January 2020 - DMovies

Top 10 films about Brexit… and why it should have never happened

Posted on 30th January 20205th January 2021 by victorfraga

At DMovies, we are proudly European. We believe in the values of internationalism, diversity and tolerance. We also believe that cinema should not be confined to the borders of one nation, and that we all benefit from the plurality of cultures, visions and perspectives. The characteristics commonly associated with Brexit – nationalism, intolerance, cultural and political arrogance – are an affront to the very essence of a dirty movie. A dirty movie is a movie that brings people together, that celebrates the universality of cinema in novel and thought-provoking ways.

None of our writers support Brexit. In fact, very few people in the film industry do, except perhaps for poor multimillionaire Michael Caine. Some of our recent interviewees have expressed their reservations about the Brexit, too. An elated Mike Newell told us a few months ago: “People like me are infuriated by Brexit. Brexit’s a very bad thing. Not just culturally, turning our backs on Beethoven, but where’s the money gonna come from?”. A more magnanimous Ken Loach stated, also in an exclusive interview a few months ago: “there’s a lot of fake patriotism, xenophobia, chauvinism. I think that cinema and the left in general should communicate that people are of equal value, whatever their origin, religion, the language they speak. Everyone is our neighbour. Our working class people have more in common with the working class of other European countries than with our ruling class.”

So we came up with a list of 10 dirty movies that investigate – at times directly and other times poetically and obliquely – the various phenomena that triggered Brexit, from overt and rabid racism to a general discontentment with the establishment and the feeling neglect in the more rural and impoverished parts of the country. We hope that these films will help viewers to reflect on the mistakes made, understand how unscrupulous politicians capitalised on these problems and sentiments, and restore our trust in a diverse, tolerant and inclusive Britain. We believe that the UK will eventually heal these wounds and rejoin the EU.

These films are listed in alphabetical order. Click on the film title in order to accede to each individual review.

…

1. Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019):

Like a modern-day A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936), Bait observes the tension between rural and city folk and sees the darkness that misunderstanding can lead to. Edward Rowe’s increasingly desperate fisherman takes us along with him, as he lives hand to mouth and dreams of buying a boat to improve his catch. The tourists he was forced to sell his family home to, who repeatedly refer to themselves as a part of the community, keep trying to make his life even harder, though of course its all within their legal rights.

Bait is also great Brexit movie. But that’s not to say that it’s a single issue movie. This film will still be relevant long after we’ve got our blue passports, because these are battles that have always taken place, probably always will. But the way Jenkin relates past and present, generational and class divide, allows the film to take on mythic qualities.

2. Brexitannia (Timothy George Kelly, 2017):

The interviewees within this documentary are mostly in scrublands, council estates, broken down factories or a workingman’s club in areas such as the North-East of England, Northern Ireland, Clapton in Essex or the South West, describing their fears and what made them vote Brexit. The movie is was divided in two parts. We knew this was so because we were helpfully given the title “Part One: The People”, before the participants started talking. It was all vaguely interesting and amusing. The audience sometimes laughed out loud at some of the views held by this strange bunch, living somewhere outside the M25.

But there came a point when I was positively looking forward to what else we were going to get after ‘the people’, hoping that there would not be too much of it and that it was not going to go on for too long. Indeed, after “Part One: The People”, came “Part Two: The Experts. A group of half a dozen or so prominent individuals chosen to give their educated views on Brexit – one of them being Noam Chomsky.

3. The Brink (Alison Clayman, 2019):

Stephen Bannon is largely credited with the election of Donald Trump, which he describes as “a divine intervention”. Bannon remained his chief strategist until August 2017, when the two men fell out. It’s not entirely clear how close the two are right now. Nevertheless, Bannon remains very loyal to Trump’s cause and ideology. He works closely to the Republican Party. He was devastated when the GOP lost control of the House of Representatives, after the 2018 midterm elections.

The controversial political figure has made very good friends in Europe, with whom she shares many affinities. We see him meet up with Nigel Farage. They a passionate conversation about nationalism. Bannon believes that Trump’s election was a direct consequence of the Brexit referendum. “Victory begets victory”, he sums it up. We also watch him meet up with smaller and less significant leaders from the European far-right, including countries such as Belgium and Sweden.

4. Democracy (David Bernet, 2016):

This documentary does what the British media generally fails to do: it highlights the importance of personal privacy. In fact the UK seems to be moving precisely in the opposite direction. The highly controversial Investigatory Powers Act was passed last November with barely any objections from the political establishment, and very limited exposure in the media. The UK government now has unprecedented powers to snoop on our Internet history. While the film doesn’t highlight the UK context, if you are vaguely familiar with Tory privacy policy (or lack thereof) you might immediately realise the stark contrast.

It’s vital to note that, with Brexit, the UK may no longer be subjected to these laws, which could make the country extremely vulnerable to US corporate interests. Data privacy laws are very relaxed in the US, where an individual’s criminal and even health records are often publicly available or stored in databases with little to no protection.

5. Eaten by Lions (Jason Wingard, 2018):

This is not a film that overtly deals with Brexit. The film delves into the topics of infidelity and paternal abandonment with the thickest tongue-in-cheek, darkly flippant and ironic tone. “She had those eyes, almost as if something was wrong with her” Irfan (Asim Chaudry) tells Omar (Antonio Aakeel) about meeting Omar’s mother. Aakeel and Chaudry are on fine form, but Jack Carroll, playing the disabled Pete, is the real scene-stealer. Simply watching him trying to act anything but impish in a seduction scene (across from the sultry Natalie Davies) shows a comedic talent that stands beside the decided discomfiture of Peter Sellers and Stan Laurel.

Kevin Eldon, Johnny Vegas and Hayley Tammaddon punch up the supporting cast with strong supporting performances, with the right hint of subtle xenophobia. Despite his background, Omar’s foster mother suggests that he belong with “his own” (pointing to his Indian father), a particularly potent and shocking moment and one that supports an exclusivist England that voted for Brexit and one that touches on an all too potent nerve.

2. Hurricane (David Blair, 2018):

It’s too easy to take most British WW2 movies (e.g. Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017) and claim they bolster the idea of Brexit – Britain alone against the world, defeating the dastardly Germans and so on. Hurricane is different. Its Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots are refugees from the Polish Air Force, wiped out by the Luftwaffe in a mere three days and kept on ice by Britain’s xenophobic War Office following their arrival in England. When they’re finally allowed into the air, these Poles turn out to be much better fighter pilots than the majority of Brits who are being slaughtered by the enemy at an alarming rate. Indeed, it’s the Polish pilots that turn the Battle of Britain around.

Hurricane is named after the RAF’s most widely used fighter aircraft and those portrayed here, at least when flying, are computer generated. Much of the CG work has been carried out in India (nothing wrong with that) on the cheap. The aircraft looks like computer models partly because no-one’s bothered to dirty them up and partly because there’s no attempt at reflecting the weather on their metal surfaces as real flying aircraft surfaces would do. Consequently, the flying sequences have an air of unreality about them which a little more budgetary spending in the right places could easily have fixed.

7. I Love my Mum (Alberto Sciamma, 2018):

This British comedy about haggling mother and son accidentally shipped to Morocco humanises refugees and also functions as a trope for Brexit.The essential misunderstanding between our heroes and their Spanish and French counterparts has overtones of Brexit negotiations, in which none of the countries can seemingly surmise what the other wants. While these later scenes meander at times, and rely on just a little too much flat sexual humour, they do get at the heart of why Britain and the rest of Europe seemingly can never properly get on.

Complemented by handsome photography of the Mediterranean Coastline and the Pyrenees, the rugged beauty of both Spain and France shows us what we are missing out!

8. Memento Amare (Lavinia Simina, 2017):

Mihai (Cristanel Hogas) is an immigrant. And as such he is divided between two nations. His beautiful wife and his young daughter dwell in Romania. Mihai is in London, where he toils as a construction worker, presumably in order to save money and provide a better future for his family. His relationship with his family is vibrant and colourful, while his life in the UK is sombre and colourless.

Because the movie is not entirely chronological, there are hints of the disclosure in the very opening sequence. The outcome looks bleak yet inevitable. And it raises a number of questions: Could the psychological wounds of Brexit could stay open for decades? How will the “orphaned” generations react to having their king (and their kingdom) taken away from them? Is it possible that the young may seek justice with their hands? Is warring the only road towards redemption? One thing looks certain: solidarity has collapsed (perhaps to the point of no return), and the future is not bright.

9. Postcards from the 48% (David Wilkinson, 2018):

It’s time to look back and evaluate what has been achieved since the referendum in 2016. Postcards from the 48%, as the title suggests, is a proud Remainer of a film. It lays out solid reasons as to why Brexit is insane, and the UK has been mis-sold a fantasy. It’s also a call to action: there’s still time to reverse a catastrophe. It’s mandatory viewing for those looking to consolidate their Remain views and opinions, and also for those in doubt.

A very pertinent analogy is made at the end of the movie. If you buy a house and find out it sits on a sinkhole, you should be able to to challenge your purchase. That’s why Britain should be given a second referendum and the opportunity to challenge the 2016 vote, which was heavily influenced by fallacies and lies.

10. The Street (Zed Nelson, 2019):

The devastating effects of gentrification are meticulously observed in documentary The Street, a scathing indictment of Tory austerity over the past four years. An empathetic portrait of a community in flux, it doubles up as a wide-spanning lament for a country that has seemingly lost its way.

As the double infliction of Brexit and Grenfell Tower impose even greater mental and physical harm upon the local population, the tragedy of Hoxton Street over the past four years becomes the tragedy of London, and by extension, the UK itself. Do the government care about working class people at all? Judging from this film, all evidence points to the contrary. While pointedly didactic (it may as well have said “Vote Labour” at the end) it earns the right to be, caring deeply for its subjects and begging for an empathetic solution.

Memento Amare

Posted on 28th January 202028th January 2020 by victorfraga

The young Romanian gave up his own personal kingdom, complete with queen and little princess, in favour of a faraway and hardly hospitable Kingdom. He hasn’t seen his beloved ones in two years, he confides to a coworker. The United Kingdom is portrayed as a dark and divided nation. Immigrants are everywhere: there are Romanian and Bulgarian construction workers, and a Syrian refugee working in the local convenience store. Yet these people are not integrated into the heart of a nation that has become increasingly immigration-hostile and downright racist.

The action takes place shortly after the Brexit referendum. Enthusiastic Remainers are campaigning on the streets: “Not in Hackney, not in Brixton, not in our name, we want to Remain”. But the bigots are equally empowered, and the repression expresses itself in other shapes and forms. Mihai and other immigrants lose their job due to the prospect of leaving the EU, and Mihai has to work as a handyman in order to make ends meet. And he encounters violence on the streets: “Stop stealing our jobs and benefits, go back to your country”.

Memento Amare is a movie about wanting to move on, but being held back because of perverse circumstances. It is not a didactic and linear drama. The narrative is complex and multilayered. It zigzags back and forth: in time, between countries, between reality, allegory and imagination. Viewers are made to wear to shoes of a hard-working economic immigrant, and to experience his roller-coaster emotions and split allegiances.

You can watch Memento Amare at home on VoD.

Show me the Picture: The Story of Jim Marshall

Posted on 28th January 202028th January 2020 by victorfraga

The Hollies’ Graham Nash flew to America to holiday among the warmer climates and smoke filled conversations. At a house party, a chance encounter with Stephen Stills and David Crosby led the trio to harmonise over a song. His fate was sealed, Nash crusading from then on in the American locales, his life in England now a distant memory.

Crosby, Stills and Nash were one of the many highlights to perform at the freewheeling Woodstock festival. Elsewhere, The Who worked with violent appearance before a fiery Jimi Hendrix lit his electric guitar alight. Jim Marshall, a hot-shot photographer, captured them all. His camera captured the intimacies, the energies and honesties each of the artists displayed. Marshall’s commitment to the lens matched Duane Allman’s to the six-string and when the blues guitarist died in 1971, Marshall walked in a 12-hour long penitent silence, mourning his friend with solemn silence. Galadrielle Allman, one of the many participants discussing the cameraman’s extraordinary legacy, laughs at how honestly Marshall recalled her father’s liberal drug use.

Marshall’s drug habit was legendary, and one he flaunted openly, publicly and regularly. Discussing the matter on radio, Marshall bullishly boasted he snorted more cocaine than The Rolling Stones themselves, the steamy band Marshall befriended and captured. Drugs aided his work, Marshall capturing the penetrative excitement of the 1960s’/1970s’ product. One of his more intimate photos shows Mick Jagger and Keith Richards working on their harmonies, studio bound and pensive.

