Red-haired Katy (Elinor Machen-Fortune) lives with her mother Lucy (Fiona Whitelaw) somewhere in the suburbs of West London. The verdant neighbourhood looks peaceful and quiet, the type of perfect residential environment for bringing up your teenage daughter. But there’s unrest creeping out of the apparently placid streets into Katy and Lucy’s home: a local street gang has decided to pick on Lucy.
The bullying tactics are profoundly dehumanising and intimidating. Katy is branded a “twitchy bitch” (in reference to the body language often associated with Asperger Syndrome). The bullies taunt and insult her at her doorstep, and one day they eventually break into her house. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Katy struggles to develop a romantic relationship with Roxy (Elijah Baker), who is very closely associated to the gang. The young man becomes infatuated with Lucy after watching her sing in a local open mic night. He is genuinely split between his street friends and the fascinatingly coy Katy.
Despite being shy and introverted, Katy is not a weak character. She is undaunted by the knowledge of her disability. She does not wish to be seen as different and vulnerable. She’s prepared to confront her bullies, and her reaction will eventually land her in trouble with the police. Machen-Fortune has Asperger Syndrome in real life, which means that this must have been a profoundly liberating experience for the young actress. But she doesn’t “suffer” from her condition. I’m A Celeb star Anne Hegerty recently said: “I don’t suffer from Asperger. I suffer from idiots”, which also bodes very well for Elinor/Katy.
Acceptable Damage is a very tender and feminine film, produced (Anda Teglas) directed (Lavinia Simina), written (Fiona Whitelaw) and starred (Machen-Fortune and Whitelaw) by women. Tender doesn’t mean rosy and pretty. The photography is mostly dark and sombre with sparse artificial lighting, giving the film a certain realist feeling, plus rendering the whole experience a little mournful and jarring. It’s as if the DOP was saying: “youth is at ebullition, yet the outcome of such agitation isn’t always colourful and pretty”.
The institutions that failed to help Katy during her ordeal are also central to the story. Her mother Lucy frantically attempts to engage the police and even her local MP to no avail. An officer tells her: “vandalism and abuse is not an emergency”, while her MP dismisses her with an vapid remark: “as I understand this is an ongoing situation, and it’s monitored by Safer Neighbourhood Team”. She is instructed to send an e-mail, despite not being computer literate – this reminded me of I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016), where the protagonist is forced to the grapple with the technology that he has never used.
Our lack of preparedness to deal with certain types disabilities becomes apparent, even in a society that takes disability more serious than most other countries. The mother’s desperation at such the consistent failure to help her daughter is entirely palpable. You will feel both indignant and moved. Also, be prepared for a very powerful denouement, which will hit you right in the nose!
Acceptable Damage premiered on March 7th (2019) at the Regent Street Cinema in London, in a partnership with DMovies. It’s out on VoD (Amazon, GooglePlay, Microsoft XBox and Sky Store) on Monday, March 25th. It shows on September 4th as part of the British Urban Film Festival in Ealing. It won the Best Action prize at the National Film Awards in 2021.
From as far back as the Tower of Babel, humans have seen language as a divisive tool. Film has worked around language barriers since the days of black and white silent reels using subtitles, dubbing and elaborate body language. But if working around a foreign tongue is such a hassle, why bother?
In many ways, the intricacy and unique nature of language adds new layers of meaning and emotion that can’t be found through a simple translation. There are phrases that just don’t work in stilted translations (think John Kennedy’s iconic “ich bin ein Berliner” for starters, pictured below) and of course the limitations placed on casting those who can only speak the main language of the film can be incredibly detrimental to the realism and intersectionality of the cast.
It is also crucial to note that there is a power dynamic here that those in the cinema industry rarely discuss: the colonial hangover of portraying ethnic minorities as speaking in stilted, broken English or, worse, presented in yellow or blackface.
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Tongue twisters
When, as an actor, you perform your own cultural stories and your nation’s history in your first language, you can take command of what you are saying. You can speak in the rhythm and motion of your mother tongue, fully engage with the script in a way that works for you, and take back control over what you truly want to say about your country’s past, rather than parroting the words of a foreign screenwriter.
When you are working in a language that you don’t know very well, the consequences can be somewhat dire. There have been hilarious translations over the past – The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) famously became “If you Leave me, I Delete You” in the Italian translation, and the translation for Twister (Jan De Bont, 1996) became “Run! Run! Cloudzilla!” in Chinese. And that’s just movie titles. The problem becomes far more complicated when you have to dub entire dialogues in a film. And even if you have got a really good translator on set, sometimes the poetic and personal nature of dialect and accent become lost when distributed abroad.
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Dubbing reinvented
But if I’m going to point out a problem, I might as well point towards a solution, or at least a film that has overcome these difficulties spectacularly well. That film is Air Strike (Xiao Feng, 2018; pictured above). Or The Bombing, if we are talking about the European title. Or Unbreakable Spirit in China. It stars Bruce Willis, Adrien Brody and many Chinese actors). The film tells the story of the Japanese bombing of Chongquing in WW2, a horrific campaign that is not widely known outside of China due to the Eurocentric focus on the conflict that the West tends to take. Using American, Chinese and Japanese characters, speaking their own languages, the film manages to transform a simple war movie into an intersectional marking point in cinematic history.
With over 55 speaking roles dubbed over a four-week period, followed by six weeks of sound mixing, the task of translating the film was a mammoth one. Talent is so often blurred by an unconvincing dub, but the film’s rythmo band dubbing technique allowed Chinese star Bingbing Fan (pictured below),to appear to Western audiences as she appears to Chinese speakers, every word delivered at the same pace and rhythm as her own voice.
The “band” is actually a clear 35 mm film leader on which the dialogue is hand-written, together with numerous additional indications for the actor – including laughs, cries, length of syllables, mouth sounds, breaths, and mouth openings and closings. The rythmo band is projected in the studio and scrolls in perfect synchronization with the picture. A little bit like a teleprompter. You can see an example here.
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Words tailored for your lips!
