Month: September 2019

Bombay Rose

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

From its opening in which alternately horizontal and vertical paint brush strokes appear on the screen, slowly building into a street scene, you know you’re in good hands. This 2D animated tale deftly juggles its assorted characters and themes to construct a panorama of everyday life in Mumbai.

A framing device explores Bollywood action movies in which the no nonsense action hero can rescue the girl by beating up the bad guys. Outside of the movies, however, life isn’t quite so simple. The clearly well-off driver of a highly conspicuous, flashy car involved in a hit and run accident later in the narrative turns out to be the Bollywood action star glimpsed at the beginning. Those doing well out of the dream factory don’t live out the virtues it espouses.

Images of romantic lead Salim are modelled after the screen idol, yet unlike the idol, Salim is capable of change. When he steals flowers from graves to give one to Kamala, the girl he loves, she is horrified and labels him a thief, with the result that he changes his behaviour.

Also unlike the big star, both lovers have money problems. Salim is selling flowers to motorists, Kamala is doing a deal with a gangster to go to Dubai. That’s true of other characters too. An underage boy is dodging police raids while working illegally in a restaurant.

Meanwhile, his sister is taking English lessons from a fading Bollywood starlet Shirley D’Souza living in memories of a successful past. The starlet’s collection of automata from that period are breaking down, but happily her pupil’s grandfather has a gift for repairing such things.

The animation, designed with an intense and gorgeous colour palette to outdo even the most vibrant of live action Indian movies, allows the narrative to periodically shift into cultural, historical and even mythological areas and back again without missing a beat. As well as action movies, these include a man’s strange journey seated atop a flying horse with a woman’s head. We witness the killing of the hero’s parents at the hands of soldiers attacking their Kashmiri village. The gangster appears as a bird of prey, flying in to menace Kamala then flying out. There’s also a highly effective scene where as the ageing starlet walks down the street hand in hand with her young pupil, their surroundings turn from contemporary colour to period black and white.

This is an impressive warts and all picture of Mumbai. The animation style is highly original and well suited to the film’s aims. It’s not really like anything else out there and deserves a wider UK release.

Bombay Rose plays in the BFI London Film Festival on Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th October. Watch the film trailer below:

Zombi Child

Posted on by victorfraga

Melissa (Wislanda Louimat) left Haiti at the age of just seven, after losing both of her parents in the devastating 2010 earthquake. She was brought up by her doting and “cool” aunt (Katiana Milfort), who also happens to be a mambo (a type of voodoo sorcerer). Melissa gets accepted into a highly prestigious girls’ school founded by Napoleon because her late mother was in the Legion Honour thanks to her resistance of the Duvalier regime. She befriends four white girls.

At first, the young women are hesitant to welcome Melissa into their clique, an unofficial literary sorority. They challenge the Haitian teen to tell them something peculiar and unique about herself in order to join their close-knit group. She is only entitled to one go, and if the girls are left unimpressed they will simply shun her. That’s when Melissa begins to open up about her family secrets and the voodoo traditions of her native Haiti. One of girls remains a little sceptical, while the more open-minded Fanny (Louise Labèque) becomes almost immediately enthralled by the fantastical stories.

Melissa’s grandfather Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou) “half-died” in 1962. Greedy farmers brought him back to life by using a white powder in order to have him work as a slave in their plantations. Clairvius was in a “zombi” state, unable to talk and to interact with others. Until one day he ate salt and broke the evil spell, returning to full life (in non-zombi condition). He reclaimed his family and led a normal existence until he died “again” in 1994 (this time for good). The story of Clairvius is told in non-chronological fragments dispersed throughout the film. Clairvius was a real person, and his zombi saga had been previously fictionalised in Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988).

Fifty-one-year-old French helmer Bertrand Bonello is no stranger to fiery political and social statements, with the controversial Nocturama (about disillusioned youths and terrorism; 2016) and The Pornographer (about a filmmaker who found artistic liberation in erotic movies, 2001) already under his belt. This time he opted to contrast the vivid and fiery religious traditions of Haiti against the rigid and stern literary tradition of his home country. Numerous French writers are mentioned in the boarding school, and the girls are very studious themselves. Their highly regimented existence in an self-contained institution couldn’t be more different to unfettered life of Haitians. Bonello is very respectful of both European literature and Haitian voodoo.

Bonello and his DOP Yves Cape excel in visual wizardry. The voodoo rituals are hypnotic and extravagant, bursting with colour and energy. Melissa, however, isn’t the real star of the film. She serves mostly as a narrator, while her grandfather and aunt embody (quite literally) the exotic traditions. Both Milfort and Bijou are nothing short of extraordinary. Labeque (who plays curious Fanny) also has a little suprise in store.