Nash adored the reality of his work, a work ethic entrusted by many. John Carter Cash, discussing his father’s At Folsom Prison, felt Marshall’s work captured his parents’ intensity better than any film could. The son of immigrant parents, Marshall shadowed his fellow underdogs, and his John Coltrane portraitures caught the jazz artist’s inherent passion.

What starts as a love letter to photography quickly changes to a history of America, tighter in its resolve than Martin Scorsese’s three hour Netflix epic. This documentary shares with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) a non-linear structure and a fascination for automated weapons. Though he lacked Frank Sheeran’s murderous streak, Marshall’s gun use got him into legal trouble, including one 1983 arrest for threatening the lives of his neighbours. Typically, Marshall offered his wardens rock star photos with chutzpah, but the incarceration had consequences. Work with corporate rock band Survivor felt at odds with his bohemian sixties principles, while friend/associate Amelia Davis recalls a solitary older man coked out spreading incomprehensible messages in his private notes.

Marshall, if not always the most pleasant of individuals, was never less than fascinating. The film uses archived interviews among the more contemporary (Marshall died in 2010). Matched against Michael Douglas’s self aggrandising segment (the starlet seems more interested in talking about himself than his subject), Marshall was something often unseen in LA circles: humble. A great tribute.

Show me the Picture: The Story of Jim Marshall is in cinemas across the UK from Friday, January 31st.

A Streetcar Named Desire

Posted on 25th January 20205th June 2022 by victorfraga

The film title is evocative with sub-erotic overtones. In fact, it is just the streetcar running to Desire, still a rough area in downtown New Orleans. Here is hard, proletarian New Orleans, with its honky-tonk bars, jazz clubs, African American underworld, louche and long, steamy nights. Into this world comes Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh), one time teacher, a faded “Southern Belle”, now penniless so forced to live with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter), who is married to the handsome roughneck Stanley (Marlon Brando), who treats Blanche with disdain. This might just seem to be a treatment of the tougher end of American working class life.

This famous 1951 movie is an adaption of the eponymous Tennessee Williams’s play, which was a Broadway hot in 1947. Far from being just a depiction of a certain area and its inhabitants, its themes are universal and stretch way beyond New Orleans. The original play, written by a gay man, is surprisingly feminist, showing how women are forced into false and fictitious roles by male oppression. Its gay undertones are obvious but remember that Williams’s text was heavily censored to suit the 1950’s. Class oppression also features, with Blanche’s fantasies about herself as a faded member of the upper classes.

The dominating presence of Stella’s husband Stanley smoulders over the whole film. Marlon Brando gave a performance that launched his career. Stanley is unregenerate masculinity, handsome, beautiful even, but totally selfish and domineering, holding late night poker games that ruin the sleep of the women around him, including Eunice (Peg Hillias), the neighbour upstairs.

Interestingly, all significant male characters are types that may well have been familiar to Tennessee Williams as a gay man. Stanley is a gorgeous piece of “rough”, as beautiful as he is dangerous. Mitch (Karl Malden) is the desperate gay man, who has lived with his mother all his life, desperate to get married before it is too late. The pretty and gentle young man who collects for the Evening Star (Wright King), from whom Blanche obtains a kiss, is the shy type Tennessee Williams may well have known from the gay scene. Finally, Blanche’s fiancé, who shot himself after Blanche was hurtful to him one evening, is the self-hating gay man who cannot take any reproach to his masculinity.

It is not that Blanche is specifically attracted to gay men. What she is looking for is kindness, gentleness and respect in men, which seems more easily provided by gay men. Her prissy and delusional ways put most men off so she is driven to receiving them at the disreputable Flamingo Club, while holding down a job as a teacher. Eventually she is driven out of town after an inappropriate affair with a 17-year-old schoolboy. Stella is her last refuge.

Stella, at least, has knuckled down and got on with the world as it is, however unsatisfactory her marriage. Blanche has not and things eventually unravel for her when the brutish Stanley, on the very night that his wife is giving birth to his child, rapes her. Her mind tips over into insanity and she is driven away to an asylum.

What makes A Streetcar Named Desire so outstanding is the way it illustrated the brutality with which society marginalises and isolates people just because they are on the wrong end of the power game. Women have to put up with a rotten deal because so many men refuse to give up their power and to relate properly to women. Many gay men have to live in a shadow world of desperation because society will not afford them a place. Poor Blanche copes by living in a world of class-driven illusion by imagining she is a lady”fallen on hard times but, in doing so, only removes herself further and further away from any hope of redemption. Unlike her sister, she cannot face the world and men as they actually are. All this is acted out in Stella’s cramped apartment in New Orleans, the monochrome of film noir and the sure footed direction of Elia Kazan.

A Streetcar Named Desire will be shown in selected cinemas from Friday, February 7th. Go see.

The Lighthouse

Posted on 25th January 202025th May 2020 by Jeremy Clarke

The 1890s. The constant pounding of 19th century industrial machinery. Stark black and white photography in a 4:3 Academy aspect ratio. On the prow of a steamship as it ploughs through the water stand two men. They head towards an island with a light… a lighthouse. They disembark from a rowing boat.

Inside the building, the older lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) instructs his new assistant (Robert Pattinson), who he constantly addresses as “Lad”, in his duties. Despite what’s written in the manual, he won’t allow the assistant to operate the light itself – he’s charged with repair and maintenance work.

They get off to a bad start when the Lad refuses a drink from his new superior, opting for water rather than whisky. Some time later though, he relents to join him in a whisky and asks that they address each other by name. The assistant is Ephraim, the keeper is Tom. Ephraim becomes increasingly unreliable. He has a run in with a gull and lobs a rock at it, an act which upsets Tom who believes that dead sailors’ souls inhabit the birds. Ephraim is sitting in Tom’s hoist halfway up the lighthouse exterior on painting duty when it breaks, causing him to fall some twenty or so feet.

He also has unnerving, increasingly sexual dreams and masturbatory fantasies of a mermaid, brought on perhaps by a combination of the isolation of the place and the small carved mermaid figurine he finds in a slit in his mattress. He finds her lying in recesses under seaweed atop rocks. He imagines tentacles passing and strange, close up shots of orifices in undersea creatures.

The two men’s rough period costumes and lengthy conversations in equally period dialogue over meal times and drink, the cramped lighthouse room and stairwell interiors, the harsh exteriors of rocky outcrop, gulls, mermaids, the contrasty black and white photography, the constant, pounding and pulsing industrial sound, all these elements combine to render the film a unique sensory narrative, visual and aural experience for the viewer.

