Month: August 2017

Severina

Posted on by victorfraga

Felipe Hirsch is the kind of artist that I define as a “man who’s got an itchy issue”. By that I mean an artist that likes to venture into your discomfort zone. Is there any other explanation for a successful Brazilian playwright, who suddenly decides to film a movie in a foreign land? Moreover, working with actors whose mother tongue is neither his own nor English (the natural choice for those aiming for commercial success in the cinema industry)? Severina, which is entirely spoken in Spanish, is the outcome of this uncomfortable feeling.

The movie is a melancholic story of a certain Latin America. It is not by chance that its title resonates with a Brazilian cult play in verse, “Morte e Vida Severina” (The Death and Life of a Severino), by João Cabral de Melo Neto. The book is a Christian tale about an ordinary and suffering migrant in the Northeast of Brazil. The film, on the other hand, portrays an Uruguayan bookseller and aspiring writer whose small business is raided daily by a muse who steals his books. The muse (Carla Quevedo) is also an immigrant, from Argentina.

That certain Latin America that Severina shows is dying. The film is set in a decadent centre of Montevideo, where there are no 24 hours convenience stores. Its once glorious Art Deco buildings lacks life. Still, the main character (Javier Drolas) resists. He lives where he works but almost no one comes in in order to buy books. His solitude sometimes is broken by three or four friends. They come in to drink wine, talk about politics and read fragments of books. Does that happen anywhere else nowadays?

The feature is divided in chapters, or parts, in an order that challenges the spectator to define what is real and what is surreal. The second part is called “A loving delirium”, an obvious hint to a clever audience. The sound of the oboe and the Nouvelle Vague-ish cinematography sets the surrealistic tone. The characters, later, quote the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, probably the most significant figure in Spanish language literature since Cervantes. Borges also had his elusive and surrealistic muses.

Hirsh is not telling a story set in a distant and small country. Instead, the filmmaker describes what is happening just now in the digital world. Bookish geeks and literature lovers are a threatened species. Just walk down Regent Street or Oxford Street, the popular two commercial streets, in search of a bookstore. You will find only one amidst tons of fancy clothes, colourful shoes and mobile devices outlets. The world’s largest trade fair for books, Frankfurt Book Fair, is now reduced to an exchange of copyrights.

The beauty of the movie lies precisely in its moribund quality. Watching Severina is like taking care of a sick relative you love. You watch your old daddy falling asleep and you feel in peace because he is safe at home with you.

Severina is dedicated to the late Brazilian/Argentinian filmmaker Hector Babenco, and it premiered this week at Locarno Film Festival. You can watch it for free until August 20th, courtesy of Festival Scope.

A Ghost Story

Posted on by mjbstaging

A couple lives in a house. He dies and returns as a ghost (a person with a sheet over his head) she can’t see. She stays for a bit then moves out. Other people come and go. He stays, he waits.

Initially M (Rooney Mara) wants to move somewhere else, but C (Casey Affleck) rather likes the house and wants to stay. After his death, she identifies his body in the morgue then spends some time with his mortal remains. Later, his corpse gets up matter of factly, sheet and all, and leaves. To return to their house. Before moving out, she scribbles a note on a small piece of paper, folds it in to a tiny square and pushes it into a door frame. He tries repeatedly to extract this note to see what it says. We want to know, too.

Time moves on but C doesn’t. He attempts to scare a resident mum and her children by hurling kitchen plates at them in an uncharacteristic loss of self-control. He listens to a man at a party pontificate on the meaning of life in terms of what we leave behind. He waves at the (person under a floral patterned sheet) ghost in the house next door. Eventually the houses are demolished and the site is built upon. He goes back in time to watch the settlers who built the first house.

Some very long takes include one of the bereaved M violently stuffing herself with a pie then throwing up. The 4:3 frame with rounded edges throughout recalls projected photographic slides and home movies of yesteryear. Odder still are the noises off which M and the pre-ghost C get out of bed to investigate although they can find nothing. We’re never quite sure what we’re doing in this house or why we’re watching this couple in their very private, home space. We might be some strange, unearthly presence. Such as a ghost.

All of which is thoroughly compelling to experience or just to watch. As M drops out of the film, you’ll find yourself wondering what C’s ghost is still doing there, why hasn’t he just vanished at death or gone on to whatever place we go to when we die. If the film ponders such questions, it never attempts to impose easy answers. That lends it an incredible power.

C’s death is violent but we see only its peaceful aftermath. There is violence however in both their lives: M’s violent eating reflects C’s when we eventually see him eat in flashback. His violent outburst with the kitchen plates suggests something latent in his character but elsewhere he seems relaxed. The violence expresses a pent up frustration lurking beneath. What matters in life? What happens if it’s suddenly cut short? What exactly do we leave behind us?

A Ghost Story was out in cinemas in August 11th, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on all major VoD platforms in February 2018.

Click here for another film meditation on death.

Recollection

Posted on by victorfraga

Preoccupied with the politics and history of his country and the dramatic sociopolitical changes that took place during the 1990s in the Balkans, Art Haxhijakupi has created a very personal movie, offering a very exciting glimpse into Kosovo through the eyes of a local artist.

This 40-minute featurette combines a vast spectrum of archive material from the 1990s: from television footage of national pop singers to videotapes depicting the director’s family circle and his own childhood. It begins with a very intimate scene: a young girl, probably a friend or relative, facing the camera and passionately warbling a song in a relaxed family environment. Later on, we come across various VHS clippings of popular singers from the 1990s, such as Adelina Ismajli and Shyhrete Behluli.

The dialogue is very limited and there is no voice-over. Instead, the audience sees a juxtaposition of various archive pieces providing some useful insight into the country’s culture as well as into the fragile political landscape during the last decade of the 20th century. We view scenes of the police oppression against demonstrators, symptomatic of a very young and volatile state. Tanks and soldiers shooting rockets bring back painful memories of the dark days of a recent past.

This documentary film doesn’t follow a linear narrative; the various archive images have been collated arbitrarily, it seems. This is a fascinating peek into everyday life in this newly-formed and troubled country two decades ago. There is a lingering feeling of nostalgia throughout. Like the title suggests, this doc is a complex mosaic of memories. It is also a personal investigation reflecting the director’s childhood as well as the collective memory of the Kosovan people. Ultimately, it establishes a dialogue about national identity and history, and offers an opportunity to rediscover and reclaim a hurtful past.

The film director Art Haxhijakupi is one of our favourite dirty boys. Click here in order to find out more about the young artist.

Donkeyote

Posted on by victorfraga

This bucolic documentary by Spanish filmmaker by Chico Pereira follows the footsteps/hoofsteps of the elderly Spaniard Manolo and his lifelong companion Gorrión (“Sparrow”) the Donkey, and their monotonous life, roaming the countryside of Southern Spain. Retired and with a strong bond to his animals, he dreams of doing a ‘long walk’ someday – this turns out to be none other than the 2,200-mile-long Trail of Tears in the American West, a route indigenous people were forced to walk after their involuntary removal from the Mississippi River.

One of his daughters, Paca, knows he has been planning for the event for a long time. Fearful for his physical health, she raises her concern about his lack of technological savviness, which could be a problem in case he needs ask for help during such a long trip. Their interaction is fairly amusing and endearing. She knows how ill-judged and stubborn her old man can be, so she decides to step in order to help him.

The idea of shipping a donkey across the Atlantic seems like a long shot, but Paca convinces her father about making an advert on video selling his idea to a company. His search for a sponsor is one of the many heart-warming moments of the feature. When he blindly sets off to the horizon with Gorrión and one of his dogs, the spectator does not know what is going to happen. But we do believe in Manuel’s resolute ambition and his undertaking of this trip, and that is truly inspiring to watch.

