Tag: Black Nights Film Festival 2020

Karnawal

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The Malambo dance is both intense and mesmerising, setting the tone for the tumultuous ride of Karnawal. Inspired by the movements of horses, this folk cowboy dance, inherent to the Northern Jujuy region of Argentina, requires discipline and drive. And Cabra (Martin López) is so determined to be a great dancer that he is willing to do anything to get the money for the knee-length boots needed to dance; including running a gun over the Bolivian-Argentine border.

Karnawal starts right in the thick of things, with the young lad handed the gun in the midst of a celebration, and trying to sneak it over the border on a rickety bus. After narrowly escaping the hands of border police — in intense, intimate scenes shot with handheld cameras — he returns to his mother’s (Mónica Lairana) house, where she lives with her national guard boyfriend (Diego Cremonesi).

The film contains a real appreciation for the customs of the region, as shown by the pre-Hispanic rituals of the Carnaval de Humahuaca — locals dress up as bright devils, letting go of inhibitions to unearth and then bury the devil. These are some of the best scenes in the movie, where the personal interacts with history, showing how difficult it can be to break out of the place in which you’re raised. The narrative of the film maps itself onto and alongside these festivities, as his father (Alfredo Castro) is let out of prison, bringing his son along on an intense journey that combines the slice-of-life family drama with the crime thriller.

Growing up in such a harsh environment, only thing that keeps Cabra going is his love of dance, captured well by cinematographer Ramiro Civita and editors Luz Lopez Mañe and Eduardo Serrano, who know the right time to cut and the right time to let the dancing speak for itself. This leads up to the final competition, featuring a blistering performance by López that recalls the frantic drumming scenes in Whiplash.

Karnawal takes a long time to finally come together, layering on seemingly disparate elements that eventually loop back upon one another. But this ambitious narrative often comes at odds with the film’s thriller elements, stretching out its central themes instead of honing them. While boasting great scenery — including the harsh and rugged mountains of Northern Argentina — and a great eye for local detail, the sense of urgency found in individual scenes doesn’t quite work when viewed as a whole.

Additionally, despite López’s passion and strong dance moves, the young lad often seems like a bystander in his own story, overshadowed by the magnetic performance of Chilean veteran (and frequent Pablo Larraín collaborator) Alfredo Castro. Despite superficial criminal lifestyles, there feels like few similarities between the two characters, straining the father-son backbone of the film when it should be its tightest point. The supporting cast is also thinly drawn, including a mother with a paper-thick personality and an overly stoic step-dad, providing little contrast to the central duo. Debut director Juan Pablo Félix has obvious talent in creating and maintaining a tense atmosphere; here’s hoping his next film is just a little more focused.

Should the Wind Drop plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

The Body Fights Back

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

There’s one image in The Body Fights Back that seems to encapsulate Western society’s paradoxical relationship with food. On the tube station, a fitness advert is directly juxtaposed with a fast food one, asking consumers to engage in both. But this is standard in today’s society: after all, McDonald’s is one of the key sponsors of none other than the Olympic Games. Can you eat McDonald’s and run a triathlon? You can try, but it’s probably not advised.

Documentary The Body Fights Back looks at a group of people who live within our paradoxical and shame-based food culture, offering an alternative to the dieting advice found in women’s magazines, mainstream media and aspirational Instagram pages. From a disabled woman with stretch marks, to a Black woman overcoming trauma, to a white man previously obsessed with getting ripped at the gym, the film provides a fascinating perspective into how eating disorders are rarely about food, but stem from a variety of complex and interlinking factors.

While the style of the movie is a little dry — with few montages that feel really inspired — its intellectual rigour is to be applauded, especially the way it keenly threads the needle between dieting culture and wider systemic issues, including fatphobia, patriarchy and even white supremacy. With the third idea, the film does falter a little. This idea that diet culture and fatphobia is exclusively a product of White Supremacy may be true in the UK or the USA, but these issues are also a huge part of East Asian culture too, something that isn’t really explored or interrogated in any meaningful way.

In the end, bodies, in whatever form are to be celebrated. We see footage of the Notting Hill Carnival — rooted in Caribbean culture, where curvier bodies receive much higher levels of praise. It would have been fascinating for the film to branch out and see other historical and cultural attitudes to bodies, upending Western clichés and providing a broader perspective.

Nonetheless, perhaps the Western focus makes sense, as the countries with some of the worst obesity in the world are Australia, UK and USA, mainly because they have the largest economic disparity. In a city like London, for example, chicken shops can offer chicken and chips for £1.50 while a fancy restaurant bill for two can easily go over £100. Conversely, in smaller, medium income countries, which don’t have as large a population, mass chain infrastructure or much importation of food, weight levels are far down — suggesting that its not really the individual that’s responsible but society as a whole. For one thing, it makes you pray that we never make that trade deal with the Americans.

Ultimately, as someone who has been blessed with a great metabolism and never thinks too hard about what they eat on a regular basis, this is a really eye-opening look at the double standards that people face. And they also seem to end on a note similar to my own eating philosophy, named intuitive eating: eating what you want when you want and respecting the needs of your own body. Sounds good by me, now what’s for lunch?

The Body Fights Back opens the #PÖFFTrending programme at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.