settling down in the new inhospitable city.

Dimona Twist contains a large amount of archive footage and photographs. Combined with the voice-over of the seven women, the images of the physical locations take us on a beautiful journey from the Northern Africa of the 1950s to the establishment and gradual development of Dimona.

What is incredibly interesting and extraordinary is the degree of freedom and independence that these women used to have when they lived in North Africa. Morocco and Tunisia, colonised by the French till the 1950s, were countries in which Jewish women had a high level of freedom and autonomy: they lived alone, they worked, they went to the cinemas and to theatres – they were modern, independent and dynamic women. “Who could marry me off? I’d let someone marry me off? I was modern, everyone was modern there” explains Solange Saranga who arrived from Morocco at the age of 27.

In a period when it became very common and “trendy” for Jewish people to migrate to Israel, these young characters – some of them still underage – decided to leave Northern Africa and search for a promising future in Israel. However, upon their arrival, they were sent directly to the recently established town, Dimona – an empty desert with just a few blocks of buildings. Isolated from the rest of the world, they started from scratch to create a new life and a new society literally from scratch.

What is particularly admiring is the psychological resilience and the determination of the protagonists to make their life better, their decisiveness to build a new life and make the new land their new home. Their positive attitude and strength can be an inspiring example for all women that attempt to take their lives on their own hands, stand on their own feet, follow their dreams and succeed.

Dimona Twist showed earlier this year at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and it has now been acquired by Go2Films. Just click here for more information about the film and how to view it.

“We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people”, once wrote the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano in his book ‘Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent‘.

History of Latin America is a sequence of coup d’états followed by some shy attempts to install democracy and bring some social justice to its people. The consequences of a right-wing dictatorship can disrupt community cohesion, generate mistrust in legal authorities, and promote conflict resolutions that muffle protests. The Clan charts the recent history of Argentina via a middle-class family, whose business consisted of kidnapping people.

The film opens with archive images soon after the fall of General Jorge Rafael Videla in 1981. Videla’s regime was nicknamed “dirty war”, because government opponents were routinely brought to detention centers in secret. Once in custody, the prisoners’ punishment included beatings, torture, rape and death. Arquimedes Puccio, magnificently played by Guillermo Francella, belonged to the State Intelligence Department and used a domineering control of his family – the clan, in other words – to keep his victims in his own house. His practices continued even after Videla’s regime had collapsed, because for a time he had the tacit protection of police to do it.

What is horrifying in Pablo Trapero’s vision of the clan is not the violence itself, but the concept that the lives of torturers are full of joy, prosperity and dreams like any other middle-class family. Arquimedes’ eldest son Alejandro Puccio (Peter Lanzani) was a famous rugby player for Los Pumas. The film portrays his acts of violence as one of the aspects of his ordinary life; after all, he was an admired athlete, who enjoyed good music and had fun like any other teenager.

To conspire with this vision that it is ok to commit cruel acts and get along with life, Trapero built a superb 1980s’ atmosphere in every detail, including music. The soundtrack is joyful and memorable, going from The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ to Charly García’s ‘Encuentro con el Diablo’.

But things start to get wrong for the clan. Alejandro was not happy with the killings – one of the dead guys played rugby with him. Sometimes, the kidnapper’s relatives would deny paying ransom, and Arquimedes resorted to extreme measures. During the dictatorship, pregnant women were held until they gave birth and killed afterwards. The babies were usually handed over to military couples, or couples with military connections. The grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo is a human rights organisation with the goal of finding the children stolen and illegally adopted under such conditions.

It is significant that Puccio’s family got caught after kidnapping a sexagenarian rich woman. Her family resisted in paying the ransom, and that makes us think about machismo in Argentina. Was it because she was old and woman and therefore disposable? Either way, Puccio was finally caught.

The film ends abruptly with a tragic event that happened during the trial of the clan. It doesn’t follow the verdict, the consequent imprisonment and the fate of the family members. It is very relevant that Trapero opted for that end. It gives the sense that justice did not prevail at all. For how long can a manipulative and violent father control his family? For how long can a military dictatorship endure in people’s life even after it falls?

The Clan won prestigious awards in Venice and Toronto in 2015, as well as a Goya prize as best Ibero-American film in its hometown. It was part of the Argentine Film Festival in London, and it is now showing in cinemas in Curzon Home Cinema – just click here for more information.

You can also watch the film trailer below:

.

Nicolas Roeg rarely talks about his films. He prefers to let his films speak for themselves, as many filmmakers do. Film director and producer David Thompson examined Roeg’s remarkable vision of cinema filming Roeg where he is happiest: his own house. The reserved British filmmaker counts many acclaimed masterpieces under his belt, including Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Bad Timing (1980).

