Month: December 2019

Film should brighten up our imminent dark future!

Posted on by victorfraga

To paraphrase a statement made by the late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of Hollywood”. As someone who was raised on Hollywood movies and is still enthralled by the creative industry of filmmaking and film story-telling, I also find it hard to imagine a moment in time when film, for reasons we’ll explore below, will not exist and will not be made in the same manner that it is currently.

The nature of film is changing and is now in decline. Attendance to movie theatres has been dropping for decades as home entertainment has shifted audiences’ collective bums from theatre seats to sofas. First it was the revolution of VHS cassettes, then DVD, now the epoch is online streaming. Only the spectacle of a franchise cinematic event – a Marvel film, a Star Wars episode – brings the masses out. On occasion an oddity might rise above the din and become a hit, a recent example of which would be Jordan Peele’s Us (2018) and Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019, pictured below), though these are few and far between. Hollywood’s reliance on domestic audiences to recoup has also dwindled. Hollywood now looks towards foreign markets such as China for return-on-investment. And investment is key to understanding the current state of mainstream filmmaking, as the new online studios of Amazon, Netflix and now Disney produce mid-priced dramas and comedies to keep their consumers at home and in Amazon’s and Disney’s case, keep purchasing their products.

Is this the future of mainstream film? A two-hour-plus exercise in product placement designed to shift toys, clothes and lifestyles. But, if (or as) capitalism unravels, or catastrophe strikes, film may be unleashed from this undesired future and become something of a savoir to those that remain.

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The end is nigh

Whilst never envisioning its own demise, Hollywood has envisioned the end of the world by spectacular means over its short history. In an essay titled Disaster Movies and the Collective Longing for Annihilation, published in early 2013, I argued that the disaster movie genre plays out our fears of mass death and the end of humanity, but also gives us permission to enjoy the destruction from a safe distance and the utopia of a renewed version of humanity that often comes Post-catastrophe. The payoff was to witness the end of the world so we could witness the renewal. Whilst elements of that essay may still be justifiable, the world we live in now is different and more divisive to that of the time the piece was written. A lot has happened in the space of only a few years. Some of it feels like tropes from a comedy film, too ridiculous to contemplate, some of it has been drawn from tragedy and is too heartbreaking to imagine.

With the aid of CGI, it was easier to envision the catastrophic death tolls and the mind-blowing damage of end of the world scenario. In the blockbuster films Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998, pictured below) and Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) ocean waves caused by crashing asteroids rise up and wash over towering cityscapes. In Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) and Independence Day: Resurgence (Roland Emmerich, 2016; pictured at the top of this article), populations are wiped out in minutes by invading alien technology. In 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), a virus infects and kills billions. In Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996), a series of tornadoes tear up a fractured landscape. In Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1998), an army of invading insectoids demolish entire buildings and kill countless. In The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004), the Earth is plunged into a new global Ice Age. In Hollywood, the future can be cancelled easily.

But even then, Hollywood continued to find more elaborate ways to offer screen-based destruction for audiences to joyously lap up.

In most of these disaster films, the world was reset. After the devastation, life was renewed yet continued in much the same way. For example, in Deep Impact, despite the death of possibly millions and the exhaustive costs associated with global destruction, the man who is President of the United States – President Beck (Morgan Freeman) – remains the U.S President and continues the work of that office even through the structures that held the senate and congress is physically decimated. We later learn that Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore in Independence Day serves a second term as U.S President after the initial invasion. The structures of the worldwide system of organisation, i.e capitalism and democratic governance, remain.

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The saga never ends

This has been made more explicit in the 23-film Infinity Saga of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With each movie the threat increased and although most of the saga was Earth-based, the perception of the threat widened to include villains that were demi-gods, actual Gods, intergalactic warlords, and legions of armed warriors from other realms. In most cases, cities are wiped off the map, yet, the populace of Earth seemed to continue on regardless of the dramatic loss of life and the demolition of the cities they live and work in. The faith placed in The Avengers to reset the standards was absolute.

In Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2018), half the population of the universe is snapped out of existence by the tyrant Thanos, and this event is reversed by The Avengers five years later in Endgame (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2019),when all those who were “snapped” out of existence are “returned”. There is no permanence, and as seen in the first MCU post-”return” film Spider Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts, 2019), life more or less continues on very much the same.

Now the reset can now happen again and again within a single franchise. No threat is sustainable but dangers continue to come that can be swept aside by a team of superheroes.

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Reality imitates fiction?

But this is not the world we live in. We’ve no superheroes among us and the people we put in charge of our daily lives, the leaders, politicians and representatives we elect, are mediocre at best, tyrants and imbeciles at worst. In the near future our own world might succumb to the scenes of destruction that prevail in Hollywood cinema. The threat won’t come from mad tyrants from space, but from circumstances of our own doing. It will very likely be less dramatic than the scenario we see in Hollywood’s version of events. There will be no swelling music to accompany the scenes, no brave muscular superhero to swoop down and save us. We’ll live or die and the after effects of any disaster for the survivors will be just as devastating. No reset or utopia, just continued hardship and survival.

