Month: March 2020

Misbehaviour

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

One of the great achievements of the British historical drama Misbehaviour is that it recreates a single event on which two separate stories hang. The 1970 Miss World competition coincided with the rise of not only the nascent women’s liberation movement but also increasing international unease with South Africa’s Apartheid regime. The pitfall awaiting anyone writing a script about all this (or directing one) is that it means constantly walking a tightrope, getting the balance right so that justice is done to both intertwining narratives. It is to Misbehaviour’s great credit that it manages to pull off this difficult feat.

On the one hand, Women’s Lib activists would disrupt the ceremony with flour bombs after claiming it was nothing more, nothing less than a cattle market. On the other, there were two entrants from South Africa, one white, one black. Although the London-based Miss World was a popular annual event begun in 1951 which by 1970 had become a regular fixture in the television calendar, it was open to charges of both objectifying women and tending to favour white winners (notwithstanding the fact that Miss World 1966 was an Indian, a fact omitted here).

The two narratives are very much an insider’s and an outsider’s view of the contest. The insiders are the organisers Eric and Julia Morley (Rhys Ifans and Keeley Hawes), their special guest star Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) and his savvy wife Dolores (Lesley Manville), and last but most definitely not least the contestants, most notably favourite-to-win Miss Sweden (Clara Rosager) and two black contestants Miss Africa South (Loreece Harrison) and Miss Grenada (Gugu M’batha-Raw). The outsiders are the Women’s Libbers, an Islington collective headed by force of nature Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley) joined by University College London history student Sally Alexander (Keira Knightly) who gets volunteered into becoming the group’s press spokesperson for TV talk shows.

The presence of two Miss South Africas represents a shrewd strategy by Eric to avoid an anti-Apartheid boycott of the contest. He and his wife are putting on a show / running a business and trying to make everything go like clockwork. The white Miss Sweden can be seen chafing against the establishment nature of the event while the two black girls are glad to be there but convinced neither of them has a chance of winning. Dolores Hope, meanwhile, is well aware her husband has an eye for the ladies and Manville’s astutely observed performance makes it very clear that she not he wears the trousers in their relationship.

The pleasures on offer here are many. The script is clever, the casting smart, the production design spot on. Articulate and intelligent student Sally is seen sidelined by male tutors and students purely on the basis of gender, told for example that to write a thesis on female workers is ‘niche’. All this fuels her as the token protester on panel discussions at the oh so establishment BBC. She is also the one who gets Jo and her fellow protesters to dress down so that when they turn up with tickets they won’t get refused entry to the contest. Kinnear exudes just the right of smarmy charm as celebrity Hope. Ifans generates a seedy respectability as instigator and organiser while Hawes as his wife comes across as a shrewd businesswoman who won’t stand for any nonsense and sticks up for the contestants.

From early close ups shots of 1970 ladies’ boots, shoes and dresses through creches with men looking after the kids for their female activist partners to the interior of the Princess Theatre where the contest takes place (presumably the real life location the Albert Hall wouldn’t give permission for filming), you feel like you’re back in the London of 1970. (I speak as one who was a pre-teen in London at the time: watching it felt like I was really back there again.)

Director Lowthorpe brilliantly pulls it all together in a film which understands the issues as they were then and as they are now. It may be hard for today’s twentysomething feminists to understand what the world was like at that time, but this film will give you a pretty accurate idea of not only the fashions and the complicity, but also the rebel mindset that started to take it all apart. As a title at the end mentions, the Patriarchy still needs taking down one event at a time. Wherever your head is at, watching Misbehaviour is a good place to start.

Misbehaviour is out in the UK on Friday, March 13th. On VoD from Wednesday, April 15th. Watch the film trailer below:

The top 10 LGBT+ dirty movies on Netflix!

Posted on by victorfraga

Sexual diversity is at the very heart of our vision and mission. Unsurprisingly, in our four years of existence we have come across and helped to promote LGBT+ of all types and from every continent on Earth. Most of these films started on a conventional distribution route, opening in cinemas, then DVD and finally on to the major VoD platforms. Netflix has since grown and taken up many of these dirty gems, which are now an integral part of their selection.

