Tag: Panorama

All Eyes Off Me (Mishehu Yohav Mishehu)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Avishag’s (Elisheva Weil) iPhone is cracked. These things happen, but it’s this kind of small detail that immediately invites the viewer to judge her. She sits in a dog park and watches the Israeli X factor on her broken screen; someone singing “Hurt” by Christina Aguilera. The film invites us to watch almost the entire clip along with Avishag, trying to square her love of mainstream television with her fantasies of extremely rough sex.

Her face is also cracked. She likes to be choked and slapped during intercourse. This comes as something as a surprise to her new paramour Max (Leib Lev Levin). He quickly jumps on the idea as he utterly adores Avishag, who has this quality of quickly making men swoon. The miracle of All Eyes Off Me is the way it takes this dirty premise and spins it into something rather profound, a low-key reverie on the unknowability of man.

Max and Avishag might be hitting it off, but Danny (Hadar Katz) is quickly losing touch with her youth. She’s just realised that she’s pregnant with Max’s baby, telling her friends at a party that she will get an abortion as soon as possible. Another girl details in blasé fashion both the terror and the ease of terminating a pregnancy, the camera lingering on Danny’s more-or-less unreadable reaction. Nonetheless, she cannot bring herself to tell Max the news, as he seems so absorbed in his new girlfriend. In a brave move, she disappears for the rest of the film, lingering over both Max’s and Avishag’s choices for the remaining runtime. We are left with an enigma, shafted from the story due to her inability to move forward.

Split into three related yet distinct parts that refract off one another like three interpretations of the same tune, Hadas Ben Aroya’s film is unpredictable, unnerving and quietly exhilarating. This generation of Israelis might be young, sexually liberated and drug-friendly; readily journeying to Paris and Berlin while down for experimentation without the moral baggage, but they can never talk about the future in any depth. Instead they live in an eternal present. Yet, behind this veneer of sexual freedom is something far more intriguing: an investigation into modern relationships that struck me with its precise dialogue, illuminating anecdotes and precisely framed movements. The acting is uniformly great, utilising unforced naturalism to bring conflicts to the fore while never letting them boil over into histrionics.

There is a touch of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore in this film, both in its unadorned approach to sex and relationships as well as a thorny investigation of the power within those relationships. And just like in The Mother and the Whore, director Hadas Ben Aroya is unafraid to simply allow characters to sit and bask in their feelings, usually while listening to an entire track — Yé-Yé pop and Israeli dad rock — play out from start to finish. This allows us to just sit with the characters and tune into their reality. Without exterior moralising or unnecessary exposition, this ambiguous chamber drama never gives too much away. I was constantly engaged by its fascinating, constantly shape-shifting form.

All Eyes Off Me played in the Panorama section of the 71st Berlinale. It also showed at the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Dirty Feathers

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

A poetic snapshot of life on the periphery, Dirty Feathers excels in capturing the multifarious nature of life on the streets. Although there are many similarities between the various homeless people the film follows, no two stories are the same, painting a diverse portrait of people taking each day as it comes.

Using his experience working in the camera department for Roberto Minervini, the US-based Italian filmmaker whose movies, blending documentary and narrative, capture rural lives often ignored in the USA, first-time feature director Carlos Alfonso Corral builds upon these portraits with a striking observational documentary of his own. Blending poetic voiceover with light music and stark black-and-white images, Dirty Feathers quietly observes the lives of those in and around a homeless shelter in El Paso — on the border with Mexico — optimistically known as the “Opportunity Center.”

Opportunity and optimism permeate this story, with most of the subjects talking with clear-eyed enthusiasm about how God will eventually provide for them. At its heart is an African-American couple: Brandon and his pregnant wife Reagan. They support each other as much as possible while living with debilitating drug addiction. But Brandon has his own dreams of running a soul food restaurant, methodically laying out his plans to make it a success. Yet Brandon and the many others who make up this film — a Latino man grieving his son, a war veteran, a Trump-hating immigrant — are not followed in a traditional sense, with Corral more interested in poetics than conclusions.

Many of them are barred from the OC for one reason or another, forced to find alternative living arrangements that stress the difficulty of their situation. It’s clear the director has spent a fair amount of time with these people before rolling the camera, allowing for immersive yet unobtrusive frames, capturing light in an almost ethereal fashion. It can be hard to know exactly how much time has passed, yet this seems to be the point, capturing these people as they lie suspended between a difficult past and a tentative future, aptly symbolised by Reagan’s upcoming baby.

It’s scary watching this documentary knowing the twin-horrors that lie ahead: the Covid-19 pandemic and Texas’s ongoing energy crisis. Perhaps some of these characters have already fatally succumbed to state failure. Texas is well-known for its rugged sense of individualism, even within the hyper-capitalist USA, and this theme of self-improvement is evident within almost all of its resilient subjects; nonetheless, without forcing a central thesis upon us, Dirty Feathers shows us the importance of a social state in order to deal with addiction, mental health issues, healthcare (one man talks of a $10,000 hospital bill), post-traumatic stress disorder and homelessness; how people ultimately need some help in order to realise their dreams. The apparent collapse of the social state in these regions (which has no income tax!) has led to an underclass of forgotten people; Dirty Feathers, with its stirring, un-judgemental tone, returns some measure of dignity and beauty to their lives.

Dirty Feathers is playing in the Panorama section of Berlinale, running from 1st to 5th March.

We (Nous)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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