Despite the director’s attempt to make the journey feel quite idyllic, ultimately we are just watching a 73-year-old man’s willpower and desire to keep on ‘walking’ and ‘moving forward’, being the wanderer that he was always supposed to be. Manuel is here to teach our increasingly sedentary society: set yourself on path and stand firm on your journey, wherever it might take you.

Donkeyote showed in August 2017 at DokuFest, in Kosovo, when this piece was originally written. It showed in September 2017 as part of the Open City Docs Film Festival in London. It’s out in UK cinema on Friday, October 26th 2018.

Click here for our review of another touching film about an old man taking his beloved and very large pet to another continent.

Celebrate your inner s**t, with Twin Town!!!

Posted on by victorfraga

Two decades have passed, and Kevin Allen’s Twin Town remains a refined piece of trash and self-deprecation. The movie is probably as close as you will get to John Waters on this side of the pond. Not very often you will see across such copious amounts of sheer bad taste, violence and profanities within just 90 minutes, all with a very British flavour, namely Welsh.

And just like the local food, Twin Town tastes like shit. And willfully so. This crime film is entirely set in Swansea, and it celebrates the… the unsightliness and mediocrity of local life. The story centres around the misadventures of Lewis “twins” (who in reality are just brothers), who lead a glamorous existence with their parents and sister in a static caravan home. The female works in a very dubious massage parlour, while the two boys spend most of their time prancing around, taking drugs and stealing cars. Until they decide to escalate their wrongdoing to include more scatological and visceral deeds.

Some of the best moments in the movies include a very strange twist on Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), as the head of an animal much less formidable than a horse is placed on someone’s bed, plus a very dirty karaoke performance that’s vaguely reminiscent of the prom scene in Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976). Overall, Twin Town is a very shit tribute to gangster and crime films. And incredibly fun to watch!

The proud community

This weekend the cast of Twin Town reunited in front of more than 3,000 nostalgic Welsh cinema lovers at Singleton Park in Swansea. The director Kevin Allen and many of the surviving members participated in a question and answer session before the film was played on a large screen. It rained massively, adding the final touch of shit to this dirtylicious film experience!

This is not how most town would choose to embrace and to commemorate their identity, and the locals deserve praise for the ability to laugh at themselves, for taking self-deprecation to such an extreme. This is not family fun, a film that you can show to your small children – it’s teeming with sex, violence, while the f-word is the most consistent element of the narrative. The movie proudly opens up with a character quoting the poet Dylan Thomas, who described the second largest city in Wales as “an ugly lovely town” and a “graveyard of ambitions”, while someone else complements: “this is a pretty shitty city” while shouting out his newly discovered rhyming epiphany.

Is the future shit?

Swansea is bidding to become the UK City of Culture in 2021, so it’s safe to say that they are looking for a brighter future ahead with more cultural options. The City was indeed shortlisted last month, which generated large amounts of excitement amongst locals. You too can support their campaign by visiting their website.

Meanwhile, we recommend that you watch Twin Town and discover (or reclaim) the dirty Welshman or woman inside of you. In order to maximise enjoyment, we suggest that you do it while drunk and feeling like shit. Or alternatively, while heavily intoxicated with a Class A drug (locally sourced cocaine is probably your best option).

Twin Town is available for viewing online for free here, and also in most dodgy streaming websites. This experience might turn out to be infectious for both yourself and your computer!

Liberation Day

Posted on by victorfraga

Not very often you will come across a combination as dirty and explosive. Firstly, think of the Slovenian band Laibach, who have always loved controversy: their name is German for their country’s capital Ljubljana, a very unwelcome gesture in Tito’s Yugoslavia (where the act was formed back in 1980); plus they’ve constantly made provocative usage of Nazi symbols and so on. Now place such band in the most secretive and possibly most oppressive regime in the world: North Korea. What’s the outcome? Perhaps something very different from what you would expect.

