Lorry driver Wong (Eric Tsang) lives in a cramped apartment block in Hong Kong. He collects his estranged adult son Tung (Shawn Yue) from the hospital. Tung is bipolar and the doctors say there is nothing more they can do in order to help him. He must return home.
But “home” is less simple than it sounds. His mum (Elaine Jin) was bipolar, too. Dad walked out on the family years earlier. Tung resents him for it just as he resents his brother, his mother’s favorite, who impressed her by doing well in school and getting himself a lucrative job in the US where he now lives. As he pointed out to his mother while she was still alive, it was Tung – and not his idolised brother – who stayed behind to look after her. She was incontinent and he had to help her wash and shower regularly. In the end, that didn’t work out because following a heated argument between the two of them, she had a fatal accident in the shower – an incident which keeps coming back to torment Tung.
Then there’s the matter of Tung’s former girlfriend Jenny (Charmaine Fong) who left him the night of their engagement when he unexpectedly and violently turned on her. He wants to find her and get back together. But that may not prove possible. When Tung tracks her down, Jenny explains that although she’s paid her share of their mortgage, if he can’t pay his share she stands to lose everything. She’s also managed to pay off the debts he got the couple into which she only discovered after they split up. Determined to make the relationship work, he accompanies her to the Christian church service she now attends where she goes up to the front and explains to the congregation how he destroyed her life and she hates him, but God will help her to love him. Not exactly the best basis to build a relationship, Christian or otherwise.
Tung’s one friendship which seems to work is with the trusting 10-year-old (Ivan Chan), who lives with his mother next door to Tung and his dad. She doesn’t want her boy to get his hands dirty since she thinks manual work is beneath him, but unbeknownst to her, he loves gardening. Tung helps him grow plants on the roof – until the boy’s mother discovers he’s bipolar and bans him from seeing Tung. But the pair secretly communicate through the paper thin walls anyway.
The script, co-written with Florence Chan, really gets under the skin of those living with bipolar disorder. Director Wong gets terrific performances out of his cast too, particularly Tsang and Yue. Hong Kong cinema is not generally noted for sharp movies about social issues, but this is one of those films that bucks that trend. It’s pretty obvious that none of the characters here, from Tung himself through to the housing block residents around him, are coping well with Tung’s bipolar condition. There are lots of complications and no real solutions offered except the implicit suggestion that Hong Kong society has failed to deal with this difficult issue and it might be a really good idea if people were at least to start openly talking about it. Clearly this film is a welcome nod in that direction. Wong and his team are to be congratulated on putting this extremely dirty and largely taboo issue out there in such a compelling way.
Mad World played in Creative Visions: Hong Kong Cinema 1997 – 2017, which took place in London between November 17th and 19th. This is a filthy genius movie worth keeping an eye on, and we will let you know about any further opportunities to watch it. Just follow us on Twitter!
Jennifer Lawrence is back again in another role in which Hollywood objectifies women. Lawrence seems to have accepted her fate as an actress: she is a woman who is asked to give and give and give until she can’t do it anymore. The trailer shows her sitting on a bed in a night red dress with a drink on her hand. She is obviously waiting for a man. We don’t see him. We only see him placing a mobile phone and money clip on the bedside table. His next move is an order: “Take off your dress”.
Well, that is hardly acceptable nowadays, and so the trailer quickly notes she is in control. Lawrence is a young officer trained to seduce and manipulate. Her trainer is Charlotte Rampling, We hear the Australian actor Joel Edgerton (from Jeff Nichols’s Loving, 2017) say in the voice-over: “she uses her body” in order to attract men and kill them. She is what they call a Sparrow, or a spy. And indeed we realise that from the first clip that she is probably feigning her vulnerability. Next, she kills and puts on a wig in order to flee the crime scene (by the way, speculation around the natural colour of her hair is a recurrent topic on the internet; the wig is certain to stoke this profound and colourful discussion).
But the story is seen from the perspective of Joel Edgerton’s character, who happens to be a CIA spy. Hence, the audience tends to agree with him and be on his side. He is the right guy. And Lawrence chose the wrong side, as she is Russian. This highly Manichaean spy tale promises to show breathtaking Jennifer Lawrence mastering what she does best: an uncensored inability to be a cheat.
Despite sharing the surname with the sexy actor in red, the director Francis Lawrence is not related to her!
Red Sparrow will be released theatrically in early March.