It’s fascinating to watch, and the success of Air Strike backs up how much it is transforming the industry. Sold to over 100 countries, the impressive dubbing was among the key factors that made it so attractive to distributive buyers. The rythmo band method allows words to be stretched, compressed or even changed to perfectly synchronise with lip movements on the screen, allowing the pace of the dialogue to flow more evenly.
But this wasn’t simply a feat of dubbing. In total, the cast and crew spoke four different languages, and working together proved to be an interesting challenge. The directors in China relied on body language and hand signals to ensure that the cast understood what was happening. You can listen to the cast and director talk through this experience here.
In a globalised world, the film industry is becoming bolder and braver with the stories we want to tell, the languages we use to tell them, and the people we cast and hire to work on them. Films like Air Strike show that we can overcome the stumbling blocks of translation and language barriers and create innovative, poignant work that challenges the borderlines of traditional storytelling.
Her speech is soft and tender, a little nasalised and highly avuncular – the perfect voice to read a night story to a child. The woman behind the voice, however, is very different. She’s firm and stern, her nerves and her body made of steel. And it’s not night stories and fairy tales that you will hear coming out of her mouth, but instead some of the most decisive and iconic court sentences in the history of the US.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in 1933, and she is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the US. She was the second female in history to be confirmed to the court. President Bill Clinton appointed her in 1993 – he became star-struck after a very short conversation. Her achievements, however, began much earlier. RBG investigates Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s entire life, from cradle to present (Ginsburg is still very active at the age of 85).
In her early 20s, Ginsburg had to juggle her Law studies at Harvard, her two-year-old daughter and also her ailing husband Martin D. Ginsburg, who suffered from testicular cancer. She only slept two to three hours a day, we learn. Harvard registered a single-digit number of females amongst its 500 students, and Ginsburg was one of them. There was an enormous amount of pressure on these females, whose behaviour was expected no less than sterling. Ginsburg succeeded. Not only she graduated and became a successful lawyer, but also her husband made a full recovery. She often credits Martin’s positive attitude towards her career as instrumental in her achievements. The husband was more than happy to share the housework and to watch Ruth shine on her own merits. He joked: “she’s not allowed into the kitchen”.
Ginsburg focused on the equality agenda early in her career and long before she became a judge, in the 1970s. She argued and won the Frontiero vs Richardson case, which challenged a statute preventing females from claiming housing allowance. Perhaps more significantly, she argued and won the Weinberger vs Wiesenfeld case, where she represented a widower denied survivor benefits under Social Security. By arguing in favour of a male client she demonstrated that the equality agenda was fundamental to people of both sexes, not just to females.
After becoming an Associate Justice, Ginsburg continued to focus on the equality agenda. Yet she was not perceived to be a radical judge, but to sit roughly in the middle of the ideological spectrum instead. As the Bush years kicked in, however, Ginsburg quickly shifted to the left and is now firmly established as one of the most powerful progressive voices of the US. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the documentary opens with Republican voices (Bush, Trump, etc) using very strong and misogynistic terms to describe her: “witch”, “evil-doer” and “vile” amongst those.
There is no doubt that Ginsburg is an exceptional human being, and also a very affable one. Her large teeth and broad smile are contrasted against large and yet timid eyes hiding behind gigantic spectacles. Her backbone is stern, her posture erect, her head tilting slightly forward as if giving into the weight of her glasses. She blends rigidness with femininity in the right dose. She’s quietly formidable. Someone you’d love to have a drink with and also trust to make the right decision under the most extreme circumstances. Yet there’s something that makes me very uncomfortable about Ginsburg, and also about this documentary per se.
Despite (or perhaps precisely because of) her charisma, Ruth Bader Ginsburg should step away from the spotlight. The making of RBG is in itself a sheer perversion of justice, or contempt of court. Judges should remain discreet and solemn, particularly if they are still active. Such demeanour would never be permitted in the UK. Justice Denis Henry is probably the closest we ever got to a celebrity judge on this side of the pond, but the treatment that he received was nothing comparable to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg has been nicknamed The Notorious RBG, and become a regular television appearance. Her image is printed on shirts and mugs, a little bit à la Che Guevara. She has become a diva, a celebrity and a cult personality.
We might applaud such perversion of justice when the judge sits on our end of the political spectrum (such is the case with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which whom I share many beliefs). However, we should be more cautious. The idolisation of individual judges could have disastrous consequences. I come from a Brazil, home to a judge called Sergio Moro. Similarly to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, judge Moro is treated like a hero, like a celebrity. Unlike Ginsburg, however, judge Moro is a fascist. He’s personally responsible for an extensive lawfare campaign that culminated in a coup d’état, the political imprisonment of Lula and the sheer destruction of Brazilian democracy. None of this would have happened had he remained solemn and discreet, like a judge should.
The maverick Greek director of Dogtooth (2009) makes his third English language film and his first period costume drama. The Favourite is loosely based on early 18th century historical record. Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts who was beset by health issues, had some 17 pregnancies including many miscarriages and no heir surviving beyond the age of 11.
Her smart and shrewd childhood companion and friend Lady Sarah Churchill did much of Anne’s thinking for her, pushing her to support the merchant class political party the Whigs rather than the landed gentry party the Tories. The Whigs demanded support for a war against the French, while the Tories were resistant to the heavily increased taxes which funded the war effort at their expense. The relationship of Lady Sarah to the Queen was undermined by the arrival of maidservant Abigail Hill, a ruthless member of the gentry whose family had fallen on hard times and who was determined to fight her way back up the social ladder at any cost.
If that outline is true to the facts, the screenplay fashioned upon their foundation by Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara seek to explore less the historic detail of what actually happened and more the power dynamics of the three women involved. Olivia Colman is magnificent as the shy and vulnerable Anne who nevertheless wields absolute power as monarch. Rachel Weisz makes a fearsome Lady Sarah, whether the powerful manipulator seen at the start or the hideously disfigured victim of a riding accident she becomes towards the end as events turn against her. Emma Stone as the social climber Abigail however seems to be playing the same empowered woman character she always plays.
