Borderlines Film Festival Blog

Labours of Love

2019-04-17T09:30:00.000+01:00

Irene's Ghost

Documentary film-makers have always been well represented at Borderlines and 2019 was no exception. Irene's Ghost (2018), directed by Iain Cunningham, was a quest to resurrect the memory of his mother who died when he was just three years old. Watching it was a deeply immersive and highly emotional experience. In the Q&A afterwards, Cunningham revealed that he had worked on the film for five years. This got us thinking and talking about other great documentaries where the film-makers had been willing or driven to put in the time: Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1995) followed the hopes and aspirations of two young basketball protegees over the course of four years, for example. Marcel Ophuls worked for decades on Hotel Terminus (1988). This was the documentary maker on an heroic quest, to track down and expose the war criminal, Klaus Barbie, the infamous 'Butcher of Lyon' and in which he succeeded and procured justice in the name of all who suffered and died because of this man.

Of Love and Law

Of Love and Law (Hikaru Toda, 2017) follows two young lawyers, who live and work in Osaka, over the course of a year. Openly gay in a still deeply patriarchal and closeted society, they specialise in minority cases. The camera throughout is effortlessly unobtrusive and it is a little startling when, whilst bickering across the breakfast table, one of the lawyers turns directly toward the camera and talks to the film-maker and of course, by extension, to we the audience. 'Are you happy' he chortles, 'to have caught us arguing?' When the film ends we feel as if we are deserting the lawyers mid-stride, as they continue to strive for change and equality one small step at a time.

The Raft

The Raft (Marcus Lindeen, 2018) documents a flawed social experiment from the 1970s where anthropologist Santiago Genoves wished to explore human behaviour in a confined setting without access to the outside world. He, together with six women and four other men, set sail on a specially commissioned raft to cross the Atlantic. Genoves had very set ideas about what would probably happen but when the sex and violence failed to materialise as he had envisaged he became somewhat disengaged and acted in the very way he had expected of his 'specimens'. Fe and Maria, the raft's captain, clearly recognised Genovese's deep rooted sexism and prejudices and these two came across as the ones who most challenged and angered him. It was interesting that the other women interviewed for this compelling and revealing documentary seemed accepting of his behaviour even when he placed their lives in danger having mutinied and taken over as ship's captain during a life threatening hurricane and then had to relinquish this role back to Maria. The ending, which records his not particularly convincing apology, also shows him turning it all to his own advantage when he later published a book about the experiment. Thankfully, this documentary has helped to set part of this record straight.

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (Margarethe von Trotta, 1986), was introduced by Selina Robertson, Film Programmer at Club de Femmes and ICO, who explained that von Trotta had inherited the project from Fassbinder following his death. Von Trotta spent some two years researching her subject and was given access to 2,500 of Luxemburg's letters to study. This level of dedication and commitment is up there on the screen and this is a richly detailed and masterful biopic because of that research. Along with actress, Barbara Sukowa, von Trotta brings Luxemburg vividly to life.

Performance

Performance (Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970) was written by Donal Cammell, his Ortonesque gangsters a gallery of camp grotesques, their banter shocking and absurd. Cammell co-directed the film with Roeg, who of course went on to have a distinguished career. Not so Cammell who faded into obscurity and who committed suicide in 1996, aged 62. It is difficult not to draw comparisons with Jagger's reclusive musician Turner. 'He's stuck', Anita Pallenberg's Pherber tells James Fox's Chas. Cammell's script is wonderful, witty and subversive and quite literally one of a kind.

Christine and Mark Renney ©Matthew Evans

Christine and Mark Renney

From Dull and Flat Bedfordshire

Watching films online

2019-02-24T15:08:00.001+00:00

The Wife

Borderlines Film Festival 2019 will screen 10 films featured among this year’s Academy Awards nominees. But you can see every single nominee pirated online. You have nothing to lose but your identity. It’s a small risk.

I missed Bad Times at the El Royale, the potential word of mouth sleeper hit that disappeared from cinemas after a week. The DVD is a tenner from Sainsbury’s. A 23 year old friend pointed out the many ways I could watch it online, none of which contribute towards the production’s balance sheet. He imagined that they received some money from the ads.

I don’t care that, apparently, watching an uploaded DVD is not illegal. It’s not illegal because the legislative process is outrun. It is, however, wrong and a lot less fun than doing the square thing.

Do you remember when films weren’t ubiquitous? You can buy them for pennies, there are dozens broadcast on Freeview every day and thousands are streamed online complete with their creators’ permission. “Ah,” I hear you say, “You miserable hypocrite. What about those ‘otherwise unavailable’ examples of ‘cult’ British cinema you ‘discovered’ on YouTube the day you got broadband?” Yeah, well, that crime was its own punishment. To quote Marx, “Those are my principles and if you don't like them... well, I have others.”

Green Book

Borderlines Film Festival 2019 will screen 10 films featured among this year’s Academy Awards nominees. The winners will be announced over two days at the end of February. The Borderlines picks are: A Star Is Born (8 nominations), Vice (8 nominations), Green Book (5 nominations), Cold War (3 nominations), If Beale Street Could Talk (3 nominations), The Wife (Best Actress), Free Solo (Best Documentary) and Border (Best Makeup and Hairstyling). There are three nominees from the Best Foreign Language Film category: Cold War, Capernaum and Shoplifters.