Laibach and North Korea have something in common: they both claim that they are highly misjudged and misunderstood, and that most of the world does not grasp their real intentions. They are the alleged misfits of the political and of the music world, and so they decided to officialise a very bizarre marriage through a singular event: Laibach performed two concerts in August 2015 at Kim Won Gyun Musical Conservatory in Nampo-dong, Pyongyang, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. This was a first time in history a foreign band performed on North Korean soil. While you may not agree with the good intentions of the heady European band and the obscure Asian country, few would challenge that they indeed perceive themselves as the misconceived underdogs just waiting for the right opportunity to shine.

Directed by the Latvian filmmaker Uģis Olte and Norwegian Morten Traavik (who is also in front of the cameras most of the time acting as some sort of narrator, moderator and peace broker) and filmed in the days preceding the concerts, finally culminating in the event itself, Liberation Day couldn’t get any more bizarre. And yet it works extremely well. While not stated in the movie, it is obvious that the helmers could only film in locations picked by the strict regime, and I have little doubt that politicians also inspected the final footage in minute detail. Despite the censorship, the film offers an extremely interesting insight into the world’s most closed country.

Laibach also had to adapt their repertoire, and their setlist was absolutely dirtytlicious. They offered the perplexed crowd of North Koreans a medley of songs from The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965), a movie very well known in the country. Of course this isn’t your jolly and gay Julie Andrews rendition, but instead a performance infested with heavy drumming, industrial flavours and a deep voice singing in German – very much the antithesis of the original musical. There are also bits of Opus’s Live is Life and We Will Go to Mount Paektu (a song in praise of Kim Jong-un) mashed into the whole ordeal.

The imagery within the movie is beautifully constructed, with elements of Soviet/ North Korean propaganda iconography blended with the idyllic hills of Austria (from the 1965 movie). And the performance at the end is priceless in both its campness and awkwardness. Think of the most bizarre act you’ve ever seen on Eurovision, and you’re not even halfway there.

From a moral perspective, is the making of such film questionable? Yes. Did the directors and the band collaborative with an oppressive regime which willfully conceals extreme poverty from the rest of the world? Yes. On the other hand, this is also a subversion of a regime which does not embrace change, a challenge of censorship and a singular opportunity for two very different worlds to establish to communicate channel, however limited it may be.

There is an unintentional reminder of the oppressive ways of the North Korean regime in the film. The American student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested in North Korea for a stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel room, is shortly featured in the movie. He died in April this year (after Liberation Day was already finished), shortly after being returned to the US. The reason of his death is likely related to mishandling while at prison and forced labour camps.

Liberation Day is showing this week at DokuFest, one of the largest documentary film festivals in Europe, which is taking place in Kosovo right now. The location of the screening isn’t insignificant at all: Kosovo and Slovenia were both part of Yugoslavia when Laibach was created 37 years ago!

Williams

Posted on by victorfraga

The cliché that behind every great man lays a great woman simply couldn’t be more applicable than to the case of Frank Williams, a Formula 1 icon of resilience. Bound to a wheelchair after a car crash in 1986 he still watches every race as though it were his first. two women cared and nurtured him towards greatness; his daughter and wife. And one of these women had now forged ahead.

The bedrock of his modern being the Deputy Team Principle of the Williams Mercedes racing team – a position never held by a woman in the sport previously – Claire Williams carries on her father’ legacy. Determined and driven like her father, she is the epitome of a strong modern woman. His wife, Ginny Williams’ story is placed in the past and her modern absence casts a long shadow on Frank and Claire. Writing her story in 1991 in A Different Kind of Life, her memoir acts as quasi script to Morgan Matthews’ documentary. Exploring his continual presence in the sport and the importance of women in the family, Williams does not hide away from confronting the loss, sacrifice and defiance discovered in this family.

In recent years, F1’s presentation in film has had an upturn in fortunes. Starting with Asif Kapadia’s documentary Senna (2010), it elicits profound emotions by focusing specifically upon the uniting power of one man’s driving success. Exhibiting a fearless veneer and compassionate nature, he now represents everything that a racing driver should be. Unlike this independently produced piece, Rush (2013) offered a blockbuster rollercoaster of a ride in the direction of Ron Howard and his two leads, Daniel Bruhl and Chris Hemsworth.