One the films on this list (Isabel Coixet’s Elisa and Marcela; also pictured above) is a full-on Netflix production, meaning that the movie giant was involved in the project from its very conception. This is perhaps a sign that many more LGBT+ films will follow a similar route in the near future. This isn’t good news for traditional distributors with a niche focus, such Peccadillo films.

The films below are listed in alphabetical order. Don’t forget to click on each individual film title in order to accede to our exclusive reviews. These films are available on Netflix UK and Ireland; there may be variations in other countries and regions.

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1. Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, 2017):

It’s New York, it’s Summer and it’s sultry. The tarmac is sizzling, and the pavement scorching hot. And so are the libidos of young men. Frankie (Harris Dickinson) is no exception. The problem is that he is very confused about his sexuality. The extremely attractive young male is dating an equally stunning female called Simone (Madeline Weinstein, who’s not related to the now infamous Harvey), and he hangs out with young straight men of his age. She struggles to have sex with her, and instead fulfils his sexual needs through online gay chat rooms and stealthy sexual encounters with older men.

This sounds like an ordinary predicament, familiar to many gay men. There’s nothing unusual about a teenager grappling with his sexuality. What makes Beach Rats so special is the director’s sensitive gaze, and the very realistic and relatable settings. The young female filmmaker Eliza Hittman, who’s only on her second feature, managed to penetrate (no pun intended) a male and testosterone-fuelled territory to very convincing results.

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2. Call me by your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017):

Our writer Maysa Moncao argued that Luca Guadagnino twisted Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971), and that he had the right to do so. Times have changed. A queer movie can be treated as a universal love story. Call Me by Your Name was praised by public and the critics at 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

In the summer of 1983 in northern Italy, Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a 17-year-old boy, is about to receive a guest in his aristocratic house. He is lending his bed to Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American scholar who has some work to do with Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor specialising in Greco-Roman culture. Elio and Oliver will share the same toilet as well as a desire for each other.

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3. Elisa and Marcela (Isabel Coixet, 2019):

This is a film about two women in love, and directed by a female. And this is cinema at its most universal. It will move you regardless of whether you are a male or a female, Spanish or British, progressive or conservative, or anything else. This is the real-life tale of two humans being who fell in love and took draconian measures in order in order to remain together, against all odds.

Elisa (Natalia de Molina) first meets Marcela (Greta Fernandez) on the first day of school in 1898. They are immediately fascinated with each other. Their tender affection gradually develops into a full-on homosexual relation. Marcela’s parents intervene and send Marcela away to a boarding school in Madrid for three years. The two women, however, resume their romance as soon as Marcela returns. The residents of the parish of Couso too realise that their share more than a friendship. Elisa is branded a “marimacho”, and the couple become increasingly despised and isolated.

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4. Girl (Lukhas Dhont, 2018):

This is a remarkable movie for many reasons. First of all, Flemish Director Lucas Dhont was only 26 years old when he finished a film that he first conceived at the age of just 18. The fascination with transgender people is conspicuous nowadays in cinema. Filmmakers want to investigate the saga of transitioning, and how to reconcile it with with the mixed perspective of outsiders. The fluid sexual/gender identity and the intense transformations in both the mind and the body allow for the construction of very interesting characters. There has been no shortage of such films in then past couple of years. But there are still topic areas waiting to be addressed in more detail, and this is exactly what Girl does.

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5. Handsome Devil (John Butler, 2017):

Ireland is a fast-changing nation. The profoundly Catholic country was the first one in the world to legalise gay marriage by the means of popular vote, despite fierce opposition from the Church. The society has suddenly come out of the closet, and cinema is keeping the closet doors open so that no one is left inside.

But gay marriage isn’t the only issue that matters to LGBT people. Handsome Devil touches is a very touching and moving gay drama, urgent in its simplicity, delving with two woes that remain pandemic: gay bullying in schools and LGBT representation in sports – the latter is often described as the last and most resilient stronghold of homophobia. The movie succeeds to expose both problems and the destructive consequences for the afflicted with a very gentle and effective approach.