Free Solo

Faces Places (Dir. Agnès Varda, 2017) was nominated for Best Documentary Feature last year. It is, I believe, the first film to be screened at the Borderlines Film Festival two years running.

Faces Places

However, there are three nominees that are only available to Netflix subscribers: Roma (10 nominations), End Game (Best Documentary Short) and the Joel and Ethan Coen “anthology film” The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (3 nominations).

This is problematic. (Particularly in a blog encouraging you to go to Borderlines). Steven Spielberg, in an interview with ITV News in March 2018, spelled out the issue: “Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie. You certainly, if it’s a good show, deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar. I don’t believe films that are just given token qualifications in a couple of theaters for less than a week should qualify for the Academy Award nomination.”(Source)

Last week J. Timothy Richards, the founder and CEO of U.K. exhibitor VUE, the largest exhibitor outside the U.S., wrote an open letter to BAFTA about these concerns. He stated, “It is clear that Netflix made at best a token effort to screen Roma, screening it to less than 1% of the U.K. market solely because it wanted an award.” (Source)

I spoke to a manager of a local independent cinema. Their customers are asking to see Roma. The cinemas want to screen Roma but the studio that made it, Netflix, wants film-lovers to stream it from their website. This is a new development: film-makers used to support cinemas.

There was a similar situation last October. Peter Jackson’s They Will Not Grow Old was premiered at the London Film Festival, received a lot of media attention and cinema-goers wished to see it. It was broadcast on BBC2 the following month and no more was said. The BBC helped to make it and I doubt they’d object to cinemas showing it next Armistice Day. (Source)

The issue isn’t exclusivity. A month’s subscription to most streaming services costs less than the average price of a cinema ticket. I’m reminded of 1980s drugs awareness campaigns: “I thought I could handle it. The dealer started me on the best stuff but I began binge-watching third-rate American shows within days.”

Other pushers are available. Wired magazine listed 16 mainstream Oscar-nominated movies available via iTunes, Amazon Prime Video or YouTube. HBO Go has a deal with Isle of Dogs and Hulu stocks Minding the Gap and RBG. Other territories have their own services and the web is world wide. (Source)

Awards season is vital to cinema and cinemas. The previous Yorgos Lanthimos flick, The Killing of the Sacred Deer, was picked up by one venue in the entire south-west quadrant of England. It starred Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell. Many people liked The Lobster but not many people went to see it. I suspect that cinemas lost money. Four years on The Favourite is playing to full houses. Some of the audience want to see what’s getting all this attention. Most are there because Olivia Colman is in it.

As Sacha Baron Cohen pointed out Hollywood wouldn’t bother with certain genres if it wasn’t for the awards season. These films need the chance of an awards buzz to have a chance of making money. Thus awards promote the more ‘demanding’ films and art houses show them. This is very old news.

Basically the movie industry is a whale decomposing on the ocean bed. Cinematic masterpieces are the miniscule flecks of protein flaking off it. One-screen cinemas are the tiny crustaceans which survive on these scraps. Independent cinema managers sense that an Academy Award for Roma is good for Netflix but cuts them out.

The moving picture industry has been facing up to crises since the first gas-powered Magic Lantern exploded. What will independent cinemas do if they cannot screen the award-winners?

Still, they won’t be the only business plans thrown against the wall this year.

Robin Clarke

22/02/2019

Borderlines and the Snow Show

2018-04-06T22:07:00.000+01:00

After all the grumbling about the snow and the films we missed, we thought it would be good to say something about some of those we did manage to see and so here goes:

Custody

Custody by Xavier Legrande was as unsettling as it was compelling. Comparisons to the Dardenne Brothers are certainly apt, especially their earlier works such as The Child. We agree with the review in Little White Lies that it is a film of two halves and the second half built to a fraught and nail-biting conclusion with the precision of the most effective of thrillers but not at the expense of its social commentary.

Zama

Lucrecia Martel's existentialist tale of colonial displacement, Zama, was beautifully framed. It made us think of Werner Herzog, especially Aguirre, The Wrath of God (definitely a good thing) but unlike Klaus Kinski's Conquistador, the central character sits as a relatively rational being which contrasts with the levels of crazy going on around him. A flawed character, yes, but Zama just wanted to return home to his wife and family but could not grasp how to be or what to do to achieve this whilst others, apparently being punished, seem to reap the rewards Zama seeks for himself.

The Shape of Water

The Shape of Water is not so much a remake of Jack Arnold's Creature From The Black Lagoon but more a second attempt at a sequel after Arnold's own Revenge of The Creature but it also so much more than that. A magical love story, set in the immediate post-Joe McCarthy era during which Hollywood produced many great films, Westerns, Melodramas and of course Film Noir with the screenwriters and directors un-credited and the anti-McCarthyite message cleverly cloaked. Conversely in The Shape of Water, nothing is hidden, and shows everything Guillermo del Toro and his team intended. It is a fable, a fairy tale about the beauty of otherness and as such reminds us of Cocteau's Beauty and The Beast, a mythic and stunning creation to which we would compare The Shape of Water. Guillermo del Toro, recently interviewed on Radio 4's Film Programme with Francine Stock, explained how he showed Sally Hawkins many silent films to study the use of expression in place of the spoken word, which she did brilliantly, and let us not forget that this is the woman who couldn't stop talking in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky.