It’s 2060 and the Aids crisis is finally over, with the HIV virus finally wiped out from the face of the Earth. And it gets better (or worse, depending on how you look at it). The bug had mutated into a gene that can be manipulated into a psychoactive drug once extracted from the human body. So an extensive underground network of fluid slaves has been established. In other words, a prolific sperm factory.
These poor males have to wank non-stop and so that their much-coveted man juice can be harvested and sold off to the joy of recreational drugs users. A little bit like the basement slaves in John Waters’ classic Pink Flamingos (1972), except that there are no babies involved.
Women are also involved: there’s also plenty of urine, sweat and other bodily secretions. Yet the film never feels repulsive. This is nothing like Isabelle Adjani on the subway in Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981). Fluid0 is vibrant with colours, futuristic CGI effects and flashing lights. It’s entirely pleasant and fun to watch. It’s also very sexy. And it’s not just the lights that flash! To boot, digital has a double connotation: there’s a lot you can do with your computer but also with your finger!
The slaves seem to have a lot of fun at what they are doing. Maybe they are also experiencing the effects of the psychoactive drug, for which they provide the vital staple. The factory is populated with all sorts of characters: trans and cis, old and young, male and female, gay and straight, black, white and all of colours of the race spectrum.
There is also a “sexecologist, plus a a “porn terrorist”, although I’m not entirely sure what they do! People are having fun, and penetration is never mandatory. “Enjoy your soft on, no need for an erection”, a female character succinctly challenges the established orthodoxy of our phallocracentric world. Challenging the norm seems is the leitmotif, it seems.
Ultimately, Fluid0 is a dirtylicious, transgressive and futuristic post-porn art piece. The charming indie soundtrack by Aerea Negrot gives it a nice and amusing final touch. It’s not a perfect movie though. The plot becomes subordinate to the imagery way too often, and so the narrative gets a little manneristic. The idea of HIV being converted into a drug in a very interesting one, and I wish this had been explored in more depth. Still, a wet and salacious evening is guaranteed.
A seemingly endless canopy of umbrellas. An edgy viral roast. Ryuichi Sakamoto. The Midwest automobile industry. An Arab rapper. Any idea what might connect these five disparate threads? Rupert Russell’s continent-hopping debut feature documentary provides a neat answer: freedom, or lack thereof. Rupert is the son of the late Ken Russell, the enfant terrible of British cinema, and Freedom For The Wolf is his debut feature.
Following in the frenetic footsteps of Gene Sharp and Paul Mason, Russell aims to offer a global analysis of the state of contemporary democracies. However, while the aforementioned luminaries have tended to examine revolution and any immediate shift to democracy, Freedom For The Wolf is in post-transition territory. More specifically, it dissects the politics of a number of countries that appear to be shifting from Western-guided democracies into democratic illiberalism. Thus we find out about “embracing democracy” in Hong Kong, “after the revolution” in Tunisia, “illiberal democracy”in India and “freedom for sale” in the US. This is a laudably varied mixture, although Central Europe’s proud illiberals and any representatives from South America are omitted. However, Russell dedicates enough time to each of these divergent regions that his analysis feels mostly reliable.
The validity of analysis is superb, with a wildly diverse selection of grassroots voices, academic opinions and political plurality. We hear from Hong Kong student activists, as well as pro-China and pro-democracy politicians. Tunisian rapper Klay BBJ and tortured blogger Jabuer Mejri share their experiences alongside humanitarian advocates and officials from the Muslim democratic Ennahdha party. Narendra Modi’s spokespeople offer their views, together with Hindu nationalist clerics and the young Indian sketch group All India Bakchod. Former American police chiefs, Black Lives Matter activists and Republican fundraisers all get airtime. The result is a rounded range of remarks with an all-important feeling that the creators are attempting to offset any biases.
Russell is lucky enough to have studied under the eminent cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson, whose economic critique is balanced by that stalwart of liberal democracy, Francis Fukuyama, among others. The primary theoretical thrust is that individuals in a liberal democracy are driven by their freedom to enjoy the consumerist carrot-and-stick of liberal economics. Take away the choice of 20 different carrot soups, and individuals will invoke illiberal forces at the ballot box, if it means that their economic fortunes might return.
Freedom for the Wolf’s analyses of the Tunisian and Indian situations are particularly impressive. Tunisia is regularly held up by Western nation states as the one successful democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring. Likewise, India has earned its own Western plaudits as the Global South’s largest democratic economy. As such, the inclusion of evidenced illiberalism in both of these states highlights a blind spot that may indeed hinder longstanding Western democracies’ abilities to keep their own liberalism in check. The documentary is at its dirty shocking best when the film crew are escorted by Indian police who jovially threaten them with after-hours drunken brutality. Nonetheless, Russell fails to mention subsequent democratic elections in Tunisia that have ousted the religious-conservative Ennahdha movement and replaced them with the centre-left secularists Nidaa Tounes.
