10 Billion (10 Milliarden)

As many health and eco-orientated millennials, including myself, turn towards a plant-based diet, it is hard not to escape the overwhelming feeling that the world’s agriculture is being strained by an ever-growing demand for meat. Picking up on this notion and extrapolating it towards the innovative ways small communities are dealing with the problem, 10 Billion hones in on the harsh reality that by the middle of this century, the world population will hit the titular number.

Directed with clarity by Valentin Thurn, who also acts as the focal inquisitive persona in the interrogative documentary, Thurn follows in the footsteps of Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore by conducting his views in front of the screen. Akin to these influential directors in the documentary medium, Thurn uses his own critical, and professional voice, to discuss the fundamental questions that face all of humanity; how will we survive overpopulation?

Unlike Alexander Payne’s recent Downsizing (2017), it is made clear from the outset that in order to sustain the planet, communities and agricultural knowledge must be combined in an effort to endorse local farmers. From India, to Germany and then England, Thurn and his team examine the varying ways that farmers, scientists and eco warriors are attempting to deal with such an impending problem. Commencing in Germany and pharmaceutical and life sciences company Bayer’s approach to hybrid plants that can withstand severe flooding, in every piece of analysis, the documentarian takes a focused methodical evaluation of all the benefits and negatives of each subject matter. In the case of science, it is made abundantly clear that the evolutionary forces of nature over thousands of years are simply no match – at this point in time – to laboratory made plants and synthetic meats.

Consequentially shifting focus to Indian rice farms in their systematic storage of ‘anti-salt’ and ‘anti-flood’ seeds, again the power of communal knowledge, with nature, are stressed. In Britain – just like in India -, small movements of internalising local produce, alongside economics, are the moulds to which bigger governments should aspire towards. Growing seasonal produce anywhere, from car parks to pavements, the small town of Todmorden (in West Yorkshire) has set in motion the Incredible Edible movement – utilising every available space to grow fruit and vegetables. As they state ‘Everyone understands food. Food could get people talking; even better, it could inspire people to take action.’

Away from the agricultural debate, Hajo Schomerus’ camera, after each segment on the subject matter or topic, films the people involved in the labs, farmland or eco movements in a simple yet graceful photographic medium close up. It successfully captures these people’s presence and contributions to preventing global food starvation. Further, they are moments that spring to mind the ephemeral beauty of Agnès Varda, most recently with JR in Face Places; 2017’s best documentary. A criticism of Thurn is that his approach to examining communities et al can become too repetitive and formulaic, leaving little room for innovation; ironic for a featuring the most cutting-edge agricultural innovation.

In a moment of seriousness, one scientist predicts that the next world war could be fought not over oil, hatred or racial divides but food. Everyone in the world, regardless of wealth, cast or ability, deserves to eat good food that isn’t mass produced. Still, In an age where millennials are set to become the fattest generation, according to Cancer Research UK, it is hard to not be so focused on starvation, as opposed to mass obesity. By looking internally to our own communities and land, the future, as proposed by Thurn’s 10 Billion, will be a much healthy, safer and harmonious place.

10 Billion is available to watch on VoD from March 5th, as part of the Walk This Way Collection. Click here in order to watch it on iTunes.

Profilers: Gaze into the Abyss (Blick in den Abgrund)

A Finnish cabbie asks Helinä Hakkänen-Nyholm: “Are you a policewoman?”. “No I’m not”, she says. “A little bit like Jodie Foster in Silence Of The Lambs?”, comes the question. “That’s just a film,” she replies. “Reality is very different”, in a conversation that sums up Profilers: Gaze Into The Abyss.

Meet the men and women from around the globe who, in their various national jurisdictions, have the job of profiling serial rapists and killers. As with the members if any profession, they talk to each other too. So Helinä is working on a case where a corpse had multiple stab wounds around but not actually in the eyes. She rings up a contact Gerald in South Africa who suggests that this phenomenon relates to trying to mutilate the face and represents anger towards the specific victim.

Gerald, meanwhile, visits a crime scene in a veld wherein have been found two bodies of children aged 8-10 which (who?) have rotted down to the bone over time. Since he started the job in 2009 he’s handled some 80 murder and 200 cases. “If you’re not the right sort of person, you don’t last” he says.