And thank you for showing Behind The Door - it was so worth seeing.

We came to The Wound, directed by John Trengrove, without any preconceptions but quickly found ourselves immersed in its questioning of what is manhood and why does it need to be publicly proven to other men via the traditional rites of circumcision? The principal character is gay and, if it were known, would not be treated as a man within the society he inhabits, and yet he submitted to the tradition in which he now oversees teenagers as they go through the same ritual. His treatment by his 'annual' lover, whom he has known and cared about for many years, is difficult to watch as we see the price paid by gays within deeply entrenched traditional communities. Some critics have questioned the ending and whether it was a mis-step but we felt his final action was still to protect the man he loves from being 'outed' rather than for his own safety. We found it both absorbing, educational and upsetting.

Lean on Pete, based on the book by Willy Vlautin, a great American storyteller in the vein of Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, and a musician par excellence, was beautifully realised and so well researched as were the perfectly drawn performances from Steve Buscemi and Chloe Sevigny, who last appeared together, as Robin has pointed out, in Buscemi's directorial debut Trees Lounge from 1996 which we know he is not fond of but what can we say, we kinda love it.

Loveless

Is Loveless a film where the message is also cloaked? It is certainly an important work from Andrey Zvyagintsev, a powerful and searing indictment of Russia under Putin where no lessons are learned as we watch the two main protaganists recycle their bitter and unhappy experiences together with new partners. The missing child, an innocent, is not even worthy of investment of time by the Police and it is left to volunteers to try and trace him. There are no questions about why he would go missing and this is in a country which is happy to erase people from its history in one way or another with no conscience on show.

And has the mobile phone ever been as prevalent as it is in Loveless? The lead female character is certainly obsessed with hers, constantly taking selfies and gazing longingly down into its screen. It is reflected in the windows of their apartment and in the windshield of the car. It is often the only source of light when it is dark but none of this is about communication which all fail to do face to face. It is the era of having many contacts and few friends.

We will see you next year.

Christine and Mark Renney from dull and flat Bedfordshire.

Hail to thee Borderline spirits

2018-03-04T23:37:00.000+00:00

Sweet Country

We browsed the brochure, we picked and booked our films, we booked b&b and self-catering accommodation out in 'the sticks' and we were all set to arrive in Hereford on 1 March. Only we didn't because of, yes, the snow.

Our first film was to be Sweet Country the second fictional work by director Warwick Thornton since his debut Samson and Delilah in 2009, followed by Loveless by Andrey Zvyagintsev, both directors whose work deserves to be seen on the big screen. Our first film now will be Custody directed by Xavier Legrand, the winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. Our second film to view will be Zama directed by Lucrecia Martel whose work The Headless Woman, which was screened at Borderlines in 2017 is one of our favourites of the last decade and which speaks of lies and the power to avoid punishment endemic in the wealthy classes.

Zama

However, we managed to get into Cambridge today to see Greta Gerwig's film Lady Bird which is funny and touching and was one on our list of bookings. We now hope to see Free and Easy by Geng Jun as we are intrigued by the comparisons to Keaton, Beckett and Kaurismaki - we are big fans of all three.

Free and Easy

In our local supermarket on Thursday we were able to pick up copies of The Party and The Death of Stalin - we watched and enjoyed both but were unable to recreate the Borderlines experience of a convivial viewing alongside other film enthusiasts in a drafty village hall with, possibly, a tea and biscuits pause half way through. But at least we were warm, watching films and safe.

We must thank the Borderlines Team, particularly Naomi, as it was agreed that we could either find other films to see using the tickets we could not take up or hold them over until next year. It is this love of film and appreciation of its audience that makes Borderlines an incredibly friendly experience and we appreciate the gesture very much.

We remain loyal supporters of the event and will see you tomorrow.

Christine and Mark Renney

from flat and dull Bedfordshire

A Distorting Lens of Directors

2018-03-03T23:48:00.002+00:00

You Were Never Really Here

In one piece in Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler: Celluloid Tirades and Escapades (2000), Joe Queenan waits in the lobby of a multiplex, fully prepared to hand actual money to any member of the public who can name the director of the movie they have just watched. It did not cost him much. Even the ‘name’ directors didn’t register. I suspect that most other people recall their visits to the cinema in order of preference.

One pleasure of a new Borderlines programme is looking for work by directors who have delivered the goods in the past. They all have of course or they wouldn’t be in the schedule. When a former Borderlines selection is screened on Film4 I know it’s going to be worth catching. If someone made a Super Size Me for watching every new release, six hundred in the UK alone last year, I wonder which part of mind & body would fold first? There are many directors whose body of work I don’t know – but I do know that online reviewers rave about every single one. Here are my ravings.

