Tag: youth

Youth (Spring)

Posted on by victorfraga

Fifty-five-year-old Wang Bing is perhaps China’s most internationally acclaimed documentarist. His films are recognised for the humanistic portray of Chinese people as well as for their peculiar duration: Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) lasted a mere 551 minutes (little more than nine hours). Youth is no different, with an equally focus on real people, and at a taut 213 minutes (little more than 3.5 hours). The film follows various young people – mostly adolescents aged 16 to 19 who migrated from the neighbouring province of Anhui – as they toil and unwind (in their scarce leisure time) in Zhili, a small town in the vicinities of Shanghai. Their stories intertwine, in a movie devoid of a narrative arc. The director stays behind the camera, in a fly-on-the-wall type of interaction.

These young people are energetic and boisterous. They carry out their work undaunted, and almost invariably with a smile on their faces. Their joie-de-vivre is entirely palpable. They don’t seem to mind the insalubrious working and living conditions. The corridors are littered with debris, the walls collapsing with filth, the sleeping areas crammed with countless people (bedsits often next to the sewing machines). These workers are at the coalface around the clock. Their favourite topics are marriage and money. Only very occasionally there is a touch of romance. These people seem to have an inborn sense of practicality. They spend most of the film calculating how many garments they have to produce in order to make ends meet. Thousands. Perhaps even tens of thousand. They are paid between 4 and 12 yuan per piece (£0.40 to £1, roughly). They presumably have to work exceptionally long hours in order to make a decent living wage. Despite taking place in a technically communist nation, it is the machinations of Neoliberalism – particularly the gig economy – that you will identify in Youth (at one point, a boss reminds his workers of their replaceability. while also insulting them: “retards”).

Strangely, these people never bemoan their working conditions, and they don’t dream of getting away either. There is no desire for change, it seems. I wonder the reason for such lack of self-reflection and criticism. Is it due to censorship, is this a factuality, or perhaps just a creative choice instead? While certainly not a piece of government propaganda, I am not sure whether Chinese authorities vetted Wang Bing’s latest film Hence I genuinely don’t know the answer to the question that I just posed. Whatever the answer, I wouldn’t blame the director. He is not responsible for the protocols that may (or may not) be forced upon him.

The cinematography is sombre and elegant, in line with the shabby locations, and in contrast to the chirpy demeanour of the characters. Despite the “spring” in its title, Bing’s latest endeavour is a very dark one, at least from a visual perspective. The weather is almost invariably cloudy or rainy. The director presumably used a very low ISO: the photography light is visibly bust during the only, extremely brief sequence out in the sun.

While Bing deserves unequivocal praise for his realism, the same does not extend to the length of the narrative. Overall, Spring does overstay its welcome. It is possible to make an extremely long documentary about spirited teens that’s engaging throughout. If you enjoy watching young people haggling relentlessly for 3.5 hours, this is the film for you. Otherwise you might get a little bored. Or you might at least want to pop out of the cinema for a little break (the film is being shown without an interval at all)

Youth (Sprint) premiered in the Official Competition of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It isn’t the only documentary in a strand normally reserved for fiction features. Tunisian drama Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania) is a highly inventive and audacious family and political doc. Out in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

This is the first entry in a trilogy of films that follow the same characters over an extended period of time.Wang Bing estimated the trilogy would run for approximately nine hours and 40 minutes.

Beautiful Beings

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TRANSYLVANIA

Step over, Euphoria (Sam Levinson, 2019-). When it comes up to hyper-attenuated and messed-up portrayals of youth, you have a serious contender from Iceland in the form of Beautiful Beings. Telling the story of four kids growing up in a rugged and beaten-down Reykjavik, it’s a dark, mysterious and complex portrayal of young life that is equal parts beautiful and grotesque.

It’s a 90s period piece. The main give away is the sheer amount these 14-year-olds smoke. Given that a pack of cigarettes in Iceland these days is just over £10, there’s no way that they could chain with the absolute glee seen here. Likewise, the country, known for its natural beauty, has never looked quite so depressing and ruinous. Director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson and his team do some great location work here to depict a city that feels like one of the worst places in the world to grow up.

We start with Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason), who comes from a broken home and is a shy reticent boy. His mother is off scoring drugs and drinking with friends, while his abusive step-dad is in jail. To make matters worse, he is terrorised by the cooler kids In the first of many violent scenes to come, he is smacked in the face with a branch. This attracts the attention of Konni (Viktor Benóný Benediktsson), Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frímannsson) and Addi (Birgir Dagur Bjarkason), who think it’s fun to terrorise Balli and make fun of his injuries. Nonetheless, Addi is revealed to be a far more sensitive soul, eventually reaching out to Balli and becoming his best friend.

