The “I” in the title refers to Leyla, one of three friends who have finished school, and are ready to seize their first summer of freedom. Director Karin Heberlein’s Swiss coming-of-age drama, Sami, Joe and I (Sami Joe Und Ich), opens with the evocative words of Leyla’s late mother: “Always keep more dreams in your soul than reality can destroy.” This sentiment haunts the story, as Sami (Anja Gada), Joe (Rabea Lüthi) and Leyla (Jana Sekulovska) become deflated by harsh reality.
It’s Heberlein’s intent to show the difficulties of young adulthood, that contrasts to the hopeful enthusiasm of her characters. The trio are filled with naïve and abstract notions about the future, as they should be. There is a time to dream, to feel empowered, and the prospect of escaping institutional control fuels such hopes. The director however, is not narrow-minded, and she does not lose herself in the romanticisation of youth.
After an argument with her controlling and disciplinarian father Adem (Astrit Alihajdaraj), Sami overhears him tell her mother that their son is enough for him. Joe’s mother struggles to raise her children as a single parent, and Leyla experienced the loss of her mother at a young age. Even before the burden of young adulthood penetrates their future dreams, the trio have not been spared difficult experiences. From here the story touches upon the troubling issues of generational trauma and sexual assault.
Sami’s father lived through the Bosnian war, before resettling in Switzerland. Frequently clashing with his daughter, his past experiences allow the audience to show a modicum of sympathy, his nature possibly one borne out of traumatising experiences. It would have been interesting had the director explored the theme of generational trauma, penetrating the ambiguity whether Adem’s past experiences are the reason for his nature, or is he patriarchal? Heberlein is non-committal, but her approach to Joe’s own experience of trauma following a sexual assault is clearer. The film directly addresses toxic power structures, that force victims to live in silence or seek revenge, however, each choice is filled with pain.
As in all coming-of-age stories, the characters encounter a metaphorical death as their experiences emotionally transform them. Leyla’s mother spoke about dreams, but Heberlein also emphasises that what we believe in is important. This is a source of energy we can draw off, even as our dreams collapse.
Sami is drawn towards the web of radicalisation because of her father’s controlling nature, and when she asks Leyla what it is she believes in, her friend answers, their friendship. It’s a moment that reminds us of the value of those simple joys that we need to hold on to. Our dreams and what we believe in are vulnerable and impermanent. We must protect ourselves from their destruction. The story celebrates friendship, and how we can empower ourselves when we’re connected to our tribe.
In spite of the challenges, Sami, Joe and Leyla hold on to an energy for life, but we’re left to ask the question whether it can hold out against adulthood adversity? Heberlein’s film doesn’t offer an end, instead the credits mark the end of a chapter, only there’s no next chapter, except life’s uncertainty.
Sami, Joe and I is a rewarding film, showcasing a filmmaker in command of her story. By not exploring the themes and ideas as aggressively as she could have chosen to, Heberlein creates a space for her audience to enter the film. She also honours the reality that people often internalise their thoughts and feelings, or as this trio do, internalise inside of their tribal bubble. Some questions are not asked, others may be left unanswered, but it remains an engaging film that acknowledges the difficult experiences, as much as it celebrates youth and friendship.
Watch Sami, Joe and I watch it online for free in December only with ArteKino.
Actress, writer and director Madeleine Sims-Fewer, and director and writer Dusty Mancinelli, premiered their feature debut, the Canadian independent horror Violation at Midnight Madness, TIFF 2020.
Miriam (Madeleine Sims-Fewer) and her husband Caleb (Obi Abili), visit her younger sister Greta (Anna Maguire) and brother-in-law Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe), at their secluded lakeside home in the Canadian woods. Troubled from a past trauma and on the edge of divorce, the family reunion takes a dark turn for Miriam when a slip in judgement leads to an act of betrayal. Fearing that her sister is in danger she commits an act of violent revenge, but she’s unprepared for the emotional and psychological toll.
The pair first collaborated together on the 2017 short Slap Happy, about a breakup of a sexually expressive couple, and was followed by Woman in Stall (2018) and Chubby (2019), about a ten-year-old confronting the trauma of her sexual abuse.
In conversation with DMovies, Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli discussed not weighing a film down with expectations, but instead allowing it to be whatever it needs to be, and guarding against being typecast by the genre.
