Author: John Bleasdale

Norway offers our writer one profound revelation!

Posted on by John Bleasdale

It starts at the airport where a large illuminated sign over the car park reads wryly: “BERGEN?” I don’t know; you tell me. With flights delays, cancelled flights and a mad dash through Munich airport, I’d managed through some manipulation of the space time continuum to arrive four hours earlier than my original ticket had allowed. When we come out to get the car, the driver Farid is surprised to find it locked. “I don’t usually lock the car,” he says apologetically. “I must have done it accidentally.” Farid tells me here the police are like helpers: ‘They’re not really the police.’

Norway always comes as a revelation. I relax suddenly aware that I no longer have to be on the defensive about my personal space or belongings. The whole time I’m here no one checks my ticket, they just ask me where the film is and direct me to the correct place. When I go for breakfast at the hotel no one asks for my room number. Like Sean Connery says in The Untouchables: ‘Why would some claim to be that which he is not.’

This assumption of basic honesty is surprising in the way I’m surprised. In other words why not? Why base our entire society on the number one priority of catching the dishonest; the over-riding assumption that everyone is sneaky and out to game the system? In this Norway is similar to the imaginary country in Ricky Gervais half-excellent comedy The Invention of Lying (2009). It isn’t perfect – there are homeless on the streets and everything costs iPhone prices – but in this one respect they excel. There’s no better criticism of a society, than another society.

Having said all that I’m here to watch films. So what films have I seen and how do they relate to this no doubt rosy tinted superficial glance at Norwegian society?

Well, the first film is Austrian and is about a pathological liar. In Axiom (Jöns Jönsson), Julius (Moritz Von Treuenfels) is a charming young man with a job as a museum guard. He is friendly and outgoing. The kind of person who strikes up conversations with strangers on the bus, or invites a new co-worker along on a boat trip. But he has a knack of dominating the conversation with his odd but amusing anecdotes. But there are danger signs straight away. A story he’s overheard becomes his own. The boat trip – we find out – has been promised many times and never actually realised. When the title turns up about fifty minutes in, all but the densest in the audience will have realised that Julius talks so much bullshit that even when he isn’t talking bullshit we assume it’s bullshit and so nothing he says has any value whatsoever.

And yet he still seems like a nice guy. His deceptions don’t seem to earn him anything and he’s in constant danger of being embarrassed, caught out, humiliated. In fact, those who know him longest – his brother, his family, his flatmates – treat him with a mix of bafflement, exasperation and contempt. Julius has no master narrative like the protagonist of Emmanuel Carrere’s book The Adversary who spent decades faking a career as a doctor to all who knew him. And society proves fairly resistant to Julius’ charms. He’s met with skepticism and several times revealed, at which point his face goes blank and he withdraws. Julius is the main victim. He lives an inauthentic life, unable to keep relationships or operate for long without weaving some version of himself that’s going to Japan to study or has just got a contract to build the Serbian embassy.

Swedish director Jöns Jönsson, in only his second feature, Axiom, is masterful in his composition of long shots where the framing does all the work as we sit and endure the latest of Julius’ performances, occasionally salted here and there with a poignant significant close up. Treuenfels gives a sympathetic performance, an imposter without the syndrome but who ultimately relies on the kindness and gullibility of others until he wears it through.

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John Bleasdale is pictured at the top of this piece, and one of the Bergen’s main cinemas is pictured below.

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How the Sarajevo Film Festival holds a hand out to Ukraine

Posted on by John Bleasdale

The attentive among you will notice something weird about the fact that the Sarajevo Film Festival celebrates its 25th edition in 2022. It means that the first edition took place in 1997, a mere one year after the siege of Sarajevo was lifted. It’s even stranger to find out that the festival actually has its roots in the city while the war was ongoing and shells were falling throughout the city.

I spoke with Edin Forto, the Prime Minister of the canton of Sarajevo. During the Bosnian war, Edin was a radio journalist who was vitally interested in film and got involved in the nascent festival. A drama society theater was taken over and films were smuggled in via a tunnel that ran under the airstrip and dug by hand. Crowds would brave sniper fire and mortars to get to the theater where they would watch such varied fare as Kieslowski’s Three Colors Blue (1994),John Woo’s Hard Target (1993) and Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal (1993).Soldiers returning from the frontlines – inasmuch as frontlines existed in a war that claimed thousands of civilian lives – huddled next to civilians to watch films, hungry, starved both literally and for any kind of cultural experience. “Whenever we had electricity, we would play music and show films”, Edin said. With space limited in the tunnel and a premium on what could be smuggled in, choices of film and music were hotly argued over. No one shared Edin’s goth sensibilities that saw him arguing for The Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland CD to be added to the wishlist.

The recent news from Ukraine hit hard in Sarajevo. Photographs that shocked the world of busy streets of a European city being reduced to Stalingrad like moonscapes arrived with the immediacy of memories. Edin describes how colleagues simmered with rage and trauma during those weeks and how he himself sat in his office and wept. ‘We were all triggered,’ he says.

Festival director Jovan Marjanovic met me for a coffee outside the National Theater which will show the Ukrainian films Klondike directed by Maryna Er Gorbach and Butterfly Vision, by Maksym Nakonechnyi. In a sign of solidarity, Ukraine has been granted regional status by the festival, Jovan explains, which will allow Ukrainian filmmakers to access funds, take part in industry meetings and compete in the regional competitions. Fellowships and working opportunities have also been created for Ukrainian refugees from the film industry. It is a small but vital contribution from a European city where the bullet holes are still visible on the walls. But this is also a sign of hope.

If Sarajevo – having suffered the longest siege in modern warfare, longer than Stalingrad, Leningrad and Madrid – can emerge with a hunger for culture and cinema intact and even more vital then here’s hoping the same will happen in the not-too-distant future for Ukraine.

The 25th edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival was held from August 12th to 19th.

Pacifiction

Posted on by John Bleasdale

Albert Serra has steadily gained a reputation as a filmmaker to watch. Provocatively, he has mixed the high and the low, no more explicitly as in his Cannes shocker Liberté (2019); and yet there was frequently the suspicion that there was more ambition than effect. Like someone poking you sharply in the ribs to gain your attention only to forget what he had to tell you.

Pacifiction might well be his first out and out masterpiece. Visually stunning via the cinematography of Artur Tort, there is barely a shot or moment in the film that is not worthy of absorbed contemplation. Benoît Magimel plays De Roller, the high commissioner for France of Tahiti in French Polynesia. As he likes to remind people, he is the representative of the State. He shamelessly employs his power to garner his business interests and give himself access to the local nightclubs. In his double-breasted white suit and perpetual sunglasses, he could have slipped from between the mound mottled pages of a Graham Greene novel. He negotiates with the locals, both officially and via the underworld. Various pies have been fingered. A new casino is due to open. The navy admiral (Marc Susini) is orbiting like a little mosquito. A mysterious Portuguese man has lost his passport. The CIA have a presence. And De Roller begins a flirtatious friendship with a transgender hotel worker (Pahoa Mahagafanau).

But the overarching concern is that there are rumors that France is too resume nuclear testing. De Roller’s attitude is slippery, at one point pointing out that nuclear testing caused cancer, but then implying that somehow it also created the possibility of treating that cancer. It is a charmingly obtuse rationalisation which demonstrates the man’s demonic talent for remaining aloof of human empathy while appearing to be intellectually engaged in the world he floats through.

Despite all the plotting, the actual plot is scant and the audience are kept at a distance. De Roller is as enigmatic and slippery for us as he is for the islanders: Magimel imbues him with a wonderful charm. He rarely has a bad word for anyone: engaging in a constant stream of glad-handing conversation. He has his appetites for the life of Tahiti, the food, the colors, the nightlife, the natural environment – but he is a voyeuristic appreciator as languidly excited by the violence of a ritual dance as he is by the jaw-dropping scene in which he boats out to witness first hand the giant waves crashing in.

Doom – as resonant as in any JG Ballard novel – looms over the island and Magimel reveals himself as someone who might well enjoy the apocalypse on aesthetic grounds. In this he no doubt mirrors Serra’s own fascination. There is a definite erotic fizz to the shadiness and corruption smells so invitingly sweet. White underpanted waiters serve drinks to sailors; natural splendor and beautiful sunsets and seascapes abound. This is a film which portrays a tropical evil which never loses sight of the former beauty of the fallen angel in his white suit and tinted glasses.

Pacifiction premiered at The Sarajevo Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It also showed in October in the UK at the BFI London Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, April 21st. On VoD on June 27th.

Men of Deeds (Oameni de Treaba)

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM SARAJEVO

Being the only policeman in a small village in Northern Romania shouldn’t be that hard. There might be the odd six families that do all the stealing, but for the most part all you really have to do is run errands for the mayor and not get into trouble. So Ilie – played by popular Romanian comedian Iulian Postelnicu – tells a new recruit (Anghel Damian) fresh from the academy. Ilie really doesn’t care about the job. What he really wants is an orchard. But the question is how much is he willing to compromise in order to get it?

Paul Neghoescu’s feature is a blackly comic satire on politics as it’s played out at the local and potentially most corrupt level. There is an obvious beauty to the countryside, though the village has recently been hit by floods, and one can understand Ilie’s longing for a little piece of land and something to look on with joy. The locals are a mix of free roaming chickens, mouth-breathing thugs and headscarved hardworking women and the powerful leaders of the community comprised of the avuncular major Constantin (Vasile Muraru) and his brother (Daniel Busuioc) a lumbering potentially psychopathic priest.

And Ilie himself is an ‘anything for a quiet life’ type. A brutal murder disrupts the delicate balance, but even so Ilie does his best to keep the peace with the added incentive of an orchard the mayor might be willing to give him cheap. The academy fresh rookie has other ideas though and risks upsetting the balance. As the violence begins to escalate, including the intimidation of the victim’s widow (Cristina Semciuc) who Ilie has an unrequited crush on, the hapless policeman must work out which side he truly wants to stand on.

Postelnicu is superb and the film at times seems to exist more as a vehicle for his obvious talents rather than an independent entity in and of itself. His policeman is a slacker who seems to have found something like the quiet life. He goes along to get along and has very little that’s admirable about him, but quite a lot which is likable. His thin frame and the deadpan face which always seems stuck between incomprehension and a grimace gives him a Keatonesque melancholy. As the film progresses however the tone shifts notably into something much darker and the last act slides into bloody farce. Whether the film has anything deeper to say about corruption and how winking at small misdeeds leads to ever deeper swamps of corruption is open to question. But there are comedies where even the cries of pain can become very funny – and no less real for that.

Men of Deed premiered at the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival, whichs is being held from August 12th to the 19th.

Fire of Love

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM SARAJEVO

I have always loved volcanos. Ever since I was a child visiting the Natural History Museum in Edinburgh on a school trip and I bought a book about them. Who wouldn’t? The moment all that is solid flows like water, heat of the surfaces matches the core of the earth and explosions many multiples of nuclear bombs destroy entire mountains. Did you know Mount Etna grows by a metre every year? The non-volcanic Mount Everest manages a measly three centimetres. Then again the whole of Etna could be slung into the air at any moment and the cartographers would have to revise the altitude radically down. Rutger Hauer voice: That’s what it is to be a volcano.

So I fully understand Katia and Maurice Krafft’s obsessional devotion to these temperamental mountains. The pair group up not too far from each other in the Alsace region of France where they independently became fascinated in vulcanology. Having met, they started organising trips to eruptions and documenting their own adventures with films that became popular spectacles but also scientifically important in the understanding of the underlying geological – geothermal activity. Their work also had a more consequential impact in informing at risk communities of the need to evacuate: something which tragically did not happen when Nevado del Ruiz erupted in Columbia and thousands died in the ensuing mudslides.

Sara Dosa’s documentary lovingly delvers into the cinematic heroes who shot incredible amounts of footage at great personal risk – sometimes foolhardy in their adventurousness. Indeed, with their matching red bobble hats and perverse sense of adventure, the couple appear to have escaped a Wes Anderson movie. There are differences of approach. Maurice wants to canoe down a lava river to the sea in Hawaii and Katia thinks he’s an idiot.

The film benefits enormously from the knowing eccentricities of the couple – Maurice in particular is a polished media savvy presence, even as he pretends to a no-nonsense workman like persona – as well as the spectacular footage which is the film’s core appeal. It’s less successful in its narration which Miranda July provides with a sort of sleepy wistfulness. It grasps for a Werner Herzog-kind of poetry, but suffers by not being Werner Herzog.

There is a contemporary resonance in the tale of scientists struggling to avert disasters in the face of unknowing populations and obstinate and reluctant governments. Ultimately, though the film is about the fascination of lava flung into the air, clouds of billowing dust that reaches miles into the atmosphere and the mythically huge drama of the Earth living. The puny humans in the foreground are at once dwarfed by the immense drama unfolding and elevated by their own obsessed love.

Fire of Love premiered at the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival runs from August 12th to the 19th.

Medusa Deluxe

Posted on by John Bleasdale

When a leading competitor in a regional hairdressing competition is found scalped, the evening is thrown into chaos, and paranoia and rivalries come to the fore in Thomas Hardiman’s stunning debut feature: Medusa Deluxe.

If you thought the hairdresser’s was just a place you went to get a haircut, enjoy elaborate puns and read month old magazines, you are sadly mistaken. It is a world of Hair Today Dye Tomorrow – murder and intrigue, as well as hairspray and scissors. One thing’s for certain: no one is going to ask you where you’re going for your holidays this year.

Told in one (seemingly) continuous shot, we’re backstage in the immediate aftermath of what appears to be a murder. Mosca has been found dead and the suspects are many. The hairdressers and rival competitors have a furious passion for what they do. Cleve (Clare Perkins) sums this up in a beautifully played scene as she vociferously defends her own work and tells a story of how Mosca got in trouble with his wife. Her stories of hairdressing reveal a Tarantinoesque level of violent danger. Then there’s Divine (Kayla Meikle) who has found Jesus and believes in the holiness of the hair. Kendra (Harriet Webb), another rival, is perhaps getting fringe benefits from Rene (Darrell DeSilva), the organizer of the competition. Add to that a bald security guard called Gak (Heider Ali) with creepy eyes and the hair models who sport the elaborate coiffures, one of whom Timba (Anita-Joy Uwajeh) found the body.

The corridors and dressing rooms of the exhibition centre are the setting as Robbie Ryan’s camera swoops and glides, following the characters who themselves are trying to find out what is going on. The police are upstairs asking question, but we never get a scene with them as you would in a traditional whodunnit. In fact, everyone is more in danger from each other and themselves rather than the off stage authorities. The tension has something of Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964), but there is restraint here and the Grand Guignol is located more in the bitchy dialogue rather than blood spilled. The appearance of one of the cutest toddlers on film only locks in the feeling of dread.

Technically, the film is a cut above the rest. The one-shot pony is a bit overladen following so close on the heels of last year’s Boiling Point. We’ve had a one shot realtime version of a chef and a hairdresser. What next? Baker? Candlestick maker? But here the technique is relatively unobtrusive and works. It is actually the performances of the cast which makes the film thrum with its own rhythm.

There’s also the suspicion that this is a shaggy dog story. There are mysteries and questions which are resolved in an unexpected but also bathetic denouement. The musical title sequence feels like an admission on a part of the filmmakers to go out with a bang rather than a pop.

That said the film is so well styled and fun that its churlish to nitpick. Medusa Deluxe marks the arrival of a new British writer-director who looks likely to be way more than just something for the weekend.

(Please note: any hair puns contained in this review were entirely unintentional).

Medusa Deluxe premiered at the 75th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, when this piece was originally written. In cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 9th.

A Perfect Day for Caribou

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Fatherhood and failure are the subjects of Jeff Rutherford’s ambling debut feature. Jen Berrier plays Herman, a man who finds himself at the end of the road with a filched pickup truck packed with his belongings. He is recording a message for his son Nate (Charlie Plummer), explaining “I don’t want you to know me as just the father who killed himself”. A fortuitous phone call from Nate offers Herman an opportunity to meet and talk with his son face to face and meet his young grandson Ralph. However when they do meet – in a windswept cemetery – Ralph goes missing and father and son go on a meandering search for the lost boy.

Filmed in a pristine black and white, Alfonso Herrera Salcedo’s cinematography is as sharp as a pencil sketch made with a H2 pencil. The 4:3 ratio underlines the contained littleness of the story even as the characters are dwarfed beneath huge skies and epic open landscapes. There seems to be little urgency in the search for Ralph as if the characters know that his absence is more a metaphorical underscoring than an actual child in danger. Nate is seeking to reconnect with his father as a way to also understand if he is going to repeat the mistakes that Herman made. Herman in his turn finds that the ease with which he spoke to his son via the dictaphone is replaced by a shuffling inability to communicate. When Nate tells him Ralph has some behavioral problems – he only eats food on the right side of his plate – Herman keeps mistakenly wondering if Ralph has a hole in his head.

A careless hunter and a black janitor wander into the action as well as vaguely lost as the main characters but they skim off the surface of the story, making barely a ripple.

The ghosts of other films haunt Rutherford’s first feature. Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013) is an obvious influence, while in its offbeat characters and quirky dialogue there’s also the feel of early Hal Hartley. The opening of the film superbly sets up an unexpected character and a story that is going in an unexpected direction. Little flashbacks appear as silent slices of the past, memories stubbornly lurking.

However as the film goes on the dialogue becomes grating in its obvious writtenness. Berrier can handle it, suggesting a man at the end of his frayed rope, but Plummer is less convincing: a callow twenty-something with an oh-for-goodness-sake-cut-it haircut. And the lack of urgency becomes stultifying and when two characters decide to play paper-scissors-stone it feels less Jarmusch and more B roll. It also has to be said that using a suicide as a trope to give a character heft should really be stopped. It’s cheap and unhealthy.

A Perfect Day for Caribou showed at the 75th Locarno International Film Festival.

My Neighbor Adolf

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

If poetry is impossible after Auschwitz – as Theodor Adorno maybe said – what about feel good comedies? What about feel good comedies about Hitler? We’ve had Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning but deeply immoral Life Is Beautiful (1997) and the more successful black comedy of Radu Mihaileanu’s Train of Life (1998), which to be fair didn’t aim for the feel good component. If we can go way back, Ernst Lubitsch perhaps was most effective with To Be or Not to Be in 1942 – ‘we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping’ – but that was before the horrors were fully comprehended.

A Jewish family are taking a photographic portrait in the garden before the outbreak of the Second World War. They will soon be exterminated, with one exception. Now Polsky (David Hayman) lives in Columbia and it is May 1960. Adolf Eichmann has just been abducted from Argentina and flown to stand trial in Israel. At the same time, a mysterious new neighbour, Mr Herzog (Udo Kier) moves into the house next door. Polsky is soon convinced that Herzog is non other than Adolf Hitler, who he once met during a chess tournament. When the local Israeli embassy appears uninterested in his claims, Polsky sets about gathering the evidence himself, spying on his neighbour and taking surreptitious photographs. In order to get closer and by doing so get his incontrovertible proof, Polsky finds himself actually getting closer to his would be enemy and reluctantly sympathising with the old man who is as cantankerous as he is.

Like JoJo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019) before it, Leon Prudovsky’s film My Neighbour Adolf is offensive in its inoffensiveness. There are so many things wrong with this film but lets get some of the basics out of the way. The basic premise: why would someone in hiding choose a house which is overlooked by another so closely when there are plenty of options in rural Columbia? The screenplay is littered with anachronisms and the main characters speak with heavy accents. The look of the film has that dog turd brown that stands for period these days and the story plods on with a series of doorbell rings as we go from one house to the other and back. Worse still is the bromance that progresses via a series of cliched stages: the arguments, the grudging respect, the getting drunk together, the mutual admiration of a fraulein and the final revelations that draws some pretty disgraceful false equivalency between well I don’t want to spoil it. Or maybe I do.

There was some controversy about the fact that the Rabinovich Foundation – which partly funded the film – was obliging filmmakers to sign a contract agreeing that their films would not any message that denied the “existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”. Locarno was called on to deny the film a position in the competition and Locarno, rightly, declined. Ultimately though, the damage this film ought to have been more controversial for the way it isn’t controversial: for the way it turns the Holocaust into a backstory to a lame grumpy old men comedy. And that’s the problem in the end. This just isn’t funny. Not remotely. It aims for gentle laughter and the gray pound: it Exotic Marigold Hotels the Holocaust. Just think about that for a second.

My Neighbor Adolf premiered at the 75th Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It opens the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Stone Turtle

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Zahara (Asmara Abigail) explains:”I’d rather live on an island of ghosts than be a ghost among the living”. She is a stateless refugee who lives on a remote Malaysian island where she makes her living selling rare turtle eggs on the black market. But she is still a ghost on the mainland and for the bureaucracy. One gets the feeling it wouldn’t matter so much for her but she is caring for a young girl, Nika, who she is desperate to get into school. Nika, however, has no papers: her father is unknown and her mother is dead – killed by her religious parents for having Nika out of wedlock. When Samad (Bront Palarae), claiming to be a university researcher, arrives on the island, Zahara’s life descends into a spiral of violence, magic and revenge.

Ming Jin Woo’s film is a surreal melange of Elizabethan revenger’s tragedy, mixed with Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). Kong Pahurak’s cinematography makes the most of the beautiful locations even as terrible things occur throughout them. A postmodern irreverence sees Ming and his collaborators use everything from animation to folklore and dance to create a rich and layered tale.

That Samad is not who he claims to be is apparent fairly early on but his complicity and motives are revealed gradually as Zamara enacts her revenge only to find herself having to reset her life to before the killings in order to try again. As the old saying goes: she who would have revenge first dig two graves. In this case, it will be many more than just two.

From the very first scene, when we see the original killing of Zamara’s sister, the murders are brutal without being gratuitous. Having said that there is something almost glorious in the varieties of danger Ming packs onto his island. Poisonous fish, ritual sacrifice, stabbing, drownings and even a return to quick sand. Each time though unforeseen consequences requires Zamara to have a rethink. But played with utterly fierce conviction by Abigail, she strides through the film in a red dress like a wet blade, in search of a stabbing. She is a feminist avenger who uses witchcraft against religious bigotry and patriarchy, and a righteous fury against the men who have destroyed her life. While Nika reads a Ms Marvel comic book, her guardian angel here is the real Avenger.

Stone Turtle is a striking tale of many layers which manages the handy trick of being mesmerising while retaining a basic direct simplicity. It has the depth and power of a folktale and yet feels witty and topical. When a murderer woman reveals her husband and murderer’s sexual insecurity, it is at once funny and terrifying that strong women should be destroyed by such fragility.

Stone Turtle has just premiered at the 75th Locarno International Film Festival.

The Coup d’État Factory (A Fantástica Fábrica de Golpes)

Posted on by John Bleasdale

We can’t watch everything all the time. In a moment when the consequential events seem to be happening with the regularity of a helicopter blade rotating, we need the media not only to tell us what is going on, but to prioritise, to filter and to interpret. Our understanding of present day events depends upon the veracity of a functioning media and – for all the pizzazz of the internet – most people still consume their news from the television. It is here that history is written in the present tense. So when Operation Car Wash succeeded in imprisoning ex-President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and ousting the then sitting and democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff, I – along with many other foreign onlookers – assumed that this was a case of endemic corruption. Another hero with clay feet. Power corrupts etc. So it came as a surprise when in Victor Fraga and Valnei Nunes’s documentary The Coup d’État Factory referred to the ousting of Dilma in 2016 as a coup. Something had been going on. And the answer is TV Globo.

The Brazilian TV station is a national institution with its flagship news programme Jornal Nacional is part of a media empire which includes radio, newspapers and magazines, as well as an online presence. Fraga and Nunes’s documentary unfolds how from the earliest days, the Globo empire has fomented and at times invented civil disorder in order to caFter for the interests of parts of the political establishment. This began with a roulette table being placed in a city square in Rio de Janeiro and then the crowd was photographed as evidence of the licentious lifestyle of the people: a situation entirely provoked by the newspaper itself.

Further interventions involved the daubing of any progressive forces with the accusation of communism and the promotion of the military and the conservative values of the right wing. In the present day, the destruction of the Workers Party and the legacy of President Lula involved a barrage of insistent negative press and collusion between the media and the justice department who were pursuing the case. The flimsiness and at times non-existence of evidence was made up for with a war of memes and specifically the portrait of Lula in prison garb which prefigured Donald Trump’s chants of ‘lock her up’ in the 2016 election. The 2016 ousting of President Dilma was a coup which used a weaponised prosecution on a technicality and TV Globo carried the prosecution case live as rolling coverage and then returned to regular programming for Dilma’s 12 hour rebuttal.

With such a damning case against Globo it is unsurprising that the documentary filmmakers have not been allowed to use any assets from the Globo network, but they manage their way around this restriction and in doing so perhaps make a better documentary for it. Using artists animation to re-enact scenes they have also gathered a convincing roster of witnesses including president Dilma Rousseff, journalist Glenn Greenwald, Nobel prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Human Rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC and iconic musician Chico Buarque, who along with Francisco El Hombre, Josyara and Erika Nande also provide the soundtrack. The documentary is both an important corrective to the historical record and an effective polemic. It is a vital contribution to the debate within Brazil, but also a primer for those – such as myself – whose understanding has been relatively superficial.

There is a keen irony in the fact that Globo’s interference has led to the rise of Jair Bolsonaro rather than the intended centre right candidate. TV Globo’s lack of diversity has also led to an atmosphere in which the violently misogynistic, homophobic and racist populist has come to power. To paraphrase a much maligned German economist, the media make history but they don’t necessarily make the history they want.

The Coup d’État Factory saw its world premiere at the Havana Film Festival in December 2021. The film premieres in the UK in May at a special BFI screening. Several further screenings have been held in the British capital since, including two as Sands Studios, and two in partnership with Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project.

Click here in order to watch The Coup d’Etat Factory on VoD.

DMovies is the production company behind The Coup d’État Factory. The film director Victor Fraga is the editor of this portal.

The Island

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP : LIVE FROM ROTTERDAM

We don’t all live on a Yellow Submarine. Far from it as Anca Damian‘s new film makes abundantly clear. We live in a world that is riven by conflict, sullied by waste and fast spinning towards a very uncertain future. But it was the 1968 George Dunning film for The Beatles Yellow Submarine that most readily sprang to mind while watching The Island. Despite its subject matter, it has that exuberant colourful giddiness. The animation feels like the result of a truly talented child going for it. And the music is a pounding by Alexander Bălănescu and Ada Milea is comprised of almost percussive string quartets – think Eleanor Rigby – and brilliantly hypnotic songs that devolve into chants and laments.

A superbly inventive reimagining of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, we first meet Robinson (composer, Balanescu) already lost on his island – which in only the first of many paradoxes resembles nothing other than a ship. Dispensing with the usual imperialism, Robinson is a here black man and before long with the help of the augmented reality from his iPad, he saves Friday a refugee from drowning. Everyone else on the ships dies, they sing. Robinson starts to school Friday in the way of survival, even as he is plagued by starvation and dreams of supermarkets. He steers him clear of the mermaid with the tail made of traffic cones and teaches him about the water bottles which symbolise relief and life but also modern waste of the environment. They will be separated as Robinson is taken by a woman claiming to be his mother and her ex-pirate paramour.

To be perfectly honest, I spent a lot of the film not understanding what was going on and that struck me as perfectly acceptable. There’s a narrative looseness and plenty of room for interpretation and fun to be had on the part of the audience. Does it all hang together as political allegory? Perhaps not. The refugees who come off the boats all look identical to Friday, which plays somewhat away from the idea that these are individual human beings. But the animation is constantly reinventing itself and Robinson and the world he inhabits morphs between dreamlike visions and the banal normality of foil blankets and the flotsam and jetsam of the sea.

Damian has already impressed with her films such as Crulic – The Path to Beyond (2011), the docu-drama The Magic Mountain (2015) and 2019’s Marona’s Fantastic Tale. Here the Romanian director continues to make fascinating and rich cinema.

The International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) is an online edition running from 26 January to 6 February.