Author: Paul Risker

Rouge

Posted on by Paul Risker

In his director’s statement, Hamoody Jaafar says that real people, real places and real stories are the inspiration for his work. His basketball documentary, Rouge is an engaging story about the River Rouge High School Panthers – past and present.

Between 1954-72, the Panthers won a record 12 state championships under their legendary coach Lofton Greene. Now, former Panther player LaMonta Stone, returns to the once thriving industrial town of River Rouge, Michigan, seeking the school’s fifteenth state championship as its head coach. Rouge is as much about the personal journeys of its subjects, among them Seniors Brent Darby Jr. and Ahmoni Weston, and junior Legend Geeter, as it is about basketball and the dreams of its players who look ahead to their collegial future.

Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994), about the struggles of two inner-city Chicago high school teenage basketball players with aspirations of playing professional, and Jason Hehir’s The Last Dance (2020), chronicling Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bull’s 1997-1998 season campaign to win a sixth NBA title, are perhaps the two seminal basketball documentaries. Jaafar’s film struggles to escape these long shadows, but as if it were doggedly moving back and forth between offence and defence on the court, it captures something of Hoop Dreams and The Last Dance. There are the struggles the adolescent players must confront as student-athletes, and the pursuit to add to a legacy, that echoes both James and Hehir’s captivating real-life stories.

Jaafar’s directorial debut shows his deft touch at constructing layers of a story. He does this by identifying chapters in the story of the basketball programme, drawing out themes and ideas that contribute to a broader conversation. The first is emphasising the relationship between past and present, and the new generation of players that want to belong to the school’s storied history. It speaks to the natural desire in each of us to belong to something, which provides us with a sense of meaning and purpose. Only for these players, everything has to be earned. They must confront their vulnerabilities and the uncertainty of the future, even the outcome of each game they play on route to hopefully being one of the final two teams playing for a state championship.

The Michigan State Spartans University head basketball coach Tom Izzo offers some of the films most compelling contributions. He speaks about how sport at its best can break down boundaries and acknowledges Lofton Greene’s determined principle of setting aside racial politics in the segregated US to give those deserving the opportunity. Greene would select an all-five starting line-up of black players and would go on the record as saying he didn’t care about the colour of his players’ skin. Shining a light on these progressive actions during segregation and remembering someone that was ahead of their time sets Rouge aside as an important and necessary film.

Memory is a subject that Jaafar weaves throughout the film. Former players gather in the run-down gymnasium and its locker room, reminiscing about the past. The bonds of sweat spilled on the court transcend the years, as the audience witnesses the timeless connection these players share with one another. It calls to mind how the past never fades into obscurity as long as it’s alive in the memory. What Stone and his players, among them Darby Jr., Weston, and Geeter are trying to do is to keep the past alive and create new memories so that the River Rouge legacy endures for future generations.

One of the striking things about Rouge is how Jaafar immerses you in the real-life drama of Stone’s campaign to win the fifteenth state championship. He splices through time, creating music montages, picking out the on-court action and off-court conversations the audience need to see and hear. In the on-court action, one forgets they are watching a documentary and momentarily finds themselves perched on the edge of their seat in front of a live sporting event. Rouge effortlessly captures how the individual journeys intersect one another, emphasising that what’s special about team sports is that aside from the individual accolades, it’s the camaraderie of pursuing a common goal.

Rouge premieres at the Cleveland International Film Festival. It also shows at the Freep Film Festival.

Paul’s 27 Dirtiest Movies of All Time: Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d’une chute)

Posted on by Paul Risker

This is the alphabetic list of the dirtiest movies ever made, as carefully selected by this humble film critic. I’ve whittled down over a century of films and assigned each one of them to a letter of the English alphabet, beginning with a numeric one.

I’ve always looked at cinema as being like a kid in a sweet shop. There’s an abundance of choice – multiple lifetimes worth. In keeping with this metaphor, this series will include cinema from different decades of film history, and from across the world.

From Sidney Lumet’s 1957 jury room drama 12 Angry Men, we continue our 27-month-long odyssey, jumping forward more than six decades to a suspicious death, of which, the only witness is a blind boy.

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Justine Triet’s crime and courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, co-written by Arthur Harari, is a near-perfect film. From the opening scenes, Triet and Harari have the audience on the proverbial string. The courtroom drama unfolds like an intense duel as the players battle over their convictions. The razor-sharp dialogue, plotting and character development show their deftness for talky dramas. It recalls the writing of some of cinema’s most attuned screenwriters and directors, including Howard Hawkes, Billy Wilder and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Then there’s the obvious comparison to the tension in Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), albeit with a modern sensibility.

While only in its infancy, Anatomy of a Fall is already showing itself to be a sassy film. Triet was more than equal to her male co-nominees at the 2024 Academy Awards and should have walked away with the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture.

Anatomy of a Fall is prone to labour under the stuffy and rigid clichés and procedural tropes of the courtroom drama. The filmmakers, however, re-energise it with entertaining, thought-provoking and emotional storytelling. The film exudes a confidence with a Bresson-esque touch. Triet and Harari include only what’s essential, omitting those unnecessary or extended scenes one anticipates. In their hands, every scene has a point and the introduction of specific themes in the courtroom scenes elevate its stature. The relationship between the author and their stories, and how fiction and reality relate to one another, are only two engaging ideas that emerge. The demand from the prosecutor for those giving testimony to describe complicated ideas, thoughts and feelings, to the bias of the therapeutic model, are other intellectual ideas, that creates space for the audience to enter the film and critically engage.

There appears to be a genuine anger towards the legal system, where the fate of a person’s liberty is decided by competing versions of events. The emphasis is on interpretation and how Sandra is perceived by others. Here, the truth can be an inconvenience in the courtroom, that is a stage upon which the characters perform. The prosecution’s case is even accused of offering theories and not explanations. The noticeable misogynistic and patriarchal rhetoric of the prosecutor and his witnesses towards Sandra’s sexuality and professional success fuels the simmering anger beneath the film’s surface.

Triet and Harari’s detailed exploration of human nature, makes Sandra psychologically and emotionally elusive. Complemented by Sandra Hüller’s finely judged performance, she’s one of cinema’s most intriguing and compelling females, not only because of the ambiguity of her guilt or innocence, but who she is.

Anatomy of a Fall is as infuriating as a Lynchian puzzle because it refuses to give its audience any clarity. The point of the film, however, is not to answer that burgeoning question of whether Sandra is innocent or guilty of her husband’s suspicious death. Instead, Triet and Harari want to force the audience to confront this uncertainty and decide, sharing in the young son’s anxiety. This is where Anatomy of a Fall transcends its narrative to be about something more than a question of a woman’s guilt, challenging its audience to overpower their own obsession for clarity. Here, it plays on the first words spoken, when Sandra asks the student interviewing her about her work, “What do you want to know?”

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This is the second one in the series of Paul’s 27 Dirtiest Movies of All Time (one for each letter of the alphabet, plus a numeric film)

Wake Up

Posted on by Paul Risker

In the fourth feature by the Canadian filmmaking collective, Road Kill Superstars (RKSS), François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, a group of Gen Z activists sneak into a home superstore before closing. They plan to make a political statement against the company’s active role in deforestation by vandalising the store and posting protest videos to social media. Their plan, however, hits a problem when they encounter Kevin (Turlough Convery), a security guard keen to reconnect with his primitive side. He sees them as prey on his hunting ground and when the hunt begins, the activists must survive the night.

Wake Up is the type of film that encourages its audience to kick back and enjoy as all hell breaks loose. Borrowing the popular phrase, it does exactly what it says on the tin, it’s a rollicking 80 minutes of fun – for us, not the unfortunate characters fighting for their lives. However, it lacks the guttural punch of other survivalist films like John Carpenter’s classic, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000) and Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s Ready or Not (2019).

While some may salivate for more excessive violence, the hunt and the kills are entertaining and creative enough. The main qualm will be that the characters’ motivations and interpersonal dynamics are underdeveloped. RKSS, working from a screenplay by Alberto Marini, does the minimum necessary. They introduce a potential romantic motivation for new recruit Tyler (Kyle Scudder), and Ethan’s (Benny O. Arthur) distrust of him, as well as one activist talking about how stores like this put her father out of business. This contrasts with other survivalist films that take time to develop the interpersonal dynamics of its characters, their pasts and motivations. It’s a decision that’s not to Wake Up’s detriment, because it can be enjoyed as a breezier take on this type of story that’s crossed with the slasher.

Wake Up also leans into the archetypal story of the man who has reached breaking point, calls to mind Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993). The construction of cause and effect in pitting the activists against Kevin, may also be a nod to Frankenstein, and the traditions of the sympathetic horror monster.

RKSS and Marini refuse to emphasise the environmental activism angle and enter the timely and contentious conversation about what’s an appropriate form or way to protest. There’s a version of Wake Up that’s more consciously engaged with these social anxieties that would certainly elevate its presence. The filmmakers, however, slip in metaphors that may be missed in favour of the film’s orgy of violence. An effective touch is how the activists who are being killed off one-by-one wear animal masks, metaphorically becoming the thing they’re advocating for and are trying to protect. In the aftermath, we’re reminded of how the engines of commerce and industry continue to endure, despite righteous indignation from the conscionable.

Wake Up continues RKSS’ rebellious affront towards authority. From the orphaned teen’s battle with the older and ruthless warlord and heroics to save the girl in Turbo Kid (2015), to teen Davey spying on his neighbour, a police officer, who he suspects of murder in Summer of 84 (2018), and three young slackers against a corporation in We Are Zombies (2023), RKSS have stacked their films with young characters standing up to the status quo. They challenge authority and institutions of power in an effort to empower themselves.

RKSS are drawn to stories where the young and innocent step out into the adult world, where they try to become heroes of their own stories. These films appeal to the audience’s inner child. They are offering a nostalgic reconnection with not only youthful imagination and desire to grow up, but also the types of films prevalent in the 80s and 90s that tapped into this sense of being. RKSS’ films convey this sense of fun with heavier undertones, where innocence is in peril. All the time, they’re moving between diverse settings, from an apocalyptic world to suburbia and now a deserted home superstore.

Wake Up screened as part of FrightFest at the 2024 Glasgow Film Festival.

Paul’s 27 Dirtiest Movies of All Time: 12 Angry Men

Posted on by Paul Risker

This is an alphabetic list of the dirtiest movies ever made, as carefully selected by this humble film critic. I’ve whittled down over a century of films and assigned each one of them to a letter of the English alphabet, plus a numeric one. After all, what would film titles be without numbers? There would be no 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957), 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), or even 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrcik, 1968) to consider. Therein, the alphabet series begins with a numerical twist.

I’ve always looked at cinema as being like a kid in a sweet shop. There’s an abundance of choice – multiple lifetimes worth. In keeping with this metaphor, this series will include cinema from each decade of film history, and from across the world. I inevitably have my personal preferences: cinema from the 1970s, Martin Scorsese, and Europe, but these won’t prevent me from creating a genuinely universal list. This is a partially critical, partially emotional undertaking!

I will run an entry on the first Monday of each month. This means that the series will be finished in the first half of 2024, just as DMovies celebrates its 10th anniversary with a website relaunch.

Let’s begin this 27-month long odyssey with a claustrophobic drama set in a searing New York jury room.

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One of the great American films, 12 Angry Men (1957) remains a powerful experience more than six decades after its release. Sidney Lumet’s direction is a masterclass in dramatic tension. The opening shot walks the audience into the courthouse, around it, seeing and feeling the buzz from working journalists, before winding up in the locked jury room with twelve men whose names we never learn. They’re only known by their jury number.

There’s a contradictory vibe between the impersonal and personal. In how much the audience appropriate the camera’s gaze, is an intriguing interrogation of critical thought because of the opening sequence’s point-of-view gaze, and Lumet’s reluctance to frame the jurors in close-up.

A reason 12 Angry Men has endured is that it’s an immersive drama in which a young man’s life is at stake. It’s also a film that lends itself to critical inquiry, observing the construction through the writing, characterisation, cinematography and editing. Its premise allows it to sneak upon us as a deceptively simple film, that becomes complicated in the jurors’ deliberations and the emotional conflicts it provokes.

12 Angry Men is perhaps Lumet’s maiden ‘great’ film or ‘masterpiece’, who demonstrated the ability to stay relevant and evolve with cinema. It feels the odd one out when considered alongside his other notable films including, The Offence (1973), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), yet its importance cannot be understated. These other dark and gritty films spoke to changing sensibilities that Lumet embraced as a filmmaker. His jury drama might not make or break his reputation, but it elevates him.

It’s comparable to Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film, Frenzy (1972), which saw ‘the master of suspense’ finally break from his reliance in shooting on studio sets. By this time, his reputation had been long cemented, but his tale of violent murder in London elevated his reputation. The Nouvelle Vague director François Truffaut even described it as having the energy of a film directed by a young filmmaker.

In much the same way, 12 Angry Men bridges Lumet’s presence in modern and classic American cinema, heightening this sense of versatility and artistic growth.

As important a role as it plays in its director’s career, the image of the empathetic and critical thinker in a white suit would help underpin Fonda’s shocking heel turn in Sergio Leone’s, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). It’s often discussed in the context of Leone taking one of John Ford’s western heroes, and turning the blue-eyed, noble Fonda into a villain. It’s perfect for Leone’s agenda of wanting to subvert American romanticism of its own myth-building, but Fonda’s heroic character in 12 Angry Men is as important as his western heroics.

The use of the white suit is telling, an echo of the Western genre’s iconographic colour coding of heroes in white and villains in black. It speaks to the actor’s view of himself, appropriating the heroic archetype in cinema that contrasts to Fonda’s darker nature in real life. Now, 12 Angry Men might be watched through a revisionist lens, of an actor’s attempts at myth-building. More broadly, it addresses the artistic space as an act of myth-building for filmmakers and actors, which the studio system itself was implicit in.

An intriguing aspect of the film is how its strong masculine presence conceals a gender nuance. Fonda alongside other characters, represents a type of thoughtful and emotionally secure masculinity, yet the interpersonal dynamics allow broader gender politics and identity to emerge. Fonda’s gentle, humble and empathetic thoughtful presence, as well as his voice and his movement, contrasts with the loud and aggressive recriminations and snide comments from some in the group. This allows the feminine to emerge within this masculine-dominated space.

12 Angry Men may superficially age as a consequence of its black and white cinematography, but it remains young at heart and full of curious wisdom. It’s as relevant today as it was in 1957, addressing the theme of ‘unconscious bias,’ and how what we see and hear is selective. The story is about whether we can be self-aware enough to recognise these shortcomings.

There’s an optimistic spirit to the film as we watch conversation bring out the best in people, but there’s also a cynicism, or disappointed idealism – happenstance good fortune, that this young man wound up with this jury. It’s both optimistic and fearful of the American justice system, whose values must be upheld by flawed human beings. In the end, 12 Angry Men shares something in common with the darker and grittier sensibilities of Lumet’s later films.

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This is the first one in the series of Paul’s 27 Dirtiest Movies of All Time (one for each letter of the alphabet, plus a numeric film)

Our dirty questions to Trần Anh Hùng

Posted on by Paul Risker

Vietnamese-born French filmmaker Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things, aka The Pot-au-Feu, is a simple story about gastronomy, based on Marcel Rouff’s novel.

Set in 1885, the unrivalled cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) has worked for the famous gourmet chef Dodin (Benoît Magimel) for the last twenty-years. Their relationship has transitioned into a romance, but Eugénie values her freedom and refuses to marry Dodin. Their love and his desire to possess her sees the pair create dishes that are unrivalled, exceeding the expectations of even the world’s most respected chefs. Now, Dodin decides to do something he has never done before – cook for Eugénie.

Born in Da Nang, South Vietnam, Hùng has lived in France since 1975, where he studied filmmaking at Paris’, L’École Nationale Louis Lumière. He made his directorial feature debut with The Scent of Green Papaya (1992), a story of a wealthy family’s gradual decline. For his sophomore feature Cyclo (1995), he delved into Ho Chi Minh City’s underworld, which was followed by The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000), a gentle story about three sisters living in Hanoi. Hung has directed the English language thriller, I Come with the Rain (2009), and a Japanese language adaptation of celebrated author, Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. In 2016, he directed his first French-language film, Eternity, an adaptation of Alice Ferney’s novel The Elegance of Widows.

In conversation with DMovies, Hùng discussed his love of hidden structures in his films, how he turns his audience into the film’s writer, and a lot more!

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Paul Risker – What appeals to you about filmmaking as a means of creative expression?

Trần Anh Hùng – In the process of making a movie there are certain moments that are important. The first is when you choose a project, and if it at least sets you a challenge, then it should be something interesting. When I say challenge, it’s always about how to work with the language of cinema to make something special, that has meaning and emotions. If you work well with the language of cinema, then the emotions will be deeper than a simple illustration of a story, even if the story is quite moving. When you express something that only cinema can do, you touch the audience in a different way.

PR – Are your films less about story and more about emotion and the sensory experience?

TAH – Oh yes, the story isn’t that important. You need to have a story, but it can be very simple. What was more important was the feeling of life and humanity that’s in this movie – how do you create the space to express the value of being alive? This was the most important thing, not an exciting story. This is not interesting to me.

PR – Looking back over your films, can you see how your use of the cinematic language has changed?

TAH – No, I never analyse my films in this way, but I can find similarities between the movies and it’s around the ideas that’s important. For instance, the idea of making a movie that has a musical quality. It has nothing to do with the music I use, it’s more about the film feeling like a piece of music.

The other thing is what I call structure, that’s something related to scriptwriting. Of course, you have the story that could be simple or very complicated, and you have a theme. The most important thing is having a structure that deals with the theme and the story. This structure then creates emotions and meanings in a way that’s less obvious and a little bit more hidden.

In this movie, The Taste of Things, you have the character of Beaubois, the little girl. She appears at the beginning, and she handles the theme of the transmission of knowledge – of cooking. Then she disappears from the movie, and she only reappears at the end. She always represents the idea of transmission but because of the structure she means something else. She’s the one who is going to save Dodin from his depression because of Eugénie’s promise to train her.

This structure also says something else that’s hidden – somehow before dying, Eugenie managed to give Dodin a daughter. So, all of this has a beautiful meaning, and this is what I call structure.

PR – We think of structure as the narrative framework, and often themes and ideas as being separate. Are you repositioning the traditional way we think about structure into interlocking layers?

TAH – I always want to make a structure that’s hidden, so the audience has to formulate a way to find the right words to talk about it. Somehow, I turn the audience into a writer because they have to write down the story they’ve just watched. This is important to me because words are the reality of our lives.

If we don’t put an experience into words, then it’s not completely real. We need to give words to what we experience. Watching a movie is an experience and so you have to find the right words for yourself to express it. I always want to have this hidden structure that allows or forces the audience to put everything into words.

PR – The characters in the film are trying to find the words to communicate and understand one another, and the audience also have to find the words to understand the film. This lends the film an intimate playfulness, where the characters and the audience mirror one another.

TAH – The words in this movie, how they talk to and look at each other, leaving space for the other to be free to express what they need, reflects their humanity. It’s quite beautiful.

For instance, in one scene after a meal we would normally see a conversation between Dodin and Eugénie where he’d tell her what the dinner was about. I prefer her to have this conversation with their four friends. We can see how they talk to each other and how respectful these men are to Eugénie, that it created a rare kind of beauty.

PR – Returning to your point about musical rhythm, diegetic sounds alongside the way characters move and talk creates its own rhythm. By removing the music, it allows these sounds and movement to create a natural and hypnotic rhythm that draws the audience in.

TAH – You’re right, because most of the time when people use music in film, it’s to tell the audience how to react to the scene. I like using music in film, but only when the emotions are already there, and the music is used to confirm it. Somehow, there’s a dialogue between the audience and the music that says, ‘You and I agree this is moving and beautiful.’ The music is the beauty of what’s inside the audience’s soul – this is the role of music for me.

On this movie, I found if you work well with the actors, you ask them to create the right rhythm in terms of the dialogue and the silence between the lines. I asked them to slow everything down and to not play too much, but to trust that the meaning is already in the lines. What they had to take care of was the flavour of the sound they’re making. They had to taste the line in their mouth, then wait a little bit before they give it to the audience. So, there was this sense of the audience hanging on, waiting for the line, and they appreciate it more because of the silence that came before.

All of this was quite precisely done. With all the sounds in the kitchen and in nature, I thought the music could be a little artificial in this case. I needed to let everything be real in terms of the sound, so no sound effects, nothing. Only real sounds that I chose carefully to ensure the right flavour was mixed with the picture.

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Trần Anh Hùng is pictured at the top of this article. The other two images are stills of The Taste of Things.

The Taste of Things opens in US, UK and Eire cinemas on Wednesday, February 14th, courtesy of IFC Films in the US, and Picturehouse Entertainment in the UK and Eire.

The Civil Dead

Posted on by Paul Risker

Cinematic storytelling can be likened to a recycling centre, where ideas recur. While sometimes it’s an act of appropriation, other times we see ideas and character archetypes reimagined. The Civil Dead, directed by Clay Tatum and co-written with Whitmer Thomas, both of whom star in the buddy ghost comedy, is neither. It’s the type of film that has a certain indie charm that it’s easy to feel the impulse to like, but the experience quickly becomes a grind.

Set in Los Angeles, photographer Clay (Tatum) and his artist wife Whitney’s lives are uneventful, that is until she goes out of town. He’s told to not just lie around drinking beers and when he ventures out to do some photography, he crosses paths with Whit (Thomas). The pair spend the rest of the afternoon and night together, and the next morning, Whit shares the truth – he’s dead, and apparently only Clay is able to see and hear him. While Whitney’s away, the pair bond, but when she returns, Clay’s eager to drop his newfound friend like a bad habit. Only, Whit is less keen to say goodbye.

One can’t help but hear the echoes from the past, notably of Jim Carrey’s The Cable Guy (1996). Whit isn’t the hyper embodiment of Carrey’s character, but the dependency on their respective friends, in Whit’s case companionship to ease the loneliness of death, sees them both intrude on other people’s personal space.

Unlike the spiritual connection to the 1990s cult black comedy, the nod to Caspar (the friendly ghost) is intentional – appearing on television in Clay and Whitney’s lounge. It’s a direct nod to a tradition of pacifying ghosts, treating them with sympathy and revealing their friendly and eccentric natures.

The Civil Dead is always seeking to be its own thing, but it struggles to make an impression. Instead, it’s more likely to affectionately recall other films that have pacified ghosts, from director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s gentle love story between the spirit of a sea captain and a single mother in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), to a quintessential troublemaking poltergeist in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), and the ghosts of baseball’s past in Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams (1989).

Tatum and Thomas’ struggle to liberate the film from its concept is compounded by the plot’s framework. It’s as if the script has not fully metamorphosed into a film; its evolution stilted. Unlike Mankiewicz, Burton and Costner, who evolved the concept into stories that feel lived by their characters, Tatum and Thomas’ story feels more like a series of underwhelming moments threaded together. It doesn’t feel an exaggeration to say that the film was born from a script still in its infancy.

The 105-minute run time places unnecessary stress on pacing and the humorous and dramatic episodes. Ironically, just as Whit intrudes on Clay’s life, outstaying his welcome, so too does the film outstay its welcome. There’s no reason why The Civil Dead couldn’t have been a sprightly 80-85 minutes, ideal for this type of comedy. Still, this wouldn’t have been a fix to deeper-rooted problems.

In moments, Tatum and Thomas strike an emotional chord that shows promise, but these are too few and far between. Often pedestrian, the skill to manipulate time and infuse the story with energy is lacking, forcing the humorous verbiage and set pieces to overcompensate. Scenes such as a hustle at a poker game and Whit’s eventual confession quickly go from being a potential highlight to a bewildering what could have been. Even the playful back and forth as Clay tries to avoid Whit when his wife returns is rushed.

Ultimately, The Civil Dead is haunted by the film it could have been. Tatum and Thomas’ charm and good intentions aren’t enough to rescue a story that’s drawn to darkly humorous twists about friendship, and the dangers of dependency.

The Civil Dead is in cinemas and on VOD from Friday, January 19th.

The filmmaker, the writer and the queer

Posted on by Paul Risker

Lithuanian director Romas Zabarauskas’s beautifully reflective fourth feature The Writer (Kirjanik, 2023) is a conversational piece, which hits upon themes and ideas that land with a weighty delivery. The director came out as gay in 2011 when he premiered his first film Porno Melodrama. He is likely the most prominent LGBT filmmaker of the Baltics.

Thirty years ago, Russian born Kostas (Bruce Ross) migrated from Lithuania to the United States, leaving behind his lover, Dima (Jamie Day), who he met during their mandatory service in the Soviet army. Following the publication of Kosta’s new book, 1990, Dima arrives in New York under the pretence of a job interview. The real reason he’s travelled to the United States is to discuss Kostas’ latest work. The film is predominantly two characters talking in an apartment. Zabarauskas and his co-writers, Marc David Jacobs, Anastasia Sosunova and Artūras Tereškinas, invite the audience to eavesdrop on their private and intimate conversation, first in public, then in private, when Kostas invites Dima back to his place for dinner.

Throughout the concise 85-minute running time, they discuss immigration, sex and work, their nationalities, families, and relationship. This infuses the film with an insightful and introspective energy. The film’s driving interest is the idea of how we’re defined by our choices, for better or worse, but it’s effectively supported by broad themes and ideas. One such idea is how we carry our pasts with us, even as we build our future, and to understand our own story requires us to understand the story of those dearest to us.

Speaking with DMovies, Zabarauskas discussed a trilogy of films about queer male couples, how he’s drawn to political dilemmas and is open to different ways of interpreting his films.

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

Romas Zabarauskas – I don’t really see filmmaking as a means of creative expression, because that would seem to imply that an artwork is an extension of the inner world of its creator, which I don’t think is necessarily the case. For me, cinema is a form of art and entertainment rather than creativity. There wasn’t a particular moment that inspired me, but I did watch a lot of great movies in a local library as a teen, fascinated by the diversity of their visions.

PR – What was the seed of the idea for The Writer, and would you agree that there are three versions of a film – the one that is written, the one that is shot and the one that is edited?

RZ – No, I don’t agree with that. There is only one film, and how it was made is simply a question of the behind-the-scenes. In my case, writing the script is like creating an itinerary, but it would be foolish to follow the map blindly when going on a trip. If I see something beautiful on my way, I’ll stop by.

PR – How do you compare and contrast The Writer to your previous films?

RZ – I’m truly grateful for all the opportunities I had to make these films, each a unique challenge. The Writer will form a trilogy on queer male couples in different political circumstances, preceded by The Lawyer (2020) and to be followed with The Activist, which we also shot this year. The Writer stands out as my first fully English [language] film, a co-production with the United States, and a SAG-AFTRA signatory. It was also an opportunity to explore the art of the dialogue to the fullest. I think all my films have a similar approach of focusing on complex political dilemmas and lush visuals.

PR – The premise of The Writer contextualises it as a voyeuristic work. Would you agree?

RZ – I didn’t really conceptualise it this way, but I’m always fascinated to learn about any possible interpretations. For me, one of the unique qualities of film is that you can feel what the characters are thinking, thus allowing for the dramatic qualities to be experienced in a special way.

PR – Kostas and Dima don’t talk like people in a film talk and it feels as if you’re merging the film and theatrical forms.

RZ – Well, I don’t think there is a single way that people talk in films. That said, yes, I love theatre and the theatre tradition in Lithuania is very strong, although to be honest it’s a lot more experimental than The Writer’s approach. If you think I’m merging the film and theatrical forms that’s fine by me. I don’t – I just think that a large part of cinema continues a timeless tradition of drama-based work, in unique ways that don’t diminish the cinematic experience. I was inspired by filmmakers like [Alain] Resnais, [Eric] Rohmer, [John] Cassavetes, but also American classics shot on soundstages (Hitchcock, Wilder, etc.), and sitcoms.

PR – One of the enthralling disagreements the pair engage in is over the legitimacy of choice. Does either Kostas or Dima align with your own views on this subject?

RZ – My views are closer to Dima’s. I’m an optimist, and while I think it’s important to admit one’s privileges and societal obstacles, it’s equally important to strive for personal and political progress. But some of my co-writers would likely disagree with me, which is awesome, too.

PR – What do you think the appeal is of stories like The Writer that are predominantly a conversation between characters?

RZ – To be honest, I don’t think that such a format itself is a winning or losing proposition – it depends on the film. In our case, it allowed us to truly delve into intimacy as well as complex views of the two characters.

PR – In The Writer, you explore how ideas are malleable, how they’re filtered through the subjective gazes, and the messy, non-linear nature of relationships.

RZ – Sure, but it wasn’t my goal to somehow show that everything is subjective and so nothing can be true. It was important to me to represent two different people with often opposing yet nuanced political views, clearly disagreeing but still staying civil about it.

PR – A British filmmaker called Carol Morley once told me: “You take it [a film] 90% of the way, and it is the audience that finishes it. So the audience by bringing themselves: their experiences, opinions and everything else to a film is what completes it.” Would you agree that there is a transfer of ownership? Is making a film a transformative experience?

TZ – I agree, in a sense – during our premiere in Tallinn, it truly felt like the audience’s reactions made the film happen. There was a lot of laughter, and after the screening I kept hearing about different ways the audience members connected to our film. However, it’s important to be careful with any metaphors when describing cinema. Ultimately, it’s a film, a work of art and entertainment, for people to watch, enjoy and discuss. It doesn’t need to be renamed in different ways – cinema is already a magic experience, and people know it.

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The Writer played in the Baltic Film Competition of the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Just click here in order to read our exclusive movie review.

Romas Zabarauskas is pictured at the top of this interview, snapped by Arcana Femina. The other image is a still of The Writer.

Our dirty questions to Hugh Welchman

Posted on by Paul Risker

Following the visual tour deforce of film turned into an oil painting with Loving Vincent (2017), husband-and-wife filmmakers Hugh Welchman and DK Welchman (née Dorota Kobiela) return with another striking visual blend of film and painting – an adaptation of Polish author, Władysław Reymont’s four-part novel. The movie is entitled The Peasants.

Set in the late 19th century, Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska) has reached childbearing age. Her mother has promised her to wealthy farmer Maciej Boryna (Mirosław Baka), but it’s his son Antek (Robert Gulaczyk) who she desires. She agrees to marry Maciej in order to please her mother, but she can’t deny her feelings for Antek. When they’re discovered mid-coitus by Maciej, it’s only a matter of time before derogatory rumours about Jagna spread. After returning from self-exile, Antek is faced with a choice: stand by Jagna, or bow to societal conventions and disavow her.

Aesthetically stunning, The Peasants is grounded by timeless themes that explore the light and darkness within human beings. Welchman and Kobiela’s evolved their use of animation, pursuing a more realistic style compared its predecessor. Their ambition coincided with unexpected real-life events to ratchet up the challenges that Welchman, who spoke to DMovies about the making of the film, says thrust them into an uncertain struggle.

The Peasants, which is Poland’s Oscar submission, is in in cinemas across the nation on Friday, December 8th.

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Paul Risker – Is animation a purer form of filmmaking?

Hugh Welchman – […] At the film school level, animation is very pure and artistic. [In film], if you’ve got a good actor or cinematographer, you can get away with [mistakes], but with animation, if it’s not drawn, animated or modelled properly, then there’s nowhere to hide. You also have more artistic possibilities with animation, in terms of expressionism, simplification and caricature.

Live action films use animation a lot now, so the lines are becoming more blurred. People doing big Hollywood films need to know how to do it, otherwise, they can’t create these big special effects in sci-fi or superhero films. These have dominated for the past ten years, but I think their time is over – it’s time for something new.

PR – If film and art are cyclical, in what ways are your films an example of this?

HW – When we were developing Loving Vincent, we were looking at Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger, 1947). Jack Cardiff was not only one of the greatest cinematographers of all time, but he was also an oil painter, and he recreated the Himalayas in the studio.

With Loving Vincent, we were doing something that no one had done before, and so, someone has to start somewhere. Every single frame was an oil painting, but because of the realistic style of The Peasants, each frame took twice as long. So, for Loving Vincent it was two and a half hours average time per frame, compared to five hours for this film.

For our production pipeline, we had to resurrect the old Disney studio 2D system, where we had key frame animators and in-betweeners. The oil painters became the key frame animators and then we had a team of digital painters, animators and effects artists, who were creating in-between frames out of the oil paintings. There were forty thousand frames of oil painting and from those we digitally created another forty thousand in-between frames.

PR – How do you compare the experiences of these two films?

HW – Actually we didn’t realise how hard The Peasants was going to be. On Loving Vincent, we had 113 financing meetings before we even financed the film. The hardest thing was persuading people to give us money for the crazy endeavour of painting an entire film, whereas we quickly got the funding for The Peasants.

With Loving Vincent, we had to work out how to do it – every single aspect, from the whole studio structure and painting machinations to what kind of canvas board and paints, and yet, The Peasants was three times more difficult. It wasn’t just the filmmaking, but Covid. There were two stoppages for the live action, the second time for a whole year. Many of the painters we thought were going to join us who worked on Loving Vincent couldn’t because they were coming from outside of Poland. Then we had inflation of 20% in the four countries we were making the film. The costs were just escalating before our eyes. If you make a film over three years that makes a huge difference.

The thing that almost collapsed us was the Ukraine war because one of our studios was in Kiev. We set up the studio because on Loving Vincent we had a lot of Ukrainian painters. They asked rather than them having to move and leave their families, could we set up a studio in Kiev? We loved that idea, but two months later the Russians invaded.

We had to close down the studio and evacuate all we could. We were picking up the women with their kids, sometimes with their elderly mothers, and starting them all over again in Poland. We lost our funding that we were going to get from Ukraine. From the outbreak of the war, for most of the next fifteen months, we didn’t know where the money was coming from to pay for the 100+ people that worked for us.

There was this level of anxiety and uncertainty that we never had on Loving Vincent. On that film it was the other way around – we started with nothing and were doing it bit by bit. It was a bohemian studio and an artistic adventure. With The Peasants, once we hit the ground running, we knew exactly what we were doing, but then the world changed, and we were left to try and finish the film.

PR – What was it that originally compelled you to adapt Reymont’s novel?

HW – One of the things that really drew me to this novel was it’s a tour de force. My wife gave it to me and said I had to read it. She didn’t tell me we have to make a film about it because she wanted my opinion on it before she prejudiced that. I read the book and I felt that it was the greatest novel I’d read about peasants. [Émile] Zola’s The Earth is a fantastic novel, but it’s very patronising. It’s like he parachuted into a village for six weeks, reinforced all of his prejudices about peasants, and wrote this incredibly funny but horrific and scathing account of what peasants are like.

You have to remember that peasants are the backbone of every society since the Egyptian pyramids, even further back. You’re talking about the whole of recorded history. All of our religions are peasant religions. All of our food is peasant food. We are all peasants. We think we’re so much further away from them than we are. That’s not surprising because that’s still the foundation of the cultures we’re living in. Despite incredible technological change, the fact is we haven’t moved away from that paradigm.

It’s amazing because a lot of nineteenth and twentieth century authors are obsessed with the working or middle classes trying to improve themselves, or the aristocracy or war heroes. They ignore the every people of every society, and when I read The Peasants, I felt I recognised those people from growing up in rural Hampshire. It was an amazing portrayal of the human condition.

PR – What’s striking about the novel is how we can see our contemporary world in it, suggesting as much time that passes, it seems things stay the same.

HW – We toned down the routine violence from the book. For my dad it was normal that you got caned at school. That’s how they taught people to read and write, by whacking them. It was not that long ago – a couple of generations back. I wanted to put these people up on the screen and ask, ‘Do you recognise them? How much have we actually changed?’

[…] If you look at the sexual violence Jagna experiences, there’s still a huge difference in the threats [of violence] men and women are likely to feel and then experience. Mobs are something that’s on the rise again because of the internet and social media, that allows people to anonymously gang up on people. This is what happens to Jagna, and that kind of scapegoating is unfortunately what we humans retreat to as a group.

This film is unfortunately not only relevant now, but it’s going to be relevant in two hundred years because it’s about how people are. Part of the purpose of art is to try to bring people’s attention to how we are, how it could be or what it will be if we don’t change.

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Hugh Welchman is pictured at the top of this piece at the BFI London Film Festival. The second image is a still of The Peasants.

The Peasants was released in cinemas on 8th December 2023. Just click here in order to read our filthy genius movie review.

The Quiet Maid (Calladita)

Posted on by Paul Risker

QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The soothing sound of water precedes the first image in Spanish director Miguel Faus’, The Quiet Maid. Then, appears the Spanish coast bathed in sunshine, the turquoise sea with trees in the foreground, forming a type of proscenium frame. Then, the sound of someone climbing a ladder and a maid appearing to attend to one of her many chores. It turns out the view is through a window.

Away from the British tourist hotspot of the Costa Brava, Ana (Paula Grimaldo), a newly employed Columbian maid, arrives at the luxurious vacation home of her employers, Pedro (Luis Bermejo) and Andrea (Ariadna Gil). She inconspicuously goes about her work as instructed, sending her wages home to her mother, to pay for her younger sister to study medicine. Befriending Gisela (Nany Tovar), a servant for a neighbouring family, her hopes are dashed that her employers will be able to sort her contract and papers once her probation is up. Frustrated by their empty promises and the shitty wages, Gisela lures Ana into sneaking out to parties at night, where they risk drinking too much. Gradually, she becomes mischievous, finding ways to enjoy her lavish surroundings, while feeding the cats that annoy Pedro, who complains they ruin his garden vegetables.

The pre-title image is unnecessary, unless it’s making a point. The next image of Ana, in the backseat of a car, arriving at the summer home is an appropriate beginning. However, watching Ana against a paradisal background, reminds us that for some life is pleasure, for others it’s a toil. The opening image lays the groundwork for the film’s themes of inequality and privilege.

Walking around the house, running her fingers along the paintings, Ana’s filled with wide-eyed wonder. There’s a fluidity to The Quiet Maid’s early scenes, where Ana puts herself to the grindstone. Unlike Pedro and Andrea, and their daughter Claudia (Violeta Rodríguez) and son Jacobo (Pol Hermoso), who can move at a casual pace, whether it’s cleaning, cooking or ironing, it feels as if there’s a pressure for Ana to be in perpetual motion.

In one scene, Ana speaks to her mother on the phone while ironing. This is juxtaposed with Claudia on her phone, idly sunbathing and tickling her stomach. At dinner Ana waits on the family, jumping to attention to clear the plates when the bell rings. In another scene, when Jacobo catches her smoking, she acts as though she has done something wrong. Faus returns to this initial idea of pleasure versus toil, and the fruits of absent labour Claudia and Jacobo enjoy.

The drama is playful, as the conflict between Ana and her employers takes some interesting and subtle turns. The conversation with Gisela is when the seeds of discontent are sown. Ana’s ignorant bliss or belief in her employers, who she describes as “good people”, begins to fade. She’s aware of how far off she is from covering her sister’s tuition fees. Again, the director is drawing comparisons between those that have and those that don’t, and the glaring inequality of opportunity to rise above one’s station in life. However, he doesn’t exclusively condemn people in positions of privilege, through a little twist in this narrative thread.

There’s a foreignness to the film in which Ana’s relationship with her employers is purely transactional. She serves at their pleasure and should she fall out of favour, she’ll be replaced. Any genuine acts of kindness are fleeting. Claudia is sympathetic when she notices Ana is upset, while Pedro even insists she join them on the boat. Yet, in other scenes, she makes up their beds and scrubs their toilets. The power dynamic is blatantly prejudicial, evidenced when Andrea demands or firmly instructs, instead of asking. Even the boat trip is motivated by an ulterior motive. It’s a means to placate Ana’s inevitable disappointment when her employers realise that they can’t get her papers, by making her feel a part of the family. This is after Andrea is condescending about Gisela, and she spoke like it was in her and Pedro’s power to circumvent Spanish laws. It conveys the casualness towards what’s important to others, that plays on the employer and employee, master and servant dichotomy.

At a glance, The Quiet Maid is a film about class, however, we should see it as an interpersonal war story. True to its title, the contentious relationship between Ana and the family develops quietly. Faus teases us as to what will happen, and even when relations fall apart, the drama is quietened.

The conflict emerges out of the perception of ownership by Ana’s employers, who see her as an asset. When a guilty Ana is told that Gisela was fired for being caught intoxicated, she’s forced to lie to keep her job. Unlike Claudia and Jacobo’s hedonistic lifestyle, who enjoy being young and carefree, Ana is a young, yet mature character with responsibility, who is provoked into rebelliously acting out. She lures a male friend of Claudia’s to the house when it’s vacant under false pretences and has sex on the inflatable flamingo. With a cigarette, she drinks out of a mug that reads, “Breakfast of Champions.” There’s a flippant presence to her that’s a response to the way she has been dehumanised by Andrea and Pedro.

What’s particularly noticeable is the sexual repression. Ana has agreed to work every day in August and feels she can’t leave the premises without permission. When Gisela introduces her to Tinder, her sexual desires are stirred. In an early scene, she signals to Claudia who is sneaking around with a boy, helping her to avoid her parents. She even witnesses Jacobo having sex in the pool, and yet she is condemned, described as a dirty pig by Andrea for having sex when everyone was away from the house for the night.

Andrea’s rhetoric recalls the gradual dehumanising thought process by which we have historically arrived at justifying non-consensual sterilisation of specific groups of people, through unethical government-sanctioned programmes. Faus isn’t so bold as to go there, but how the film flirts with power dynamics, teasing whether Ana can empower herself, especially against Jacobo and his friends, displays not only toxic masculinity, but the toxicity of privilege that empowers patriarchy and dehumanisation and objectification.

Aside from at least one odd bit of plotting, The Quiet Maid is an effective story about Ana’s quiet, almost silent struggle. She’s a compelling character whose internal and quiet self we catch glimpses of. We only see her break out of her timid self-consciousness in moments, like when she embraces her sexuality or stands up to Jacobo and his friends. In these fleeting moments, however, we fall in love with a character who is both a rebel and a responsibly thoughtful person.

Faus plays to the drama, when need be, but downplays it to sustain Ana’s quiet and subtle retaliation, even omitting music for much of the film, which is refreshing. Not only another observation of the class system, and the inequality of the wealth gap that cannot change anything, The Quiet Maid is a playfully entertaining film about one woman’s empowering journey, exploiting the arrogant shortcomings of the upper class.

The Quiet Maid just premiered in the First Feature Competition of the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The Writer (Kirjanik)

Posted on by Paul Risker

QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Some films are like the quiet whisper of a gentle breeze. It’s an appropriate way to describe Lithuanian director Romas Zabarauskas’ beautifully reflective fourth feature, The Writer, or at least that’s how it feels. While it might lack the umph of bigger storytelling, the conversation between two lovers reunited, hits upon themes and ideas that land with a weighty delivery.

Thirty years ago, Russian born Kostas (Bruce Ross) emigrated from Lithuania to America, leaving behind his lover, Dima (Jamie Day), who he met during their mandatory service in the Soviet army. Following the publication of Kosta’s new book, 1990, Dima arrives in New York under the pretence of a job interview. The real reason he’s travelled to America is to discuss Kostas’ latest work.

The film is predominantly two characters talking in an apartment. Zabarauskas and his co-writers, Marc David Jacobs, Anastasia Sosunova and Artūras Tereškinas, invite the audience to eavesdrop on their private and intimate conversation, first in public, then in private, when Kostas invites Dima back to his place for dinner. The nature of the set-up contextualises The Writer as a voyeuristic work, but the director’s playfulness with the film’s aesthetic makes it more interesting than the label suggests.

Kostas and Dima don’t talk like people in a film talk – there’s a noticeable rhythm to the dialogue, and inflection on the words that sounds like a stage play. The staging may be partly responsible for this impression, but it nonetheless feels deliberate, as if Zabarauskas is merging the film and theatrical forms. In one playful scene, Kostas and Dima dance. Suddenly, as in a staged production, the lighting scheme is changed by the lighting technician off stage. The subtlety of film to mask its contrivance momentarily disappears, and here, the voyeuristic context changes.

The Writer is a play within a film, and whereas cinema creates an illusion of reality, theatre requires the audience to use their imagination to in order suspend their disbelief. The moment the film’s contrivance fades, it becomes less voyeuristic and more exhibitionist. The jazz score is like an intermittent whisper or a third voice. It’s sometimes unnoticeable, but there are other times the music emphasises the emotions of the moment. Zabarauskas approaches the soundtrack as a complement to the diegetic sounds. The dialogue and sound of Kostas and Dima’s voices are able to breathe, liberated from musical accompaniment. As the film progresses, we recognise the texture of their voices, while the sounds of their movement and the wine glasses being placed down on the table, comprise a noticeably engaging audio landscape.

Admittedly, the conversation becomes heavily academic at times, which could put off some audiences. Their intelligence, however, feels true to their characters, and the appeal of the film is the provocative and thoughtful back-and-forth dialogue. Not always easy going, Zabarauskas and his co-writers tease what feels like an escalation towards, if not explosive moments, then a dredging up of contentious differences of opinions and memories that could see their reunion end bitterly.

They talk about two of the three things we’re told we should never discuss: politics and religion. Their discussion has that prickly energy of two people that can provoke one another, in a way only friends can, exposing the adversarial side of friendship.

Kostas and Dima’s intellectual musings are intimate details of lives lived. They can speak about the violence of living under Soviet occupation and the xenophobia towards homosexuality. One of the enthralling disagreements the pair engage in is the disagreement over the legitimacy of choice. Kostas argues that living under tough circumstances strips away the person having a choice, whereas Dima challenges this supposition. It’s a thread that will run throughout the film, revealing a meticulous attention to detail.

The film also asks about whether our nationality makes us morally responsible for our country’s actions, but it’s Kosta and Dima’s different point-of-views on this and the other subjects, such as capitalism and socialism, stigma about one’s sexuality that energises the discourse. Zabarauskas and his co-writers home in how ideas are malleable, and how they are filtered through the subjective gazes, and the messy, non-linear nature of relationships. Throughout the concise 85-minute running time, they discuss immigration, sex and work, their nationalities, families, and relationship. This infuses the film with an insightful and introspective energy. The film’s driving interest is the idea of how we’re defined by our choices, for better or worse, but it’s effectively supported by a broad themes and ideas.

What’s striking is how Kostas has filled his apartment with nice things. His shelves are lined with books and he tells Dima that if he wants to know who he is, to read the books he has read, not the books he has written. Beneath his pleasant apartment is the soul of the man, who’s present and future is built atop of the catacombs of his memories. The story is a reflection of how we carry our pasts with us, even as we build our future, and to understand our own story requires us to understand the story of those dearest to us.

The Writer plays in the Baltic Film Competition of the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Read our dirty review of the Lithuanian filmmaker’s previous feature film The Lawyer that premiered at BFI Flare.

Another Body

Posted on by Paul Risker

A reflection of a face in a pornographic video reflects in the eye at the beginning of directors, Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn’s unsettling documentary, Another Body. The face is of the film’s subject, Taylor. It doesn’t feel like an appropriate adjective to describe the film, reductive more than enhancing its importance, and the experience it offers audiences. It’s an arresting image, and the first in a film whose visual aesthetic of jarring video diaries, computer screen shots and animation, evokes the feeling of the horror that has been thrust upon the many victims of this new breed of cowardly online abuse.

The movie explores the personal story of engineering college student Taylor, who discovers her identity has been used for deepfake pornography. Sharing her personal story, there are other women from her college whose identities have been stolen, their faces placed onto pornographic content and uploaded to mainstream sites. Taylor connects with other victims and outlines her experience with law enforcement. Through the striking aesthetic that feels as though it has one foot in reality, the other in the digital space, the directors reconstruct Taylor’s pursuit of the person responsible for appropriating her image, and the image of other women for nonconsensual pornography.

It feels relevant to reference David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network (2010), specifically how the social media giant, Facebook, was born of a frustrated and angry man’s intent to dehumanise women.

The deepfake videos are made by manipulating AI technology, using images shared or posted by the person on their social media channels. Compton and Hamlyn use their documentary to discuss social media’s history of being weaponised against women, direct and indirectly. What we’re witnessing in this age of digital appropriation of identity, is an escalation of misogyny. While we talk about progress towards treating women with equality, dignity and respect, that 90% of deepfakes are nonconsensual pornography of women, suggests a seething and thriving hostility towards women. This has been empowered by a reactive legal system, that has been reluctant and slow to respond.

Another Body is vitally important because it’s at the vanguard of pushing to create a conversation about deepfake pornography. Victims will encounter hostility when they try to speak out, and the film presents glimpses into this toxic indifference, void of either empathy or sympathy.

Taylor tells us that’s not her real name and an actor’s face has been deepfaked over her own. It’s the only way she could feel safe to tell her story. It gives us an insight into the sophistication of deepfake technology, and despite knowing it’s the face of an actor, our mind is tricked into thinking otherwise. It speaks about the authenticity of the technology and the seamlessness by which a person’s identity can be appropriated.

Compton and Hamlyn effectively take us inside the experience of their subject, first by how a young person striding towards a career in engineering is abruptly halted by the shocking revelation. Then, they allow the film to empower Taylor and her friend Julia, whose identity is also protected, to speak about their experiences. Taylor talks about the anonymity of the person behind the deepfakes and how not knowing the reason why, leaves victims not able to feel safe anywhere. She also discusses how her obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and being a people pleaser, escalate the trauma. From behind a deepfaked face and using a pseudonym, she intimately opens up about her experience and the ways in which it has impacted her. If her online assailant has dehumanised her, speaking up humanises her, and the many victims of deepfake pornography.

Another Body is part of a wider and necessary conversation. There should be a call to action to fight the weaponisation of social media and technology against women. If we’re serious about equality for women, then it’s imperative that women shouldn’t have to live in fear in our digital future. The history of women has been one of dehumanisation, fear and oppression, and the inability to legislate technology risks a cyclical experience, especially when the film’s closing text tells us: “Deepfakes are doubling every six months. Researchers predict there will be over 5.2 million in 2024. 90% are nonconsensual porn of women.”

Another Body shows at the 31st Raindance Film Festival, and also at the Science360 section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, November 24th.