Jeune Femme

There was some excitement among film society types in 1999 when Lynne Ramsay’s first feature Ratcatcher was released. Here was a new, young, female Scottish director who could really put a film together. In 2002 this excitement spread to the review sections of selected broadsheets when she followed it with Morvern Callar: Samantha Morton’s portrait of a modern woman sans archetype to a 'hold the zeitgeist' soundtrack. It was Generation X’s Lady Bird (2017) sans box office, leur Jeune Femme (2017) de l'époque. Since then Ramsey’s rate of output makes Stanley Kubrick look like Takashi Miike. To give you some idea of how long it’s been, Morton’s characters are still low-waged but they’ve moved beyond casual sex in the Costa del Sol. She played the cook in August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (2014). After Morvern Callar Ramsey spent two years adapting an early draft of The Lovely Bones – and then Alice Sebold’s novel was completed, published and became a best-seller. Peter Jackson directed the movie version in 2009; it stars a 14-year old Saoirse Ronan. Source: The Guardian

It was another 9 years until Ramsay’s third feature, another adaption of a novel, the uncompromising We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011). The next person to describe Lynne Ramsay’s work as “uncompromising” or "long-awaited" could have clichés in their copy. By way of comparison, Michael Winterbottom directed 13 features between 2002 and 2011. Since 2011 Ben Wheatley has directed 5 films without surpassing his work on BBC3 Johnny Vegas sit-com Ideal. The long-awaited You Were Never Really Here (2017) is Lynne Ramsay’s fourth picture.

The Third Murder

You may have seen Nobody Knows (2004) by Hirokazu Kore-eda at Borderlines 2014. You may still be recovering. In modern day Tokyo four abandoned siblings are left to look after themselves. Kore-eda played me like an accordion for 141 minutes. His latest is at Borderlines 2018: The Third Murder.

Loveless

During Borderlines I seek out depressing Eastern European movies that my local picture palaces would never dream of screening. So I’m always in the market for the latest by Andrey Zvyagintsev. His Elena (2011) was particularly bleak; I want to see how Loveless (2017) portrays today’s Russia. The plot also sounds a bit close to a notorious Christopher Morris sketch, Unflustered Parents, from his BBC Radio 1 show Blue Jam (1997 to 1999).

A Fantastic Woman

Billy Wilder watched Brief Encounter (1945) and wondered about the unseen character who lends Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) his flat. What was his story? Then he made The Apartment (1960). Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria (2013) was inspired by Laura Branigan’s disco classic of the same name (1982). All together: “Will you marry for the money? Take a lover in the afternoon? Feel your innocence slipping away; don’t believe it’s coming back soon. And you really don’t remember? Oh, was it something that he said? Are the voices in your head calling, ‘Gloria?’ Gloria, don’t you think you’re falling? If everybody wants you, why isn’t anybody calllllling?” Now that’s a character description. It’s a Film4 regular. Lelio returns with A Fantastic Woman (2017), a big winner at the Berlin Film Festival. There have been many, many movies about gender identity. There are the ones you’ve heard of and the rest are plotted against deranged and exploitative, scattered beyond the Psycho (1960) to Dressed to Kill (1980) trend-line.

Lean on Pete

Andrew Haigh directed 45 Years (2015) – in my opinion the smartest British movie this century – so I am looking forward, quietly, to Lean on Pete (2017). I notice that it stars Steve Buscemi and Chloë Sevigny. Before her name grew an umlaut Chloe Sevigny’s second movie, Trees Lounge (1996), was Steve Buscemi’s first movie as director. He was an alcoholic who worked an ice cream van; she wore leggings and hung out. In 1994 Jay McInerney took seven pages in The New Yorker to call Sevigny “the coolest girl in the world”. Buscemi was still a bit cool because he’d played Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs (1992). Trees Lounge wasn’t that great – it took me two goes to realise I’d already seen it – but it was the mid-1990s, the internet was coming closer and the World was getting ready to party like it was 1999. Lean on Pete will be their second movie together.

Talking of the 1990s, spotting Claire Denis in the Borderlines 2018 brochure made me smile. I am very fond of the Nenette et Boni (1996) OST by Tindersticks, a Nottingham band who contributed to or composed six of her soundtracks. Nine of these numbers were compiled on a cover-mount CD free with the May 2011 issue of Sight & Sound (Volume 21 Issue 5). I was also reminded of screening the superb Beau Travail (1999) at Worcester Film Society, a few years before art house film societies were scuppered by, erm, Film4, the internet and a flood of cover-mount DVDs.

Let the Sunshine In

Seeing Juliette Binoche and Gérard Depardieu cast together gave me the giggles. Let the Sunshine In (2017) will be the first film to star both but it will not be their first memorable co-production. An entertaining little tiff began when Depardieu opined (2010): “Please can you explain to me what the secret of this actress is meant to be? I would really like to know why she has been so esteemed for so many years. She has nothing. Absolutely nothing! She is nothing. Compared with her, Isabelle Adjani is great even if she's totally nuts. Or Fanny Ardant - she is magnificent, extremely impressive. But Binoche? What has she ever had going for her?”