There’s a strong if historically contentious sexual element, with Lady Sarah the Queen’s clandestine lover until Abigail, who initially ingratiates herself with both Anne and Sarah by using a herbal paste to relieve burning sensations in the bedridden Anne’s legs, replaces Sarah in Anne’s affections. Further intrigues involve the English two party Parliament in the story’s background. Foppish opposition Tory leader Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult, the memorable psychotic from George Miller’s 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road almost unrecognisable under a lengthy, light coloured wig) senses Abigail working her way into the Queen’s favour and wants to recruit her to spy on Lady Sarah and Anne. Although a fringe character, he is more pivotal to the action than his rival the government’s Whig PM Lord Godolphin (James Smith) who the Queen, under Sarah’s influence, supports.
Apart from Stone’s arrival where she’s literally pushed out of the carriage into the shit on the ground, her excursions into the forest to collect ingredients for a herbal paste to ease a painful condition on her arm and scenes of Lady Sarah outside shooting and riding, the proceedings play out within the confines of Anne’s vast palace – kitchens staffed with cooks and maids, lengthy corridors with footmen, the Queen’s vast bedchamber which is also a well-stocked library.
Cinematographer Robbie Ryan frequently shoots from bravura angles although his slavish use of Kubrickian reverse tracking shots is less than original and while the overall look and feel of the piece echoes Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975), it lacks that film’s rigorous discipline and doesn’t similarly immerse the viewer in its eighteenth century world.
Lanthimos still hasn’t bettered his earlier, homegrown Greek films like Kinetta (2005) and Dogtooth (2009) both of which not only present strange and unfamiliar worlds to the viewer but also completely immerse him/her in them. Those promised a maverick artist on a par with the likes of Lynch and Cronenberg, on which promise his bigger budget, English language movies (The Lobster, 2015, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, 2017) haven’t to date delivered. As with those films, while there’s much to admire in The Favourite, it still fails to achieve those qualities of Lanthimos’ early films that marked him out as destined for greatness.
The Favourite is out in the UK from Saturday, December 29th. Watch the film trailer below:
Fairy tales have a mysterious sense of hidden meaning, covert messages, and lost faith and legends; a strange depth to them that no other genre of fiction carries. Symbolism of apples, resurrection and the power of women flow throughout these stories all over the world. One story, more than any other, continues to fascinate many of us: Snow White.
There have been over 30 versions of her across the history of film. All of these films have portrayed her as a slim, Caucasian beauty with a kind and passive personality. They include Disney’s 1937 iconic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (directed by David Hand, Larry Morey, Wilfrey Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen, William Cottrell and Perce Pearce; pictured directly above and below). But who was she based on? Where did the story come from? And how has film shaped the way we see her?
The original Snow White wasn’t some simpering maiden singing with birds over a well. She was a curvaceous beauty who enchanted the Emperor of China with her charm and charisma, battled her rivals in a cruel and often murderous court, and ultimately had to face her own vanity, leading to her downfall. So how did her image transform into the blushing, white-skinned Germanic maiden?
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In a faraway land…
The first Snow White can be found in a place you wouldn’t expect, 1,300 years ago in ancient Chengdu, a province of the Chinese Empire. Plucked from obscurity to marry royalty at the age of 13, and famous for her voluptuous figure and fondness for lychees, she nonetheless had her enemies at court. The rebel armies and rival courtesans all wanted rid of the elderly emperor’s favourite. He doted on her, employing 700 labourers to make her robes, presenting her with gold and jade worth millions.
All this attention created jealousy and anger, rumours stirring of corruption at the heart of her influence. Legend has it that the lychees themselves would be her undoing. She was found dead having eaten some, which were rumoured to have been poisoned. Others would insist she had been strangled by a rebel leader, but the truth has been lost in time. The lychee became the symbol of her downfall – and her decadence.
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An apple-to-lychee comparison!
Her body was wrapped in purple cloth – the Chinese colour for love – and buried without a coffin. The Emperor was distraught, and demanded her body be brought back to him to be buried in honour. When he was given her fragrance bag to remind him of her, he wept bitterly. He never truly recovered from his grief.
And so the story travelled down the Silk Road; the beautiful sleeping princess corrupted by poisonous fruit. On and on it travelled, down to the sea, across Italy and Germany. There it was mixed and met with other influences; the Christian elements of resurrection, the European apple replacing the lychee, and a glass coffin replacing the lilac fabric. Perhaps the dark colouring of her hair stuck, or myths of the whiteness of her skin passed down, for although she was reimagined in Europe as a Caucasian, she is the only fairy tale character with such striking physical traits.
Disney was the first film company to send her image reeling into popular imagination: yellow, blue and red becoming colours synonymous with her character. Like Lady Yang (pictured directly above and below, by Hanfugirl), Snow White is only 13 when she meets her ‘prince’, but the comparisons stop there. This story, along with the scores that would follow, were distinctly Germanic in feel: yodelling, European dress, kitsch cottages and a wicked witch replacing the archetypal evil stepmother.
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Return to the roots?
The other interpretations – most notably the live action retellings – are all based on this animation breakthrough. Every character since has followed the European version; a slim, white woman taking centre stage. As with so much of film as a genre, the biggest fish in the pond chooses the narrative. The white, Western world has laid claim to the tale and made it distinctly European in feel. Until now.
Snow White, it appears, is taking a trip back to her origins. While she won’t be appearing as Lady Yang – a story perhaps too adult for many young Snow White fans – the return is nonetheless interesting. In Snow White: Adventures In China (provisional title), the story will take place in the 19th Century, featuring a Chinese cast and following a tale of Snow White and her rivalry with an embittered sorceress. A story, perhaps unwittingly, eerily echoing the competition and rivalry faced by Lady Yung hundreds of years earlier.
Big Screen Entertainment Group (BSEG) is overseeing the project in conjunction with a Chinese production team, East and West mingling once again across the tale. As film is a genre which so often struggles with presenting an intersectional approach to storytelling and production, it will be intriguing to see how this plays out. Hopefully Snow White will be the first of many fairy tales being retold in their cultures of origins.