It helps too that the dramatic element is grounded in two striking lead performances, but the other elements are very much in play. As the film proceeds, it becomes increasingly dreamlike and harder and harder to distinguish fantasy from reality. It’s not always clear if events are unfolding in the real world or somewhere in Ephraim’s subconscious. Like the intermittent shots rising up the spiral staircase lighthouse interior, this us not do much as descent into madness as, disturbingly, an ascent to that state as if it were a higher physical plane.

Although not that long a film, it’s highly demanding, not something to see if you’re quite tired after a hard day’s work. This is not a film that carries the viewer: a certain amount of work is required of the audience. Approach it in that frame of mind, though, and it should prove rewarding.

The Lighthouse is out in the UK on Friday, January 31st. On VoD on Monday, May 25th.

The Grudge

Posted on 22nd January 202015th January 2024 by victorfraga

In 1998, for the TV anthology Gakko no Kaidan G, Takashi Shimizu made two very short (three-minute) shock films, respectively titled Katasumu and 4444444444, in which he introduced creepy, contorting revenant Kayako Saeko and her meowing son Toshio, laying the central groundwork for the grudge-dbearing, implacably vengeful spirits at the epicentre of what would become his Ju-on series. Their popularity enabled him to expand this universe into the feature-length ‘V-cinema’ features Ju-on: The Curse and Ju-on: The Curse 2 (both 2000), and these in turn would be remixed by Shimizu into the theatrical features Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) and Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (2003). By this stage, the J-horror craze had hit the United States, and Shimizu was invited to remake his films for an American audience. In the first of these, The Grudge (2004), Shimizu retained the Tokyo setting and the extraordinary actress Takako Fuji (in the role of Kayako Saeki), while importing an ensemble of American characters to add to the alienation and disorientation that were always fundamental parts of the series. By The Grudge 2 (2006), Shimizu had allowed Kayako’s curse to be translocated stateside to Chicago, and by The Grudge 3 (2009), he had handed over the property entirely to director Toby Wilkins’ caretaking. There have been further reboots in Japan (also lacking Shimizu’s personal touch) with diminishing returns, and there has even been Koji Shiraishi’s more-fun-than-it-sounds Sadako vs Kayako (2016), a postmodern crossover of The Grudge with that other iconic, multiple sequel spawning sequel J-horror sensation Ring (Hideo Nakata, 2000).

So there are inevitably some whose knee-jerk response to news of yet another attempt at The Grudge will be to roll their eyes and begrudge this umpteenth retake its very need to exist. After all, there is little new that co-writer (with Jeff Buhgler) and director Nicolas Pesce brings to the prospect, apart from his identity as an extremely talented creator of mannered indie horror (The Eyes of My Mother, 2017; Piercing, 2019), and the associated promise of a more idiosyncratic spin on the material. Yet with The Grudge, Pesce merely retreads old ground. We have already many times seen Kayako aiming her irrational rage at anyone – young or old, male or female, good or bad, local or foreign – who has the misfortune to step into the residence where she and Toshio were murdered by her husband.

We have even already seen this rage transferred across the Pacific to America. Pesce is pointedly going back to the source of his inheritance, expressly setting the passage of Kayako’s grudge from Japan to America in 2004, the same year as Shimizu’s first cross-cultural American remake, and then skipping ahead to 2006. the year of Shimizu’s remake sequel. The new location of the transplanted curse is a small town in Pennsylvania whose very name, Cross Rivers, marks it as a site of transition – a place of passing between one country, or perhaps one state of being, and another.

Ignoring the warnings of her police colleague Detective Goodman (Demián Bichir), newly widowed, newly arrived Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) starts investigating the connections between a strange series of deaths that have radiated out from 44 Reyburn Drive ever since, two years earlier, Fiona Landry (Tara Westwood) returned from a Tokyo job and moved in there with her family. You already know the score. The stories of those that either lived or even just set foot in the house, and the inexorable deaths that came to them afterwards, are here told in a mixed-up manner that confounds the norms of chronology, fitting everyone’s fate (including Muldoon’s own) into a complex jigsaw of creeping horror. This is, essentially, the pattern found in every version of The Grudge. Even Shimizu’s first theatrical version from 2002, not to mention his first American remake from 2004, were merely replaying – and refining – a routine that he had already set out clearly in the series’ previous incarnations. Not only do the Grudge films, with their recurrent hauntings in showers, baths, beds and closets, echo one another, but repetition – of a viral variety – is inscribed as a theme in the very fabric of each and every instalment, as the curse is passed, like a contagious infection, from one person to another, always, inevitably, leading to the same vain struggle to survive or escape, and to the same destructive outcome.

In all these films, the conclusion is foregone and a mood of utter nihilistic doom pervades. That is the films’ raison d’être – it is, precisely, the nature of the grudge, an ineluctable, supernatural force which, once it has put its hooks into a person, will never let go. Here, as previously, the fractured timeline ensures that we know that most of its characters are going to die – indeed, are already dead by the time Muldoon comes to look back on their cold case files. In this franchise, like in the Final Destination series, mortality is prescribed, and is not meant to come as a surprise, even if the precise form that it takes may, until revealed, be less clear.

Complaining that Pesce’s version is merely more of the same may involve some truth, but it is also missing the whole point of the franchise. Apart from Kayako herself, the one fixed point of these films is grotesque, harrowing death foretold, which Pesce, like previous directors, duly delivers as a bleak memento mori for the popcorn-chewing, thrill-seeking viewer. Pesce’s The Grudge is most definitely a Grudge film. If you have objections to that idea in principle, or dislike the Grudge films in general, then obviously it would be strange to pursue this one. The clue is in the title. If you like some or all of those other films, then Pesce’s film has all the grim goods – and if those goods seem like pre-loved hand-me-downs, in a way, with this particular franchise, they always were. Kayako’s iterative acts of vengeance have always been passed down a chain of contagious inheritance, affecting anyone and everyone but the actual party who wronged her.

“We’re still settling in,” Muldoon tells Goodman of her and Burke’s recent move to Cross Rivers. “It’s definitely different.” Perhaps Pesce felt the same way, having to find his way around a property that was not originally his own. Pesce’s previous film, Piercing, was already itself a Japanese import, adapting a 1994 novel by Ryu Murakami (whose writings also inspired Takashi Miike’s Audition, 1999) into the stylised idioms of an urban American giallo – but with The Grudge, one feels Pesce is far more constrained in his inventiveness by the demands of a studio, and struggling to put his individual stamp on an established and now highly conventionalised set of franchise tropes. He is certainly well-served by a cast that includes (among its victims) John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Jacki Weaver, Frankie Faison and Lin Shaye, all of whom – apart from Shaye, whose character’s dementia makes her different from the others – play their rôles with a genuine, earthy earnestness that brings an anchoring reality to the film’s more surreal flights of fancy.

