The Wonderful Kingdom of Papa Alaev

Fittingly marketed as “Tajikistan’s answer to the Jackson family”, The Wonderful Kingdom of Papa Alaev will take you into the heart of a celebrated folk music clan from Tajikistan that migrated to Israel, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The octogenarian Allo Papa Alaev rules his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren with the iron fist of a tyrant, but when they get together on stage their differences seem to disappear, where they simply exhude musical joy. In fact, the family feuds seem to be a catalyst for their stamina.

All of Papa Alaev’s offspring except for his daughter Ada live in a single-family house in Tel Aviv. Papa Alaev resents his defecting child, whom he views as a sinner. He is profoundly misogynous and racist, and most of his family seems to reflect or at least tolerate his old-fashioned values, oppressive demeanour, unpredictable tantrums and antics. Marriage is to happen only within the Buhkarin ethnic group, and women will always remain secondary. A female sums it up succintly: “I’m very proud to be my father’s daughter despite him not being so proud of me”. Such orthodox values are sure to make liberal Westerners cringe.

But Papa Alaev is also certain to get you moving. You will catch yourself gently tapping your feet and swinging your hips on your sofa or seat. And you will marvel at his desimbodied voice, and the unwavering strength of his crystal-clear and hypnotic chant, plus the supporting drumbeats. It’s not surprising that the president of Tajikistan recently labelled the old man “a national treasure”. The large and unusual troupe consistently attracts large hordes of fans of all ages as they tour the small Middle Eastern country.

This 71-minute doc will look at some of the drama that unfolds behind the stage, but these fall-outs are never fully investigated. It’s difficult to glue the pieces together. The final third of the movie is the most fascinating part, when you experience the musicality of the clan at full throttle – so make sure you stick to the end. Ultimately, the movie is an ode to an extraordinatry music act, and an increasingly rare family model – modern pundits will dissmiss it as too archaic and reactionary. This is a warm tribute to a rich, beautiful and yet doomed kingdom.

The Wonderful Kingdom of Papa Alaev has been showing in leading music and film festivals around the world, including Womex and Hot Docsclick here in order to find out more about distribution and exhibition of the film.

You can also watch the film trailer below:

The Dreamed Ones (Die Geträumten)

In an age when we’ve become slave to our computers, phones and their multifold messaging applications, it’s difficult to imagine writing a letter to someone and then posting it. The person at the other end has to wait several days before receiving your correspondence, and it could be weeks before you’ve heard back from them. But does such wait heighten your feeling and emotions, is it a catalyst of love, or does dampen it instead?

Shortly after the Second World War, the Jewish Romanian-born poet Paul Celan – best known for his German poem Death Fugue, a shocking and dazzling description of life and death in a concentration camp – met in Vienna with Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian poet and dramatist, and the daughter of a devoted Nazi. They instantly fell in love, but Celan married another woman. So they exchanged poems and love letters for more than 20 years, until Celan’s untimely death in 1970 at the age of just 49.

The Austrian documentarist maker Ruth Beckermann, herself the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, worked with professional actors for the first time, creating a very unusual reenactment. She shuns modern and sophisticated cinematic devices in favour of old-fashioned reading. Anja F. Plaschg (who is also a famous experimental musician and artist) and Laurence Rupp read out Celan’s and Bachmann’s correspondence to each other in a recording studio inside the Funkhaus, a radio station and theater in central Vienna. They gaze into each other’s eyes, lie on the floor and take cigarette breaks. They gradually break the ice, smile, laugh and flirt with each other, leaving viewers wondering whether they too (the actors) are becoming infatuated.

The Dreamed Ones is, above everything else, a loud meditation about forlornness, immortality and the timelessness of art and love. The tormented love between Celan and Bachmann mandates a joyless life, it seems. Their painful relationship is very intense and alive, even if letters are their only communication device. They also discuss other pertinent subjects, such as antisemitism and fame. They are often angry at each other. Their love isn’t just impossible; it’s also profoundly dysfunctional.

The tragedy is sealed when Celan drowns in Paris at the age of just 49. Bachmann dies just three years later, in a fire in her flat in Rome. Water and fire: it seems that even at death the two lovers were incompatible.