The career of the auteur started several years before his first film was completed, the documentary reveals. He worked on François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 in 1966. He fesses up: “Truffaut guided me into film”; that was when he began to distinguish between the work of a photographer and of a cinematographer.

Later Roeg developed some concepts that followed him in many films and influenced filmmakers such as Mike Figgis (Suspension of Disbelief, 2002) and Ben Wheatley (High-Rise, 2015), also pictured in this documentary. The idea that the chronology within a film is not linear is one example. It is possible to obliterate time. He explains that “in film we can put the clock back”.

In Bad Timing, the montage plays a key role in this story build up in flashbacks and flash forwards. The film barely has a plot, and sponsors at the time dismissed it as “very sick”. It is a psychological thriller involving a professor (Art Garfunkel) and his lover (Theresa Russell). Garfunkel plays a repressed academic and professional voyeur in Vienna who finds in Milena (Russell) a chaotic force to drive his libido. The montage mixes scenes from the past and the present: it shows Milena suffering a tracheotomy after a suicide attempt in the present interspersed with an orgasm in the past. The film is considered very risqué because portrays emotional manipulation and rape.

British filmmakers before Roeg were usually very shy about graphic display of sex. Sexuality in Roeg’s films is very open. He likes to show destructive relationships. His former wife and actress Theresa Russell explains that for him “nobody ultimately knows anything about the person they love”. One is alone, even when loved.

Roeg cast many rock stars in various films. Mick Jagger is Turner, a fading musician in the Swinging London of the 1960s (Performance), while David Bowie is an alien who comes to Earth in search of water (The Man Who Fell to Earth). Plus Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing.

More than just using rock stars in order to boost box office takings, Roeg understood pop culture like nobody else. His films are visual pictures of the second half of 20th century, just like Warhol’s paintings. Performance is a film about identity and what is behind the masks we wear daily. The Man Who Fell to Earth is more than a sci-fi picture; it is a movie about alcoholism. In It’s about Time, Bowie confesses he was “living two lives in his mind. It was easy for me not to relate with other people”. At the time of the shooting, Bowie was just coming out of a life-threatening drug problem.

At last, Thompson talks to Roeg’s son, Luc, who remembers that his father filmed at location in the very distant corners of the world. Eureka tells the story of the richest man in the world who gets lost in Alaska, and Walkabout is probably the “best film about Australia made by a non-Australian”, declares Luc.

You can buy the documentary Nicolas Roeg: It’s about Time and watch it online at the BBC Store – just click here. You can watch Bad Timing (1980) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) anytime on BFI player. Or you can also catch Walkabout this Tuesday evening at Somerset House. It is a tale about the pivotal encounter of two white schoolchildren and a young Aboriginal boy in Australia’s outback. The film will be screened as part of Film4 Summer Screen – just click here for more information.

An underground bunker, an imminent apocalypse, a lonely scientist and an ominous computer are the main ingredients of this convincing British indie sci-fi. It is guaranteed to keep you hooked for 90 minutes, and it will give you a few good scares, too. Twenty Twenty Four has an estimated budget of just £20,000.

Roy (Andrew Kinsler) inhabits an underground facility named Plethura on his own, completely isolated from the inhospitable outside, and the intelligent computer Arthur is the only type of interaction available. Until he begins to sense a foreign presence, and strange events begin to take place, including a infection protruding from his chest. The computer Arthur is ambiguous and ironic, often mocking and bullying the young scientist. It grudgingly carries out his requests, instead prompting him with a constant “are you sure, Roy?” – in a mix of British irony and feigned politeness which Roy and audiences will find both amusing and vexing.

The dark imagery elegantly veers between reality, dream and allegory, and it is often impossible to distinguish between these three film layers. It is precisely this narrative and poetical freedom, supported by good acting and convincing photography, that make this movie a powerful viewing experience.

Twenty Twenty-Four mixes elements of Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (the evil and manipulative computer; made in 1968), Tarkovsky’s Solaris (isolation, the questioning of the real location, hallucinations; 1972), Ridley Scott’s Alien (contamination, stalking creatures; 1979) and many others sci-fi classics. Despite being made in 2016 and set in 2024, the movie has a strange vintage look because it was mostly filmed inside facilities constructed in the past. There are even green phosphor and monochromatic computer screens.

This retro feel does not compromise the quality of the movie. Quite the opposite, Twenty Twenty-Four is a fitting tribute to the sci-fi classics. It excels in its simplicity, deftly making use of the few resources available. There are also a few shortcomings, such as the excessive contextualisation of the movie in the beginning by the means of text, but this will not prevent you from having a lot of fun.

