Fatah (Fatsah Bouyahmed) is an Algerian peasant married to Naima, and together they have two kids. He lives isolated in his remote village, fully devoted to his family and… to his beautiful cow Jacqueline. All of his life, Fatah has dreamt of sending Jacqueline to a major event in France. Thanks to the ongoing love and dedication, one day be receives an official invitation to take part in the Paris International Agricultural Show.
The humour within the movie is centred on Algerian mentality and local traditions in focus – a deeply old-fashioned and patriarchal society. Along with the bovine, our protagonist literally imports his foreign values into France. This is an effective way to get Western audiences to laugh. There’s even a certain sarcasm in placing a naïve peasant in the middle of a cosmopolitan Marseille. The agricultural show is some sort of American dream to an Algerian pariah.
This is a film about the clash of cultures and classes. Fatah strikes a very unlikely friendship with a wealthy Frenchman called Philippe, and the contrast couldn’t be more evident. The cow has a dual significance: firstly, it is an ironic allegory of French pomp; secondly, it’s also a symbol of the stereotypical Algerian housewife.
The relationship between Fatah and Philippe epitomises the identity crisis of France, and the struggle between citizens and immigrants, the whites and non-whites. The film replaces the fear of the “other” (non-European, non-white) with love and friendship. It reminds people how important is to stick together and to refuse the politics of xenophobia, division and fear in general. Let’s instead shun borders and stereotypes.
The one big problem with One Man and his Cow, however, is that it represents the “other” as primitive and precarious, and therefore it perpetuates stereotypes instead of challenging them. In a way, this defeats the purpose of the diversity rhetoric.
One Man and His Cow premiered at the London French Film Festival in September 2016, and it is being made available on all major VoD platforms on July 11th (2017).
Click here for our review of another film dealing with Algerians, immigration and… cows – if from a far more stern perspective.
Ange (Patrick Bruel) is a bachelor that comes straight from the Hollywood tradition: a rich womaniser who likes it no-strings-attached. One day, he finds Gabrielle (Isabelle Carré) in his office, begging him to talk to his estranged son Simon (Thomas Solivérès) – whom he never recognised. Simon has made her teenage daughter Gabrielle (Alice de Lencquesaing) pregnant, and she wants Ange to teach Simon a lesson about being an accountable father (spot the irony!). From this encounter on, all characters are set on a collision course against each other.
The film’s setup isn’t always plausible. For example, it’s hard to believe that Ange would put up with Gabrielle showing up so often without calling the police. And that Simon would begin talking to his estranged father out of the blue after 20 years. The script, penned by Anne Giafferi, who also directed the picture, doesn’t really sell these interactions. The final product is a bit like Brechtian theatre, but not in a good way: we see all the strings being pulled and we can pretty much guess where we’re going. But instead of subverting language and the cinematic apparatus, the movie simply becomes very predictable.
The film is still pleasant to watch, just not very dirty. The acting is very agreeable enough. Bruel is particularly charming as the egotistic Ange. He’s a douchebag, a very real and recognisable one. There are a plenty of Anges in posh dinners and social events everywhere in real life. He starts off as stereotypical and self-centered, but his narrative arc pays off. Carré carries much of her job on charisma and, despite the script’s explanations for her actions being insufficient, she’s utterly believable. Her Gabrielle is someone that’s seeing her life cycle repeat itself on her daughter and wants to stop it, whatever the cost might be.
Solivérès gets the upper hand over everyone else: his Thomas is all over the place, like many young men straight out of adolescence. He’s doing a Masters in economics but still does odd jobs in order to make ends meet. He’s polite, but short-tempered. His rejection of fatherhood does not stem from a yearning for freedom, but instead from something else (no spoilers here!). Curiously, it’s the mother’s character that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, watching passively all the conflicts around her.
The film does provide some humour within its 90-minute runtime and tries to touch on sensitive family matters. Yet it’s a little too obsessed with family values and dons very traditional views on happiness and domestic life. Its characters are moved by the idea of settling down as the only way towards personal fulfillment. Ultimately, Love at First Child is a romantic comedy done by numbers and, despite a few detours, it sets its characters on a path with few surprises. It does entertain but, unlike children, it just won’t stay with you for very long!
Love at First Child is available on VoD on July 11th.