The new film is currently in development. The ball is definitely rolling, even if little information has been disclosed! The producers are both American and Chinese, and the actions will be shot in Louisiana (US) and China next year. BSEG are producing it alongside K7 and various Chinese investors. The project was first announced in 2015, and it is currently under production.
The film producer Kimberley Kates told DMovies: “I’m super excited about Snow White: Adventures in China: we’re into development and we are shooting next year. It’s wonderful to be retelling a story that is loved by children all over the world.”. The images in the picture gallery above are from the new production, copyright by BSEG.
Another year has gone by and DMovies is now nearly three years old. Since we started in February 2016, we have published 1,100 exclusive articles and reviews. We have attended both big and small small festivals and industry events on both sides of the Atlantic, always digging the dirty gems of cinema firsthand and exclusively for you.
This year alone, we have published 450 articles and reviews and renewed our partnership with VoD providers such as Walk This Way and ArteKino. Plus, our weekly newsletter has highlighted the best films out in cinemas, festivals, VoD and DVD every Friday to our 25,000 subscribers! We now have 100,000 monthly visitors on average.
So we decided to pull together a little list of the 10 dirtiest films of 2018. And what better way to do it than asking our most prolific writers and also our audience for their dirty pick of the year? This is a truly diverse and international list, containing very different films from every corner of the planet, some big, some small, some you can still catch in cinemas, some on VoD and some you will just have to keep an eye for, at least for now!
Don’t forget to click on the film title in order to accede to the our dirty review of the movie (not necessarily written by the same person who picked it as their dirty film of the year).
Alasdair writes: “Fashioning himself into the hearts of festival viewers for years with features as After Life (1998) even through to neo-noir Third Murder (2017), Hirokazu Koreeda is a master of conveying the purest of human emotions on screen. Yet, his Palm d’Or winning Shoplifters (2018), on the surface, appears in to be purely in the ilk of similar films in his oeuvre. Nevertheless, what is quietly breathtaking about his latest film is that it comes to subvert any predictable pleasures that one may hold before entering the theatre. Central to these small twists is the pivotal final act which lands a sly uppercut to one’s emotional state. Further, the direction is objective towards the titular group of people – they simply exist in a state of love, without any prejudices.
Personally, witnessing the dexterous Kirin Kiki give one of her last on-screen performances, after sadly passing away in September, adds a deeper level of profundity to the narrative. Supported by the whole cast, particularly Lily Franky as the dishevelled father figure, the visuals merge with Haruomi Hosono’s tender score to create a definitive cinematic experience not only the greatest of 2018, but of modern cinema”
Tiago writes: “Reset the world! Hirozaku Koreeda’s magnificent accomplishment by Director Hirokazu illustrates the beauty of the relationships and their impact on our lives – even where they disregard social conventions, laws, assignments and dogmas. The topic fits in very well in a world facing a crisis of human values. It’s a delicate, profound and controversial study of an unconventional family. And of how the family concept evolves with time”.
“Nuri Bilge Ceylan is never in a rush. His movies are meditative, talky, novelistic. The Wild Pear Tree is no exception, taking over three hours to explore the life of a graduate returning to his hometown to try and write a novel. Interweaving discussions about literature, Islam, love and success, its a film simply bursting with ideas. At first appearing to be plotless, once the central conflict between father and son slowly comes into view, Ceylan has slyly dug his claws in. Its an astonishing mastery of form, showing a director at the top of his game.”
“This is not your average Australian film. In fact, it’s as international as it gets. The action takes place in New South Wales, but the crew and cast are very international indeed. The director Partho Sen-Gupta is originally from Mumbai, while the lead role is played by Palestinian actor Adam Bakri. The topics addressed are also universal: cultural assimilation, Islamophobia and religious/political extremism.
Ameena (Danielle Horvat) is a young rebel. She lives with her mother, a Palestinian refugee. She’s an activist and a feminist. She wears a hijab out of choice because she believes that women should be respected for their fists, and not for their curves. She routinely engages in slam poetry in the local community centre, a competition in which poets perform the spoken word. The letters “S-L-A-M” are written on her hand, very much à la The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955). Her performances are hypnotic and passionate. Her room is covered in Palestinian freedom, fight racism and antifa posters.”
“This is a film that has a lot to say, with detail, subtlety and poetic wit. It made me laugh out loud and also flinch with alarm. The central spine is the relationship between best friends since childhood Colin (Daveed Diggs) and Miles (Rafael Casal). This relationship sits within a story of the changing neighbourhood of Oakland, California and the lethal relationship the police have with black men in America.
The first thing that draws you into this story is the visual and vocal panache of a style that realises this tightly wound genius of a script (Daveed Diggs/Rafael Casal). The editor (Gabriel Fleming) deserves a special mention here. Scenes are beautifully cut through with tight cut away shots of doors slamming, feet on truck pedals, faces on wall murals and the juxtaposition of regular and ‘hipster gentrified’ housing.”
“In a year in which Russia has often dominated headlines, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless reminded us that the most incisive social and political critique often comes from Russia’s own artistic community. His savage thriller is gripping throughout and visually arresting, throwing the viewer into a stark spiritual emptiness that resonates further West too”
“It’s the closest thing he’s directed to a mainstream movie, but Steve McQueen’s towering Widows (2018) is also his best work since Hunger (2008). His first three films cemented themselves under the performances of Michael Fassbender’s withering body, Cary Mulligan’s naked body and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s naked soul bearing, yet this bears an entire ensemble of credible performances. McQueen has not lost the eye for insurrectory, bringing the muscular Liam Neeson in bed with the beguiling Viola Davis, an addition to this painter turned filmmakers growing collection of incisive and thoughtful pieces.“
“Aesthetically impassioned filmmaking, Rumley’s visual eye and how he marries it to the soundtrack seers the experience of Crowhurst to one’s memory. Beneath this aesthetic flare lies a touching story of aspiration, that in the time of Brexit offers a reflective insight into the fallacy of the identity of this once great isle”
Selected by Ben Flanagan. Also pictured at the top of the article.