Twenty Twenty–Four was completed in May 2016, and premiered in London at Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, with the British Independent Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It became available for streaming on iTunes and Hulu in March 2018.

Watch the film trailer below:

.

Last May Brazil saw a coup d’état, when democratically-elected president Dilma Rousseff was removed from office by the means of an unconstitutional impeachment process. The deeply corrupt, reactionary and illegitimate interim president Michel Temer (pictured above) is now running the country. Since then, Brazilians have been eagerly waiting to boo the non-elected and extremely unpopular head-of-state during the opening of the Olympic Games.

Last night they succeeded, despite every attempt to prevent them from doing so – such as threats from Temer’s Chief of Staff Eliseu Padilha to punish those protesting. For the first time in the history of the Olympics, the name of the head-of-state of the hosting nation was not announced, and Temer opened the games with just a couple of short sentences instead. This was followed by a resounding “boo” that could probably be heard from the other side of the Atlantic. Most media around the world reported the long awaited protest, as well as their drowning out – such as the Guardian.

On the other hand, many Brazilians never heard or read about the Olympic booing. That’s because the almighty TV Globo – the largest and by far most powerful TV network in the country – not just drowned out the booing, but also replaced it with clapping coming from the stall were Temer himself was sitting. To add insult to injury, Globo’s presenter Galvão Bueno reported to the whole country on the “applauding” of Temer. This is a genuine Olympic coup against journalistic ethics and the Brazilian people.

.

.

Cinema exposes television

Back in 1993, late British filmmaker Simon Hartog authored a documentary entitled Beyond Citizen Kane denouncing the manipulative tactics of the Brazilian TV giant Rede Globo to the world. The film revealed that Globo had a firm grip – virtually a monopoly – over the Brazilian government, local politicians and, most importantly, the opinion of Brazilians. It supported the military coup of 1964 (when it was still a newspaper) and it grew because of its unequivocal support of the regime.

Globo was furious at the documentary, and it quickly moved its tentacles in order to prevent the film from being screened. The movie was first shown broadcast in the UK in September 1993 by Channel 4. This exhibition was delayed because Globo challenged the director’s right to use extracts from their programmes without permission, for the purpose of critical review. Read our article about the film here.

The film reveals that Globo used highly unethical and deceitful tactics to support the military regime and to silence the voices of the Workers’ Party. These tactics are surprisingly similar to the muting of Temer’s booing. Even their enemies remain the same: they helped to topple the democratically elected government of Dilma (from the Workers’ Party) and are not attempting to legitimise a borderline dictatorial government through lies and manipulation.

Beyond Citizen Kane exposes many examples of such tactics. For example, it reveals that Globo described the large street demonstrations asking for direct elections and the end of the military in the early 1980s as mere “street celebrations” without a purpose. During the large national strikes of the same decade, it removed the voices from the trade unionists, and only their bosses remained audible. The similarity with the Olympic coup last night is striking.

DMovies now wants to place Beyond Citizen Kane in a modern context, showing that the times may have changed, but Globo hasn’t altered its criminal tactics. We will hold a screening of the film on September 23rd at 18:00 at the charming Regent Street Cinema at the heart of London, one of the oldest film venues in the world. The film will be followed by a debate about Globo and media manipulation in Brazil, with the film producer John Ellis and special guests from Brazil (tbc).

Tickets are not available for sale yet, but we will let you know as soon as they are.

Below is DMovies‘ protest video against the illegitimate government of Michel Temer:

.

Some people make sacrifices for the ones they love. Others do it for the ones who they don’t love. Such is the case of Vic Brown (Alan Bates), who marries Ingrid Rothwell (June Ritchie, in her debut role) because he felt that this was “the honourable thing to do”. Ingrid was pregnant with Vic’s child following a short dalliance, but the charming young man did not harbour any profound sentiments for her, except perhaps for pity and compassion.

A Kind of Loving is set in a permanently wintry, colourless and heavily polluted town in the north of England in the 1960s, complete with grey skies, crammed housing, plus a steamy rail network conspicuous in its noisiness. Their existence is terribly ordinary, their job and hobbies extremely mundane. Vic is a draftsman and Ingrid is a typist working for the same company. Vic is a football fan, and he enjoys his time at the pub, while Ingrid is obsessed coats, television and brass bands. They are the essence of working-class Britain in the 1960s, as with most of the kitchen sink dramas.

The difference is that this British new wave classic is a very subtle and yet profound investigation of the values of people living at that time. The performances are superb, the bleak photography is oddly fascinating, and the topics examined very pertinent and universal. The black and white movie saw both commercial and a critical acclaim, becoming of the biggest box office hits of the time and taking the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1962.

The irresistibly handsome Alan Bates delivers a warm and apparently caring Vic, with a genuine – if a little trite – smile. June does the vaguely shy and needy Ingrid, who still evokes some sympathy from the audiences despite her futile obsessions. She epitomises a fast-transforming Britain, that quickly embraced consumerist values as very suitable assets for the baby-boom generation.

The love that Vic grudgingly offers Ingrid is very awkward and uncomfortable to watch. The “I love you” hardly audible, the kissing is hackneyed, the lovemaking feels almost altruistic. He is completely unfazed by her nudity. Neither one is happy and enjoying it, and the unexpected pregnancy remains their biggest bond. To make things worse, they are poor and live with Ingrid’s mother, a domineering and manipulative old woman who makes no effort to conceal her dislike for Vic. At one point she describes her in-law: “you talk filth, you smell filth, you are the filth, you filthy pig”.

Disaster then strikes, as Ingrid falls down the stairs and has a miscarriage. She is inconsolable. Yet Vic is strangely stoic and even happy, telling the doctor in hospital: “Don’t worry about the kid, i couldn’t get used to the idea of being a father anyway”. Perhaps he wasn’t so caring and altruistic after all. He then hits the bottle and his chauvinistic side is immediately revealed.

The vain attempt to conform to the tacit obtuse social rules and thereby to concoct a fragile relationship is a central theme of A Kind of Loving. In the end of the day, marriage has little to do with love, and people have to make do with “a kind of loving” instead.

Having a baby is one of these social rules, and it still remains so today. Just last month conservative MP Andrea Leadsom infamously questioned Theresa May’s ability to run the country because of her biological inability to conceive a child (the now PM of Britain is sterile). It is therefore understandable why Ingrid panicked when she lost a child, in an even more conservative Britain from more than 50 years ago.

A Kind of Loving has now been fully restored. Its new version premiered last month in Manchester and Bristol, during Cinema Rediscovered. It has now been made available on DVD and, for the first time, on Blu-ray – just click here for more information.

You can watch the original film trailer below:

.

Sid Vicious was not a hero. He was the bass player of the Sex Pistols, but he didn’t live long to get his feet on the ground. He died of an overdose a few months later his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen was found dead in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. But to many young people of London, he represented an affront to a society that offered no jobs, no training, no education and no entry into the world. Still today we see punks on the streets of London.

The opening scene of Sid and Nancy is the arrest of Sid Vicious (played by Gary Oldman) on the day following Nancy’s death. The scene itself is a testimony of Malcolm McLaren’s opinion on Sid: “He is a fabulous disaster”. But according to John Lydon, McLaren was “the most evil person on earth”. He had put the band together and orchestrated the English punk rock scene in late ’70s. He had a talent for marketing, and for creating provocative graphics, but in essence he was a symbol of everything punks hate.

The film then moves back in time to when Sid and Nancy met and to some memorable concerts Sex Pistols played in the UK and in the US. They often did gigs in the Soho venues The Spice of Life and 100 Club (both still in existence), and led a mostly independent lifestyle. In other words, they lived in shit flats, with dozens of other young guys, and they were very naughty in public appearances, especially on TV, when they cursed a lot. Sometimes they were not even be able to finish their concerts. Sid was heavily involved with heroin.

The romance with Nancy is doomed from the start. Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb got that punk feeling into the film, despite Oldman’s opinion on his own performance: “I don’t think I played Sid Vicious very well”. Nancy was also a junkie, who could not understand why she was despised by her relatives. The scene in which she introduces Sid to her uncle and aunt is a cynical example of generation gap.

Oldman and Webb performances are an reflection of the stars’ real lives, in which the noise and the fury give birth to alienating days and nights. Sometimes, the couple was so weak they couldn’t leave their hotel in order to get a pizza.

Sid and Nancy is a film that portrays the modern man. The modern man no longer belongs to a people, a tribe or a clan. He lives in the absolute solitude of a metropolis. And maybe this is why we are still celebrating punk movement to this date.

A restored copy of seminal biopic Sid and Nancy is being launched this week in order to celebrate 40 years of punk. The 1986 film directed by Alex Cox’s (Repo Man, 1984; Walker, 1987) previewed last week in Bristol, as part of Cinema Rediscovered Festival, and it is being released in UK cinemas this August, 30 years after its initial release.

The launch party will take place on August 29th at Screen on the Green, where on the same day in 1977 The Clash and the Buzzcocks supported the Sex Pistols at their famous ‘Midnight Special’ showcase event organised by Malcolm Maclaren. The evening will include a screening of ’Scorpio Rising’, a film shown at the event in 1977, and a DJ set from music legend and punk filmmaker Don Letts. Just click here for more information.

You can watch the film trailer below:

.