Tag: documentary

We (Nous)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The strange thing about the banlieues that surround Paris is that none of them are technically considered to actually constitute the city proper. Never-mind the fact that the city itself is largely made up of people commuting into the centre from these suburbs each day; popular outskirts such as Seine Saint Denis are counted as their own departments.

Even more curious is the make-up of Paris. Once when coming in from Charles De Gaulle, I noticed that the majority of people on the train were black; but when finally reaching my friend in Montmartre, almost everyone in the famed district was white. There seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the different ethnicities in the city, with the prospect of moving up the economic food chain an almost impossible task.

We examines this interesting make-up of Paris’ outskirts — which still reveal the fault-lines at the heart of French society — using the urban RER B train as a connective tissue between the different people one can expect in director Alice Diop’s hometown. She has Senegalese roots, but her observations are not tied towards one race or people, taking an all-encompassing look at the different types of people that make up the larger metropolitan area.

Stretching from a Malian garage-worker who hasn’t been home since the early ’00s, to young girls teasing each other on a housing estate, to the residents of an old-person’s home, the film is effectively a collection of self-contained portraits in search of a larger picture, Diop a modern flaneur, taking in the panoramic city scene. Traditional stereotypes of the banlieue are completely dispelled here, with the film beginning and ending with rural scenes; first spotting a stag in the far distance, later accompanying affluent residents on a fox hunt. Those who expect Parisian banlieue to still resemble the scenes of La Haine will be surprised by its diversity.

Often the most compelling images are those of her own family; such as her departed mother, glimpsed enigmatically through home footage, and her father, proudly talking of how he traversed from Senegal to make a better life for himself. But these moments, touching in and of themselves, can’t intersect with the film’s otherwise observational approach in a satisfying way.

Additionally, several of the film’s aesthetic choices and elongated scenes test the patience of a digital festival-goer, who may have been more generous in the stringent atmosphere of a cinema screening. With no central thematic point, rather than simply a loose geographical tissue, holding the disparate scenes together, its anthology approach seems to strain its ideas rather than focus them. Coming in at a significant two hour runtime, one imagines the tighter, more effective film lurking within a second or third edit. Diop has a noble aim; to survey that, like her mother, which she feels has been forgotten to the sands of time — notably spelled out during a visit with a local historian — but the execution is often painfully academic. The title We is meant to stand for everyone, but without really honing in on anyone at all, this ‘we’ remains rather vague.

We played in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It shows in October at the BFI London Film Festival.

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.

I Am Greta

Posted on by victorfraga

Born in January 2003, Greta was just 15 when she started a lonely “strike” outside the Swedish parliament in the summer of 2018. She wasn’t famous, and there were no “manipulating” parents telling her what to do. This was entirely her initiative. For weeks, she held a sign saying “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (“school strike for climate”). At first, very few people engaged with her (no more than three adults in a day), but soon other young people joined her protest. She was consequently invited to attend a climate change event in Katowice (Poland), where she received worldwide attention and became a global hero virtually overnight. One swallow does make a summer, after all.

Remarkably, the documentarist started filming Greta without the knowledge that she would quickly become a world-famous icon.

Greta revolutionised both the world and her personal life. On one hand, she inspired people of all ages. On the other hand, the once highly introspective girl (who did not talk to anyone outside her immediate family for three years) would suddenly deliver lengthy, passionate speeches to crowds everywhere in the world, thereby smiling and breaking away from her world of personal isolation. She met world leaders (Emmanuel Macron being the first of them), the Pope and delivered televised speeches at the EU and the UN. Her commitment to the environment remained steadfast. In fact, she remains very critical of those whom she met, consistently accusing them of hypocrisy, inaction and complacence. She removed her headphones while the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker delivered a speech because she felt that she was being used as a political symbol. She believes that the world leaders behave like kids, that they have failed our planet, and it’s therefore time for the children to take the matter into their own hands.

In the end of the movie, we join Greta and her father as they sail across the Atlantic in order to join the Climate Change Summit at the UN Headquarters in New York. “This feels like a dream, or a movie”, she sums it up as the waves hit the racing yacht. The voyage took nearly three weeks to complete. She received a rapturous welcome upon reaching the other side of the pond.

The young activist’s rhetoric is concise and urgent: “this is not about going vegan once a week, this is a real crisis”. She argues that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction, at a tipping point for the planet. Her resilience and her determination are inspiring. She looks entirely unaffected by her critics, and even guffaws at some of them. They include Fox News, Vladimir Putin and far-right leaders such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro (all featured in the movie). They see her as a “brat” manipulated by unscrupulous parents and being used to serve a very questionable agenda. She is described as a “mentally ill”, in reference to her Asperger’s Syndrome. She challenges a reporter: “I don’t suffer from Asperger’s. I just have it“.

Overall, I Am Greta is an observational, fly-on-the-wall type of documentary. It never challenges its subject. Instead, it paints an intimate portrait of a fascinating human being. Greta is always supported by her doting father Svante. There is little doubt that she is the one in charge, taking all the decisions. Her mother Malena is only briefly featured in the movie: there is only one brief personal interaction while baking a cake. Malena is a famous opera singer in Sweden (she once represented her country in Eurovision) and her near-absence in this documentary might raise a few eyebrows.

The biggest problem with I Am Greta and that it falls into one of the trappings that it set out to avoid. Critics accuse Greta of being too broad and repetitive, devoid of concrete proposals. Her father explains that she learns the facts in a book almost automatically, and that she knows more about the environment than “97% of politicians in the world”. While I am satisfied that Greta does a very important job is appealing to people’s emotions, I would like to learn more about her propositions. What are the facts and figures, and are there any targets? “The future of the planet is at stake” and “we need to act now” are statements way too vague. Ultimately, I Am Greta fails to qualify action.

I Am Greta premiered at the 77th Venice International Film Festival in September, when this piece was originally written. It is out in cinemas on Friday, October 16th. On Disney + UK on Friday, July 22nd (2022). Also available on various other platforms.

Talking About Trees

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Sudan has been in a near-consecutive string of conflicts since its independence in 1956. The deadliest of these was the Second Sudanese Civil War, which raged from 1983 to 2005 and ended with the creation of South Sudan, which would have its own civil war from 2013 to February 2020, causing a further 383,000 deaths. This miasma of death and dictatorship crushed infrastructure and erased culture that wasn’t overtly Islamic. Consequently, Sudan has been without a film industry since the military coup of 1989.

Amidst this narrative of chaos, however, has been the Sudanese Film Group (SFG), led by four retired filmmakers – Shaddad, Suliman Ibrahim, Eltayeb Mahdi and Manar Al-Hilo. They’re an affable, insouciant bunch whose bond has seen – as they humorously catalogue – ‘three democracies and three dictatorships’. The true soul of their friendship, though, is an existential passion for cinema, and Talking About Trees documents their struggle to share it with the Omdurman community.

To do this, they aim to host a series of free public film screenings that, after consulting the locals, will kick-off with a showing of Django Unchained – a solid choice. Their venue is dusty, gutted and decrepit, but the old pals’ easygoing stoicism very much subscribes to the maxim of “where there’s a will, there’s a way”; until, that is, they notify the local government, which is a hive of venality, incompetence and Islamic fundamentalism.

The men’s quiet struggle is observed rather than investigated. Director and cinematographer Suhaib Gasmelbari steps back from his subjects, framing shot after beautiful shot with an almost tableau effect; the only life in them coming from the men’s energy and ambition.

Despite the injustice of it all, Talking About Trees isn’t here to appeal or campaign. It is an unassuming work with an organic, engaging humanity. Alas, thanks to a mindless, authoritarian regime, it seems the Sudanese Film Group will struggle to move beyond their dark, dusty storeroom trove of 16mm cameras and Bunuel tapes, and the locals, who have a combined literacy rate of 47%, will continue to be failed by their government.