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6. I am Michael (Justin Kelly, 2015):

Executive produced by Gus Van Sant, this is a brave movie for anyone in the US to write, direct or star in given the seemingly irreconcilable positions of openly and happily gay people on the one hand and the bigoted anti-gay sentiments of right-wing fundamentalism on the other. Its starting point is Benoit Denizet-Lewis’ fascinating New York Times magazine article entitled My ex-Gay Friend.

In the article the writer goes to visit his former colleague at San Francisco’s young gay men’s XY magazine Michael Glatze who is now studying at Bible school in Wyoming to become a pastor. The XY period is covered towards the start of the movie while the Bible school episode appears in its last third. In between Michael and partner Bennett (Zachary Quinto) try and build a life together which later becomes a ménage à trois with the addition of Tyler (Charlie Carver).

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7. Ideal Home (Andrew Fleming, 2018):

The tale of accidental “parenthood” (or, more broadly speaking, of the awkward and unexpected bonding of a child and an adult) is no big novelty. They includes classics such as Central Station (Walter Salles, 1997), Son of Saul (Laszlo Nemes, 2015) and also the more mainstream About a Boy (Chris and Paul Weitz). Ideal Home is a welcome addition to the list, providing a very gay and Camp touch to the subgenre.

Erasmus (Steve Coogan) and his partner Paul (a heavily bearded and mega cuddly version of Paul Rudd) lead a mostly pedestrian life, and bickering seems to be their biggest source of entertainment. Erasmus is an accomplished and respected TV boss, while Paul is some sort of younger househusband. One day, the 10-year-old grandson that Erasmus never knew he had shows up for dinner, and he has nowhere to go. That’s because his father, Erasmus’s estranged son, has been arrested on domestic violence charges. The two men are forced to look after the child (Jack Gore), who refuses to reveal his own name.

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8. LOEV (Sudhanshu Saria, 2016):

The first gay kiss in Bollywood happened just ten years ago in the movie Dunno Y (Sanjay Sharma), a year after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India. Sadly, the country has now moved backwards and two years ago it recriminalised gay sex. This makes the graphic content of LOEV, which includes a gay kiss and violence, very subversive for current Indian laws and standards.

This is a very unusual Bollywood movie, not just for its audacious content, but also for its narrative and format. The film shuns easy entertainment devices in favour of much more complex personal and social reflections. Also, the film has very little music, which is also memorable for a movie made in Mumbai.

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9. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Desiree Akhavan, 2018):

Hitting somewhere between the picaresque brilliance of Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2018) and the corny idealism of Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, 2018), Desiree Akhavan won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance for her second feature, which takes the personally revealing, post-mumble aspects of her first feature film Appropriate Behaviour (2015) and places them within a YA adaptation that retains her touch but is more accessible, simplistic, and perfect for its teenage target audience.

Chloe Grace Moretz plays Cameron Post, who in 1993 is caught with another girl on prom night and shipped off to a gay conversion camp in Montana. There, she finds herself stuck in a ritual of self-blame, repression and increasing hostility as she and the other teenage inmates attempt to quietly subvert the system and survive their miseducation.

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10. My Days of Mercy (Tali Shalom Ezer, 2019):

Mercy (Kate Mara) is a woman unwilling to offer her own mercy to the criminal who killed her father’s police partner. Across from her, Lucy (Ellen Page) fights for the innocence of her incarcerated father, convinced that he did not end her mother’s life. They meet in a line of picketing protests, where flirtations quickly make way for more romantic endeavours.

This is a profoundly romantic movie also dealing with the impact of grief on our daily lives. Fittingly for a subject on death, it concerns itself on the living and how people live in the face of their mortality. The interchanging lines on the death penalty is strangely hushed at points, Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking (1995) dealt with the subject more abjectly and thoroughly.

Escape from Pretoria

Posted on by victorfraga

Ten years as the boy wizard brought Daniel Radcliffe fame and fortune beyond the dreams of avarice, yet it did not bring credibility. In a review of Horns (Alexandre Aja, 2014), Times critic Kevin Maher wrote, “you never want to rip into actors, they’re a sensitive bunch… and yet I really struggle with Daniel Radcliffe.” Even Radcliffe, ever the self-deprecator, described his work in the Half Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009) as ‘one-note’, ‘complacent’ and ‘just not very good’.

Mindful of his critics and no doubt the weight of child stardom, Radcliffe made a string of interesting script choices in the 2010s, with highlights including Imperium (Daniel Ragussis, 2016), an edgy thriller about an undercover agent infiltrating a neo-Nazi group, and Jungle (Greg McClean, 2017), a gruelling survival story set in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. Escape from Pretoria continues this trend of punchy, low-budget indies. Like the other titles, Pretoria is based on a true story, and what a story that is! Set in apartheid South Africa in the late 1970s, it follows Tim Jenkin (Daniel Radcliffe) and Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber), two white political prisoners who hatch an ambitious plot to escape from Pretoria Central Prison.

How does one escape from a maximum-security prison? Make your own keys, of course. In a truly remarkable display of will and ingenuity, Jenkin made nine copies of prison keys using timber he smuggled from woodwork classes.

It was a plan riddled with setbacks, doubt and in-fighting – committing to it risked death – and Francis Annan’s film captures the weight of this predicament. It also explores the dynamics of political activism, namely the sagacious old guard clashing with the daring new.

This old guard is led by Denis Goldberg (Ian Hart), the resident ANC leader who chaperones Tim and Stephen into prison life. Goldberg’s reputation precedes him as a political leader and there is mutual respect among the ANC inmates. However, relations are strained when the escape plot consumes the younger men, with Goldberg’s faction believing it reckless while Tim and Stephen seeing it as essential for the cause.

The sparring revolutionaries’ heated exchanges reflect the nuance of the script, which is adapted from Jenkin’s book Inside Out: Escape from Pretoria Prison. The men are united by their existential cause, yet the plan raises difficult, personal questions of how to lead it.

Despite the chemistry of ANC prisoners, Pretoria could have benefitted from a harsher edge and better developed captors; 12A-rated content and thinly drawn antagonists means the tension does not reach the fever pitch of Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978). Nevertheless, the movie remains a solid prison thriller with enough risk, danger and remarkable source material to be a compelling watch. Also, Radcliffe further proves both his acting chops and a flair for accents.

Escape from Pretoria is in cinemas on Friday, March 6th. On all major VoD platforms on March 7th, 2022.

Creating political art behind bars

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Ten people stand on a stage. They are all assigned a different number. Ruled by a mysterious man called Zero, they follow strange and mysterious rules in an intentionally artificial, play-like arena. An allegorical tale that could be applied to both modern Ukraine and Russia, it sees Oleg Sentsov exploring the nature of power in relation to belief.

He knows a thing or two about the way power can be distorted to hurt vulnerable people. The Crimean activist was placed under arrest in 2014 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and sentenced to 20 years in prison under false charges of plotting acts of terrorism. After five years, he was released from jail in a prisoner swap.

Based on his own play, Numbers (Nomera) was co-directed by Akhtem Seitablaev under Sentsov’s precise jail-bound instructions. The film debuted at the Gorki Theatre in Berlin before playing at the Berlin Film Festival in the Berlinale Special section. We sat down with Oleg Sentsov to discuss the unique way the film was made, the therapeutic power of writing, and the ability of art to effect political change.

Redmond Bacon – You are still working as an activist. Could you tell us about this part of your life?

Oleg Sentsov – It’s a very important part of my life. I saw the necessity to become a human rights activist as soon as we started fighting Viktor Yanukovych. Afterwards Maidan happened, then the war started, and now many of our people are in prison. This is still going on. This war is still going on. The rest of Europe doesn’t notice it, especially now. We have over 300 of our people still in the Donbass region, sitting in Russian prisons. Until they are free, until the occupied territories are liberated, I won’t stop this civil rights activity.

RB – Are you more of an activist than filmmaker?

OS – Cinema is more important for me, at least for my inner spirit. I also know one day, when we have won victory over Putin, I can return to cinema. But as long as this war is going on, I’m going to carry on doing what I’m doing now.

RB – Your film is a blend between theatrical and film styles. How would you classify it?

OS – There are different things I work on as a writer. I write scripts. I also write novels and short stories. As far as Numbers is concerned it was written as a theatre play in 2011. I said, very consciously and very deliberately, that if it was going to be turned into a movie, it must be done in a theatrical style, otherwise this material, this subject wouldn’t work.

RB – Could you tell us a little bit about the process? About how it was made when you were still in jail?

OS – I only had two instruments at my disposal. I could receive and write letters and I could see photographs. Most of them were brought to me through my lawyer, who had access to me. When he was there he would show me letters or photographs through the glass pane that separated us and I would answer. The preparation for such a project takes a long time. I was not allowed to see video samples or anything, but I had talented guys who were able to visualise what I wanted to see and wrote to me what I needed to know so I could confirm.

RB – Did you feel hopeless in jail? Like you would never do another film?

OS – I never lose hope. There was never a moment where I thought I wouldn’t make another film. And there was never another moment when I thought I would not continue. I always believed I would be liberated one day.

RB – Did the process of making the film help to improve your mental health, and to keep you motivated?

OS – It helped me a lot. Because you can turn into someone completely different when you’re in jail in terms of your physical, mental, spiritual and intellectual state. You always have to take care of yourself. It is very easy to lose a sense of human value. What helped me not to turn into somebody who is completely lost was by reading and working a lot. This film is only one part of the work I did when I was in jail. I found many other ways to express myself. I brought lots of sheets of paper.

TB – Was the play itself inspired by any particular government? After all, it is quite a universal allegory?

OS – It’s a universal theme. But on the other hand it was motivated by the memories we had of the former Soviet Union. The slogans of the film are written in Russian, and in a Soviet Style.

It’s also a play that reminds you that any fight against the regime can end up in a situation that’s even worse than the one you were in before. We have very vivid examples of that. The Russian revolution brought about a worse regime. Likewise the French revolution ended up in terror.

RB – And what is your view on the future of Ukraine? Pessimistic, optimistic?

OS – Well, I’m neither optimistic or pessimistic. I’m a realist. But I believe in our victory. After all, Ukraine is a country that wants its independence. It is a democratic country with a Western orientation. We do not want to come under the same supremacy under Putin like in the Soviet days.

RB – And the world?

OS – You have to realise that he doesn’t want to have a light influence. Putin wants to completely control and subject us. He is going to do it via different ways and means. Be it an open war, a secret FSB-style war, or a hybrid war. This is what he’s doing not only in our country but all over the world. Take the example of Africa, Syria, United States, where he tries to influence. He also tries to influence Europe by supporting any radical group he gets access to.

RB – So Trump is an entertainment figure. And Zalensky, the President of Ukraine, was in a TV show, Servant of the People, about an average man running for President before actually becoming President himself. Do you think that art and cinema has the opportunity to change political structures?

OS – I always believe that art does and should have an influence. This is how people grow up. As children they start by listening to music, reading books, watching movies or going to the theatre. It is the task of art and culture in general to make people better. To bring them up and educate them culturally. This is a very slow process. It develops step by step.

There’s certain moments when somebody from the world of arts turns into a politician. Our current president is not the only example. I could mention Reagan, who was quite a good president, although his films were rather bad. He was better off as a politician.

The image at the top of this interview is from Oleg Sentsov, the other two below are from his film ‘Numbers’

Making a guerrilla documentary in ultra-homophobic Chechnya

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

You are unlikely to see a more important documentary made all year than Welcome to Chechnya. A work of investigative journalism depicting an undercover LGBTQ network helping gay men and woman escape from the barbarous Chechen regime, it is a breathtaking, invigorating and necessary work. We sat down with its director David France during the Berlinale, where it played in the Panorama Section, to discuss the making of the film, his thoughts about the region and whether the film may even be released in Russia itself.

Redmond Bacon –How did you gain access to Chechnya? This is a closed-off area…

David France – We had a cover story of why I was in Chechnya. It’s not a place that Americans go to visit or anybody goes to visit. But the World Cup was there so I posed as a wealthy American football fan, especially enamoured with the Egyptian team who had stayed in Chechnya. I hired these people to take me on a tour and they agreed because I was throwing money around. That was our story. I had to study up on football…

RB – What is the atmosphere in Chechnya like?