Explore David Lynch’s very first rumblings of creativity all the way to the wondrous early years as a filmmaker. Filmed over a four year period and funded via Kickstarter, David Lynch: The Art Life opens up the method and process of Lynch’s artistic works, and offers a portrait of Lynch as someone who was, and still is, deeply alert to the possibilities of living the creative life.
The doc is meditative in its approach. Mostly we see Lynch working quietly in his Hollywood Hills studio wearing his loose professorial slacks and button-up shirt, applying paints, fixing up models and twisting wire that will be incorporated into the finished products. On occasion we see old photos and 8mm footage of a young Lynch larking around with his family and friends. Over the top of all this, Lynch narrates and reminisces on a childhood spent moving from one city to another. Although his family was uprooted many times due to his father’s work as a research scientist, Lynch describes his childhood in idyllic terms. Sunny days spent making wooden guns and playing cowboys.
He then talks of his introduction to art and artistic practice through friends and colleagues, and the prolific production of paintings he endured before he began to find his artistic mojo. He then laments over his experiences of attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia during his late teens and early 20s. Experiences that were equally frustrating and exhilarating. The evolution of Lynch’s work is vivid. He breaches abstract painting to moving images quickly, spurred on by wishing to see his own artwork adopt movement and sound. His move to Los Angeles and his acceptance into the American Film Institute Conservatory were the turning point in Lynch’s artistry. His live action abstract films, The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970) sent Lynch on the road to becoming the filmmaker he is today.
Throughout the film, Lynch recalls fragments of his early life that have inevitably bled into his artistic work. Perhaps most effectively, he recalls the moment a naked middle-aged woman walked across her lawn, bloodied and crying, while Lynch played with his younger brother in their sweet suburban neighbourhood . In the story he tells, the young Lynch wants to help the woman, but he’s too juvenile to understand the crisis, whilst his younger brother just begins to sob at the sight.The juxtaposition of childhood innocence and the viciousness of the adult world is something Lynch would apply and explore in his film work. In fact, this scene would play out later in Blue Velvet (1986), when the mysterious Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossilini) stumbles naked and bruised across the suburban lawn. This is just one example from Lynch of life bleeding into art and vice versa.
The film is also gorgeously shot and edited. Frames of a quiet, thoughtful, and aging Lynch sipping a coffee and surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke illuminated by sunlight are mesmerising to watch. During these moments of reflection, the layers of Lynch begin peel back to reveal something very human and even fragile – something that is mostly absent in his public persona as an avant-garde filmmaker. No other voice is included in the film, only Lynch tells his story and every frame either has him in it or has a product of his artistic work.
The movie concludes just as Lynch is working on his debut film, Eraserhead (1977), a production period that would last over half a decade and see Lynch experience early fatherhood and divorce from his wife Peggy. Whilst personal triumph and trauma is left off the agenda, this period of time in Lynch’s life is transitional in terms of his art and his foray into filmmaking. Eraserhead could be seen as the accumulation of artistic knowledge that Lynch garnered during his formative years laid bare. It’s clear that Lynch recalls Eraserhead and indeed the time of its production as the purest embodiment of his art.
The freedom that he was allowed to craft his film during this time would rarely be replicated in future film productions as he began to be embraced by Hollywood and be responsible for million dollar budgets and the production of a commercial commodity. Lynch experienced barely any interference at all from AFI profs and certainly no studio executives were knocking on his door. This allowed Lynch to strive, to fail and ultimately to learn the language of film and incorporate his artistic background without dilution. Though it’s not as if Lynch has made many compromises since becoming a filmmaker. His directorial work Eraserhead has remained daring, abstract, strident, frightening, and life-affirming, and it is to his credit that Lynch can produce abstract fever dreams that play in movie theatres and are syndicated for television.
Those disappointed that the documentary concludes just as the directorial work begins, and films such as Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks (1992), and Mullholland Drive (2001) are left unexplored and in fact go unmentioned, should take comfort in that the film endeavours to explore and connect the process of the early art works with the contemporary works in cinema. It connects the younger impressionable Lynch with his older, wiser self. It could be said that in Lynch’s world the methods of creativity and artistic integrity can be applied to the any medium. Be it painting, sculpture, musical composition or film, the places where they come from, the memories and experiences gained in life, are one and the same.