This highly esoteric and minimalistic movie will come as a treat to fans of poetry, particularly in German language. A lot of the complexity of the text sadly gets lost in translation, but this is not the director’s fault. Some nuances of the Teutonic language simply don’t work in English. Viewers not familiar with Celan will learn about his distressed soul, but will not gain much insight into his best-known poems, including Death Fugue.

The Dreamed Ones is out in cinemas across the UK and beyond on Friday December 2nd.

Watch the film trailer below:

Lust is a neon sign at the bottom of my heart

I was just 17 when I entered university, and my education at home was sexually repressed. Not that talking about sex was a taboo, but my parents wanted me to remain an untouched sweet girl for, let’s say, almost forever. My hometown, São Paulo, Brazil, has got one of the most eclectic and funky night lives of Latin America. So getting an early bus to university was a curious experience for the eyes. The route passed Roosevelt Square, now a meeting point for gays and artists, exhuding hot and creative energy, and mostly gentrified. But back then in the 1980s, the area reeked of decadence, dotted with strip joints, dark rooms, sex shops and… movie theatres!

At that time, I was naively in love with an older man who fantasised courting Nastassja Kinski. I wanted to be as sexy as her, before having sex for the first time. She was stunning, but I secretly hoped one day she would reveal her inner beauty to be as scary and repulsive as her father Klaus Kisnki in Nosferatu (Werner Herzog, 1979).

One day I bought the newspaper in search of a film starred by Kinski (the belle; not the beast). My eyes fell upon One From The Heart, a promising romantic story. Plus, the film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, an Italo-American filmmaker. All cool. My Italo-Brazilian father would approve and give me money to the screening. The problem was that the only cinema showing it was Cine Bijou, in the infamous Roosevelt Square. This meant I had to concoct a lame excuse in order to go out, which I did. My parents trusted me.

I remember the feeling of walking down Roosevelt Square for the first time. I wasn’t able to keep my chin up: both the building and the passers-by were scary. There were drunk men sleeping on the streets and homeless kids washing themselves in the fountains. Also a malodorous beggar approached me like a ghost. I could see dildos when I peeked inside some shops, and I wondered how they were used. When I got into the dark foyer at Cine Bijou I felt safe. There were very few people in the audience.

One From The Heart is a modern love story. The two main characters (played by Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest) inhabit a Las Vegas of disappointment and neon lights. For a brief time, they break out of their married lives and meet new lovers (played by Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski), who tease them with new dreams and fresh fantasies. I thought that was so cool. Maybe I could even get married like that! I studied Kinski’s gestures and looks. Would my yet-to-be-found beloved spouse agree to an open marriage???

But what really struck me at that time – and now I am quite ashamed of my youthful taste – was the artificial atmosphere of Las Vegas. I associated libido with neon lights. Suddenly Las Vegas and Roosevelt Square were similar places. The blurry North-American setting intoxicated with gaudy neon looked like the smoky cabarets in the centre of São Paulo. But were the glitzy lights somehow related to passion and lust?

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Nastassja Kinski is pictured enjoying herself in One From The Heart.

Looking now in retrospect, as a movie critic, it doesn’t matter to me that One From The Heart is a minor and often overlooked film in the Coppola filmography. People will always talk about The Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, 1990) or The Conversation (1974) and forget his decadent love story. For once, Coppola was more worried about the lighting effects than about social issues such as the Vietnam War, the subject of Apocalypse Now (1979). From the bottom of my heart, after watching One From The Heart I was forever changed. That was my coming of age. Lust was born in the shape of a neon sign.

The image at the top is a strip joint in the centre of São Paulo, not far from Roosevelt Square. It was taken from the 1993 video clip of the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds song ‘Do you Love Me’, which is set entirely in the then derelict centre of the Brazilian metropolis

The Truth Beneath

There is often some ugly truth behind election campaigns. The tactics may involve smear, libel, media manipulation and lies with all sorts of emotional appeal. But what about infanticide? The Truth Beneath is a Korean political thriller which raises a very unusual question: would you kill your own daughter in order to ẃin the sympathy and therefore defeat your opponent in an election? Can politics get that dirty?