When we first meet the US’ Helen Morrison, we see her on the phone being frustrated trying to reach a prison governor whose charges include a serial killer on whom Helen wants to perform surgery in the interests of research. She later discusses the ethics of this with her surgeon husband. There’s a thin line between the taboo idea of experimenting on human beings – which is what she’s proposing – and the idea that such research could help determine what makes a serial offender do what they do in such a way as to prevent others from committing similar atrocities.

Meanwhile, three retired profilers sit on a sofa watching and talking about The Silence Of The Lambs, (Jonathan Demme, 1991) and the book’s author Thomas Harris. You get the impression that director Eder likes this movie and Harris a lot, but curiously she never mentions the earlier Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986), based on Harris’ prequel Red Dragon.

Elsewhere, Stephan Harbout sits on a train, reading a testimony out loud into a dictaphone, that of a woman who survived a brutal rape at first gun- then knife-point. A fellow passenger in a nearby seat looks distinctly uneasy. Although these are only spoken words not recreated cinematic stagings, the verbal description is pretty unsettling and harrowing. Perhaps it’s indicative of Stephan’s indigenous culture as Germany tends to be fairly frank about sexual matters. He later replays the recording as he retraces the journey of the victim through the locations in which the crime actually took place in order to try and gain understanding of the perpetrator’s mind, and there’s something compelling about observing him do so.

There’s a sequence in the last 10 minutes which includes caught-on-camera footage of the aftermath of an actual murder, but for the most part the film shies away from such explicit material. Wisely so, perhaps. The discussions and testimonial representations are harrowing enough in their own right yet provide food for thought and there’s no danger of the documentary being accused of lingering lovingly on footage of aberrant human behaviour. Plus, it’s refreshing to see a film which shows both men and women doing a particular job without the profession under scrutiny being biased in favour of either gender. Which is as it should be. In short, this is an insightful foray into a difficult subject which, because of its recurrence in popular culture, has considerable potential for cliché and stereotype which this down-to-earth documentary so admirably avoids.

Profilers, Gaze Into The Abyss is available to stream on all major VoD platforms on March 1st, 2018, as part of the Walk This Way Collection. Click here in order to watch it on iTunes.

The Key to Dalí  (La Llave Dalí)

In 2014, news broke across the world that Salvador Dalí’s first surrealist work – ‘The Intrautirine Birth of Salvador Dalí’ – had been professionally authenticated. At the same time, it emerged that the oil painting had been bought in a Girona antique shop back in 1988 for 25,000 Spanish pesetas (the equivalent of £132 today). In spite of the remarkable story behind his fairytale find, the original buyer, Tomeu L’Amo, appears to be fairly tight-lipped – a quick internet search throws up his personal website in Spanish, and almost no results in English. In The Key to Dalí, director David Fernández attempts to trace the events of the past 26 years and shine a light on who exactly L’Amo is.

The documentary starts off with a mirror shot of L’Amo dying his hair, as he begins to narrate the story of how he first came across the painting in 1988. It soon becomes clear that L’Amo is dying his hair so that he can recreate every step of his journey to discover the truth behind his find. This provides a nice visual distraction in a film that could be otherwise filled with a monotone palette of seated talking heads. Following L’Amo’s initial summary, the story jumps immediately into his attempts to contact various art experts – from oil paint analysts, to Dalí historians and museum curators. To little surprise – this is a tale of 26 hard years after all – the majority of these experts show little enthusiasm or approval for L’Amo’s meticulous efforts.

After a brief interlude about a spell of bad health, we pick things up again when L’Amo contacts Robert Descharnes, Dalí’s long-term secretary and administrator of copyright following the artist’s death. L’Amo latches on to the idea that his best shot is to present convincing evidence to Descharnes (and his son Nicolas), as they are considered global authorities on the authenticity of potential Dalí works. The remainder of the film involves a small twist and documents our protagonist’s eventually successful attempts to get his painting authenticated.