David Lynch: The Art Life provides an unflinching and in-depth portrait of a fascinating artist whose life and art have merged to create something truly unique. The film is out in selected UK cinemas on July 14th, 2017.
This is sci-fi of the ‘soldiers in a combat zone’ variety (think: Aliens, James Cameron, 1986) and as such comes with all the trappings of fetishised hardware – cybernetic internet point-of-view readouts and high-tech military machinery – along with the standard ‘horror of war’ scenarios seen in, for example, that other animated war movie Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) – and desensitised, shoot ‘em up scenarios in which the protagonist guns down 30 or so child/teen warriorsand a girl in underwear (the latter the sexual plaything of a middle-aged man).
Genocidal Organ starts off with the levelling of Sarajevo in a nuclear blast wherein victims include the wife and child of a man named John Paul who is having sex with Czech language teacher Lucie Skroupova in a Prague hotel room when the blast hits. Although when you first see these images, you don’t know exactly what’s going on – it only makes sense later.
It also echoes Missing (Costa-Gavras, 1982) in which a US citizen’s search to find his missing daughter in Chile following the 1973 coup eventually comes up against the US authorities “protecting a way of life”. For the US to flourish, other countries have to suffer. Something similar happens in Genocidal Organ when the two off-duty soldiers relax to American football games on widescreen television with home delivery pizza. In order to protect that world of casual consumer satisfaction, they operate in a very different world of Eastern European states collapsing into war zones. The two worlds co-exist, the collapsing states ensuring the survival of the way of life in the non-collapsing ones.
Captain Clavis Shepherd must pursue John Paul, a language expert whose travels have left in their wake a trail of nations overthrown by genocide. His research has unearthed ways of speaking and associated speech patterns which can cause populations to lapse into social breakdown. Shepherd’s big lead is Lucie Skroupova, the woman with whom John Paul had an affair.
En route, the plot takes us through a Czech nightclub where the digital currency and identity trackers in use elsewhere have been abandoned to give customers genuine anonymity. Fetishised hardware geeks in particular will enjoy the terrific sequence in which soldiers in pods are dropped into battle zones, their pods firing at/shooting down the enemy as the soldiers descend from the skies.
Finally, the ending satisfyingly closes off the narrative with a hint that it may presage an unexpected twist in the tale.
Given this is about American troops in Bosnia, the Czech Republic and East Africa (near Lake Victoria), the English subtitled version proves initially confusing in that the protagonists are not Japanese but rather US and European nationals. The Japanese language presentation would no doubt work well for the domestic Japanese audience – and, for that matter, the Western purist who wants to watch their anime subbed regardless – however, in this instance, the US-centric subject matter might have benefited from dubbing into US American Englishand other relevant languages (with subtitles where necessary). As it stands, this subtitled Genocidal Organ proves confusing in places for an English-speaking audience. Yet it still packs a hefty punch.
Genocidal Organ is out in the UK on Wednesday, July 12th.
This dirty Italian classic takes place almost entirely in the farming areas of Bergamo, and it’s spoken in the local dialect, Bergamasque. One doesn’t need a lot of translation, however, to get to the core of the picture, which is universal. The Tree of Wooden Clogs is about a society deprived of almost everything but the will to live.
The film introduces four families that work for a landowner and barely manage to survive. The director Ermanno Olmi, a local himself, does not provide a clear-cut plot and arc in order to guide viewers, but simply portrays an ordinary year in the lives of these extremely poor people.
A lot happens in these 12 months: a peasant’s son is granted education, a couple falls in love and marries, one worker is robbed, a sick cow recovers, and so on. They’re fragments of life, a small glimpse into a microcosm that Olmi- who based the screenplay in stories told to him by his very own grandmother – treats with the uttermost respect.
Despite the family connection, Olmi’s approach to the subject matter is not sentimental, instead borrowing a lot of devices from Italian neorealism. The movement, which exploded in the 1940s, favoured stories focused on people living in poverty and used non-professional actors, just like The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Most remarkably, Olmi’s film and neorealism are both very politically engaged.
It’s no coincidence that the film takes place in 1898. The years preceding the turn of the century in Italy were marked by the social unrest that followed the country’s unification, with widespread sectarianism. Interestingly, these peasants are mostly oblivious of the political turmoil and the possible benefits that they could harvest from the conflict.
They get hints that something is happening. A communist speaker comes to a local fair and gives a passionate speech about his cause. A newlywed couple travels to Milan and witnesses a political arrest. But political action is not a top priority for people without education and obliged to make use of almost anything available – such as rocks and wood – in order to cater for their most basic needs. In other words, these peasants are too busy surviving.
If that situation brings to mind any contemporary issue, it’s because it signals the timeless quality of Olmi’s picture. His characters depend on the benevolence of their landowner for almost everything and, surely, political enlightenment is not high on their agenda. Out of all the working families, only one person goes to school. No government is ever at sight, which might help to justify their lack of interest in politics.
Even so, the longing for something different is pervasive. It’s in the music that the landowner plays, in the salesman that comes around telling tales of distant lands, in the odd foreigners that they meet in a party.
The film title refers to the tree cut by a peasant in order to make shoes for his son to go to school. The landowner promptly punishes him for what he perceives as a very subversive deed, thereby reminding his workers not to challenge the status quo of the time. Poor people just shouldn’t go to school. Such relations are still pervasive even in our hyper-connected and modern times.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, July 7th – nearly 40 years after its initial launch in 1978 and when it won the much-coveted Palme d’Or in Cannes.
A few months ago at a Q&A event in Manchester’s HOME Cinema, The Levelling’s director Hope Dickson Leach referenced modern urban French cinema as a specific focus of hers when approaching the working middle-class on film. Their cinema is distinct and ignores the clichéd depictions of class that we so regularly witness on this side of the channel, typified in an upcoming Downtown Abbey big screen outing (yet to be filmed). Further, such contemporary French language directors like Mia Hansen-Løve, Eugène Green and the Dardenne Brother solidify Dickson Leach comments of stories and characters who are placed in real and tactile class structures.
Naturally a continuation of the template created by Truffaut, Godard, Demy etc during the French Nouvelle Vague, this specific type of filmmaking is similarly maintained in Martin Provost’s latest endeavour, The Midwife. Despite depicting the realities of modern working class life in France, Provost’s own script lets down the committed performance of two heavyweight actresses, Catherine Deneuve and Catherine Frot.
Frot is the middle-aged midwife Claire who must accept that her birth centre unit will close due to cost-cutting measures in Paris’s suburbs. Opening in blackness with the diegetic sounds of childbirth, Grégoire Hetzel’s camera then revels itself at an inmate angle, capturing the very moment of delivery. Claire’s compassion towards her patients is clear in her softly spoken words during the frantic moments of birth. A veteran of midwifery, she is an example to all in her healthy, non-drinking lifestyle.
Away from her job, Claire enjoys spending time at her tranquil allotment tending to her plants and vegetables. At her peaceful escape, a neighbouring gardener Paul (Olivier Gourmet) takes a loving interest. Alongside her son, who is at medical school, her insular life does not appear to bother her. One day after returning home from her busy working day, she receives a voice message from an old family friend of Claire’s father, Beatrice (Catherine Deneuve). Glamorous yet decadent, this elderly woman has secrets and old ghosts haunting her soul. Sidestepping any spoilers of the film’s narrative, which Provost’s script is eager to goad, their relationship is not what it appears at face value.
A disparity between the two women is unearthed in their interactions; Beatrice gambles, drinks red wine, smokes and eats red meat like a carnivorous dinosaur. As suggested, Claire lives a tranquil life, eating vegetables, refusing to drink or spraying her plants with chemical pesticides. This point of reference is only mentioned by Provost in a throwaway line of dialogue, a generational gap which could have taken centre-stage. Scenarios such as these feel rushed and are never allowed to flow naturally in line with these characters. They feel like a ploy from the director/ screenwriter to create tension between the two women, still such divisions seldom amount to any of notable importance.
Likewise, the poor screenwriting is reflected in a doppelganger moment between the appearance of Claire’s son and her father, whom Beatrice evidently loved. The ghosts of the past rarely impact the present in any noteworthy fashion. The lacklustre nature of such events leads one to recall better films as 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015) and Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016), which deal with the ghosts of the past and life in greater philosophical and thoughtful style and depth.