We’ve seen this play out at various times in the past decades. The terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 felt, and were meant to feel like a scene from a Hollywood disaster movie. The Indian Ocean Tsunami that struck the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India and the Maldives with an estimated body count of 227,898 people could have been ripped right out of a disaster film. The earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011 was a real-life disaster and footage of the first wave sweeping across the country had cinematic overtones. Hurricane Katrina that struck New Orleans in 2005 offered a post-apocalyptic landscape of submerged city streets and dead bodies floating in the waters.

These are the most news-worthy examples that come to mind, but on a day-to-day basis, people are facing what we might perceive as miniature – personal apocalypses. Climate disruption is frying the forests, melting the ice caps and the burning of fossil fuels continues to pollute our air. The devastation to land means a desperate wave of displaced people. War and unrest in places such as Syria (pictured below, in this year’s For Sama, by Waad Al-Kateab, Edward Watts) and Libya have pushed an exodus of people to take extreme measures in migrating to safer environments in Europe. These civil conflicts are having wider repercussions throughout the world as governments retract decades of assistance and refocus themselves nationally and dismiss the wave of migration as another regions problem.

These are prolonged events that will play out and worsen over decades. But these events are not Hollywood material. The slowness softens the impact. Like climate disruption, we only heed the warnings when disaster impacts us in the immediate moment. But people are subject to even smaller waves of devastation brought on by capitalism and the impact of greedy corporations that inflict themselves of the landscape and then abandon without remorse when the buck and the labour becomes cheaper elsewhere. These pockets of economic devastation exist across the globe and are the end times in miniature.

Catastrophe happens on an almost daily basis and is nudging us at various intervals towards bigger cycles of devastation. There will be survivors of any large-scale natural or man-made disaster. In the harshest of circumstances pockets of existence will continue and may even be able to thrive under these new environmental conditions. The end of civilisation is not always the end of humanity. How we rebuild, or prolong our existence depends on the stories we will recall and stories we choose to pass down.

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Can film save the world?

Today the stories that reveal our contemporary culture are locked within literature, novels, short stories, popular culture, games, apps, social networks, and film. The naivety of that statement becomes apparent when written down, and maybe the fact we have allowed our culture to be locked within these realms is perplexing, but this is the situation we find ourselves in and the direction of societies has always been informed by the stories of the past and present. Film cannot be excluded on the basis that it is considered entertainment. Film has always been a form of education and an apparatus for personal and societal change and progression. It can guide us towards a world we want or away from a world we don’t. This is in line with DMovies’ vision that cinema is a tool for personal and social liberation.

In any post-catastrophe world, film will still be available to those that we’ll call survivors. The means of how it will be made and how it will be screened and distributed will have to be explored in more depth elsewhere, but my initial thinking is the potential hacking of the discarded technology that will litter a post-catastrophe world. Why it must be made is quite simple. We will need to tell stories to starve off hardships and to strive for betterment. We will need creativity to overcome the predicament we find ourselves in.

Humankind has a need to express itself, a desire to explain its times, a longing to record its moments. Anything to overcome the trauma of living in dark times, but even in the light.

Our societies now have film and popular culture ingrained within its very essence. This will not change and will stay ingrained for a very long time to come regardless of our predicament. Show a young child an image of a popular culture artifact, a character from a popular show, a sports logo, a TV theme song, and its recognition is almost instantaneous. There is enough access in any form, physical or digital, to know that film will continue, and must continue beyond any doubt. What type of film comes after collapse is anyone’s guess.

Film, or at the very least its mainstream variant, is tied to capitalism and globalisation, and with any measured catastrophe, capitalism and globalisation will collapse. One must assume that this kind of film will be impossible to make and maybe that is for the best anyway. In post-catastrophe times, humanity will divert, disperse and regroup into smaller, more localised forms, film will most likely do the same after the collapse and instead of needing to communicate on a global scale, film should become the engine of change to smaller pockets of society. It would be nice to consider film and its current audience implementing this before a catastrophic event, but like the climate, we’ll probably have to wait for a full disruption before we even consider it.

La Dolce Vita

Posted on by victorfraga

Fellini’s eighth feature film has passed into the English language as a synonym for Italian exuberance, style and the ability to enjoy life without apology. No film has ever had such an ironic title as La Dolce Vita (“The Sweet Life”, had the film title ever been translated). In the film that made his international reputation, the Italian filmmaker pours cold water over the whole concept of a treacly existence. Instead, he reveals his home country as shallow, vacant and cruel. Indeed, he is not just depicting Italy but the whole era of the 1960s, which is the beginning of our own era, and all that he shows is still relevant and deeply prophetic.

The ennui of is emphasised by the fact there is in this film there is no very obvious narrative. The story consists basically of a reporter named Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) drifting through of the streets of Rome, and contending with a number of events. His girlfriend takes an overdose, he encounter an heiress, a movie star, and so on. Each scene is a series of episodes, in night clubs, at parties, in restaurants, etc.

This is a movie built upon imagery and symbolism. The flying Christ scene mimics the idea of the Second Coming of Christ. Christ flies over his “eternal” city and what does he find? He finds paparazzi in the Via Veneto with rich, aimless people, he finds two children in a field pretending to have visions of the Virgin Mary, and a beautiful woman in a clinging dress climbing up the steps of the cupola of St. Peter’s, wearing what looks like a cardinal’s hat. The images of La Dolce Vita linger in the mind long after you have seen it.

The secular world he depicts is just as ridiculous and, perhaps, crueller. The one person who has any pretensions to intellectual insight is Steiner (Alain Cluny) and he shoots himself and his two children. The paparazzi wait until his wife gets off a bus and is told that her husband and children are dead and hope to photograph her reaction. The paparazzi are quite happy to run around a field in a downpour while two children pretend to have visions. It doesn’t matter to them. It’s all news. If it’s fake news, it doesn’t matter. It still sells. Even glamorous Rome is not that glamorous. The down at heel prostitute Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) whose flat Marcello Rubini stays at with a girlfriend lives in a depressing housing estate on the edge of Rome. You can’t get into her sitting room or bedroom except by walking over planks because the floor is flooded, and no one has come to do the repairs.

This film heralded the beginning of the 1960’s. Besides its teasing of Catholicism, it also featured openly gay characters. It was the beginning of the modern age which is still very much with us. It is a world of trivia, diversion and pointless celebrities. It believes nothing and knows nothing. The great fish that ends up on the beach right at the end of the film with its huge vacant eyes symbolises this. It could well be a metaphor for modern life, large, bloated and meaningless. The only aspect of today it lacks is poisonous politics.

The only people who seem to do an honest day’s work are the police and a beautiful young girl running a beachside restaurant and her busy, little brother laying out the plates on the tables. At the end of the film the girl tries desperately to communicate with Marcello, but she cannot be understood because the gap between her world and the world of the rich and spoilt people Marcello inhabits is too vast.

The film was loathed by many at its first screening in Milan. The Vatican hated the film and it was banned in several Catholic countries. Yet abroad it was immediately greeted as a masterpiece.

The 4k restoration of La Dolce Vitta was in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 3rd. The BFI are holding a centennial celebration of Fellini’s work in 2020. On Mubi in June.

December is once again the month of European cinema!

Posted on by victorfraga

We are delight to announce that the fourth edition of the ArteKino Festival will take place throughout the month of December, from the very first day of the month until the end of the year. This gives you plenty of time to enjoy the 10 films carefully selected exclusively for you!

The online Festival is aimed at cinephiles from all over Europe who are seeking original, innovative and thought-provoking European productions. You can watch films on ArteKino’s dedicated website and also on ArteKino iOS and Android app (developed in conjunction with Festival Scope). Subtitles are available in ten different languages: English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

Once you have finished watching your favourite movies, you can rate them on a scale 1 to 5. The film with the highest score will receive the European Audience Award of €20,000. The sum will be shared between the director, the producer and the international distributor, thereby encouraging a wider geographical distribution of the film. In addition, a jury of six to 10 young Europeans, aged between 18 and 25, will select a movie to win an award of €10,000. The young Europeans will be invited to Paris for the European Audience Award and the Young Public Award Ceremony in January.

ArteKino is supported of the Creative Europe Media Programme of the European Union. Below is a list of the 2019 selection, listed alphabetically. Click on the film title in order to accede to our exclusive review (where available) in here in order to accede to the ArteKino portal and watch your favourite European movies right now!

PS – The winner of this year’s ArteKino has now been announced: Psychobitch. You can watch it for free until the end of January by clicking here.

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1. Messi and Maud (Marleen Jonkman):

They say that children are the gifts that keep on giving, yet for many couples out there, their Christmases, birthdays and anniversaries seem empty of gifts. So it is for Frank (Guido Pollemans) and Maud (Rifka Lodeizen), both now past 40, eager to put a decade of miscarriages and false starts behind them. Flying to the Andes, an awaited rebirth is marred by another miscarriage, the following argument causes Maud to abandon her husband for the barren countryside. Only through a chance encounter with 8-year-old Messi (Cristobol Farias), does Maud re-discover the value of life.

Lodeizen delivers an extraordinarily well put together performance, even if the story sounds very conventional. Twelve minutes into the film and Lodeizen clothes herself in funereal black robes, wailing at the failures her blond body holds. She holds the contrived moments with an elegiac loneliness, aching for a child of her own to carry and hold. Her travel companion is the very thing she’ll never bear, a sprightly child, fervent, feverish and full of life.

Messi and Maud is also pictured at the top of this article.

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2. Normal (Adele Tulli):

An unsettling visual journey through gender norms in contemporary society. Immersed in a kaleidoscopic mosaic of visually powerful scenes, viewers experience the ritualised performance of femininity and masculinity hidden in ordinary interactions, from birth to adulthood.

Isolating the slightly grotesque, uncanny elements surrounding our everyday life, NORMAL meditates on what remains imperceptible about it – its governing norms, its inner mechanisms. The result is that what counts as ‘normal’ does not feel so reassuring, anymore.

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3. Psychobitch (Martin Lund):

Fifteen-year-old Frida assumes to be the class outsider. In this world of the “Generation Perfect”, the other kids at school agree: Frida is so weird. Marius does pretty much everything he can to be exemplary. When the two are paired up as study buddies, he sees it as another opportunity to show everyone what a great guy he is. But Frida has no intention of being “fixed” by the class golden boy.

Their study sessions become the catalyst for a turbulent relationship. Yet in his fights with Frida, Marius also experiences something exciting, challenging and completely new.

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4. Ruth (Antonio Pinhao Botelho):

Ruth is about football, but, apart from a brief sequence at the end, there are no scenes of the great game being played. Instead, this movie uses sport as a means to explore Portugal’s colonial legacy, delivering a tale of a changing nation.

The year is 1958, the country is Portuguese Mozambique and the city is Lourenço Marques (now called Maputo), introduced in an opening montage as the “Jewel of the Indian Ocean”. Our protagonist Eusébio (Igor Regalla) is a young black lad from the streets, impressing everyone he meets with his devastating footballing skills. Playing for Sporting de Lourenço Marques, he is noticed by white Portuguese scouts for Benfica, who regularly travel to Mozambique to find players who can play for clubs back home.

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5. Sad Song (Louise Narboni):

The artist must look in many places in order to find their muse. For Fonnard, capturing the untamed spirit of the wandering refugee brought wasn’t a mere altruistic gesture. Captured under the slanted camera angles, Fonnard cuts vegetables with Ahmad, sharing a community of comradeship and love. Exchanging lyrics of a poetic and musical nature, the intertwined art forms form the basis for a concert that might prove Fonnard’s purest work. With Ahmad at her side, Fonnard has a new muse, a new mirror and, most importantly, a dear friend.

This is one of the more compelling documentaries of the year, detailing the companionship that close quarters can both bring and inhibit. For a generation of viewers versed in Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, this might not come across as something entirely original, but Narboni’s piece feels genuinely organic, instead of tediously automated.

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6. Selfie (Agostino Ferrente):

Alessandro and Pietro are 16 years-old and live in Naples, district of Traiano where, in the summer of 2014, Davide Bifolco, also 16, was shot by a policeman who mistook him for a fugitive. They are inseparable friends, Alessandro works as a waiter in a bar, Pietro dreams to become a hairdresser. Alessandro and Pietro accept the director’s proposal to shoot themselves with an iPhone, commenting live on their own daily experiences, their close friendship, their neighbourhood – now empty, in the middle of summer – and the tragedy that ended Davide’s life.

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7. Sons of Denmark (Ulaa Salim):

Shakespeare famously proclaims in Hamlet: “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark”. In Sons of Denmark something is indeed very rotten in the Scandinavian country. Forget nice social democrat Denmark, the land of hygge, Danish pastries and the Little Mermaid. This is a country where migrants live in fear of vicious, xenophobic gangs, where pigs’ heads are deposited where Muslims gather, and random acid attacks are made on innocent foreigners. This film is an impressive debut by its director and writer Ulaa Salim. Made by the migrant community in Denmark, mainly Syrian and Iraqi, and their sympathisers, it portrays a country of cruel disdain for those who seem just a bit different.

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8. Stitches (Miroslav Terzic):

Based on true events, Stitches takes place in contemporary Belgrade, 18 years after a young seamstress was coldly informed of her newborn’s sudden death. She still believes the infant was stolen from her. Dismissed by others as paranoid and with a mother’s determination she summons the strength for one last battle against the police, the hospital bureaucracy and even her own family to uncover the truth.

9. Thirst (Svetla Tsotsorkova):

A couple and their teenage son live on a hilltop, doing the laundry for local hotels, despite the intermittent water supply. Their simple life is overturned by the arrival of a father-and-daughter team of diviner and well-digger, who promise to bring an end to this precarious existence by finding a source on their arid hill. But ultimately, these newcomers quench a thirst that is much stronger than that for mere water.

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10. Thirty (Simona Kostova):

This somewhat millennial take on the midlife crisis follows a bunch of friends in a hip Berlin neighbourhood for 24 hours while they celebrate – or at least attempt – the birthday of one of them. The German drama, which premiered in Rotterdam earlier this year and is available online throughout December as part of the ArteKino Festival, is a snapshot of the existential ennui of the 30-somethings.

The writer Övünç (Övünç Güvenisik) turns 30 and calls upon his mates to party, all the while coping with a severe creative block. His friend Pascal (Pascal Houdus) is coming to terms with a bad breakup with Raha (Raha Emami Khansari), a struggling actress with bouts of depression. Other members of the group – such as Henner (Henner Borchers) and Kara (Kara Schröder) – also deal with insecurities. Together, they venture outside in order to enjoy life, although internally, they have no clue how to begin.

Thirty (Dreissig)

Posted on by victorfraga

A somewhat millennial take on the midlife crisis, Simona Kostova’s Thirty follows a bunch of friends in a hip Berlin neighbourhood for 24 hours while they celebrate – or at least attempt – the birthday of one of them. The German drama, which premiered in Rotterdam earlier this year and is available online throughout December as part of the ArteKino Festival, is a snapshot of the existential ennui of the 30-somethings.

The writer Övünç (Övünç Güvenisik) turns 30 and calls upon his mates to party, all the while coping with a severe creative block. His friend Pascal (Pascal Houdus) is coming to terms with a bad breakup with Raha (Raha Emami Khansari), a struggling actress with bouts of depression. Other members of the group – such as Henner (Henner Borchers) and Kara (Kara Schröder) – also deal with insecurities. Together, they venture outside in order to enjoy life, although internally, they have no clue how to begin.

Thirty exudes a realistic charm. It focuses on seemingly unimportant dialogue and wandering scenes. We follow Övünç’s go through the first ciggies of the day for eight minutes. An entire conversation stops for almost 2 minutes just so one of the characters can use a blender. The movie relies on mood and understated acting to do the heavy lifting. Nowhere this is clearer – and more effective – than on scenes centred on Raha, who carries a muted pain around and always seems to be hiding something. Her monologue about her inability to find a reason to get out of bed is one of the production’s best moments.

The feature is divided in two parts. The first half is a theatrical and brightly-lighted affair, focused on long takes in minimalistic apartments. The second half is an exploratory and colourful night out, somewhere between Gus van Sant and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The dramatic elements of the first part get audiences hooked, while the second part provides the film with a sense of purpose and emotional punch.

Said search is echoed in Övünç’s opening of his birthday gift – a potent scene which is the heart of the film. He starts off with a big box that reveals, Matryoshka-style, several smaller boxes within itself, only the find the last and smallest one empty. While his friends argue that “the journey is the reward”, what’s clear in his face – and in Thirty as a whole – is the disappointment which comes with the end of youth.

Watch Thirty for free during the month of December only with ArteKino – click here for more information.

Motherless Brooklyn

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

It’s taken Edward Norton 20 years to adapt Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn for the screen, but it’s been worth the wait. Norton is best known as an actor, but his talent clearly extends a long way outside of that field – as well as being the lead, star actor here, he produced, wrote and directed, fulfilling all these duties as well as you can imagine any four separate people doing. You can sense the time that’s gone into this: the loving period detail, the feeling that the script has marinated so that the characters have a real depth to them on the page, the superb music score. There is a palpable sense here that you are watching one of the great private eye movies. Actually, there’s more than that… although this is a period piece, it feels very much about where we are now.

New York City, 1957. Lionel Essrog (Norton) works for Frank Minna’s detective agency. A confident, safe pair of hands, Minna (Bruce Willis) has taken a chance on Lionel who suffers from Tourette Syndrome. Someone will say a word or make a gesture and it will set Lionel off. He just can’t help it. Most people would regard Lionel as an unemployable misfit, a drain on social resources. Frank sees his potential. Lionel’s head detects patterns, makes connections, won’t leave puzzles alone until all the pieces that don’t quite fit have been assembled into a coherent whole. Lionel is now an invaluable asset on Frank’s crew.

So when in the opening minutes Frank goes to a meeting which leads to a car ride which ends in his death, the circumstances and background worm their way into Lionel’s subconscious and force him to investigate, ponder and try to make the disparate pieces fit together. Somewhere in the puzzle, an unseen member of numerous committees at City Hall, lies the power behind the city’s planning department, visionary developer Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, the actor who among other roles is known for satirising Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live) who thinks nothing of demolishing areas where poor people live to further his idealised metropolis of the future. It’s simply collateral damage. Moses is contrasted with Paul (Willem Dafoe) who looks like a tramp but turns out to be a trained architect fallen from grace and the brother of Moses, with whom he has profound disagreements about urban development and the way people who live in a city should be treated.

Lionel’s investigations lead him to a woman named Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) at the Committee Against Racial Inequality in Housing. She drags him to a Harlem jazz dive where he discovers the music to be a liberating experience; if his Tourette’s is normally a cause of social embarrassment, here he finds himself involuntarily singing scat and impressing the players on the stage. He and she connect on the level of outsiders – he because of his so-called disability, she because of the colour of her skin. Eventually he will work out for himself her place in the complex puzzle his head is putting together.

Everything about this film – from its broadest brushstrokes to its finest detail – is magnificent. Nothing is here that hasn’t been considered, from Dick Pope’s satisfying noirish cinematography to a period jazz score with a contemporary urban edge involving legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, composer Daniel Pemberton and a demo (of his song Daily Battles) by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Norton’s vision is so strong and so detailed that he elicits and encourages incredible work from his well chosen team be they in front of or behind the camera.

More significantly though, the film is about something very important: ordinary people at the bottom of the pile, with their weaknesses and idiosyncrasies which make them human, doing the best they can. Perhaps even making a positive difference. And, at the other end of the social spectrum, the rich and powerful who walk all over them without seeing themselves doing anything wrong. It’s a US movie which clearly speaks to an America run by the despotic, racist and sexist Trump. The film doesn’t appear to be conceived that way – it was in development way before Trump was even a presidential nominee – it’s just that as a movie coming out now it seems to fit the place in which America currently finds itself. It likewise seems appropriate as a comment on the wider world right now. As for Britain, currently in the throes of a general election where the incumbent Tories appear to care little for truth in their duplicitous and deceitful campaigning, ordinary damaged heroes like Lionel who fight for human dignity as best they can are exactly what we need. The movie of the moment. Go see it as soon as you possibly can.

Motherless Brooklyn is out in the UK on Friday, December 6th.

Messi and Maud (La Holandesa)

Posted on by victorfraga

They say that children are the gifts that keep on giving, yet for many couples out there, their Christmases, birthdays and anniversaries seem empty of gifts. So it is for Frank (Guido Pollemans) and Maud (Rifka Lodeizen), both now past 40, eager to put a decade of miscarriages and false starts behind them. Flying to the Andes, an awaited rebirth is marred by another miscarriage, the following argument causes Maud to abandon her husband for the barren countryside. Only through a chance encounter with 8-year-old Messi (Cristobol Farias), does Maud re-discover the value of life.

Lodeizen delivers an extraordinarily well put together performance, even if the story sounds very conventional. Twelve minutes into the film and Lodeizen clothes herself in funereal black robes, wailing at the failures her blond body holds. She holds the contrived moments with an elegiac loneliness, aching for a child of her own to carry and hold. Her travel companion is the very thing she’ll never bear, a sprightly child, fervent, feverish and full of life. Together, Maud and Messi walk through the cascading South American deserts, pushing and pulling each other through their collected journeys.

Messi too holds a troubled history, his boorish father decrying the woman who bore him a whore and a mad woman. In Maud he finds a mother figure, in Messi, she finds a child. Inevitably, they must leave each other, but it’s not the collective destinations that makes the film so interesting. It’s the journey.

It’s richly illustrious in photography, the varying montages showcasing the lush escapades that entices tourists to the Patagonia. Much like the two leads, the landscape offers excitement, restraint, melancholy and possibility. And yet there’s a sadness at play. Messi will likely leave his fellow pilgrim to a dubious household, Maud must return to a childless marriage. Surrounded by this prosperous arid regions, where plants and soil meet, Maud comes to terms that her body will never grow and flower a life of her own.

While a little heavy-handed at times, the end result is an emotive one, celebrating the virtues of womanhood that exist outside of the womb. Lodeizen is excellent, steering the journey that a viewer can enjoy, but understands that Maud is not and will not be the only woman who has walked in these unenviable steps.

Watch Messi and Maud for free during the month of December only with ArteKino – just click here for more information.

Ruth

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

This is about football, but, apart from a brief sequence at the end, there are no scenes of the great game being played. Instead, Ruth uses the sport as a means to explore Portugal’s colonial legacy, delivering a tale of a changing nation.

The year is 1958, the country is Portuguese Mozambique and the city is Lourenço Marques (now called Maputo), introduced in an opening montage as the “Jewel of the Indian Ocean”. Our protagonist Eusébio (Igor Regalla) is a young black lad from the streets, impressing everyone he meets with his devastating footballing skills. Playing for Sporting de Lourenço Marques, he is noticed by white Portuguese scouts for Benfica, who regularly travel to Mozambique to find players who can play for clubs back home.

As Sporting de Lourenço Marques is a subsidiary and feeder club for Sporting Lisbon, this floated move to Benfica proves very controversial, with the other side trying to do everything within their grasp to block the move. This all takes place against the backdrop of the fascist Portuguese regime and the events leading up to the revolution of the colonised nations of Africa. As a result, the treatment of the black man by, often patronising, rich white men, doubles up as a fascinating metaphor for Mozambique’s treatment by Portugal.

A free adaptation of true events, Ruth — named after the codename Eusébio was given during the lengthy transfer process — is a playful, intermittently amusing exploration of Portuguese rule and the bureaucracy of their football system. While it will be inevitably more interesting for people with some knowledge of either the Portuguese fascist regime or the intricacies of the Primeira Liga, Ruth offers small pleasures in its production design — bringing the colonial-era architecture of Maputo to life — and the affability of the cast. Its core issues stem from the overly labyrinthine plot. The editing cannot find always a way to bring the story together, slowing everything down when it should be ramping the tension up.

Ruth will work a lot better with people who already know a lot about the player as opposed to somebody coming in with no prior information. It’s going to connect with football historians, colonial studies students and the citizens of Portugal and Mozambique.

You can watch Ruth during the month of December for free with ArteKino – just click here for more information.

Shooting the Mafia

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Letizia Battaglia followed a most dangerous career path – capturing the life and crimes of the Mafia in Palermo, Sicily’s capital. John Gotti may have loved celebrity, but none of the Mafiosi from the old country appreciated a young, brazen woman confronting them with a Pentax. ‘If he could, he would have killed me’, Letizia remarked of Luciano Leggio, a leading figure of the Sicilian Mob.

Her work, presented in stark monochrome, depicts death and suffering in the arresting style of Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths. Thematically, however, Letizia’s work may share more with that of Alexander Gardener, who used photography – then in its infancy – to confront the public with the horrors of the American Civil War.

This is what compelled Letizia to take some 600,000 photographs for the L’Ora newspaper – to shatter any romantic notions of the Cosa Nostra by depicting the rank brutality of their war on civil society. And it worked, her catalogue of dead men, women and children made a powerful impression on the people of Sicily, driving support for the heroic anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.

Shooting the Mafia isn’t just an organised crime documentary, though. It is the story of a girl and woman making her way in Sicily’s patriarchal society. Longinotto presents her subject in an intimate, engaging way, placing Letizia’s narration against a combination of stock and archival footage to tell her story.

However, this look into her personal life can overstay its welcome. Letizia’s early life is given a quaint, romantic quality, yet the continued emphasis placed on her later relationships can be of dubious interest. After all, it is her association with organised crime that makes her interesting, not her love life. Yet, despite this, there is a resonant tenderness about how she and her lovers talk about what their relationships meant. There is no acrimony, just an open discussion of why things transpired the way they did. It’s a reflection of the contentedness that can come with age.

Her work in public life makes for the most interesting viewing, though. Letizia states the importance of having a clean political system and she is absolutely right. Corruption is the harbinger of dysfunction, destitution and death. And the man who took the fight to the Mafia – Giovanni Falcone – was a hero. When asked about his life-risking commitment to the state, he answered, ‘it’s not about state, it’s about society’.

And the island society he was trying to save was wracked with terrible violence. ‘We’d never known violence like it, there were 1000 murders one year’, Letizia recounts. She confronted this menace head-on, documenting as many crimes as she could. Indeed, it was the photos she didn’t take that ‘hurt her the most’.

Shooting the Mafia is in UK cinemas on Friday, November 29th.

Pink Wall

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Romantic dramas lend themselves nicely to non-linear formats. Given that romance is all about chasing, prolonging and relocating desire, mixing up the timeline can add bittersweetness to proceedings. Think the stream-of-consciousness riffing of Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), the melancholic undertow of (500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009) or the science-fiction philosophy of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004).

Pink Wall takes this concept of heightening emotion through non-normative narrative to its most minimalist form, honing into six key moments over six years in a particularly fraught relationship. In both narrative and style, it is a genuinely innovative attempt to reinvent the endlessly bickering-couple-genre. While admirable for its ambition and the strength of the two central performances, it fails to take all of its nervous energy and convert into something truly potent. All six scenes are fine on their own; taken all together it feels like a piece of the puzzle is still missing.

It stars two American immigrants in the UK, Jenna (played by director Tom Cullen’s wife Tatiana Maslany) and Leon (Jay Duplass). We never quite find out why they made the move across the pond — although its suggested, rather kindly, given our current situation, that the United Kingdom is a great place for self-expression — but they are glad to have found each other in a land notorious for its lack of Yankee expats. He’s a self-styled cool guy (read: kind of lazy) while she has incredible ambition as a producer (read: kind of uptight). Locking eyes in a club they seem to fall in love at first sight. This scene is given extra melancholic weight by the fact we know it’s going to go wrong; the question is how and why.

Within those two questions, debut writer-director Tom Cullen, has crafted his film. A true writer and actor’s showcase, it could’ve easily worked as a play, yet its ambitions are cinematic too, making use of different aspect ratios — from 1:1 to widescreen — to suggest both intimacy and apartness, opening up and closing down. Cullen has a good knack for locating the way arguments can swiftly turn into resolution and vice versa, passionate debate turning into passionate sex or, even better, passionately eating leftover pasta. These scenes are well-acted and even better-filmed, bringing to mind Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) in both style and content.

Pink Wall

It’s a shame then that some of the dialogue is overwritten and over-improvised, perhaps an inevitable limitation of a nine day shooting schedule. While undeniably relatable to anyone who has been in the throes of a messy relationship, their constant bickering and recriminations, later counterpointed by lovey-dovey cooing and awing, seems like showing-off rather than narrowing in, lessening drama through awkward stabs at realism.

These unpolished flaws are further strained whenever we meet anyone else. One big theme dinner scene, tackling everything from polyamorous relationships to lesbian mothers to gender stereotypes, sound like a parody of London dinner conversation than the real thing. Supporting characters here are merely obstacles for Jenna and Leon to overcome, provoking reactions in them instead of genuine people in and of themselves. A far braver film, perhaps — suggested in the opening shot, where we only see Jenna and Leon as she lays into her brother for calling Leon a “cuck” — may have shown us no supporting characters at all.

In these kind of films, you want to root for the characters; either to get together or show some kind of personal development. Non-linear structure need not be an excuse to avoid plot momentum altogether, yet the six scenes of Pink Wall cannot find a way to meaningfully coalesce into a satisfying whole. We all know relationships are hard. Almost impossibly so. But they also offer all kind of opportunities — to be a better person, or to look at things from a new perspective. I liked a lot of the things I saw here. I only wish that I learned something new too.

Pink Wall is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, December 13th. On Amazon Prime and other platforms in April.

Sad Song (Chanson Triste)

Posted on by victorfraga

The artist must look in many places in order to find their muse. For Fonnard, capturing the untamed spirit of the wandering refugee brought wasn’t a mere altruistic gesture. Captured under the slanted camera angles, Fonnard cuts vegetables with Ahmad, sharing a community of comradeship and love. Exchanging lyrics of a poetic and musical nature, the intertwined art forms form the basis for a concert that might prove Fonnard’s purest work. With Ahmad at her side, Fonnard has a new muse, a new mirror and, most importantly, a dear friend.

This is one of the more compelling documentaries of the year, detailing the companionship that close quarters can both bring and inhibit. For a generation of viewers versed in Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, this might not come across as something entirely original, but Narboni’s piece feels genuinely organic, instead of tediously automated.

Barely off camera for a moment, Fonnard speaks to Ahmad with fervent respect, understanding the values that intertwining cultures can bring. Eager to remind audiences that Muslims are not terrorists, Fonnard changes her material to incorporate Mohammedan symbolism. When her concerned pianist questions her use of Arabic in song, she replies “Allahu Akbar only means “God Is Great” after all”.

Then there’s Ahmad, staring magnetically towards the ceiling as she practices her repertoire. Sandy-eyed, he looks wordlessly through her recitals, his eyes ache with the ghosts he unwittingly admits to the camera. Conversing with his new surrogate mother, Ahmad details a harrowing phone call he shared with his biological mother. You can watch the horrors in his body language, that he may not be the infallible tout we opened our eyes on. It’s all there in the undiluted agony, turning himself into his arm to tear up, Fonnard motionless in her incomprehension of the world’s cruelty.

Together, they create a poetry more potent, more real than anything Fonnard could sing in the classical metier. Together, in body and voice, they’ve achieved an art piece.

You can watch Sad Song online and for free throughout the month of December with ArteKino – just click here for more information!

Fittingly, the film comes out only a year after Sinead O’Connor’s (now Shuhada’ Sadaqat) conversion to Islam. Traditionally a Judeo-Christian continent, Europe has shown a growing interest in Islamic Traditions in recent years.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg)

Posted on by victorfraga

The BFI are featuring a season of musicals on film which continues to January 2020. One immediately thinks of the great Ginger Roger/ Fred Astaire song and dance Hollywood musicals of the 1930s. These were followed by those of the 1940s and 1950s dominated by Gene Kelly who worked so successfully with Stanley Donen to create a series of outstanding movies – On the Town (1949), and Singing in the Rain (1952) among them.

However, there is a lesser known gem of the French cinema in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg directed by Jacques Demy, a director associated with the French New Wave. It was released in 1964 and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in the same year. Now, after all these years, it is still distinguished by all the dialogue being sung by the characters. The film was the joint creation of Demy as director and Michel Legrand. The sung dialogue seamlessly unfolded the poignant tale of the course of young love. The combination of sung dialogue and beautiful backgrounds lends itself to creating an unique nostalgic quality; the theme tune is haunting and reflects the tone of the bitter sweet relationship between the lovers.

I saw The Umbrellas of Chebourg when it first came out in the 1960s. It contrasted completely with the song and dance musicals produced by Hollywood which were fast and full of movement. However, so much was changing with the French New Wave, one just enjoyed the originality of the sung dialogue and the provincial setting of the story. It was a departure from what one was used to but a delightful glimpse into French culture. Seeing it now, one is almost overwhelmed by the colour, the carefully co-ordinated and constructed interiors and the realistic filming in dark, wet cobbled streets. It still retains a magical quality with something of a fairy tale in its gorgeous use of coordinated colour, the simplicity of the story and the haunting melodies.

Earlier in 1961 Demy had directed another now almost forgotten film, Lola, which was much appreciated at the time with Anouk Aimée as the central character. For those interested in film, it provides an excellent preparation for The Umbrellas – the music shares certain themes as does the story and provides a link to the back story of the diamond merchant in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Demy supports the sequence of events by dividing the narrative into three parts starting with Departure, followed by Absence with the concluding Return. The story begins with an engaging young couple, Guy and Geneviève who are very much in love. Their total absorption with each other adds a new dimension to their mundane lives; each living with family in a port seemingly largely populated by French sailors. The hoped for future of marriage with children is disrupted by Guy being drafted to serve abroad in the army for two years.

While the story line is very much of its period – a couple separated by the Algerian War, with the forlorn girl facing pregnancy without the face-saving possibility of marriage and its economic security – the poignancy of the situation is as powerful as ever. Geneviève’s predicament is beautifully realised with her gradual recognition of the difficulty of sustaining a powerful relationship at a distance.

The final part depicts the challenges experienced by Guy on his return to Cherbourg as a veteran of the war in Algeria. While reflecting on his earlier life with Geneviève, he gradually realises he needs to establish a new life for himself. Rain sunshine and snow all reflect the mood of the characters. Many images and themes are repeated – the Mercedes car brings Geneviève back to Cherbourg where there is a bitter sweet reunion. Not a Hollywood happy ever after resolution but perhaps one with which we can all recognise and identify.

It is stunning to see the beautiful Catherine Deneuve as a 20-year-old at the beginning of a lifelong career. The supporting actors are equally strong in conveying the poignancy of the situation and the working port of Cherbourg creates the gritty realism of every-day life. Much to be recommended – a truly memorable film.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is back in cinemas on Friday, December 6th