Tag: bullying

The Young Arsonists

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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The Summer of 1987. Nicole (Maddy Martin), Veronica (Jenna Warren), Amber (Sadie Rose), Sara (Madison Baines); four rural girls on the verge of womanhood, having their periods for the first time. Nicole hasn’t yet got over the death of her older brother Seamus, killed by an accident with a thresher. She’s so wrapped up in this, and in generally being a teenager, that she fails to spend much time with her little brother Brendan.

Her tomboy best friend Veronica spends her time bunking off household chores demanded by her hard-drinking, authoritarian father Gavin (Joe Bostick) and seems to be constantly pushing boundaries. Plus-sized Amber seems timid and easily frightened, and is subject to sporadic bullying by Veronica, yet is a dark horse capable of a shocking practical joke or unexpected, anti-social behaviour.

We never find out that much about Sara beyond that she’s embarrassed by her conservative, aerobics-obsessed mum (Measha Brueggergosman). She’s most definitely the fourth character with Nicole as the main protagonist, Veronica as the second and Amber as the third, in that hierarchical order (was it that way in the script?) And while Veronica’s father Gavin remains largely a dark, troubling figure in the background, we see quite a bit more of Nicole’s family life and parents.

Her dad Dale (Aaron Poole) is out of work and can’t seem to find a job anywhere, although he appears to be actively looking, at least some of the time. Dissatisfied with her husband’s lack of progress on this front, wife May (Miranda Calderon) goes out and gets a job with the company building homes in the area, Happy Haven Development – much to Dale’s disgust.

Meanwhile the four girls (initially five, but one has a run in with Veronica and walks away early on) move in to Nicole’s family’s former home, now abandoned and dilapidated. This is a summer childhood game rather than anything with any legal standing, and at various points they find the front door and windows boarded up with Happy Haven warnings of private property, impending development and no trespassing, which signs are cheerfully pulled down by the bravura Veronica and others.

It’s also an excuse for Nicole to move into her late brother’s room, where she frequently sees and talks to Seamus (Kyle Meagher), who never talks back, asking him questions like, what’s it like to be dead? This aspect of a teenager dealing with sibling bereavement is nicely handled, even if it at one point tips over into the conceit of seeing him standing upside down on the ceiling and her walking up the side of the wall to stand beside him, a competent visual effects job even if one’s not exactly sure what the writer director is trying to say at this point.

That moment is representative of the whole film: it’s constantly going off in different directions and, having established the four girls in their illicit summer property, throws in myriad scenes and plot strands without seeming to know what it’s about or where it’s going. To have two characters driving around a cornfield in an old car may look good, but it doesn’t seem to take the story anywhere and delivers little more than an excuse to play a striking music track in Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, which doesn’t really add anything beyond immediate, gratuitous, foot-tapping adrenaline rush. Likewise in another scene which throws in Brian Eno’s Babies On Fire. Fabulous music – but why is it here?

This means that final reel attempts to close the narrative feel forced, and even then there are too many such attempts going on at once. A shame that the film can’t make up its mind quite what story it wants to tell (out of several on offer), because the competing narratives are all pretty interesting. Such a shame these problems couldn’t have been fixed at script stage, because the performances have a natural feel while writer-director Pye appears to have genuine vision, albeit unfocused.

As for the title – one character (singular) commits arson towards the end. The is no group of arsonists (plural). Happy Haven or Happy Haven Development might have made a much better title, because all the ideas floating around here seem to relate to the happiness (or otherwise) of the home environment.

The Young Arsonists plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It is part of the brand new Critics’ Picks strand.

Tallinn 2022 Kids Animation Programme – part 3

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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Self-contained fable Birth Of The Oases (Marion Jamault, France, 9 mins) is a near-perfect portrayal of a symbiotic relationship. The cold-blooded hilltop snake struggles to keep warm while the two-humped camel is constantly exhausted by the desert’s heat. They come to a mutually helpful agreement whereby the cold snake takes up residence on the camel’s humps. This warms up the snake and cools down the camel. After the camel dies from old age, the snake moves around the sand dunes – here designed to look like a never ending series of camels humps – to create first water and later full blown oases which, according to the armadillo revealed as the narrator at the very end, to this very day.

In the black and white classroom of the black and white world of The Boy And The Elephant (Sonia Gerbeaud, France, 7 mins), black and white kids taunt someone who is different – a boy with an elephant head who is coloured blue. One kid, though, takes an interest – a boy who is coloured red, and the two embark on a playground friendship which could be read as a gay relationship, a state threatened by the red boy’s need to conform and revert to fit in with the black and whites. Eventually, a black and white girl takes pity on the elephant head, accepts him and he is subsumed into the group.

Marea (Guilia Martinelli, Switzerland, 5 mins) is another self-contained fable about a family living on an island within an hermetically sealed dome.

