The British drama Mogul Mowglihas just premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, and BFI Distribution has picked up it up for a highly sough-after theatrical slot later this month, on October 30th. It tells the story of a British-Pakistani rapper about to embark on his world tour, when he’s tragically diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. The movie was directed and written by American-Pakistani helmer Bassam Tariq, and co-written and starred by British-Pakistani actor Rizwan Ahmed.
Dan Daniel sat down with Bassem in order to find out more about the origins of the film, his creative collaboration with the Ahmed (who happens to be a rapper, and all the songs in the movie), the learnt lessons and also a curious visual connection between Islam and the NHS!
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Dan Daniel – Riz Ahmed has a writing credit on the film. How collaborative was the process of making Mogul Mowgli?
Bassam Tariq – Massively collaborative. We took every step together on building the character of Zed (Riz Ahmed). He’s an amalgamation of both him and I. And you know, the world that we built around Zed, so much of it was his family and my family and the conditions and everything – we took bits and pieces of both of our lives and that’s how we put it together.
DD – So how did it all begin? What made Riz and you decide that you could make this film?
BT – Yeah, that’s a good question! Cinereach are this incredible arts organisation who gave us some money – seed funding – to go to Pakistan to explore. So Riz and I went to Pakistan together and it was really our first time getting to know one another and seeing what we were about and how we can work together. And in that relationship, there in that trip, it cemented to me the importance of music in this film and how we could possibly use music to ground these experiences and build something that was unlike anything we had ever seen before. And I think I wanted to use the arc of music and Riz’s lyrical capacity because I think it’s quite exciting, so I wanted to push him musically. So much of this film was seeing how far I could push Riz into doing exciting and weird things!
DD – Were the lyrics penned by Riz in their entirety?
BT – Yeah! Riz would pen all the lyrics but he would always run them by me and I’d say, “I don’t know if that makes sense, maybe we could try it this way or this way etc.”. But it’s all Riz, sitting there in a room right before we’re about to film like “uh what if we say this? What if we say that?”. I also have to say that Adam Biskupski our editor did a phenomenal job of building out some of the lyrics because some things got really long, so we had to cut it down and work out, how we do make sure the lyrics are still making sense and we are cutting in a way that feels elegant and we are not losing the rhythms of the words, or the intensity?
DD – Your film is a great character study. Did you and Riz have any rehearsal time in order to build his performance?
BT – We had maybe a day or two in rehearsal, man. I was able to meet with all the actors one-on-one and tell them, “look, we are all going to be figuring this out on the day and we are bringing our best”, and I think that kind of worked for us, that element of throwing ourselves into it and not having too much preparation, so I think it was giving people the space to explore and bring their best, and it was exciting to see how people were really able to shine that way. There were a lot of meetings I had with Nabhaan Rizwan, the actor that plays RPG, and of course Riz and I were working non-stop on the project together, so everything was like a weird rehearsal when we were figuring things out.
DD – How long did it take from writing to shooting the film?
BT – No, not much. We were just writing and I had written a draft and people would come on board and we were like “oh no, we have to make this better and better”. We were building the tracks as the train was moving.
DD – You used a lot of greens and teal shades and the aspect ratio is unusual. Please tell us how you styled the film visuals.
BT – Yeah man, so green is a really important colour in the Islamic culture as well as the Persian and South Asian Pakistani heritage. And the thing about teal is that it’s the colour of the NHS, like gowns and outfits. It felt like we wanted colour to be in the film was very sparse but when there was colour, we really wanted it to hit you so it always quite earned. It was tough. We knew most of this film would take place in hospitals so we wanted to figure out a way to build up to the points of colour and the rest of the film to be quite neutralised. It’s a risky decision I would say, and it’s a bit hard to watch sometimes because we’ve purposefully made the film a bit messy and it’s tough thing to sometimes look at because you want to make things prettier as a filmmaker, right!. But you know you have to be in service of the story, and the story called for it to be shot this way and I felt that’s how we had to bring it to life.
DD – Have you gained any more insight or learnt something about about yourself while making this film?
BT – Oh man. I think every experience you have as a filmmaker is honing your instincts, helping you understand how to work with different kinds of people. You’re learning so many things along the way you know, somebody said to me once, “if you are not embarrassed of who you were a year ago, you’re not learning enough” and I find that to be so great because when I look back where I was last year, I feel so embarrassed versus where I am now, because it’s like “oh my god I can’t believe I did those things, and I think that’s a good way to exist, when you look back and you see all those things that you’ve learned.
I’d say the biggest thing I’m learning is how to really trust your instincts and to really guard them, and also bringing people in in a really respectful way and how you speak to them. If there’s one thing I’m really proud of that we did in this film was that we tried to create a very welcoming environment and we tried to be very kind and respectful to everybody in the crew.
They could’ve been on any other project but they chose to be on mine so it really meant a lot to me. I think also having a sense of gratitude in every step that I take when I work on this stuff. Because you never know if your stuff is gonna get made as a filmmaker. You don’t know. This could be my first and only film. And that’s what I have to learn to live with.
DD – I do hope we’ll see more films from you in the future!
BT – Thank you Dan, that means a lot to me.
The image at the top of this article is of Bassam Tariq, the one in the middle is of Tariq and Ahmed, and the one at the bottom is a film still of Ahmed
During the recent San Sebastian International Film Festival, we managed to get some time to sit with Lithuania’s foremost director Šarūnas Bartas and discuss his latest film Into the Dusk. This is a period picture set in 1948 that depicts the Russian occupation of Lithuania following WW2. It follows the relationship between homesteader Pliaugai’s family and the group of partisan rebels encamped in the nearby backwoods.
What follows is a primer to the historical context of the film and how the film was inspired by Bartas’s adolescence, growing up in the shadow of Lithuania’s Soviet occupation. The fate and background of certain characters is outlined in detail and as such the interview is best used as a companion piece to the film itself, to flesh out some of the more obtuse elements from this quiet but affecting piece.
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Charles Williams – I imagine that In the Dusk refers to the dusk of the war, after the frontline fighting has finished. This is kind of the twilight that follows. Is that where you’re coming from yourself with the title?
Šarūnas Bartas – Yeah, I was. I was born when the last partisan was killed – at the same moment, more or less – there was resistance for a few decades. In the beginning it was stronger, much more organised. This is the resistance against Soviet occupation but, year by year, these people were destroyed and one decade later they still were in the forest with weapons and so on. Everyone was waiting for the Russians to leave, to move away. Not only us but all the world was almost sure that after WW2 they would leave the Eastern European territories, but they didn’t. They went an absolutely different way. They took a part of Berlin, they cut it into pieces.
CW – I was going to ask about the overall plan of the partisans shown in the film. There doesn’t seem to be much organisation beyond waiting for things to blow over.
SB – It’s normal. There are three years already passed being in the forest, not being able to show up somewhere in the village in the daytime or something.
CW- No idea how many other groups are left as well, no communication between the cells.
SB – They were still connecting somehow but it was always more and more difficult. In 1948 it was already clear that nothing would happen.
CW – From a British perspective, when you hear of men in the woods, resisting, we have the legend of Robin Hood and the Merry Men. But in their case it was just resisting a local landlord as opposed to a monolithic Empire and the scale is so different.
SB – Well, just imagine if part of England was occupied by Nazis. People somehow would try to resist them.
CW – Whilst we’re on the partisan group, I was interested in their names. ‘Dollar’, ‘boar’ – are these names accurate depictions of real rebels?
SB – They had codenames. Most of them had different names, like ‘Eagle’.
CW – The partisans of the film are such a small group, they can’t really afford to be so vicious on how they internally police themselves. When there are executions for infractions, removing some of their number, it’s not something they can really afford to do but they are trying to uphold their principles.
SB – In the very beginning the USSR was weak, having just taken Berlin. But they were there. With their armies, their horses. I show the biggest group of people that might be hiding and not traced easily. You have to supply the food, there is snow all the time leaving footsteps. You hear stories from the people who live around who supply them with food… They leave traces so they go on purpose into the wood.
CW – The more people you have the more exponential the difficulty of hiding them.
SB – Normally it was five or six people who live there and also the forests are not so deep. They had to create an infrastructure of collaborators.
CW – Could you explain the situation of Inges, the farmhand who works there? It seems he wasn’t paid anything except a place to stay, some food from the farm… The whole talk about giving him land – that would have been his only payment?
SB – No, normally they were all paid, the workers, but we didn’t show that they buy some stuff, you know? Like some food.
CW – It seemed very similar to the situation of Unte’s parents. Pliaugai said they were poor, working on a farm. On the one hand he is generous to take in Unte but on the other he is not willing to award some land to Inges which could be construed as his eventual downfall, when the communists roll in and parcel up the land, offering it as reward to collaborators… Perhaps if he had been more open-handed?
SB – Eventually it was a lie, a huge lie. Nobody gave the land to anyone. All the lands were taken and all these people, like Pliaugai, they went to Siberia and they died there.
CW – That is Pliaugai’s fate, following the events of the film?
SB – Finally they took all the land. When I was a teenager, all the land belonged to the government. All the flats belonged to the government. You could have one car, one car for one family – not more. It was like a prison. Before, okay, they were shouting that they would give the land to those who would work on it. But it was a huge lie. That lie was used to get rid of people who were wealthy and somehow be a danger to the regime.
CW – Are any of these stories inspired by personal family stories recounted to you directly? Partisan family members throughout the years?
SB – A lot of stories I heard in my childhood, from my great-grandparents. I had five which I remember, and grandparents. They were telling every day, all the time.
CW – Have you been doing a lot of research personally in order to o get the specifics of In the Dusk?
SB – We had to do the research but in Soviet times there was every year a thick book of Soviet union history and one thin book for all years of Lithuanian history. That’s when I was in school but now it’s different times and I was mostly reading diaries of partisans. Which were written not later, and not before. They were written in the bunkers, in the forests. Diaries, just diaries that show that exact moment.
Still there are partisans that are alive these days but there isn’t much use in talking to them. They forget a lot, they are very old people already, and also they were speaking about that so many times it becomes almost a cliché to them.
CW – In your film, the partisans keep diaries, and listen to transmissions from the US, from President Truman. Is this a reflection of their composition as formerly well-educated people with land?
SB – They were printing papers, they were spreading them in the villages, the country, the city. It wasn’t finished until 1991. There were several editions of underground newspapers, very difficult to find but they were still going when I was 20 or 19. Mostly they went through the church.
CW – They were finding out the news from the church?
SB – In church it was easier to cover the dissemination. It was the Vatican church, we have a different church. We are Catholics and Russians are Orthodox.
CW – Are you looking to do more period filming? Depending on the stories that come to mind?
SB – Long ago we had a historical film about the Middle Ages… I don’t know.
CW – Finally, what is in the berry juice that they’re always drinking?
SB– It’s not a juice, it’s something else. There’s no equivalent. It’s a starch water but not so liquid, you add juice and it’s a little heavy. Like a jelly but it’s not completely jelly. It’s still popular in Lithuania today. [This turned out to be the unappetising-looking kissel]
The two images at the top are of Šarūnas Bartas, snapped by Montse Castillo. the other two are stills from ‘In The Dusk’.
