From fast cars to quiet horses: a wild journey into filmmaking

In director Nick Rowland’s directorial feature debut Calm With Horses, an adaptation of Colin Barrett’s short story, ex-boxer Douglas ‘Arm’ Armstrong (Cosmo Jarvis) has become the feared enforcer for the drug-dealing Devers family. While spending much of his time with business partner, he also tries to be a good father to his autistic young son. But when he is asked to kill for the first time, his loyalties are tested.

Rowland’s previous credits include the BBC series Ripper Street and Hard Sun, and his short films have broached a range of subjects, from Dancing in the Ashes (2012) about a young Jewish ballerina in a Nazi concentration camp to Group B (2015), about a rally driver making his comeback to competitive racing.

In a candid conversation with DMovies, Rowland detailed his specific approach to the cinematography, the audience’s impression of “hyper-violence”, the surprising transformation of his own interest in the story, and much more!

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Paul Risker – Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?

Nick Rowland – I spent most of my teenage years rally driving, so I was heavily focused on motorsport. I grew up in the Midlands near Peterborough and there wasn’t a cinema in my town, so I had to travel into the city. I wasn’t hugely exposed to cinema growing, but I’ve always been quite sensitive and artistic, and interested in creating things. When I was 19 years old I moved to Scotland with my mum, and being away from a lot of my friends it was around that time I began watching movies – the Film4 channel and more art house films.

I remember watching Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 19916) and Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2008) on a double bill, and until then I’d absorbed the stories, and those two films together made me become interested in the way they’d been told – the point of view, the camera work and the way they’d been edited.

The reason why I went to film school was because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life once my racing career dried up. I took an online multiple choice quiz and the first thing it suggested was to be a librarian, and I thought, ‘I can’t do that because I’m dyslexic.’ Number two on the list was film production, so I took myself off to film school.

PR – Is the short story more well suited to film adaptation than a novel because you are able to add to the source material, as opposed to condensing it?

NR – I can only speak from my experiences because I’ve never adapted a novel, and Calm With Horses is more of a novella – it was a 70 page short story. It was perfect because it gave us a skeleton, but it was missing a second act, and for us it was very much about retaining the spirit of the novella. We had to build on it rather than cut it down and that’s more of a creative process.

The short story is focused on the crime side of the plot and while you do see Cosmo Jarvis’s character with his son, they’re not linked to the story in any way – they’re little vignettes that give you a bit of characterisation. We wanted to draw that side of the story out and to make that the heartbeat of the film, and to also expand Niamh Algar’s character [Arm’s ex-partner].

Making the leap from short films to features and having a skeleton to work from, and the characters in place to develop was a great experience. Film4 were very supportive and also Colin Barrett was not precious over the material. Once he gave us the option, he just said, “Go mad lads and do what you want with it.” In his eyes a successful adaptation is something that develops the idea further, and it has to change because the medium is changing.

PR – Was it your intention throughout the film to create a movement between the wide shot close up, and specifically in the film’s opening violence?

NR – One of the first things I do when I’m thinking about how to shoot the scene is to think about the point-of-view that we’re in at that moment. With this film, a lot of the time the point-of-view is fixed very closely to Arm and that’s because he doesn’t say much, and he’s not very good at articulating what he wants or how he’s feeling. So it’s important that the camera is seemingly subjective much of the time so that we are in his head, and we can feel what he’s feeling and pick up on very small details and little clues that give us insight into what’s going on in his head.

This would sometimes dictate being close to him, but by contrast I wanted to introduce him in an objective rather than a subjective way, and that’s why the opening beating is more voyeuristic, and it’s in a wide shot. I wanted to present Arm and his day job of beating people up in a cold and unsympathetic way, and then invite you to actually empathise with him as the film goes on.

I find it funny that some people have said that the film is “hyper-violent” or it’s one of the most violent movies they have ever seen. There are only two scenes of violence in the film, but when the violence is onscreen it’s visceral and it does mean something. The violence has consequences and weight to it, and it’s very unpleasant. There’s a lot of tension throughout the film and the threat of violence is around the corner, and that’s what probably gives people this feeling of violence throughout the whole piece. But it’s only ever used sparingly and for the sake of the story.

PR – Would you agree that film is not just a narrative experience, but is a piece of art to be looked at and experienced aesthetically?

What I love about cinema is the fact it’s an art form that encompasses so many other things. It’s theatre and emotion, performance and story, mixed with painting and images, music, sound design and architecture. There are so many layers to it, and it’s how all these things mix together that makes it so effective and exciting when it’s done well.

Piers McGrail does a fantastic job with the cinematography, but it’s the way it’s complimented by Matis Rei’s sound design, and Blanck Mass who did the soundtrack. It’s all of those three elements working together that allow you to move into more expressionistic places.

As I was saying earlier, telling the story from a very subjective point-of-view allows you to be expressionistic with the language of the story. For example, there’s a scene in the nightclub where the camera moves in on Cosmo and transitions into slow motion. There’s the music that Blanck Mass wrote for that track, and it’s diegetic music that’s actually playing in the space, that responds to Arm’s emotions in that moment. Then there’s the sound design that takes over and heightens the subjectivity. Moments like that I get the most thrill out of because you’re using all of the tools at your disposal to allow you to show and to feel an emotion, rather than just telling the audience. And that’s when I think it’s the most fun for all of us as collaborators because we are all riffing off of each other.