Stop-frame marvel Laika & Nemo (Jan Gaderman/Sebastian Gadow, Germany, 15 mins), arguably my favourite film in the programme, again concerns an outsider – a boy who lives in a lighthouse who is regularly tormented by fellow pupils and local fishermen at the harbour for wearing deep sea diving gear. When an astronaut crashes his spaceship near the lighthouse, the two helmet-wearers bond which puts them in a good place for when one of those local fishermen drops a key into the harbour.

Last but not least, The Queen Of The Foxes (Marina Rosset, Switzerland, 9 mins) is a French tale about the saddest member of a group of foxes who is, perhaps for that reason, made their queen. The other foxes’ inability to write hampers their attempts at writing such a letter to cheer her up. Instead, they steal from the nearby town all the love letters people have never been brave enough to send, delivering one which results in the uniting of a happy human couple who write their own letter to the fox queen thanking her for their efforts, which finally does the trick. The foxes then deliver the other letters, and the town windows suddenly become full of lively couples, straight, gay, even a threesome.

Which goes to show that programmes of kids animation can be a lot dirtier than you might expect.

The third of three programmes of Kids Animation shorts plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

House Of Hummingbird (Beol-Sae)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Seoul, South Korea, 1994. Less than 10 years since South Korea has become a democracy. The year of the Winter Olympics, the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and the Seongsu Bridge collapse. The latter incident will leave its mark on some of the characters here.

Teenager Eun-hee’s mum and dad (Jung In-gi and Lee Seung-yeon) run a small food store, sourcing “only the finest ingredients”. On occasion, they deliver to other suppliers and the whole family is roped in to make sure the orders are prepped and sent out on time. They are fiercely proud parents who want only the best for their kids. The best, as they understand it, is doing well in the school and university system, presumably with the idea of getting a well paid job afterwards.

This message is reinforced by her school. A male teacher has the girls chant, ” I will go to / Seoul National University / instead of karaoke”. He also gets his class to nominate the top two delinquents among them, defined as those who smoke or date instead of studying. Eun-hee is the top nominee. Or, as two of her classmates with a clear sense of privilege put it when talking about her, “dumb girls like that don’t make it to college and they become our maids”

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Her brother Dae-hoon (Son Sang-yeon) is achieving good grades at school and looks set to go to university. He has a nasty side too: he periodically bullies and hits Eun-hee, making her home life a misery. Her sister Soo-hee (Park Soo-yeon) is out a lot and looks less devoted to academic work, on one occasion hiding in a cupboard to avoid their father.

Eun-hee herself (Park Ji-hoo) is an outsider who doesn’t really fit in at school. She likes to draw and wants to b a comic artist.

She has a boyfriend of sorts, schoolboy Kim Ji-wan (Jeong Yun-seo) who she tentatively gets to kiss her who is later dragged from her presence by his overbearing mother. A later same-sex romance with the shy Bae Yu-ri (Seol Hye-in) comes to nothing.

A lump under one ear will later cause her to be hospitalised.

Her parents send her to the local Chinese cram school, but that doesn’t motivate her academically until her teacher is replaced by university student Miss Kim Young-ji (Kim Sae-byuk), first seen smoking a cool cigarette on the school stairwell, who gets both Eun-hee and Calvin Klein clothing-obsessed fellow student Jeon Ji-suk (Park Seo-yun) to talk about themselves and their interests, the only person in the film to do so.

When the two students go shoplifting and get caught, Ji-suk reveals Eun-hee’s father’s name to the understandably incensed owner. It is Miss Young-ji to whom Eun-hee talks about the crime and in whom she subsequently confides, the one person in the film who brings her out of herself and gives her good advice, e.g. to stick up for herself when her brother beats her. Consequently, they become friends. And Eun-hee becomes vaguely aware, through titles on Miss Young-ji’s classroom bookshelf, of politics and such schools of thought as feminism.

It’s a bleak period picture of an emerging democracy where almost everyone seems to be focused on career at the expense of relationships or family. At the same time, though, it’s highly affecting as a sympathetic portrait of a teenage girl’s life which also exhibits an optimistic undercurrent in the character of a teacher who goes against the grain and shows a genuine interest in her pupils.

House Of Hummingbird plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below:

Edhel

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Although her father was killed in a riding accident, Edhel (Gaia Forte) is training hard for an upcoming show jumping competition. Tensions are frayed at home where her mother (Roberta Mattei) constantly tells her off for wearing her hoodie over her head round the house. School is even worse. She won’t take the hood down and expose her head for anyone – and her classmates hate her for it.

Things change with the arrival of a new boy in the classroom who is far more friendly towards her. Around him she starts to come out of her shell. This is an amazing, really thoughtful film about people who are different. It has a lot to say about not only bullying and the cruelty of children towards their peers but also what goes on inside the head of the person being bullied.

Its narrative walks a very clever tightrope between its heroine having a physical deformity beneath the hood in the form of distinctive, pointy ears and the fairly preposterous idea that she might in fact be an elf. There are connections you can make to support the idea, but the style of shooting never goes beyond suggesting the possibility.

Silvano, a caretaker at the school who is also a sword and sorcery fantasy obsessive given to hanging out at the local comics store, is certainly convinced and becomes concerned for her. He thinks she needs to return to “her people”. His obsession gets him into trouble with his employers. And when Edhel vanishes for part of the final reel, it’s very tempting to agree with Silvano. But perhaps there’s another explanation.

However, the trailer boasts no such subtlety and screams at us, she’s an elf, she’s an elf, she’s an elf! No possible room for doubt, no ambiguity and – to all intents and purposes, not the film I saw. It’s a terrible trailer because it completely misrepresents the feel of the film and what it’s actually about. Although we’ve published it below, you’re better off watching the opening five minutes instead which provides a much clearer idea of the film (the clip is below the trailer – no subtitles, it’s in the original Italian, but you’l get the idea).

If you want to see how to promote a film like this, look no further than Border (Ali Agasse, 2018). That has some pretty clever surprises hidden in the twists and turns of its narrative (although no one in that film is an elf, in case you were wondering), but the clever trailer understands the game the film is playing and gives away nothing it shouldn’t. It’s a shame whoever did the trailer for Border couldn’t do the one for Edhel too. Both are subtle films which need the correct marketing to succeed and are likely to fail in cinemas without it.

Edhel played in the Schlingel International Film Festival. Watch the uninspiring subtitled trailer for the film below – or below that, watch the first five minutes instead for a more accurate idea of the film (in Italian without subtitles, sorry):

A Silent Voice (Eiga Koe no katachi)

Posted on by victorfraga

Superficially, this is a very clean looking film. It’s anime, it’s a high school drama; school children are drawn with clean lines and bright colours in bright settings with mostly clear blue skies. Beneath that clean veneer, though, lurks dirt. Psychological dirt. Bullying. Its effect on the self-worth of the victimised and the perpetrator. Self-loathing. Suicide.

Shoya Ishida (voice: Miyu Irino) has marked the days up to the 15th on his calendar and torn off the numbers after. He does his last day at work, sells his possessions, leaves the money with his mum to pay off an outstanding debt and goes out to jump off the local river bridge. Flashback: in elementary school he is a troublemaker who picks on the new girl in class Shoko Nishimiya (Saori Hayami), who happens to be deaf. Nishimiya tries hard to be nice to her classmates asking them to communicate with her via the notebook and pencil she carries around. Perhaps she tries a little bit too hard and apologises once too often. In the playground, Ishida throws little stones at her and when she tries to be friendly, he literally lobs dirt on her face. Naoka Ueno (Yuki Kaneko) encourages his actions. Eventually he’s hauled up by the principal for repeatedly plucking Nishimiya’s hearing aid off (to the tune of some eight sets).

Shunned by others for his bullying, Ishida stops interacting with them and withdraws. This is represented onscreen by the extraordinary graphic device of an ‘X’ over the faces of his fellow schoolmates whenever they appear. It’s a very powerful way of expressing his isolation. Five years on, wrecked with guilt about his treatment of Nishimiya, he learns sign language and decides to befriend her and to make amends…

His fellow elementary classmates too are struggling to come to terms with their varying degrees of complicity in aiding or condoning his bullying. They may be children and this may be animation, but these are complex characters, deeply scarred, and yet still trying to find ways to move forward and live.

asilentvoice2
Diversity isn’t always embraced in the school playground

This film may well broaden your idea of what animation is capable. It’s nothing like Disney and equally it’s light years from Japanese SF action fest Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) although it likewise started life as a manga and concerns teenagers. These teens, however, are not rebels against the system but simply very ordinary, screwed up kids. If this were British we’d probably have made it as a live action drama, possibly for television. It feels long at 129 minutes, but that running length allows for complexities of character and plot that a shorter running length would have sacrificed.

In the end, you get to feel how a disabled person struggles to fit in as much as you do a bully’s remorse for what he’s done against an ongoing background of other interconnected minor characters. It’s a very dirty movie, but it’s the internal dirt of the mind that’s under observation here. A challenging and demanding work, it’s also an extraordinary and groundbreaking piece of animation unlike anything else you’re likely to see on the screen this year.

Beyond that, it’s innovative on another level: it will play some UK cinema screenings with hard of hearing subtitles to allow hard of hearing audience members to experience the full film, including sound effects and music. Which seems highly appropriate given its subject matter.

A Silent Voice is out in the UK on Friday, March 17th, with exclusive screenings nationwide on March 15th.