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Paul Risker – ‘What we are’ versus ‘who we feel we are’ can often be out of synch. I’ve spoken with directors who say that it took a number of films before they felt they could call themselves a filmmaker. Do you feel that you can call yourselves filmmakers?
Dusty Mancinelli – I was struggling with actualisation as a human being for a long time, and it’s only now that I feel comfortable with myself as a human being. In terms of being a filmmaker, I’ve been making shorts for 13 years, and I definitely had no clue who I was as a filmmaker prior to meeting Madeleine. It was only through our collaboration that I felt I finally understood the kinds of films I wanted to make, and how I wanted to make them.
Madeleine Sims-Fewer – There’s a clarity that comes from our collaboration in realising what our voice is, together and individually. I definitely didn’t know what my voice as a filmmaker was, I was still working it out, and there’s something about the way Dusty challenges me as an artist that actually helped me to realise what it is I want to say.
DM – I don’t believe in anything ever being fully formed. No artist is fully formed, even the greatest artists, and I’m always in awe of PT Anderson for example, who has evolved. His films are very much his films, but you see a progression in his work that’s inspiring.
There’s a danger in thinking you’re fully formed as a human being, or as an artist because then there’s nowhere to go. I don’t believe in the idea of mastering a craft, or yourself as a person – that idea is an illusion. What we’re constantly striving for, like Madeleine said is clarity, but also a sense of growth and progression. It’s almost like you’re in a dark forest that’s absolutely endless, and you’re trying to find some boundary that represents your shape. You don’t know what that is and with every film it’s like we’re trying to figure it out, and hopefully we get closer to it, but also that it shows a range of tastes.
One thing we’re noticing coming off the back of Violation is how many people will see us as these kinds of filmmakers because of the content and the genre. We have such a wide range of tastes that it’s important for us to think carefully about the next thing that we do, and how that still represents who we are, but will also show our diversity.
MSF – There’s a funny thing people in the industry say: “Don’t say I want to be a director, say I am a director”, which is so silly. I don’t subscribe to that at all. It’s almost like this secret way of imagining things into reality, and filmmaking is a lot more tangible than that. I don’t know if I would, other than by putting on my tax form, say I’m a filmmaker. There’s no pride for either of us in saying that.
DM – A lot of that has to do with how we romanticise the idea of filmmaking and writing. The imposter syndrome only comes out of the romanticisation of it because I don’t feel any pleasure in being able to identify myself as a filmmaker, or as a writer.
MSF – It’s more stifling.
DM – It’s not easy, and it constantly feels like you’re going to battle with yourself. It’s part of your identity I guess in a way that feels basic, though I totally respect and appreciate the idea of the imposter syndrome. We’re definitely crippled with insecurities and things that sometimes slow us down, or we get blocked creatively.
PR – Greta and Miriam both convey the characteristics of strength and weakness, but in different ways. Was it your intention to question these as being exclusive of one another?
MSF – This reveals what we’re interested in, which is the complexities of human beings and human relationships, but also that we are multifaceted people. There’s an inherent strength in emotional outpouring, but there’s also an inherent strength in stoicism, and I don’t think those two things have to cancel each other out, when neither one is right.
DM – In revenge films, it’s all about that person finding their redemption or closure. This is an anti-hero, this is someone who it’s not important to us that you like her, but we want you to understand her as much as possible, and it’s the same with Miriam’s brother-in-law. This is drawing from our own personal experiences of abuse and trauma now, but you’re so used to in the sub-genre of rape revenge seeing the stranger in the alleyway who is clearly a nefarious villain. Yes, I’m sure those people exist and that does happen, but it has been reported that more often than not sexual abuse is caused by a perpetrator who is close to the victim, and who’s trusted. It’s a family member, a friend, someone who’s in the inner circle. We realised we had not been seeing that, and what happens when you make that person affable and charming at the beginning? How can you actually make the audience feel betrayed by this character, so that it simulates the betrayal that Miriam feels in the moment?
PR – We infer a previous traumatic incident in Miriam’s past, but by treating it ambiguously do you see this as a way to create space for the audience to enter the film, and for you to manipulate how we identify with characters?