DF – I had never been in a place that is so closed. I felt watched and studied. There’s something in the air that I’ve never experienced before. I don’t even know how to describe it. I have done war reporting in Central American, Lebanon, Occupied Territories, Western Africa, but I never felt the kind of peril that you felt when you were there even though you didn’t really see it. There were no goons with guns and no military infrastructure in front of you, but you felt it anyway.

RB – What filmmaking techniques did you have to use?

DF – The two women who met with Anya were wearing hijabs. One of them was my DP, and she was shooting with a go-pro. I was across the restaurant with a cellphone, taking selfies or appearing to take selfies. It was guerrilla filmmaking.

RB – What kind of emotions did you feel? Did it feel dangerous?

DF – Not really. We had prepared very well with our security team. But we were detained briefly as we were leaving. That’s the scene in the film where they are reaching for passports. They were reaching for my passport and I had my cellphone between my legs and I was shooting that way. And when they called me out the car I just dropped the phone and walked out. I had a second cellphone that had all of my football fan tourism on it and they were shocked by the story we told them about me needing to come and see the Egyptian football in Chechnya. Eventually they were like: “this guy is way too crazy”. We were heading in the right direction out of the region anyway, so they just threw us back in the car.

RB – Can you talk about the danger for your documentary subjects? For them, this is life or death...

DF – It was especially dangerous for them. That’s why they wanted me there. The video would present an alibi if needed. “What are they doing there? Are they kidnapping this girl? Who are they? Is she consenting?” All of these questions would be disproved by whatever video we were shooting. In a way we were functioning as a failsafe for the activists and the work they were doing.

David France

RB – How did you initially establish contact with the LGBT network?

DF – I had read an interview with Olga Baranova, who is running the main shelter in Moscow. She had spoken publicly about her work. I was introduced to her and proposed that we make a documentary. She was interested at first, but there were the questions of security and protecting the identities of people within the shelter. We worked that all out quickly. Within three days I was there shooting.

RB – How did you come up with the idea to obscure their faces digitally while still allowing the audience to see their emotions? What was the rationale behind it?

DF – I had to make the argument to people who were on the run that we needed to see their faces in order to generate empathy. I needed to know what it was like to be them, to have been tortured so terribly, to have barely escaped, to be so dislocated from everyone, even your family, and to know that even your family has joined the hunt for you.

I promised everybody I would disguise them in some way although I didn’t know how yet. And yet they still agreed to let me do this. I had in my release form a question asking if they needed to be covered, or if they needed their voices to be disguised. And they would check those boxes and everybody on the run checked those boxes. I promised that I would return to them with my solution for their approval. I think they realised it was going to be a breakthrough film in this respect.

Once we began the work of research and development to find ways to cover them we began to worry very seriously that we had a movie that we would never be able to release.

Thankfully it worked and it’s been recognised as major new tool for documentary filmmakers. It gives back the power to people to tell their own stories. It gives them back their humanity.

RB – Did you worry that the film may have blown the network’s cover?

DF – They had a trade-off that they were weighing and that was their need to get the world to pay attention to what they’re doing. This was also the reason for the activists to appear with their real faces. Due to the increasing physical risk to them and to their safety, they believed that their notoriety from this film will add to their level of protection. David Isteev, for example, expects to do his work in some way. Of course, he’s not going to travel in and out of Chechnya after the film comes out. But he does believe that after passing that torch to others, he will be able to continue living the life he had before.

RB – What can Vladimir Putin do to successfully intervene in Chechnya? The region is volatile, and known for its two wars with Russia…

DF – Putin could tell Ramzan Kadyrov to stop it and Kadyrov could stop it just like that. Why isn’t he telling him? Because I believe that what’s happening in Chechnya is the extension of Putin’s policies for the last ten, fifteen years.

He has been systematically rolling back a cultural acceptance of the LGBT community in Russia. He did it by passing only one law. And that’s what they call the anti-gay propaganda law. This law makes it illegal to say anything in the presence of a minor that might be construed as suggesting the normalcy of LGBT folks.

