Month: April 2018

Big Fish & Begonia (Dayu Haitang)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Around the age of 16, people in the spirit world must visit the world of the humans, with whom they are warned not to interact, as a rite of passage. Thus it is that teenage spirit girl Chun must pass through the elemental maelstrom linking her world and ours whereupon she is transformed into a red dolphin and made to spend seven days in the seas of the human world. On her sixth day, she hears a teenage boy play a dolphin-shaped flute to his sister; on her seventh she sees blue dolphins struggling in a fishing net. Her return to her world is blocked when she becomes entangled in a net between her and the whirlpool until the boy rescues her only to be himself fatally sucked into that whirlpool. This is more or less how the Chinese animation Big Fish & Begonia sets off.

Safely back in the spirit world, Chun understandably feels she owes him a debt so trades half her life to a soul keeper in exchange for that of the boy: she must nurture the boy’s soul which will be given the form of a fish in her world and release him back into the human world when the fish reaches adulthood, at which point she will die but he will live. She names the fish/boy Kun after a legendary sea creature of immense size.

There’s a lot more to it than that: firstly, an unrequited love story introduces teenage spirit boy Qiu who fancies Chun and looks out for her even though she treats him like no more than her big brother. Then, while the old aged male soul keeper watches over the souls of departed good people incarnated as fish, his equally old female counterpart watches over the souls of departed bad people incarnated as mice. Chun’s late grandma is reborn as a phoenix; her beloved grandpa, a Begonia tree. Also in the mix are a deadly two-headed snake, a mystical stone dragon and an unearthly ferryman who steers his barge along the clouds. And while in the human world the red dolphins swim among the seas, in the spirit world they soar through the skies along with cranes and dragons.

The whole is rendered in beautifully drawn animation as effective at portraying in the heroine’s internal life as it is in bringing incredible landscapes and fantastic creatures to the screen. The pace is mesmerisingly slow in places, breathtakingly action-packed in others. Where else can you see a girl sell half her life to save someone else’s, a man play mah-jong against three other versions of himself or the terrible portent of snow falling in the middle of Summer? For the finale, it throws in cataclysmic floods and waterspouts descending from the skies.

The production, which was intermittently on then off for some 13 years, was ultimately promoted by posts on Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter) then financed by China-based crowdfunding. Very much an indie production by two directors with a unique vision, it’s a landmark entry in the annals of fantasy film and animated storytelling which deserves to be widely seen. Its limited UK and Irish release means you’ll need to make a special effort to see it. You should do so though because this magnificent home-grown Chinese offering demonstrates just how tired and formulaic most Hollywood fantasy and/or animated films are. Don’t miss.

Oh, and be warned there’s a key scene buried in the middle of the end credits.

Big Fish & Begonia is out in the UK on Wednesday, April 18th. It is screening in both subtitled (independent cinemas) and dubbed (Showcase Cinemas) versions. We recommend the subtitled version as screened to press. Click here to see where it is being screened. Watch the film trailer below:

Subtitled:

Dubbed:

DMovies joins the fight for Brazilian democracy, as we get working at the coalface!

Posted on by victorfraga

This one has been in the oven for a year, and it’s now beginning to happen! DMovies is supporting its first filmmaking project, a documentary about the reactionary and anti-democratic developments in Brazil in the past few years, and the enthusiastic support of TV Globo (the largest media conglomerate in the continent). The movie will be called The Coup d’État Factory.

You too can support the project by clicking here.

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The world needs to find out about TV Globo’s dirty game!

In 1993 the British Channel 4 produced the emblematic documentary Brazil Beyond Citizen Kane, which denounced the anti-democratic and manipulative tactics of TV Globo, the largest television and media conglomerate of Brazil.

Now two Brazilian journalists based in London, Victor Fraga and Valnei Nunes, decided to give continuity to the 1993 movie, establishing a dialogue between the past and the present. The new film, which will be called The Coup d’État Factory will reveal that TV Globo has hardly changed throughout the decades, retaining its highly biased and unethical journalistic practices, aligned with the interests of large capitalists.

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The new documentary

The new documentary The Coup d’État Factory will have a duration of approximately 75 minutes, and it will establish a dialogue between the past and the present. It will include footage from its predecessor Brazil Beyond Citizen Kane, as well as images collected in the past couple of years (mostly with the support with alternative of Brazil). Brand new and exclusive interviews will represent the most important pillar of the movie.

Interviews already confirmed or in the process of being requested include: elected president Dilma Rousseff, former president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, senator Roberto Requião, congressman Jean Wyllys, congresswoman Benedita da Silva, senator Gleisi Hoffman, music composer Chico Buarque, British-Australian Human Rights Lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, artist and activist Brian Eno, British MP George Galloway, writer Naomi Klein, lawyers Cristiano e Valeska Martins, producer of Brazil Beyond Citizen Kane and media professor John Ellis, city councillor Leonel Brizola Neto, homeless activist Carmen Silva Ferreira, political commentator Breno Altman, journalist and former Globo presenter Paulo Henrique Amorim, and many other politicians, activists and intellectual from Brazil and beyond, as well as members of the public (Globo viewers).

The movie will feature an original soundtrack including artists engaged in the fight against the deeply reactionary events taking place in Brazil. They include Naked Universe and Muntchako (already featured in the crowfunding teaser above). We are currently having a conversation with artists such as Linn da Quebrada, Dagruta, L_cio & Boratto and Chico Buarque, amongst others.

The film will be partially funded through a crowdfunding effort. Just click here in order to support our campaign. The platform is in Portuguese, but all the material has been translated into English, just scroll down in the “sobre” (“about”) section and please make a donation!

Below is the short film teaser (the longer version can be found on the crowdfunding link above):

* The images in this article are from the 1993 documentary Brazil Beyond Citizen Kane, except for the one at the top which is owned by Stuckert (it is an aerial shot of Lula being protected by crowds as he hands himself in following an illegal arrest warrant).

The animated life of Isao Takahata!!!

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In the twin worlds of animation and movies, Japanese director Isao Takahata – who died yesterday aged 82 and whose death was announced earlier today by Studio Ghibli – was one of a kind. In 1985, following the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) which Isao Takahata produced and Hayao Miyazaki directed, the two men founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. People who know Ghibli tend to know the Miyazaki films, blockbusters in their home territory of Japan and big successes among family, animation and foreign language audiences internationally. Very fine films they are too. But Takahata is a slightly different kettle of fish.

Where Miyazaki, at least until he reached old age and started making noises about retiring, turned around a new film about every two years or so and these tended to be hits, Takahata often took twice as long and the resultant films were much less viable commercial propositions. This is the man who, for example, early in Ghibli’s history made a live action documentary about canals (The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals/1987), something about which he was clearly passionate but hardly the sort of blockbuster follow up to Nausicaä that would impress the bean counters.

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Not just another animated face

His next Ghibli film, the profoundly affecting Grave Of The Fireflies (1988), was a long way from traditional children’s animated fare being the story about a young boy and his much smaller sister orphaned during WW2 and their struggle to survive in an abandoned bomb shelter on a riverbank. It’s harrowing, tear-jerking and stunning.

Other films included Only Yesterday (1991, pictured above), in which a 27-year-old office girl rediscovers herself upon moving to the countryside. It’s peppered with flashbacks. The resultant film was considered so inherently Japanese by the Studio that for over two decades they refused to dub Only Yesterday into English, believing the task an impossibility. (Ironically, the excellent dub the Studio was eventually talked into a few years ago is in this writer’s opinion one of the few instances where for English-speaking audiences the dubbed version of a foreign animated film surpasses the original subtitled one).

His 1999 feature My Neighbours The Yamadas (pictured below) again broke the Ghibli mould in terms both of unfamiliar production techniques and visual style. Takahata wanted to create something akin to a newspaper strip cartoon wherein characters are loosely delineated by lines while the odd bit of pastel shading replaces the fully coloured-in look (the aesthetic historically popularised and locked in to the popular concept of what an animated film should look like by Disney’s industrialisation of the medium).

Takahata was determined to utilise computers – but not in the way that everybody else in animation did which was to create more immersive, three dimensional looking worlds and characters. He was after a completely different quality. If his approach indicated a purity of artistry, it made little economic sense. The Studio swiftly moved on to a more successful Miyazaki project (Spirited Away/2001) and Takahata didn’t work on another project for years. But he had introduced computers into Ghibli’s production process as a by-product of his artistic obsessions.

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A life extraordinary

The sheer quality of the director’s films inevitably had its admirers. In 2005, a Nippon Television Network executive approached Ghibli with the money to fund another Takahata offering so that he could go to his grave knowing he’d done so. Given a completely free rein, Takahata spent five years in discussion with a young Ghibli producer about a vague project which looked like it might never materialise. Eventually, he was talked into directing his own conception of an adaptation of the Japanese folk tale The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya (pictured below), but as production dragged on, dogged by Takahata’s perfectionist approach, it looked for a while like it might never reach completion. Takahata was dissatisfied with one element here and tinkered with another one there. Those who had to work with him must have been tearing their hair out. The film eventually appeared in 2014, a remarkably rich and strange work which no-one would make if their only intention was box office returns. Widespread international acclaim and an Oscar nomination followed.

Isao Takahata was a cinematic maverick whose refusal to play by the industry’s rules could easily have destroyed him. Instead, thanks in no small part to his association with Miyazaki and the latter’s considerable faith in him, Takahata directed a small number of truly remarkable films. We should be thankful his career went the way it did: he’s a director whose idiosyncratic vision overcame impossible obstacles to leave an indelible impression. His passing is a great loss which will be felt both by those at the Studio he co-founded and in the wider world of international film culture.

Mellow Mud (Es Esmu Seit)

Posted on by victorfraga

Renārs Vimba’s debut feature, Mellow Mud, started life in 2011 as his final project at the Latvian Academy of Culture. In the film, screenwriter and director Vimba takes us to Kaunata village in rural Latvia, where he spins an adolescent girl’s coming-of-age story against the subtle backdrop of Eastern European economic emigration.

The film initially sets the scene by introducing us to Raya (Elīna Vaska) and Robis (Andžejs Jānis Lilientāls), two children whose father has recently passed away and whose estranged mother moved to London in search of better financial fortunes. They are currently living with sharp-tongued paternal grandmother Olga (Ruta Birgere) on her small apple tree estate, where a social worker occasionally drops by to keep an eye on things. Early on, Olga has a night-time cardiac arrest, but instead of informing the village, Raya buries her grandmother among the trees and keeps things under wraps. With the help of Olga’s pension, Raya gains enough independence to explore her maternal abandonment anguish through the familiar tropes of wearisome wandering, minor law-breaking and emergent sexuality.

The plot has a few gaps a tendency to brush over the inexplicable holes that it creates. At times, it feels as if the film might be taking place as Raya’s teenage fantasy, although the conclusion is too sombre for this to be the case. Nonetheless, Vaska’s performance as the protagonist is a real highlight and one of understated perfection. She consistently conveys adolescent ennui in all its confused glory, with an insolent flick of her hood or through her playfully naive mendacity.

The rural setting is also refreshing, both in its gorgeous autumnal tones and as a canvas to explore the mixed fortunes of post-communist transition in the former Eastern Bloc. Young people have no future in Kaunata and leave for the Latvian capital. Conversely, the only character from Riga appears to have come to the countryside to manipulate its trusting community. The film’s most pertinent thread examines the ruthlessness of a free market that tears parents away from children left behind in the East. This is best portrayed in Raya’s climactic trip to her mother’s apartment in London, where rural intimacy is discarded for unfulfilled urban estrangement. However, I couldn’t escape the feeling that this theme was dissected with greater incision in another recent Eastern European debut, Piotr Domalewski’s Silent Night (2017).

Mellow Mud is abundant in worthwhile ideas that its promising female lead carries out to varying degrees of narrative success. The rural cinematic landscape has a tendency to be dominated by male characters (e.g. God’s Own Country, dir. Francis Lee, 2017) and the focus on Raya’s story is commendable, if not always believable. This is a solid debut and with some fine-tuning on future scripts, Vimba will definitely be one to watch.

Watch Mellow Mud now, with DMovies and Eyelet:

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco

Posted on by victorfraga

One participant describes: “Antonio spent a lot of time out on the streets”. This goes to show the humanity behind the famed fashion illustrator, a man whose work influenced Hannah MacGibbon and Paul Caranicas. His work was regarded on a similar plane to Andy Warhol’s, and his social circle included Bill Cunningham, Jessica Lange and Grace Jones. Where fancifulness and tempered directions to the outré have become antiquated and passé in recent years, the works of Antonio Lopez expressed the carnal and outrageous indomitability of female clothing of the 1960s and 1970s, the grandeur of the female form at its most extravagant and larger than life.

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco is a reminder of the vision Lopez had, the Puerto Rican born child wonder who could sketch as early as two years old. The documentary discusses and speculates on his overt bisexual nature, though the primary focus of this documentary is on the art, the gift of the art and the models who were involved with the art. Bill Cunningham (here giving his last interview) discusses a witty story whenever a female model was unavailable, Cunningham would stand in a dress in their place. However successful Lopez became, he never forgot his roots, retaining everything that was raw, primal and excitingly sexual in all of his work.

Lopez is painted as a raconteur of the world, an artiste with no concept of deadlines or team co-operation, but gifted with the charm to sweet talk even the most hardened of editors. Even at his most irresponsibly hedonistic (many of the interviewees entail that nothing could stop Lopez from dancing once he got the idea in his head), each speaks of him with the passion and grace and awe the man brought to the fashion world.

The film veers a little too uncomfortably at points to describe Lopez’s party lifestyle. Viewers should be regarding him solely as an artist, one that was an undeniable facet of Lopez’s life, though, much like Freddie Mercury, his racier antics are as much a part of his fame as his art (little doubt the Rami Malek starred Queen bio will similarly entertain the singer’s glossier backstage antics). That said, the film (much like its subject) is anything but boring, as director James Crump lets camera clips seamlessly change from black and white to psychedelic paintings filling the screen a colourful palette for a colourful character.

Lopez’s death in 1987 is played with particular dignity as a particularly emotional Cunningham recounts how Lopez searched for any cure he could find for his Aids at a time when the disease was almost synonymous with death. It’s a fittingly sombre moment to a larger than life idol whose work maintains the decadence of an era retained only by photographs and memories.

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco is out in cinemas on Friday, April 6th.

Ghost Stories

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman) is a sceptic who hosts a TV show named Psychic Cheats. Any paranormal activity can be explained away, as he demonstrates time and time again to his studio audience. But then, out of the blue, he receives a strange package containing an audio cassette recorded by his former mentor Charles Cameron who mysteriously disappeared some years ago. The latter’s rationalist world view was profoundly shaken after he encountered three paranormal episodes he couldn’t explain away, so he points the former in their direction.

Thus the good professor sets off in pursuit of three separate ghost stories, convinced he’ll be able to debunk them. But each of the three episodes defies explanation outside of the paranormal. In the first, night watchman Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse) of a supposedly unoccupied warehouse comes up against an unearthly presence. In the second, young man Simon Rifkind (rising star Alex Lawther) has some unnerving experiences in his car in a forest in the middle of the night. In the third, city trader Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman) experiences the terrors of becoming a father. And then there are matters relating to Philip Goodman himself and an enigmatic, hooded figure…

This movie began life as a theatre play inspired by writers Dyson and Nyman’s love of portmanteau horror movies, three men on stools telling scary stories to a live audience. It proved a huge hit so the offers to film it rolled in. The writer-director duo had other ideas, however, and have made it themselves, retaining a down-at-heel British sensibility to the proceedings. More impressively, while the original worked on the stage, the pair have taken their material, stripped it down to its essentials then rebuilt everything from scratch for the moving picture medium.

Adaptation can so easily be a recipe for disaster. Your scribe has lost count of the number of movies he’s seen adapted from great plays or books which fall flat in screen adaptation because they’re exactly that: filmed books or filmed theatre. Happily, Ghost Stories avoids that common pitfall to prove highly effective as a cinematic outing. Parts of it will creep you out even as it delivers its fair share of effective shocks and surprises. In short, it does everything it claims on the tin. The casting is spot on and you’ll find yourself completely caught up in the three stories and the elements that link them together. Don’t miss.

Ghost Stories is out in the UK on Friday, April 6th. It’s on all major VoD platforms on Monday, August 20th.