Mark Cousins’ Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema is a follow-up to his earlier work, The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2016). Again he explores how movies are made, but this time through hundreds of clips from films directed by women.
In actress Tilda Swinton’s introduction voiceover, she says, “Most films have been directed by men; most of the so-called movie classics were directed by men. But for 13 decades and on all six filmmaking continents, thousands of women have been directing films too. Some of the best films. What movies did they make? What techniques did they use? What can we learn about cinema from them? Lets look at film again through the eyes of the world’s women directors. Lets go on a new road movie through cinema.”
The documentary is structured around a series of “how to” questions, the film broken down into 40 chapters that begins with Openings and ends on Song and Dance. In between are chapters discussing a range of subjects, amongst them: believability, framing, tracking, dream and bodies.
In conversation with DMovies, Cousins spoke about being drawn to the external world rather than his internal world, the need to bleed cinema of gender generalisations, and how we all have the power to instigate a change to keep the contributions of women filmmakers alive.
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Paul Risker – Film and storytelling to my mind is a process of answering questions. Would you agree, and what led you to decide to structure the film with a series of “how to” questions?
Mark Cousins – I don’t think I’ve heard the idea that filmmaking is about asking questions, but I can see what you mean. I always ask myself, “How do I avoid banality?” Another way of saying this is, “What is the form?” The conventional way of looking at the great female filmmakers would be chronological, or looking at industry employment trends, or doing interviews, or to report on the Weinstein revelations. I decided to do none of these things. Instead, I wanted to focus on the work of the filmmakers, not their gender or victimisation. Once you decide to look at the work, then – if you’re a filmmaker rather than a more theoretical person – you end up, by a process of elimination, asking “how” to questions.
PR – One of optimistic impressions to take away from Women Make Film is that in spite of women filmmakers being marginalised, they’ve found a way to express their creativity. Would you agree that this is a source of optimism?
MC – I agree that Women Make Film is a work of optimism, or I’d say affirmation. It’s about what has been made, rather than what hasn’t been made. I passionately believe in structural change in the film world and the revolution against sexism, but – also – years ago I became a bit impatient with those activists who hadn’t actually seen many of the thousands of films directed by women.
Also, I don’t quite see the great films directed by women as a sign that human storytelling can’t be silenced. I don’t think that film is necessarily a storytelling medium, to be honest. I realise that sounds contrary, but many of my favourite films: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), Vagabond (Agnes Varda, 1985), The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova, 1990), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), D’est (Chantal Akerman, 1995), etc, aren’t really very story driven! And on your bigger point about creativity: Again I don’t want to sound contrary, but when people make films (or make anything) they are not necessarily expressing themselves! I certainly don’t have a rich inner life that I’m desperate to share with the world. It’s the world, the outer life that is rich, and I use my cinema to clock it, to bear witness to the richness and to throw my anchor onto it.
PR – In your opinion, does it harm cinema to have a focus on gender? Should the end goal be beyond equality, reducing the focus on gender to appreciate the filmmaker as “filmmaker?”
MC – Focusing on gender was a necessary means to an end. I hugely admire the pioneering film feminists of the 1970s and since, who came up with ideas such as the male gaze. But the end was not, I think, to identify and separate male and female cinema, as if they are black and white chess pieces. The idea, surely, was to out the unacknowledged power and gender imbalances in film production and aesthetics. Once that was done and at the very moment it was done, it was also important to bleed cinema of gender generalisations, like you bleed a radiator. There is nothing gendered about the movie frame; it’s an androgynous rectangle, and that’s one of the reasons why shy people and queer people in particular like it. To go to the cinema is to escape the pressure to be what a man or woman is supposed to be like. The voice-over artists in WMF have all brilliantly embodied that in their work.
PR – In your video essay on the Blu-Ray release, you speak about your collaborators who watched films, suggesting scenes, supporting you in researching and making the film. Hearing this, my immediate thought was how we can only understand film together – filmmakers, critics, audiences, academics and scholars, amongst others including technicians and actors. To my mind, you remind us of the importance of a community of ideas, of sharing to fully understand cinema.
MC – In my real life, I totally agree with you on this. Co-operation is one of the biggest themes – it’s the final message in the first great poem, the epic of Gilgamesh, for example. And yes, my collaborators on this film were great: John Archer and Clara Glynn at Hopscotch Films, my regular editor Timo Langer, executive producer and voiceover artist Tilda Swinton. The other voiceover artists: Jane Fonda, Debra Winger, Sharmila Tagore, Kerry Fox, Adjoa Andoh, Thandie Newton. Our London-based researcher Sonali Battarachya, the great LA film historian Cari Beauchamp, etc. But I hope you don’t think I’m again trying to disagree with you! My desire for cinema has always been a solitary thing. I’m quite an anxious person, and am often worrying what other people around me are thinking. Alone in front of the screen, such social and psychological worries ebb.
PR – Do you believe access to film should continue to be a concern? I ask because there are filmmakers featured in this documentary whose work audiences will likely only see these small glimpses.
MC – Definitely, and Women Make Film is a shoulder to the wheel of advancement. Many of the filmmakers featured within it are dead, but that doesn’t mean that their work has stopped contributing to film culture. In some cases – for example the McDonagh sisters in Australia, who were successful in the silent time – the directors have stopped (been prevented from) contributing to movie culture. We can make that change; everyone reading this can make it change.
PR – Speaking with Pollyanna McIntosh about her feature directorial debut Darlin’, she told me, “I’d love to just never talk about the film and just let people experience it how they experience it, because you don’t make a film to say: This is what the case is, this is the truth”. Do you agree with this sentiment, and what are your hopes for the experience of the audience?
MC – Totally. On the day that I complete a film, I want to stop speaking about it because the thinking is over, the picture is locked, the sound is mixed. The reason that I do speak about my work a bit is because it’s a tough world out there for fledglings.
Director Oliver Laxe’s third feature Fire Will Come (2019), centres on Amador (Amador Arias), an arsonist only just released from prison who returns home to his mother (Benedicta Sánchez). But when a new fire threatens his community, he becomes the likely suspect.
The film opens with a majestic image of nature, interrupted by the aggressive destruction of man made machinery. From the outset Laxe hypnotises, the power or emphasis of the image central to the experience of the film. Less interested in the intricacies of relationships or answering the question of guilt, the story is crafted with an attention to the senses. The way the film is shot and scored treats cinema as art, not attempting to explain itself, but something we look at and feel. There is a narrative present, but it’s more of a silent narrative, the storyteller not explaining point by point the thoughts and the feelings of his characters, rather he trusts us to be active participants, to create meaning through the projection of our own emotions and thoughts.
In conversation with Paul Risker from DMovies, Laxe spoke about cinema as an act of submission, the artist’s absurd request for an audience’s love, and the need to escape one’s inner world.
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Paul Risker – Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?
Oliver Laxe – Since I was a child I have escaped inside of myself a little. I sense this flavour when I imagine images and they agitate me, or when I’m in a place and I feel something while I’m there, and I enjoy introducing that flavour in images.
I’m not a subject filmmaker – “I want to make a film about that.” It’s more about colours and images, faces and places. I like to call those images “essential images”, that are deep inside and that want to exist. It’s as if they use you to exist, and these iconic and essential images are clear to me, and so I try to relate them. And for Fire Will Come, I saw the first images of the eucalyptus and I wanted to make that scene like falling into night; the fight between machine and forest, but there are no more machines. I don’t know what they are, but they’re not bulldozers.
When we ask ourselves the motivation of why we make a film, it’s easy to let yourself as a filmmaker. For me, there are different reasons, in part because I always wanted to come back to the village where my mum was born, which is where we shot the film. I was attracted by the fire and the place, I was attracted to the images, but as to why I wanted to make a film about something simple, about love and mercifulness, I don’t know.
PR – Is there an unconscious dimension to the process, in which not every choice is a conscious one?
OL – It’s very organic and I’m quite agitated by this will that you’re obliged to do it. I don’t know if my films are good or not, but it’s clear that it’s necessary for me, and you feel that when you are watching a film – you feel what is necessary or not for the filmmaker. We filmed inside real fires and now when I look back on that I think, “Come on, you’re crazy.” [Laughs] But when we were shooting, it was natural.
I like to say that cinema is an art of submission, which is a very frustrating thing but it’s what is good about cinema. It‘s something that transcends you – something that is not you takes the opportunity to express itself across you and the cinema. It’s crazy, and sometimes I have the idea or the image that someone is pushing me and all my crew and actors to a river that we follow. It’s as if the current of the river makes the film, and we try to swim, but you have to let go and abandon yourself.
I remember someone gave me some advice that I appreciated: “You have to be crazy to want to be someone. Fight to try to be no one. Try to be void, and it’s when you are void that something can agitate you.” If we apply that to the art then I agree, and I’m quite existentialist and determinist in the way that I think about life. There is a relationship between imagination and image and inspiration, which I trust.
PR – Does the filmmaking process create a space in time where you can explore the different sides of your personality?
OL – There is a hole of love when we come into this world and each one of us tries to transcend this hole, to jump it by asking for love or not, but each of us in a different way. This is what medicine calls a neurosis and obviously the way artists ask for love is related to this scar. But in our way it’s like saying to the spectator, “Look at what I do, love me.” It’s such a ridiculous thing [laughs] because when you mature, you understand that you don’t need to do that – to have love.
Art helps you to work because you’re blind and so you need that tool. The problem is when we think the tool is a kind of God, but it’s just a tool. We see that filmmakers keep using this tool when they don’t need to and we can see these filmmakers suffer. They think they’re not inspired, but it’s just they don’t need to make their films anymore, and continuing to make films, we feel that they have no soul. This is the reason why I am trying to adapt myself and why my films are increasingly simple, and complex at the same time.
Art is born from an inner adaptation, and I’m curious watching the work I do because I discover and understand that subtly – I unconsciously make films about region of personality. For example, that’s why I made a film about tolerance because I’m quite intolerant [laughs]. I’m somewhat of a judge, and I know it’s something I have to work on, to not judge and that’s the reason for this character [Amador]. But this is something I understood after, and also another side of my personality is that I’m an artist, and we are quite obsessive compulsive, so there is that aim of perfection. We are perfectionists, but cinema is the art of imperfection. You are never going to make the film you want to, never. I think it’s a good thing for me to try to become detached and to manage expectation.
PR – From communicating with the layers or aspects of your personality, why then seek a detachment?
OL – Cinema is a parallel and you have to be detached to avoid yourself – you have to let something inside of you go. It’s strange, but cinema is a perfect tool to invite some transcendental meanings to exist. We provoke something, but life always transcends, not always, but if you do it in a way that allows life to express itself, then it will transcend you, the author. That’s why I don’t like auteur or art house movies because at the moment cinema is becoming more polarised between art house cinema and commercial, market place films, and I think we have to keep crossing these two boundaries. Art is very comfortable in making films for an artist elite, and the depth and power of cinema is that it’s high culture and popular culture at the same time. I want to resist that way of making films more – both dimensions are my thing.