With notably cameos from Karidja Touré of Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, 2014) and Pauline Etienne, one cannot help feel that even if such actresses were developed further into the script, Provost’s inability to engage and sustain and audience’s interest would fail Toure and Etienne’s majestic screen qualities. Granted Deneuve and Frot’s performances cannot be questioned in terms of their commitment, however the poor screenwriting deters one from truly engaging in the text. Possibly perfect viewing for those nostalgic midwifes who attend the tea and biscuit screenings….
For a piece of modern film as profound as the attempted plot of The Midwife, I can only suggest Things to Come and the greatness of Queen Isabelle Huppert. Admittedly it passes the famous Bechdel Test with flying colours, still it lacks a insightful impact one would hope for when dealing with life itself. The Midwife is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, July 7th.
It’s not often that a film willfully aims for distance and monotony, and it successfully finds urgency in the banal and the mundane. This is precisely what Argentinian born and Paris-based filmmaker Eduardo Williams does in his latest endeavour, the unusual the documentary The Human Surge.
The film has indeed a deeply artistic, experimental and borderline homemade feel. The camera is mostly handheld and shaky, and Williams’s idiosyncratic narrative style, with loose plots and a fluid congruity, won’t please everyone. It’s not surprising that the film premiered in an art gallery earlier this year, the Tate Modern. Yet it’s not like an art installation in a museum, which you sit watch for 10 or 15 random minutes and then walk away. It’s a 93-minute feature that must be seen in its entirety. And it’s not a film to be watched at it home, and it mandates concentration and attention to detail.
Young men in three countries and in three different continents are the subject of the movie: first in Argentina, then in Mozambique and finally, in the last third of the film, in the Philippines. The people mingle in groups, have futile conversations, meander aimlessly and engage in soulless sex; their existence looks profoundly tedious to an outsider, almost worthy of pity. Perhaps most importantly, they communicate with the support of technology: computer, mobile phones and so on. Such devices link the three narratives in a very subtle and yet effective way. It’s not entirely clear whether the dialogues and action are scripted, and whether the young men are reenacting something – and this ambiguity is an integral of the allure of the movie
This is a dry and prescriptive experiment. Faces and bodies are hardly discernible in some of the dialogues, particularly the most sexually-charged moments.The shots are mostly medium and long, there is no voice-over and the overall result is purposely dispassionate, disjointed and disengaged, almost like a amateurish scientific observation. Or a nature show about an exotic creature called homo sapiens. Except that there is there is no avuncular David Attenborough, and the photography is dark and somber.
In fact, the most impressive moment of the film is when the focus moves away from human beings. The camera shifts from a urinating young man and literally splendidly penetrates an anthill morphing into macrophotography, thereby documenting the movement inside the colony. It’s as if Williams wanted to tell us these social insects function is a manner not too different from us human being.
In a nutshell, this is a dirty and innovative film, and it’s interesting to watch if you have a taste for languid and excruciating observation. The Human Surge is out in selected cinemas across the UK on Friday, July 7th.
Nine-year-old Ren runs away from his mother and is promptly abducted by a creature named Kumatetsu into the parallel Beast Kingdom of Jutengai. Kumatetsu is the outsider of two possible candidates to succeed the retiring ruler of the beastly world. Renaming the silent boy Kyuta, he designates him apprentice and teaches him fighting skills. The relationship is strained and as the boy learns from his master, so too his master inadvertently learns life skills from his pupil. This is how it all begins in The Boy and the Beast.
Where Kumatetsu lacks in self-confidence, the boy encourages him in competitive battles with the rival candidate for ruler and popular favourite Iozen. Returning to our world as a much taller teenager, Ren meets school bullying victim Kaeda, bonding with her and sharing her appetite for human learning and knowledge. After this initial return, he continually moves between the two worlds in order to maintain his obligations in both. Meanwhile in Jutengai, Kumatetsu and Iozen’s rivalry for the position of grand master builds to a decisive climax…
It’s actually a lot more convoluted than that with a supplementary cast of further, minor characters. Nevertheless the narrative is coherent and even at two hours in length The Boy And The Beast rattles along at a good pace without overstaying its welcome. If the first 40 minutes play like a children’s film, the remainder of its running time sees the film’s sensibilities mature as the boy grows into a teenager. Beneath its ostensibly silly, juvenile plot it actually covers plenty of interesting topics – the interrelation and conflict between two very different cultures, issues of parenting and child dependency, confronting school bullies, teenage male angst and more.