Although the film purports to be the story of the controversial oil work, it ends up becoming a very timely critique of truth, expertise and elitism. On the one side, we have L’Amo, a retired biology teacher who clearly knows a thing or two about art, yet has no real art credentials and is struggling financially. On the other side, we have the world of professional art, an institution that displays severe wariness of outsiders and a near-impertinent thrust of disbelief in the face of evidence (best exemplified by Dalí expert Ricard Mas’s po-faced refusal to buy L’Amo’s story). Yet to paint these two sides with such broad strokes is a little difficult – L’Amo’s quirky energy can sometimes veer towards the strangely obsessive and Mas is never given the screen-time to sketch out any contrary evidence.

Differently to other documentaries, The Key to Dalí has a tendency to back its eccentric teacher underdog. For example, Myles Kane and Josh Koury’s Voyeur (2017), outlines its background and set-up, before diving head-on into the murky belly of truth, ulterior motives and waning expertise. The final line of The Key to Dalís only partly answers the question: is L’Amo just doing this for the money?

The Key to Dalí is a solid documentary, one that will thrill both Dalí fanatics and those who’ve never set foot in an art gallery. It goes three-quarters of the way to becoming a truly gritty exploration of fantasy and facade, but could do with an extra 20 minutes to push itself over the line. Whether he’s truly unlocked the Spanish surrealist master or is simply an obsessed retiree with wacky ideas, L’Amo is an entertaining character and well worth this 78 minute watch.

The Key to Dalí is available on all major VoD platforms on March 1st, 2018. It is part of the 2018 Walk this Way VoD collection.

The Russian filmmaker who shot Elvis!

Most people in the West have never heard of Sergei Dovlatov, the Armenian-Russian writer who never found fame in the Soviet Union before eventually leaving for New York in 1979, but after his death slowly grew to become one of the most famous of all Russian novelists. A tragic symbol of the kind of culture Russia could’ve had if it were not under the yolk of an authoritarian regime, he is the subject of a new film by Aleksei German Jr. The director has a personal investment in the material, as his father, Aleksei German Sr., found himself constantly blocked by the Soviet authorities, only making six films over his lifetime.

Coming at a critical time in contemporary Russia, whereby thousands of citizens are also leaving the country for brighter opportunities, the dramatisation of seven days in the writer’s life seems to ring with political overtones. Winning the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at the 68th Berlinale, and just picked up by Netflix, Aleksei German Jr.’s latest film depicts a week in the life of the writer in Leningrad, 1971. Showing him hanging out with contemporaries such as Joseph Brodsky, the film is a muted and contemplative affair that creates an intimate portrait of the writer’s dream to be published and wish for a better life. Redmond Bacon sat down with Aleksei German Jr. during the 68th Berlinale to talk about his personal relationship to the material, the film’s political messages, and why Dovlatov isn’t as famous in the West as his contemporaries.

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Redmond Bacon – Did you have a personal interest in the works of Sergei Dovlatov for a long time?

Aleksei German Jr – The starting point is that Dovlatov knew my father. And my grandfather helped the family of Dovlatov. We lived close to them, a distance of several kilometres, and my father had a destiny that was a bit similar to Dovlatov’s. One of his movies was banned for almost 15 years [the 1971 WW2 film Trial on the Road]. It was personal family history for me. And of course, Dovlatov is like [the] Elvis Presley of Russian literature and there were no movies made about him before. And he’s a bit of paradox. He doesn’t look like [a] writer. Half-Jewish, half-Armenian, he was different from all the people who lived in St Petersburg. He’s witty and he’s tragic and he’s sometimes funny [but] can be hurt really easily. For example, he was very popular among women, but he loved his family and his wife very deeply. He’s a big paradox in himself.

RB – Can you tell me if you had a political message with this movie?

AG Jr – I wasn’t really interested in political messages three years ago when we started the film. When I want to give a political message I’ll give it directly, for example, through an article. I wasn’t interested in the political element. I just [wanted] very sincerely to make a film about the destinies of those people and things that shouldn’t be forgotten and as a reminder for the future that these things shouldn’t happen again. It’s not a political movie for me. It’s more a personal story for me, and it just so happened the time caught up with the film.

RB – Can you tell me why you choose such a white colour scheme for your cinematography?

AG Jr – We wanted to make two feelings possible. The first one is the feeling of [the] observer, the way you would observe what is happening. And the second is creating this feeling of a not very bright era. Because the Soviet Era was not very bright, we didn’t want to enhance this colour. I hate official Russian TV series about that era. They’re very bright, very rich, the fabrics are very beautiful. That was not the truth. It was quite [a] poor time. We didn’t want it to look like the pages of [a] fashion magazine.