The second feature film the Korean female director Lee Kyoung-mi is flooded with whirlwind twists, not too different from the recent presidential elections in the US. Yeon-Hong (Son Ye-Jin, pictured above) is married to Jong-Chan (Kim Ju-Hyeok) and they have an adolescent daughter called Min-Jin (Shin Ji-Hoon). Jong-Chan is running for office at the National Assembly. Suddenly Min-Jin goes missing, and her mutilated body is found. Yeon-Hong begins to suspect that her husband is involved in the murder of their daughter for the purpose of increasing his ratings. So she sets off in a mission to investigate what led to the teenager’s death, and to find out whether her very own spouse would be capable of carrying one of the most shocking crimes imaginable: infanticide.

The Truth Beneath is an elegant and gripping noir thriller, in the tradition of good Korean movies such as Mother (Bong Joon-ho, 2009) and Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003). The narrative is fast and complex, with emotional depth and visual flare. There is plenty of attention to trivial details: a close-up of the lips, food being chopped, the reflection a ringing mobile phone on a mirrored table, raindrops on a window, etc. The montage is also highly inventive, with faux raccords, objects morphing into something else (such as head turning into a person with their hands up), and a particularly impressive – if very short – sequence where the sun rapidly sets while a car drives down a road (as if dusk lasted just a couple of seconds). Top-drawer performances also help to sustain the borderline absurd plot: Son Ye-Jin delivers a passive-aggressive type of motherhood which will keep you riveted to your seat, afraid for your very own physical integrity.

Teenage angst is also a central pillar, and the director succeeds at blending a girl’s colourful world with the grim and gruesome elements of murder. There’s plenty of violence contrasted with the pink and the puerile. Colours are deftly used; there’s also pop music and creepy whistling and yodelling. The imagery, the performances and the incidental details of this movie will linger in your memory. Not to be missed!!!

The Truth Beneath is showing as part of the London Korean Film Festival taking place between November 3rd and 27th – just click here for more information.

Don’t forget to watch the film trailer below:

Urmila: My Memory is My Power

We’d like to think that something as dehumanising and morally reprehensible as slavery is dead, but unfortunately it’s not. The practice is still widespread in many parts of the planet. Worse still, many girls are being forced into slavery from a very young age, in a practice that is borderline institutionalised and often includes sex work. In Nepal, these people are known as kamalari.

Urmila was sold off as a kamalari by her parents at the age of just six, and she worked as a slave for 12 years. She is now aged 25 and a freedom activist, and she’s attempting to become a lawyer. Her purpose is to prevent young girls from encountering the same tragic fate as herself. She has the enthusiastic support of international human rights organisations and of German documentarist Susan Gluth.

Urmila: My Memory is My Power is a vital register of a highly contemptible and humiliating practice. Urmila questions her parents why they did this to her. The rice farmers explain that they were perpetually in debt with their bosses, who systematically cheated on them. This a remarkably common pattern for people working in conditions analogue to slavery. It seems that both parents and the girl were being exploited. So, who’s to blame?

There are other powerful moments in the movie, such as when activists force an old lady and a child off a bus suspecting that she’s about to sell the child into slavery. Or when Urmila visits the river that she crossed at the age of six: “I crossed this river as a kamalari and I returned a free person”. The river here is a watershed, in both the denotative and connotative sense..

Susan Gluth’s view of Urmila’s struggle is gentle and feminine, and never exploitative. The photography of the foggy and gloomy cities of Nepal is strangely soothing. However, the film is not without faults. The foreign investigative gaze often fails to get under Urmila’s skin, and the movie never feels like it’s a first person account (like the title suggests). It lacks verve and spontaneity, and sometimes feels a little rehearsed.

Still, Urmila’s courage and determination are remarkable. And perhaps more importantly, she has helped to free many kamalari. More than 13,000 girls had been freed by the end of 2015 when the movie was completed. They believe that there are only a further 150 kamalari, those being kept by very influential and rich people. There’s still some work to do, but a lot has already been achieved. It’s nice to see such a deplorable practice dying out.

Urmila’s struggle has remarkable similarities with Chinese human rights activist Ye Hayan, who also fights for women’s rights – she was the subject of the movie Hooligan Sparrow (Nanfu Wang, 2016). Or if you are interested in a fictionalised account of child trafficking in neighbouring India, we recommend that you watch Sold (Jeffrey D. Brown, 2016) – just click on the film titles in order to accede to the reviews.

Earlier this year, Urmila: My Memory is My Power has shown in film festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Berlin Film Festival and Hot Docs in Canada. You can find out more information about future screenings and distribution rights by clicking here.

Below is the film trailer:

The top 10 dirtiest film quotes of all times!

Films quotes are very powerful not just because they can make you laugh or introduce an unexpected twist in your favourite movie. Never underestimate the power of words. They can also change the way your see other people, force you to rethink your values and ideologies split your allegiances, and even alter your sentiments and emotions. Ultimately, words can both cleanse and intoxicate you.

That’s why DMovies has decided to come up with a list of the top 10 dirtiest films quotes of all times. Our team has selected films from various corners of the planet and from different times, in no special order. They include famous lines from Hitchcock and Billy Wilder classics, but also lesser-known gems from countries such as Germany, France, Spain and Brazil. And of course we haven’t the UK out, with a hilarious line from this year’s winner of the Palme d’Or in Cannes, in what’s for us the most urgent film of the year.

So keep your eyes, your ears and your mind open! Let these pungent and heady words into your world. Allow the twisted sages of cinema wreak havoc in your life!

1. “Nobody’s Perfect.”Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

Daphne (Jack Lemmon) is not a woman, but this does not matter to the millionaire Osgood Fielding III, (Joe E. Brown). At the final sequence of the movie, Jack’s character famously removes his wig and shouts, “I’m a man!”, revealing the much feared secret to his dalliance. An unaffected Osgood simply responds: “Well, nobody’s perfect”. This is likely the most subversive final movie line ever, at a time when homosexuality was illegal in most of the planet.

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2. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Napalm is a flammable liquid used in warfare. It was initially used as an incendiary device against buildings and later as an anti-personnel weapon, as it sticks to skin and causes severe burns when on fire. Yet for Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, its fragrance seems to evoke a grotesquely romanticised belligerence.

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3. “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) relationship to his his mother is a very unusual one, complete with jealousy, murder, necrophilia, crossdressing and split personality disorder. Oh, there are also hints of incest. Would you envisage such “friendship” with your mum?

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4. “OK, look, your role isn’t inspired by you!”The Law of Desire (Pedro Almodóvar, 1987)

Juan (Miguel Molina) is developing a monologue his transsexual sister, Tina (played by the cisgender Carmen Maura). But at one point he has to break the devastating news to the diva-wannabe: “OK, look, your role isn’t inspired by you”. He then tries to comfort her: “there’s certain affinity: in terms of problems with men”, he says before having another line of coke.

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5. “I’m big! It’s the pictures that got small”Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson, also pictured at the top of the article) is blissfully ignorant of her demise as a silent movie. In her fantastically delusional world, she remains as big as ever. It’s everyone else’s fault that they can’t see enviable grandeur. She remains the biggest star of all times, it’s just a pity there’s no one to worship and adore her.

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6. “Dora, everything has a limit!”Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998)

Would you sell a child to an organ-trafficking network in order to buy a television with that money? Well, Dora (Fernanda Montenegro) did, in this Brazilian classic. The words above are uttered in indignation by her friend Irene (Marília Pêra) upon seeing a large television in Dora flat, and thereby deducing that she traded the orphaned child under her care for the device.

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7. “Could you please defrost it?”I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016; click here for our review of the movie)

Daniel is unable to work due to a recent heart attack. so and has to claim Job Seekers Allowance. The problem is that he has to do it online, and he has never used a computer before in his life, describing himself instead as “pencil by default”. He heads to a library in order to use the internet, but he is soon told that his device froze, to which he reacts with the question above. A hilarious moment urging people and government to rethink the benefit system.

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8. “But secretly, you’d love to know what it’s like, wouldn’t you, what it feels like for a girl”Cement Garden – (Andrew Birkin, 1993)

Julie (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) explains the challenges of being a woman in this relatively obscure French film. Julies’ words were catapulted to fame when Madonna incorporated it into one of her songs: “Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, because it’s OK to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think that being a girl is degrading. But secretly you’d love to know what it’s like, wouldn’t you? What it feels like for a girl?”

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9. “This is love, baby. Believe me, it’s rare.” Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus (Serge Gainsbourg, 1976)

The manly lorry driver Krassky (Joe Dallesandro) is obsessed with anal sex. He has a young and handsome partner called Padovan (Hugues Quester), but he is soon infatuated with the highly androgynous female Johnny (a short-haired version of Jane Birkin). But the only way he can engage with his new lover is through her back entrance. Love is indeed a double-sided sentiment.

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10. “You’ve given me a great deal of happiness”; “I sold it to you!”Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981)

Veronika Voss is a formerly popular UFA film star who is now struggling to get roles, but she finds comfort in the opiate pills prescribed by Marianne Katz (Annemarie Düringer). The dialogue above takes place when Veronika expresses her gratitude to her doctor. It is is both a reflection and a joke about Fassbinder’s own very unbashed drug use. The German director overdosed on fatal cocktail of valium, cocain and alcohol less than a year after the film was completed.

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Indignation

In the 1950s the US was a closed-minded country – everyone was polite, maddeningly conventional and intolerant against diversity -, a little bit like what’s going on nowadays in Trumpland. To define the austerity of the decade, Cate Blanchett said: “You didn’t express your feelings. It was inappropriate to talk about how you felt”. Indignation resembles Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), the film to which Blanchett referred, as it depicts the resentment of people who dared to think differently. In Indignation Logan Lerman plays the son of a kosher butcher, Marcus, who falls in love with a libertine girl in a Midwestern college. We find out later that the girl (Sarah Gadon) suffers from mental disorders.

The 110-minute long film is based on a novel by Philip Roth, who seems to be Hollywood dearest these days. Other recent pictures based on his books are American Pastoral (Ewan McGregor, 2016) and The Humbling (Barry Levinson, 2015). The sexual content in Roth’s literature has the power to shock. In American Pastoral there are hints of incest, and in The Humbling a septuagenarian man gets involved in a threesome with a hot young woman and a middle-aged lesbian socialite he met in a psychiatric institution. The socialite uses a strap-on dildo. In this James Schamus’ debut, though, there is more suggestion than action.

Malice comes shrouded in puritanism. As a son of a superprotective Jewish family, he cannot allow himself certain pleasures. He feels guilty at his first orgasm. The narrative enters the territory of the unconscious and strong and rigid family values. The girl was not “the type to marry”. Besides she had attempted suicide, a very difficult issue to deal with even if you are in love. When Marcus enrolled at the university, he was trying to evade his military duty of the Korean War. But he soon encountered other problems.

Religion is another pillar of the film structure. Marcus resents being forced to attend the University chapel. He promptly finds a way of cheating the system, and gets a colleague to sign in for him. The college dean (Tracy Letts) exposes the fraud in the film’s best scene. In the near 20-minute centrepiece, Marcus stands firmly for his own values of freedom and voices his indignation. It seems, though, American society was not ready for such freedom, and maybe will never be. Instead, intolerance and hypocrisy prevail. As he approached adulthood, Marcus has to adhere norms he doesn’t agree with. He has to juggle atheism and religious values in a Christian college.

While touching on an array of complex themes, including coming-of-age, religion and sexuality, Indignation fails to go into too much depth. The feeling of unsettlement and disorientation are not fully explored, and Marcus’ intern struggle is barely visible outside the lengthy centrepiece. The imagery does not have a strong emotional impact. For example, suicide is represented by a few bruises contrasted against a yellow cardigan. Indignation is not a harrowing piece; it’s not a loud cry for freedom.

Indignation was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival last January. Vertigo Films bought the distribution rights to the UK and the film is currently showing in London and other cities.

You can watch the film trailer below:

Panic

London can be a lonely and threatening place, where communication with strangers is scarce. Most people hardly meet their neighbours, particularly if you live in a soulless and gloomy high-rise. That is, except when you bump into them in the corridor, on the elevator or see them through their window across. Yet no one interferes with each other’s lives in the name of privacy and anonymity, but at the expense of solidarity.

The indie thriller Panic was filmed in just three weeks in the East End, and it deals with a number of very pertinent issues, such as illegal immigration, labour exploitation of and underground crime. The novice helmer Sean Spencer explains what the film is about: “London’s intricate and often brutal ghost economy, and the ever-growing feeling of social alienation in our urban environments.”

Panic tells the story of music journalist Andrew (David Gyasi, pictured above), a recluse healing from a vicious street attack. He constantly watches his neighbours from his window, often with binoculars, in good James Stewart style, from the Hitchcock classic Rear Window (1954). One day he decides to meet a woman online and invites her for a very awkward encounter in his flat, where she accidentally witnesses through the window a very violent episode involving a Chinese woman. Andrew then sets off on a mission to save his neighbour from the hands of very dangerous criminals.

The Hitchcockian tale then suddenly turns into a frenetic, action-packed and testosterone-fuelled thriller, where a black man confronts the criminal underworld of gangsters and illegal immigrants in order to save a hapless woman. The movie then becomes remarkably similar to Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002), except that the illegal being here is the female and not the male (click on the title film in order to accede to our review). Here it is the old-fashioned nobly selfless macho hero the rescues the weak and vulnerable female, who is unable to fend for herself.

Panic is good Friday entertainment, particularly if you live in East London and can relate to the murky and oppresive vibe of the movie. The performances are strong enough to sustain the narrative, even if they sometimes lack of the emotional depth required for some of topics addressed. They are supported by a music score composed exclusively for the movie, which sounds a little like creepy “Also sprach Zarathustra” (the theme from Stanley Kubrik’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey) – maybe the strongest element of the movie.

Panic showed in cinemas in November 2016, when this piece was originally written. It is available on iTunes, Google Play and most VoD platforms on August 29th, 2017.

The War Show

Marketed as a “video diary of the Syrian conflict”, this Danish-German-Syrian production isn’t just an ordinary compilation of emotions, words and images. It’s also an invaluable register of collapse of country, society and of a youth full of hopes and dreams. It’s a vivid and sorrowful reminder of the tragic consequences of a war that started as an effort to implement democracy, a byproduct of the Arab Spring. This film captures the essence of a human tragedy.

In March 2011, radio host Obaidah Zytoon and several friends joined the street demonstrations against the oppressive regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose family has lead the country for 40 uninterrupted years. They decide to film every step of a very bleak journey that is nowhere near finding closure five years later. Obaidah’s voiceover narrates the story in retrospect, with the lugubrious tone of her voice suggesting from the start of the movie that the outcome wouldn’t be rosy.

The blithe ingenuousness of the young friends is evident: they are constantly cheerful, and their smile is puerile. Their revolutionary naivety is perhaps akin to the Baader-Meinhof in Germany. They believe that their “friends” Russia, Iran, China and Venezuela will help to liberate them from decades of turture and arbritary arrests, but they never anticipated that sectarianism and conflicting international interests would turn their Syrian version of the Arab Spring into a very cold and grey winter, tarnished with blood and intoxicated with the smell of death. Their camera captures their jolly moments on the beach, in their homes, as they drink, smoke, discuss their ideologies, heroics plans and ambitions. There is also romance in the air, particularly between the pretty Lulu and the heartthrob Hisham. At one point, Lulu takes enormous pride in removing her “veil of shame”, fully unaware that the future is far more oppressive than the present.

Eventually, the young people are forced to move and they see their hopes for a fair society slowly dilacerated. They have to escape from a sieged town, and they have to battle the Al-Nusra faction (now rebranded Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, perceived as vaguely less savage than Isis). They gradually see their society succumb to extremism and total war. The banality of violence and death prevails.

The young rebels here know that their camera is their lifeline, a vital denunciation and survival tool. The film apparatus becomes a key player. Obaidah notes: “The camera was an event in itself, it was salvation, but it was also dangerous”. The camera, just like the guns, serves to perpetuate war. She carries on, now realising the futility of her actions: “they are arming rebels enough to continue war, but not to win it”.