PR – You refrain from explaining the relationships, thoughts and motivations of Amador. Do you trust the audience to critique the character and the story for themselves?
OL – The narrative is quite universal – the son that comes back home who either will or will not adapt. I’m interested in psychology in my life, but not when I make films. I like some psychological movies, but I wanted to make an essential movie, and when I say essential, I’m talking about the essence inside of us, and that the characters have too.
There is the essence and there is the personality that surrounds it – the psychology and the neuroses. I didn’t want to make a film about the personality, which means mask and persona. I wanted to cross over that to the essence, and when you touch this essence, you are touching the essence of the spectator that is connected a little bit with the character’s.
This is when the artist’s gesture of the countryside agitates me because I’m from that valley, and my parents they still have these gestures of the nature of the countryside. So the process was to try to not write but to do the opposite, and to always try to find an economy. They are simple people in the countryside and I’d like to be like that because the modern human being has too much of an inner world. It’s an illness, it’s too much and I’m not interested in that.
The image at the top of this interview is from Oliver Laxe, the other ones are stills from ‘Fire Will Come’, which is available now on all major VoD platforms
In director Nick Rowland’s directorial feature debut Calm With Horses, an adaptation of Colin Barrett’s short story, ex-boxer Douglas ‘Arm’ Armstrong (Cosmo Jarvis) has become the feared enforcer for the drug-dealing Devers family. While spending much of his time with business partner, he also tries to be a good father to his autistic young son. But when he is asked to kill for the first time, his loyalties are tested.
Rowland’s previous credits include the BBC series Ripper Street and Hard Sun, and his short films have broached a range of subjects, from Dancing in the Ashes (2012) about a young Jewish ballerina in a Nazi concentration camp to Group B (2015), about a rally driver making his comeback to competitive racing.
In a candid conversation with DMovies, Rowland detailed his specific approach to the cinematography, the audience’s impression of “hyper-violence”, the surprising transformation of his own interest in the story, and much more!
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Paul Risker – Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?
Nick Rowland – I spent most of my teenage years rally driving, so I was heavily focused on motorsport. I grew up in the Midlands near Peterborough and there wasn’t a cinema in my town, so I had to travel into the city. I wasn’t hugely exposed to cinema growing, but I’ve always been quite sensitive and artistic, and interested in creating things. When I was 19 years old I moved to Scotland with my mum, and being away from a lot of my friends it was around that time I began watching movies – the Film4 channel and more art house films.
I remember watching Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 19916) and Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2008) on a double bill, and until then I’d absorbed the stories, and those two films together made me become interested in the way they’d been told – the point of view, the camera work and the way they’d been edited.
The reason why I went to film school was because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life once my racing career dried up. I took an online multiple choice quiz and the first thing it suggested was to be a librarian, and I thought, ‘I can’t do that because I’m dyslexic.’ Number two on the list was film production, so I took myself off to film school.
PR – Is the short story more well suited to film adaptation than a novel because you are able to add to the source material, as opposed to condensing it?
NR – I can only speak from my experiences because I’ve never adapted a novel, and Calm With Horses is more of a novella – it was a 70 page short story. It was perfect because it gave us a skeleton, but it was missing a second act, and for us it was very much about retaining the spirit of the novella. We had to build on it rather than cut it down and that’s more of a creative process.
The short story is focused on the crime side of the plot and while you do see Cosmo Jarvis’s character with his son, they’re not linked to the story in any way – they’re little vignettes that give you a bit of characterisation. We wanted to draw that side of the story out and to make that the heartbeat of the film, and to also expand Niamh Algar’s character [Arm’s ex-partner].
Making the leap from short films to features and having a skeleton to work from, and the characters in place to develop was a great experience. Film4 were very supportive and also Colin Barrett was not precious over the material. Once he gave us the option, he just said, “Go mad lads and do what you want with it.” In his eyes a successful adaptation is something that develops the idea further, and it has to change because the medium is changing.
PR – Was it your intention throughout the film to create a movement between the wide shot close up, and specifically in the film’s opening violence?
NR – One of the first things I do when I’m thinking about how to shoot the scene is to think about the point-of-view that we’re in at that moment. With this film, a lot of the time the point-of-view is fixed very closely to Arm and that’s because he doesn’t say much, and he’s not very good at articulating what he wants or how he’s feeling. So it’s important that the camera is seemingly subjective much of the time so that we are in his head, and we can feel what he’s feeling and pick up on very small details and little clues that give us insight into what’s going on in his head.
This would sometimes dictate being close to him, but by contrast I wanted to introduce him in an objective rather than a subjective way, and that’s why the opening beating is more voyeuristic, and it’s in a wide shot. I wanted to present Arm and his day job of beating people up in a cold and unsympathetic way, and then invite you to actually empathise with him as the film goes on.
I find it funny that some people have said that the film is “hyper-violent” or it’s one of the most violent movies they have ever seen. There are only two scenes of violence in the film, but when the violence is onscreen it’s visceral and it does mean something. The violence has consequences and weight to it, and it’s very unpleasant. There’s a lot of tension throughout the film and the threat of violence is around the corner, and that’s what probably gives people this feeling of violence throughout the whole piece. But it’s only ever used sparingly and for the sake of the story.
PR – Would you agree that film is not just a narrative experience, but is a piece of art to be looked at and experienced aesthetically?
What I love about cinema is the fact it’s an art form that encompasses so many other things. It’s theatre and emotion, performance and story, mixed with painting and images, music, sound design and architecture. There are so many layers to it, and it’s how all these things mix together that makes it so effective and exciting when it’s done well.
Piers McGrail does a fantastic job with the cinematography, but it’s the way it’s complimented by Matis Rei’s sound design, and Blanck Mass who did the soundtrack. It’s all of those three elements working together that allow you to move into more expressionistic places.
As I was saying earlier, telling the story from a very subjective point-of-view allows you to be expressionistic with the language of the story. For example, there’s a scene in the nightclub where the camera moves in on Cosmo and transitions into slow motion. There’s the music that Blanck Mass wrote for that track, and it’s diegetic music that’s actually playing in the space, that responds to Arm’s emotions in that moment. Then there’s the sound design that takes over and heightens the subjectivity. Moments like that I get the most thrill out of because you’re using all of the tools at your disposal to allow you to show and to feel an emotion, rather than just telling the audience. And that’s when I think it’s the most fun for all of us as collaborators because we are all riffing off of each other.
PR – Filmmaker Christoph Behl remarked to me: “You are evolving, and after the film, you are not the same person as you were before.” Do you perceive there to be a transformative aspect to the creative process?
NR – Over a five-year period I’m a very different person to who I was when I stepped up to make the film. What’s interesting is that what initially attracted me to the story was the genre, the crime story elements, but as the project went on I became more interested in the emotional and dramatic side with his son and ex-partner. So as the project developed more of the sensitivity came to the fore, and also once you get actors involved, then the film day-by-day naturally morphs because you’re reacting to one another, you’re finding the film together and that’s always exciting.
I feel like such a different filmmaker now than I was when I started and I think if only I could go back to the start again with everything I know now, I would love that opportunity. But that’s what drives you onto the next project. By the time you get to the end of the story you’re so saturated, and it has beaten you down in many ways. I remember as soon as I’d finished Calm With Horses, I just had a huge desire to do a love story or a romance film after spending years with these gangsters.
Nick Rowland is pictured at the top of this interview. The other images are from ‘Calm with Horses’, which is available on all major VoD platforms now.
Rose has been a director since the 1980s, when he became known for the original video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax – the one that was banned, and made the song a hit from club play. He had worked with Jim Henson on The Muppet Show television series and the film The Dark Crystal (Jim Henson and Frank Oz, 1982) previously, and snagged a deal with the BBC. His first full-length feature film as a director was Paperhouse (1988), a cult hit mainly on video, but was well reviewed by several critics, including Roger Ebert, who raved about it when he caught it at a festival.
Paperhouse was made with Vestron Video, which did have some theatrical hits like Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardoline, 1987)but expected to make their money back on video. He is still probably best remembered for Candyman (1992), the most original horror movie of the 1990s. Based on a Clive Barker story, it also had something to say about race and class. Candyman is due for a reboot/remake with Jordan Peele later this year, with Tony Todd reprising his role as the titular character.
Rose did Immortal Beloved (1995) with Gary Oldman as Beethoven, which garnered a mixed response, and unfavourable comparisons to Amadeus (Milos Forman, 195). His next film Anna Karenina (1997) was a tremendous flop. It started a string of films inspired by Tolstoy, but that was the only one set in Russia. Rose followed it up with Ivans XTC (2002), one of his very best, also based on story by Tolstoy but set at the turn of the Millennium Los Angeles. Danny Huston made his name in the lead. It was an extraordinary film, one of the very few that was shot on high-def video before the technology improved that was really good. It’s about the last week in the life of a film agent on a booze and coke bender.
Rose did a few horror films in the late ’00s, plus the Howard Marks biopic Mr. Nice (201) and a film about Paganini. Before Samurai Marathon (2019), his most recent project was an interesting, low-budget Frankenstein (2015) set in modern LA, also starring Huston, who has appeared in almost every film Rose has made since Ivans XTC, including his latest. Samurai Marathon is a Japanese Samurai film set in the Edo period. It’s probably the largest scale film he has done in some time.
Samurai Marathon is out now on VoD. You should be able to find it on Amazon, Apple, TalkTalk TV and the Sky Store (Amazon and Apple are the cheapest options).
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Ian Schultz – How did your newest film Samurai Marathon come around? It’s certainly a change of pace for you.
Bernard Rose – Well, basically, Jeremy Thomas—the British half of the producing team—emailed me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to go to Japan to do a Samurai picture. I thought the answer to that question had to be YEAH! It really was as simple as that, I then went to Japan and met with Toshiaki Nakazawa, the other producer. We got into some discussion about the screenplay they were developing. I then rewrote the screenplay, and then we rewrote the screenplay I wrote into Japanese. That’s the short version, but it was pretty much that. The unusual thing about much of it was me going into a Japanese production, rather it being a Western project going over there to shoot.
IS – Is this the first time you’ve directed for hire, at least in a feature film sense?
BR – Well, in a sense you are always in effect ‘for hire’ if you’re doing the film and are being paid a fee. We spent a good year and a half working on the screenplay, so it wasn’t just like a “here’s the script, do the job” kind of thing.
IS – What was the most challenging part of making a film in Japan, and in Japanese?
BR – It was actually a lot of fun, to be honest with you! It’s interesting to go into another culture in that kind of way. I didn’t know that much about the Edo period when I started the picture, other than what I had seen in movies. I then realised after a while that most of what people know, including the Japanese, about the Edo period comes from the movies. I think in a sense that world of the Samurai has become a kind of mythic arena that has been taken as much from Westerns: Kurosawa was influenced by John Ford. It’s an arena where you can tell mythic stories rather than it being necessarily being restricted to one specific culture, and there’s always been this weird kind of cross-cultural fertilisation in the Samurai movie… between the Samurai movie and the western, certainly. I think all cultures have a weird kind of “Golden Age” mythical path they revert to. In Europe, it’s kind of Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe, 1953), and in America it’s the West, and in Japan it’s the Edo period.