La Binoche responded in a dignified fashion: which is to say she landed a few digs whilst responding in a dignified fashion. They put on a great show. Recently, Depardieu starred in Marseille (2016), a Netflix series that garnered frenzied reviews in France. The rest of the World quite liked it however and he’s making a second series. He was also in Valley of Love (2016) with Isabelle Huppert. His gut dwarfed Death Valley. Binoche’s previous Borderlines appearance was last year’s surreal comedy Slack Bay (2016). Opinion was divided: I enjoyed it. The local linguists were in hysterics every time Inspector Malfoy spoke. And one-eighth of the audience left long before the end.

Sight and Sound (December 2017) observed that Happy End (2017), “Michael Haneke’s most interesting film since Hidden (2005), and also superior to his back-to-back Palme d’Or winners The White Ribbon (2009) and Amour (2012)” was his first feature since 2003 not to win a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. To the magazine’s own surprise it did not feature in their ‘Best Films of 2017’ poll. The Borderlines 2018 selections Zama, Western, Faces Places, Loveless, 120 BPM, You Were Never Really Here, God’s Own Country, The Shape of Water, Lady Bird and Let the Sunshine In all made the Sight and Sound Top Twenty. Such slips are relative. I really enjoyed The Lobster (2015) and so did many others. I could not find a cinema screening Yorgos Lanthimos’ follow-up, The Killing of the Sacred Deer (2017), nearer than Bristol. Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell are in it! Some movies just disappear.

Journey's End

Finally, Journey’s End (2017) adapts R. C. Sheriff’s 1928 play of the same name. It was first filmed in 1930 and has been made for television at least five times since then. The BBC’s 1954 version, probably live to air, starred Bryan Forbes, whose The L-Shaped Room (1962) is part of this year’s Borderlines programme. The book Hollywood’s World War I Motion Picture Images (Bowling Green State University, 1997) notes that the public appetite for war films waned after World War I – until The Big Parade (1925), a $10 million making hit for MGM, found “a kind of perfect neutrality between embarrassing flag-waving and noxious despair”.

It was followed by What Price Glory? (1926), based on a long-running Broadway play, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Journey’s End (1930), The Road to Glory (1936), The Road Back (1937), Three Comrades (1938) and many more depictions of life and death in the trenches. As many movies again were set among ‘the young Knights of the air’. In 1929, one of these, Wings (1927) was the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. It might be worth watching a few of these for context then revisiting The Marx Brothers’ war movie Duck Soup (1933): “You're a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.” This was before The Great War was re-made with a more convincing bad guy.

Journey’s End (1930) is of particular interest because it was directed by James Whale. Whale was born in Dudley, Worcestershire in 1889, the sixth son of a blast furnace man and a nurse. During World War I he served as a second lieutenant in the Worcestershire Regiment. He spent the final year of the conflict as a Prisoner of War. It was at the Holzminden POW camp that he first became involved in theatre. Ten years on he directed the premiere of Journey’s End, casting the little known Laurence Olivier in the lead role. Journey’s End soon transferred to the Prince of Wales Theatre where it ran for two years. In 1929 Whale was called to Broadway to direct Journey’s End there. It ran for a year. In 1930 he directed the movie version. In 1931 he directed the definitive Frankenstein. Well, how do you picture the monster?

Robin Clarke

Human Flow

2018-03-01T12:42:00.000+00:00

Tuesday’s 1.30 screening of Human Flow at The Courtyard, alas the last of three, was all but sold out. Remarkable, for a 2hr 20 min doc that can at times feel unrelenting. But entirely appropriate. We all know, or think we know, the story - but the scale of it - 65 million displaced people across the globe - alone justifies the length of the movie. Ai Wei Wei’s documentary, however, is far more than an exhausting catalogue of suffering. Duncan Wardlaw’s BFF notes and multiple laudatory reviews make that very clear. But what’s less noticed is the scale of the effort that both Ai Wei Wei and his crew - over 200 people worldwide, a dozen of them, including Ai himself, cinematographers, sixteen additional cinematographers, thirteen drones and one steadicam operator. An extraordinary but wholly justified camera department that produced some stunning results - including two aerial shots that alone are worth the price of admission.

Ai Wei Wei’s mobile phone footage features throughout, as does Ai Wei Wei, cutting hair, swapping passports, respecting, investigating, collaborating, witnessing. The editing of 1,000 hours of footage had at its helm Niels Pagh Andersen, best known for Joshua Oppenheimer’s Academy Award nominated documentaries about Indonesia, The Act of Killing and The Look Of Silence. Anyone who wants more should go to the comprehensive press kit.

The Courtyard projection team at work

Even if you stuck around for the credits, there’s plenty more there, but what it won’t have is a big shout out to Simon Nicholls and the projection crew at The Courtyard. Pin sharp pix, beautiful sound - they produce excellent results day in, day out. Not easy. Anyone spurred to action by Human Flow found People In Motion at the door with flyers about their work with refugees. In a country whose proud record includes the Kindertransport, they, and Ai Wei Wei’s film, are more than deserving of our support.

Stephen Hopkins

Shorts Selection

2018-02-27T13:06:00.000+00:00

Journey’s End (2017), as I’ve mentioned in another blog, first opened as a play in 1928. It was directed in the theatre by James Whale. It ran for two years in London and, concurrently, one year on Broadway. Whale continued to direct Journey’s End in New York and, subsequently, directed the movie version in 1930. The following year he gave Frankenstein (1931) to posterity. James Whale was a gay man from Dudley.

Whale’s final days were fictionalised in the bio-pic Gods and Monsters (1998) starring Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave. Lynn Redgrave died of breast cancer, aged 67, in 2010. This month Brendan Fraser gave the most revealing celebrity interview by any movie star for many years. The toll that his acting roles have taken on his health is interesting enough. Then he explains how #metoo includes men too. Please check out Zach Baron’s interview with Brendan Fraser in GQ magazine.

Ian McKellen is in one of the shorts being shown – free of charge, gratis and for nothing - by Borderlines 2018 tomorrow at 2.30pm, Wednesday 28 February.

He is the narrator of Edmund the Magnificent (2017, 14 minutes) which stars David Bradley, Rebecca Front and Mark Bonnar. It was written and directed by Ben Ockrent. The comedy, set in a picture-book version of the countryside, concerns a country show, a farmer and his pig. The pig is having problems in the bedroom. Here’s the trailer:
Edmund The Magnificent - Trailer from HAUS Pictures on Vimeo.

The Full Story (2017, 8 minutes) was written by Daisy Jacobs and directed by Daisy Jacobs and Christopher Wilder. Her previous animation, and her graduation film, The Bigger Picture (2015), won a BAFTA and was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Animated Short Film. In The Full Story (not a title made for search engines) a man, selling his childhood home, recalls its tense history. It is animated using various techniques. The film is in English but it was made in France, a major centre in animation. Here’s the trailer:

Submissions ÉCU 2015 - The Bigger Picture TRAILER from ecufilmfestival on Vimeo.

Remora (2016, 19 minutes) was written and directed by David Schofield. Filmed in Rhyl and Towyn on the North Wales coast, in November 2015, the story begins with a loan shark, his debt collectors and those vulnerable people, addicts and the mentally ill, who provide their bread and butter. Events happen. Here’s the trailer:

Remora Trailer from David Schofield on Vimeo.

And here’s the soundtrack, written by William Morris and performed by William Morris and The Didsbury String Quartet:
This is the film’s own website.

Ramona and The Chair (2016, 12 minutes) was written and directed by Dominique Lecchi. Ramona talks to her therapist but – don’t ask me how because I haven’t seen any of these – an empty chair in the room gets involved. You may recognise the empty chair from its work alongside Clint Eastwood.

I could not find a clip. The director discusses her film here:
The short has its own website.

Lecchi’s previous, and debut, short Balsa Wood (2014, 10 minutes) in its entirety:

Balsa Wood from Dominique Lecchi on Vimeo.

Fifth and finally, the comedy Some Sweet Oblivious Antidote (2017, 15 minutes). The title comes from ‘the Scottish play’, Act 5 Scene 3:

Cure her of that.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

“Official synopsis: Exasperated by her daughter Ivie’s refusal to converse in anything other than Shakespearean verse, Esosa resorts to psychoanalysis for a cure. The psychiatrist and her therapist struggle for a solution until a full-on Shakespearean quote-off on a theatre stage uncovers the reason for Ivie’s affliction.” Source.

Another article.

It was written by Moya O’Shea, directed by Christiana Ebohon, has “a largely female crew” and a mostly British/Nigerian cast. Wunmi Mosaku is Esosa, Fatima Koroma is Ivie and Sir Lenworth George Henry, CBE plays the therapist.

Hence, three of these five shorts get a F-Rating and two of them are triple F-rated.

Ebohon has directed 96 (ninety-six) episodes of the beloved BBC1 dinner-time serial Doctors and a couple of the international smash-hit Father Brown as well as instalments of Emmerdale, Eastenders and Hollyoaks. Mark Williams, who plays the title role of Father Brown, was born in Bromsgrove.

I used to plough through scores of short films 15 years ago and, a few stand-outs aside, the quality of film-making and standard of story is far higher these days. Believe me.
Thirsting for more? Go mad.

Lenny “Lenny Lenny Len, Lenny Lenny Len, Lenny Henry Show” Henry is a Shakespearean actor from Dudley. As Stan Laurel didn’t say: All roads lead to Dudley but a pencil must be led. And we’re done. Enjoy the flicks.

Robin Clarke

I Still Hide To Smoke

2018-02-25T19:50:00.000+00:00

I’d be surprised if this Borderlines came up with a film as relevant, shocking, courageous and timely as the one I saw last night at The Courtyard in Hereford. I’m sure I won’t see one for which, in its first incarnation as a play, the director was doused with petrol and had a lit cigarette flicked at her in a mercifully failed attempt to burn her to death. Rayhana Obermeyer’s I Still Hide To Smoke, set in a hammam in Algeria, is more than a revelation - it’s an urgent and necessary film about women, freedom, religion, sexuality, men and liberty. It has the backing of Costa-Gavras, echoes of Nell Dunn’s ‘Steaming’, and the lineage of Aristophanes ‘Lysistrata’ - not inappropriate for a film, through force of circumstance, mainly shot in Greece. The strikingly passionate performance of Hiam Abbas, an Israeli Palestinian actress most recently seen in Blade Runner 2024, brings to mind Brecht’s Mother Courage, whilst the final images of the film - countless black headscarves floating away on the wind - are a more than timely prophecy of the hijab protest we are now seeing in Tehran. Alas, last night’s screening of I Still Hide To Smoke was the only BFF screening, and the official YouTube trailer -

- isn’t, in my view, all that good. Anne Cottringer’s excellent BFF programme notes are available online, but for anyone who’s interested - and that should mean everyone - the French distributors press kit is a very thorough and beautifully produced summary of the film and its principal players. You can find it here. I urge you to seek out this brave and important film.

Stephen Hopkins

The Subliminal Strand

2018-02-24T19:04:00.000+00:00

Phantom Thread

One delight of a new Borderlines programme is the search for strands the team may not have known they had. A 'Phantom Thread’ if you like. It is usually a good idea to set a story in a time and place. A background of civil unrest or civil war forces each character’s personal credo into sharp relief; a milieu between the war movies and tales of the defiant dispossessed. Unlike The Death of Stalin (2017) here’s a place where people can represent competing political ideologies with only the occasional threat of sudden violent death. There’s a 'There’s a Riot Going On' season: Milou en Mai (1990; France 1968), I Still Hide to Smoke (2016, Algeria 1995), The Nile Hilton Incident (2017, Egypt’s Arab Spring 2011).

Borderlines 2018 boasts a rich seam for art lovers. Ai Weiwei is best known to occasional browsers of Sunday supplements as the artist behind the 'Sunflower Seeds' sculpture at Tate Modern, London, in 2010: millions of individually hand-crafted, porcelain, sunflower seeds. Weiwei directed Human Flow (2017), a documentary about the 65 million refugees currently displaced around the World. I predict, like Steve McQueen or Anton Corbijn before him, that the framing is impeccable.

Loving Vincent

There are two bio-pics of artists: Loving Vincent (2017, Vincent Van Gogh) is animated in his Post-Impressionist style. His paintings are brought to life. Find out what 'Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate)' was really like! Maudie (2016, Maud Lewis) is a big favourite of Toyah Willcox: “I love films! I have an expensive DVD library! One of the joys of where I live is that I'm 50 yards away from an arts centre that shows a film every Monday morning. I was blown away by Maudie with Sally Hawkins. It's about the naive artist Maud Lewis. Sally Hawkins’ performance in this is one of the best technical character journeys I have ever seen.” The Guardian

JR and Agnes Varda in Faces Places

Sally Hawkins’s last four movies are Paddington (2014), Maudie (2016), The Shape of Water (2017), Paddington 2 (2017). That is strong form. They all feature plenty of water. Agnès Varda’s latest documentary Faces Places (2017) was made with the artist JR. They are a good fit. He photographs the people they meet on their travels around France and turns these images into murals. His approach brings to mind Turner Prize winner Gillian Wearing’s 'Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say' (1993) on the scale of Turner Prize nominee Mark Titchner’s poster campaigns. Having found JR’s website – – I’m reasonably wrong. His humour is much sillier. This is what JR displayed on a wall in Bethlehem.

The Nile Hilton Incident

Followers of Swedish cinema should note the five Ingmar Bergman films and three other Swedish directors. Look out for the acclaimed thriller The Nile Hilton Incident and the very enjoyable comedy A Man Called Ove (2017). Give the latter a go if you enjoy a swooping character arc but couldn’t stomach Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Borderlines 2018 opens with Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winning The Square (2017), a study of ‘the art game’. Östlund’s previous film - Force Majeure (2014), an account of a family holiday at a ski resort that reveals a stark home truth - looked good and was good. The design left no shadows for the disgraced father to hide in.

The Square

The Square is a big favourite of Laurie Anderson: “There are not enough comedies now, so I was relieved to see this. It’s hilarious. It skewers the art world, which is long overdue: that whole scene is pompous and ready for satire. The film looks at what happens when people step out of their social structures in Stockholm, and it makes you realise how isolated people are within their scenes. Elisabeth Moss is fantastic in it.” The Guardian

I only pay attention to the film recommendations of female solo artists who had big hit singles during 1981. It has never let me down.

Robin Clarke

Festival Volunteer

How did we get to this place?

2017-11-24T11:58:00.000+00:00

120BPM

People keep asking us how we choose the films for Borderlines.

Jan Doran, one of our regular volunteers and a trustee of Arts Alive/Flicks in the Sticks, attended the BFI London Film Festival and kindly gave us access to her report:

It takes days of eyeing up the festival programme before I can build up to tackling it and establishing a system that ensures I’m not endlessly re-reading blurb or doubling up on dates. Once I’ve cracked it I’m cramming as much as possible into my four-day extravaganza.

Having recently been bowled over by Andrew Garfield’s fine performance in Angels in America I welcome the opportunity to see him in Breathe and to see what Andy Serkis might do as director.

The film opened with titles in a lurid yellow, very traditional font and within the first five minutes we witnessed cliched scenes of cricket matches and afternoon tea with gorgeous young leads stealing glances followed by an open top classic car scenario driving along idyllic country lanes……much fun and laughter. Forty minutes in and I was on my way out.