RB – When you talk about an author like Dovlatov, how do you make the movie universal and not only for specific audiences?

AG Jr – We made a lot of translations [subtitles] of this film: 14 translations! And we tried to clarify the things that wouldn’t be clear to an international viewer. We wanted to put ourselves in the place of an international viewer who doesn’t know anything about 1970s or Leningrad. That was why we had a lot of translations to make it more readable.

RB – So Dovlatov is a very accessible writer, he’s very funny and his books are quite short. But he’s not as famous as other Russian writers from the period like Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn even though those writers are arguably more difficult to read and their books are longer. So why isn’t Dovlatov as famous in the UK or the USA as these writers?

AG Jr – It’s a very complicated question. You need to know in Russia that Dovlatov is one of the most famous writers, maybe the most famous writer, of the last quarter of the 20th century. And for foreigners it’s a bit complicated to understand his jokes because they are so rooted in Russian contexts and I think he’s not an expert writer. With Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, they’re just more understandable, the context is more understandable, the events, the situations of Stalin and repression are more understandable.

For example, we have two directors: [Andrey Petrovich] Zvyagintsev and [Boris Igorewitsch] Khlebnikov. Zvyagintsev is more famous than Khlebnikov. Both are very good, but Zvyagintsev is more understandable for Western viewers, because he can fit in with this view that foreigners have of Russia. Khlebnikov not. But they are directors of the same level, so it’s a matter of understanding the context and the culture. But they look the same. A lot like each other.

This is why we have these never-ending problems between West and East. You see what we are not, and we see what we will never become in your eyes and this is where the problem lies.

RB – Did you find something about Dovlatov you didn’t know and that surprised you?

AG Jr – We have unique material we found [during] the preparation. I found a lot of archived poems and alcoholic short stories of Brodsky for example. We even found the moment and the paper of when Brodsky first wrote down the telephone [number] of Dovlatov. We have literature and culture that’s a lot worse than came before — we found a lot of things in open access [that] wasn’t used in any books on Dovlatov. That means that the qualifications of the people who are writing these books about Dovlatov and Brodsky is getting poorer and poorer. They didn’t even use the material that is accessible.

RB – Why did poetry survive in the post-war time in Soviet Russia, when it was much less popular in other countries?

AG Jr – The duration was complicated. The war ended recently. There was a freedom when Khrushchev was in power. There was no immigration. The war with the government made the poets more united and stronger. I don’t know why we don’t have such striving poetry right now. Maybe it’s the tragic paradox that when the poetry gets worse, the country gets better.

The Nile Hilton Incident

A wonky TV signal that the local supplier can’t fix seems to be symptomatic of the life of Police Commander Noredin (Fares Fares). Separated from his wife, he lives in a sleazy Cairo apartment. At work a colleague shows him Facebook, but later when the internet goes down Noredin doesn’t get why the social networking website doesn’t work. Clearly, justice isn’t exactly secure in such scarcely competent hands, at least not in The Nile Hilton Incident.

When the corpse of a beautiful girl turns up in a hotel room, Noredin is called in to investigate. He has to locate another girl who may have seen the killer. Salwa (Mari Malek) is a chambermaid but she’s also an immigrant working illegally which means that tracking her down may prove difficult.

It’s hard to like the central character here: Noredin doesn’t seem to possess much in the way of redeeming features. Perhaps that’s the point: perhaps the filmmaker is trying to show us a state apparatus made up of people barely fit for the job. It is however much easier to have sympathy for the girl. She’s a member of the underclass trying to survive with any number of reasons for not coming forward and talking with the Egyptian authorities. Malek plays her with an arresting sense of vulnerability, lifting an otherwise uninspiring effort (one dirty splat) to another level (erm – two dirty splats – we’re still struggling here) whenever she appears on the screen.

As the plot progresses, it becomes clear that the chief suspect for the murder is a powerful property magnate who knows all the right people and could probably choose to have sacked any government official or policeman he wanted to. And the film ends with images of Arab Spring protestors placing all this in context. The problem is, apart from the immigrant girl, as a crime thriller this is pretty lacklustre stuff and fails largely to grab the attention. Because of its local colour aspect and political context, one wants it to be much, much better than it is. In the end, those two factors alone, good though they sound on paper, can’t save it from being something of a dud.