Somewhere in between Hindu riots and American institutional racism, the documentary takes a somewhat surprising trip. It’s full Footloose (Herbert Ross, 1984) mode, as we swing into Japan and its so-called No Dancing Law. This section sets out to elucidate the idea that ‘the personal is political’ and, at first glance, seems warranted. Dancing on a night out is a personal freedom taken for granted in many democracies, yet we hear a nightclub owner’s account of being arrested for allowing late-night Britpop grooving. Japan has some of the world’s lowest levels of income inequality, along with recent consistent GDP growth. As such, it seems like an exciting challenge to Russell’s thesis of economic uncertainty catalysing illiberal governance. Unfortunately, this part of the documentary is both the shortest and most under-developed. Its focal point is outdated, as the No Dancing Law was abolished a few years ago and was often flouted by residents and tourists. A more suitable case study may have been Sweden, which is often viewed as a well-functioning social democracy….but is in the midst of repealing its own ban on spontaneous dancing.
This documentary isn’t just a series of voices and footage though. Just before each country is introduced, an image from the previous frame is sketched out and quickly finds itself among animated wolf-faces and symbolic political acts. These animated interludes are entertaining enough and give the viewer a quick pause for reflection, breaking up what could otherwise be a full-on intellectual assault. It’s a nice touch from the Polish DARE studio and befitting of their Łódź animation heritage.
Russell’s first feature film is confidently ambitious in its vision. It doesn’t quite get down to the dirty nitty-gritty of making the promised over-arching connection between increasingly emergent global illiberal democracies. Indeed, it may have missed a trick in not acknowledging the role of internet technology in silencing free-speech and promoting illiberalism. Notwithstanding a couple of obsolete references, the smooth blend of talking heads, grassroots activists and witty animation makes for a gripping and thought-provoking watch.
Freedom For The Wolf shows at the International Documentary Film Festival taking place between November 15th and 26.
The constant struggle between life and death has never been more clearly expressed than in Sigmund Freud’s concept of Eros and Thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. In his work, the famous psychologist stated that all life is dependent primarily upon ‘life or death instincts’. Over my academic studies, such a theory became paramount towards my scholarly essays et al.
Yet, away from theoretical thinking, the actual lived in experience of life is what truly matters. In the instance of Simon Fitzmaurice, a constant interaction with death occurs daily as he is wheelchair bound, stricken sadly with Motor Neuron Disease in 2008. Achieved through deeply personal footage shot by Simon himself over the course of his life thus far, It’s Not Yet Dark uses his original novel and extrapolates upon it in the best possible fashion; through film and Simon’s love of family and life.
Starting out from humble beginnings in Dublin, it was clear from a young age that Simon was captivated by short fiction. Eventually graduating film school with a 1st Class Honours degree and a short film which took him to NYU’s Short Film Festival and later Sundance, the world was his oyster. Accompanied by a devote love for his partner, Ruth, his life consisted of spiritual and physical fulfilment. Just as things started getting good, the MND started out with a small limp in his leg and later developed into a full bodily paralysis, as we see Simon at the start of the film.
Director Frankie Felton chooses to initially present Simon as his current state is. Motionless but looking to camera with a brooding beard and pushed back hair, his face naturally gives no expression. As the documentary unfolds, the still image of Simon that is originally presented decays into a man glowing with happiness, as created by his wife, numerous children and family.
Accompanied by the voice-over narration of Colin Farrell, his story becomes bookend by his five years in the making of a film called A Girl Called Emily, which opened at a local Irish film festival last year. Though Farrell’s participation in the film maybe is viewed as a lucrative piece of star appeal, the actor’s relationship with Fitzmaurice runs deeper than simply narrating his life so far – he was a huge advocate for the fundraising needed to get A Girl Called Emily financed and made.
In life we all have struggles, still, it is the character to which we resiliently persevere that define us. In the instance of Simon Fitzmaurice, he is a shining example to us all that through thick and thin one must love, care and pursue their dreams to the utmost. Though a whole packet of tissues will inevitably be consumed, it’s pivotal to the person that Simon Fitzmaurice is, that those who view the film seek to achieve fulfilment in their lives. Simply carpe diem.