DM – This is something we learned when we made our short film Woman in Stall, about a woman trapped in a public bathroom. There’s a man on the other side and she’s not sure what his intentions are. When we were cutting the movie, we weren’t sure how much to show of him, and if we should make him out to be a complete villain. We realised the best thing we could possibly do was to try to walk as fine a line as possible, without revealing to the audience what our thoughts were about either of these characters. Instead we tried to subvert your expectations of who you thought this person was, trying to show you them both in as much of an unvarnished way as possible.
It was fascinating when we showed it at the Austin Film Festival. We were in the audience and they did a poll to see what the stances were, and it was 50-50. It was amazing to see that half the people thought she over-reacted, and half the people thought he was a creep. We realised it’s magic and what that kind of conversation reveals to us is just how a film can provoke an internal bias, and that’s exciting to us. After that experience we’ve been chasing it, trying to figure out how can we constantly do that, and Violation does it in so many different ways.
MSF – Some people can be frustrated by that because they don’t like any ambiguity in the films that they watch, and that’s fair. This film is not for those people, but it’s something that will always exist in our films.
DM – … There’s no ambiguity in what happens to Miriam, I think that’s important to note. The ambiguity comes in the complexities of this being someone she trusts, someone in the family. Then what happens when your sister also doesn’t accept this truth? What does it mean to find justice, and is there such a thing as the self-righteous notion of this crusader who enacts their own violent course of vengeance? These are the interesting elements that are complex for us.
PR – You’re right to stress that. By not fully revealing herself to us, she leaves us wanting to understand the violence, pain and anxiety she has suffered, that makes her a difficult character to forget.
MSF – I’ve been thinking more and more about the character, where she’s not someone who entirely belongs anywhere. She doesn’t belong with her sister and she doesn’t belong with her husband. She’s constantly seeking this belonging and never finds it, and so many people latch onto that and feel the same way about their own lives. We feel that, and it’s something that has come through in the character.
DM – Trauma can be incredibly alienating, and that’s what it comes down to for us.
PR – Interviewing Larry Fessenden, he spoke of how a film is abandoned. Would you agree with this sentiment, or is it more about being able to let go of the film, and accepting it’ll never be perfect?
DM – One thing I’ve discovered over the years, and I believe this, is that the thing we’re creating is alive. I think of it as a living organism and I don’t know what it’s going to be. I’m a parent and I’m trying to inspire it, shape it, or encourage it, but it can go in so many different directions.
MSF – You have the idea of its potential and if you impose your view of what it should be, then it absolutely will not live up to your expectations – just like no child lives up to their parent’s expectations if they impose these on them. You have to just be open for it to become whatever it needs to be.
DM – We could keep working on it forever, and when you release a film there’s a sense of clarity about what you would do differently. Sure, we could go back in the edit room and spend four more months on it, and we’d change it, or we could go back and rewrite the script. There’s a certain point with any piece of art where you have to accept the final manifestation of that idea, as the inevitability of every action that brought you there, and you have to fully accept that it’s always going to be imperfect.
MSF – One of our actors said that when they watched the film, they didn’t recognise themselves because that was a moment in time that has now gone. It was a great way of putting it because when I now watch the film, I don’t quite recognise that part of myself because I’m now someone different. You’re just constantly moving and evolving, and the next thing we make will be a completely different stage, and then we’ll move on from that.
Emma’s (Emilia Jones) older brother (Oliver Coopersmith) left their mother (Sienna Guillory) for dead in a violent assault, forcing mother and daughter to flee. Crashing their car in a freak accident, they find shelter by breaking and entering into an isolated house on the outskirts of the village.
Out one day for a swim, Emma meets a mysterious boy (George MacKay), who’s fascinated with the defunct nuclear power plant that poisons the lake water. Listening to stories of his adventures, she inquisitively asks questions, which amuses him. But she can’t run from her traumatic past forever, and when it catches up with her, she must face it if she is to move on.
Nuclear opens with a poetry of words and imagery. The mysterious female figure (Noriko Sakura) who first appears in the film’s opening scene, offering a poetic contemplation on death, echoes the Lynchian surreal. The cinematography and the editing rhythm, staring up and across through the crowded woodland of trees, evokes the aesthetic poetry of cinema. The opening has a feeling of waking, and as our eyes open we see before us the first glimpses of the birth of Nuclear’s world.
The intense and unnerving opening, as we hear the cries of pain from the mother, the aggressive grunts of violent exertion from the son/brother, is disturbing. It’s not gratuitously violent, but Linstrum and her cinematographer Crystel Fournier do not pull their punches. We feel uncomfortable and we want to pull our gaze away from the screen. In this moment a bond is forged between the audience and the two women.