The Nile Hilton Incident was out in the UK March 2nd. It’s available for digital streaming in July.

Mary Magdalene

Just in time for Easter, here’s the latest biblical epic about the life of Jesus Christ. In telling the story from the perspective of Mary Magdalene (Rooney Mara), this one adopts the time-honoured strategy of embracing a different character’s point of view, something done in, for example, the various adaptations of Ben-Hur (Fred Niblo/1925, William Wyler/1959, Timur Bekmanbetov/2016) and the underrated Barabbas (Richard Fleischer, 1961).

Mary Magdalene is impressive. For a start, it feels like a movie someone really wanted to make rather than one a Studio executive thought could make a lot of money out of a religious demographic. It opens with Mary and other fisherwomen deploying nets along the shore and details her family’s latest unsuccessful attempt to marry her off against her wishes to a promising suitor. Apart from working at fishing, she’s a woman to whom things are done rather than one who does things for herself: the fact that she doesn’t marry means that her family subject her to an exorcism ritual to rid her of the demon that is clearly causing the problem.

All of which changes when Mary decides to leave home and follow charismatic, itinerant preacher and potential revolutionary Jesus (Joaquin Phoenix) in the sense that this is a way she can assert herself and make her own journey through life – to the great consternation of some of his disciples such as Peter (Chewitel Ejiofor) who don’t think that they should allow women to come along, ostensibly because it would be bad for their reputation. Or maybe Peter’s take is just a straightforward case of misogyny. After all the Old Testament with which Peter as a first century Jew would have been familiar is a book written largely under patriarchy even if, for those who read carefully between the lines, it has much to say in favour of the emancipation of women.

For people to leave behind families and travel with him in this way, Jesus must have had some truly extraordinary about his character and personality and the casting of Phoenix (shortly to be seen as a Taxi Driver-inspired avenging angel in You Were Never Really Here, Lynne Ramsay, 2017) is a master stroke. In his interpretation, Jesus becomes a sharp-witted, enigmatic type who speaks in spiritual conundrums. You need to believe that this rag tag bunch of fishermen and others would leave their everyday lives behind to follow him on his travels – and believe it you do watching this film. In the case of Judas (Tahar Rahim) it has to do with Jesus’ proclamations of revolution and a new order – not so much a case of whether the Romans are going to be overthrown as when. However, Mary interprets Jesus’ words completely differently and makes a point of saying so. In doing so, she also appears to get closer to Jesus than any of the others. But the others aren’t too happy about her views.

It’s a much more consistent film than the equally personal The Last Temptation Of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), which alongside an effective sequence of Jesus casting out demons has the disciples arguing in New York accents and a ludicrous desert temptation sequence involving the devil portrayed as an unconvincing special effects snake. As well as its exorcism, Mary Magdalene features the dead Lazarus being brought back to life and is shot not in Israel but Southern Italy, yet neither locations nor special effects get in the way of its vision and the whole thing hangs together well.

Although it apparently used the apocryphal Gospel Of Mary as a major source, Mary Magdalene treats the better known Biblical gospels with respect but is perfectly happy, in the interests of narrative coherence, to leave things out if they’re not really relevant to its central character’s experience, e.g. the trial of Jesus, where Mary isn’t present, is omitted for that reason… he’s dragged off and she’s knocked unconscious in (unnamed) Gethsemane, then he’s carrying the cross(bar) through the streets and being crucified. It makes sense as a character study of her rather than him and the narrative flows well as a piece of cinema.

The exorcism is nowhere near as upsetting or indeed lengthy as the one in contemporary Romanian convent drama Beyond The Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012), but then here it occurs fairly early on whereas the one in Beyond The Hills is the narrative destination. It may also be because Hollywood has half an eye on selling this movie to the Bible Belt heartlands which Mungiu almost certainly didn’t. Whether that audience will buy into the independent woman as disciple story presented here and a feminist film remains to be seen: the film is a long way from the right-wing “father knows best” mentality but then so are some of the more liberal or radical Christian traditions. The filmmakers claim in the press blurb to be making a film aimed less at a narrow Christian audience and more at a wider spiritual one. I found myself completely caught up in her story (or herstory) and never found it twee, clichéd or picture postcard-y. Not for one minute. It deserves to have both religious and non-religious people go and see it and make up their own mind.