Talking About Trees is available on DVD and VOD on Monday, April 27.

Making a guerrilla documentary in ultra-homophobic Chechnya

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

You are unlikely to see a more important documentary made all year than Welcome to Chechnya. A work of investigative journalism depicting an undercover LGBTQ network helping gay men and woman escape from the barbarous Chechen regime, it is a breathtaking, invigorating and necessary work. We sat down with its director David France during the Berlinale, where it played in the Panorama Section, to discuss the making of the film, his thoughts about the region and whether the film may even be released in Russia itself.

Redmond Bacon –How did you gain access to Chechnya? This is a closed-off area…

David France – We had a cover story of why I was in Chechnya. It’s not a place that Americans go to visit or anybody goes to visit. But the World Cup was there so I posed as a wealthy American football fan, especially enamoured with the Egyptian team who had stayed in Chechnya. I hired these people to take me on a tour and they agreed because I was throwing money around. That was our story. I had to study up on football…

RB – What is the atmosphere in Chechnya like?

DF – I had never been in a place that is so closed. I felt watched and studied. There’s something in the air that I’ve never experienced before. I don’t even know how to describe it. I have done war reporting in Central American, Lebanon, Occupied Territories, Western Africa, but I never felt the kind of peril that you felt when you were there even though you didn’t really see it. There were no goons with guns and no military infrastructure in front of you, but you felt it anyway.

RB – What filmmaking techniques did you have to use?

DF – The two women who met with Anya were wearing hijabs. One of them was my DP, and she was shooting with a go-pro. I was across the restaurant with a cellphone, taking selfies or appearing to take selfies. It was guerrilla filmmaking.

RB – What kind of emotions did you feel? Did it feel dangerous?

DF – Not really. We had prepared very well with our security team. But we were detained briefly as we were leaving. That’s the scene in the film where they are reaching for passports. They were reaching for my passport and I had my cellphone between my legs and I was shooting that way. And when they called me out the car I just dropped the phone and walked out. I had a second cellphone that had all of my football fan tourism on it and they were shocked by the story we told them about me needing to come and see the Egyptian football in Chechnya. Eventually they were like: “this guy is way too crazy”. We were heading in the right direction out of the region anyway, so they just threw us back in the car.

RB – Can you talk about the danger for your documentary subjects? For them, this is life or death...

DF – It was especially dangerous for them. That’s why they wanted me there. The video would present an alibi if needed. “What are they doing there? Are they kidnapping this girl? Who are they? Is she consenting?” All of these questions would be disproved by whatever video we were shooting. In a way we were functioning as a failsafe for the activists and the work they were doing.

David France

RB – How did you initially establish contact with the LGBT network?

DF – I had read an interview with Olga Baranova, who is running the main shelter in Moscow. She had spoken publicly about her work. I was introduced to her and proposed that we make a documentary. She was interested at first, but there were the questions of security and protecting the identities of people within the shelter. We worked that all out quickly. Within three days I was there shooting.

RB – How did you come up with the idea to obscure their faces digitally while still allowing the audience to see their emotions? What was the rationale behind it?

DF – I had to make the argument to people who were on the run that we needed to see their faces in order to generate empathy. I needed to know what it was like to be them, to have been tortured so terribly, to have barely escaped, to be so dislocated from everyone, even your family, and to know that even your family has joined the hunt for you.

I promised everybody I would disguise them in some way although I didn’t know how yet. And yet they still agreed to let me do this. I had in my release form a question asking if they needed to be covered, or if they needed their voices to be disguised. And they would check those boxes and everybody on the run checked those boxes. I promised that I would return to them with my solution for their approval. I think they realised it was going to be a breakthrough film in this respect.

Once we began the work of research and development to find ways to cover them we began to worry very seriously that we had a movie that we would never be able to release.