What quickly defines this as accomplished and mature storytelling is how we should feel about the characters is not as black and white as the opening scene suggests. Revealing familial tensions complicate our feelings towards the young man. Yes, his violence is full of hate, anger and frustration, but it’s an anxiety whose roots lie in the imperfections of people and relationships. Linstum and her co-writer David-John Newman, take the neat juxtaposition of the terms like and dislike, good and bad, and plunge them into the murky grey.
Without entering the world of horror, the director and her co-writer touch upon the idea of the origins of the monstrous. They flirt with horror, but remain interested in the psychological drama. Linstrum utilises horresque cinematography: the female protagonist stalked by the angry male antagonist i used as a complimentary tone. The focus is on the psychological, and a repeat viewing will reveal a nuance to the internal conversation of the mind in response to trauma. Here is a meticulous and thoughtful contribution to cinema’s representation of this mental disorder.
Nuclear subverts our expectations by downplaying the drama of its story. The interest of the filmmakers is that we contribute to its creation, by bringing ourselves to the film and emotionally connecting with Emma. The drama comes out of our own feelings of desperation and urgency, empathy and anxiety that we share with not only the characters, but also the filmmakers, who have crafted the film with a deliberate intent to engage with us through shared thoughts and feelings.
Contributing to this repression of the drama is the limited screen time of the unnamed boy, who traditionally would be subject to a more thorough character development. This choice sustains the feeling of Emma’s isolation, by holding the surrounding world at arm’s length. Even when she enters the village shop, any interaction is unseen – we only see her enter, cutting to her back at the house. What is so striking is this artificial feel, life neatly blocked out and streamlined with a minimalism, that contrasts to the rigorous portrayal of the psychology of trauma.
Nuclear is an unassuming film, that subverts the expectations of the mainstream commercial, and refrains from committing fully to the non-commercial aesthetic. There are glimpses of abstract visual metaphors for example, with a potential for an ambiguous reflection on character, themes and ideas.
Linstrum conveys that experience of crossing paths with a stranger, and while the encounter touches us, an aura of mystery remains – what do we really know about Emma, her family or the unnamed boy? This allows for a subtle emotional seduction that sparks our intrigue, and in a film vulnerable to spoilers, it leaves us with the impression that there’s much going on beneath its simple form. And like parables, Nuclear is about us seeing the ideas and reflections of thought that can either offer us a message, or be a spark for our own deeper contemplation.
Morley’s latest film is both infuriating and enthralling in equal measure. Infuriating because its convoluted plot, firing off in several directions one after another, is often nigh on impossible to follow. Enthralling because while you never quite know where you are, it periodically throws at you utterly compelling little visual clues and sequences of images as teasers to suggest narrative or other possibilities.
Some viewers are going to hate this film and wonder why they wasted their money to see it. Others like myself, while not showering the film with unqualified praise, are going to want to revisit it several times and get more out of it each time they return. If you’ve got the patience and are prepared to dig on a first viewing and return later to dig some more, there’s a lot waiting to be unearthed here.
After a brief introductory sequence in which astronomer Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) talks to a small audience outside an observatory about the stars and our place in the universe, she becomes the subject of a homicide case. But who pulled the trigger and blew her face off?
Finding herself in charge of the investigation, Police Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) examines the crime scene. Rainfall has interfered with it through the opened telescope slit in the domed roof. She notes such objects as a gun, a sock, a high heeled shoe and a jar of skin cream. She is approached by and surprisingly quickly falls in with TV news reporter Stella Honey (Devyn Tyler) who appears at unexpected moments and disappears equally unexpectedly.
The two immediate murder suspects are Jennifer’s boss Dr. Ian Strammi (Toby Jones) – it was his gun and he covered up the telescope but didn’t close the roof – and her boyfriend Duncan Reynolds (Jonathan Majors) – it was his sock. Reynolds’ alibi was that he rushed home after lovemaking to work on an all-consuming academic theory, Strammi’s that he spent all night with a female student discussing Schrödinger’s Cat. Hoolihan’s boss Lieutentant Janey McBride (Yolanda Ross) and colleague Tony Silvero (Aaron Tveit) have different ideas, including the latter’s belief that the perpetrator is the .38 Calibre Killer who hasn’t killed since the 1980s.