Mary Magdalene was released in cinemas on March 16th, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on VoD on Monday, July 9th, and on DVD/BD on July 23rd.

Dayveon

The film’s titular character (Devin Blackmon) finds amusement through the barrel of a gun, aware that a similar weapon robbed him of his brother’s life. Blackmon heads an all-black cast and delivers a strong performance for such a young actor. Playing a perturbed teenager, Blackmon is solemn at moments of mourning, charismatic at moments of elation, angered at his circumstances and confused at his space in life. He rejects the comfort of his sister’s boyfriend (and surrogate father figure) Brian (Dontrell Bright), for affinity with a local Arkansian gang, The Bloods.

Through this gang, Dayveon sees the actions of the guns he so obsessively longs for and the damages they cause. While the script is guilty of deviating from place to place (character arcs are started and ended in minutes, plus the film ending is a bit disjointed), it’s an arresting look at an America that currently talks of artillery on a daily basis. Director Amman Abbasi is passively anti-gun, as characters point to the life-held wounds they receive from fire-arms and as Davyeon comes to the realisation that vengeance and killing will not bring his brother back.

There is a continuous strain of scorching sun setting on the camera, rare a scene in which characters don’t sweat audibly and visibly. There is something real here, the actors speaking in an audible untrained local accent, which – despite sometimes being difficult to follow – still gives the sense that this is reality unfolding on the screen; Davyeon’s life could be anyone’s life.

The film doesn’t shy away from the seedy underbelly of crime. Davyeon, a 13-year-old, leisures uncomfortably in strip joints, partaking in liquor store robberies and watches bare knuckle boxing matches. All of this is shown as naturally as possible; the carefully calibrated realism is shot by DP Dustin Lane in a mannered handheld 4:3 angle. But there is a beauty at play here; a common motif seen throughout the film concerns Davyeon cycling throughout the Arkansas countryside, however stupid he feels his bike is (as he tells his audience during the opening voiceover), it’s a sense of freedom for him, speedways and greenways, a timely reminder for audiences (and for him) that for all the grief and paraphernalia he is what he is: a kid.

Dayveon is showing at the Glasgow Film Festival taking place right now!

Old Beast

Talk about a rebel without a cause, Lao Yang (Men Tu) pinches his children’s hospital donations meant for his wife’s surgeries. Understandably upset, his sons take him to sign a contract for all future expenditures, an action that turns violent from both parties. Angered, Lao Yang reports them to the police – but will his conscience allow for such a folly? Produced by established Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai (whose past directorial credits include Beijing Bicycle, 2001, Shanghai Dreams, 2005, and In Love We Trust, 2008), this is a movie that takes familial conflict to another level altogether in Ordos, the hometown of writer/director Ziyang Xhou, a city often described as a “modern ghost town” and a “failed utopia”.

Ziyang Xhou’s script is as thematically rich as one would expect for such a familial drama, as naturalistic and material imagery draw viewers to a China witnessed by three generations. Camels, cows, birds and cats all feature throughout, each encompassing the state Lao Yang finds himself in. He values love and money equally and the costs come at the price of the animals he wishes to sell.

Lao Yang is a difficult character to invest in. He gambles, he boozes, he serially cheats on his wife, even having the temerity to steal money from her while she’s comatose. It is to Men Tu’s credit as a craftsman that audience members are compelled to follow him throughout his few moments of heroic glory and many moments of pathetic grovelling. Foolish and selfish he may appear, it is clear Lao Yang merely intends to be a loving father and grandfather in a Chinese economy that has left him near destitute.

Despite the austerity of the synopsis, this script is often darkly comic, as our grunting lead bumps into an old farming friend, promising to mind his camel, only to sell it for beef prices. Cinematographer Mathias Dalvaux keeps the attention centred over compositions of widely emptied laneways and brick damaged apartments. Ordos is gritty, barren-looking, crime-ridden, banality-bidden and money-focused (quite literally, there are a number of close-ups that wade over bundles of notes throughout this film). Prettily filmed and morally ambiguous, this is a familial drama that keeps a good sense of pulse and purpose.

