Tag: 71st Berlin Film Festival

Censor

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Before spurious terms such as “cancel culture” entered the mainstream, British censors were hard at work “cancelling” content they deemed inappropriate for genuine consumption. This work became the centre of a media storm in the 1980s with the rise of “video nasties — cheap, sensationalist content that toned down on the plot and dialled up the violence, including gratuitous scenes of rape, torture, cannibalism and dismemberment. Think the chainsaw scene in Scarface, but for an entire movie. And just like arguments regarding GTA in the 00s, right-wing voices were concerned that these videos could lead to copycat violence of its own.

Censor evokes the drabness of the 80s rather than its neon-light sparkle, using clips from Margaret Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse to set the “mother-knows-best” tone of the era. It’s in a dark, smoke-filled room we first encounter Enid Baines (Naimh Algar), who discusses removing a penis shot here, a gouged eye-ball there. She takes pride in her work, trying to make the videos just right so they are suitable for public consumption. But there is a sense that something else is boiling under the surface of this self-controlled, persnickety woman, who might be able to change the tone of difficult movies, but cannot censor the difficulties of her own past.

This is the debut film of Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond (one more of many debut British filmmakers making waves in the horror scene) yet she shows a maturity of composition that shows off a great confidence in form. The video nasties are expertly recreated with excessive blood and gore in an Academy ratio, while the real scenes are shot in widescreen, making use of expressive, two-tone lights to suggest the conflicted nature of Enid. In one impressive flourish, betraying the ways that both reality and movie-making can merge, the widescreen ratio slowly contracts into the smaller frame, the film tightening its grip as the true horrors finally emerge. Along with Saint Maud, Rose: A Love Story and Kindred, it appears horror is becoming the de facto form for Britain’s up-and-coming directors. I would suggest a crossover anthology film!

Nonetheless, while Naimh brings great sensitivity and complexity to the main role, the supporting cast, including her parents and fellow co-workers, feel lightly sketched in, not allowing for much contrast to her fixed mission. The overarching message is that censorship might be needed in some extreme cases, yet can often achieve the exact opposite effect. This is lost somewhat in the final sequence which doesn’t allow the horror to linger, opting instead for an unsatisfying fantasy flourish. Coming at a time where the topic of censorship in art is being rigorously discussed once again, Censor perhaps needed to be bolder in its transgressions. With that said, this is a fascinating debut from Bailey-Bond, who will likely work wonders with a larger budget. Here’s hoping the same backers, Film4 and BFI, give her the necessary investment she needs to become one of Britain’s hottest horror tickets.

Censor played in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival. On Mubi on Sunday, October 31st.

The World After Us (Le monde après nous)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The conditions that made Paris such a hub for writers in the early 20th century — cheap flats, strong communities, endless time to put pen to paper — have been more or less swept away by the powers of gentrification. Faced with paying €1,200 in rent every single month, Labidi (Aurélien Gabrielli) is forced to come up with some unusual schemes, like low-key insurance fraud and cycling for Deliveroo, in order to meet the bills.

He is a promising young French-Tunisian writer with an award-winning short story under his belt. His agent secures him a meeting with a top literary firm, who enjoy the first three chapters of his Algerian-war focused novel. With only six months to finish the book, this decision is rather complicated by his romance with Elisa (Louise Chevilotte), who he picks up in true Frenchman-style on a Lyonnaise terrasse by asking for a cigarette. He didn’t smoke before; he will now.

She’s a younger penniless student while his home is in Paris; making the move to one of the world’s most expensive places — drained of the usual romantic clichés of walking along the seine or staring at the Eiffel Tower — difficult for the young, loved-up couple, who can barely rely on their working-class parents for help. The resultant film explores the pressures of being an artist in an increasingly capitalist world, existing without a connection to one’s roots, and trying to stay in love amidst the maelstrom of modern life. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but neatly packaged in a smart, bittersweet yet ultimately optimistic package.

With a light, unaffected style with simple yet effective editing, The World After Us effortlessly brings to mind the films of François Truffaut, especially Antoine and Colette, as well as recent ‘novelistic’ French-speaking films like the work of Xavier Dolan, Being 17 and Next Year. While the New Wave is often parodied for its pretensions, it was filled with great humour; effectively communicated here when Labidi interviews for a job at a high-end optician. The comedy diffuses the self-seriousness of similar writer stories, rounding out Labidi as a man who feels like he actually exists off-screen.

As a portrait of a young man as a writer, a genre often tackled in French literature and cinema, The World After Us, partly based on director Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas’s own life, seems unconcerned with the weight of history, using its tightly-written characters and a condensation of time to easily absorb us into Labidi’s life. Aurélien Gabrielli carries his character with a deceptive simplicity, first appearing like a passive sponge before slowly turning into the hero of his own story without exhibiting any stereotypical or groan-worthy moments of growth. Accompanied by a few choice needle drops — “Knights of White Satin”, “Remember Me’ — The World After Us expertly sweeps us through these six months in a smooth 84 minutes. More novella than novel, this is a lovely slice of Francophone auto-fiction.

The World After Us plays in the Panorama strand of the Berlinale, running between 1st-5th March.

Brother’s Keeper (Okul Tıraşı)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

If you like lording over people with less power than you, but you don’t have the tenacity to make it in the army, your second best bet is to work in a boarding school. After all, it’s easy to be a jobsworth when punishing children. Handled badly and these are unique, reactionary places that don’t have to operate like the rest of the world. For example, if there is a snowstorm, the nature of their self-sustaining community means that, while other children in the country can stay home, they will still have to soldier on and still go to all their classes.

This uniqueness has deadly consequences in the slow-burn drama Brother’s Keeper, set in a remote boarding school in the mountains of East Turkey. With temperatures in the winter dropping to minus 35 degrees, the special school for gifted Kurdish pupils becomes a literal danger zone, with students and teachers alike slowly succumbing to the bitter cold.

The students — who come from poor regions in the country — are told that they should actually count themselves lucky whilst lining up for reception in the freezing snow. Lucky enough to shower once a week, the chaos and embarrassment of their group wash is caught in tight frames by cinematographer Türksoy Gölebeyi. But when a few of the boys are caught messing around, one of the teachers punishes them by making them have cold showers.

The next day Yusuf (Samet Yıldız) wakes up to find that his friend Memo (Nurallah Alaca) can’t get out of bed. Much to his teacher’s annoyance, he begs them to take care of Memo, but to no avail. The teachers are far more caught up in pointless power plays of discipline, making the film feel like a Young Adult makeover of The Death of Mr Lazarescu. Once he finally gets the principal to realise that Memo is in bad shape, the school slowly deteriorates, with the petty priorities of the different teachers finally let loose on one another.

This drama is caught up in the wider context of the film, which plays as an allegory for Turkey’s relationship with the Kurdistan region, a large swathe of which intersects with the Eastern Anatolia Region. This is brought to the fore in a geography class, when a young boy is berated for saying they are actually living in a Kurdish part of the world. After a while, the school slowly resembles a type of colonial prison, escape impossible thanks to the endless pile-up of snow.

To keep this claustrophobic feel, we never physically leave the school, kept close in a 1.37:1 frame. The location is a real estate boarding school, which looks like it’s in desperate need of urgent repair. Combined with local community casting, Brother’s Keeper adheres to a realist style and execution, never losing sense of the wider message in the process, tastefully putting a spotlight on a people lacking both a country to call home or even a family to go home to.

My Brother’s Keeper played in the Panorama section of the 71st Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. Out in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. It also shows at the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Dirty Feathers

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

A poetic snapshot of life on the periphery, Dirty Feathers excels in capturing the multifarious nature of life on the streets. Although there are many similarities between the various homeless people the film follows, no two stories are the same, painting a diverse portrait of people taking each day as it comes.

Using his experience working in the camera department for Roberto Minervini, the US-based Italian filmmaker whose movies, blending documentary and narrative, capture rural lives often ignored in the USA, first-time feature director Carlos Alfonso Corral builds upon these portraits with a striking observational documentary of his own. Blending poetic voiceover with light music and stark black-and-white images, Dirty Feathers quietly observes the lives of those in and around a homeless shelter in El Paso — on the border with Mexico — optimistically known as the “Opportunity Center.”

Opportunity and optimism permeate this story, with most of the subjects talking with clear-eyed enthusiasm about how God will eventually provide for them. At its heart is an African-American couple: Brandon and his pregnant wife Reagan. They support each other as much as possible while living with debilitating drug addiction. But Brandon has his own dreams of running a soul food restaurant, methodically laying out his plans to make it a success. Yet Brandon and the many others who make up this film — a Latino man grieving his son, a war veteran, a Trump-hating immigrant — are not followed in a traditional sense, with Corral more interested in poetics than conclusions.

Many of them are barred from the OC for one reason or another, forced to find alternative living arrangements that stress the difficulty of their situation. It’s clear the director has spent a fair amount of time with these people before rolling the camera, allowing for immersive yet unobtrusive frames, capturing light in an almost ethereal fashion. It can be hard to know exactly how much time has passed, yet this seems to be the point, capturing these people as they lie suspended between a difficult past and a tentative future, aptly symbolised by Reagan’s upcoming baby.

It’s scary watching this documentary knowing the twin-horrors that lie ahead: the Covid-19 pandemic and Texas’s ongoing energy crisis. Perhaps some of these characters have already fatally succumbed to state failure. Texas is well-known for its rugged sense of individualism, even within the hyper-capitalist USA, and this theme of self-improvement is evident within almost all of its resilient subjects; nonetheless, without forcing a central thesis upon us, Dirty Feathers shows us the importance of a social state in order to deal with addiction, mental health issues, healthcare (one man talks of a $10,000 hospital bill), post-traumatic stress disorder and homelessness; how people ultimately need some help in order to realise their dreams. The apparent collapse of the social state in these regions (which has no income tax!) has led to an underclass of forgotten people; Dirty Feathers, with its stirring, un-judgemental tone, returns some measure of dignity and beauty to their lives.

Dirty Feathers is playing in the Panorama section of Berlinale, running from 1st to 5th March.