Parts of the Japanese animation resemble some of that medium’s cheap formulaic clichés – two creatures charging each other and turning into larger, monstrous versions of themselves, for example – while other parts achieve far greater originality. One minute it feels like a martial arts movie, the next like a father and son drama and then a complex map of political intrigues. It’s all thoroughly impressive, certainly keeps the viewer on their toes and hangs together surprisingly well.
Some of the material is quite dark: humans grow holes in the centre of their physical bodies in the Beast Kingdom which function as a metaphor for their moral disintegration, a boy advances violently towards a defenceless girl in a school playground and, in the final reel, a villain dismisses an insignificant human book about a whale (Moby-Dick) prior to transforming into a terrifying, psychic version of its eponymous monster.
The present day, human world of Shibuya (a district of Tokyo) and its parallel Beast counterpart are lovingly designed and the whole thing is consistently beautiful to look at. At the film’s core though is the growing child and his relationship with his non-human master, a beautifully handled scenario which grabs the viewer from the get go. It’s due out on UK home cinema platforms in September but worth catching on its big screen outing in the meantime. A bit of a treat.
The Boy And The Beast was out in cinemas across the UK on July 7th, when this piece was originally published. It’s out on DVD and Blu-ray on September 4th.
In the past week or so, went to see two documentaries part of the East End Film Festival (EEFF), which ends tomorrow. They were Timothy George Kelly’s Brexitannia and Damani Baker’s The House on Coco Road, both made this year. Both were shown at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, both were followed by a QA with their respective directors. The two films couldn’t be more different, yet there was something far more important about the overall experience.
Brexitannia, shown on Saturday evening, was a long black and white exposition of the different views of several people who voted in the EU referendum. I expected the documentary to show both sides of the argument and although a few among those selected had voted for remaining in the European Union, most of the participants espoused a Brexit point-of-view. There is nothing wrong with that. As a metropolitan, immigrant, middle-class, middle-aged, university educated, Londoner, I don’t need to be listening to the views of people like me. Part of the exercise was, indeed, to get a little more understanding into the views of those who think differently from me.
Break-away Britain
In the cinema, there were ‘eccentric’, mainly working-class people, generally being confronted with the dilapidated and ugly part of the country on the silver screen. The interviewees within the film were mostly in scrublands, council estates, broken down factories or a workingman’s club in areas such as the North-East of England, Northern Ireland, Clapton in Essex or the South West, describing their fears and what made them vote Brexit.
The documentary was divided in two parts. We knew this was so because we were helpfully given the title “Part One: The People”, before the participants started talking. It was all vaguely interesting and amusing. The audience sometimes laughed out loud at some of the views held by this strange bunch, living somewhere outside the M25.
But there came a point when I was positively looking forward to what else we were going to get after ‘the people’, hoping that there would not be too much of it and that it was not going to go on for too long. Indeed, after “Part One: The People”, came “Part Two: The Experts. A group of half a dozen or so prominent individuals chosen to give their educated views on Brexit – one of them being Noam Chomsky (pictured below).
A monolithic view
I did not dislike the doc at all. I went imagining I was going to enjoy it and was prepared to leave thinking it was a bit long and rather forgettable, but ok. The problem was the discussion afterwards. Let’s be explicit, I was not the only metropolitan person in the audience; I was one of many and, mostly white, new-Dalstonite types. If there was a difference between the rest of the audience and me, it was that I was perhaps slightly older and perhaps more conservative in my dressing.
As well as the director, there were a few of the film’s ‘experts’ on the panel, lavishing praises on him, telling him what a sensitive documentary it was, how he had let ‘people’s feelings come through’. Except that… the audience had been laughing at the characters portrayed, just as much as the film’s subjects would probably have been jeering at us, if someone had made a film about ‘London Metropolitans’ and showed it at some workingman’s club in the middle of one of County Durham’s defunct mining villages.
Still from Brexitannia.
A member of the audience even asked the director “what do you think about the audience laughing during the showing”, to which he replied: “they were uncomfortable with the views exposed”. Rubbish!! We were laughing because, despite his attempts, Timothy George Kelly was unable to break the ‘us vs them’ barrier. Other questions followed such as “where were the black people?” (few) “Black people will mainly talk about colour” Kelly replied, immediately realising his gaffe. “What about the middle-class? Some of them also voted Brexit?”, asked another. “Oh, middle-class views are boring, they know how to express themselves” and so he went on, dismissing his audience.
Kelly, unable to move away from portraying his subjects like animals in a zoo, was now pontificating that we, the pro-European Metropolitans, had to accept the Brexiteers’ views, following the same line of argument used by the mainstream media: any debate or dissent is anti-democratic and ‘condescending’. Brexitannia did absolutely nothing to move us beyond the current division we live in, or to elucidate in any way what is a very complex subject.
United in our New World roots
The next morning I went to see Damani Baker’s The House on Coco Road. On my way to the Rio, I was already wondering what type of people I would encounter at the cinema. Some Caribbeans, since the film was (somewhat) about the Island of Grenada, a few left-wing romantics like me, and… quite a few empty seats.
I arrived to see a huge queue outside of people still looking for tickets. All mainly Black and almost all Grenadians. I sat at the back of the circle next to a lady my age and we started talking, why was I there? What relationship did I have with Grenada? I told her about my Latin American background and our mutual historical links, my interest in the Caribbean, etc.
Having now moved away from the area, she told me about being a child on Sandringham Road, the Hackney ‘frontline’, before Dalston `viralised’ and about coming as a child to matinees at the Rio. We talked about Caribbean immigration, how many of the older population had `returned home`, and how others, including herself, had moved out because of the bad reputation the area had in the ’80s and ’90s.
Still from The House on Coco Road.
The documentary started late, whilst the staff tried to accommodate the, mostly female, crowd. Meanwhile, we had some footage of the speeches of Maurice Bishop, the revolutionary Prime Minister of Grenada who was murdered in 1983, just before Ronald Reagan sent in the armed forces to the island. It was not really about Grenada or Bishop, but about the director’s mother’s: a sensitive and respectful rendition of the life of a Black woman and activist, in his words, about one of many “extraordinary women…(who live their lives) in the face of tremendous obstacles”.
Although centred on their family’s experience of moving to Grenada in 1983, after Maurice Bishop, leader of the People’s Revolution became Prime Minister, the story starts much earlier, with Baker’s grandparents leaving Louisiana for California as part of the mass migration to the North, when approximately five million Black Americans left the racist South.
Baker’s mother, Fannie Haughton, was the first woman in her family to go to university, UCLA in fact, where she met and became friends with the black feminist activist Angela Davies, who also features in the documentary. House on Coco Road is an intelligent and surprising documentary which teaches us about some extremely significant and yet relatively unknown events, which took place in the 20th century. In a personal way, it sheds light part on the history of the American continent, of Black people in general, decolonialisation, as well as left-wing and feminist politics. It is a tribute not only to his mother, but to the power of idealism, the need for utopian dreams to make our lives meaningful and the importance of fighting for what we believe in.
Two films, multiple identities
In their own ways, both documentaries, discussed an important contemporary topic: identity. While Timothy Kelly’s documentary Brexitannia is about ‘them’ shown to ‘us’, without providing a tool for us to break our own bubbles and reach the ‘other’, Baker offered us a film about nothing else but himself – though by doing so, it involves us.
Especially the Grenadian audience, because it was also a film about how what happened in that tiny little island on the edge of the Caribbean had an incredible impact on his life. In other words, Baker’s documentary was able to build bridges and make bonds.
Indie cinema needs your help
As part of the EEFF, both documentaries brought very different audiences to the Rio, a popular, and still independent local cinema. The EEFF and the Rio cinema are here in order to provide something distinct from the mainstay of commercial houses like Vue. The Rio (pictured above) has managed, so far, to survive. It is about to launch a crowdfunding campaign for its much-needed refurbishing and build a second screen, they say they will need £150,000. You too can become part of the RIOgeneration campaign by clicking here.
Let’s hope it is successful so that it continues to attract different crowds for the variety of films and film festivals it screens, because the London cinema scene very much needs places that are open to diversity.