Something doesn’t feel quite right to Hoolihan, though, so she turns her attention outwards to the victim’s family – war hero father Colonel Tom (James Caan), mother Miriam (Jacki Weaver) and their twin sons.
The plot may or may not be clearer in Martin Amis’ novel Night Train from which Morley’s script is adapted, although she’s apparently removed and added quite a lot of material. The New Orleans setting allows for a commendably interracial cast and a clutch of striking performances. Chief among these is Clarkson’s detective, trying to just get on and do her job even as elements from the case on which she’s working resonate with half-remembered memory fragments from her own past. Or perhaps they’re prophetic images from her future.
Morley tantalisingly baffles and dazzles us with repeating images: a red scarf blowing in the wind of an electric fan, blue necklace baubles dropping onto and bouncing on a floor. The piece ends as it begins with images of the stars in the sky above the city.
All this proceeds in a kaleidoscopic manner focusing on a character here and a bunch of images there until a point towards the end where one of the images furnishes a key clue as to what all this is about and the solution is abruptly revealed in a curt couple of lines of dialogue that could have been thrown in at any earlier point in the proceedings.
As far as Morley’s concerned, the plot doesn’t seem to be what really matters. Her interest lies elsewhere – trauma, memory, repression. Our past affecting our present. Some intensely personal events have influenced Morley’s directing: her father committed suicide when she was eleven and according to the press blurb there were characters and situations in Amis’ novel that she immediately recognised as from her past. If the film doesn’t work so well as a straightforward genre exercise, those viewers with the patience to let it speak to them on its own terms over multiple viewings will find it rich in meaning indeed.
Set to open in Korea in 2018, this is the follow-up documentary to Two Doors (Kim il-rhan/ Hong Ji-you, 2012) about the Yongsan tragedy in which a policeman and five protesters were killed in a fire atop a housing block during a protest. One of the limitations imposed on that film was the incarceration of those protesters that escaped the burning rooftop lookout atop the Yongsan building. Viewers of the first film kept asking what had happened to these people.
The short answer is: four years after originally being sentenced, they were pardoned and released. This meant that they were now available to tell their own stories, so Kim and Lee from the Pinks film making collective and their crew started talking to them on camera. Slowly, a second film started to emerge. It’s not exactly a sequel, more a follow up. Which is to say, it’s dealing with different aspects of the same story but constructed around a different template and operating within a dissimilar set of parameters.
In the process, this second instalment starts to unpack elements that were never fully explained in the first film. For one thing, the rooftop lookout is now described as a simple structure erected by the protesters themselves rather than an original architectural feature, with interview material of the rigger who oversaw its construction.
This second doc also explores areas into which the first’s limitations prevented it from venturing. One question is that of how the fire in the lookout actually started in the first place. Two Doors drew upon a number of sources. The exterior footage shows the structure unexpectedly, suddenly burst into flames with no obvious visual clue as to why. There’s no police footage of what occurred inside the structure presumably because cameras were turned off when the Swat team moved onto the roof. The official report which formed a major part of the evidence in the court case goes suspiciously quiet when it comes to this part of the operation. It was something which therefore got passed over in the original film, but with access to those who were inside the inferno and survived, the various factors leading up to the deadly combustion are explained in some considerable detail.
This access makes The Remnants much more people-centred than its predecessor. It becomes clear that there were two camps among the protesters, those from the building itself and those activists who came in from outside to help them in their struggle. In prison, the two factions became polarised. After their release, three survivors wanted to meet together on a regular basis to talk through and collectively process the trauma they’d experienced. By way of contrast, the fourth survivor’s way of dealing with it was to go to rallies and remind people of the tragedy to keep it in the public eye. The first three want him to meet up with him and talk about it, but for a long time he refuses, believing this to be a waste of time. Eventually though, the four are brought together in an event attempt to try and understand what happened on the day of the fire: this also serves as a catalyst for the unwilling party to engage (argue with) the others which proves cathartic for all concerned.
Any documentary about survivors of a tragic fire will bring to mind Grenfell Tower for UK residents, although the specifics of that tragedy are very different. Inevitably, because The Remnants concerns the Yongsan tragedy survivors rather than the authorities, the film feels more inwards-focused than its predecessor. But it’s a striking work for all that.
The Remnants plays in The London Korean Film Festival.