Akin to Senna, Williams adopts a monosyllabic title and an emotive personal core. Opening with Williams on a wheelchair and the fortunes of the racing team depleting after 48 years in the sport under Claire, Matthew’s holds back the underdog rise of Frank and his and Ginny’s romance to avoid a cliché rosy linear narrative. Life is not always perfect and the film drives its emotional underpinnings from these opening scenes. Although Frank’s face holds the frame accompanied by the diegetic roar of an F1 car, it’s the family tale that is in pole position.

Using a mixture of talking head interviews, dramatic reconstructions and archive footage, Williams utilises modern documentary techniques to its advantage. Ginny’s presence is felt through dramatical recreations of her memoir recordings which alongside Claire’s interviews create a comprehensive honest commentary on Frank. In his obsession for F1, family commitments disappear. Still, it is this sheer determination that steers the success of William racings into the heritage of F1.

The initial images of Frank act as an antithesis to the pictures and footage presented of him in his physical prime. It’s the passage of time and life’s cruel hand that linger over the documentary. While centred around speed and passion, Matthews’ quietly builds character and sentiment throughout, leaving the sniffles and tissues not far away.

Williams is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 4th.

Kosovo is once again sizzling with the best docs!

Posted on by victorfraga

Launched in 2002, DokuFest is now firmly established as one of the most important film events in the Balkans, and the largest one in Kosovo. American filmmaker AJ Shnack recently described it as one of best international documentary festivals in the world.

It includes a diverse programme of documentaries and short films from every corner of the world screened in theatres and impromptu venues in the Medieval city of Prizren (pictured above). There are green rolling hills and a majestic fortress quietly overlooking the film action and industry buzz.

Prizren is a multi-ethinic city where languages, culture and religions have existed in harmony for centuries, as a symbol of tolerance for Kosovo and the region. Located on the slopes of Sar Mountains in the southern part of the Republic of Kosovo, Prizren has a major cultural centre throughout history, already mentioned Byzantine and Ottoman times.

This year DokuFest is in its 16th edition. What was once a small initiative quickly grew and became a catalyst for cultural and cinematic revival, and a hub for documentary films in the Balkans, attracting filmmakers from all over the world. Perhaps more significantly, DokuFest is a platform for human rights, environmental protection, cultural heritage and taboo breaking. It has built solid bridges between the peoples of the Balkans and the rest of the world.

Kosovo’s new face

Until recently, people thought of Kosovo as a warzone. Not anymore, and DokuFest played a major role in changing this perception. It has given film professionals and visitors the opportunity to experience a beautiful, safe and fast developing country, alive with culture.

The festival tends to focus on small groups, causes and communities without a voice. The organisers carefully shape the event according to films being shown, with numerous support activities – such as workshops, panels, master classes, and a photo exhibition. Previous strands of the festival included migration, political change and activism, and they have consistently encouraged the discussion religious, sexual and social taboos.

This year’s programme is divided into Competition and Special Programme. In the competition section, films are grouped in Balkan Dox, International Dox, Human Rights Dox, Green Dox, International Shorts, and National categories. Sections of the Special Programme include ‘View from the World’, ‘Future My Love’, a retrospective of avant-garde English documentarist John Smith and much, much more.

The lowdown

It’s very difficult to select from a pool of more than hundred documentaries and many more short films, but here we have come up with a few recommendations for you, and our reviews will follow soon.

Firstly, the eagerly-awaited doc about the controversial Slovenian band Laibach’s concert in North Korea (pictured above) will be presented at the Fest. This is as dirty as it gets. The country may sound strangely interesting to almost everyone these days but few would imagine a concert of legendary Slovenian rock band Laibach in Pyongyang in celebration of countries national holiday. That’s exactly what happens in Morten Traavik’s and Ugis Olte’s wry and humorous film Liberation Day (2017), a first such concert for a western rock band. There’s even a very unusual rendition of The Sound of the Hills to a beyond perplexed audience!