Old Beast is showing at the Glasgow Film Festival taking place right now!

Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me

This documentary brings us through the various stages of Davis Jr’s life, a timely reminder of how difficult it was for black people to become entertainers in the 1950s and 1960s. Director Samuel D.Pollard uses this as a vehicle to show the differing facets of his subject’s life. Although Pollard makes it clear to his viewers that his subject challenged and broke through boundaries, it came at a price few paid in the manner Davis did. The newest addition in the American Masters canon, this is a documentary that allows the life of Davis to tell itself, though fails to contextualise it in the context of racial politics of 2018.

Through archived performances and interviews (segmented with interviews conducted by Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte and Jerry Lewis among others), viewers are welcomed to the world of Davis, who though he joked anecdotally that by being Puerto Rican, Jewish, black and married to a white woman “when I move into a neighbourhood, I wipe it out”, his lack of acceptance in either white or black communities hurt him deeply.

There is no shortage of material on display here, clips of Davis imitating Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney on chat shows (Davis was the first black person to publicly imitate the voices of white actors on television) intercuts with timely reminders that he was the first black American to sleep at the White House. The film braces back to Davis’ childhood, making audiences aware that even as a three-year-old he tap-danced loudly and proudly on stage.

Although a rip roaring success as an entertainer, behind closed doors, Davis faced bomb threats after marrying Swedish actress May Britt in 1960. Pollard also points a political portrait of his subject; the film starts with Davis accompanying Richard Nixon at one of his campaign speeches, highlighting that Davis was the one member of the Rat Pack who wasn’t invited to John F.Kennedy’s inauguration.

Strangely, for a film that takes a reflective look at Davis as a black artist in the then predominantly white world of entertainment, it fails to make a contemporary comparison to artists of today. It ends with a youthful Michael Jackson paying tribute to Davis, but how has Davis’s influence transcended his death? The audience is left unsure. At a time when #BlackLivesMatter has been a talking political point, not to mention, less contentiously that the United States has seen an African American president lately (something Davis himself would probably never have envisioned), Pollard fails to contextualise Davis’s life to an audience who were born after Davis’s death in 1990.

But as a testament to a life of entertainment and as a look at the human off camera/stage, Sammy Davis Jr: I’ve Gotta Be Me works serviceably. It is showing in the Glasgow Film Festival, which is taking place right now.

Touch Me Not

This is as close to a tactile experience as you will ever get from a moving picture. Touch Me Not starts with the extreme close-up of a male body, so close you could even count the body hairs. The camera navigates through the unidentified entity: legs, penis, stomach and nipple. This is a suitable taster of incredibly intimate and human film that will follow for the next 125 minutes.

Romanian director Adina Pintilie establishes a dialogue with several real-life characters, in what can be described as a documentary with flavours of fiction, in a roughly congruent arc. Laura, Tómas, Christian and Hanna and Hanna have a very different relation to their sexuality and bodies, and they are all working together in order to overcome their fears and and claim control of their lives. Laura is middle-aged voyeur. She hires a young and good-looking male prostitute whom she watches while he masturbates. One day, she hires the services of Hanna, a 50-something-year-old transsexual extremely confident of her sexuality and her body, despite knowing she doesn’t fit beauty standards. Laura wants to learn how to be as relaxed and liberated.

Meanwhile, Tómas – who has full-body alopecia – is challenged to touch Christian’s face in some sort of therapy session. Christian is severely disabled, with a disfigured body, protruding teeth and saliva constantly drooling from his mouth. Tómas confesses that he feels uncomfortable at doing so, which doesn’t upset Christian. The diminutive disabled man, who has virtually no movement in his body, is very comfortable in his own skin, and it looks like Tómas could learn a lot from him. Christian doesn’t like being told that he “suffers” from a disability, because he’s entirely happy about his life and his looks. . He’s married to a loving able-bodied partner called Grit. He describes himself as “very good-looking”, and his relationship to Grit as “very balanced”. There’s no time for suffering in his life. An incredibly sobering and inspiring attitude.