Most of the effects work is practical, while careful attention is paid to the house’s gradual deterioration over time – like the terminally ill loved ones that both Muldoon and Goodman had to watch slowly getting worse. Old William Matheson (Faison) is also having to bear witness to the decline of his wife of 50 years, Faith (Shaye). Perhaps the most disturbing innovation of the film is not any of several standard (and not especially effective) jump scares, but rather William’s stated claim that the house, whose ghosts represent an opportunity for someone who otherwise has no belief in an afterlife, might be the best, indeed only, kind of hope for him to be able to spend more time with his dying wife. This is a loss of Faith in more than one sense. No doubt some viewers will state that Pesce’s film is not frightening, but most of its dread is of a more existential brand, with everything awash in anxiety, despair and the panic of fatalism.

The Grudge ends with a sustained exterior shot of yet another home. Even if we suspect that something horrible is happening indoors, nothing happens in the shot itself, which elapses merely to the banal sounds of a garden sprinkler and birdsong. This is where Pesce comes into his own as the film’s director, with a sequence that, in looking away, distances the viewer and frustrates any expectation of pat resolution. Though they always come with a supernatural overdetermination, most of the film’s killings are carried out by the living upon members of their own family, opening up a subtext of domestic violence and mental illness (both of which are formally presented within the film as the police’s explanations for the multiple deaths at Number 44). Pesce’s long final shot offers the chilling suggestion that we never really know what is going on inside, behind closed doors, in an America whose sunny suburban surfaces conceal a deep-seated anger and murderous madness that are catching.

The Grudge is in cinemas on Friday, January 24th. Also available on Netflix.

Our dirty questions to Bernard Rose

Posted on 21st January 202021st January 2020 by victorfraga

Rose has been a director since the 1980s, when he became known for the original video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax – the one that was banned, and made the song a hit from club play. He had worked with Jim Henson on The Muppet Show television series and the film The Dark Crystal (Jim Henson and Frank Oz, 1982) previously, and snagged a deal with the BBC. His first full-length feature film as a director was Paperhouse (1988), a cult hit mainly on video, but was well reviewed by several critics, including Roger Ebert, who raved about it when he caught it at a festival.

Paperhouse was made with Vestron Video, which did have some theatrical hits like Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardoline, 1987)but expected to make their money back on video. He is still probably best remembered for Candyman (1992), the most original horror movie of the 1990s. Based on a Clive Barker story, it also had something to say about race and class. Candyman is due for a reboot/remake with Jordan Peele later this year, with Tony Todd reprising his role as the titular character.

Rose did Immortal Beloved (1995) with Gary Oldman as Beethoven, which garnered a mixed response, and unfavourable comparisons to Amadeus (Milos Forman, 195). His next film Anna Karenina (1997) was a tremendous flop. It started a string of films inspired by Tolstoy, but that was the only one set in Russia. Rose followed it up with Ivans XTC (2002), one of his very best, also based on story by Tolstoy but set at the turn of the Millennium Los Angeles. Danny Huston made his name in the lead. It was an extraordinary film, one of the very few that was shot on high-def video before the technology improved that was really good. It’s about the last week in the life of a film agent on a booze and coke bender.

Rose did a few horror films in the late ’00s, plus the Howard Marks biopic Mr. Nice (201) and a film about Paganini. Before Samurai Marathon (2019), his most recent project was an interesting, low-budget Frankenstein (2015) set in modern LA, also starring Huston, who has appeared in almost every film Rose has made since Ivans XTC, including his latest. Samurai Marathon is a Japanese Samurai film set in the Edo period. It’s probably the largest scale film he has done in some time.

Samurai Marathon is out now on VoD. You should be able to find it on Amazon, Apple, TalkTalk TV and the Sky Store (Amazon and Apple are the cheapest options).

…

Ian Schultz – How did your newest film Samurai Marathon come around? It’s certainly a change of pace for you.

Bernard Rose – Well, basically, Jeremy Thomas—the British half of the producing team—emailed me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to go to Japan to do a Samurai picture. I thought the answer to that question had to be YEAH! It really was as simple as that, I then went to Japan and met with Toshiaki Nakazawa, the other producer. We got into some discussion about the screenplay they were developing. I then rewrote the screenplay, and then we rewrote the screenplay I wrote into Japanese. That’s the short version, but it was pretty much that. The unusual thing about much of it was me going into a Japanese production, rather it being a Western project going over there to shoot.

IS – Is this the first time you’ve directed for hire, at least in a feature film sense?

BR – Well, in a sense you are always in effect ‘for hire’ if you’re doing the film and are being paid a fee. We spent a good year and a half working on the screenplay, so it wasn’t just like a “here’s the script, do the job” kind of thing.

IS – What was the most challenging part of making a film in Japan, and in Japanese?

BR – It was actually a lot of fun, to be honest with you! It’s interesting to go into another culture in that kind of way. I didn’t know that much about the Edo period when I started the picture, other than what I had seen in movies. I then realised after a while that most of what people know, including the Japanese, about the Edo period comes from the movies. I think in a sense that world of the Samurai has become a kind of mythic arena that has been taken as much from Westerns: Kurosawa was influenced by John Ford. It’s an arena where you can tell mythic stories rather than it being necessarily being restricted to one specific culture, and there’s always been this weird kind of cross-cultural fertilisation in the Samurai movie… between the Samurai movie and the western, certainly. I think all cultures have a weird kind of “Golden Age” mythical path they revert to. In Europe, it’s kind of Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe, 1953), and in America it’s the West, and in Japan it’s the Edo period.

IS – What were some Samurai films you looked at, besides maybe the obvious Kurosawa films?

You say we all know them, we all know Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954), but they don’t necessarily know the more obscure ones. There are lot of interesting, more recent Samurai films, and some that are in a more classic vein, like Twilight Samurai (2002) by Yoji Yamada and things like that, which has an almost Freudian quality. The things Jeremy and Nakazawa made before such as 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, 2010), which is much more an action picture, I suppose. The parallels with the Western: one influenced the other, and then it was influenced back. I think Kurosawa came up with the modern concept of violence in cinema with slow motion, which was very much picked up on by Peckinpah, of course. It first appeared in Seven Samurai, and of course Lucas basically based Star Wars on The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 2002; pictured below). It was interesting to go back and inject something a little different—but not making a western film, it’s still very much a Japanese movie.