Thankfully it worked and it’s been recognised as major new tool for documentary filmmakers. It gives back the power to people to tell their own stories. It gives them back their humanity.

RB – Did you worry that the film may have blown the network’s cover?

DF – They had a trade-off that they were weighing and that was their need to get the world to pay attention to what they’re doing. This was also the reason for the activists to appear with their real faces. Due to the increasing physical risk to them and to their safety, they believed that their notoriety from this film will add to their level of protection. David Isteev, for example, expects to do his work in some way. Of course, he’s not going to travel in and out of Chechnya after the film comes out. But he does believe that after passing that torch to others, he will be able to continue living the life he had before.

RB – What can Vladimir Putin do to successfully intervene in Chechnya? The region is volatile, and known for its two wars with Russia…

DF – Putin could tell Ramzan Kadyrov to stop it and Kadyrov could stop it just like that. Why isn’t he telling him? Because I believe that what’s happening in Chechnya is the extension of Putin’s policies for the last ten, fifteen years.

He has been systematically rolling back a cultural acceptance of the LGBT community in Russia. He did it by passing only one law. And that’s what they call the anti-gay propaganda law. This law makes it illegal to say anything in the presence of a minor that might be construed as suggesting the normalcy of LGBT folks.

It is legal to be gay in Russia. There are also no laws against gay sex in Russia, but there are no protections either. But Putin’s campaign in the last fifteen years is to create an appetite for traditional values and to rebuild the role of the Church in society after the collapse of communism. What he has done is weaponised homophobia to consolidate his power. And the logical extension of that is what’s happening in Chechnya, Dagestan, North Ossetia, and numerous other republics in the South and creeping throughout Russia. We’ve seen other explosions of extreme anti-queer violence in Russia.

What shocked me the most is the fact that I didn’t think that homophobia could be weaponised again the way it was in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. I thought that would be impossible. In almost every society we have celebrities who are queer, we have politicians running governments who are queer, we have people who are out in the industry and we have people marrying left and right.

But we also currently have the first place and first time since Hitler that a top-down government-sponsored campaign exists to round up LGBTQ people for execution. This hasn’t happened since the 30s.

RB – How challenging was it for you to show these shocking images? What was the reasoning behind them?

DF – It was not a hard decision at all. This is an ongoing crime against humanity that no one is paying attention to.

Without knowing what this persecution looks like, it makes people in the shelter’s journeys dismissible. We wanted to show the grotesqueness of what is happening there and what they are escaping.

RB – Can you talk about the film as a work of investigative journalism. After all, reporting out of Chechnya is scarce.

DF – The biggest failure is the failure of the news media. It was a Russian-based independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, that broke the story.

They’re the only paper in the world that’s been aggressive about reporting this story. The news cycle throughout the world, and throughout the West especially, has become inexcusably shallow. The economy is not there to continue investigative research and reporting, especially the way we knew it in the past. I’m an investigative journalist myself, I came to filmmaking through that. This film is a piece of investigative work of the sort that newspapers should be doing.

The idea for the movie is to get the story back in the headlines. Then people in the news media can amplify a call for justice from the audience, which will put pressure on governments around the world to bring effective pressure on Putin. Currently the only global leader who has taken him to task on this is Angela Merkel. There’s been nothing out of the United States.

RB – I’m so glad the film also shoots scenes of the refugee Maxim Lapunov and his boyfriend together in the bath and then playing by the beach. Because those are such tender, lovely moments in a film which is mostly very harrowing. Did you feel that you needed to include those love scenes?

DF – I’ve realised very early on that this is a film about love. Not just romantic love, but love in a much larger way. I thought I was making a film about hate but having spent time in the underground network I saw a remarkable expression of love.

I spent so much time with those guys that we, as filmmakers, disappeared. We were able to watch them really without them having any sense of us watching them. But yes, when I crawled into the bathroom they did notice.

RB – Will it play in a few independent cinemas in Moscow or St Petersburg perhaps?