“What do we burn for? Is the question at the heart of Lee Chang Dong’s latest, an extended masterpiece that meditates on the transience of identity, voyeurism, and a changing South Korea. But the Hitchcock of it all, might come as a surprise.
Yoo Ah-in plays Lee, an aspiring writer who begins a fling with a Shin (Jeon Jong-seo), a girl he once bullied in high school. He soon moves out of Seoul and back to his father’s farm, where propaganda alerts from Pyongyang echo from across the border. In a nation that, Dong suggests, increasingly revolves around city life, his family duty has him tethered to a liminal Korean zone.”
“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 ourswhereupon she is transformed into a red dolphin and made to spend seven days in the seas of the human world.
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.”
Selected by our audience (most read review of the year, with more than 50,000 views).
“The world is blithely unaware of the coup d’état that took place in largest country of Latin America in 2016. Most people outside Brazil assume that the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff was a legitimate process in accordance with the country’s constitution. Many think that Dilma was involved in some sort of corruption scandal and that her removal was an entirely bona fide process. The 137-minute documentary The Trial reveals the details of a process so absurd that it’s akin to Kafka’s eponymous novel, which is mentioned the film. The book tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote authority, with the nature of his crime remaining a mystery. Not too to different to what happened to Dilma.
The Trial premiered at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival in February, when this piece was originally written. The film received a standing ovation that lasted nearly 10 minutes, the largest one I have ever witnessed at the Festival (which I have attended eight times). This is a powerful venting outlet and denunciation tool for Brazilians who feel that they have been denied a voice in the mainstream media.”
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And a last minute addition (let’s play it dirty and make it 11 instead of 10)…
“It exists as a headfuck, a hallucinatory trip, but it’s one worth taking and experiencing in all its lucid glory. The action takes place in 1983 in the Pacific Northwest of America that seems devoid of people, at least normal people. But we know this is no alternate reality, however much Mandy believes in the supernatural or the otherworldly. President Ronald Reagan appears on the radio rallying against drugs and pornography. If Mandy had been released at the time of Reagan, the moral majority would have flipped at its bent vision of religion and God. Still, the woods, mountains, and lakes are bathed in a fog of dreamy light and aura that offers a sense that weirdness is a norm in these parts.”
Here’s a Christmas movie with a difference. It’s December 1985 and young New York ad agency man Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) flies home to Texas to see his family for the first time in several years. Tensions are immediately apparent between go-getter son and his blue-collar worker father Dale (Michael Chiklis) from the moment the latter picks him up from the airport. Once Adrian gets to the house, his devoted mother Eileen (Virginia Madsen) can’t stop fussing over him while his younger brother Andrew (Aidan Langford), in his early teens, is distant having never forgiven Adrian for leaving.
Each of the family members presents Adrian with a different challenge. Dad is horrified at his Christmas present of an expensive leather jacket while Adrian is slightly shocked to receive a brand new Bible. Mom encourages him to call up Carly (Jamie Chung), a girl with whom Adrian grew up who also left Texas and is likewise home for the holidays and who he hasn’t seen for years. Andrew quit the school football team for its drama society, which is giving him issues with the father who understands contact sports but doesn’t really get the arts.
Underneath all of this is the presence of the local conservative Christian church, briefly heard as dad sits listening to sermons on a Christian radio station and seen as a worship service which the family attend in Sunday best where Adrian struggles to sing the words of hymns which make him uneasy. Elsewhere, Adrian has an embarrassing encounter with former high school jock turned supermarket manager Mark (Ryan Piers Williams) who has become a Christian and apologises for his past treatment of Adrian, although the two clearly have nothing in common.
Adrian learns from Andrew that his younger brother’s Madonna music cassettes and Bryan Adams poster have been taken off him because the local pastor deems them ungodly. When Andrew discovers that his brother saw Madonna on tour, he suddenly has a new-found respect for him. As a covert Christmas present, Adrian gives him a $100 voucher for the local Sound Warehouse to replenish his audio cassette collection, admonishing Andrew to keep his purchases hidden.
Contacting Carly, Adrian is invited to see her do an impressive improv stand-up gig where she expresses “all the shit you daredn’t say in real life”. Following some time at a dance club, they go back to hers which ends badly when she comes on strong to him but he isn’t really interested. As he tells her, “I’ve had a shitty year.”
Shot in aesthetically pleasing black and white by Ten’s cameraman and co-screenwriter Hutch, this boasts a strong script with deftly sketched characters and is beautifully cast and acted to boot. It completely understands its chosen time period of the mid-eighties, a time of LP records and portable music cassette players, before mobile phones and the internet existed. The film grasps very profound topics: the pain of the gay community being decimated by the AIDS virus in urban locations like New York and the deficiencies of Bible Belt Protestant fundamentalism in its inability to comfort those feeling that pain. And it grasps them without judgement of one side or another.
This is full of genuinely touching moments. Via an overheard conversation in another room, Adrian hears his mother tell his father he really ought to wear that leather jacket to work. Carly’s stand-up routine details her heartfelt experiences of racism as a Korean-American. And in a frank conversation with his mother, Adrian learns that she… well, you’ll have to see the film to find out.
Most people have experienced the joys and heartaches of spending time with their families at Christmas. While 1985 is set in the Christmas of that year, and some of its issues are specific to that date and time, there’s also much here that relates to wider human issues of family, how children deal with parents and siblings, how parents deal with children and how, sometimes, with the best intentions, that can all go horribly wrong. And can then sometimes, somehow, tentatively, in small steps, be at least partly put right.
A Christmas treat.
1985 is out in the UK on Thursday, December 20th, and then on VoD on Monday, December 24th. Watch the film trailer below:
DMovies first joined forces with Under the Milky Way and The Film Agencyin 2017. Our objective to reclaim the hidden gems of European film often overlooked. These movies are part of the Walk This Way project, which is funded by EU Media (a sub-programme of Creative Europe) and is aimed at fostering and promoting straight-to-VoD European cinema. The Film Agency is handling the PR and communications of the initiative.
According to Walk This Way coordinator Nolwenn Luca “Walk this Way defends the diversity of European documentary works. The public thanks to the programme have the chance to have access to films that they would not have been able to discover otherwise if they were not available in VoD”.
We renewed our partnership in 2018, helping to promote and take a different, refreshing look at cinema make in all corners of Europe. The 18 films this year ranged from Latvia to Spain, from the Netherlands to Italy, touching on topics as varied as painting (The Key to Dali), serial killers, (Profilers: Gaze into the Abyss), cooking (Step Up the Plate), disability (Life Feels Good), grieving (Tonio) and even a very dirty and twisted Santa Claus (Le Pere Noel). Check out all the details, exclusive reviews and how to watch these films by scrolling down.
And that’s not all. On October 26th, DMovies, Walk This Way and Infinita Productions held a very successful industry event in the heart of London, at the prestigious May Fair Hotel (which is also home to the London Critics’ Award). The event was entitled An Evening of Straight-to-VoD, and it included the screening of VoD hit Home (Fien Troch, 2016), a debate about the future of Straight-to-VoD and networking drinks. Find out the event’s key messages and learning curves by watching the video below:
Walk This Way, the Creative Europe MEDIA programme supported project, now closes 4th edition. Along the way, 39 right-holders have trusted the initiative to give visibility to a wealth of 156 European films, reaching audiences in 48 countries around the world. You can find out more about Walk This Way, key facts and figures in the infographic below:
And there’s more information in the video below:
And here is the full list of dirty gems released in 2018. Just click on the film title in order to accede to our exclusive film review!
What will happen when the food runs out of food? Well, in his 2015 documentary Valentin Thurn places this very notion front and centre! Exploring the scientific, agricultural and environmental ways we can prevent global food shortages, all due to global warming, it’s not a feature filled with bias but educated solutions to an impending world problem. Globe jumping from India to England then Germany, the multifaceted nature of its tone makes the issues it is dealing with a tangible reality for the viewer.
Part of Europe’s natural beauty, The Alps are towering force over every country they touch. Approaching the scope of the natural phenomena in a highly cinematic manner, directors Peter Bardehle and Sebastian Lindemann deploy a cineflex camera to capture every inch of its beauty in filmic splendour. Telling the tale of its history, socio-political and geographical story, the sweeping shots of the snow-tipped mountains interpolate you into its vistas. Accompanied by the Germanic tones of Emily Clarke-Brandt, man and nature are combined into one form.
This Spanish documentary explores Tomeu L’Amo’s maverick purchase of surrealist artist, Salvador Dali’s, first work for a cut-price 25,000 Spanish pesetas in 1988 (£132 in today’s money). Scratching away at the persona of L’Amo, scenes from the documentary allude towards a recent trend of re-creating history or pastness through a post-modern reimagination. Though the elaborate nature of the man could shadow the work, what emerges is a contemporary discussion on elitism, to which is unearthed in many aspects of society. Unlike the recent retelling of the life of Van Gough in Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, 2017) it is undeniable that The Key to Dali is grounded in the real world, opening pathways for art fans or not into the world of painting.
Adopting the same global view as 10Billion (Valentin Thurn, 2015), Barbara Eder’s hard-hitting work on the men and women whose job it is to investigate killers does not any soft punches. Intertextually referencing The Silence Of The Lambs, (Jonathan Demme, 1991) in numerous conversations, the grotesque nature of the classic is expressed as a means of the verbal descriptions. Not venturing into sadistic footage of murders etc, this doc holds respect for the victims. A natural intuition, we as humans constantly seek to explain the un-explainable and Eder’s film elicits this notion poignantly..
The concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been around in some form or another for over half a century, but in recent years it has grown so much in prominence that even entire countries are considering implementing it. Spanning both the hard left and the libertarian right, UBI is an Utopian idea that threatens the very ideals of what most consider to be the economic ordering of society. The latest film from Christian Tod considers the possibility of such a scheme, amassing a wide variety of politicians, activities and businessman to discuss its potential revolutionary aspects. The result is both a fine primer on the history of the scheme and a look forward towards how it may change the world we live in.
17-year-old Kevin, sentenced for violent behaviour, is just let out of prison. To start anew, he moves in with his aunt and her family and begins an apprenticeship at her store. Quickly he adapts to his new home and gets along well with his cousin Sammy, in his last year of high school. Through Sammy and his friends, Kevin meets John. Upon discovering John’s unbearable situation with his mother, Kevin feels the urge to help his new friend. One evening fate intervenes and questions of betrayal, trust and loyalty start to direct their daily lives more than ever.
Loneliness, disillusionment and the experience of first love reveal the character of Raya, a 17-year-old living in rural Latvia with her grandmother and her little brother Robis. A staggering turn of events shakes up their lives, and the young girl must come to decisions that even a grown woman would find difficult to make.
Elvira Lind’s documentary profile of contemporary dancer Bobbi Jene Smith captures new beginnings, endings, and everything in between, and faces the fact that you can switch your life around at just about any time. Having left Guillard at 21 to join Israeli dance troupe Batsheva, we meet Bobbi in a state of arrested development, but about to change things. As a dancer her accomplishments are unparalleled, but she’s now 31 with a Kanken Backpack, a decade younger boyfriend, and little of her own agency.
Set set for both a personal and a political journey. From the moment we enter Irene (Anna Gieslerova) and Anna’s (Judit Bardos) apartment, we are clearly in Eastern Europe during the Communist era. The evocatively decorated surroundings with ‘pull out bed’ and utilitarian furnishings, the drab clothing and simple bread and cheese breakfast immerse us immediately in this world. The country is Czechoslovakia, and the decade is the 1980s. As Irene switches on the ‘Free Europe’ radio channel, we meet a woman who is willing to risk listening to forbidden news, glimpsing her position on the political system under which she is forced to exist. Mother and daughter share the extraordinary ability of elite athletes, giving them opportunities not afforded to most citizens.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on March 11th 2011 marked a turning point in the history of the Japan, when an earthquake followed by a tsunami hit the Tepco Nuclear Power Plant on the country’s Pacific coast. It was the first time in history that the Japanese government declared a nuclear emergency. It was also the first time ever Emperor Akihito spoke on television directly to his people. The last time an emperor broadcast a message live to his people was when his father Hirohito announced the end of WW2.