It is legal to be gay in Russia. There are also no laws against gay sex in Russia, but there are no protections either. But Putin’s campaign in the last fifteen years is to create an appetite for traditional values and to rebuild the role of the Church in society after the collapse of communism. What he has done is weaponised homophobia to consolidate his power. And the logical extension of that is what’s happening in Chechnya, Dagestan, North Ossetia, and numerous other republics in the South and creeping throughout Russia. We’ve seen other explosions of extreme anti-queer violence in Russia.

What shocked me the most is the fact that I didn’t think that homophobia could be weaponised again the way it was in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. I thought that would be impossible. In almost every society we have celebrities who are queer, we have politicians running governments who are queer, we have people who are out in the industry and we have people marrying left and right.

But we also currently have the first place and first time since Hitler that a top-down government-sponsored campaign exists to round up LGBTQ people for execution. This hasn’t happened since the 30s.

RB – How challenging was it for you to show these shocking images? What was the reasoning behind them?

DF – It was not a hard decision at all. This is an ongoing crime against humanity that no one is paying attention to.

Without knowing what this persecution looks like, it makes people in the shelter’s journeys dismissible. We wanted to show the grotesqueness of what is happening there and what they are escaping.

RB – Can you talk about the film as a work of investigative journalism. After all, reporting out of Chechnya is scarce.

DF – The biggest failure is the failure of the news media. It was a Russian-based independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, that broke the story.

They’re the only paper in the world that’s been aggressive about reporting this story. The news cycle throughout the world, and throughout the West especially, has become inexcusably shallow. The economy is not there to continue investigative research and reporting, especially the way we knew it in the past. I’m an investigative journalist myself, I came to filmmaking through that. This film is a piece of investigative work of the sort that newspapers should be doing.

The idea for the movie is to get the story back in the headlines. Then people in the news media can amplify a call for justice from the audience, which will put pressure on governments around the world to bring effective pressure on Putin. Currently the only global leader who has taken him to task on this is Angela Merkel. There’s been nothing out of the United States.

RB – I’m so glad the film also shoots scenes of the refugee Maxim Lapunov and his boyfriend together in the bath and then playing by the beach. Because those are such tender, lovely moments in a film which is mostly very harrowing. Did you feel that you needed to include those love scenes?

DF – I’ve realised very early on that this is a film about love. Not just romantic love, but love in a much larger way. I thought I was making a film about hate but having spent time in the underground network I saw a remarkable expression of love.

I spent so much time with those guys that we, as filmmakers, disappeared. We were able to watch them really without them having any sense of us watching them. But yes, when I crawled into the bathroom they did notice.

RB – Will it play in a few independent cinemas in Moscow or St Petersburg perhaps?

DF – We are in genuine conversations with people at the Moscow Film Festival, and there are additional conversations with another festival in St.Petersburg. We believe that we will be invited there. But in Russia, in order to show a film, it needs a license by the Kremlin.

So whether the Kremlin give a license for this film is certainly an open question. I’m not the one negotiating these deals. We have an agent for foreign sales, who did tell me last night that they are deep in conversation about official commercial distribution in Russia. Will it happen? I don’t know. But I would love to see it happen.

The picture at the top of this article is from David France at the 70th Berlinale, where this interview was conducted, while the other two are from ‘Welcome to Chechnya’

The Truth (La Vérité)

Posted on by victorfraga

By bringing together Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, two of the greatest actresses of our times, Hirokazu Koreeda’s latest movue was hyped ever since it started production. While the film isn’t likely to attract any new fans, it’s a tender affair that finds the director searching for refreshing new ways of tackling time-honoured conflicts.

Besides reuniting the French screen legends for the first time, the drama is also Koreeda’s first movie outside Japan, made immediately after his Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters (2018). It centres on Fabienne (Deneuve), a film star in the upper echelon of fame who’s in the middle of shooting a film she resents. Her life is suddenly disrupted by the arrival of her daughter Lumir (Binoche), who always felt neglected by her mother and decides to come to Paris for a heart-to-heart account of Fabienne’s soon-to-be-published memoirs. The daughter contests the contents of the book.