PR – Filmmaker Christoph Behl remarked to me: “You are evolving, and after the film, you are not the same person as you were before.” Do you perceive there to be a transformative aspect to the creative process?

NR – Over a five-year period I’m a very different person to who I was when I stepped up to make the film. What’s interesting is that what initially attracted me to the story was the genre, the crime story elements, but as the project went on I became more interested in the emotional and dramatic side with his son and ex-partner. So as the project developed more of the sensitivity came to the fore, and also once you get actors involved, then the film day-by-day naturally morphs because you’re reacting to one another, you’re finding the film together and that’s always exciting.

I feel like such a different filmmaker now than I was when I started and I think if only I could go back to the start again with everything I know now, I would love that opportunity. But that’s what drives you onto the next project. By the time you get to the end of the story you’re so saturated, and it has beaten you down in many ways. I remember as soon as I’d finished Calm With Horses, I just had a huge desire to do a love story or a romance film after spending years with these gangsters.

Nick Rowland is pictured at the top of this interview. The other images are from ‘Calm with Horses’, which is available on all major VoD platforms now.

Calm with Horses

In rural Ireland, ex-boxer Douglas ‘Arm’ Armstrong (Cosmo Jarvis) has become the feared enforcer for the drug-dealing Devers family. While spending much of his time with business partner Dympna Devers (Barry Keoghan), he also tries to be a good father to his autistic young son. But when he is asked by Paudi Devers (Ned Dennehy), to kill for the first time, his loyalties are tested.

“I can hurt people; there’s no hate in any of it now. Don’t go thinking all violence is the work of hateful men; sometimes it’s just the way a fellow makes sense of his world” says Arm. Calm With Horses opens with its protagonist’s narration, that familiar muffled sound of being lost in one’s own mind, disconnected momentarily from reality. The blood pulses, the words recollecting a violent childhood that has bled into adulthood. The silent inner voice breaks its silence before once again it is abruptly silenced, dragging Arm and we into his conscious reality, to in his words, “make sense of his world.”

This action plays out in a tightly woven narrative, where the past is an injury that cannot be eased with either an amicable resolution or peace. In this type of story, the only closure is an anxious one – the protagonist forced to either accept its blow and fall, or continue the violent march.

The task undertaken by director Nick Rowland, adapting Colin Barrett’s short story, is not a film critiqued for its originality, but for the compelling emotional portrait of it’s characters. Following the violent opening scenes of Arm laying out Fannigan (Liam Carney), an associate of the family with a punishing beating, there is a sense that Rowland believes that the anticipation and consequences of violence are now more than adequate to impress upon the audience the violent world that the Devers preside over. Like Arm’s violent blows upon Fannigan, the film should deliver a punishing beating upon us. The success of a story such as this is not whether it entertains us, but whether we can tangibly feel its characters and their world. And the drama lies in the ultimatum confronting the character, simplifying the choices and emphasising that it’s not about where the character or story ends, but how we reach that conclusion. The calm and composed direction tempers the drama’s emotional intensity, yet emotionally we feel the weight of its strikes.

Calm With Horses displays an economy of storytelling, with the dramatic climax not relying not on the edit to piece it together, the scene unfolding around the camera which is strategically positioned. In the opening scenes of violence, Rowland skilfully uses the movement between wide shot and close-up. He details the harsh brutality up close, yet even when the cut to the wide shot distances us from the violence, it remains a shrill experience that is difficult to watch. This is in part because of the sound of the strikes of fists upon flesh and bone. While the close-up is visually more graphic, in Rowland’s hands the wide shot does not feel inferior, because once pictorially established, like a nail struck by the hammer, sound repeatedly drives the violence into our sensory cortex.

The artful presentation of violence, avoiding gratuity, and not allowing the edit to intrude upon the scene shows the richness of technical craftsmanship. A film’s heart however lies not in the superficial, but under the skin, and permeating the drama here is the idea that the person decides whether a cycle of violence is permanent or impermanent. With an emotionally wrought power, Calm With Horses looks to where we draw the line between sacrificing ourselves for others, and when that sacrifice is the greatest act of kindness towards oneself – liberation from what we don’t want to be, when one makes sense of one’s world. The message of the film is that as humans, we are tragic beings, yet we carry with us the flame of hope.

Calm with Horses is out on VoD on Monday, April 27th. On BritBox on Monday, May 1st (2022). Also on other platforms.

Be Good or Be Gone

Given a four-day temporary release from prison, Ste (Les Martin) returns to his terra firma in search of resolution. His partner Dee (Jenny-Lee Masterson) shuns him when he turns up unannounced to his place of work. He settles her with a coffee before he talks about resolving himself. Meanwhile Weed (Declan Mills), another prisoner granted a four-day leave from prison, has his sights on becoming a fashion don. Between them, the two men battle their self afflicted addictions to love, substances and robbery.

In what proves to be Ireland’s answer to Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), the story centers on two unlikely rogues. Like a rich Roddy Doyle novel, the film sprinkles with sparking wordplay: fresh with deep, darkly written Dublin slang. An encounter with Ste’s ‘Ma’ (his mother) reminds him how far he’s fallen in life, a conversation with a fellow drug dealer finds him how difficult it is to return to civilisation. It’s not a comedy in the traditional sense, but it does have a richly dark undercurrent flowing within the script. Take Weed’s exclamation of recognising a rat-bag for his questionable choice of sock-wear as one choice example.

Another rat-bag (played by the mercurial Graham Earley) picks up the two unassuming characters, before throwing them into the confines of a shop robbery. It being Dublin, not Miami, the shop is little more than a newsagents and Ste’s fury envelopes when he’s given a poxy €20 in “wages”. In a classic tale of Ulyssian qualities, Ste finds traps on every street he considers home.

Yet like Robert De Niro in Heat, he’d give it all up for love. Returning to a local pub, he watches the woman he treasures sing out a tavern ballad. He brings her on a walk, spinning tales of pig-tailed beauties who once won his heart over. Yet for all his tales, beautiful and bold, he can’t escape the lingering crimes that keeps his love from returning her affection.

His memories of gratuity turn to gratuitous actions. In one of the film’s more extraordinary scenes, he pauses over the gun that sits by his bedside. It’s a beautiful segment in a film that follows the romance of escape as thoroughly as it follows the romantic conversations two lovers share. In one four-day “holiday trip”, Ste and Weed uncover the values, bonds and relationships that keeps this wonderful world floating all around us.

Be Good or Be Gone premiered Garden State Film Festival in New Jersey on Saturday 28th of March. The Festival was held online due to the Covid-19 virus. Available on Tuesday, April 13th on various platforms.

Talking About Trees

Sudan has been in a near-consecutive string of conflicts since its independence in 1956. The deadliest of these was the Second Sudanese Civil War, which raged from 1983 to 2005 and ended with the creation of South Sudan, which would have its own civil war from 2013 to February 2020, causing a further 383,000 deaths. This miasma of death and dictatorship crushed infrastructure and erased culture that wasn’t overtly Islamic. Consequently, Sudan has been without a film industry since the military coup of 1989.

Amidst this narrative of chaos, however, has been the Sudanese Film Group (SFG), led by four retired filmmakers – Shaddad, Suliman Ibrahim, Eltayeb Mahdi and Manar Al-Hilo. They’re an affable, insouciant bunch whose bond has seen – as they humorously catalogue – ‘three democracies and three dictatorships’. The true soul of their friendship, though, is an existential passion for cinema, and Talking About Trees documents their struggle to share it with the Omdurman community.

To do this, they aim to host a series of free public film screenings that, after consulting the locals, will kick-off with a showing of Django Unchained – a solid choice. Their venue is dusty, gutted and decrepit, but the old pals’ easygoing stoicism very much subscribes to the maxim of “where there’s a will, there’s a way”; until, that is, they notify the local government, which is a hive of venality, incompetence and Islamic fundamentalism.

The men’s quiet struggle is observed rather than investigated. Director and cinematographer Suhaib Gasmelbari steps back from his subjects, framing shot after beautiful shot with an almost tableau effect; the only life in them coming from the men’s energy and ambition.

Despite the injustice of it all, Talking About Trees isn’t here to appeal or campaign. It is an unassuming work with an organic, engaging humanity. Alas, thanks to a mindless, authoritarian regime, it seems the Sudanese Film Group will struggle to move beyond their dark, dusty storeroom trove of 16mm cameras and Bunuel tapes, and the locals, who have a combined literacy rate of 47%, will continue to be failed by their government.

Talking About Trees is available on DVD and VOD on Monday, April 27.

A Paris Education (Mes Provinciales)

Etienne (Andranic Manet) leaves Lyon to go to film school in Paris. His neurotic girlfriend Lucie is worried that Etienne will forget her and sleep with other women. At film school he meets the charismatic Mathias (Corentin Fila) who is determined to become a film auteur of some sort, believing passionately that film has great and deep things to convey. He is continuously rude to William (Laurent Delbecque), which annoys many other students. William, presumably, intends to make commercially successful films, which Matthias finds bourgeois and contemptible.

Etienne is greeted by the friendly Valentina (Jenna Thiam), his flatmate, who attempts to seduce him by questioning his devotion to Lucie, all the while smoking a cigarette in a very elegant manner. Etienne befriends Jean-Noël (Gonzague Van Bervesseles), the gay character, who is friendly and relaxed, and also wins the admiration of one of the senior lecturers Paul Rossi (Nicolas Bouchard), who expects great things of him. Etienne is supposed to produce a film as part of his studies but for most of the film never gets round to it.

With the exception of Jean-Noël and the pleasant woman he later seems to have as a partner, Barbara (Valentine Catzéfils), no one has any humour or sense of proportion. Etienne mopes around Paris like a soulful version of Gérard Depardieu. He picks out on the piano Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto from his 5th. Symphony (the music from Visconti’s Death in Venice, 1971) which is supposed to add a sense of tragedy to the film. The whole Adagietto is played from beginning to end as the film closes. Both Mahler and Visconti must be spinning in theirs graves.

Eventually, Mathias runs into the formidable Annabelle (Sophie Verbeeck), a Marxist intellectual, who takes Mathias’s view of film making to the cleaners and leaves him without a materialist-dialectical leg to stand on. Then tragedy strikes. Jean-Noël gets fed up with Etienne’s incessant melancholia and drops him as a friend and I don’t blame him. Etienne is a pain in the neck.

This film makes no attempt to help the viewer understand what is going in the characters’ inner lives. Instead, we are given a set of dialogues in cafés, flats, beds and on the street which tell us what the protagonists think but not why. It arrogantly presumes that the viewer thinks filmmaking is an exercise in existential angst. No one discusses technique, lighting, studio sets, the hiring of actors or finance, which I thought was half the battle in making films. This film seems to be in the tradition of French “salon” film where everyone sits around in rooms discussing their relationships and deep matters in life, and little else.

All this is a pity because, in fact, the actors give competent enough performances with the material that has been handed them. I would like to see more of them of Andranic Manet, Jenna Thiam, Gonzague Van Bervesseles and Corentin Fila. All of them are good, thoughtful actors. Some critics have commented that A Paris Education seems more to be inspired by the events of May ’68, with its Marxist and existentialist references, than what is going on now.

This is the sort of movie so strangely old-fashioned that it reminded me of Monty Python’s parodic Le Fromage Grand, by the fictitious Kenneth Longueur. The French can do much better than this.

A Paris Education is available to download from Monday, May 11th.

The dirty secrets of Oliver Hermanus

The fourth feature from South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus tells the story of the experiences of the silent generation of white South African men who served in the South African Border War (1986-1989).

Reflecting on this chapter in his country’s history, the filmmaker explains, “… this was a generation of men that didn’t talk about what happened during this conflict. It’s a very controversial war because it had no value – it never ended in a sense there was a winner and a loser; everything just evaporated. The borderline and the countries changed, and the army that was fighting it no longer exists. So there’s a lot of guilt and shame that these men have taken on because they were forced into something that represents the Apartheid system.”

The film is set in 1981, and like all white boys over the age of 16, Nicholas Van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer) must complete two years of compulsory military service to defend the Apartheid regime. The title of the film means weak, effeminate or illegal, and amidst the fear of communism and the “die swart gevaar” (the black danger), homosexuality is forbidden, placing Nicholas in danger when he experiences a connection with a fellow recruit.

In conversation with DMovies, Hermanus discussed his approach to the filmmaking process, the contradictions arising from his conflicted feelings, and his desire for Moffie to be a fearless piece of filmmaking.

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Paul Risker – Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?

Oliver Hermanus – There is a very clear memory of going to the movies as a youngster with my dad, and I remember seeing the live action movie The Bear, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, that just connected with me – there was something deeply emotional about the film. There was the power to be impacted and I became addicted to the effect of movies, and the sense of how they can change my attitudes and the way I feel. So I started craving being in the cinema, and particularly when I was younger, seeing what were more and more challenging films. I would try to see films that I shouldn’t have been seeing because I was too young, like The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992), or Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999), which I saw illegally at high school. I definitely see film as an upsetter, as a way of challenging people, and that’s the heart of why I want to make films.

PR – Discussing the relationship of the film and the filmmaker, writer/director Rebecca Miller remarked to me: “If they are made honestly, all pieces of art are self-portraits of the person making them.” Do you agree with her?

OH – There definitely is a tax to creating films, but not every director thinks about filmmaking in this way. There’s a part of the world where cinema is just a business, a factory, and directors step in and step out with very little personal tax. But the work that I’ve made and the way that I like to make films, there definitely is the risk that you always place yourself in by pouring a lot of yourself into the film. The risk comes from the vulnerability of making something in earnest, giving it every fibre of your being, every last morsel of your energy, and then having it go out to the world with no guarantees that it’ll be appreciated. It could be so heavily criticised that it impacts you personally, and that’s something you only learn through releasing films.

When my second film [Beauty, 2011] got into Cannes, I was 17 and I remember the festival director calling me to tell me they wanted the film to come to the festival. I thought that was it, that I’d made a film. It was such a personal and an emotionally taxing film to make, that I was not prepared for the fact that the world would then weigh and measure it in other ways, and that’s where a part of your soul gets taken. You put yourself out there in such an extreme way and you can’t take it back.

OH – What compelled you to believe in this film and decide to tell this story at this particular point in time?

For me personally, my previous film The Endless River (2015) felt like my first film, although it was my third. It was the hardest film to make. It pulled me in every direction, and at the end of the process, it felt like I had come through a baptism by fire. There were moments in the making of the film where going left or going right would have this enormous impact on the completion of the film, and when it became the first South African film to ever enter competition in Venice, when that happens, you are overwhelmed by this emotional release because you have been holding it together.

I remember standing in Venice and it being the first time I felt that I could make a film – the idea that making a film is blood and guts, having embalmed myself in myself, where I now had this resolute gut instinct about how to make a film, and how to survive it when the conditions are bad from different directions, whether financial or creative.

Coming out of The Endless River, I had a set of rules for myself about the kind of people I wanted to work with, or how I wanted to go about making my next film, and Moffie is the product of that. Ironically, I work with the same team, the same production designer, costume designer, director of photography, composer and producers, but it was just that my attitude was different. I wanted to make something that was unafraid, and so I suppose in answer to your question, the choice of what is next is for me always revolves around what came before.

PR – Picking up on your point about the moment you felt you could make a film, what we are versus what we feel we are can often be out of synch.

OH – One of the interesting challenges for me is whether I would refer to myself as an artist, and whether filmmaking in the sense of what I do is art, or artistic? Does it have that legitimate description or label? It’s always the question of legitimacy of owning a space, and I’ve made four films now.

If you think about the amount of time that I’ve actually spent on a movie set, they’ve only been my own. Directors don’t get to work with other directors, we go to other sets more as spectators. But the crew, they spend every week of their lives on a film set, and you’re coming to the process sometimes being the least exposed to the environment that you are in control of. So there’s an occupational strain where you’re not sure what it is you are, or whether you’re just an impostor – that’s an insecurity. Moffie was the first time that the insecurity went away, so I am now walking onto a movie set of my own, whether that’s this year or next year with an internal calm about it, with an internal sense of feeling of place.

PR – Moffie is characterised by a reluctance to make statements or to preach to the audience. Do you trust the audience to criticise the story for themselves?

OH – My attitude is about posing questions – my film is a question, a provocation of some kind to the audience. I’m more about the passive meaning of things, the silences, and there is usually not a lot of dialogue in my work. I would agree with you that I assume the audience’s level of intelligence and focus, and you hope that there’s a resonance. The expositional and prescriptive sentiment of bashing things over their head is not the style of filmmaking that I like to make, or that I like to watch.

PR – Music often replaces verbal communication or the expression of feelings in your latest film. Why is that?

OH – The music is a perfect example of that attitude I went into the film with – a confidence or ambition to firstly use the music that I wanted to use, despite the potential expensive costs. I suppose the relationship the music has with the rest of the film, it was a risk. When I started doing it, the editor was a little bit apprehensive because you go into these moments using famous pieces, where there’s always the question: Can I use something in my film that has been used in very popular movies? There’s an insecurity that comes with that as well, because people remember some of these pieces from films like Barry Lyndon or The Piano Teacher, and Bach’s Fugue [Toccata and Fugue in D Minor], is often used as a comical piece of work in commercials.

It was one of those moments where I was just going to go with this confidence, this gut feeling about playing against the sentiment of the music and using it as an energiser, but it was also a disarming tactic in where the audience’s focus goes, particularly when we cut to the flashback. And then relating that direction to the composer who was creating original music to live and coexist with this famous music. The use of music is one of those examples of how it’s important as filmmakers to take risks.

PR – From film to film, do you learn by taking different risks specific to that film, and is it a process of developing an instinct for what works?

OH – You definitely learn from film to film, and there’s also the factor of being inside of your own film. The more you prepare and the more centred you are in the message, the heartbeat of the story and the world you are creating while you’re shooting, the more solid that is. And if you have a perspective as the filmmaker, the easier in a sense it is to make decisions and to explore ideas, like the music in this film. So that’s the learning experience, the creative confidence I was talking about, which is how I’ve become aware of the headspace I need to be in, in the creation of a film to be able to expand on my creative ideas. The impulse can be pure as long as you have perspective, direction and thread, and your feeling of the film is singular and resolute.

Oliver Hermanus is pictured at the top of this article. The other images are stills from ‘Moffie’

Sea Fever

When a trawler hits an unseen object and becomes marooned, marine biology student Siobhan’s (Hermione Corfield) research excursion takes an unexpected twist. As the crew of six, led by husband and wife Gerard (Dougray Scott) and Freya (Connie Nielsen), learn that a mysterious water-borne parasite has infected their water supply, they find themselves in a struggle for survival.

“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed” are the words of English poet Alexander Pope. If expectation is absent, this offers no assurance that one will avoid feeling disappointed by a film. Not only are we cineliterate, but we have unconscious or subliminal desires that we are not always fully aware of. The marketing of a film, a still image, the briefest of a synopsis constructs narrative expectations that we then judge the film against. The tussle between the story and the audience, is whether the latter will accept the story the filmmaker has chosen to tell, and critique it by those creative choices, and not by their expectations.

Sea Fever is a familiar story, the type we are most critical or unforgiving towards if it does not satisfy our desire in its approach. In genre cinema the theme of survival is a common one, and here for the conflict of man versus monster, writer and director Neasa Hardiman favours the psychological and human drama over the spectacle of the creature. It is a choice the filmmaker commits to, her attention dedicated to constructing the suspense, the terror lurking offscreen with only glimpses of the creature and its parasitic spores.

This approach will not satisfy everyone’s preferred choice of claustrophobic survival out at sea. Some audiences will want a visually aggressive struggle, while others will appreciate this alternative approach. But then, this is an archetypal story with a flexibility, that can serve different branches of the genre tree. The premise alone sets up expectations of a horror film, but reducing the emphasis on the parasite as an onscreen antagonist, while it has a shade of psychological horror, Sea Fever is at its heart a thriller.

It takes time for the film to make its point, only revealing its conviction in the third act when it addresses the moral conflict of one’s self-preservation, or the survival of the few versus the welfare of the collective. Hardiman places a pressure on the characters to carry the film, and with patience and conviction, Sea Fever gradually emerges as an effective and prescient piece of filmmaking, in pandemic stricken 2020.

The reliance on Siobhan’s scientific knowledge by the trawler crew mirrors our deference to science and medicine to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, while the conflict over self-isolation or self-quarantine to prevent the spread of the parasite to the mainland grows increasingly relevant. With much of the world in lockdown, and demonstrations in opposition to these measures in U.S states, including: Arizona, Colorado, Montana and Washington State, brings an urgent authenticity to the moral conflict that arises in the films third act. And amidst this question of the welfare of the few versus the many, the circumstances under which the trawler becomes marooned, latches on to the tension unfolding in America, of the welfare of the economy over the welfare of the nation’s health.

So, what should one expect from Hardiman’s feature directorial debut? Removed from the shadow of the pandemic, Sea Fever may resonate less strongly – a modestly effective survival at sea story. However, outside of the present crisis, the film is an effective, albeit a quiet and unassuming piece of genre filmmaking. It is emotionally tempered, the top never taken off of the suspense, instead the filmmaker follows a series of cause and effect choices that threads the narrative together.

Gerard defies instructions to not enter a restricted area, which brings them into contact with the parasite. Yet without the promise of the haul from the restricted area, he and Freya will lose their trawler. Siobhan is meanwhile forced to leave the lab by her tutor for a mandatory research excursion. Choice is an intriguing antagonist at the heart of Sea Fever – choice not always our own, and is sometimes a response to pressure. What it strikes at is the issue of co-dependency and the futile nature of individualism. Gerard’s choice plunges his crew into a struggle for survival, while Siobhan’s tutor forces her to leave her introverted comfort zone, and the moral conflict over quarantine is one of the welfare of the individual over the collective on yet a bigger scale.

Sea Fever has a timid feel for a genre picture, and if its themes and ideas are dramatic, the restraint towards emotion compliments the ideas by not reducing human angst to a spectacle of high emotion. The film is observing and commenting on society, looking to human tendencies and the ongoing struggle for humans to embrace the collective over their individual needs, spurred on by the primitive survival instinct that fuels the desperation here. Hardiman also acknowledges man’s arrogance as a precursor to his own downfall, and the ignorance towards our role as part of a larger ecosystem. And yet, she infuses the film with a sympathetic and optimistic heartbeat by its end.

Signature Entertainment presents Sea Fever on Blu-ray & Digital HD from April 24th.

Ema

This is a movie that starts out on fire – a metaphor appropriate for the lives of characters who seem to burn with the heat of their passions. Director Pablo Larraín takes a break from his usual environment – the historical drama – and delivers a modern and tension-filled character study centred on a powerful performance by Mariana di Girolamo.

She plays the title character, a dancer whose marriage to choreographer Gastón (Gael García Bernal) has been in a deep crisis after the unsuccessful adoption of an orphan. With nothing to ground her emotionally, she sets out to get the boy back – whatever the cost. The same plot could serve as the basis for a post-watershed TV thriller, but Larraín refuses to come up with easy answers. The outcome is avant-garde in both form and content.

In an interview, the Chilean filmmaker has mentioned the existence of a first cut of the feature that his close circle found incomprehensible. The current version in broken down into three acts. This structure does not prevent Ema from flowing smoothly like as a stream of consciousness. The sensational colours captured by cinematographer Sergio Armstrong give the action a delirious tinge.

Here, the universe of dance, the landscapes of the coastal city Valparaíso and the energetic soundtrack by Nicolas Jaar reflect and amplify the protagonist’s uncontrollable desire for freedom. The script, penned by Larraín, Guillermo Calderón and Alejandro Moreno, anchors the story to an unstable character, difficult to root for.

Ema’s paradox is that she longs to be free almost as intensely as she wants to be a mother – and these two goals aren’t necessarily always compatible. Much of her maternal verve comes from the desire to transcend her emotional turmoil. Her instability drives her to constantly challenge constraints. She explores her body to the maximum through choreography, hooks up with different partners despite her marriage and indulges in sexual acts that are not bound by gender or number of participants.

Faced with Gastón’s infertility and a traumatic adoption process, she goes through increasingly selfish and Machiavellian schemes to get what she wants without any remorse. Symbolically, the protagonist’s inability to properly deal with life is manifested in her pyromania, which she even passes on to her then adopted son. For her, fire is a tool for escapism which obliterates the past.

It is evident that, outside the festival circuit, Ema will be more welcomed by the arthouse crowd. It’s a demanding watch and its elliptical twists and turns might put more mainstream audiences off. It’s their loss, since Larraín has bravely delivered one of his best works: a film as indomitable and indefinable as its protagonist.

Ema is on Mubi in May, and then on Amazon Prime.

Cinema and fashion: a graphic and vivid partnership

Fashion has never moved this fast before. At 24 frames per second, to be more precise.

Doesn’t Exist is a publication that merges cinematic elements with a fashion landscape. They become are translated into intricate fashion stories, pictorial written pieces, interviews and filmic illustrations. The objective of the publication is to create a new space to be used by both fashion and film industries, and a mutual feeding of references in all their aesthetic and intellectual fields. The magazine seeks to develop a visual dialogue between the two industries, thereby generating a fully cinematic fashion content.

The first issue is a tribute to the iconic Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, and the impressive work for the her fashion brand Comme des Garçons. Our writer Redmond Bacon has drawn parallels between the fashion artist and the late Greek filmmaker Theodoros Angelopoulos, arguing that both embrace austerity and reject the mainstream in very assertive and yet different ways.

There is a visual fashion story stylised with archive pieces from Kawakubo’s Paris debut, complementing the words by Redmond. The minimal, groundbreaking collections from the 1980s and 1990s are all there to be savoured.

The first print edition of Doesn’t Exist also features an article about the elusive and mysterious American-born and London based filmmakers the Quay Brothers, and their connection with the fashion world through the means of fragrance. The words were penned by our journalist Jeremy Clarke, and the piece is also embroidered with a set of stylised images, once again straddling between the wondrous world of cinema and clothes.

Two pieces are available exclusively online for readers of DMovies: an article on twisted motherhood, and an interview with the magnificent actress Izabél Zuaa.

The shiny first edition of Doesn’t Exist has 244 pages, and it is available to purchase in four different front covers from various stockists across the UK, Portugal and Italy, both on the high street (once the lockdown is over) and online. You can see the full list by clicking here, or by visiting their Instagram.

In order to celebrate the partnership between DMovies and Doesn’t Exist, and the enduring connection between the movie and the fashion worlds, we are giving away five copies of the magazine entirely for free posted to you. Just send us an email to info@dirtymovies.org, and let us know the title of your favourite movie by Theodoros Angelopoulos. The promotion is valid for readers anywhere in the world!

All images in this piece are taken from the first print edition of Doesn’t Exist. Find out more on their website by clicking here.

When a gestation goes terribly awry…

The Brazilian horror-fantasy movie Good Manners (Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas) was launched in 2018, and it has now been made available on Amazon Prime. It follows two females, the increasingly pregnant Ana (Marjorie Estiano; pictured above to right) and her maid Clara (Isabél Zuaa; pictured left). They develop a romantic bond and a strange sexual attraction, but their lives are changed when Ana unexpectedly gives birth in one night of full moon.

We interviewed Isabél in order to find out more about her experience as a woman, an actor, a mother and an immigrant. Scroll down and find out her dirty secrets. And don’t forget to check our partnership with the magazine Doesn’t Exist, which originated this content, and to watch Good Manners (which is now available on VoD).

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DMovies – Please tell us about the casting process for Good Manners. How did you get to Clara, your character in the film?

Isabél Zuaa – Well, the casting process was quite normal. I saw an ad on the internet, looking for an actress with more of less my profile, so I sent in my actress portfolio. At the time I was living in Rio de Janeiro and I was asked to do the first test in Sao Paulo, and it went very well. It exceeded all expectations.

DM – It is possible to look at Good Manners from different angles. A drama about the abysmal gap between social classes in Brazil. A fable about the gestation period and early childhood of a unique boy, out of a fairy tale. Or even a horror story about motherhood. What is your take on the script?

IZ – I look at the film from all of these angles and other layers as well. At first, there is the stark topic of the social divide between the two characters in the first part of the film – with the addition of racial issues. As the story progresses, the loneliness of each of those two women, the curiosity, suspense, motherhood, the special child, the music: everything develops and comes together.

DM – Do you see parallels between Good Manners and other films, such as Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) or The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)? Or even Son-Rise: A Miracle of Love (Glenn Jordan, 1979)?

IZ – Yes, the fact that babies with ultra-special needs, in all of their sensitivity and fragility, are conceived in special nights. And these children are born in a “strange” way and change the lives of their caregivers in such a violent way – I think this is something present in all of these stories. I believe that those films were mentioned at some point or another, along the making of Good Manners, but the one that was really underlined as a reference was Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.

DM – Your character is always clearheaded and serene, even when facing complex and terrifying situations. Are you like that in real life?

IZ – [laughs] I see Clara, my character, as quite restrained in some situations, but what pleases me the most are the contradiction inside of her. That makes her a lot more true-to-life. In my real life, I go through times that are more serene than others: it depends a lot on the circumstances. Maybe I’m looking for this balance between lucidity and serenity.

DM – What is your favourite technique to develop a character? Specifically for this film, was there a lot of research? Because the character is immersed in a lot of fantasy…

IZ – My process is quite intuitive: in every new project, I try to understand what the needs of each character are. As much as possible, I try to dive into the universe that surrounds the character.

I don’t always know “everything” about the characters by the time the cameras start rolling but, lately, I have been interested in the (astrological) star sign of the characters, to help me know the “temperature” and the “action verbs”. Clara is a Sagittarius.

DM – The characters’ performances are naturalistic: was this specifically designed by the directors to be a counterpoint to the dreamlike visual that the film portrays or was it something that happened organically?

IZ – If I remember correctly, it was all natural. The premise was undoubtedly to believe in that universe and to try and be as true as possible in our emotions. At some of the times, acting in an intuitive way, some other times more practically and mathematically. It always depended on the atmosphere of the scene.

DM – There is an atmosphere of sexual tension pervading the apartment in which Ana lives and where your character Clara works. How did you handle the topic of homosexuality?

IZ – It was all very natural. In the development of my character, she had already experienced relationships with other women. At first, she had no intention of mixing the professional relationship with the personal one, but the proximity and the tension in the apartment made it inevitable.

DM – How was the experience of working with an automated baby (who moved his face, opened and closed his eyes like a doll)?

IZ – It was a lot of fun, everyone in the team loved the doll. One day, before we started filming, they played a prank on me and it freaked me out. But, overall, it was a lot of fun.

DM – What was it like working with costume designer Kiki Orona? Did you have any say on what your character wears in the film?

IZ – Working with Kiki was great! She is amazing and has this great vibe about her, as well as her assistants. An incredible team. She managed to be faithful to Clara’s background. She did a fantastic job with the film’s colour palette: as beautiful as an orchestra. And she was in tune with the film directors, art direction and director of photography.

DM – You were born in Portugal, but you have done a lot of work in Brazil. Do you feel like a foreigner when you are in Brazil?

IZ – I was born in Lisbon and I am the daughter of emigrants. My mother is from Angola and my father is from Guinea-Bissau: so I grew up with different cultures at home. I am fairly adaptable to places and I love travelling, and Brazil has become my second home. I love Brazil and I am fortunate to feel welcomed.

DM – What are your next projects?

IZ – In Portugal, I will be in a theatre play named Dinheiro [Money] with the Mala Voadora company, which was founded by Jorge Andrade and José Capela. In Brazil, I am in the film O Novelo (Cláudia Pinheiro, in post-production). Also, I am in the film Prisioneiro da Liberdade (De Jefferson, 2019), where I have the honour of being Luiza Mahin, mother of the abolitionist Luiz Gama. I am very happy and grateful with these challenges.

This content was produced in partnership with the magazine Doesn’t Exist. Just click here for more information, and to order your print edition right now!

You can watch Good Manners on Amazon Prime (all stills in this interview were taken from the film).

Bad Guys

Roger Corman, the pope of pop cinema, once said: “The worst thing you can do is have a limited budget and try to do some big looking film. That’s when you end up with very bad work.” Happily, with a nano-budget of just £200, indie filmmakers Jack Sambrook and Will Unsworth are well aware of their limitations, and Bad Guys is all the better for it.

Corman learned the ropes with trashy horror movies, but this Brighton duo have drawn inspiration from the kitchen sink flavours of the British indie scene, namely Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and Down Terrace. As a result, the film’s influences are worn on its sleeve, but this is all part of the Corman philosophy – watch a load of movies, understand how they work, and turn this knowledge into your own cineliterate, nuts-and-bolts feature.

The story, which is a road trip-cum-crime caper, follows Gaz (Sambrook) and Cal (Unsworth), a pair of lowly debt collectors operating in a grey and gloomy Brighton. The dynamic is one you can imagine – Gaz is aloof and stand-offish, while Cal is loquacious, reckless and prone to violent outbursts. When Cal’s temper kills a man, the young men are ordered to drive the body north and bury it in the countryside.

The film’s bleak tone is framed by Rowan Holford’s striking cinematography, which combines long static shots and handheld work that skilfully balances rawness and fluidity. Particularly absorbing are the driving montages through Britain’s bypasses and winding, canopied B-roads, deftly capturing the motion and sensation of travel. Indeed, there is an elemental streak that runs throughout Bad Guys, which is complemented by Matt Unsworth’s orchestral, Carter Burwell-inflected score.

The real draw, however, is the chemistry between the leads. Sambrook is appropriately crabby as Gaz, making the rules as he goes along in an attempt to control Cal, who chinwags with anyone who’ll listen. Gaz does lighten up, though, and their exchanges consider everything from petrol station confectionary to a revelatory discussion of the female urethra. The dialogue never feels contrived and no wisecracks fall flat, which is a reflection of the leads’ performances and their collaboration on the script.

Another merit is a small but marked flair for suspense, which is ratcheted in a bathroom encounter between Gaz and a faceless, ominous stranger. It reminds you that these young men, barely into their twenties, are in a grave situation with some very dubious people.

We love indie film here at DMovies, so it is always a delight when an accomplished nano-budget feature like Bad Guys appears on our radar. Sambrook and Unsworth will have more cash for their next film, no doubt, but this won’t mar their grounded, kitchen sink sensibilities – it will bolster them.

Bad Guys is available on Amazon Prime in the UK now.