This film is a clash between the “rise-and-fall” gangster genre and a traditional fish-out-of-water comedy. Director Sydney Sibilia does a great job of depicting his group of oddballs adapting to their new life. Plot-wise, comparisons to the TV series Breaking Bad are inevitable, but while the acclaimed TV series carefully built up its world block by block, I Can Quit Whenever I Want is a much looser affair. In fact, with all its hyper-specific nerd jokes, it is closer in tone to The Big Bang Theory. The mileage of these jokes will vary with how much you understand each subject.
It all starts like a conventional French comedy. Laurent (Vincent Cassel) and Antoine (François Cluzet) are old friends going on holiday with their daughters, Louna (Lola Le Lann) and Marie (Alice Isaaz). But initial appearances can be deceiving, as director Jean-François Richet has something far deeper on his mind. A remake of the 1977 film with the same title, One Wild Moment exploits the limits of male desire, offering up a queasy moral play with no easy answers. As the title suggests, the film is structured around one key incident; the seduction of Laurent by Louna by the beach during a party. She may be the one who has started it, but she is only 17 and his best friend’s daughter, making Laurent’s willingness to go along with it all that more problematic.
They’ve chosen to name this work Heart of Glass, which evokes the existence of two widely-rcognised projects, the first typified from Joseph Conrad’s prose detailing the descent from maddening stance to madness, the other Blondie’s greatest song, one of the few New Wave records that sounds more contemporary with age. This Heart of Glass, on the other hand, shows how passionate work can saves lives and challenge the human experience in entirely novel ways, in the hands glass artist Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert.
An ensemble piece that combines fly-on-the-wall observation with lyrical reflections on the Bras family and food, plus a warm work that expertly depicts the passing of the baton– that’s probably the most succinct and accurate way of describing the documentary Step Up The Plate. The French title Entre Les Bras has a double meaning that’s impossible to translate: it means both “in your arms” and “amongst the Bras”.
It stars Michel Bras, owner of the the world-acclaimed three Michelin-star rated Bras restaurant in Laguiole, Southern France, and his son, Sebastien, who has worked in the restaurant for over 15 years and is being prepped to take over.
Getting the disability biopic right can be a difficult task. Lean too hard on the struggle and it can feel exploitative, lead too hard on the sentimentality and it can feel mawkish. Life Feels Good, directed by Maciej Pieprzyca, manages to avoid these pitfalls to discover the deeply human story underneath. Depicting one Polish man’s struggle with cerebral palsy from 1987 to almost the present day, Life Feels Good is a heartwarming and uplifting tale that never softens the edges and is that much stronger for it.
There is much to be made from death leading to life. Tonio (Chris Peters) is a 21-year-old finding joy through photography. His ambitious father, novel writer Adri (Pierre Bokma), has a differing view on life, while his wife Mirjam (Rifka Lodeizen) plays the peacekeeper in what still appears to be a functional family unit. The film cuts quickly to the untimely death Tonio undergoes and the grief his parents have to endure from now on. At times the film tries to find answers to grief, an unanswerable commotion, and the performances are stellar. A cutback to the past shows two new parents finding joy sleeping with their new baby.
Being a good father to a son is not an easy task. And neither is being a good son to a father. The bizarre and grotesque societal connotations of masculinity will often stand on the way of what should be a beautiful and tender relationship. As a result, fatherly love is often murky, sons are traumatised and whole notion of affection is mired in mud. Thankfully someone in France invented a father-son bootcamp where the two generations can reconnect through group therapy and bizarre activities. Well, actually the outcome isn’t as rosy as many would hope!
Nailing both the comic and sentimental sides of the festive farce, Le Père Noël is the perfect kind of holiday film to settle down to after a few mulled wines. Fun and tender in equal measure, it makes the most of its inspired conceit, cleverly pairing a career criminal with a young child slowly coming into contact with the cruel ways of the adult world. Key to the film’s mischievous sense of misdirection is its opening, layering different children’s Christmas wishes on top of each other. It lulls us into a false sense of security, thinking that this will be a very run-of-the-mill Christmas tale.
Nailing both the comic and sentimental sides of the festive farce, Le Père Noël is the perfect kind of holiday film to settle down to after a few mulled wines. Fun and tender in equal measure, it makes the most of its inspired conceit, cleverly pairing a career criminal with a young child slowly coming into contact with the cruel ways of the adult world.
Key to the film’s mischievous sense of misdirection is its opening, layering different children’s Christmas wishes on top of each other. It lulls us into a false sense of security, thinking that this will be a very run-of-the-mill Christmas tale. It centres around one boy in particular, Antoine (Victor Cabal), who writes that he wants a sleigh ride, and lies in bed patiently waiting for Father Christmas to arrive.
He is warmly wrapped up in bed, when, all of a sudden, he hears a bang on his balcony. As Antoine is still a very young boy, he believes that this man (Tahar Rahim) is the real Father Christmas himself. In reality, its just a cat burglar dressed in a costume, yanking us away from stereotypical tales of Christmas magic and into the gritty Paris underworld. Père Noël (we never learn his real name) makes it out of the flat in one piece, only to find that Antoine has followed him out of the apartment. There’s not much Noël can do to get rid of him; Antoine won’t stop until he gets his ride.
The rest of the film follows them on their hijinks journey, with Pere Noël finding more and more inventive ways to explain how his low-level life is exactly like that of Father Christmas (approaching a slum filled with drug addicts he explains that it’s his “French headquarters”). It works well as a festive comedy because it is, at heart, a warm-natured tale. The two of them have something crucial in common: Antoine’s father died when he was young while Pére Noël grew up moving between orphanages.