Zombi Child, however, is not a film without flaws. The story takes a little to long to build momentum, and the first half of this 117-minute movie isn’t as riveting as the second one. The ending is visually spectacular, but also a little clumsy, with too many narrative device suddenly becoming tangled up. Still, very much worth sticking until the very last minute.

Zombi Child shows at the BFI London Film Festival in October. It’s available on Mubi from October 17th and November 16th.

Ghost Town Anthology (Répertoire des villes disparues)

Posted on by victorfraga

Adapted from Laurence Olivier’s eponymous 2015 novel, this unusual ghost story takes place in the wintry Irénée-les-Neiges, a fictional town with a population of just 215. It all starts when 21-year-old Simon Dubé dies in a car accident. His family and locals suspect that he took his own life due to depression, and the inability to break away from his dull routine. As the family and the locals grapple to come to terms with the tragic death, strange events begin to take place.

The government wants to help the small community to overcme the tragic loss. They recruit a social worker from Montreal in order to support the mourning locals, but the formidable mayoress Simone Smallwood (played by veteran Diane Lavallée) emphatically turns the offer down, instead sending the envoy away. She claims that the tiny hamlet is emotionally self-sufficient and they can handle their problems on their own, as they always have. It’s as if Irénée-les-Neiges wanted to be detached from the rest of the world.

Suddenly, paranormal entities begin to appear. Children wearing masks wander the snowy fields and streets. Silhouettes pop out of people’s windows. Spectres show up inside the houses, triggering hapless locals to run scared. The late Simon appears inside his father Romouald’s (Jean-Michel Anctil) car. He also visits his older brother Jimmy (Robert Naylor) and their mother Gisele (Josée Deschênes), separately and on different occasions. The silent apparitions (the dead don’t talk) continue to escalate, seemingly outnumbering the living. Soon the streets are dotted with quiet and spooky figures. We learn that some of these people died decades earlier.

Despite the paranormal topic, this not a horror movie. Denis Cote is not a genre director, but instead a recognised auteur. This is not the type of film that will keep you in the edge of your seat, even if some of the images are quite creepy. The cinematography (shot on 16mm stock) is mostly grainy, with a touch of grey and gloom, evoking photographs from yore. The dead are never covered in blood. There are no gaping wounds and contorted faces. They just look sad and passive. This is not George Romero. Instead, this a subtle art movie, a commentary on small-town insularity, where life is so trite and banal that the dead are more liberated than the living. Young people feel particularly trapped. The desire to move away is pervasive.

A young woman called Adele (Larissa Corriveau, pictured at the top of this review), with apparent learning difficulties, is very scared of the apparitions. Corriveau is magnificent, her big bulgy eyes conveying a palpable sense of vulnerability. But she has a surprise in store for everyone. She finds a very peculiar way of rising above both the living and the dead in the end of the movie. A very unorthodox redemption. Those who have seem Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) will know exactly what I mean.

All in all, this is an elegant and moving ghost story, even if a little lethargic at times. The images of the equally dismal dead and living inhabitants of Irénée-les-Neiges will stay with you for some time.

Ghost Town Anthology premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2019, when this piece was originally written. It’s on Mubi in April and May!

The Farewell

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

New Yorker Billi (Awkwafina) is constantly being phoned from China by her granny or Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen). Billi has lived in the US since age six and is now thoroughly Westernised with her own apartment.

It therefore comes as something of a shock to learn that her parents Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and Lu Jian (Diana Lin) are going to China ostensibly for her wedding of her Japanese immigrant cousin Hau Hau (Chen Han) but actually to see Nai Nai before she dies. The latter has been diagnosed with stage four cancer and her sister Little Nai Nai (Hong Lu) who looks after her in China has decided it would be better if Nai Nai didn’t know. So the extended family are going to China with all of them sworn to secrecy about the real reason for their visit.

Pitched as a US movie, this is mostly in Mandarin with subtitles. Maybe 10% is spoken in English. Plus a smidgen is in Japanese with no subs, as Hau Hau’s Japanese bride Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara) speaks no Chinese.

While the film works well enough as a family drama, where it really scores is in the tension between the two cultures, Chinese and US American. The Chinese is all about family, society and the greater good while the US American by way of contrast is all about the individual.

Nai Nai and her Chinese relatives want to know when Billi is getting married, and how much money she is going to make, whereas she herself is more interested in self-expression as a writer. More poignantly however, the Easterners see not telling someone they are terminally ill as a good thing because the protected person will enjoy life more, whereas the Westerners see it in terms of keeping a dreadful truth from someone who should be told about it.

Director Wang derives a degree of absurdist comedy from all this, yet these underlying cultural conflicts lend the proceedings a sense of gravitas. After last year’s shallow but fun, US Chinese comedy Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M.Chu, 2018), The Farewell grapples with tough intercultural conflicts on a very deep level with echoes of Taiwanese-American outing The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993). It’s possible that Western and Eastern audiences may view the film very differently. But in both cases, it’s worth viewing.

The Farewell is out in the UK on Friday, September 20th. On VoD in April. Watch the film trailer below:

How do you manufacture happiness?

Posted on by victorfraga

In 2016, 141 political economists tried to ban the ideas from Christian Felber’s book Change Everything: Creating an Economy for the Common Good (ECG) from being referred to in the Austrian education system. Felber’s game-changing book has, however, been acclaimed as a sustainable economic model by the European Economic and Social Committee and recommended for integration into not only Austrian but wider European law.

Felber’s 2015 text offers an alternative to the high human and environmental cost of capitalism with a new economic model that supports human and humane development, utterly reorienting our relationship to work, money, and the purpose of both. In response to the censorship battle, Austrian chamber orchestra Klangforum Wien (who are one of the 1700 companies signed up to the ECG movement) in collaboration with Waltraud Grausgruber of the Tricky Women Festival, invited 10 animators to work in partnership with 10 composers to create 10 short, animated films that explore themes inspired by Felber’s economic manifesto.

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Women have the power

Paired together on the style and basis of their previous work, the animators and composers – all women – would be equal partners for the project, and would work closely together over a two-year period overcoming the challenges of geographical separation and work commitments. “Why not try to find out if women think differently?” says Therese Zalud of Klangforum, “because after all, it’s mostly men who run the economic world and protested against the ECG.” Zalud explains Klangforum’s decision for a female-led project, “let’s find out if women can find alternative ways for working-together, in a project which is itself an example of a working relationship based on equal rights.”

Ideas would be shared back and forth over two years between the paired collaborators until eventually the films would be presented in an anthology feature film called The Happiness Machine. The experimental shorts explore the values of the ECG, which include human dignity, cooperation, ecological sustainability, social justice and transparency using a range of styles and techniques to tell their stories, ranging from collage and drawn or painted images to clay, photos, moving image and stop motion.

“I worked with real plants, that grew and got eaten by snails” says Rebecca Blöcher of her film titled Lickalike (pictured above), “I made the animation with a ‘blind drawing’ technique. In the centre, there is a pretty fluent movement and outside it’s very twitchy with many surprises.”

Some of the films, including Lickalike (Rebecca Blöcher / Eva Reiter) and Bloomers by Samantha Moore and Malin Bång are more concerned with the present than a projected idea of the future which is where Elizabeth Hobbs and Carola Bauckholt’s The Flounder and Eni Brandner and Misato Mochizuki’s PANTOPOS are focused. And then there’s the pairs that chose to express heavily abstracted concepts of specific values of Felber’s new economy, these include Vessela Dantcheva and Electric Indigo’s Hierarchy Glitch and Andrea Schneider and Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri’s Generator / Operator (pictured below).

Samantha Moore and Malin Bang’s Bloomers is a portrait of a lingerie factory and to create the score Swedish composer Malin Bang visited the factory to record the sounds which she then translated into a score that is played by the Klangforum ensemble. ‘For the live performances, “one of the musicians draws the shape of knickers onto fabric with a mic’ed up pencil and another cuts it out with a mic’ed up pair of scissors” says producer (of the film) Abigail Addison, “and the percussionist plays a real sewing machine as part of the score.”

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A less aggressive era

While some are more abstract than others, all of the films possess a sense of the urgency with which Felber’s social and economic change could usher into a less aggressively capitalist era. The sonic and visual landscapes created by the 10 paired collaborators cover a vast range of styles from rough and playful, slick and cosmic to rustic and charming and examine the themes of Felber’s economic evolution in 10 very different, very idiosyncratic ways.

The Happiness Machine, designed to work as a live musical performance as well as a screened feature, is showing at the Encounters Film Festival in Bristol, the UK’s leading short film festival. It’s showing at the Watershed Cinema on Friday, September 27th. This is where you can buy tickets. And just click here in order to find out more about the project and the contributing artists.

Following the screening of the Happiness Machine will be a masterclass with British animated documentary maker Samantha Moore, Swedish composer Malin Bång, and British producer Abigail Addison. The trio will discuss how they worked together, whilst in different countries, to create the animation and original score for Bloomers, one of the 10 projects commissioned for the Happiness Machine. Click here for more information.

The image at the top of this article is from Ana Nedeljković and Hanna Hartman’s Happiness Machine.

Extra Ordinary

Posted on by victorfraga

In a rural Irish town, Rosie (Maeve Higgins) runs a driving school. One of her passengers, the eligible and handsome Martin (Barry Ward), turns to her to ask her to speak to his dead wife. The daughter of a clairvoyant, Rosie has ceased to use her powers since she accidentally killed her own father. Unknown to both of them, Christian Winter (Will Forte), a Rockstar hunched up in his castle long past his prime time, has entrapped Martin’s daughter in a spell, hoping to sacrifice her pure soul for returned chart success. Reluctantly agreeing to Martin’s request, Rosei re-opens her abilities to talk with ghosts, and by doing so, opens herself to love.

This is a very bizarre and twisted 90-minute comedy, which at one point sees a floating goat explode in front of a congregation of shocked passers-by. Elsewhere, a recycling bin haunts an old woman while Bonnie, Martin’s deceased wife, haunts both her widowed husband and Rosie. Just as Rosei learns to let herself go, so too does Martin, in an effort to rid himself of his wife’s image. These attempts to self-exorcise results in her presence within his body, Ward switching from bewildered husband to possessive, cigarette chomping wife with slapstick brilliance.

Less successful is Winter, the emaciated rock star desperate to return to the top of the charts. His flirtations with the dark arts leads to a litany of tiring phallic jokes, especially when his girlfriend refers to his magic implement as the “dick stick”. Much better is his rendition of Cosmic Woman, an eighties synthpop track which shows Winter crying out in excessive rock regalia. His treatment of women echoes the thinly veined misogyny eighties rock stars display on a daily basis, though the way in which he rids himself of his clawing girlfriend might shock some viewers.

And yet there’s a lot of heart to the film. A lowly image of Martin serenading his slumberous daughter (trapped in Winter’s spell) is strangely potent, while Rosie, lonely as she has been the whole film, falls delightfully in love with her companion. All of which leads to the haunting finale, as Winter serenades the dark lords to savour his virginal sacrifice. The libidinous punchline that ends the scene is a very funny one, though the hammy special effects are painful to sit through. There are too many dick jokes leading to the climax. Never the less, one of the more inspired Irish comedies since Sing Street (John Carney, 2016).

Extra Ordinary is out in Irish cinemas on Friday, September 13th. On VoD in the UK and Ireland in April!

The dirtiest movie soundtracks ever

Posted on by victorfraga

Films and music have had a long and exciting history. This dates back to the era of silent films, which were scored by a live band, and even sometimes, an orchestra. A good filmmaker knows that audiences watch with their ears as much as they do with their eyes, recognising a whole new dimension to the cinematic experience. A film’s soundtrack has a profound effect on audiences, contextualising what they see on screen by grounding it in their emotions.

That said, here are my top four favourite films with the dirtiest soundtracks that have elicited the most visceral emotions from myself (and audiences, more broadly) since their premiere.

1. Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971):

It’s quite rare that a soundtrack supersedes a film, but Isaac Hayes’ work on the soundtrack of 1971’s Shaft changed the landscape of music in film for generations to come. He, along with guitarist Charles “Skipp” Pitts, had worked on the soundtrack, experimenting with abstract melodies. This now iconic sound was only possible through the use of the iconic Cry Baby Classic Wah pedal, an essential part of guitarist Skip’s studio rig. It’s this out-of-the-box (at least at the time) experimentation that gave the Shaft soundtrack its unique quality — something that has stayed with it to this day.

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2. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017):

Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos gave audiences plenty to take away from his modern retelling of the tragedy of Iphigenia, where Agamemnon is forced by the goddess Artemis to sacrifice his daughter after having killed a sacred deer. However, one unexpected takeaway is the most random use of Ellie Goulding’s dance floor hit Burn in cinematic history. The film opens with violence, a pulsing heart in the middle of an operation, juxtaposed with blaring classical music: Franz Schubert’s Stabat Mater in F minor. This sets the tone for the rest of the film, as it approaches its crescendo without batting an eye. Indeed, the smattering of classical pieces from the likes of J.S. Bach, György Ligeti, and Piette-Laurent Aimard ground and subdue the ostentatious nature of the film itself, giving you the false sense that everything will be okay when things couldn’t be further from it.

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3. Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977):

From the mind of Dario Argento, the cult classic Suspiria has sent many a viewer down the rabbit hole — if the rabbit hole was a dance academy in some obscure town in Germany. While a lot can be said about the different aspects of this iconic film, nothing is more synonymous with Suspiria than its score. The film’s soundtrack, created by Italian progressive rock band Goblin, helped push Argento’s horrific technicolour vision. The band created a slew of eclectic tones and featured one of the earliest uses of synths in horror that gave audiences the lingering feeling of dread all throughout the film. The film has since been remade in 2018 by Luca Guadagnino with Thom Yorke taking over soundtrack duties.

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4. Thoroughbreds (Corey Finley, 2017):

Thoroughbreds is Cory Finley’s black comedy directorial debut, which can be described as Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1979) without the remorse. While this technically is a black comedy, we’re dead serious when we say that this film will move you like no other. A huge reason for this is Erik Friedlander’s jangly nerve-wracking score. Friedlander is a classically trained cellist who has worked on films like 2017’s Oh Lucy (Atsuko Hirayanagi). While the score does add to the film’s visceral effect, where it truly shines is when Friedlander uses silence as a tool to stretch tensions to their breaking point. He bends the elements of tension to his will and inflicts it upon the audience like a knife in the dark. All in all, Thoroughbreds will go down in the history of cinema as a cult classic, and so will Friedlander’s score.

Official Secrets

Posted on by victorfraga

This is the fascinating story of one of the unsung heroes of our times, whistleblower Katherine Gun. The Iraq War is still an inglorious part of our past and present. This film follows the sequence of events when in 2003 a young woman in the employ of the Government Communications Headquarters takes the momentous step to reveal a memo from the United States to the British government.

It draws on the experience of the Observer staff reporter who had a tip-off about the memo to which Katherine had access. It revealed that the British government was colluding with the US in order to blackmail smaller countries in the United Nations Security Council into supporting the War against Saddam Hussein. The public was not made aware of such engagement, needless to say.

Keira Knightley conveys Katherine’s strength of character with great economy and conviction. There is a stellar supporting cast. Ralph Fiennes as the defending lawyer carries the pivotal role of the man with the thorough investigative legal mind who takes on a case which sets him against longstanding close friends in government. As the Observer reporter, Matt Smith enjoys a central part in the complex considerations surrounding the decision whether to publish or not. Welsh actor Rhys Ifans produces an entertaining eccentric portrayal as Ed Vulliamy, the newspaper’s correspondents in Washington.

The events are followed in the actual time sequence and the consequences gradually unfold. The film demands concentration from the viewer but the story being little known still has elements of suspense. Will Katherine succumb to the pressures when the leak is discovered? How far is she willing to sacrifice her marriage to her strongly held beliefs?

Gavin Hood the director won recognition with Tsotsi in 2003 and more recently with the spy thriller, Eye in the Sky (2015). The film has taken some time to get made, with change of director and cast in the process but the end result produces a compelling narrative with all the actors delivering auspicious performances that complement each other. Anyone interested in the dynamics of diplomacy and the internal forces at work in governing a country cannot fail to be engaged. The role of the free press in trying to check sources and resist government pressure is a compelling element to the gradual unravelling of the story.

Official Secrets is scheduled for national wide release on Friday, October 18th. It also features as a Headline Debate Gala in the programme of the BFI London Film Festival. On VoD in March. Not to be missed!

American Woman

Posted on by victorfraga

Poverty, adultery, domestic violence, child abduction – in Deb’s world, almost everything bad that can happen, happens. In fact, American Woman risks being miserable to a fault on several occasions, yet the nuance of the performances and Brad Ingelsby’s script largely eschews this risk – the film pulls back when others would descend into soap opera.

However, Ingelsby does hurl an awful lot at Deb (Sienna Miller), so much so that the disappearance of her daughter – ostensibly the core element of the story – becomes almost incidental for much of American Woman’s 111 minutes. Some critics have said this causes tonal imbalances, yet the sidelining of Bridget’s disappearance reflects the terrible reality of so many missing person cases – a loved one vanishes without a trace and all the family can do is bury the grinding misery so they can get on with their lives, in a small blue-collar town somewhere in Pennsylvania.

Despite this noirish bent in both its premise and aesthetic, this is not some trite, gloomy murder mystery. Rather, American Woman is best described as a kitchen sink drama, and like the best examples of the genre, its bleak existentialism resonates across class and creed. You consider the purpose of your own life as Deb and her neighbours Katherine (Christina Hendricks) and Terry (Will Sasso) seemingly meander through theirs. The characters’ dynamic and story reminds you of the terrible pain of life as well as the relentless drudgery required to maintain it – work, shelter and sustenance.

This is what makes American Woman a dirty movie – the way in which confronts the viewer with the hardships and banalities of life. It does this through a deft realism created by both cast and crew, but the bulk of the praise rests with the performers, who refrain from indulging maudlin, scene-hogging theatrics in favour of subtle, almost homely performances. Admittedly, the film star looks of Sienna Miller and Christina Hendricks can distract from this milieu – which is given a stark aesthetic by cinematographer John Mathieson – but American Woman remains a sturdy, engrossing depiction of blue collar, Rust Belt America.

American Woman is in cinemas on Friday, October 11th. On VoD in April.

Our dirty questions to Karim Ainouz

Posted on by victorfraga
Picture: Denny Sachtleben

The year of 2019 has been a very difficult year for Brazilians, with reckless neo-fascist president Jair Bolsonaro coming to power. Brazilian cinema, however, begs to differ. Two Brazilian movies won two brand new prizes in Cannes. Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles won the Jury Prize Ex-Aequo with the ultra-violent and highly-politicised sci-fi Bacurau, while Karim Ainouz took the Un Certain Regard award for Best Film for the very feminine melodrama The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao. That’s the highest accolade bestowed upon movies showing outside competition. Ainouz’s film has also been pre-nominated for an Oscar, and we think that it could become the first Brazilian film ever to snatch the statuette.

The 145-minute epic drama follows two sisters from Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s who are tragically separated throughout the decades thanks to a society that subjugates females in more ways than one. The story investigates the subtle and also the not-so-subtle oppression mechanisms that males use in order to perpetuate their position in society. The story forwards to present days at the end, and there’s a dirtylicious surprise in store for you.

Our editor Victor Fraga (who’s also Brazilian) travelled to Berlin, where Karim has lived for many years. They met in a local cafe and talked about The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao, the role of women in the resistance, what it means being a Brazilian immigrant in Europe, the failure of capitalism, religion, Netflix and much more!

The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao is in cinemas on Friday, October 2021. This interview was originally conducted in 2019,

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Victor Fraga – Your latest film won a major prize in Cannes, and so did Bacurau. Can you please talk about the significance of such double achievement for Brazilian cinema, particularly at a time when censorship is biting in?

Karim Ainouz – It’s very important in general because it’s the first time we had such a big number of Brazilian films in Cannes, and that we won the Un Certain Regard as well as a major competition prize. It’s important historically but also contextually because it’s a prize for both the movies and the trajectories (Juliano is a bit younger, but Kleber and I are from the same generation). And not a trajectory as directors and auteurs, but a trajectory of policies that made the films possible. It’s a coronation of the films but also of the political work that has been done throughout the years. It’s like winning the World Cup. But you don’t win the World Cup without practising.

VF – Who created these policies?

KA – The film supported was discontinued in the Collor government of the early 1990s. Embrafilme was completely shut down. There was a struggle to bring back public funding. Things began to change with the Audiovisual Law brought in by Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The real beginning of the renaissance of Brazilian cinema was in the nineties and the noughties. What came afterwards were the decentralisation politics, moving away from Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo towards other regions of Brazil. This started in the first Lula government.

VF – During a speech in Cannes (and I was there) you dedicated The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao to Brazilian women. Can you please talk about the role of Brazilian women in the family, in the film and also in the resistence?

KA – My film is a shout against patriarchy. It’s also a continuation of my first short film Seams (1993), a portrait of a my grandmother. My grandmother was a single mother, my mother was also a single mother. I was talking to a friend yesterday about the French Revolution, and the role of women. The moment the women invaded the Paris City Hall was a pivotal one because women could not be shot. There’s no one with more leverage and legitimacy than women to fight against the establishment.

When the film began in 2015, it was the year my mother passed away. She was a scientist, and she raised me on her own. So it was a very personal project. Of course any project has a political agenda, nobody’s a fool. But it was a very personal journey to me. When my mother died I realised how difficult it was being a single mother, supporting a family. This film was about shedding light on women of that generation. The political relevance of the film became much bigger as the years went by. If you think of the crisis we’re going through today, it’s all because of patriarchy. Women have a pivotal role in challenging this.

VF – Your film is set in the 1950s. Do you think that your protagonists Guida and Euridice would be just as oppressed and ostracised had the story taken place at present?

KA – No, I don’t think so. I think it would have been very different. Oppression is still there, but it’s played out in a different way. It depends on class, geography, a lot of things. I don’t think that a middle-class woman nowadays, if she had a boyfriend, left him and came back pregnant, would experience the same cruel behaviour from her father. But I’m not saying women are under less discrimination and pressure than back then. It’s just that the mechanisms are different.

When you look at Brazil, it’s the fourth of or fifth country in the world in terms of violence against women. I think that the toxicity of patriarchy is the same, or perhaps even worse. Men are desperate to cling to power, and this makes things worse. The tactics, the context and class have changed. But also there’s much more resistance, and this resistance is visible.

VF – Do you fear for the future of Brazilian women, given the current situation in the country?

KA – I fear for the future of the world. We are in a place I never thought we would be. I of course fear for the future of my country. We’re undergoing a tragic moment, to put it lightly. It’s pathetic. I fear for the new generation. I think we should fear but we should also have hope for the future. I prefer to think of Brazil as the country that has elected the greatest number of black women in congress and senate. I prefer to think of the Brazil as the country as Linn da Quebrada and Marielle. There’s a lot of fucking resistance! Those are the people who we need to celebrate![Linn da is pictured below, in Kiko Goifman’s documentary Bixa Travesty]

In other words, I fear for the future, but I’m also deeply in love with human beings. We are repeating the same mistakes as 50 years ago, but at the same time I prefer to look at people who are somehow making a difference. It might sound naive, but I do prefer to celebrate the people who have been raised and made conscious of who they are in the past 15 years. We must give credit to the resistance taking place.

VF – There are two types of female oppression. The father Antonio is the clear-cut type of oppressor, but there’s also Euridice’s husband Antenor, the subtle oppressor, who seems more kind and yet frowns upon his wife having a successful career. How to we extricate ourselves from such pervasive patriarchy?

KA – It’s very difficult no answer. This patriarchy is very deeply ingrained. The first thing is education, as obvious it may sound. But education in the sense of critical thinking. But also when you look at Antonio and Antenor, I don’t think that they are not absolute villains, they are just a byproduct of the time

VA – What about Bolsonaro, is he not a villain. Is he too just a byproduct of the time?

KA – No, Bolsonaro is a real villain! It’s more complicated than that. It’s a question of human ethics.

VA – Do you think that religion plays a role in the oppression of women? In Brazil we have a female minister called Damares, who also happens to be an evangelical priest. She argues that women should stay at home and not play a role in politics at all.

KA – That’s a very good question. There’s an issue with my film. I think that I could have paid closer attention to the role of religion in the life of the family. Religion plays an enormous role in control, in perpetuating power structures. I do have a hard time dealing with religion because I don’t believe in it. So in every film I make I feel that there could be more religion as an antagonist of what’s happening. I also think we shouldn’t just point fingers at the evangelicals, and at the bad qualities of religion. In stead we should be asking ourselves: “why are people turning to religion?”.

The population of Brazil feels completely abandoned, and it’s no coincidence that the evangelical Episcopalians are so successful right now. These are religions that are very much linked to success and achievement. The perfect religion to a moment when a lot of people felt betrayed. They feel liked they were promised something, I was reading an article, like they were going through a revolving door and then get suddenly thrown out. They are angry. Religion helps them to come to terms with that. In late capitalism people feel very alienated.

When people talk about global warming, it’s about industrialisation and capitalism. In 1983 there was a talk about the whole planet suddenly freezing. What I’m saying is we need to ask ourselves: “does the world need to be so industrialised? What’s the root of the problem?” Capitalism is always at the root of the problem.

VF – Is it correct to say that capitalism failed Brazil?

KA – It is correct to say that capitalism failed humanity. What’s happening in Brazil is really about that.

VF – Yet communism seems to be the real enemy. Brazilians who voted for Bolsonaro are not scared of capitalism, it’s the old ghosts of communism that they’re afraid of.

KA – I think we need to come up with something new. What’s happening in Brazil is a race for natural resources, that’s what at stake, it’s as simple as that. What’s really despairing (and also inspiring, at the same time) is that we don’t have a new model. What’s the new economic model? That’s very exciting for me, because I came from a place of privilege. But for people in despair this is not exciting.

VF – Immigration is a topic very close to you heart. More specifically, the desire to flee from Brazil to Europe. It’s a central pillar in Futuro Beach (2015, pictured below), and again in The Invisible Life. Can you please talk about your experience as an immigrant, and how that helped to shape your career?

KA – I feel like I was born in a strange place. I was born in Northeastern Brazil from a mother called Iracema and an Algerian father. Imagine the confusion. You feel like your [Arabic] name doesn’t belong to that place. This is something very close to my private life. I was closing up my mother’s house the other day and I found this writing exercise for school from when I was eight. I was already talking about travelling to Argentina, Netherlands, etc.

VF – Wanderlust?

KA – Totally. That has marked anything I do in life. This dream of fleeing, going somewhere I don’t know. It was also the dream of meeting my father, who was never there. He was living in France, then Algeria. This was very strong a feeling in my upbringing.

VF – Did you eventually fulfil the dream of meeting your father?

KA – I did! But I also realised that the places were I feel most at home are the places where I feel most foreign. The sense of home to me is connected to being uprooted and then rooted again. That’s something that was not easy for me to come to terms with, but it was also very liberating when finally happened. I get more pleasure from being in Greece than Italy because I have no fucking clue what they’re saying! I don’t understand a word, the alphabet. So there’s a sense of freedom in not belonging, and that’s also in my films.

VF – It’s a pleasure being an alien?

KA – Yes, that’s a huge pleasure! It’s a pleasure not belonging anywhere and at the same time belonging to a lot of places. Anywhere can become home to me.

VF – A few years ago, out then Prime Minister Theresa May shunned the idea that people could have multiple nationalities, and that multiculturalism could work. She infamously said “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere“. Are you a citizen of nowhere?

KA – Absolutely. I love being a citizen of nowhere!!! I think she’s probably talking about legal rights, while I’m talking about sensations. Not being able to understand what’s happening around me is really inspiring! Not being able to decipher allows you to experience things in a different way.