IS – How was it working with Jeremy Thomas for the first time? Because he seems like such a logical choice for you, with his track record of working with Nicolas Roeg, Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, Bernardo Bertolucci, etc.?

BR – He is one of the greatest producers of all time, and is a lovely guy in all respects. He is incredibly helpful and respectful at the same time, two incredibly unusual characteristics for a producer. He is the greatest! What can you say? Jeremy started in the cutting room: he was an editor, so he is very good in post-production too. He just has so much experience and knowledge, and just knows how to deal with people in such a kind of supportive way. He is really the best.

IS – Have you been consulted on the new Candyman movie or not?

BR – Yeah… I’ve had some conversations with Jordan Peele about it but… I don’t think I can tell you anything. It’s coming out this year, and I think it will be rather good, I hope it’s good. I haven’t seen it, and they must be close to being done with it.

IS – When is the remastered Ivan’s XTC coming out?

BR – Hopefully later this year—there’s been some discussions, but we’ll see.

IS – You were a pioneer in digital filmmaking with Ivan’s XTC early on. Do you have any regrets that you didn’t wait till the technology had caught up?

BR – I don’t think it was just about that for me—it was just about the ability to make something that was different in its very nature. Yes, of course the technology has improved massively since then, but the idea you can just go out and make a film with equipment that’s not exactly to hand, but more readily, was more exciting than the technological aspect of it for me. Wait till somebody else does it first? That doesn’t sound very smart.

IS – You made a lot of music videos back during the “golden age,” with most famously the banned Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. What did you learn making videos then that you still use today?

BR – I loved doing music videos. What was wonderful about them, especially in the early 1980s, was the record companies pretty much let you do what you wanted to do, because it was so new to them. It was like making little silent movies, and it was such a great era for pop music, the early 1980s, which was part of what was so fun about it.

I think everything changes all the time, certainly for me. In the videos I made, it was all about visual storytelling: essentially making little silent movies with musical accompaniment. That was also a part of the challenge of doing the Samurai picture. Although obviously the film does have Japanese dialogue in it, I really wanted the picture to pretty much work with visuals and music primarily, and the dialogue was there just to add a little something. I wanted the film to be self-explanatory—there are some films you can understand with the sound off, and some films you can’t. That’s always been a thing for me. You should understand the film without understanding what people are saying. It’s a shame that sometimes with films with subtitles, you just end up reading the movie, because you often miss so much without looking at people’s eyes. What people are saying is never as important as you think it is. When I was cutting the movie, we didn’t have subtitles. It was kind of a slightly different experience when you put the titles on, and obviously you have to, people need to know what’s going on, but there is always less info than you think there is.

IS – Do you see any trends in horror movies at the moment that you find kind of interesting?

BR – The horror business is very interesting, because it’s very cyclical. It’s obviously went through a huge upswell recently, with people like Jordan Peele and all the interesting new directors, and other people too. I think that one of the great things about horror is essentially it’s a way of telling a story that you’re saying to the audience: at least you will get a thrill out of this instead of just sitting through a drama. A lot of the drama and arthouse films I really enjoyed in the 1970s were really horror movies. It’s such a cinematic genre, because you’re expected to make an impact, basically, first and foremost. That’s what people love from a movie, when they feel something viscerally, and suspense, horror and comedy are the biggest things you can make an audience feel. All great horror movies have comedy at some level, Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) is one of the funniest films I can remember, The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) is an extremely funny film… so is The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1974) – it’s full of jokes!

I think there is a wonderful compliance between horror and suspense and fear, it’s really the most entertaining thing you can give an audience. That’s why people love them and don’t tire of them. I think genre labels can be reductive, like for most people there is nothing more repulsive than that awful label “elevated horror,” as if it’s somehow better for you. It’s like saying “somebody won’t like this”—if a movie is scary, people will love it! One of the most frightening movies I’ve ever seen in my whole life is Sátántangó (1994) by Béla Tarr: all seven hours and 45 minutes of it. You probably have to accept that’s probably an “art movie.”

IS – I always say one of the most terrifying films ever made is 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).

BR – It’s very frightening, no question! there are more obvious ones, like Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968) and all that. Horror movies have always been the province of the very best filmmakers, it’s weird that somehow when people say just “horror,” people’s immediate response is it’s something very exploitative and cheap. Of course there are cheap, exploitative horror films, but that doesn’t mean in its essence it’s cheap and exploitative.

IS – Is there a film that got away from you, one that you were desperate to make but it never happened?

BR – Not really. There are some things I’m planning to make and haven’t given up on, so I don’t think those really count.

IS – Any new films you have been impressed with? (Note: the 2020 Oscar nominations were announced the day of the interview).

BR – It’s always controversial when they put out the Oscar nominations, but this year seems a better bunch of films than I’ve seen in some years. Some years, without naming names, you kind of go WHAT? ARE YOU KIDDING?

There are some films I would’ve liked to have seen in there that weren’t nominated, but that’s always the case. A lot of them seem pretty interesting: kudos to the people who got the nominations. A couple of them I like very much. I liked Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019; pictured below), I thought that was a really terrific movie. I liked Parasite, and that’s already two really good movies, and sometimes there’s not even one! I don’t think there was any real stinker this year.

Another film I liked was Honey Boy (Alma Har’el, 2019), I thought that was really good, and it’s a shame it didn’t get anything. And it was different, too. I liked the Adam Sandler film Uncut Gems (Safdie Brothers, 2019), the gambling thing is a little similar to Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1993), but it’s also Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. Bad Lieutenant was such a classic, I think I just like anything with Harvey Keitel in it. That’s my only criticism of The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019), I wanted Harvey Keitel in it more. Every film should have Harvey Keitel in it, really, shouldn’t it? I want to see Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1998) recut with Harvey Keitel in it!

IS – I think that footage has been destroyed, sadly.

BR – I actually don’t think they actually shot anything, but it would still be great.

IS – So obviously, with Scorsese and The Irishman, I have to ask you: are Marvel films cinema?

BR – The obviously answer is: “of course they are!” I think there are two real issues here. One is positive, and one is problematic. It is fantastic that theatrical movies can take over a billion dollars in less than a month: it’s still such a mainstream, vital business that can happen, and that’s really significant, given all the technology and all the things distracting young people today—it wouldn’t necessarily be the case. It’s fantastic that power is still there, and the vitality of feature film is still so important to the culture.