Secondly, the very touching Donkeyote (Chico Pereira, 2017). Manolo leads a simple life in Southern Spain. He has two loves: his animals, in particular his donkey Gorrión (“Sparrow”), and wandering through nature. Against the advice of his doctor, he decides to plan one last walk in the US, the brutal 2200 mile Trail of Tears. But not without his donkey.

Finally, Recollection (Art Haxhijakupi, 2017) reflects experiences of Kosovo from the perspective of a child of the 1990s. It is an experimental documentary that explores the author’s feelings between individual and collective memory, identity and struggle. Through a collage of family footage along with mixed items of pop culture memorabilia, this experiment celebrates the collective journey in an era of oppression and resistance. In the intersection between two different realities, this video-narrative is spontaneously built and never simply over.

This piece is an updated version of the article originally published last year for the occasion of Dokufest’s 15th anniversary.

The Ghoul

Posted on by mjbstaging

A police inspector investigating a bizarre shooting incident in a London house goes undercover as a mental patient to investigate his prime suspect: a psychiatrist. The nature of mental illness being what it is, after the policeman has gone undercover it becomes increasingly hard to distinguish whether he’s really a policeman undercover as a mental patient, as was initially suggested, or whether he is in fact an actual mental patient with delusions of being an undercover policeman.

The Ghoul was executive produced by Ben Wheatley who gave British actor-turned-director Gareth Tunley a small role in dirty gem Kill List (2011). The Ghoul weaves a complex web of relationships between policemen and colleagues, policemen and suspects, psychiatrists and patients. Real and assumed identities. And this web takes the form of a Möbius strip. As psychiatrist Morland (Geoffrey McGivern) explains it to his patient Chris (Tom Meeten), it’s a strip of paper twisted then joined so that if an insect were to land upon it and walk its length, it would come to be on the other side from where it was previously without in any way crossing over from one side to the other. Proceed for the same distance in the same direction again, and it would be back where it started. As pictured here:

In his role as a policeman, Chris has driven down by night from Manchester to London in order to help to investigate an attempted double shooting. Lengthy discussions with colleagues Jim (Dan Renton Skinner) and Jim’s partner Kathleen (Alice Lowe) point to Coulson (Rufus Jones), Chris assumes the role of a man with mental health issues and takes up counselling sessions with psychiatrist Fisher (Niamh Cusack) so as to gain access to Coulson’s file at her office. She passes him on to another psychiatrist, the aforementioned Morland, who is currently counselling Coulson.

Morland talks to Chris at great length about various obsessions including a bottle “of which the outside is the inside” and explains the Möbius strip. Meanwhile, Chris has been following Coulson around the streets. Eventually Chris finds himself driving from Manchester to London again, traversing the Möbius strip, back where the film started.

Like that other Möbius strip movie Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) this opens and closes with a point of view shot of a road from a car driving along it at night (those familiar with Lynch’s work will probably notice a resemblance between the road markings at the beginning of the 1997 film and the art work above). It has much in common too with B-movie thriller Shock Corridor (Sam Fuller, 1963) in which a Pulitzer-prize-hungry newspaper man goes undercover as an asylum inmate in order to solve a murder that has taken place there. While Shock Corridor plays out as a linear narrative, albeit one in which deluded characters occasionally shift into lucidity, The Ghoul constantly shifts in terms of the identities of its characters.

A number of questions are raised. Is Chris a cop or a loner with mental problems? Is Kathleen his superior on the force or the girl he’s fancied since his Manchester student days? Is Coulson the subject of an investigation or Chris’ best mate? These games the piece plays with its audience and the way it folds back upon itself are ultimately what make it worth seeing.

The Ghoul is out in cinemas across the UK on August 4th. It was made available on BFI Player the following month.

Why did Nigel Farage like Dunkirk so much?