IS – What were some Samurai films you looked at, besides maybe the obvious Kurosawa films?
You say we all know them, we all know Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954), but they don’t necessarily know the more obscure ones. There are lot of interesting, more recent Samurai films, and some that are in a more classic vein, like Twilight Samurai (2002) by Yoji Yamada and things like that, which has an almost Freudian quality. The things Jeremy and Nakazawa made before such as 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, 2010), which is much more an action picture, I suppose. The parallels with the Western: one influenced the other, and then it was influenced back. I think Kurosawa came up with the modern concept of violence in cinema with slow motion, which was very much picked up on by Peckinpah, of course. It first appeared in Seven Samurai, and of course Lucas basically based Star Wars on The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 2002; pictured below). It was interesting to go back and inject something a little different—but not making a western film, it’s still very much a Japanese movie.
IS – How was it working with Jeremy Thomas for the first time? Because he seems like such a logical choice for you, with his track record of working with Nicolas Roeg, Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, Bernardo Bertolucci, etc.?
BR – He is one of the greatest producers of all time, and is a lovely guy in all respects. He is incredibly helpful and respectful at the same time, two incredibly unusual characteristics for a producer. He is the greatest! What can you say? Jeremy started in the cutting room: he was an editor, so he is very good in post-production too. He just has so much experience and knowledge, and just knows how to deal with people in such a kind of supportive way. He is really the best.
IS – Have you been consulted on the new Candyman movie or not?
BR – Yeah… I’ve had some conversations with Jordan Peele about it but… I don’t think I can tell you anything. It’s coming out this year, and I think it will be rather good, I hope it’s good. I haven’t seen it, and they must be close to being done with it.
IS – When is the remastered Ivan’s XTC coming out?
BR – Hopefully later this year—there’s been some discussions, but we’ll see.
IS – You were a pioneer in digital filmmaking with Ivan’s XTC early on. Do you have any regrets that you didn’t wait till the technology had caught up?
BR – I don’t think it was just about that for me—it was just about the ability to make something that was different in its very nature. Yes, of course the technology has improved massively since then, but the idea you can just go out and make a film with equipment that’s not exactly to hand, but more readily, was more exciting than the technological aspect of it for me. Wait till somebody else does it first? That doesn’t sound very smart.
IS – You made a lot of music videos back during the “golden age,” with most famously the banned Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. What did you learn making videos then that you still use today?
BR – I loved doing music videos. What was wonderful about them, especially in the early 1980s, was the record companies pretty much let you do what you wanted to do, because it was so new to them. It was like making little silent movies, and it was such a great era for pop music, the early 1980s, which was part of what was so fun about it.
I think everything changes all the time, certainly for me. In the videos I made, it was all about visual storytelling: essentially making little silent movies with musical accompaniment. That was also a part of the challenge of doing the Samurai picture. Although obviously the film does have Japanese dialogue in it, I really wanted the picture to pretty much work with visuals and music primarily, and the dialogue was there just to add a little something. I wanted the film to be self-explanatory—there are some films you can understand with the sound off, and some films you can’t. That’s always been a thing for me. You should understand the film without understanding what people are saying. It’s a shame that sometimes with films with subtitles, you just end up reading the movie, because you often miss so much without looking at people’s eyes. What people are saying is never as important as you think it is. When I was cutting the movie, we didn’t have subtitles. It was kind of a slightly different experience when you put the titles on, and obviously you have to, people need to know what’s going on, but there is always less info than you think there is.
IS – Do you see any trends in horror movies at the moment that you find kind of interesting?
BR – The horror business is very interesting, because it’s very cyclical. It’s obviously went through a huge upswell recently, with people like Jordan Peele and all the interesting new directors, and other people too. I think that one of the great things about horror is essentially it’s a way of telling a story that you’re saying to the audience: at least you will get a thrill out of this instead of just sitting through a drama. A lot of the drama and arthouse films I really enjoyed in the 1970s were really horror movies. It’s such a cinematic genre, because you’re expected to make an impact, basically, first and foremost. That’s what people love from a movie, when they feel something viscerally, and suspense, horror and comedy are the biggest things you can make an audience feel. All great horror movies have comedy at some level, Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) is one of the funniest films I can remember, The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) is an extremely funny film… so is The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1974) – it’s full of jokes!
I think there is a wonderful compliance between horror and suspense and fear, it’s really the most entertaining thing you can give an audience. That’s why people love them and don’t tire of them. I think genre labels can be reductive, like for most people there is nothing more repulsive than that awful label “elevated horror,” as if it’s somehow better for you. It’s like saying “somebody won’t like this”—if a movie is scary, people will love it! One of the most frightening movies I’ve ever seen in my whole life is Sátántangó (1994) by Béla Tarr: all seven hours and 45 minutes of it. You probably have to accept that’s probably an “art movie.”
BR – It’s very frightening, no question! there are more obvious ones, like Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968) and all that. Horror movies have always been the province of the very best filmmakers, it’s weird that somehow when people say just “horror,” people’s immediate response is it’s something very exploitative and cheap. Of course there are cheap, exploitative horror films, but that doesn’t mean in its essence it’s cheap and exploitative.
IS – Is there a film that got away from you, one that you were desperate to make but it never happened?
BR – Not really. There are some things I’m planning to make and haven’t given up on, so I don’t think those really count.
IS – Any new films you have been impressed with? (Note: the 2020 Oscar nominations were announced the day of the interview).
BR – It’s always controversial when they put out the Oscar nominations, but this year seems a better bunch of films than I’ve seen in some years. Some years, without naming names, you kind of go WHAT? ARE YOU KIDDING?
There are some films I would’ve liked to have seen in there that weren’t nominated, but that’s always the case. A lot of them seem pretty interesting: kudos to the people who got the nominations. A couple of them I like very much. I liked Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019; pictured below), I thought that was a really terrific movie. I liked Parasite, and that’s already two really good movies, and sometimes there’s not even one! I don’t think there was any real stinker this year.
Another film I liked was Honey Boy (Alma Har’el, 2019), I thought that was really good, and it’s a shame it didn’t get anything. And it was different, too. I liked the Adam Sandler film Uncut Gems (Safdie Brothers, 2019), the gambling thing is a little similar to Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1993), but it’s also Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. Bad Lieutenant was such a classic, I think I just like anything with Harvey Keitel in it. That’s my only criticism of The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019), I wanted Harvey Keitel in it more. Every film should have Harvey Keitel in it, really, shouldn’t it? I want to see Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1998) recut with Harvey Keitel in it!
IS – I think that footage has been destroyed, sadly.
BR – I actually don’t think they actually shot anything, but it would still be great.
IS – So obviously, with Scorsese and The Irishman, I have to ask you: are Marvel films cinema?
BR – The obviously answer is: “of course they are!” I think there are two real issues here. One is positive, and one is problematic. It is fantastic that theatrical movies can take over a billion dollars in less than a month: it’s still such a mainstream, vital business that can happen, and that’s really significant, given all the technology and all the things distracting young people today—it wouldn’t necessarily be the case. It’s fantastic that power is still there, and the vitality of feature film is still so important to the culture.
The flipside of that here in the UK and the in the US, still very healthy in just pure total numbers, is that all of the money is being sucked up by the giant tentpoles that are coming out of Disney, so there isn’t money left for anybody else, and others are struggling for the awards season’s pennies on the floor. I would say the third aspect of it is that it was purely expected to make its money back theatrically: is The Irishman really economical at 165 million dollars? The answer is probably no.
IS – But with Netflix, they pay all the directors and actors upfront, and they get nothing in the back end.
BR – You never get anything in the back end anyway! Anybody who is making films at that level is extremely lucky and privileged, and it’s not a right for anybody, it’s definitely a privilege working and doing the stuff. I certainly feel really privileged that I’m still working, still doing stuff that’s interesting and sometimes has a little bit of scale to it. Nobody has given me 150 million dollars to make a film, but you know, that’s OK, you don’t need that much money… That’s an awful lot of money.
IS – I think the big issue is distribution.
BR – It’s a big issue, and one of the things everybody forgets is that everything is much more available now. Inasmuch as if you want to watch all the classic arthouse films, you can go on the Criterion channel and just see them all—that wasn’t true before, not even slightly. I love that certainly in Los Angeles there are still some fantastic repertory houses, like the American Cinematheque, the Egyptian Theater and Tarantino’s theatre, The New Beverly. These places show really interesting, unusual programming. And here you have some really good repertory places, like the BFI. People want the big screen and communal experience, and they want the feature films. There is so much stuff you can’t watch it all, and half of the time I want to catch up with stuff from the 1930s that I haven’t seen. The other thing that always strikes me is that people forget that sound movies have only been around since 1927, so 93 years, it’s not very long. Everything going on now is still basically early cinema, in historical terms.
IS – Do you think there will be some kind of new technological event that will change how films are made, like with DV?
BR – Probably there will be things that will change, but there is something about the way a movie works and the way we watch that does seem to fit with the kind of alpha rhythms or brainwaves of dreaming and the imagination in such a kind of conjugate and powerful way that I don’t think people will ever tire of it. All films have secret content that is only apparent years later, and a film like Ivans XTC is a perfect example of that. If you look at the film now, it’s not just a story, it’s a perfect little time capsule of 1999. When films have that, it’s one of the most powerful things, the way that they are time capsules.
IS – I have one final question from my friend Dan Waters, who wrote Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1979) and BatmanReturns (Tim Burton, 1992): is there any way one can see the HBO Inside Out short with Djimon Hounsou that you did?
BR – You know what? “I don’t know” is the honest truth. As far as I know, they are available on video, but I may be wrong.
IS – He says it was the one he couldn’t find.
BR – Then unfortunately I don’t think I can help, I don’t think I have any copies.
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If you enjoy this interview, you may want to check out his Trailers From Hell segments, where he specialises in Ken Russell films but has also done some on If… and Sorcerer.
Ken Loach remains the most prominent and virtually unchallenged voice of the working class in British cinema. His latest movie Sorry We Missed You is an extremely powerful statement about eroding working conditions in modern-day Britain. Our editor Victor Fraga believes that it is even more excruciatingly painful to watch (and therefore even more effective) than its companion piece from three years agoI, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. That’s because audiences are forced to walk in the shoes of the oppressed working man.
In Sorry We Missed You, Ricky (Kris Hitchen) is a building worker with an impeccable CV, living with his family somewhere in suburban Newcastle. He persuades his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) to sell off her car so that he can buy a van and move into the delivery industry. A franchise owner promises Ricky that he’ll be independent and “own his own business”, and earn up to £1,200 a week. The reality couldn’t be more different. Ricky ends up working up to 14 hours a day six days a week. His draconian delivery targets turn him into a delivery robot. Ricky has been conned. His “independence” is but an illusion. Click here in order to read the review of the movie.
Our editor sat down with Ken in order to understand the challenges that Ricky and the working class in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world face, and what we can do in order to overcome their apparently insurmountable barriers. They also discussed modern-day slavery, Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, free movement and how British movies have helped the far-right to disseminate prejudices and fake patriotism!
Sorry We Missed You is in cinemas on Friday, November 1st!
It’s a process that began with Margaret Thatcher. She destroyed communities in the old working-class areas, with mines and factories being closed. Those were the old days of the secure job, with the eight-hour day and the 40-hour week, a wage on which you could bring up a family and have somewhere to live, have a holiday without losing money. Those working conditions were gradually eroded under the pressures of harsh competition from big companies, because they have to compete on both quality and price, so those who get the trade will be cheaper. They have to cut their labour costs. And they do that by finding new ways to employ people. They don’t pay holiday pay, they don’t pay sick pay. They have no responsibility for the worker beyond their day’s work. They can hire and fire them very easily. So they work through agencies, which also have no responsibility for the worker. They are so called self-employed. The bogus self-employment.
The work in this case, he [Ricky from Sorry We Missed You] is simply providing a service. He’s just a worker providing a service. Therefore they don’t need to obey trade unions rules, they don’t need to pay the minimum wage. It’s just a contract to supply a service. That of course isn’t true, because the driver is entirely contracted to this one company, and they are to all effects and purposes one worker. But this new form of words for the same job means the employer has no responsibility.
VF – Who changed the words?
KL – Employers found clever new strategies. They are market-orientated people who find their way around the rules. The minimum wage doesn’t apply to someone who’s providing a service. So a driver might work 12 hours a day or more and still struggle to make a decent living. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage and the guaranteed working week have been swept away by the gig economy.
It’s a logic. If you are committed to the free market, that’s based on competition. Firms compete on price, therefore they must continue that exploitation, otherwise they are going to lose trade.
VF – We’re seeing far-right and ultra neo-liberal governments destroy working rights around the world. I’m from Brazil, where the phenomenon is more pronounced yet not entirely dissimilar to the UK. Is the erosion of working rights the natural and inevitable consequence of capitalism, or is this just a perverse subversion of capitalism?
KL – I think it’s an inevitable consequence of free market capitalism. Because, as I say, it’s based on competition and therefore they will try to cut their labour costs and increase exploitation. That’s the only way they can do it. And now they use technology in order to do it. So Ricky as a driver, he doesn’t have someone over him telling him he has to work harder. He’s got a machine in the car which knows where he is every two minutes. It beeps if he’s out of the car for more than two minutes. It allows him no time to go to the lavatory. No time for a break. He’s driven by a piece of electronic equipment. He’s forced to exploit himself. And when the worker has to exploit himself, that’s the ideal situation for the employer.
VF – I would argue that we saw improvements in working conditions in the 20th century. And we’re now going back to Victorian times, or even the industrial revolution. Do you agree?
KL – Absolutely. I think that there was a real change in consciousness after WW2, the public good was something that we all subscribed to. Trade unions grew stronger, and therefore workers’ rights grew stronger. The trade unions had the negotiating strength to get the eight-hour day, to get a decent wage. Collective bargaining is the strength of the working class. And that’s what Thatcher aimed to destroy. And to a large extent she succeeded. Partly because the labour movement itself, and the Labour Party, didn’t put up a good enough fight.
What’s much remarkable about this time right now is that with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, it’s the first time in 100-year history that the Labour Party has a leader of the left. And that leadership will stand for the interests of the working class. Blair stood with business. Corbyn will stand with workers, and that’s why he’s so attacked.
VF – The working conditions in Sorry We Missed You are comparable to slavery. The British Empire was built upon slavery. Have we found a surrogate for old-fashioned colonialism whereby we oppress our very own workforce?
KL – I wouldn’t use the work slavery. It’s too glib. Colonialism has been replaced by the working class of countries were the wages are even lower than they are here. Getting clothes from Bangladesh is a form of colonialism, because we are using their very exploited working class for goods to sell here. When capitalism goes global, the trade goes to those on starvation wages. It’s a race to the bottom. And we know that the working conditions in some Eastern countries are atrocious.
VF –Abbie knows unfettered solidarity and devotion to her job. But she pays a price for that. Has solidarity become unfeasible or even illegal?
KL – They have tried to nullify it, and that’s a challenge for the left. Solidarity needs political intervention. And obviously we need strong trade unions. But in order to get strong trade unions we need a party in power that will restore their powers, which Thatcher took away. A party that will make zero-hour contracts illegal. There has to be some commitment to the working week. Otherwise the minimum wage is meaningless. There also has to be an end to bogus self-employment. And there’s yet another change that we must deliver. Not long ago our post office was nationalised. And was always a public service. We owned it. Then the Tories privatised it, and now we need to bring it back into public ownership, so that parcels are delivered by the postman. That cuts out this need to rip-off delivery companies.
The system pits people against each other. The fastest driver gets the best route, which means they will earn more money. They consciously put one driver against another. That’s what Paul Laverty’s [Loach’s screenwriter for nearly three decades] found in his research. And that’s another reason why this bogus self-employment should end.
VF – Will Ricky be better off in post-Brexit Britain? Will he enjoy more or will he enjoy less labour protections?
KL – This bogus self-employment is happening while we are in the European Union, and it will get worse if Boris Johnson and the Tories are in power when we leave. Brexit is a distraction. Because the big issues – poverty, exploitation and failing public services – are being neglected. For the left, it’s a tactical question.
VF – Let’s say Jeremy Corbyn gets to power. Do you think Ricky will be better off -in a post-Brexit Jeremy Corbyn government?
KL – That depends on the deal. They haven’t negotiated the deal yet. I would hope that a Labour government under Corbyn would negotiate a deal whereby we have control over our fisheries, so that we can protect the fish stock, and we have control over agriculture, so we can control the ecological side. And we would improve on workers’ rights by ending zero-hour contracts and bogus self-employment. We would bring public services entirely back into public ownership. Not outsourced. That might be against EU policies of competitive industry, their rules of what the state can do in terms of intervention. They think that’s against competition.
VF – But aren’t some public services nationalised in the largest EU countries, such as the trains in France and Germany?
KL – Yes, they are, but that’s a tension within the European Union. The European Union’s founding document is based on the free market. So those examples are an anomaly in the practice and in the rules. If you look at the rules, they oppose state intervention if it interferes with competition. I would argue that a Labour government needs to intervene in competition in order to provide a better service and protect workers’ rights. It depends on the deal that Corbyn gets, if he gets elected. If the deal is a good deal Ricky would be better off outside the EU. If the Corbyn deal is not a good deal, he’d be better off inside the EU. It’s a judgement you can only make once you see the deal Labour has negotiated.
VF – What about free movement and diversity? If we close our borders and no EU people can come in, would that have a positive impact on Ricky’s life?
KL – In principle, you have to be in favour of free movement. But I think that in order for free movement to be really free – not a means of an employer getting cheap labour – the economies have to be roughly equal. Because if the wages are lower in one group of countries, people will migrate to where the wages are higher. And that’s what happened. And that can produce problems of racism, because the local people feel undermined in their income. In order to avoid that, there should be a conscious move to equalise the economies. People can travel, freely, but they can have a good living in their own country. Free movement has to go alongside equalising the economies.
VF – But that’s going to take a long time. Wages in Romania won’t be on the same level as Britain in 10 or 20 years. Does that mean we should close our gates for now?
KL – No, I think that we need to work with poorer countries so that their young talent don’t go abroad to work in coffee shops because the wages are higher. But equally, that’s got to be done with planning and agreement, not with one country putting up barriers.
VF – Fake patriotism and nostalgia of imperialism are more rabid than ever, with the ultra-nationalistic Brexit Party coming first in the latest EU elections. How can cinema help to fend off this dangerous and reactionary threat?
KL – Yes, I agree with you that there’s a lot of fake patriotism, xenophobia, chauvinism. I think that cinema and the left in general should communicate that people are of equal value, whatever their origin, religion, the language they speak. Everyone is our neighbour. Our working class people have more in common with the working class of other European countries than with our ruling class. We’ve taken Sorry We Missed You to Spain, France, Germany and Ireland so far, and everywhere it’s the same story. When you show it to an audience in France you realise that delivery drivers here have exactly the same situation as delivery drivers in the rest of Europe, and they have nothing in common with Boris Johnson’s ruling class.
KL – Very much so. We had so many war films after the War where all the Germans were bad, except there was one nice German. That’s where the phrase “the good German” passed into common usage. The message of these films was: “Germans are bad”. The German language became associated with Nazis, even though the British governments were happy to support the fascists in Spain under Franco. Churchill was a rabid imperialist. We supported dictators and the far-right around the world. Same with the States. So came the phrase: “he might be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”. So let’s not take any lessons from the far-right and their patriotism, because the interests of the working people are the same anywhere in the world.
VF – Does mainstream cinema tend to have a subliminal far-right message?
KL – Yes, absolutely. The classic message of the American cinema is: “one man with a gun will sort your problems”. It’s not about solidarity.
VF – What about British cinema?
KL – I don’t know much about British cinema, to be honest. It may seem strange.
VF – It does seem very strange!!!
KL – That’s true. The British war films that I grew up with were always about the “good Brit” versus the “bad German”. Or the coward Italian. They were all stereotypes.
VF – You made a documentary entitled In Conversation with Jeremy Corbyn (2016), yet there doesn’t seem to be much positive coverage of the Labour leader elsewhere. Do you believe that the British media – even the left-leaning papers such as The Guardian – are biased against Jeremy Corbyn, is there a smear campaign, and has that impacted how your documentary was received?
KL – It was a just short film, it never really had a major presence, so I wouldn’t say I encountered resistance.
I spoke to Jeremy very little about this. So this is just my opinion. The right wing and the centre press – the Guardian included (which I don’t see it as a left wing newspaper) the BBC, ITV and so on – certainly have to varying degrees opposed Corbyn. The only paper that supports him is The Morning Star, but the others won’t even acknowledge its existence. There is a smear campaign against him, there is a campaign to undermine and to ridicule him. And key to that are the Labour MPs, the majority of which came to power when Blair was the leader, so they are right wing Labour MPs and their task is to undermine Corbyn. They are the biggest danger we face.
The picture at the top and at the bottom and of this article are of Ken Loach and Victor Fraga on the the day this interview was conducted. The other images are stills from Ken Loach’s latest film Sorry We Missed You.
The 39th edition of the Cambridge Film Festival starts this week. This year’s diverse programme includes over 150 titles from 30 countries from all continents. They range thrillers and dramas to comedies and documentaries created by the very best of both established (such as Ken Loach, Francois Ozon and Werner Herzog) and emerging filmmakers (such as Mati Diop and Aaron Schimberg).
We asked a few questions to the Stella Frangleton, who is currently the Festival’s Marketing Coordinator. She previously reviewed submissions for the event. She also runs a Young Film Programmers Group at The Abbeygate Cinema in Bury St Edmunds, and holds a degree in English and Film from King’s College London.
Victor Fraga – You are the third-longest running film festival in the UK, and you are now in your 39th edition. Please tell us a little about the relationship between city of Cambridge and film.
Stella Frangleton – Cambridge is a very cinematic city with well known films and series such as The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, 2015), the Netflix drama series The Crown and ITV’s Grantchester being filmed in and around Cambridge. The Cambridge Film Festival has been a staple of the Cambridge cultural scene since 1977 and has been joined by other film festivals such as the Cambridge African Film Festival in 2002 and the Watersprite Student Film Festival in 2010. We have a vibrant community of film students at both Anglia Ruskin and Cambridge University, many of whom go on to work at the city’s various film events. Boasting three cinemas, this city is certainly one of film lovers.
VF – This year you are screening more than 150 titles from 30 countries. How many people are involved in the curatorial process, and do they work throughout the entire year?
SF – We have a pool of around 10 programmers who select films in a variety of ways. Some attend film festivals all year round to discover the latest and most inspiring films from around the world, whereas others create very specific programmes and are only with us for a small portion of the year. By having a variety of programmers who work in very different ways, our programme achieves an extremely high quality of content across the board and you’ll notice the high level of curation involved. We are well known for our strands such as Camera Catalonia, the Cambridge African Film Festival and the Family Film Festival as well as the great selection of previews and premieres on offer every year.
VF – Are there anecdotes from the past few years that you would like to share?
SF – We have had some very acclaimed directors submit short films to the festival in their fledgling years. Christopher Nolan had a short film accepted in the festival in 1996 and has gone on to become one of the best-known directors in the world having directed such films as Dunkirk (2017), The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Inception (2010), Memento (2000), and his films have gone on to gross over $4.7 billion worldwide. Likewise, acclaimed British directors Andrea Arnold (2016′ American Honey, 2009’s Fish Tank) and Shane Meadows (This Is England, 2007) also had shorts screened at the festival before going on to have massively acclaimed careers.
VF – The Festival is run by the Cambridge Film Trust. Could Please tell us about the Trust activities outside the Festival?
SF – At Cambridge Film Trust we believe passionately about great cinema and making it accessible to all. We really feel that cinema can expose people to new perspectives and ideas, aiding cross-cultural understanding and contributing to community engagement and well being. To that end we have lots of events outside the festival throughout the year. Our most well known is Movie on the Meadows, one of the biggest outdoor cinema events in the UK which takes place every August and sees around 3,000 people enjoy amazing cinema in the picturesque location of the Grantchester Meadows. We run a large amount of free community screenings around Cambridge where we bring the latest blockbusters in the heart of communities for people who may not be able to access cinemas due to money, mobility or other social factors. We have brought in a Pay What You Can Afford scheme to our “A Film I Love” seasons at the Arts Picturehouse. We invite special guests to choose a film close to their heart and audiences can choose how much they pay. We are very proud of our year round activities and hope to continue to make greats films available to all.
VF – You have given out an Audience Award since 2015. Are there any plans to expand this, and to include, for example, a jury award?
SF – We are very proud of our Audience Award and have expanded to have a Youth Jury award as well. We recruit a jury of young people who learn about all different aspects of the film industry and watch and critique the film of the festival. We think these awards make the community feel included and we hope the Youth Jury award fosters future film talent.
VF – What’s your advice to both emerging and established filmmakers who want their work showcased at the Cambridge Film Festival?
SF – It may sound obvious but we really are excited about bringing the best cinema we can to our audiences. We welcome submissions from filmmakers at any stage in their career and our submissions team works through the massive amount of submissions rigorously from around March until September. We show submissions from student filmmakers, big name directors, with tiny budgets and with big ones. We just love great film and we feel that shows in our programme and the reputation the festival has for always having such a strong film selection.
All the images on this article are property of the Cambridge Film Festival.
A little town in the arid hinterlands of Northeastern Brazil has been erased from the map. Literally. Locals can no longer locate it on the various online applications. Someone (or something?) is killing the locals. There have been seven murders in one day. Small UFOs monitor the town from above. The locals are prepared to fight back for their survival. They also wish to protect their their identity and cultural heritage.
The fictional struggle depicted in Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau has come to symbolise the very real struggle that Brazil is experiencing at present, as the country grapples with a profoundly authoritarian and obscurantist government. Bolsonaro has vowed to eradicate left wing ideologies, and he’s currently attempting to implement measures that are tantamount to censorship.
Bacurau premiered at the BFI London Film Festival to a lot of glitz and glam, on a Friday night red carpet gala event. Kleber and Juliano delivered a passionate speech, explaining that Brazilian artists and culture are being demonised. Meanwhile, Brazilian activists demonstrated on the red carpet, asking for Lula’s freedom [pictured below]. The highly popular left wing leader and former Brazilian president is currently a political prisoner.
Our editor Victor Fraga (who’s also Brazilian) sat down with Kleber and Juliano the following day. They talked about the state of Brazilian cinema, censorship, the armed struggle, movie genres, the role of the Brazilian Northeast in the resistance and much more!
Victor Fraga –Bacurau won the Jury Ex-Aequo Prize in Cannes, a brand new achievement for Brazilian cinema. Karim Ainouz’s The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmaoalso won a novel prize, the Un Certain Regards. Could you please talk about the significance of this double achievement, particularly in the light Brazil’s obscurantist and anti-culture government?
Juliano Dornelles – We are currently experiencing what’s perhaps the most important moment in the history of Brazilian cinema. That’s thanks to two things. First of all, the decentralisation of cinema, which moved away from the Rio de Janeiro/Sao Paulo axis, and started being produced in other states and regions. Secondly, there are more ways to make films thanks to technology developments. That said, we have been making films for many years, in my home state of Pernambuco, in the states of Ceara, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, plus of course Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
And then this awful situation happens. The new government extinguished the Ministry of Culture in its first day in office. Plus he started talking about censorship as if that was a reality, but it’s not, because the Brazilian constitution establishes that it does not exist. These prizes mean that we have a lot of visibility, and the interest in Brazilian culture grows, impacting our pride and self-esteem.
Kleber Mendonca Filho – This is indeed the best moment that Brazilian cinema has ever experienced. When two films win memorable, historical prizes in Cannes. In the same year, it has a massive presence in Rotterdam, Berlin and Locarno. The newly-elected far-right government, however, decides to go in the opposite direction, destroying this very careful construction of Brazilian culture. We have been working for 15 years in a very democratic fashion in terms of filmmaking, with new policies which see funding being shared in a fair way, geographically speaking. There are more films being made in places where they were never made before, such as Pernambuco. We did not have a film community in our state 25 years. We had a few sparse productions. And of course Ceara and Minas Gerais. Right now we have an amazing moment that’s being basically deconstructed and destroyed, and that’s very sad.
VF – The Wild Wild West helped to define American counterculture. Will the Wild Wild Northeast define Brazilian counterculture? Is there a parallel?
KMF – The Brazilian Northeast has always defined Brazilian culture. It’s the very structure of Brazilian literature, cinema and music. The history of the Northeast explains a lot of what we do in Brazil. So it’s only natural that we should now come full circle with a film where most of the crew come from the Northeast, particularly from the state of Pernambuco. It’s not really a film about the Northeast, but it has a very strong social flavour and the historical aesthetics of the region. It’s interacting in such an amazing fashion with Brazil as a country, a nation and a society. The film has become a part of the conversation. It has become a mean. It’s a moment that we witness in awe, and that’s the most beautiful thing that can happen to us.
We share with the US many notions of landscape and of occupying the landscape. And that of course includes a lot of violence. Plus we are all Americans, we come from the Americas. The American West is known for its violence, and the genocide of the indigenous populations. And that’s also happening in Brazil. We just came from New York and the reactions to the film was astounding. There’s a very clear parallel. It’s like the mirror image.
VF –Locals have to resort to extreme violence in order to resist against colonialism and other reactionary forces. Do you believe in the armed struggle as a resistance weapon?
JD – I think that any person deserves respect as a human being. There are limits to your survival, to your life. Bacurau is just a film. I’m not in favour of violence. I don’t think that’s the way forward. At the same time, however, I’m also in favour of equality between people. And when someone is being threatened or unfairly treated, the reactions are unpredictable. Our film is about solidarity and respect.
KMF – Someone as a viewer should be able to differentiate between reality and a fiction film – with actors, special effects and a reasonable budget such as Bacurau, a piece of artistic expression and entertainment, and which draws from history. History informs us what we can do and write about, how we can look at society. Violent events are part of history. The Warsaw Ghetto informed us in order to write a movie about survival. Genocide was carried out The Jewish population were isolated in an area of the Polish capital, and systematically asphyxiated and killed. At which point, a group of people from inside the Ghetto decided to do something, and there was some violent action.
VF – The regional divide in Brazil is a prominent topic in your film. Southerners see themselves are racially and culturally superior, aligned, even sycophantic towards Americans and Europeans. Can Brazil overcome this divide, or will the Northeast have to continue to fend for itself?
KMF – The divide is historical. It is what it is. It’s how society develops, and it developed in all the wrong ways. The capital was unevenly divided, all the money went to the South and the Southeast, and this has been so since the 18th century in Brazil. Now we see the consequences. We have an invisible and yet very-much-present social, racial and economic divide. That’s not something that we made up for the film, it exists. We come from the Northeast, so we know what we are talking about!
I don’t know whether this will ever change. It takes many generations to promote change. Sadly I don’t see anything happening right now.
VF – Censorship is biting in in Brazil, with films such as Wagner Moura’s Marighella prevented from being shown, plus the film agency Ancine potentially turning into a propaganda machine. How can we fight back? Is private funding the way forward? Or international co-productions?
KMF – It’s very hard to answer that question because we’re treading on new ground. I have never been through what Brazilian cinema is going through right now in terms of basically being extinct. What I can say, and I’ve been talking to a lot of young filmmakers, very talented men and women in the their twenties, and late teens, and they are very passionate about Bacurau, and it’s an amazing moment to make films. You can now shoot a film with an iPhone like yours [he points to the device being used in order to record the interview] and with a simple computer you can get it done. You just have to say something about the situation in Brazil; just f**king say it with cinema!
It’s an amazing moment. Every time cinema is banned, something good comes out of it. That’s something Ariel Schweitzer from Cahiers du Cinema wrote last month, when Bacurau was in the cover of the magazinee. He devoted 25 pages to talk about the crisis of Brazilian cinema.
JD – The big question for me is: just fucking do it! That’s very important. That’s how this moment that we’re experiencing right now began. Because technology changed, and enabled people without the traditional production structure to make cinema. That’s how we can ensure that production doesn’t stop and vouch for our future.
The problem are the people who have become professionalised in the past 20 years, they are industry workers. What are they going to do now? That’s a question without an easy answer. If it wasn’t for Bacurau, I would be far more concerned about my career. Fortunately, our film is doing very well in terms of box office, but sadly many other good films haven’t had the same luck.