Unlike many movies, where bullies are often one-dimensional and uninteresting, this film does a great job of showing the ways that bullies can become friends and friends can become bullies. But while Siggi bullies to fit in and Konni to assert power, Addi seems to do it just because he can. This also makes it easier for him to stop. But in a few strange dream sequences, he starts to sense violence coming around the corner, which finally erupts with incredible force and brutality.

The kids do a great job of navigating an almost-adultless world, free to run around, smoke, experiment with drugs and rib each other over the slightest deviation from the so-called masculine norm. Their lives are captured with handheld camera-work, soft colours and nuanced editing choices, resulting in a poignant portrait of broken youth, the cycle of violence and the difficulty of finding your place in such a terrible world.

Nonetheless, viewers should beware: there are scenes of sexual violence here that are likely to turn some people off. While the more joyful parts of the kids lives go someway counteract the misery-fest, they’re not quite handled with the nuance that such a difficult topic deserves. Despite this, the kindness and the tenderness remains. While adults may have ruined their chances of being better people, kids are often far more malleable. There’s still a chance that they’ll be alright.

Beautiful Beings plays in Competition at TIFF, running from 17th-26th June.

22 July

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The date is July 22nd, 2011. After detonating a bomb in Oslo, a far-right terrorist traveled to the island of Utøya to massacre teenagers attending a youth leadership Summer camp. Once he was apprehended by police, the country had to come to terms with his actions while the survivors had to rebuild their lives and, if they chose, confront the terrorist in court.

Not to be confused with the bravura single take, Norwegian language film U: July 22 (Erik Poppe, 2018) about the massacre on the island itself, due for UK release two weeks after this one, 22 July is the English language film by UK director Paul Greengrass using a Norwegian cast and crew which covers not only the massacre but events leading up to it and its aftermath. It’s based on the book One of Us: The Story of a Massacre and its Aftermath by Åsne Seierstad, a renowned Norwegian war correspondent whose expertise Greengrass says he found invaluable in making the film.

Greengrass’s background in journalism and documentary led to feature films like Bloody Sunday (2002) and United 93 (2006), about the 1972 Derry, Northern Ireland ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings and one of the commercial flights involved in the 9/11 US terrorist attacks respectively, which dramatise actual historical events with documentarian accuracy. He uses this approach again in 22 July, which shares a great deal with United 93, another film about a terrorist attack perpetrated against a Western democracy.

Whereas 9/11’s terrorists were immigrant Islamists from a culture beyond the target country, the lone operator behind the Oslo and Utøya attacks was a far-right extremist and a Norwegian national, the enemy within. Both United 93 and 22 July start with the terrorist preparations and follow them as they put their plans into action, but where United 93 followed both what went on in the aircraft and events on the ground e.g. in air traffic control up to the point the aircraft was destroyed in mid-flight, 22 July covers not only the Oslo bombing and the Utøya shootings in its first third but also the survivors – both teenagers and terrorist – up to and including the point where the former group confronted the latter individual in court.

Thus, in addition to one plot line following far right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie), another follows two teenage brothers at the camp Viljar and Torje Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gravli and Isak Bakli Aglen) in their attempts to survive. Viljar, who helps his younger brother flee to safety, receives a gunshot wound to the head and shoulders and for months after the incident must undergo hospital treatment and therapy. As he does so, he must face his own demons: will Viljar be able to confront the terrorist in court and show the world that there is a better way? A third plot strand involves the Norwegian PM Stoltenberg (Ola G. Furuseth) as he struggles to deal with the unfolding terrorist incidents.

It’s gripping and terrifying material, impressive not least for the huge amount of research that Greengrass, Seierstad and team have clearly put in. On a really big screen it’s visceral and harrowing – apart from Viljar’s sustaining his injuries there isn’t a great deal of graphic detail shown, but the fact that these are carefully crafted recreations of actual events that took place in recent history lends the representation considerable gravitas.

Controversially, Greengrass has chosen to make this film with online movie streaming service Netflix and while we would encourage you to see it in a cinema with a decent sized screen if you possibly can, those with Netflix accounts may, understandably, choose to watch it on that platform instead. (Hey – go and see it in the cinema first!) The teenage survivors are the next generation, so Greengrass’ stated intention of reaching that audience via a familiar streaming platform makes complete sense, much as I hate to have to write that this is the case.

In short, this is a well researched, realised and performed and to boot a highly effective docudrama about devastating events that remind us to be vigilant in combating and confronting terrorism, whether perpetrated by right wing extremists or anyone else. It would make a terrific double bill if preceded by United 93 for those that have both stomach and stamina to cope with both at once, however it’s undeniably an effective piece of cinema in its own right. You might wonder why Greengrass would need to make a 22 July after having already made a United 93: the answer is, the Islamist terrorist atrocity and the right wing extremist terrorist atrocity are two sides of the same coin, so the pair of films presents us with some sort of wider, balanced view. The new film is absolutely essential viewing in much the same way that the earlier one was. Don’t miss.

22 July is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, October 10th as well as on Netflix. Watch the film trailer below: