Month: September 2019

The Prince’s Voyage (Le Voyage Du Prince)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Hidden away in the LFF’s Family section where it looks like a suitably harmless piece of children’s animation, this turns out to be a fascinating exploration of difference and bigotry set among different simian races.

Prince Laurent, King of the Laantos turns up on the distant shores of the land of the Niokous. After being subjected to a full medical and scientific examination by Professor Abervrach and his team and their discovery that Laurent doesn’t speak their language, the Prince is sequestered in huge, secluded rooms within the Professor’s vast labyrinthine mansion complex.

Abervrach is assisted by a nurse named Nelly and the decidedly less friendly Elizabeth. He wants to present the newly arrived stranger to the science academy to prove his thesis about other races existing outside their country

The one person with whom the Prince really makes a connection is a boy named Tom. Selected by the Professor to be the stranger”s companion, Tom is gifted at languages, able to learn the tongue of the foreigner and consequently communicate with him. They talk for hours and become firm friends.

Through their discussions it emerges that the city visible through the mansion’s vast windows is slowly being overrun by the jungle surrounding it. This is confirmed by occasional elements of vegetation which appears to have forced its way into the edges of the mansion’s interior architectural features.

Eventually, Tom takes Prince Laurent on a trip outside to see the Victorian-styled city viewable from the mansion’s huge windows, where they board a tram and travel a circular route which takes them out of the city into the jungle beyond and back in again. They also find themselves attending local revelries in the form of a masqued event called the Festival Of Fear. Fear, it seems, is the guiding emotion in the metropolis.

Tom’s initiative in organising this trip will incur the Professor’s displeasure and lead to Tom’s being barred from visiting the Prince, who will later become caged like a zoo animal and put on public display. Tom will help him escape. Together, they will discover the wonders that lie beyond the confines of the city’s deeply regimented world.

The fact that all the characters are apes, some of whom treat others as inferior, has echoes of the Planet Of The Apes franchise(s) (1968, onwards) which originally sprang from French source material, Pierre Boulle’s novel Monkey Planet/La Planète Des Singes. It’s not Laguionie’s first foray into this territory: he previously made A Monkey’s Tale/Le Château Des Singes (1999).

The Prince’s Voyage is also remarkable for conjuring a whole other world, one in which a nineteenth century aesthetic holds sway. Somehow, that seems a good fit. Maybe it’s because Victorian sideburns are not entirely dissimilar to simian facial hair. Maybe it’s because on some subliminal level we make a connection between the period and Darwin’s theories of man being descended from apes. Either way, the visuals look fantastic on the big screen, taking the tale to a whole other level. And when The Prince and Tom finally leave the city for the jungle, what the directors achieve with that latter environment is equally visionary.

While there’s nothing here that’s unsuitable for children, this 2D animated slice of French fantastique is a clever fantasy that never insults an adult’s intelligence. Plus, the LFF are showing it in the original French language with English subtitles (with English voice translation on headphones for younger viewers). A visual treat.

The Prince’s Voyage plays in the BFI London Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

I Lost My Body (J’ai Perdu Mon Corps)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This unique 2D animation opens with a discussion about how to catch a fly before splitting into two parallel narratives. In one, a severed hand goes on a quest in search of the body from which it has become detached. In the other, boy meets girl. This is the boy who at a later point in the film will lose his hand in an accident. The opening fly discussion turns out to be a flashback of the boy.

The hand shows great ingenuity as it escapes rats in a subway, climbs medical skeletons in a storage room and duels with an aggressive pigeon in a roof gutter. It has a pretty hard time of it physically. And when it eventually finds its body, reuniting with it proves far from simple.

The boy, Naoufel (voiced by Hakim Faris in the seen French version and Dev Patel in the upcoming English dub), is working as a pizza delivery boy, a job to which he isn’t particularly suited. One night, he gets involved on a minor road accident which means he’s late with a delivery. The customer for whom he’s late is a girl, Gabrielle (Victoire Du Bois in French, Alia Shawkat in English), living in a block of flats. He gets into a long and involved entryphone conversation with her and, without knowing what she looks like, falls in love with her voice.

Naoufel then sets about trying to track Gabrielle down. This leads him to her ailing grandfather who he talks into giving him a woodworking assistant position in the man’s workshop. This turns out to be his dream job. But he initially wants the job to be near the guy’s granddaughter. And then these relationships go horribly wrong.

This will keep you guessing as to how the hand got severed and how the whole thing is going to work out. En route, the plight of the hand searching for its body will keep you riveted as it undergoes a series of perilous scenarios, while the parallel story of the boy, the girl and the grandfather proves genuinely affecting. Assorted flashbacks revealing elements of the boy’s childhood and his relationship with his father also prove illuminating.

It’s difficult to know how the film would play out as special effects live action – but as 2D animation, it works just fine. It’s not a horror film, more a sort of action-adventure, existential romantic drama, captivating in the relationship parts and thoroughly compelling throughout.

I Lost My Body premieres at the BFI London Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 22nd and on Netflix from Friday, November 29th.

Clemency

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

A mood-driven piece about the morality of capital punishment, Clemency depicts the pernicious effect this macabre, bureaucratic practice has on those who implement it. Particular attention is paid to Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), a death row warden who is prostrate with all manner of grief.

The film opens with Bernadine overseeing her latest execution – a lethal injection – as it goes horribly awry. We see the veneer of protocol and civility fall desperately apart as the prison doctor fails to find a vein in the inmate’s writhing body. Eventually, he manages to pierce his femoral artery, into which he pumps the three following chemicals – midazolam, to sedate; vecuronium bromide, to paralyse; and potassium chloride, to stop the heart. It is a genuinely visceral sequence that brings to attention the 75 botched lethal injections that have occurred since 1982, when the method was first implemented in the state of Texas.

However, the power of the opening belies Clemency‘s overall glacial pace – it is, to be frank, a portentous slog of a film. Of course, this is a subject that requires tact and solemnity, but Clemency has all the tiresome earmarks of a ‘serious’ indie – the staring, the drawn-out takes, the sparse dialogue. That’s not to say the film’s performances aren’t impressive – they are. As Bernadine, Alfre Woodard makes the best of the laconic script, imbuing her every fibre with barren anguish. Aldis Hodge brings a similar pain to his character Anthony Woods, who is scheduled to be Bernandine’s next execution. Both actors know how to command a static camera but their dramatic range is stunted by the coldness of Chukwu’s script and direction – they may be impressive, but they’re not involving.

The film is so lifeless, so torpid, that it feels like it’s taken a shot of midazolam with a dash of vecuronium bromide. But this is doubtlessly intentional, for Chinonye Chukwu’s film is very much a mood-piece that’s personified by Bernadine’s dejected malaise. She is, as her husband Jonathan (a charismatic Wendell Pierce) puts it, an empty shell. This mood and characterisation is all rather one-note, though. We can only be exposed to her lugubrious expression for so long, and the protracted sequence of her snotty nose towards the film’s end – in full 4K – is just beyond the pale.

All of this speaks to the myopia of Chukwu’s canvas and the brevity of her dialogue; she should have looked beyond Bernadine Williams and the procedure of capital punishment. Take the example of Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995). It offers a more dynamic account of capital punishment for it considers perpetrators, victims and the state. The characters’ emotional range goes beyond glumness and apathy, too.

Clemency premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in October, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on VoD on Friday, July 17th.

The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil

Posted on by victorfraga

Violent motorist Kang Kyung-ho (Kim Sungkyu) tailgates cars then after he and they have both pulled over stabs their unsuspecting drivers to death. One night, he picks mob boss Jang Dong-su (Ma Dong-seok) who fights back and gets away, inflicting wounds on the killer despite being first stabbed in the back. Meanwhile, his nemesis, cop Jung Tae-suk (Kim Mu-Yeol), is pursuing the same serial killer. Cop and gangster enter into an uneasy alliance to catch the murderer.

As South Korean gangster and crime movies have developed in recent decades, they’ve generally become slicker and, on one level, technically more proficient. Yet on another level, earlier South Korean gangster movies, while rougher around the edges, often have a lot more going on underneath the surface. This one however, while covering everything with the contemporary, superficially fast-paced and slick veneer with lots of impressive car chases and extremely violent one-on-one or group fights, achieves much more interesting dynamics beneath the slick, mass produced veneer.

The cop, for example, is first glimpsed in a car with a buddy on his way to a crime scene and stuck in gridlock. Spotting some of the mob boss’s men on the street, he gets out of the car to harass them, then pushes his way past several of them to get to the boss. The mob boss himself, meanwhile, who a henchman describes to the cop as “not having a good day”, is working out with a hanging punch bag. A few minutes later we discover that the hanging punch bag contained a man and that the boss was beating this man up. He’s a seriously nasty piece of work and when shortly afterwards the motorist tailgates him, it’s obvious the boss is not going to be your regular, passive murder victim.

Similarly, when the cop pushes his way past assorted gangster minions to get to their boss, you get the impression he’s someone who never lets any such obstacles prevent him reaching his goal.

As this races through scene after scene of frankly astonishing action set pieces, the developing relationship between cop and gangster, working together to catch the killer slowly emerges as the centre of the proceedings. The one wants to catch the criminal and put him behind bars, the other wants to find his attacker and wreak revenge.

Curiously, a scene of the gangster giving his men orders, to which vocal they respond as one, ” yes, Sir”, plays like a clichéd scene of a police superior addressing his cadre of officers in so many eighties Hong Kong thrillers. Indeed, the whole cop–gangster element plays out like a remade, remodelled John Woo movie, with slicker but arguably less gritty and exciting action – although it lacks Woo’s unique directing of bravura action to define his various characters.

That said, Kim Mu-Yeol’s cop possesses a certain charisma while Ma Dong-seok’s gangster will similarly stay with you long after the he final credits. But it’s Kim Sungkyu’s unflappable serial murderer, with his disarming smile, who steals the show; an arresting enough screen adversary to give the other two leads pursuing him a serious run for their money.

The whole is at once a very clever reinvention of the buddy movie and proof that it’s still possible to breathe life into a narrative form as seemingly exhausted as the hunt for a serial killer. Altogether, a hugely satisfying affair.

The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil played in the upcoming Mayhem (Nottingham), London East Asia (LEAFF) and Leeds Film Festivals (when this piece was originally written). In cinemas Friday, November 15th. On VoD in April.

Skin

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Running through this as a framing device and very narrow, ongoing thread is Bryon Widner aka Babs (Jamie Bell) undergoing the extensive and painful surgical process of multiple tattoo removal. For the narrative outside of this cinematic device, his head and torso is the site of numerous tattoos. In addition, when he removes his trousers to expose his inside legs to an interviewing lady police officer, they bear the indelible words “snitches get stitches”.

Bryon has been taken in, in more than one sense of the phrase, by Fred ‘Hammer’ Krager (Bill Camp) and his partner Shareen (Vera Farmiga) who run a chapter of white supremacists named Vinlanders. Their basic creed is that white lands like America should be for white people only and that those of different skin colour should be expelled. (Never mind the fact that whites stole the land from native American Indians in the first place.) We watch their m.o. as Fred approaches vulnerable, youthful drifter Gavin (Russell Posner) and offers him home and family in exchange for buying into an extreme right wing ideology, then puts him in Bryron’s care – a charge which Byron, who currently has complex issues of his own, almost immediately abuses.

So what’s going on with Byron? Initially, he’s on a white supremacist march where he badly beats up the black guy unfortunate enough to get picked on by Byron. Which later results in Byron’s being taken in for questioning by racist tension activist worker Daryle Lemont Jenkins (Mike Posner) and Agent Jackie Marks (veteran star Mary Stuart Masterson in a bit part). Outside of rioting and being arrested, Byron indulges in brutal sex with girlfriend April (Louisa Krause) who is likewise a member of Fred and Shareen’s gang.

But then, Bryon attends a rally at which are performing the three children Desiree (Zoe Colletti) Sierra (Kylie Rogers) and Iggy (Colbi Gannett) of single mum Julie Price (Danielle Macdonald). He finds himself defending them in extremely violent manner against fellow gang member Slayer (Daniel Henshall) and striking up a serious relationship with Julie which is destined to end in marriage, although it follows a far from smooth path and subsequently sours.

The film is based on a real life case on which Israeli-born director Nattiv has clearly done a considerable amount of research. It’s a terrific study both on the level of (multiple) character(s) and on the dynamics of US white supremacism as a movement and a phenomenon. Many of the actors dig deep to deliver astonishing performances.

This clearly applies to Jamie Bell. You wouldn’t lightly describe a Bell performance as one of his very best because it’s hard to remember him giving a performance which wasn’t really good, but he really stretches himself here.

The other standout performance is from Vera Farmiga, nothing less than brilliant playing a devious and manipulative woman in whose hands many lesser individuals are putty. In short, this movie is a tremendous piece of work, well worth seeking out while it’s in UK cinemas.

Skin is out in the UK on Friday, September 27th. On VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:

Rambo: Last Blood

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

It’s been 11 years since we last saw John Rambo kill dozens of people with guns, arrows, knives and even his bare hands – and with good reason. Rambo (2008, Sylvester Stallone) was so genocidally violent that we needed this respite, this breather.

Stallone had seemingly gone mad, directing a film that was far more vicious than the previous three films combined. He lifted the stark, savage aesthetic of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and applied it to the pulp of the action genre. There wasn’t a single memorable character in it, granted, but as a spectacle of murder it was something to behold.

So when the teasers for Rambo: Last Blood did the rounds, I had flashbacks of gore drenched .50 cal machine guns and all the other wanton gratuity that had so amused me as a 15-year-old boy. Surely Rambo had been a one-off, a moment of madness? After all, The Expendables 3 (2014, Patrick Hughes) was a 12A.

The BBFC’s issuing of an 18 certificate, then, came as a very welcome surprise. Not even the litany of negative reviews – or Rambo creator David Morrell’s abject disgust – could dissuade me from spending £8.50 at the Tottenham Court Road Odeon (there were no press screenings).

Well, the results are mixed. It starts off strongly with Rambo breaking a man’s clavicle, digging his finger into the wound and roughly fiddling with the bone until it breaks off. It’s nice – you don’t see that everyday.

Rambo then visits a brothel wielding not his signature 10” blade but a big metal hammer, which he proceeds to bury in the heads – and crotch – of several punters. This was a bold move to take, because whether it’s Drive (2011, Nicolas Winding Refn), Kill List (2011, Ben Wheatley) or You Were Never Really Here (2017, Lynne Ramsay), we live in a culture that’s saturated with hammer-based brutality. And I’m delighted to report that John Rambo, although being late to the party, decidedly holds his own here.

After remorselessly stabbing and even beheading a few more loathsome goons (he used his knife for that one), Rambo invites the cartel back to his ranch, which sits upon a labyrinth of weaponised tunnels. It is here that John reminds us of the full extent of his bloody ingenuity, using a variety of blades, tools and bombs to dislocate, dismember and destroy. However, while there’s some good stuff in there, it doesn’t match the sheer scale of Rambo’s Burmese massacre (perhaps that should have been the title?), and it’s for that reason that Rambo: Last Blood isn’t quite the send-off I had hoped for.

It is, even to the most nostalgic fan, a shockingly empty piece of work. The revenge plot is the tritest fodder imaginable and the dialogue was clearly written by someone in a catatonic state. Speaking of catatonic states – Sly Stallone’s performance borders on the inanimate. Of course, John Rambo has never been a character of great range, but Stallone’s work here is barely distinguishable from that of The Expendables, Escape Plan and his other recent, derivative efforts. In fact, the whole film is barely distinguishable – and that is a sure sign that John J. Rambo should go on permanent R&R.

Rambo: Last Blood is in theatres in September. On Sky Cinema and NOW on Friday, May 21st (2021).

Our dirty questions to Thirza Cuthand

Posted on by victorfraga

Born in Regina and raised in Saskatoon, in the South-Central Canadian province of Saskatchewan, Thirza isn’t your average Indigenous filmmaker. This Cree artist has been making audacious and experimental short movies since 1995 delving into the topics of LGBT sexuality and identify, while also questioning and toying with the boundaries sanity. Her work fits in very well with our dirty movie concept.

She graduated in Film in the Emily Carr University of Art and Design of Vancouver in 2005. She has since exhibited her work in numerous galleries, festivals and events in various countries and on both sides of the Atlantic. She currently resides in Toronto. She’s now in London for the 13th Native Spirit Festival in order to showcase a selection of her work carefully picked exclusively for you.

Thirza Cuthand presents her retrospective of 10 short films at the Horse Hospital in London at 14:00 on Sunday, October 13th. The screenings will be followed by a talk. Click here for our review of the superb retrospective, and here in order to book your tickets now.

Victor Fraga – How did you first become involved in film? Were you the first Cree filmmaker ever, or was there a tradition beforehand?