The tragic imagery and the fatal conclusion of The War Show could haunt you for some time. Even if the film is sometimes a little disjointed, and the individual stories are difficult to follow. Despite being broken down into eight sections clearly marked with titles (revolution, suppression, resistance, siege, memories, frontline, extremism and epilogue), at times it is difficult to contextualise the events.

The War Show has won the top prize in the Venice Days strand at this year’s Venice Film Festival. A jury chaired by Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce chose the film from the 11-strong selection – click here for our interview with Bruce earlier this month.

The documentary Dugma: The Button (Pål Refsdal, 2016) also provides an insider’s view into the Syrian War, albeit a very different one! Click here for our movie review.

The film is showing later this month at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Stay tuned for more screenings and an eventual theatrical release.

And below is the film trailer!

Gimme Danger

Jim Jarmusch and Iggy Pop (whose real name is James Osterberg) have been friends since the early 1990s, when Pop acted in Jarmusch’s comic western Dead Man (1995). Jarmusch says that “No other band in rock’n’roll history has rivalled The Stooges’ combination of heavy primal throb, spiked psychedelia, blues-a-billy grind, complete with succinct angst-ridden lyrics, and a snarling, preening leopard of a front man who somehow embodies Nijinsky, Bruce Lee, Harpo Marx and Arthur Rimbaud”. The choice over who is the best filmmaker to make a biopic of Iggy and The Stooges naturally fell on Jarmusch. Gimme Danger is primitive and sophisticated at the same time, and a creative music documentary that only Jarmusch could put together.

Gimme Danger is not only a love letter to The Stooges, but also a fine piece of art. A collage. Jarmusch breaks the rules of rocumentary genre by throwing in fragments of films illustrating Pop’s memories of his early years in Detroit and his first gigs. Don’t expect mere archive footages explaining the musical, cultural, political and historical context in which The Stooges emerged. Together with his editor, Affonso Gonçalves, who edited Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch, 2014) and Forty Shades of Blue (Ira Sachs, 2005), Jarmusch reveals the fun side of Pop’s persona. The visual collage blends Clarabell, the TV series American clown, with Addams Family, horror movies, Nico‘s charms and of course The Three Stooges. When Iggy Pop is on stage anything can happen. The sexy clown does whatever he feels like doing.

Indeed he was the first rock artist to ignore the fourth wall, the space which separates a performer from an audience. He invented stage diving. He invited the audience to go on stage while he would be down, singing and enjoying himself. Iggy Pop is the terror of security guards.

But Gimme Danger is not only about Iggy Pop. It portrays the friendship among all Stooges. Dave Alexander (bass) and the Asheton brothers Scott (drums) and Ron (guitar) were pals. The band was active from 1967 to 1974. Even after the band split up, due to excessive drug use and lack of professionalism, their bond was unbreakable. They learnt to play together. They experimented with sounds. Once Pop brought a hoover on stage as an instrument. When David Bowie met Pop at the Max’s in New York and invited him to go to London, Pop only felt comfortable after he was joined by all other Stooges.

In 2003, the band returned for a concert in Coachella. The Festival managers offered Pop a large sum of money, which he refused. He asked three times more, because other musicians of the band should be paid equally. Pop never left behind the feeling of living in a commune in 1967. The Stooges were essentially communists, even if they were oblivious of that.

The Stooges never ceased to be influential. Their rage on stage and the “cut-the-crap” poetic lyrics impacted on the punks and Sex Pistols (read more about them here). Pop knew he couldn’t compete with current Literature Nobel Prize Bob Dylan’s verbal diarrhoea, so he kept it short. The Stooges went straight to the point, and their noises still reverberate.

Gimme Danger is out in cinemas on November 18th. Watch the official trailer here:

The Great Trumptator

Voters have spoken up and their verdict is clear: Trump is the President-elect of the US. Is this time Americans and the rest of the world grovellingly respect the election results and rally behind the new chief, as despicable as he may be? After all, elections are the foundation of democracy upon which the US and most of the West is built. Well, I beg to differ.