VF – To finish off our conversation, can you please talk about the role of cinema and the other media as a weapon of resistance?
JD – The biggest problem that we have face right now are the fake news. No one anticipated this would happen. We must be present various points-of-view, and cinema is very good at that. But other media can also be used. Even sitting down with someone, being patient and having a conversation at home can change a lot of things. We need to show that a lot of information that people are getting isn’t real. And that requires a massive effort. Nowadays you have to look at six or seven sources before you know whether the information is true. That includes the left wing media. Fake news are on both sides of the spectrum. You must be very careful, and people are not accustomed to checking information.
Born in Regina and raised in Saskatoon, in the South-Central Canadian province of Saskatchewan, Thirza isn’t your average Indigenous filmmaker. This Cree artist has been making audacious and experimental short movies since 1995 delving into the topics of LGBT sexuality and identify, while also questioning and toying with the boundaries sanity. Her work fits in very well with our dirty movie concept.
She graduated in Film in the Emily Carr University of Art and Design of Vancouver in 2005. She has since exhibited her work in numerous galleries, festivals and events in various countries and on both sides of the Atlantic. She currently resides in Toronto. She’s now in London for the 13th Native Spirit Festival in order to showcase a selection of her work carefully picked exclusively for you.
Victor Fraga – How did you first become involved in film? Were you the first Cree filmmaker ever, or was there a tradition beforehand?
Thirza Cuthand – There were other Cree filmmakers, I’m thinking like Loretta Todd, my Uncle Doug Cuthand makes films, there’s been a number of Cree filmmakers I can’t even think of them all. I find Cree women filmmakers were very encouraging when I was an emerging filmmaker. Actually many other Indigenous women filmmakers were very nurturing of my skills. My friend Dana Claxton was really great to connect with when I was starting out, she is a Lakota filmmaker based in Vancouver. I first became involved in film through a Queer film festival in Saskatoon called Virtuous Reality. It only ever happened once in 1995. Since then Saskatoon got obsessed with But I’m A Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 2001) and I swear that’s the only Queer film they wanna watch.
I made a short film called Lessons In Baby Dyke Theory (1995, see it below) about feeling like the only lesbian at my high school. I was 16 when I made it, with a cheap hi-8 camcorder. And a lot of pipe cleaner dollies. It became really successful on the Queer film fest circuit because there was not a lot of work being made about being a teenage Queer. Mostly when people talked about Queer Youth at the time they were picturing university students. But now of course there’s like, Queer kindergarteners so things have really shifted.
VF – How have the indigenous communities embraced Indigiqueer identity? Did you have to overcome tradition, or barriers of any type?
TC – It’s been varied. I grew up in urban communities which I found were way more open minded than if I had grown up on a reserve. But then also all the reserves have different climates. Some are more Christian and Christian-influenced than others. I was fortunate in that my mother was very Queer-positive so there wasn’t a lot of hardships at home, and my high school didn’t even know what to do with me. I do know that one of the barriers has been funding. I do get funding but usually it comes from the regular funding stream and not the stream for Indigenous people at the arts councils.
There’s also some difficulties in that people want to protect Indigenous culture so I feel like there’s a fine line between protecting ourselves and censoring artists. I know the queer work I make is not always appreciated by some of those juries, especially the more sexually suggestive work. I think repression of Indigenous sexuality in all its forms, including heterosexual sexuality, has been a big issue for us as media makers. And when it’s Queer on top of that, it gets really tough. The effects of Residential School has left a huge vein of homophobia and transphobia in its wake. I have a hard time with it, because I do understand people who have been abused by same sex perpetrators sort of view Queer society through that lens, but at the same time child sexual abuse is not Queer culture and it’s hard to explain that to some survivors of those crimes.
VF – How do you transpose oral storytelling onto cinema? Is it any difference from written literature? What are the biggest challenges, and the most beautiful and unique aspects?
TC – My videos are often told in a similar manner to the way my grandfather would tell stories his parents and grandparents would tell him, like a monologue with a sort of larger meaning attached. Cree stories can be very funny, and some can be very sexually explicit too (although I never heard those ones from my grandpa but there is a well known story about a rolling disembodied head that keeps trying to offer sexual favours as it follows this person). I think the difference from written literature is that oral stories grow and change with time, they are living texts. It’s harder to do that with videos, but I also do performance art and that can work the same way. I think the biggest challenges are that I can’t see how people react to a story until the film is finished and I’m watching with an audience. While an oral story you might be able to read the room and like, drop parts that don’t work for that audience. Like maybe there are people like your family in the room who you don’t want to tell that part about a disembodied head offering blowjobs in front of!
The beautiful and unique aspects are that a story could be passed down from generations and generations previously. I heard a story from my grandfather about the first time Crees saw white people, and I am still struck by how remarkable it is to know what happened. I also recently made a film based on another story he told my auntie Beth about a 2 Spirit person (2 Spirit is a term for Queer/Trans Indigenous people used by some Queer/Trans Indigenous people) who was a travelling storyteller, and it was really wonderful to not only be able to make that story more widely known as a film, but also to sort of have proof that 2 Spirit people were accepted and welcomed before colonisation. Oral stories give us a history that has been used to stand up in court cases here in Canada.
VF – You said that “humour is a political tool”. Can you please give us an example of how you used comedy in order to make a statement, raise awareness of an issue, or something else?
TC – My film series 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99 (2015) and 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (2017) are very comedic films, but also use the tropes of late night TV commercial formats to critique things like domestic violence in lesbian relationships, isolation in remote communities as a Queer person, capitalist values based on how big your communities are and if you are worth having media targeted towards your demographics. A lot of other things too. But mostly they come across as very light fun films. You don’t think about the heavy stuff even though it’s all in there. I think humour helps people be more open to ideas that they might shut down otherwise.
VF – Has the Canadian government been supportive of indigenous film and performance art? Who has supported you in your endeavours?
TC – I’ve gotten funding from almost all levels of government, federal, provincial, municipal. I have been fortunate. I’ve seen other people really struggle but I’ve managed to carve out enough of a career for myself that I’ve been able to be a full time artist. I’ve also made a documentary for CBC Gem, which is a national tv streaming platform, and for the NFB which is a national documentary and animation film studio. But it took a long time of making self-funded videos with my camcorder and myself to get to that point. I think the fact I was so willing to fund so much of my early work really helped my career. I still self-fund the work I think might be too controversial for a funder to touch. There have been some controversies over the years about where taxpayer money goes, so any really sexual work I’ve tried to do on my own.
VF – You describe yourself as “gender non-conforming, Indigenous, Queer, disabled, fat”. Is being non-normative an empowering and liberating experience? How do you reconcile these varied identities?
TC – I think when you rack up a couple of non-normative identities it just makes sense to add more! Ha ha! I think because my identities and interests are outside of the mainstream, it’s made my work more interesting. It can be empowering, there’s been at least a couple times I’ve been trying to find the subcultures I belong to and that is an interesting experience. When I was a teen I had to find the Queer community, and in a small prairie city too, before the internet was a thing and before I was old enough for the bar. So it didn’t take a long time, but I did have to go out looking for it.
And then when I was 18, again without the the internet, I realised I was into kink and that was another search. I think my first contact was getting a subscription to a local kink newsletter, but it stopped distributing as soon as I got the first issue! But it really does make you more independent in a way when you need to work hard at finding your communities, queer and kinky communities. My Indigenous communities were always around because I grew up with my Indigenous family members. But even reconciling Queer and kink identities even just with Indigenous identity is not so hard. There were always Queer Indigenous people, and some ceremonies involved cutting or piercing the flesh, so doing similar things in a kink context is not so wild really. And same with trans/gender-non-conforming identities, there were lots of Indigenous people historically who were gender non-conforming or trans. I think what I like about all these identities is that I can talk honestly from a first person perspective about a lot of issues.
VF – You were once invited to Bruce LaBruce’s Tiff party. He’s one of our favourite “dirty” filmmakers. Did you meet and talk to him? How did that go? What did he think of Indigiqueer film?
TC – I actually didn’t go! I ended up finishing my film about a gas mask fetish I later called Less Lethal Fetishes instead. But I did meet him once at his screening in Regina for LA Zombie (2010), which I loved. Fucking dead people back to life? Amazing! I did talk to him, he seems very nice. We didn’t talk long enough to talk about Indigiqueer film tho!
VF – Is this your first time in Europe? Do Europeans react differently to your work?
TC – I’ve been to Berlin a lot showing my work. I think because Europeans don’t have the full understanding of Indigenous culture and context like people in North America, it’s a little bit different showing work here. There are I am sure preconceived ideas of what Indigenous lives are like, I’ve never talked to Europeans about that though and I think mostly they don’t want to say anything offensive to me about what they might think. I do know I explained payments that were made to Residential School survivors were called “Common Experience Payments” to an audience in Berlin that was pretty queer and open-minded and they sort of recoiled which I think is the best reaction, Common Experience Payments is a terrible name. My grandmother was in Residential School and she said once “They weren’t common experiences! Everyone’s experience was different!”
VF – What are your plans for the future?
TC – I’m working on a feature film about a woman with the power of pyrokinesis [the ability to create and control fire with the mind] who seeks vengeance after her lover and mother go missing, so that’s been exciting. I have wanted to make a feature for a long time. I still really love experimental shorts though, and you can make those so fast with so much less influence from producers and editors and so on that I will probably keep doing that as well. I have a performance coming up in Vancouver called The Future Is So Bright which is going to be audio of me reading love letters to various women trying to convince them to be with me and start a family, while footage of climate change catastrophes like forest fires and glaciers melting and hurricanes and tsunami’s play behind me. And I’ll be licking and sticking hard candies to my nude body trying to sweeten the deal. I’m super interested in the feelings of the world ending that so many have right now. I want to be hopeful, but I am also aware we have an incredible responsibility to the future of humanity and the world right now and we could blow it!
The year of 2019 has been a very difficult year for Brazilians, with reckless neo-fascist president Jair Bolsonaro coming to power. Brazilian cinema, however, begs to differ. Two Brazilian movies won two brand new prizes in Cannes. Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles won the Jury Prize Ex-Aequo with the ultra-violent and highly-politicised sci-fi Bacurau, while Karim Ainouz took the Un Certain Regard award for Best Film for the very feminine melodrama The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao. That’s the highest accolade bestowed upon movies showing outside competition. Ainouz’s film has also been pre-nominated for an Oscar, and we think that it could become the first Brazilian film ever to snatch the statuette.
The 145-minute epic drama follows two sisters from Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s who are tragically separated throughout the decades thanks to a society that subjugates females in more ways than one. The story investigates the subtle and also the not-so-subtle oppression mechanisms that males use in order to perpetuate their position in society. The story forwards to present days at the end, and there’s a dirtylicious surprise in store for you.
Our editor Victor Fraga (who’s also Brazilian) travelled to Berlin, where Karim has lived for many years. They met in a local cafe and talked about The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao, the role of women in the resistance, what it means being a Brazilian immigrant in Europe, the failure of capitalism, religion, Netflix and much more!