DF – We are in genuine conversations with people at the Moscow Film Festival, and there are additional conversations with another festival in St.Petersburg. We believe that we will be invited there. But in Russia, in order to show a film, it needs a license by the Kremlin.

So whether the Kremlin give a license for this film is certainly an open question. I’m not the one negotiating these deals. We have an agent for foreign sales, who did tell me last night that they are deep in conversation about official commercial distribution in Russia. Will it happen? I don’t know. But I would love to see it happen.

The picture at the top of this article is from David France at the 70th Berlinale, where this interview was conducted, while the other two are from ‘Welcome to Chechnya’

Midnight Traveller

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

We first meet the Fazili family in Tajikistan, where they have been rejected for asylum. Hassan and his wife Fatma are both filmmakers on the run from the Taliban, who have a price on his head due to a documentary he made about one of their leaders. Their application to Australia, a thick wad of files numbering hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages, is also unsuccessful. Returning to Afghanistan, they decide that legal means will no longer suffice; they will make the journey to Germany over land.

Filmed over the course of three years with three phone cameras as the family travel through car, train and foot across the perilous Balkan smuggling route, Midnight Traveller is both a testament to the resilience of refugees and the power of filmmaking to effect real change. With narration from mother, father and eldest daughter, Midnight Traveller is a truly communal effort. Featuring personal touches such as Hassan and Fatma arguing about the value of morality in cinema, or discussing with their daughter about whether she wants to wear a headscarf (she doesn’t), the film is a deeply touching experience, making you root for the Fazili family to finally find peace.

There are two montages in Midnight Traveller that aim straight for the heart. One occurs about halfway through the film: a rush of snatched images such as playing in the park, riding in a fairground and rushing through dense thickets, a collection of moments to both hold onto and to overcome. The second, coming near the end is relatively similar, but this time uses memory to project a future of safety and peace. Brief yet effective, they elevate the movie from mere documentation into an embracing work of art, a homage to the idea of home and happiness, brutally rent by the barbaric concept of borders.

Midnight Traveller

With a fleet 90 minute run-time, it does feel like Midnight Traveller has been neatly packaged as if to be played in front of a court tribunal. The movie could have benefited from a heftier length, as that could really bring to bear just how difficult the journey really is. Despite effective editing, more of the story could’ve and should’ve been told.

Yet perhaps it needed to be made quickly, this film perhaps the only thing that gives the Fazili family a fighting chance of staying in Europe; their filmmaking talent bearing witness to their struggle and the difficulties they have been through. They are the lucky ones. They have money to pay smugglers and the keen sense to document their story to drum up international attention. Others from poorer backgrounds make the journey with less than nothing, relying only on the kindness of strangers in search of a better world.

There can never be too many documentaries about the migrant crisis because every single story deserves to heard. Every single story should play in a continuous loop somewhere until the leaders of Europe, from Russia to Serbia, UK to Germany, Hungary to Turkey, finally sit down together and make constructive efforts to build a better world. I welcome each of these films until this moment occurs.

Midnight Traveller is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 17th.

The Kingmaker

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

There’s one word you never hear in documentary The Kingmaker: “sorry”. Profiling the rise and fall and potential rise again of Imelda Marcos — former First Lady to the brutal dictator Ferdinand Marcos — it’s quite extraordinary that she still can’t see the consequences of her actions. This is a woman who assumes that she has done nothing wrong, determined to restore her family to their former glory.

Lauren Greenfield follows her for three years, providing a mixture of historical footage, talking heads and fly-on-the-wall campaigning as her son Bong Bong runs for Vice President. The result is truly compelling; kind of like The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2013) without the catharsis, a deadly warning that vast amounts of money has the ability to wipe away the sins of the past.

It begins with Imelda driving around the slums of Manila, handing out wads of cash to begging children and mothers. They know her by name, suggesting that this is a common occurrence. She later visits a children’s hospital built during her husband’s administration and complains that it looks nothing like it used to be. She hands out more money to mothers with dying children. The self-proclaimed “mother” of the Philippines and the world, the late octogenarian wants to be in charge of the country again. The question is how much cash should be handed out to make this a reality.

You’d think she’d know when to shy away from the limelight. Ferdinand established a deadly coup in the early 70s to consolidate power, killing thousands of people and torturing thousands more. Meanwhile, the family plundered the wealth of the country, holding the Guinness World Record for Greatest Robbery of a Government. She was a great believer in beautiful things, dubbed the “Marie Antoinette” of the Philippines due to her love of extravagant jewellery and her collection of over 3,000 shoes. Still, if you have vast wealth, anything can be possible. With the Marcos’ fortune estimated to be around $30 billion, and many in the country nostalgic for Ferdinand’s administration, they still possess the immense power to get things done.

The Kingmaker

Lauren Greenfield has scored a real coup here. Simply put, you’re unlikely to see a more fascinating subject interviewed all year. She would be a sympathetic figure if all you heard was her side of the story, yet Greenfield needfully speaks truth to power: she allows Marcos to say what she pleases, undercutting her lies by bringing in the testimony of activists, journalists and opposing politicians. It is the very opposite of Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews (2017), which albeit fascinating in their own way, inadvertently made the Russian leader seem even stronger. The depressing part is that nothing in this film will actually make a difference; it only lets us observe as the country struggles in vain to stop history from repeating itself.

And it probably will: Bong Bong narrowly missed the Vice Presidency in 2016 by just 0.64% of the vote to Leni Robredo. He appears to be a nice man, but he still cannot find a way to apologise for his father’s actions, even venerating him as a great figure. Yet they have an ace in their pocket with strongman Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, which was partly funded by their money. Duterte and his Vice President Rebredo — who was elected separately — do not get on, with him stating that he wants Bong Bong to be Vice President with the expectation he will step down and let Bong Bong replace him. In The Kingmaker, the raw power of money has rarely looked so strong.

The Kingmaker is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, December 13th. On VoD in March.

Shooting the Mafia

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

Letizia Battaglia followed a most dangerous career path – capturing the life and crimes of the Mafia in Palermo, Sicily’s capital. John Gotti may have loved celebrity, but none of the Mafiosi from the old country appreciated a young, brazen woman confronting them with a Pentax. ‘If he could, he would have killed me’, Letizia remarked of Luciano Leggio, a leading figure of the Sicilian Mob.

Her work, presented in stark monochrome, depicts death and suffering in the arresting style of Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths. Thematically, however, Letizia’s work may share more with that of Alexander Gardener, who used photography – then in its infancy – to confront the public with the horrors of the American Civil War.

This is what compelled Letizia to take some 600,000 photographs for the L’Ora newspaper – to shatter any romantic notions of the Cosa Nostra by depicting the rank brutality of their war on civil society. And it worked, her catalogue of dead men, women and children made a powerful impression on the people of Sicily, driving support for the heroic anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.

Shooting the Mafia isn’t just an organised crime documentary, though. It is the story of a girl and woman making her way in Sicily’s patriarchal society. Longinotto presents her subject in an intimate, engaging way, placing Letizia’s narration against a combination of stock and archival footage to tell her story.

However, this look into her personal life can overstay its welcome. Letizia’s early life is given a quaint, romantic quality, yet the continued emphasis placed on her later relationships can be of dubious interest. After all, it is her association with organised crime that makes her interesting, not her love life. Yet, despite this, there is a resonant tenderness about how she and her lovers talk about what their relationships meant. There is no acrimony, just an open discussion of why things transpired the way they did. It’s a reflection of the contentedness that can come with age.

Her work in public life makes for the most interesting viewing, though. Letizia states the importance of having a clean political system and she is absolutely right. Corruption is the harbinger of dysfunction, destitution and death. And the man who took the fight to the Mafia – Giovanni Falcone – was a hero. When asked about his life-risking commitment to the state, he answered, ‘it’s not about state, it’s about society’.

And the island society he was trying to save was wracked with terrible violence. ‘We’d never known violence like it, there were 1000 murders one year’, Letizia recounts. She confronted this menace head-on, documenting as many crimes as she could. Indeed, it was the photos she didn’t take that ‘hurt her the most’.

Shooting the Mafia is in UK cinemas on Friday, November 29th.

The Cave

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

The Cave opens with an establishing shot of Eastern Al-Ghouta, a dusty tableau of decrepit rooftops set against the mountains of the Syrian desert. Five to ten seconds pass before the scene is disturbed by a black object hurtling towards the ground, exploding in a billowing cloud of smoke. It’s a missile, and it’s followed by five more, causing untold terror and misery to the 400,000 people trapped in the devastated city.

This was the reality of the Siege of Eastern Ghouta, which the Syrian Government laid upon anti-government forces from April 2013 – April 2018, killing some 18,000 people and displacing 105,000 more. The Cave is a sobering depiction of the siege and the remarkable people who laboured to restore the threads of their crumbling society. Sadly, it is a struggle that continues in towns and cities across the ruined country.

The focaliser of the story is Dr. Amani Ballou, a young female paediatrician who managed a subterranean hospital known as the Cave with her colleagues Samaher, Dr. Alaa and Dr. Namour. We see bed after bed rush through the emergency entrance, the victims screaming in pain or sprawled out limply, clinging to life. Many of them are so young that they can barely articulate their suffering, they just cry or stare in confusion, covered with blood and detritus.

Dr. Amani is stoic and decisive in the face of this immense pressure, yet the carnage of the civil war is not the only thing she faces – she also receives attacks on her gender. The most notable example of this occurs when a man blames the medicine shortage in Al-Ghouta on her being a woman, ‘find someone who can help me… a male manager who can do a better job.’ What follows is a patriarchal spiel of how women should stay at home, but he is left stumped when Dr. Namour interjects, ‘as a doctor, has my work been bad in the presence of a female manager? Hospitals don’t rely only on one person, it’s teamwork.’

The filmmakers – led by director Feras Fayyad – observe this teamwork with skilful humanism. We see the chemistry between them amongst all the chaos; there are jokes, stories, bickering, but above all there is unerring purpose and perseverance. They make maximum use of the limited resources at their disposal and employ little rituals to keep them sane, such as the classical music Dr. Namour plays on his iPhone during surgery- ‘we don’t have anaesthetic, but we do have classical music!’, he tells one ailing patient.

For some, Syria has become a war rather than a country; a place of relentless violence, partisanship and religious fundamentalism. The Cave shows us the humanity of this awful conflict, immortalising the heroes who risk their lives to save thousands. And if you needed yet another reminder of the terrible loss this conflict has wreaked, four staff members lost their lives during filming of The Cave. They were: Abdul Rahman Alrihani, managing director; Wassam Albas, ambulance driver; Ezzedine Enaya, nurse; and Hasan Ajaj, nurse.

The Cave is out in UK cinemas Friday, December 6th.

The Street

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The devastating effects of gentrification are meticulously observed in documentary The Street, a scathing indictment of Tory austerity over the past four years. An empathetic portrait of a community in flux, it doubles up as a wide-spanning lament for a country that has seemingly lost its way.

The Street keeps things very local, maintaining all its action across one street in Hackney. It makes sense: London has always been a city of villages. You can still feel the distinct characters of certain districts as they flow into each other, blending contrasting architectural styles, eras and social types. Hoxton Street is one such village— located only one mile from the City of London, its characterised by its authentic East London feel. Yet with increasing monoculture on the rise, caused by the influx of the monied middle-classes, the street is in danger of losing any of its original authentic character.