Hanna and Christian are the two least normative individuals. Yet they are the ones who are most satisfied with their bodies and sexuality. They are perfectly happy to get naked and to carry out new sexual experiments. They are both regulars in a BDSM club, where punters perform their sexual fantasies in front of each other. Eventually, Laura and Tómas begin to open up, face their fears and overcome their limitations. In the closing scene, Laura dances naked to the camera, in a very potent cathartic moment (pictured above). You too will feel like taking your clothes off and spinning around naked in front of everyone else. And proud of your gorgeously imperfect body.

The director never contextualises the movie. We are never told where the story takes place, where these people come from (except for Tómas, who mentions that he’s Icelandic), what sort of therapy is being conducted. This is a movie about human beings, psychological and bodily sensations, devoid of political connotations.

The cinematic apparatus is often foregrounded in Touch Me Out. The director herself opens the film by raising the question “what is this movie all about”, plus showing her camera and filming equipment. It all comes full circle at thje end. Images of the camera screen often drive the narrative, and the director also steps in front of the device. She talks about her own fears, her darkest dreams and her inability to cut the umbilical chord connecting her to her mother. This is metalanguage taken to an extreme, twisted around and turned upside down.

The candid sexuality and graphic images of a disabled man having sex represent another daring aspect of the movie, following in the footsteps of Spanish filmmaker Antonio Centeno (of Yes, We Fuck, 2015, and Living and Other Fictions, 2017). You will even see Christian’s fully erect penis, which he describes as normal functioning and one of the favourite parts of his body (it is indeed a very beautiful cock). Top it all up with a soundtrack by Berlin industrial act Einstuerzende Neubauten, plus screechy chords and human shrieks à la Alan Vega of Suicide. Touch Me Out is a visceral journey of self-discovery throughout.

Touch Me Not showed at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It won the top prize, the Golden Bear – an enormously well-deserved and audacious recognition. It premieres in the UK a part of the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and the 21st. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, October 19th.

Mug (Twarz)

In a small rural town of West Poland they are building a giant statue of Jesus Christ. The Polish wonder (which does in fact exist!) is named Christ the King, and it’s intended to outshine the Christ the Redeeemer of Rio de Janeiro, at least in size. Unfortunately the builders can’t get its head in the right position. But this isn’t the only problem they’re facing. Jacek (Mateus Kosciukiewics) accidentally falls inside the statue while it’s still being assembled and his face becomes severely disfigured. He undergoes a full facial transplant, the first of its type in the country.

Despite the successful operation, Jacek’s life will never be the same again. He has to take large amounts of immunosuppressants so his body doesn’t reject the new face, he can’t do trivial activities such as swimming and drinking, plus he becomes partially blind and his speech hardly intelligible (at least in the beginning, before he gains control of the new facial muscles). His beautiful girlfriend Dagmara dumps him. His mother also has difficulties engaging with her “new” son, as she confesses to the local priest. Children and adults often describe him as a “monster”. He abandons his dreams of moving to London and instead becomes the face of very heterodox and un-PC advertising campaigns.

The film title in English acquires a double significance. A “mug” is a face, but it’s also British slang for a stupid person, which is exactly how people perceive the new Jacek. They forget that his mental faculties have not been affected by the accident at all, and instead judge him on his looks and speech. Ultimately, this is a satire of religion and small-town mentality, and their inability to embrace the different.

Mug has a lot of problems, too. The topics of religion and facial disfigurement don’t entirely fit together, except for a sequence when Jacek is exorcised (one of the best moments of the film). The scene when Jacek falls inside the Christ – which carries a strong symbolism and could fuse the two topics together – is extremely quick and you can hardly make out what happened. The surgery is entirely neglected, and his recovery is surprisingly quick, leaving the narrative a little implausible. Plus the make-up isn’t too convincing: it’s possible to clearly see the mask around Jacek’s eyes at least once. Some of the humour feels stale, with jokes about “kissing my arse” and sinning. To boot, the film is supported by a strange soundtrack blending heavy metal with Robyn, apparently in an attempt to contrast masculinity with femininity (Jacek likes metal, while Dagmara loves to dance to the Swedish singer). Once again, the result is a little awkward.

Mug showed the 68th Berlin International Film Festival right now, when this piece was originally written. It won the Silver Bear. It is available online with ArteKino throughout the month of December (not in the UK). It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 7th. Out on VoD on Friday, April 5th (2019). On Mubi on Tuesday, May 10th (2022).