The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao is in cinemas on Friday, October 2021. This interview was originally conducted in 2019,
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Victor Fraga – Your latest film won a major prize in Cannes, and so did Bacurau. Can you please talk about the significance of such double achievement for Brazilian cinema, particularly at a time when censorship is biting in?
Karim Ainouz – It’s very important in general because it’s the first time we had such a big number of Brazilian films in Cannes, and that we won the Un Certain Regard as well as a major competition prize. It’s important historically but also contextually because it’s a prize for both the movies and the trajectories (Juliano is a bit younger, but Kleber and I are from the same generation). And not a trajectory as directors and auteurs, but a trajectory of policies that made the films possible. It’s a coronation of the films but also of the political work that has been done throughout the years. It’s like winning the World Cup. But you don’t win the World Cup without practising.
VF – Who created these policies?
KA – The film supported was discontinued in the Collor government of the early 1990s. Embrafilme was completely shut down. There was a struggle to bring back public funding. Things began to change with the Audiovisual Law brought in by Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The real beginning of the renaissance of Brazilian cinema was in the nineties and the noughties. What came afterwards were the decentralisation politics, moving away from Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo towards other regions of Brazil. This started in the first Lula government.
VF – During a speech in Cannes (and I was there) you dedicated The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao to Brazilian women. Can you please talk about the role of Brazilian women in the family, in the film and also in the resistence?
KA – My film is a shout against patriarchy. It’s also a continuation of my first short film Seams (1993), a portrait of a my grandmother. My grandmother was a single mother, my mother was also a single mother. I was talking to a friend yesterday about the French Revolution, and the role of women. The moment the women invaded the Paris City Hall was a pivotal one because women could not be shot. There’s no one with more leverage and legitimacy than women to fight against the establishment.
When the film began in 2015, it was the year my mother passed away. She was a scientist, and she raised me on her own. So it was a very personal project. Of course any project has a political agenda, nobody’s a fool. But it was a very personal journey to me. When my mother died I realised how difficult it was being a single mother, supporting a family. This film was about shedding light on women of that generation. The political relevance of the film became much bigger as the years went by. If you think of the crisis we’re going through today, it’s all because of patriarchy. Women have a pivotal role in challenging this.
VF – Your film is set in the 1950s. Do you think that your protagonists Guida and Euridice would be just as oppressed and ostracised had the story taken place at present?
KA – No, I don’t think so. I think it would have been very different. Oppression is still there, but it’s played out in a different way. It depends on class, geography, a lot of things. I don’t think that a middle-class woman nowadays, if she had a boyfriend, left him and came back pregnant, would experience the same cruel behaviour from her father. But I’m not saying women are under less discrimination and pressure than back then. It’s just that the mechanisms are different.
When you look at Brazil, it’s the fourth of or fifth country in the world in terms of violence against women. I think that the toxicity of patriarchy is the same, or perhaps even worse. Men are desperate to cling to power, and this makes things worse. The tactics, the context and class have changed. But also there’s much more resistance, and this resistance is visible.
VF – Do you fear for the future of Brazilian women, given the current situation in the country?
KA – I fear for the future of the world. We are in a place I never thought we would be. I of course fear for the future of my country. We’re undergoing a tragic moment, to put it lightly. It’s pathetic. I fear for the new generation. I think we should fear but we should also have hope for the future. I prefer to think of Brazil as the country that has elected the greatest number of black women in congress and senate. I prefer to think of the Brazil as the country as Linn da Quebrada and Marielle. There’s a lot of fucking resistance! Those are the people who we need to celebrate![Linn da is pictured below, in Kiko Goifman’s documentary Bixa Travesty]
In other words, I fear for the future, but I’m also deeply in love with human beings. We are repeating the same mistakes as 50 years ago, but at the same time I prefer to look at people who are somehow making a difference. It might sound naive, but I do prefer to celebrate the people who have been raised and made conscious of who they are in the past 15 years. We must give credit to the resistance taking place.
VF – There are two types of female oppression. The father Antonio is the clear-cut type of oppressor, but there’s also Euridice’s husband Antenor, the subtle oppressor, who seems more kind and yet frowns upon his wife having a successful career. How to we extricate ourselves from such pervasive patriarchy?
KA – It’s very difficult no answer. This patriarchy is very deeply ingrained. The first thing is education, as obvious it may sound. But education in the sense of critical thinking. But also when you look at Antonio and Antenor, I don’t think that they are not absolute villains, they are just a byproduct of the time
VA – What about Bolsonaro, is he not a villain. Is he too just a byproduct of the time?
KA – No, Bolsonaro is a real villain! It’s more complicated than that. It’s a question of human ethics.
VA – Do you think that religion plays a role in the oppression of women? In Brazil we have a female minister called Damares, who also happens to be an evangelical priest. She argues that women should stay at home and not play a role in politics at all.
KA – That’s a very good question. There’s an issue with my film. I think that I could have paid closer attention to the role of religion in the life of the family. Religion plays an enormous role in control, in perpetuating power structures. I do have a hard time dealing with religion because I don’t believe in it. So in every film I make I feel that there could be more religion as an antagonist of what’s happening. I also think we shouldn’t just point fingers at the evangelicals, and at the bad qualities of religion. In stead we should be asking ourselves: “why are people turning to religion?”.
The population of Brazil feels completely abandoned, and it’s no coincidence that the evangelical Episcopalians are so successful right now. These are religions that are very much linked to success and achievement. The perfect religion to a moment when a lot of people felt betrayed. They feel liked they were promised something, I was reading an article, like they were going through a revolving door and then get suddenly thrown out. They are angry. Religion helps them to come to terms with that. In late capitalism people feel very alienated.
When people talk about global warming, it’s about industrialisation and capitalism. In 1983 there was a talk about the whole planet suddenly freezing. What I’m saying is we need to ask ourselves: “does the world need to be so industrialised? What’s the root of the problem?” Capitalism is always at the root of the problem.
VF – Is it correct to say that capitalism failed Brazil?
KA –It is correct to say that capitalism failed humanity. What’s happening in Brazil is really about that.
VF – Yet communism seems to be the real enemy. Brazilians who voted for Bolsonaro are not scared of capitalism, it’s the old ghosts of communism that they’re afraid of.
KA – I think we need to come up with something new. What’s happening in Brazil is a race for natural resources, that’s what at stake, it’s as simple as that. What’s really despairing (and also inspiring, at the same time) is that we don’t have a new model. What’s the new economic model? That’s very exciting for me, because I came from a place of privilege. But for people in despair this is not exciting.
VF – Immigration is a topic very close to you heart. More specifically, the desire to flee from Brazil to Europe. It’s a central pillar in Futuro Beach (2015, pictured below), and again in The Invisible Life. Can you please talk about your experience as an immigrant, and how that helped to shape your career?
KA – I feel like I was born in a strange place. I was born in Northeastern Brazil from a mother called Iracema and an Algerian father. Imagine the confusion. You feel like your [Arabic] name doesn’t belong to that place. This is something very close to my private life. I was closing up my mother’s house the other day and I found this writing exercise for school from when I was eight. I was already talking about travelling to Argentina, Netherlands, etc.
VF – Wanderlust?
KA – Totally. That has marked anything I do in life. This dream of fleeing, going somewhere I don’t know. It was also the dream of meeting my father, who was never there. He was living in France, then Algeria. This was very strong a feeling in my upbringing.
VF – Did you eventually fulfil the dream of meeting your father?
KA – I did! But I also realised that the places were I feel most at home are the places where I feel most foreign. The sense of home to me is connected to being uprooted and then rooted again. That’s something that was not easy for me to come to terms with, but it was also very liberating when finally happened. I get more pleasure from being in Greece than Italy because I have no fucking clue what they’re saying! I don’t understand a word, the alphabet. So there’s a sense of freedom in not belonging, and that’s also in my films.
VF – It’s a pleasure being an alien?
KA – Yes, that’s a huge pleasure! It’s a pleasure not belonging anywhere and at the same time belonging to a lot of places. Anywhere can become home to me.
VF – A few years ago, out then Prime Minister Theresa May shunned the idea that people could have multiple nationalities, and that multiculturalism could work. She infamously said “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere“. Are you a citizen of nowhere?
KA – Absolutely. I love being a citizen of nowhere!!! I think she’s probably talking about legal rights, while I’m talking about sensations. Not being able to understand what’s happening around me is really inspiring! Not being able to decipher allows you to experience things in a different way.
In Invisible Life, what was very interesting to me was to look at Brazil as a place of immigration [the father Antonio is a Portuguese immigrant in Brazil], and the consequences for the first generation [Antonio’s daughters Euridice and Guida]. These girls needed to succeed, to be the perfect role model. This is much clearer in the book [the eponymous Marta Batalha romance upon which the film is based]. That’s a very important subject to me, but also to the world in general.
Brazil is one of those cultures where people are really happy with what they are. There’s a real love for the land, despite all the shit that’s been going on for 500 years. I wish I could see more stories about Brazil as a place that people go to! Once you get there, the identity from where you came from is erased and you instantly become Brazilian.
On the other hand, the desire to leave has to do with queerness. The queer diaspora. The feeling of going away is something that we as queer people have faced from day one. The smaller the place, the more control they exert over your body and your life. That’s also played a big role in the way I work and in the way I have travelled around the world.
VF – Let’s go back to the topic of resistance. Brazilian television is not doing a sterling job for historically marginalised groups. Black people are constantly criminalised, while LGBT and female representation isn’t very accurate. Will Brazilians have to turn to cinema instead as tool of resistence?
KA – I don’t know! On one hand, I feel like a dinosaur. Does cinema make sense? Does it make sense to make films? Who watches them? But then, that’s all I know how to do. I have to believe it makes a difference, otherwise, how will I wake up in the morning?
It is horrendous how in television – no matter what channel – we Brazilians present ourselves as a white nation. And we are not! That also has to do with who’s owning and running the media in Brazil. And it’s part of an elite who like to think of themselves as white and European. This has nothing to do with what the actual country is.
I don’t know where the frontline is. My frontline is making films. But maybe the frontline is neither in cinema nor television. Maybe the frontline is on the Internet. Maybe it’s on long narratives called series, or something else. When you look at Porta dos Fundos [a Brazilian comedy YouTube channel], it’s brilliant. Maybe that’s the frontline.
VF – Is it on Netflix? Did Petra Costa get it right launching her documentary The Edge of Democracy (2019) there?
KA – No, I don’t think it’s Netflix at all.
VF – But Netflix gave Petra’s film available in more than 200 countries, and people around the world the opportunity to understand the tragedy that’s befallen Brazil.
KA – I didn’t see the film. I think Netflix and Amazon are great, but I also think that we need to be more creative. I’m not entirely sure where the future is, but I’m not convinced it’s not in a big corporation. I hope there are other ways we can communicate with people. We need diversity. We need diverse platforms with diverse outreach that support diverse voices.