It starts off pretty bleak. Nearly all the pubs are closed. Replaced by cafes. Garages, replaced by flats. Authentic eateries, replaced by craft beer bars. Only a few places hang on: an old garage sandwiched between two housing developments; a meat and pie shop that’s been in business for several generations; and a traditional bakery selling gingerbread men and apple tarts for a handful of change.

The Street

Photographer turned filmmaker Zed Nelson is a great listener, inserting himself when he needs to but rarely asking questions with a particularly pointed agenda. We talk to Octogenarian Coleen reminiscing about her lost loves; an Anglican priest about to lose his home when he’s forced to retire at 70; a homeless man living under a bridge. Nelson lets these locals speak more or less for themselves, explaining their sad situation and how rampant capitalism is making their lives increasingly more difficult.

But he’s also smart enough not to paint anyone’s struggle in simple black-and-white — and to simply take the word of the locals as the final point on the matter — creating a complex picture of both locals and those moving in. While some of the gentrifiers hang themselves with the rope they’re given (one barista calls Hoxton a “shithole”), other affluent immigrants are far more complex. An owner of an art gallery seems pretty attuned to the plight of her community even as she repurposes a laundromat. A late, heartbreaking twist turns her personal story on its head, reminding the viewer never to make assumptions and that ultimately we are all in this together.

It’s a vicious cycle: the things that made Hoxton Street great are the same things that cause its demise, in turn ruining anything that made it special in the first place. It’s one thing for a place to evolve positively— such as with the introduction of the Windrush generation and the rising economic power of the City — yet any change should’ve been properly managed with the help of the government, The Street squarely laming the blame on the negligence of the Conservative party.

As the double infliction of Brexit and Grenfell Tower impose even greater mental and physical harm upon the local population, the tragedy of Hoxton Street over the past four years becomes the tragedy of London, and by extension, the UK itself. Do the government care about working class people at all? Judging from this film, all evidence points to the contrary. While pointedly didactic (it may as well have said “Vote Labour” at the end) it earns the right to be, caring deeply for its subjects and begging for an empathetic solution.

The Street will be released in UK Cinemas on Friday, November 29th. On VoD in March!

Land Without God

Posted on by victorfraga

The camera opens on a middle-aged lady, seated by a derelict wooden table, eyes floorward positioned, mouth tightly closed. Probed and persuaded by a offshoot voice, the interviewee speaks on the silent promise that she owes it to the members who will not speak. Cutting to the streets of Dublin, Gerard Mannix Flynn walks the ever-changing streets of Dublin, steering his viewers into a searing portrait of a bygone Ireland.

Ireland is central to this documentary, journeyed as it is in the hills of Galway, mindful as it presents the aged towns in Offaly. The film presides over its narrative in a naturalistic way, but it is the people that make this story so pressingly important. The Flynn family offer their generational perspectives over the decades of institutional abuse that left them scarred. Anne , sister to the narrator, compares their childhood abandonment to cancer, the inner effects of a faceless disease eating its way through the body.

Land Without God does proffer some moments of devastating pathos. Returning to St. Conleths Reform School, Mannix finds a bird sitting on the splintered debris. Tellingly, the bird flies off just as he recalls the bruisings, beatings and moments of sexual abuse he encountered as a child. Clawing his ageing hands over the tumbled walls, Mannix remembers the times he prayed to a God that mocked him as the starry-eyed bird flies unknowingly into the misty skies.

Guilt hangs over the school just as guilt hangs in the interviewees. Margaret, one of the younger family members, speaks with rancorous disgust of the the Catholic Church and the way it treated its youthful fashioners. The film’s audience is primarily an Irish one, one born before the eighties at that, yet the humanity is universal, as the ragged aftermath is keenly heard from participant to participant.

This documentary, however, is not without flaws. Some frames are amateurish in display, some musical cues intrusive in their entrance and occasionally the voice-over adds little to the proceedings. The import of the film isn’t in its execution, but in its existence, ensuring that one of the more shameful phases of recent Irish history is remembered.

Land Without God is in Irish cinemas right now. A UK release has not been announced yet.