While I don’t encourage anyone to boycott election results, or to stage a coup (like they did earlier this year in Brazil), I invite people to expose and to boycott this man’s deeply reactionary, manipulative and deceitful actions. I vehemently disapprove of Theresa May’s words. She not only magnanimously congratulated Trump, without any criticism of his Islamophobic, racist and sexist rhetoric, but she also seized the opportunity to highlight her very own deeply reactionary and xenophobic, anti-immigration agenda. May’s stance is empowering an extremely dangerous egomaniac, who already has too much power in his hands. It’s like handing a box of matches to a three-year old. This is beyond appeasement. This is beyond connivance. This is sycophantic collusion. And we all know where this could lead.

In 1940, the London-born Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, scored and starred in the American political-satire comedy-drama The Great Dictator. The film tells the story a poor Jewish barber who is mistaken for a dictator of a similar appearance and takes his place. In his rejection of the position he ends up delivering one of the most inspirational speeches ever recorded. His speech remains incredibly accurate 76 years later, and his call for resistance is just as urgent.

Donald Trump with recognisable smug smile; I would hazard a guess he’s thinking about his racial superiority.

A tale of two crooks

The Jewish barber is obviusly a parody of the Adolf Hitler, but many of his words would suit Donald Trump just as neatly. Despite the film title, Hitler was not a dictator. He was democratically elected in 1933 with 43,9% of the vote, not too far from Trump 47.3%. And unlike his modern American counterpart, Hitler won the popular vote. The dictator title here is merely figurative.

Chaplin’s message of unity and tolerance couldn’t be clearer: “I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. […] In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone”. Trump on the other hand has consitently decried equality and inclusiveness by slamming pretty much every existing minority. He has offended Mexicans immigrants: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best”, and he has proposed a blanked ban on Muslims entering the US. He also failed to disavow the Klu Klux Klan earlier this year.

Trump racial hygienist inclinations are bright as daylight, and this is no conspiracy theory. Today he appointed a white supremacist as his Chief Policy Advisor. Stephen Bannon is a prominent supporter of the ultranationalist alt-right movement, which advocates peaceful ethnic cleansing. “Our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans.” – this is not Adolf Hitler, this is a declaration by a leader of the alt-right movement, which has now both a mandate and a platform inside the Whitehouse.

Chaplin asked for more: “we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost”. Trump has consistently dehumanised everyone except the normative, rich white males. He has objectified women, treating them as commodities to be grabbed “by the pussy”. He described supporters who beat up a homeless Latino man as “passionate”, and – according to a report – he described Brazilians as “latino pigs”. There actions are the antipode of humanity, kindness and gentleness.

Instead, it is greed and vulgar wealth that prevail in Trump’s grotesque world. “The beauty of me is that I’m very rich”, he fesses up. He campaign slogan heralded: “The point is, you can never be too greedy”. Chaplin couldn’t think more differently: “Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed”.

Trump allegedly described Brazilians as “latino pigs”; he probably thinks that his southertly neighbours lack any sort of humanity.

A message of hope

Chaplin wraps up his film with a very positive note of hope: “I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish”. Hopefully we won’t have to wait until Trump dies bbefore people in the US can reclaim their sense dignity and solidarity. I like to think that he won’t be reelected in four years.

The British director carries on, with a call for action and resistance: “Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder”. Of course Trump isn’t president yet and therefore he still hasn’t attacked any countries. Sadly military belligerence will be a natural byproduct of Trump’s tenure. I would even hazard a guess that Iran will be his first target. And the consequences will be catastrophic for the nation and the world, just like we saw with Iraq.

The UK refused to align itself with Germany during WWII, even if the declaration came a little late. On the other hand, the UK has enthusiastically aligned itself with the American war agenda since. Let’s hope this special relationship is not a blind one. Let’s hope that Britain will choose to honour Chaplin’s noble anti-war legacy of tolerance and kindness. Not Tony Blair’s. Let’s hope that dignity will prevail above political interests. So far, it’s not looking good.

Below are the video and the full transcript of Charlie Chaplin’s final speech in The Great Dictator:

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost….

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!