Posted on by victorfraga

Nigel Farage isn’t my favourite person. He epitomises the side of Britain with which I do not identify: racist, nationalistic, nostalgic of British Imperialism and displaying a smug and yet tacit sense of superiority. I believe in a diverse, tolerant, inclusive and internationalist Britain. A few days ago, I came a across a tweet from Nigel Farage recommending Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (accompanied by the image above), a film which Jeremy Clarke had reviewed a couple of weeks earlier for DMovies. Farage said: “I urge every youngster to go out and watch Dunkirk“. On the other hand, our dirty reviewer described it as “a remarkable insight into the dirty side of being part of a war”. So I questioned myself: how is it that someone as reactionary as Nigel Farage liked such a subversive piece? I went to the cinema to see it for myself.

I found Dunkirk excruciatingly boring and cold. The video game language and characters without background and emotional depth made it impossible for me to relate to the film. But it’s not personal taste for cinema that I want to discuss here. It isn’t the historicity of the film either (which has also been questioned). I want to understand why is it that the film resonates with nationalists.

The simple answer of course is: this is a movie about withdrawing from Europe, a heaven-sent analogy for frothing Brexiters. But that’s not all. There’s another reason why Dunkirk has pleased Nigel Narage and most likely other Ukip and Conservative voters. It plays out like a adrenaline-inducing video game or canticle, which can be easily misinterpreted.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who enjoyed the film is a nationalist or a latent warmonger. I wouldn’t even challenge that the film is indeed dirty and subversive in some ways, like Jeremy argued. And I don’t even think that Christopher Nolan willfully endeavoured to make a film that appealed to nationalists, but that’s a risk he was willing to take by making a film that’s not clearly anti-war.

So what’s an anti-war movie?

Dunkirk is not an anti-war film, not at all. Once a film portrays war in a positive and engaging light (even if this engagement is in the shape of adrenaline-induced thrills instead of patriotic chants or more didactic political messages), there’s always a risk that reactionary pundits will seize and claim it in favour of their dubious nationalistic agenda.

War is repugnant and grotesque, and so should anti-war films be. Violence should never be airbrushed, blood should never be removed, and the conflict should never be glorified, romanticised or celebrated in any way whatsoever. Otherwise it can easily slip into a military apologia. A genuinely anti-war movie should never be a feel-good movie. It should be harrowing and disturbing because at war there are no victors. Or a mockery: that’s also a possibility for an anti-war movie.

Dunkirk, on the hand, works like a hypnotising video game. Not coincidentally, the cinema screening I attended was preceded by an advert of the game “Call of Duty WW2”. The Hans Zimmer electrifying soundtrack plays out at 140 bpm, in a tandem with your heart. I would hazard a guess that a Dunkirk theme park ride will follow soon. Highly suggestible young people will undoubtedly leave the cinema subconsciously thinking: “wow, this is so cool. War is like a video game, what a wild ride, I want to be part of it”. Often we don’t remember the content of a movie, yet we remember the sensation and feelings it triggered. This is why war movies can be so dangerous.

Plus there is no blood in the film, which was a conscious decision by Nolan so that he could get a PG13 certificate in the US and a 12A in the UK. These youngsters will think, again subconsciously: “war is not a bad thing at all. Worse that could happen is I will get covered in slime. I won’t get covered in blood”. That’s why a war movie should never be sanitised and made palatable to young people. They are the same people Nigel Farage wants to recruit for his patriotic and xenophobic cause.

The fact that Dunkirk is a film about evacuation, ie victims fleeing an attacker, does not make it anti-war, either. Instead it just makes it Manichaeistic, feeding the hero and the “good vs evil” narrative, therefore spurring animosity and historical rivalries. The Union Jack is to be seen several times, and the duty to “fight” is highlighted throughout Dunkirk.

My conclusion is very clear-cut: war is the maximum expression of nationalism. If you don’t want nationalists to embrace your film, then you must make it blatantly anti-war.

The anti-war battalion

Below is a small list of genuinely anti-war films that we recommend you watch, including one that’s out in cinemas right how (click on the film titles in order to accede to our review):