In Invisible Life, what was very interesting to me was to look at Brazil as a place of immigration [the father Antonio is a Portuguese immigrant in Brazil], and the consequences for the first generation [Antonio’s daughters Euridice and Guida]. These girls needed to succeed, to be the perfect role model. This is much clearer in the book [the eponymous Marta Batalha romance upon which the film is based]. That’s a very important subject to me, but also to the world in general.

Brazil is one of those cultures where people are really happy with what they are. There’s a real love for the land, despite all the shit that’s been going on for 500 years. I wish I could see more stories about Brazil as a place that people go to! Once you get there, the identity from where you came from is erased and you instantly become Brazilian.

On the other hand, the desire to leave has to do with queerness. The queer diaspora. The feeling of going away is something that we as queer people have faced from day one. The smaller the place, the more control they exert over your body and your life. That’s also played a big role in the way I work and in the way I have travelled around the world.

VF – Let’s go back to the topic of resistance. Brazilian television is not doing a sterling job for historically marginalised groups. Black people are constantly criminalised, while LGBT and female representation isn’t very accurate. Will Brazilians have to turn to cinema instead as tool of resistence?

KA – I don’t know! On one hand, I feel like a dinosaur. Does cinema make sense? Does it make sense to make films? Who watches them? But then, that’s all I know how to do. I have to believe it makes a difference, otherwise, how will I wake up in the morning?

It is horrendous how in television – no matter what channel – we Brazilians present ourselves as a white nation. And we are not! That also has to do with who’s owning and running the media in Brazil. And it’s part of an elite who like to think of themselves as white and European. This has nothing to do with what the actual country is.

I don’t know where the frontline is. My frontline is making films. But maybe the frontline is neither in cinema nor television. Maybe the frontline is on the Internet. Maybe it’s on long narratives called series, or something else. When you look at Porta dos Fundos [a Brazilian comedy YouTube channel], it’s brilliant. Maybe that’s the frontline.

VF – Is it on Netflix? Did Petra Costa get it right launching her documentary The Edge of Democracy (2019) there?

KA – No, I don’t think it’s Netflix at all.

VF – But Netflix gave Petra’s film available in more than 200 countries, and people around the world the opportunity to understand the tragedy that’s befallen Brazil.

KA – I didn’t see the film. I think Netflix and Amazon are great, but I also think that we need to be more creative. I’m not entirely sure where the future is, but I’m not convinced it’s not in a big corporation. I hope there are other ways we can communicate with people. We need diversity. We need diverse platforms with diverse outreach that support diverse voices.

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Click here for our previous interview with Karim, back in 2016!

All images in this interview are from ‘The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao’, unless stated otherwise.

Honeyland

Posted on by victorfraga

This movie isn’t intended for mainstream audiences. Instead, it’s the hypnotic spectacle of the call of the bee. Silently, it opens on a woman, wading as she does to the hive, hiding from the camera’s reach. The lure of the bee sting sticks to their yellow shelter as the victor holds her treasure trove to the watchful camera. That an aspirational action of visual response should open the film comes as no surprise in an 80-minute mantra of silent, hopeful treats.

Nestled as she is with the bees of the Balkans, Hatidze Muratova lives in the hills, free from the constrains of electricity. Aiding her ailing mother, Muratova continues the lineage of bee-keeping by saddling the honeydew to sell in a village four hours walk away. Only the arrival of a rambunctious family, their roaring engines battering through the called airwaves, changes her meditative life, continuing the filmmakers journey to separate the mechanical from the natural. The film acts as visual poetry, sectioned as it is in unconventional norm. Muratova, the single woman, holds her pride as Hussein Sam, the proud family man surveying empty hungry mouths, competes with her income as honey-maker. It’s the battle of the sexes, the battle of equality, material modernity making the struggle more tangible for the viewer.

Superficial sympathies lie with Muratova, a practitioner with an ageing mother and attentive pup to care for. And then there’s Hussein, who works through his internal disrepair by repairing the destroyed iron cattle modes of transport. Acting as he does as entrepreneur is more practical than Hollywood Machiavellian. One long shot details the worries Muratova holds towards these new guests, tactfully, courtesies are made by all concerned. Though the story can be told in paragraphs, the film’s true strengths come in the doctrinal dealings of a tradition practised in antiquated reverie. The symbolism is cryptic, rife, sweet.

Directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov directed the lightly lit naturalistic drama over a three year journey, carefully shared as it is to its audiences. In their ventures, they expose the courage, contradictions, characters and courtesies of a daily life. And as such, it measures a poetry in visual form. Staggering cinema.

Honeyland is in selected cinemas across the UK from Friday, September 13th. On VoD in January 2020.