Sadly Simon passed away just a few weeks ago on October 26th due to complications related to MND. It’s Not Dark Yet is available in the UK on all major VoD platforms from November 13th. They include Apple, Google Play, Amazon and Microsoft.
This extraordinary character study of one of the most significant jazz guitarists of modern times is remarkable not only for the portrait it paints of Frisell himself but also for the noteworthy list of names it interviews in passing. The newcomer with little knowledge of who’s who in jazz could take a notebook and and acquaint themselves with a remarkable number of dirty musicians of one sort or another, from the late drummer Paul Motian through more familiar, popular stars like singer Paul Simon and guitarist Bonnie Raitt to big band orchestra leader and composer Michael Gibbs. Indeed, the latter’s 2009 concert at London’s Barbican Centre featuring Frisell bookends the film allowing Franz to close on ‘Throughout’, the first of Frisell’s self-composed tunes the guitarist ever recorded. And that’s just one reason why you should watch Bill Frisell: A Portrait.
Australian independent director Franz worked for a while as a musician herself, which means that her director’s eyes and ears are attuned to what musicians do in composition and performance as well as how their minds work. The film is consequently packed with fascinating material: lots of little moments which make sense to musicians, lots of interviews with musicians and lots of clips of musicians performing together.
Frisell has worked with numerous collaborators covering both his own compositions and other people’s – both on his own albums and on other people’s – but when Franz was faced with the task of reducing her considerable pile of footage down to a two-hour-long movie, it became apparent that the rights to the non-Frisell compositions were going to cost a lot more money than she had. Thus, budgetary considerations played a role in the editing process which mean that all the performances captured in the final edit are of Frisell’s own compositions. Which are plentiful as he’s a prolific composer.
Bill Frisell has recorded over 30 albums of his own since the early nineteen eighties and if you add to that the number of other people’s albums on which he’s played it runs to about 200 titles. Many of the album covers briefly go up on the screen (in one short animated montage), but the piece navigates more performance footage by Frisell himself with his musical collaborators plus Franz’s interviews with him and many of those collaborators.
The guitarist gave his blessing to the project at the start. While a working musician, Franz simply asked him if she could make a film about him and he said yes. Interviewing him however was another matter. Inasmuch as the film has a structure, it’s held together by Franz’s interview of Frisell which came right at the end of the shoot by which time he’s got comfortable with her and her cameras being around. Whilst quietly brimming with talent, he’s clearly a shy and humble man who is almost embarrassed to take her to a closet in his home to show her the numerous guitars which he’s storing there in cases. We warm to him immediately.
The performance footage varies between jazz, blues, folk, country and even an avant-garde band with a screaming vocalist, all of it amazing. Other highlights include Frisell and Gibbs chatting in the back of a car travelling through London. Those familiar with his music will be delighted, while the newcomer will be thrilled to stumble upon a versatile talent in the body of a retiring and amiable human being. Whether or not you know this man’s work, Franz’s warm and compelling documentary about him is, quite simply, a treat. And a great introduction to the man and his music.
Bill Frisell: A Portrait showed as part of the Doc’n Roll Film Festival in 2017, when this piece was originally written. Blu-ray, DVD and VoD* available and shipping worldwide through www.BillFrisellFilm.com from March 2018.
*VoD now available with English closed captions & subtitles in Spanish, French & Portuguese, with Italian and Korean to come shortly.
Tragedy befalls a rural Icelandic farming family when son Baldur (Óskar Logi Ágústsson), summoned for dinner by younger sister Hera (Diljá Valsdóttir), falls off the tractor into the threshing device he’s towing. A chunk of flesh comes off and there’s a surprisingly small amount of blood. The sequence is not perfect: had it been far more explicit with more blood, gore and medical detail, that would have fitted with the film’s subsequent investment in the excesses of heavy metal music.
The family predictably goes into shock and at the church funeral Hera glowers at a painting of Jesus. She deals with her loss by (1) adopting her brother’s metal band T-shirts, leather jackets and trousers (which, unbelievably, fit her perfectly) and burning all her own, very ordinary, young girl’s clothes, (2) listening to his heavy metal record collection and (3) playing metal riffs on his guitar and amp. She tries to leave the area for Reykjavik, but at the stop can’t bring herself to board the bus. After a few years, Hera is still living in the area as a metal-obsessed and -garbed teenager (Thora Bjorg Helga) and the guitar has inexplicably turned into a Flying V.