Koreeda is absolutely enamoured by family dramas and has made a consistent and interesting career out of them. On the surface, that’s exactly what he delivers here again. However, like its protagonist, The Truth is full of smoke and mirrors, playing with numerous narrative devices as well as its audience. It toys with established tropes and images (French people having heated arguments over dinner, Deneuve playing a cold-hearted diva, etc) in order to to create an essay about the ways people fabricate stories and memories, cinema included.

For example, when Lumir confronts Fabienne saying that the memoirs are not true, she tends to dismiss this as a form of criticism that would only come from someone who doesn’t know the nature of acting. Yet the two women are always acting towards each other. The scenes involving Lumir’s daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier) illuminate how this affects the people around them (and provide some excellent metatext to the feature).

Their need to perform – to others and, most of all, to themselves – blends into Fabienne’s roles and into Lumir’s screenwriting, a craft she pursued after her acting wasn’t nurtured by her mother. During the film set scenes, Deneuve’s character even seems to incorporate her daughter’s suffering to build her on-screen presence. It’s marvellous to watch – even if it’s not the full-on melodrama this film had every chance of being.

For its 106-minutes runtime, however, Koreeda simply has too much on his plate and his haphazard approach makes a good part of the film’s middle act drag. His script wants to cover a lot of ground and there are just so many parallel storylines thrown in that one might wish he stuck to the main ones and called it a day. The fact that many of these bits of story are tantalisingly good makes it even more frustrating not to see them fully fledged. Ultimately, The Truth, gives audiences a thorough analysis of its subject matter, even if it could have used more focus.

The Truth is available on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, March 20th. On Mubi in July/August.

Bad Tales (Favolacce)

Posted on by victorfraga

Photographed like a fairy tale and penned like a freak show, this droll movie set in the upper middle-class outskirts of Rome is teeming with peculiar families, and it’s also a real lesson on bad parenting. It’s not intended to make you laugh. Its misanthropic teachings instead will leave a bitter taste in your mouth, in a way not dissimilar to absurdist American suburbia comedies/dramas such as Parents (Bob Baladan, 1989) and Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998), or the more recent Suburbicon (George Clooney, 2017) and Greener Grass (Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, 2019).

Life in the burbs isn’t all green lawns and jolly neighbours. Bad Tales, as the title suggests, is a grim movie about the tragedies and the obsessions of those who live a seemingly comfortable life in a rich and colourful world. The houses are big, the haircuts are perfect, the meals are abundant. The cinematography is vivid and expressive. The characters, on the other hand, offer a strange counterpart to exuberant imagery.

These people do not exude happiness. Elio Germano (who received the Silver Bear for Best Actor for his role in Giorgio Diritti’s Hidden Away, a film that premiered in Competition at the Berlinale alongside with this very one) plays the formidable and unpleasant Bruno, the father of two straight-A prepubescent adolescents. He is married to Dalila (Barbara Chchiarelli), but their parental skills are beyond questionable. They impose strict rules and treat their children with little affection and a lot of anger, in a reflection of their very own relationship.

Amelio (Gabriel Montesi) is the very opposite. He’s a single father devoted to his hapless son, who catches measles. And there are other families. A very strange mother wants her daughter to develop the highly infectious illness. The two parents arrange a play-date, in the hope that the boy will share the rubeola virus with the girl. The animosity between the families explodes when a plastic pool garden is destroyed by the blade of an envious neighbour, inundating the garden and the street with chlorinated water.

The film is split between the parents’ and the children’s perspective. Awkwardness prevails in both cases. It isn’t just the adults who are socially maladroit and with very questionable motives. In the film’s most hilarious sequence, two children attempt to have sex, only for the boy to run away as the girl lies waiting for the interaction. The children don’t seem to understand sex, but instead they wish to emulate their dysfunctional parents. They are therefore perpetuating the generational failures. A morbid gift.

While effective at parts, Bad Tales is just too disjointed and does not work as a whole. It overdoes the wackiness, and the outcome is soulless and trite. Bleakness can be a valuable filmic device, but here it just feels gratuitous. The Italian identical twins are trying too hard to be Todd Solondz. The narrative relies too heavily on topical conversations that are never woven together. As a result, the movie becomes a little tedious.

Bad Tales showed in Competition at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. To my surprise, it won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. It premieres in the UK in October, at the BFI London Film Festival.