Thirza Cuthand – There were other Cree filmmakers, I’m thinking like Loretta Todd, my Uncle Doug Cuthand makes films, there’s been a number of Cree filmmakers I can’t even think of them all. I find Cree women filmmakers were very encouraging when I was an emerging filmmaker. Actually many other Indigenous women filmmakers were very nurturing of my skills. My friend Dana Claxton was really great to connect with when I was starting out, she is a Lakota filmmaker based in Vancouver. I first became involved in film through a Queer film festival in Saskatoon called Virtuous Reality. It only ever happened once in 1995. Since then Saskatoon got obsessed with But I’m A Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 2001) and I swear that’s the only Queer film they wanna watch.

I made a short film called Lessons In Baby Dyke Theory (1995, see it below) about feeling like the only lesbian at my high school. I was 16 when I made it, with a cheap hi-8 camcorder. And a lot of pipe cleaner dollies. It became really successful on the Queer film fest circuit because there was not a lot of work being made about being a teenage Queer. Mostly when people talked about Queer Youth at the time they were picturing university students. But now of course there’s like, Queer kindergarteners so things have really shifted.

VF – How have the indigenous communities embraced Indigiqueer identity? Did you have to overcome tradition, or barriers of any type?

TC – It’s been varied. I grew up in urban communities which I found were way more open minded than if I had grown up on a reserve. But then also all the reserves have different climates. Some are more Christian and Christian-influenced than others. I was fortunate in that my mother was very Queer-positive so there wasn’t a lot of hardships at home, and my high school didn’t even know what to do with me. I do know that one of the barriers has been funding. I do get funding but usually it comes from the regular funding stream and not the stream for Indigenous people at the arts councils.

There’s also some difficulties in that people want to protect Indigenous culture so I feel like there’s a fine line between protecting ourselves and censoring artists. I know the queer work I make is not always appreciated by some of those juries, especially the more sexually suggestive work. I think repression of Indigenous sexuality in all its forms, including heterosexual sexuality, has been a big issue for us as media makers. And when it’s Queer on top of that, it gets really tough. The effects of Residential School has left a huge vein of homophobia and transphobia in its wake. I have a hard time with it, because I do understand people who have been abused by same sex perpetrators sort of view Queer society through that lens, but at the same time child sexual abuse is not Queer culture and it’s hard to explain that to some survivors of those crimes.

VF – How do you transpose oral storytelling onto cinema? Is it any difference from written literature? What are the biggest challenges, and the most beautiful and unique aspects?

TC – My videos are often told in a similar manner to the way my grandfather would tell stories his parents and grandparents would tell him, like a monologue with a sort of larger meaning attached. Cree stories can be very funny, and some can be very sexually explicit too (although I never heard those ones from my grandpa but there is a well known story about a rolling disembodied head that keeps trying to offer sexual favours as it follows this person). I think the difference from written literature is that oral stories grow and change with time, they are living texts. It’s harder to do that with videos, but I also do performance art and that can work the same way. I think the biggest challenges are that I can’t see how people react to a story until the film is finished and I’m watching with an audience. While an oral story you might be able to read the room and like, drop parts that don’t work for that audience. Like maybe there are people like your family in the room who you don’t want to tell that part about a disembodied head offering blowjobs in front of!

The beautiful and unique aspects are that a story could be passed down from generations and generations previously. I heard a story from my grandfather about the first time Crees saw white people, and I am still struck by how remarkable it is to know what happened. I also recently made a film based on another story he told my auntie Beth about a 2 Spirit person (2 Spirit is a term for Queer/Trans Indigenous people used by some Queer/Trans Indigenous people) who was a travelling storyteller, and it was really wonderful to not only be able to make that story more widely known as a film, but also to sort of have proof that 2 Spirit people were accepted and welcomed before colonisation. Oral stories give us a history that has been used to stand up in court cases here in Canada.

VF – You said that “humour is a political tool”. Can you please give us an example of how you used comedy in order to make a statement, raise awareness of an issue, or something else?

TC – My film series 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99 (2015) and 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (2017) are very comedic films, but also use the tropes of late night TV commercial formats to critique things like domestic violence in lesbian relationships, isolation in remote communities as a Queer person, capitalist values based on how big your communities are and if you are worth having media targeted towards your demographics. A lot of other things too. But mostly they come across as very light fun films. You don’t think about the heavy stuff even though it’s all in there. I think humour helps people be more open to ideas that they might shut down otherwise.

VF – Has the Canadian government been supportive of indigenous film and performance art? Who has supported you in your endeavours?

TC – I’ve gotten funding from almost all levels of government, federal, provincial, municipal. I have been fortunate. I’ve seen other people really struggle but I’ve managed to carve out enough of a career for myself that I’ve been able to be a full time artist. I’ve also made a documentary for CBC Gem, which is a national tv streaming platform, and for the NFB which is a national documentary and animation film studio. But it took a long time of making self-funded videos with my camcorder and myself to get to that point. I think the fact I was so willing to fund so much of my early work really helped my career. I still self-fund the work I think might be too controversial for a funder to touch. There have been some controversies over the years about where taxpayer money goes, so any really sexual work I’ve tried to do on my own.

VF – You describe yourself as “gender non-conforming, Indigenous, Queer, disabled, fat”. Is being non-normative an empowering and liberating experience? How do you reconcile these varied identities?

TC – I think when you rack up a couple of non-normative identities it just makes sense to add more! Ha ha! I think because my identities and interests are outside of the mainstream, it’s made my work more interesting. It can be empowering, there’s been at least a couple times I’ve been trying to find the subcultures I belong to and that is an interesting experience. When I was a teen I had to find the Queer community, and in a small prairie city too, before the internet was a thing and before I was old enough for the bar. So it didn’t take a long time, but I did have to go out looking for it.

And then when I was 18, again without the the internet, I realised I was into kink and that was another search. I think my first contact was getting a subscription to a local kink newsletter, but it stopped distributing as soon as I got the first issue! But it really does make you more independent in a way when you need to work hard at finding your communities, queer and kinky communities. My Indigenous communities were always around because I grew up with my Indigenous family members. But even reconciling Queer and kink identities even just with Indigenous identity is not so hard. There were always Queer Indigenous people, and some ceremonies involved cutting or piercing the flesh, so doing similar things in a kink context is not so wild really. And same with trans/gender-non-conforming identities, there were lots of Indigenous people historically who were gender non-conforming or trans. I think what I like about all these identities is that I can talk honestly from a first person perspective about a lot of issues.

VF – You were once invited to Bruce LaBruce’s Tiff party. He’s one of our favourite “dirty” filmmakers. Did you meet and talk to him? How did that go? What did he think of Indigiqueer film?

TC – I actually didn’t go! I ended up finishing my film about a gas mask fetish I later called Less Lethal Fetishes instead. But I did meet him once at his screening in Regina for LA Zombie (2010), which I loved. Fucking dead people back to life? Amazing! I did talk to him, he seems very nice. We didn’t talk long enough to talk about Indigiqueer film tho!

VF – Is this your first time in Europe? Do Europeans react differently to your work?

TC – I’ve been to Berlin a lot showing my work. I think because Europeans don’t have the full understanding of Indigenous culture and context like people in North America, it’s a little bit different showing work here. There are I am sure preconceived ideas of what Indigenous lives are like, I’ve never talked to Europeans about that though and I think mostly they don’t want to say anything offensive to me about what they might think. I do know I explained payments that were made to Residential School survivors were called “Common Experience Payments” to an audience in Berlin that was pretty queer and open-minded and they sort of recoiled which I think is the best reaction, Common Experience Payments is a terrible name. My grandmother was in Residential School and she said once “They weren’t common experiences! Everyone’s experience was different!”

VF – What are your plans for the future?

TC – I’m working on a feature film about a woman with the power of pyrokinesis [the ability to create and control fire with the mind] who seeks vengeance after her lover and mother go missing, so that’s been exciting. I have wanted to make a feature for a long time. I still really love experimental shorts though, and you can make those so fast with so much less influence from producers and editors and so on that I will probably keep doing that as well. I have a performance coming up in Vancouver called The Future Is So Bright which is going to be audio of me reading love letters to various women trying to convince them to be with me and start a family, while footage of climate change catastrophes like forest fires and glaciers melting and hurricanes and tsunami’s play behind me. And I’ll be licking and sticking hard candies to my nude body trying to sweeten the deal. I’m super interested in the feelings of the world ending that so many have right now. I want to be hopeful, but I am also aware we have an incredible responsibility to the future of humanity and the world right now and we could blow it!

Sea of Shadows

Posted on by victorfraga

Environmentalists, scientists journalists and even the Mexican Navy have joined forces in order to save the world smallest whale, the vaquita, from almost certain extinction in the hands of unscrupulous fishers seeking a produce commonly referred to as the “cocaine of the sea”. A totoaba’s bladder is estimated as high as $100,000 on the black market, with the cascaded nets capturing the depleted levels of sea life for profit. These criminals must be brought justice.

It’s refreshing to watch a film that takes the environmental safety of the planet to heart. Edited and shot with feverish style, the film floats with tenable ease, soaking and swimming the dangers without punishing its viewers with soapbox politics. Shot over a silhouetted reflection, the camera pays tribute to the film’s environmental subject.

There is a dichotomy to the proceedings. Pirates are decimating the wildlife, yet a government ban on fishing in an area reliant on fish for survival could be detrimental to the local communities. The movie understands this paradox. Bathetically, it blends mechanical, man-made machinery with nautical, natural sea pictures.

The cameras linger with delightful poetry, ploughing from the opaque boats that have gifted generations of fisher people their livelihoods and the cascaded torrents of navy seals pummelling into action in order to serve the dying whales from butchery. One long continuous promenade over the Mexican desert drives with balletic beauty, while the neon-lit boats shimmer with exquisite colourisation. The film visually conveys the horror, the beauty and the chaos that circle the Mexican country. There is a gorgeous palette at play, with delectable use of visual flair, making this documentary cinematic in scope. The depth of the production budget is flashed with the carousel of helicopter overhead shots, which float over the yellow land and luminous sea.

Interviews, however, are not as impressive as the film’s visuals. Inhabitants speak with uninteresting precision, detailing one of the more shocking accounts of whale hunting with bored disinterest. In a way, that’s both patronising and insulting. Fewer talking heads would have been nicer. None would have be even better!

Sea of Shadows is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, September 27th. On VoD in April.

Hope Frozen

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Here’s a documentary with a difference about a family in Thailand. When their daughter Einz falls prey to brain cancer before her third birthday, her parents make the bold decision to have her cryonically frozen at death in the hope that she can, at some point in the future, perhaps in several hundred years’ time, be resuscitated and lead a normal life.

She has a devoted, older teenage brother Matrix who would do anything for her having waited over ten years for a sibling. Their dad Sahatorn is a working laser scientist who starts running experiments on his daughter’s cancer cells in an attempt to fund a cure before the condition kills her. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t find a cure. Eventually, he talks wife Nareerat and son round to the idea of having Einz cryonically frozen.

Upon Einz’ death, within 60 seconds her body has been frozen for delivery to a facility run by a company in Arizona called Alcor. We watch a representative of this company show the whole family round, which tour includes the cylinder at the bottom section of which Einz has been put into cryonic storage. For the family, it feels a lot like visiting a graveside. They’ll probably never see her alive again.

Matrix goes into a Buddhist monastery in order to try and come to terms with his sister’s death. When his parents later have another daughter Einz Einz, there’s speculation on the part of the wider family that Einz Einz is the reincarnation of Einz.

Much is made of the possibility of the human race overcoming death, but completely absent is any notion of income or cost. Clearly this kind of procedure is expensive because not everyone undertakes it. So well off people can be preserved while poorer people simply die. Yet without addressing any of that, this film presents its observations in an economic vacuum which is probably beyond the reach of most of us. That weakness aside, it’s a fascinating study of an area where science fiction is fast turning into science fact with huge philosophical, religious and socio-political implications for us all.

Hope Frozen plays in the BFI London Film Festival on Sun 6th and Mon 7th October (2019). On Netflix in September (2020).

Coup 53

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

I learnt of the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat during research for my masters dissertation, which considered British media coverage of the Suez Crisis. I viewed the Anglo-American staged coup, which came as a result of Prime Minister Mosaddegh’s nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry, as a precursor to President Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal 3 years later. However, the Iranian coup had far greater consequences. The toppling of the democratically-elected PM sowed lasting resentment not only in Iran but the wider Middle East. To understand the current state of Iran-US relations, one has to understand the Iranian coup of 1953.

Coup 53 certainly wants us to understand, but not in the BBC style of traditional, top-down history. Rather, filmmaker Taghi Amirani puts himself front and centre in the documentary’s opening half hour, inviting us into his personal 10-year journey of archives and interviews across the world. During this he brims with information and passion, yet there is a growing sense of self-indulgence – is this just an esoteric passion project, or is Amirani really going to contribute to the history of the coup? It is only when he begins to pursue the details of the UK’s involvement in Mosaddegh’s downfall that Coup 53 gains some traction. After all, only the US has begun declassifying relevant CIA documents – the UK remains officially cagey.

Amirani’s most pointed investigation centres around British operative Matthew Darbyshire, a mysterious quasi-Bond figure whose presence has been banished from tapes and snipped from archival transcripts. There is a moment of genuine curiosity and excitement when Amirani unearths a full transcript of Darbyshire’s account of the coup, but what is he to do with it? His solution couldn’t be better – ask Ralph Fiennes to play him. The passages with Fiennes, who delivers the transcript with a caddish charisma, gives Coup 53 a much needed theatrical and narrative boost, giving the project a greater sense of not only purpose but also intrigue and entertainment.

Ultimately, however, its most insightful moments come in the final stretch of summaries from the many distinguished talking heads. They pose one of the more probing questions of counterfactual history – what would Iran, a regional power of over 80 million inhabitants, look like today if secular democracy had been allowed to continue? Alas, we can only speculate.

Coup 53 premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2019, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in virtual cinemas across the UK, Ireland, the US and Canada from Friday, August 21st.

Thirza Cuthand Retrospective

Posted on by victorfraga

Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Saskatchewan and grew up in Saskatoon, and she is of Cree origin. Starting in 1995, Cuthand began exploring short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, youth, love, and race, using national, sexual and Indigenous experiences to showcase in unfiltered raw exteriors.

Make no mistake, there is purity at play here. Collecting the confines, conditions and contractions of Cuthand’s milieu, the varied works slip together into one continuous narrative written years, even decades, apart. More to the point, the essays cross genres from the pointedly visual into the realms of performance arts.

In a life’s work, we are testimonies to a great becoming of life, love and failings, fearlessly guiding the wills and witnesses of expectations over a twenty four year story. The feelings, frailities and failures are true of all our lives, but Cuthand has the courage and power to be real about them. In a peerless recall of honesty, the collected works speak so mournfully with a communal power absent even in Richard Linklater’s extraordinary Boyhood (2014). Though they could be easily overlooked, the works radically question the everyday division between the artful and the mundane. In an art form traditionally more recondite than visual, Cuthand’s work sprawls through ages, genres and documentaries.

Early clips use archive footage of films and puppetry, playfully positing the questions of truthfulness from the companionship Disney princesses traditionally have provided women. Detailed in black and white, Helpless Maiden Makes an ‘I’ Statement (1999) finds a subject discussing the frustrations of a bottom position. Bravely opening the chartered path of self discovery, the narrative continues in the striking Just Dandy (2013), an essay of entrapment read through a diary. Performances play with ease, ebullient in energised ease as the author describes her innermost thoughts at a talk more potently lit in colour.

Then there’s 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (2017), opening and centred on the butch director in the flirtatious pose which too often stamps itself on pornographic websites. From the confines of these video-confessionals, the films progress narratively and thematically in evolving the woman’s body from the shaded to the candid. In its own way, it’s a riff on the inhibitions a person feels in their comfort’s both in their naked thoughts and naked bodies. In their way, the audience grows in confidence with the naked exteriors with the subjects. Reclamation (2018, pictured at the top), the fieriest entry, imagines a dystopic future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the palpable consequences of the large scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. Visually inventive, the majority of the short films focus mostly on the experiences which the audience members find themselves longing to hear.

Topics and themes also explore the sadomasochistic lesboerotic subtexts in children’s entertainments, the temporal horrors migraine blindness inflicts and the dismal loneliness a young lesbian must endure in a Canadian school. Added to that the realities of an everyday struggle, the essays explore the different worlds an Indigenous person must walk. It’s not so different, yet completely different, to the worlds everyone else inhabits. A revelation of a series.

In addition to the short films listed above, the Thirza Cuthand Retrospective also includes the following pieces: Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory (1995), Sight (2012), 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99 (2015), Thirza Cuthand is an Indian Within the Meaning of the Indian Act (2017) and the more recent Less Lethal Fetishes (2019). The event takes place on October 13th at the Horse Hospital as part of the 13th Native Spirit Festival. Just click here for more information, and in order to get your tickets now!