Pére Noël himself may be a crook but he still wouldn’t dare telling Antoine that Santa Claus isn’t real. Additionally, he has a pretty understandable motive; owing men more dangerous than him money. As a result, when Antoine follows him into the criminal underworld it doesn’t feel like the poor kid is being taken advantage of, rather that he is bonding with the father-figure that he never had. This gives the movie a certain sweetness that allows it to rise above mere genre fare.
Victor Cabal excels as the young boy, crucially playing him as a child and not a precocious foil to the immature petty thief. His pure innocence brings Noël’s journey into focus, letting him slowly come to terms with what his life has become and to make sure that Antoine doesn’t fall into the same self-defeating traps. It’s a simple Christmas message that easily could’ve felt a little pat. Yet, by focusing on character first and by bringing the best out of his two actors, Alexandre Coffre has concocted a delightful little study in contrasts.
Santa Claus (aka Le Père Noël) is available on VoD with Walk This Way on Monday, December 17th.
Free Soloing – referring to the act of mountain climbing without any rope or harness to protect you – is not for the faint of heart. The sport requires the inability to feel regular emotions such as fear, doubt or vertigo. Alex Honnold is no regular guy – while you’re finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning, he’s already climbed tens of thousands of feet.
He is hailed as one of the greatest rock climbers of his generation, but like so many thrill-seekers, he has his own personal Everest: Yosemite Park’s El Capitan wall. Spanning over 3,000 feet, topping it unaided has been the ultimate dream for every Big Wall climber. Yet due to its daunting height and seemingly non-navigable terrain, no one has ever even dared. Free Solo details this obsessive climber as he leads up to and eventually attempts the perilous climb.
Free Solo meticulously details the obsessive level of preparation free soloers go through ahead of a big climb. They don’t simply attempt to scale something on the first go but methodically go through every pitch, indent and crack to make sure that the route is even possible. It’s all about the relentless pursuit of perfection. If only one step goes wrong, Alex will fall to his demise. It theorises that acting under pressure can bring out the best in people – after all, there’s nothing like the ever-constant threat of death to keep you motivated.
These life or death stakes give the film a strong moral dimension; not only for Alex, but for his film crew, who know that they could possibly be filming his last day on earth, and his girlfriend, Sanni, who constantly worries that he will choose climbing, and his eventual death, over her. But he is incredibly persistent, and will not stop until he has achieved his greatest ambition. For him death means nothing compared to the failure of not being able to climb this massive rock face.
The entire film leads up to this climb, which makes for a highly nauseating watch. Like the first moon landing, no one knows if this incredible feat can even become a reality. This is the sequence that really sells the film, using a combination of climbing-cameraman and drone shots to really create a vertigo-inducing sense of perspective. It makes for a difficult yet awe-inspiring watch.
What motivates a man to do such a thing? It’s hard to tell. Although the film does dive into his childhood and his difficulties in connecting with his father,Free Solo is much more interested in Alex as a kind of one-track-minded superhero than as someone in pursuit of a very particular kind of folly. On the one hand, what he is doing is a magnificent feat of athletics, on the other its incredibly selfish to put your loved ones through the ringer in the pursuit of personal perfection. These psychological contradictions aren’t particularly teased out here, giving Alex the same kind of inscrutability as El Capitan itself. Now he has conquered the rock face, what is next for Alex Honnold? Perhaps his girlfriend has the even more difficult task of getting him to stop.
Free Solo is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, December 14th. Out on Amazon Prime on Friday, March 1st. More VoD platforms to follow.
Clocking in at just under four hours, An Elephant Sitting Still isn’t something you’re going to watch unless you’re prepared for a long-haul viewing. However it’s worth it. Hu Bo’s unremittingly bleak world might not be somewhere you’d want to live, but it’s most definitely worth a visit. That said, he only made the one feature length film before committing suicide. You can’t help but wonder whether the vision he presents here bore any relation to his state of mind leading up to that tragedy.
The morning after Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu) has slept with his best friend’s estranged wife, his best friend turns up at the apartment, sees Yu and throws himself out of the window. In a nearby flat, a couple try to talk their ageing parent Wang Jin (Liu Congxi) into entering a nursing home as they have scarcely enough room for themselves and their small daughter.
Meanwhile, 16 year old Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang) gets caught up in a row over the alleged theft of a phone by his friend Li Kai ( Ling Zhenghui) from school bully Yu Shuai (Zhang Xiaolong). In an argument Wei accidentally pushes the latter down a flight of stairs putting him into a critical condition. Now Shen’s elder brother Cheng is after him. Elsewhere, Wei’s horrified classmate Huang Ling (Wang Yuwen) finds herself and her lover, the school’s vice principal, the subject of a viral video which threatens to ruin both their lives.
All the characters’ pointless existences threaten to close down around them. As the fortunes of Yu, Wei, Huang and Wang take a turn for the worse in the course of a single day and night, dragging them into their intersecting metaphysical cul-de-sacs, the film follows each of the characters in a compelling series of single takes around their rundown daytime Chinese town which recalls the nighttime one in Have A Nice Day (Liu Jian, 2017). There’s a similar sense of hopelessness to that film, although its much briefer running length makes you wonder if Hu could have tried harder to say what he wanted to here in a shorter amount of time.
That said, Hu’s four-hour film is brilliantly paced and furnishes him the time he needs to explore his characters’ lives at some length. However, the ending just… well, ends, making you wonder if he could have ended the whole thing earlier or simply cut some scenes out to get the length down. (This writer is not sure whether or not that could have been done without ruining the film. But, maybe…?)
The title derives from a story, trotted out at the start, about a legendary elephant in Manzhouli Zoo who sits around all day without moving. Both Wei and Huang resolve to visit the beast – pretty much the nearest either of them get to any sort of motivation to do anything with their lives – while Wang also wants to visit Manzhouli for different reasons.
In the end, this is bleak and gruelling stuff – but well worth putting aside four hours of your time to watch.
An Elephant Sitting Still is out in the UK on Friday, December 14th, and then on VoD on Monday, December 24th. Watch the film trailer below:
