Tag: doc

Dina

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s easy to argue that people with mental health conditions deserve a fulfilling existence, a happy relationship and even a sex life. But it’s far more difficult to demonstrate it in a convincing and realistic manner. Filmmakers Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles did just that, creating a very tender and touching doc about two people suffering from various mental health disorders, and who you wouldn’t normally expect to tie the knot.

Dina Buno is 49 years old, and she suffers from a “smorgasbord” of mental health conditions, as her mother puts it. She has profound psychological and physical scars from past relationship and she survived a shocking episode of domestic abuse (you will only find out the details in the end of the movie). She’s determined to marry her boyfriend Scott Levin, a Walmart door greeter who suffers from Asperger Syndrome (one of the conditions she also has). She wants to start afresh, despite her painful past and her complex medical issues.

What’s remarkable about Dina is that it doesn’t focus on Dina and Scott’s limitations and problems. Instead, this doc fully enables them. Dina and Scott are not human beings despite their mental health conditions. And they are not defined by their limitations, either. They are just two loving people, and we have every reason to believe that their relationship is feasible and profound enough to survive. There’s an enormous amount of tenderness in a little peck on the lips, in an insightful conversation about sexual fetishes and in a walk on the beach looking at the sunshine and listening to the seagulls squawk. There’s a sense of urgency in their candidness and simplicity.

Documentaries such as Dina, LoveTrue (Alma Har’el) and Quest (Jonathan Olshefsky), all three made this year and distributed by Dogwoof, provide us opportunity to look at the unconventional and marginalised American family in a way very different to reality shows on television. These films are far more sensitive and less manipulative. Dina even has a touch of cinéma vérité, or a home video feel – except that the audio is impeccable. The camera gets very intimate without being invasive.

We live in such a busy world, and we rarely take the time to meet real people, to talk to the eccentric couple living next door, to look them in the eyes and even join their wedding. Films like Dina offer you the chance to do so. It is out in cinemas across the UK from Friday, October 20th.

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

Posted on by victorfraga

When you think of New York what is it that comes first: buildings or people? Already in the 1930s, New York was one of the greatest cities in the world, and it was breathing modernism. Its skyscrapers, such as the Chrysler Building (completed in 1930) and the Empire State Building (completed in 1931), represented additional stories to the city. But prioritising buildings ahead of people when planning a city is a risky notion. That’s because people – not buildings – make cities.

Journalist Jane Jacobs was the first voice in the US to recognise that if you make massive transformations, getting people away from the streets, you are turning a living city into a dead one. Cities are unpredictable. Neighbours need lots of connections and public spaces to interact. Jacobs knew it and she spoke up!

The story of Jane Jacobs would perhaps be forgotten if it wasn’t for her fierce opposition to the broker Robert Moses. Citizen Jane: Battle for The City is essentially a one woman’s struggle against the man who wanted to homogenise New York. Moses was behind architectonic projects to clean the slums, build expressways that choked the city and erect low-income buildings that isolated communities. In 1960 Jane Jacobs’s book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” sent shockwaves through the architecture and planning worlds because it exposed the dangers of such reconfigurations.

Jane led a popular movement against the proposed changes to the city

But Jacobs was not simply a writer. She was also an activist. Probably inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, Jacobs headed a huge popular insurrection against politicians’ plans to revamp New York. She was no longer on her own. She sued the City Hall. And she won.

The documentary shows how New York has been transformed since. Sadly, what she fought for is now being destroyed by gentrification of districts like Brooklyn. New York might not have many hills, but it is hard to walk in the city. The sidewalks are uneven, there are major works everywhere, and very little privacy. Even the luxurious swimming pools visible from Chelsea elevated passageway reveal that it is quite difficult to suppress invasion. Rearranging spaces means rearranging social relations.

Citizen Jane is a didactic film, based on papers and pictures. It is a very conventional documentary, and sometimes it gets a little dull. It collects a series of testimonies, but all of them are in favour of her visionary ideas, neatly manipulating the film viewers. The soundtrack contributes to a very disturbing feeling: Jacobs never rested.

A high moment in the film is to listen to the activist James Baldwin (who is also in the outstanding doc I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017), explaining how such transformations led to removal of the “negroes” from the city.

Citizen Jane: Battle for The City is out on Friday, May 5th.

Chief Kunstable Jason Williamson talks dirty

Posted on by victorfraga

Last Friday saw the theatrical release of Christine Franz’s Bunch of Kunst, a doc following footsteps of the Sleaford Mods as they conduct their daily lives and prepare for their concerts. The Nottingham duo, formed by vocalist Jason Williamson and musician Andrew Fearn since 2012, convey a message of working-class disaffection and hopelessness without pandering to bigoted resentment and nationalism. Their music, which is often described as brutal and minimalistic, have a profound social and political message.

So we decided to ask Chief Kunstable Jason Williamson a few dirty questions. He talks to us about the film, how he makes music, what it means to be big, Johnny Rotten and what people should be doing on June 8th!

…

Victor Fraga – The documentary Bunch of Kunst has just been released. Can you please tell us a little bit where the idea to make the film came from, and how long did it take to make it?

Jason Williamson – It was the pipe dream of Christine Franz, a German woman who we met when being filmed for Arte TV. She proposed the idea and we agreed. It took about two years.

VF – In the doc, you describe the creative process for your music. It seems to be quite fluid and organic, devoid of strict formal rules. What is it that makes you different from other bands? Is there something particular during the creative process?

JW – We stand out because most bands have been genetically produced by record labels. They are young too, which these days is a big problem. They have no fight really, especially in music. There’s also the class war that’s been raging so anybody dipped in street music, anybody from the lower classes is finding it hard to break through, however, as I’ve said, most aren’t too interesting. Grime had a good vehicle, but even that’s being rung in. There’s nothing unique about our writing process, we just have a strong formula.

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Jason Williamson and Shona McWilliams in Andrew Tiernan’s UK18.

VF – Also in the doc, you say that “you have no idea what it means to be big”, but now you have toured many European countries, played at the O2 arena and so on. Didn’t that feel “big” at all? How was that different from playing in smaller clubs?

JW – Big to me means, stadium bands, I guess. But it’s also a state of mind. If you think you are Elvis then you are gunna have problems. It’s a job, a good one admittedly, but a job all the same.

VF – Your lyrics are extremely socially and politically engaged, a powerful statement against consumerism, capitalism and so on. Yet we face the prospect of an increasingly right-wing government, with a strict neoliberal austerity agenda. Should people go out on June 8th and vote in a bid to prevent this from happening?

JW – You have to vote for some kind of reason. Labour as shabby as they can sometimes seem are the only option. I’m not happy about party politics, but it’s no fucking good playing the defiant/anarchist card whilst people get fucked over. It’s a system that in our lifetime will not go away. Exist in it. Help where you can. Learn. Our music will carry the experience of this time for as long as we are together.

VF – You are currently perceived as one of the most ferociously anti-establishment bands in the UK right now. How do you feel about the fact that one of the supposedly most anti-establishment voices in the country Johnny Rotten has recently endorsed Trump, Farage and Brexit? Did he get it all wrong or is he fooling us all?

JW – He smokes too many ciggies and is infested with ego!

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Jason Williamson in the setting of #LostDogFilm.

VF – You are a friend of the British actor and director Andrew Tiernan, and you appear in his latest film UK18, a nightmare sci-fi about extreme surveillance. Can you please tell us how this happened? Do you intend to engage in other politically and socially-engaged cinema projects?

JW – Me and Andrew Tiernan met a couple of years ago at a show and he was also partly responsible for the documentary Invisible Britain [Paul Sng/ Nathan Hannawin, 2015] which came out around the same time. I’ve always admired his acting and what he does with his characters, he’s a proper good actor with history. I’ve always been interested in acting and we got talking about it and that’s how it arose. I’ve worked on two film pieces so far: #LostDogFilm and UK18 [both by Andrew Tiernan].

VF – How can music and cinema work together as a voice against reactionary forces?

JW – They can work together by pasting actual reality onto screens.

VF – What’s your recommendation for aspiring artists in the music industry who want to make a powerful social and political statement through their art?

JW – Be themselves. Live a little. Go out of your own town. Move about. Get into trouble. And… see things!!!