The flipside of that here in the UK and the in the US, still very healthy in just pure total numbers, is that all of the money is being sucked up by the giant tentpoles that are coming out of Disney, so there isn’t money left for anybody else, and others are struggling for the awards season’s pennies on the floor. I would say the third aspect of it is that it was purely expected to make its money back theatrically: is The Irishman really economical at 165 million dollars? The answer is probably no.

IS – But with Netflix, they pay all the directors and actors upfront, and they get nothing in the back end.

BR – You never get anything in the back end anyway! Anybody who is making films at that level is extremely lucky and privileged, and it’s not a right for anybody, it’s definitely a privilege working and doing the stuff. I certainly feel really privileged that I’m still working, still doing stuff that’s interesting and sometimes has a little bit of scale to it. Nobody has given me 150 million dollars to make a film, but you know, that’s OK, you don’t need that much money… That’s an awful lot of money.

IS – I think the big issue is distribution.

BR – It’s a big issue, and one of the things everybody forgets is that everything is much more available now. Inasmuch as if you want to watch all the classic arthouse films, you can go on the Criterion channel and just see them all—that wasn’t true before, not even slightly. I love that certainly in Los Angeles there are still some fantastic repertory houses, like the American Cinematheque, the Egyptian Theater and Tarantino’s theatre, The New Beverly. These places show really interesting, unusual programming. And here you have some really good repertory places, like the BFI. People want the big screen and communal experience, and they want the feature films. There is so much stuff you can’t watch it all, and half of the time I want to catch up with stuff from the 1930s that I haven’t seen. The other thing that always strikes me is that people forget that sound movies have only been around since 1927, so 93 years, it’s not very long. Everything going on now is still basically early cinema, in historical terms.

IS – Do you think there will be some kind of new technological event that will change how films are made, like with DV?

BR – Probably there will be things that will change, but there is something about the way a movie works and the way we watch that does seem to fit with the kind of alpha rhythms or brainwaves of dreaming and the imagination in such a kind of conjugate and powerful way that I don’t think people will ever tire of it. All films have secret content that is only apparent years later, and a film like Ivans XTC is a perfect example of that. If you look at the film now, it’s not just a story, it’s a perfect little time capsule of 1999. When films have that, it’s one of the most powerful things, the way that they are time capsules.

IS – I have one final question from my friend Dan Waters, who wrote Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1979) and Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992): is there any way one can see the HBO Inside Out short with Djimon Hounsou that you did?

BR – You know what? “I don’t know” is the honest truth. As far as I know, they are available on video, but I may be wrong.

IS – He says it was the one he couldn’t find.

BR – Then unfortunately I don’t think I can help, I don’t think I have any copies.

…

If you enjoy this interview, you may want to check out his Trailers From Hell segments, where he specialises in Ken Russell films but has also done some on If… and Sorcerer.

The Personal History Of David Copperfield

Posted on 21st January 202024th September 2021 by Jeremy Clarke

The mid-19th century novel The Personal History Of David Copperfield is considered Charles Dickens’ masterpiece. Narrated in the first person by the eponymous David, it tells of one man’s life from birth through a series of adventures and encounters with a motley crew of relatives, friends and associates that seem to span the social breadth of Victorian England.

To cut the novel’s tale down to a manageable movie length, director Ianucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell have dumped certain characters and subplots to focus on others. As with the director’s previous outing The Death Of Stalin (2017), the final film half works yet is beset by strange casting choices – actors playing Russians sporting a variety of English dialects in Stalin, various BAME actors playing roles that aren’t always entirely believable in terms of their ethnicity in Copperfield. That includes the film’s lead Dev Patel, who plays David convincingly as a wide-eyed innocent.

There’s a great deal of racism around in the 21st Century: it’s hard to believe there wasn’t considerably more in the 19th when few were trying to address those issues, yet no-one seems to notice Patel’s obvious ethnic background. When he’s sent to live with the family of his mother’s kindly housekeeper Clara Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper), she and her husband have adopted a number of orphans, one of whom, Ham (Anthony Welsh), is black, which could make sense. Later, however, when the mother of David’s privileged, white, secondary school friend James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard) is played by the black actress Nikki Amuka-Bird, the ethnic casting is distinctly unbelievable. Pursuing the colour blind casting still further, Ianucci casts Chinese British actor Benedict Wong as Wickfield, the financier ultimately ruined by alcoholism and another terrific black actress, Rosalind Eleazar, as his daughter Agnes.

On one level, colour blind casting sounds great and if you view the whole thing as a satire not based on any specific, historical place and time then it’s not a problem. Sadly, Dickens is very much a man writing about the 19th century and even though all the actors are fine in terms of performance, the BAME casting sometimes doesn’t work. I’m not saying the entire cast should be white – there were certainly some BAME people around – but I’m calling for an attempt at historical accuracy, a practice which should take precedence over the accidental pursuit of a politically correct fantasyland that never was.

Outside of the ethnic controversy, Ianucci proves highly adept at casting Dickens’ characters. Dev Patel carries the film well and other highlights include Hugh Laurie’s Mr Dick, a sweet if mentally ill man who believes Charles I to have deposited his thoughts in his (Mr. Dick’s) head and Ben Wishaw’s suitably ingratiating social climber Uriah Heep. Tilda Swinton doesn’t appear particularly stretched in the role of David’s controlling and donkey-hating aunt Betsey Trotwood.

Dickens wanted to highlight the problem of want in Victorian society and the film represents this aspect of his writing well. The constant hounding of Micawber (Peter Capaldi) for his debts results in one memorable scene where his baby in its pram is suddenly moving down the hall as the bailiffs grab under the front door and pull the hall carpet out underneath it. Equally impressive are the scenes of David working as a child in a bottle factory where the machines are too tall for him to operate properly.

Elsewhere however, as with Stalin, one struggles to remember that Ianucci is the comic genius behind television’s political comedy series The Thick Of It (2005-2012) and its superb feature film spin-off In The Loop (2009, in both of which Peter Capaldi so brilliantly played ruthless and foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker). Maybe he’s better at portraying contemporary rather than period stories. That said, if his Copperfield never quite scales the genuinely funny comedic heights of The Thick Of It, or even reaches the foothills, it at least gets Dickens’ remarkable characters onto the screen and is not without its moments.