Neither of Hera’s parents have coped well. Her mum Droplaug (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) retains the dead boy’s room as if he were still alive while her dad Karl (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) blames himself for not putting a cover on the driveshaft. They’re pretending everything’s fine when it really isn’t and their relationship has grown cold. They’re also failing to meet the spiritual/emotional needs of their teenage daughter – not the easiest of tasks at the best of times and one made much worse by all three surviving family members’ repression of their tragedy.
Subplots involve Hera’s childhood friend Knútur (Hannes Óli Ágústsson) whose platonic relationship soon turns more physically sexual and newly arrived parish priest Janus (Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson) who bonds psychically with the girl when she learns he not only likes all the bands she does but also has a metal tattoo on his shoulder. The latter wisely rejects her attempts to throw herself at him.
The film has a few glimmering moments. An early meal time scene has mother glower at daughter while some tomato sauce hangs off the edge of Hera’s plate like blood in a still from an unmade horror film festering in the back of the writer-director’s mind. And the hand of a small kid in a metal T-shirt makes a respectful Sign of the Horns to Hera in a local shop.
There is much to admire in the portrait of a small village where community and Christian religion are woven together to everyone’s benefit, although viewers may wince at the way when Hera moves in with Knútur she suddenly abandons the leather jackets in favour of the more conservative woolly jumpers and outdoor weather jackets that everyone else wears. As if to say, in this community you need to conform, it’s unacceptable to be that little bit different.
Metalhead is available to stream on all major VoD platforms, and is part of the Walk This Way collection.
Ever wondered what might happen if our neurological activity (including sexual activity) was recorded and stored digitally as neurocodes? Let’s push it further: have you ever considered the sexual possibilities around neurocodes, and indeed, the potential practice of neurosex?
Welcome to Neurosex Pornoia, a series of episodic shorts created by Berlin-based directorial/camera team Eric Pussyboy and Abigail Gnash. This project attempts to transpose Foucauldian ideas about biopower, surveillance and genealogical critique onto the queer post-porn sci-fi screen. It’s full of deeply disturbing eroticism that pushes you to reflect on patriarchal state subjugation of silenced sexualities. Unfortunately, the latest and longest installment, Neurosex3, a featurette at 40 minutes, doesn’t quite pull this off with the smart subtlety of its predecessors and has a tendency to confuse rather than confound. Nonetheless, there’s a natural knack for the nightmarish that packs a punch on both a visceral and cerebral level.
For those who haven’t watched the other NeurosexPornoia episodes, here’s a quick recap. Neurosex1sets up the concept of the neurosex code by showing two human subjects exploring oral bodily pleasures while hooked up to electrode pads in a lab. Neurosex2 introduces us to Z_1021 (Ze Royale), a human who feels frustratingly constricted by authoritarian behavioural control in a new biotechnological society and decides to illegally access a neurosex code. Both episodes are framed by archive footage of experimental lab-coated psychologists, a reminder of the unethical state-sanctioned practices that have historically ostracised ‘others’, informed theories of behavioural control and are often considered unethical. Although these episodes aren’t integral to understanding Neurosex3, they’ll certainly enrich your experience and are easy enough to watch at around 10 minutes each.
Neurosex3 brings us back to Z_1021 and – through a series of queer erotic vignettes – shows her initiation into the underground pleasure-seeking circle who previously uploaded a neurosex code to her brain. My own experiences of post-porn are largely restricted to Erika Lust’s ongoing XConfessions series. NeurosexPornoia is far more radical than XConfessions. However, similar principles apply. Neurosex3 depicts consensual sex that respects all participants and is shot through a non-coercive lens, as opposed to the typical manipulation of the female body that is portrayed in contemporary conventional pornography. Importantly, any eroticism is continuously disrupted by DYCE’s expertly unnerving mechanical soundscape, which alienates the viewer from sexual arousal and subsequently re-politicises the sex.
And that’s not all! Eric Pussyboy and Abigail Gnash’s creation imagines a world in which women of colour, as well as individuals identifying as queer and non-binary, can inhabit whichever roles their personalities seek, rather than prescribed societal functions. Thus non-white characters can be protagonists and not simply the subject of orientalised desires. Queer characters don’t exist on the margins, but are given centre-stage in a dark erotic sequence where they exercise their free will through a series of neurosexual fantasies.
This is the essence of Neurosex Pornoia. It doesn’t just defy and transcend the normative boundaries of popular pornography. By setting up Foucault’s worst vision of state apparatus and the lab, it also doubles as a critique of a Western scientific method that has often harmed those genders, ethnicities and sexualities deemed abnormal by the power structures. This idea is realised to full shocking extent in one neurosexual fantasy where a character (literally) pisses over Carl Hagenbeck’s lethal orientalist legacy, with the help of sex toys symbolic of her queer agency.
Regrettably, Neurosex3 doesn’t quite dissect in as clear and subtle a fashion as the two prior episodes. This is undoubtedly dirty cinema, but at times its plot doesn’t quite follow and dialogue feels stilted. While non-linearity and unconventional delivery can also position artistic work beyond the normative, in the case of Neurosex3 it leaves more unanswered questions than its interrogative approach necessitates.
In popular terms, this entertaining short takes the ideology of the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale into sexualised BladeRunner territory, and the outcome is a very dirty mix. For this non-initiated hetero at least, Neurosex3 serves as an enticing introduction to the boundless creativity of the queer fringe.
Byung-doo, 29, (Jo In-sung) is a smart, lean and hungry gangster on the mean streets of Seoul, in A Dirty Carnival. As a debt collector he successfully collects payments from difficult customers. Yet his immediate boss Sang-chul (Yun Je-mun) pays him so little that Byung-doo must constantly beg him for the money to pay his mother’s apartment rent. Looking out for those beneath him and determined to better himself in the wider organisation, Byung-doo realises that its overall boss Hwang (Chun Ho-jin) would like nothing more than to get the sycophantic Prosecutor Park (Kwon Tae-won) off his back. Sang-chul clearly isn’t going to do anything about it so Byung-doo takes the task upon himself. He and one of his men drive into the back of Park’s car in a secluded spot and he kills the prosecutor when they get out of their cars to exchange details.
Byung-doo’s best mate Min-ho (Min Nam-koong) is an aspiring film director who can’t sell the script for the gangster film on which he’s working because the studio producer he approaches doesn’t think it’s realistic enough. After meeting up with Byung-doo, Min-ho chances to observe the latter and his men caught up in a vicious fight to defend a nightclub’s premises. He realises that his old pal is a genuine, real life gangster and decides to mine him for all the background information he possibly can. The studio subsequently accepts Min-ho’s “much more realistic” script from which he makes a highly successful film. Alas, many of the scenes are lifted directly from life, including Park’s murder. Byung-doo eventually realises he may have to kill his friend in order to survive. But it may already be too late for both of them.
Before the two men’s relationship sours, Min-ho reintroduces Byung-doo to the girl he fancied in school Hyun-joo (Lee Bo-young), who now works in a bookstore. Their developing relationship is going well until the night a work colleague sexually harrasses Hyun-joo on the street and the outraged Byung-doo brutally beats him up in front of her. Horrified, she immediately walks away from him and out of his life, but he’s still fixated on her and wants the relationship to continue.
Unlike much of the more recent, slicker and formulaic Korean gangster fare, there’s a gritty sensibility recalling low budget, Hong Kong marvel Made In Hong Kong(Fruit Chan, 1997). Yoo’s narrative charts its way between compelling gang fights, ruthless killings, good and bad romantic episodes and down to earth, everyday scenes involving people unlucky enough to have for a relative a gangster whose deeds will adversely affect their own lives.
A Dirty Carnival would make a terrific double bill with GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). Both boast well observed characters in terms of gangsters and their wives or girlfriends. Both involve loyalty and betrayal. As people are beaten up, killed or buried alive, the viewer is compelled to watch in horrified fascination. Looking at the plight of the gangsters’ womenfolk, we’re torn apart. Yet we like Byung-doo. He gives his job everything he’s got and treats the men below him in his organisation with great respect, looking out for their interests.
Like GoodFellas‘ three protagonists, Byung-doo is an outsider trying to work his way up the organisation’s ranks with the odds stacked against him. Tasked with moving poor residents out of an area so it can be developed to line his boss’ and his own pockets, it becomes clear just how ruthless and self-centred a social parasite he is. Alongside his traumatised girlfriend Hyun-joo, when he commits acts of extreme violence we want to get as far away from him as possible. We like him as a character in a movie just like we like the three guys in GoodFellas despite their horrifically violent acts, but we might not want anything to do with any of them in real life.
A Dirty Carnival is well-paced and grips the viewer in an emotional vice from start to finish. Ten years on, this neglected masterpiece has lost none of its ability to engage and shock in equal measure. It deserves to be far more widely seen.
Some like it hot. Others prefer it dirty. DMovies and the Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest belong to the latter group. Both organisations share the view that cinema should be thought-provoking, transgressive, and constantly challenge the established orthodoxy.
Our affinity is such that we decided to ask some very naughty questions to their amazing team and find out what is it that makes their Fest so singular and special. The directors Alex K plus the programmers Muffin H, Martha M and Sean MG spilled the beans, revealing what what makes a film “trangressive”, why East London and how straight people can enjoy a queer festival. Have a read and find out what they had to say!
Fringe! is a not-for-profit film and arts festival run by a team of passionate volunteers, rooted in London’s queer creative scene and they welcome everyone – particularly dirty boys and girls like YOU! They define their mission as “to offer a dynamic, representative and unmistakably fresh alternative to other film and arts festivals”. The Festival is now on its 7th edition, and the programme this year includes more than 40 events during six days. There are panels, workshops, performances and parties in nine East London venues. There’s no time to get bored, with an international selection of 33 feature and 72 short films, including seven UK premieres.
DMovies – Can you please tell us about curatorship process? How many people are involved, how people can submit their films, the criteria, and so on?
Programmer Sean MG (pictured above) – It’s a cauldron of choice. Some of our Senior Programmers are lucky to catch a glimpse of some truly great stuff at the Berlin Film Festival or Frameline in San Francisco, and we receive hundreds of open submissions online that the whole team evaluates. Sometimes we just know something is perfect, sometimes we have to defend our choices, but it definitely makes for lively debate, which is what you want in a team. We only have a couple of rules though, one of them being NO QUEER DEATH. There are quite enough films where a gay character dies at the end and they’re not stories we want told!
Director Alex K (pictured below) – We have seven people on our programming team who find films through our submissions process, via distributors and via lots and lots of research either by going to other festivals or a good old Google search. Some films also come to us through recommendations by friends and filmmakers we’ve had in previous festivals or through fellow programmers at other festivals. Some films are clear Fringe! material and everyone on the team agrees on having them programmed straight away. Of course a lot of personal tastes comes into this process but every film is watched by more than one programmer before it goes into the programme. Films that often catch our attention: the weird stuff, the stories that haven’t been told and the cheeky.
DMovies – You have described your films as “transgressive” and “progressive”, can you please tell us a little bit more about what makes a film such?
AK – In terms of our programme it’s really those films that challenge the viewer on some level. Queer films that steer away from some of the tropes of ‘gay cinema’ (although we rarely can resist the obligatory shower scene), those films that tell established stories from a new angle, films that aren’t too prudish to show actual queer sex. Anything that resists the drive for assimilation and that is made for a queer audience in mind, rather than a film about queers so straight people can get a safe introduction.
DMovies – You are a “queer” film festival. Can’t straight people be transgressive and progressive?
Head of Programme Muffin H (pictured below): I think that queer sensibility doesn’t have to specifically be connected with sexuality, gender or sexual preference, no.
AK – Of course being straight doesn’t mean you can’t be transgressive or progressive. As much as there are those of a non-heterosexual persuasion that are conservative.
DMovies – Why East (London)? Do the queers elsewhere go to bed too early?
AK – When the festival was founded back in 2011 most of the festival team where either based in East London or partying there, so was a lot of our audience. We had a lot of connections with local venues that let us programme festival events with very short notice (we organised the first festival in less than two months) and a lot of exciting club nights and other events that were more alternative were happening around the area. Of course much has changed in terms of alternative queer culture offerings around London, and we hold the occasional year round event outside of East London, but when it comes to festival time it’s now very much a logistics driven decision to not spread ourselves too thinly geographically.
Programmer Martha M (pictured below) – I mean, the landscape is changing in terms of audience for sure, and one of the things that cements our community’s solidarity is having to protect an area, or re-adjust to the gentrification of this area. Of course the main fringe, for want of a different adjective, cinemas and venues and clubs remain in East, so that’s where we’ll be – though sadly it means lots of our community including myself now have to travel in. Fringe! was initially, after all, borne of a small group of East London queers and within a kind of community network of cinemas, clubs and underground spaces, so has remained local.
DMovies – You’ve been around since 2011. Can you please tell us about your dirty achievements in these seven editions, what you are most proud of?
AK – Queer porn, lots of it really. 2012 was probably the Fringe! benchmark for dirtiness with a brilliant screening of Wakefield Poole’s Bijou soundtracked by artist Prem Sahib while the audience was lounging on sauna mats. There was also an infamous female ejaculation workshop and an equally infamous performance by Diana Pornoterrorismo where she used a microphone to penetrative effect. That year we also opened the festival with Travis Mathews’ I Want Your Love. The film features lots of non-simulated sex and some gays weren’t happy that there was actual rimming on screen – because you wouldn’t do that in real life… Some other dirty highlights over the years include Marit Östberg’s When We Are Together We Can Be Everywhere (2016), and the work by festival regulars Antonio da Silva and Jan Soldat. There are too many to mention.
SMG – There’s a lurid joy sometimes in having extraordinary images or narratives projected on screen, and plenty of times it’s a form of sexual expression that is not palatable to mainstream audiences. It’s not that we want to shock audiences (although sometimes we do – and we laugh!) but it’s that there has to be room for these stories, characters and pleasures to exist and we want to tell them. I joined the team last year and in the “Family” programme there was a 90-second short about coming out. And while we don’t usually go for “coming out stories”, this one was particularly…”penetrative” shall we say. That was fun.
MM – I’m always in awe of the year Fringe! took over an old Catholic school and moved the annual spanking workshop to the altar.
DMovies – What about this year? Can you tell us what’s dirty and new this year?
SMG – While our films are probably more sexy than dirty there are definitely some moments of transgressive filth peppered lovingly throughout. You never know when it’s going to appear on screen
MM – It’s also important to resist sanitisation and assimilation as queers. If this is considered dirty then so be it! I’d say this year’s DIRTIEST are closing film Shua Lea Cheang’s Fluid0 (all the fluid…), Eric Pussyboy Neurosex3 which screens with lesbian porno The Toilet Line (Goodyn Green), and we’ve also got a super crazy, trippy, head-fuck of a film called Kairos Dirt and the Errant Vacuum, the brilliant first feature by early Fringe! filmmaker Madsen Minax.
AK – One of my favourites this year is WhoWill Fuck Daddy (Lasse Långström), which pretends to be worried about the patriarchy not having anyone want to fuck it anymore. It’s a hilarious, sarcastic, scathing, and silly film with a lot of strange things happening!
In recent months through the critical and audience reception of Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, the home invasion sub-genre has received some untoward criticism. Underlining the discrepancy between these two viewers, it was chiefly in the film’s tension building that leads to audience walkouts and negative feedback, the former which captivated critics. It’s a genre which deserves time and the pleasures of the final moments are an accumulative effect of this slow burn. Working with this genre and to such a level of sadism is Jorge Riquelme Serrano’s Chameleon, Sitting a taut 80 minutes, whilst filmed in production during four days, its insular approach expands to comment upon an internal class conflict within contemporary Chile.
The final days of summer are typically filled with a sense of melancholy upon the impending darkness and decay that autumn and winter holds. The home of Paula (Paula Zúñiga) and Paulina (Paulina Urrutia) is similarly ajar with this tangible sadness. Wondering around cleaning glasses, Paulina’s morning tasks are rudely interrupted after throwing a final party at their idyllic coastal house, they are visited by Gaston (Gastón Salgado) who is returning two glasses accidentally taken from the party with their shared friend, Franco (Alejandro Goic). To the woman, Gaston appears friendly and pleasant. Still, Gaston and Franco have already been framed in an extremely tight close up before the opening title cards with Gaston clearly holding sexual and physical power over the aged Franco. Establishing a dubious stance on the character of Salgado, the film places the audience one step of the main character’s surrounding the true nature of his visit.
Filled with a decadent mise-en-scene, the summer house is the zenith of modern affluent wealth. Reflecting this weather, Paulina’s costume emphasises her conservative and advantaged status. An antithesis to her is Paula who clearly possesses wealth but not to the inherent nature of her female counterpart. Placed socially beneath them, Gaston’s complexion is not as privileged as the two women. In the interaction between the three over glasses of wine in the luscious sunshine, Serrano’s elicits a multiplicity of socio-political and psychological readings. Underpinning the sheer uncanny atmosphere omnipresence due to Gaston’s being there, the sub-text of Chameleon is its main driving force. In a particularly grotesque scene, the camera lingers somewhat too long, depleting its overall impact.
As they say, slow and steady wins the case with Serrano craving up a weighted narrative with a fine collection of themes and topics being discussed with every passing scene. Acting as another touchstone, The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2010) similarly erupts in its final moments into violence and narcissism.
Chameleon debuted in 2016 at the BFI London Film Festival. It was made available on Amazon Video on November 10th. It’s showing at the ICA London on January 28th, including a Q&A via Skype with the director. It’s out on DVD on February 5th.