The Personal History Of David Copperfield is out in the UK on Friday, January 24th. On VoD in June.

Waves

Posted on 16th January 20205th June 2022 by victorfraga

Tyler (Kevin Harrison Jr.) is going to be the best at wrestling. His father Ronald (Sterling K. Brown) says so. He orders it, mercilessly training him every day in their own improvised gym at the top of their splendid middle-class house. Ronald is a successful businessman. He worked hard to get there. He tells his son that there is no option for an African-American to be “average” at anything. He must excel. Such is to be black in America.

Tyler has other problems. His girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie) is pregnant. They go to an abortion clinic in order to get the pregnancy terminated and encounter some very vocal anti-abortion protestors. One used the n-word on Tyler. Tyler is desperate to get the pregnancy ended. Alexis decides to keep the baby. In a frantic couple of hours, Tyler smashes up his room, rushes out of the parental home, goes to a party where Alexis is and in a fatal argument causes her to fall on the kitchen floor where she dies. He ends up the local “reform” facility with a life sentence. There is the possibility of parole after 30 years. The judge describes this a provision for “mercy”. The state of Florida has indeed a very odd notion of “mercy”.

The film then switches to the predicament of Tyler’s sister Emily (Taylor Russell). Isolated at High School and harassed on social media because of what her brother has done, she is befriended by a kind boy called Luke (Lucas Hedges and becomes his girlfriend. Luke has problems of his own. His father is dying of cancer in a hospital in Missouri and Luke cannot forgive him for what he put his mother and Luke through when Luke was young. Emily persuades him to visit his father and the father eventually dies amid forgiveness and reconciliation.

This film is about forgiveness. It is about how decent and well-meaning people screw up their lives because they lose their temper too much, because they are trying too hard, because they need to hang on to those they love. As such, it is winning and moving. The camera work is inventive. The music is compelling, particularly Dinah Washington’s What a Difference a Day Makes. Some, however, may feel the camerawork too dramatic, the emotional underscoring too obvious. Even the most innovative of Hollywood films can’t stop telling you what you ought to be feeling at any given moment. A good weekend weepy!

Waves is in cinemas on Friday, January 17th. On VoD in June.

#AnneFrank: Parallel Stories

Posted on 15th January 20206th July 2020 by Jack Hawkins

Josef Stalin is reputed to have said, ‘one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.’ Now, quoting a brutal dictator may seem dubious in the review of an Anne Frank documentary, but Stalin’s aphorism contained an unpleasant truth; it is much easier to empathise with the death of one or several individuals than the slaughter of millions, and the Holocaust was the greatest slaughter of them all – where does one begin to comprehend the suffering?

Primo Levi would echo this sentiment years later: ‘One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows.’ With #AnneFrank: Parallel Stories, filmmakers Sabina Fedeli and Anna Migotto seek to bring this tragically human facet of the Holocaust to the social media generation, especially young women.

This objective is highlighted by scenes of a young girl (Martina Gatti) visiting the sites of Anne’s life and the wider Holocaust, documenting her travels online with the handle @KaterinaKat. A shallow gimmick, some may think, but there’s a good chance it will resonate with its target audience.

The bulk of Parallel Stories is steered by Helen Mirren, who provides narration and readings of Anne’s diary. Mirren’s status lends sizeable heft to the documentary’s profile, but her recitals can be overly thespian. In fact, the film is best when it steps back from Anne Frank and its star narrator and documents the testimonies of five fellow Holocaust survivors: Arianna Szörenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci.

These ladies recount terrible hardship and suffering, but they do so with strength, defiance and even humour. They have beaten their oppressors and led long, fruitful lives. Especially characterful is Sarah, who has such a cheerful energy that she breaks into song on one occasion. The only strain of sadness running through these interviews is that Anne Frank would be the same age as these ladies if she was here today.

#Anne Frank: Parallel Stories contains no revelations, but it is compelling enough to be procured by teachers and museum curators. It is out in UK and Irish Cinemas from 27th January to coincide with Holocaust Memorial Day. On Netflix in July.

Midnight Traveller

Posted on 11th January 202013th January 2020 by Redmond Bacon

We first meet the Fazili family in Tajikistan, where they have been rejected for asylum. Hassan and his wife Fatma are both filmmakers on the run from the Taliban, who have a price on his head due to a documentary he made about one of their leaders. Their application to Australia, a thick wad of files numbering hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages, is also unsuccessful. Returning to Afghanistan, they decide that legal means will no longer suffice; they will make the journey to Germany over land.

Filmed over the course of three years with three phone cameras as the family travel through car, train and foot across the perilous Balkan smuggling route, Midnight Traveller is both a testament to the resilience of refugees and the power of filmmaking to effect real change. With narration from mother, father and eldest daughter, Midnight Traveller is a truly communal effort. Featuring personal touches such as Hassan and Fatma arguing about the value of morality in cinema, or discussing with their daughter about whether she wants to wear a headscarf (she doesn’t), the film is a deeply touching experience, making you root for the Fazili family to finally find peace.

There are two montages in Midnight Traveller that aim straight for the heart. One occurs about halfway through the film: a rush of snatched images such as playing in the park, riding in a fairground and rushing through dense thickets, a collection of moments to both hold onto and to overcome. The second, coming near the end is relatively similar, but this time uses memory to project a future of safety and peace. Brief yet effective, they elevate the movie from mere documentation into an embracing work of art, a homage to the idea of home and happiness, brutally rent by the barbaric concept of borders.

With a fleet 90 minute run-time, it does feel like Midnight Traveller has been neatly packaged as if to be played in front of a court tribunal. The movie could have benefited from a heftier length, as that could really bring to bear just how difficult the journey really is. Despite effective editing, more of the story could’ve and should’ve been told.

Yet perhaps it needed to be made quickly, this film perhaps the only thing that gives the Fazili family a fighting chance of staying in Europe; their filmmaking talent bearing witness to their struggle and the difficulties they have been through. They are the lucky ones. They have money to pay smugglers and the keen sense to document their story to drum up international attention. Others from poorer backgrounds make the journey with less than nothing, relying only on the kindness of strangers in search of a better world.

There can never be too many documentaries about the migrant crisis because every single story deserves to heard. Every single story should play in a continuous loop somewhere until the leaders of Europe, from Russia to Serbia, UK to Germany, Hungary to Turkey, finally sit down together and make constructive efforts to build a better world. I welcome each of these films until this moment occurs.

Midnight Traveller is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 17th.

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Month: January 2020