This really was an unfortunate start, nothing here to recommend I’m afraid. I didn’t care about these wealthy young things, couldn’t identify with them or their plight and was irritated by the music trying to tell me what to feel.
By contrast I entered Brigsby Bear, passing a life sized version of the gross cartoon character wondering why I was taking up a recommendation to see this film. Perfectly described in The Guardian as The Truman Show meets Room it was both surprising and amusing with an utterly delightful performance by Kyle Mooney as he engages with the real world following his isolated, dysfunctional upbringing.

A trip over to Hackney led me to my first encounter with a Picturehouse picket. Wasn’t expecting that - much dithering and off to find a drink elsewhere to think this one over. Compromises and resolutions a plenty in the following days but in I siddled to see 1%.

This Australian film likened by its director, Stephen McCallum, to Romper Stomper, Animal Kingdom and Snowtown was a riveting and hard edged, brutal portrayal of biker gangs. Universal themes of succession, rivalry, and loyalty were made more compelling with strong females and untypical themes of sexuality and disability driving the plot. The performances were strong particularly Matt Nable as the brutal gang leader who also wrote the screenplay.

Queues across Leicester Square at 8am on a Saturday heralded Battle of the Sexes - a naff title that hadn’t raised my expectations. It proved to be a shocking reminder of just how sexist attitudes could be in the 70s watching the battles women encountered constantly. Emma Stone and Steve Carrell are very good and the costumes are wonderfully nostalgic for those of us who dressed like that. Billie Jean King’s struggles with her sexuality, along side the battles with the tennis world, on and off the court, provides plenty of plot lines.

Wonderstruck, directed by Todd Haynes, failed to deliver in the way Carol had. It was particularly ambitious with settings in the 20s, black and white, and the seventies, brown and orange, with a silent film thrown in. The plot unfolded cleverly initially intertwining parallel stories but became tedious as it continued. Not sure who what sort of audience the film targets?

Dark River

Not sure what sort of audience Clio Barnard’s Dark River targets either. It was superbly performed with a sparse script leaving much to body language, cinematography and editing, particularly evident when a rabbit is skinned and gutted interspersed with drunken attempts at arson. The film is an utterly bleak portrayal of isolation, abuse and collusion experienced by a tenant farming family. Emotionally strangled siblings, unable to communicate and consumed with anger, struggle following the death of their father. Powerful performances. This film had everything that Breathe lacked.

120 BPM, so gritty and gripping and claustrophobic in its intensity, followed the campaigns of Act Up, a pressure group demanding better treatment and resources for Aids/HIV sufferers in 90s Paris. Unlike the black screens with white text in Meyerowitz Stories the transitions in this film were very effective: dramatic changes of focus from club scenes to intimate sex to passionate debates and radical action with sharply contrasting rhythms, volume, colour and camera work. Music was notable and arresting.

Vicarious Cannes

2017-06-23T23:18:00.000+01:00

Palme d'Or winner The Square

Cannes is not a film festival that we Borderlines staff get to, but it's probably the biggest deal of all. Word from the press screenings about the new crop of major films reverberates throughout the year and, as a matter of course, movies that are premiered at Cannes will find their way to Borderlines, many of them as previews.

Luckily our programmers at the Independent Cinema Office and their colleagues are there in force, weaving in and out of queues and movie theatres. So to grab a shaft of light into the future, read their Festival Reports from the ICO blog (there are 5 posts and if you only have time to read one, make it Jonny Courtney's - he works directly on Borderlines) and, like us, experience Cannes vicariously.

I Am Not Your Negro Vox Pops

2017-04-30T10:12:00.003+01:00

The single preview screening of this eloquent and transformative documentary by Raoul Peck about the ideas and oratory of writer James Baldwin took place at Borderlines 2017 on Friday 10 March.

Members of the black, Bristol-based collective Come the Revolution were on hand to record some vox pops of audience reaction to the film. Watch below (your browser will need Adobe Flash Player enabled - if you have problems, view on Facebook).

Trepass Against Us Q&A

2017-04-20T08:44:00.000+01:00

Trespass Against Us (15) was shown at Borderlines 2017 as a preview but is now on general release and available on DVD.

Romani writer and filmmaker, Damian Le Bas introduced the screening on Wednesday 1 March, and hosted the discussion afterwards. Damian felt that the filmmakers had gone out of their way not to identify the main characters as Travellers, Gypsies or Romani, despite using real Romani language and other cultural indications such as their mannerisms and jewellery in the film. This was probably a deliberate attempt by the filmmakers to prevent people criticising the film on its depiction of Travellers. Since TV series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and its many spin-offs, the media/film depiction of Travellers has become an uncomfortable experience for many Travellers themselves, fearing the worst excesses of stereotyping or just plain untruth.

Damian was convinced that Trespass Against Us was based on a BBC documentary from 14 years ago about a Gloucestershire Traveller family, the Johnsons, who were well known for being pretty wild. They had been severely mistreated by the authorities, which was where their mentality to strike back came from. Without this context, the behaviour of the family in Trespass Against Us didn’t really make any sense, though it did have some elements of truth about Traveller life as it was still lived 30 years ago.

Have a listen to the discussion here. There are Travellers in the audience and they talk about it with particular insight and a wry sense of humour.

Jane Jackson

Borderlines Chair

Images in slideshow ©Christopher Preece www.infinityunlimited.co.uk

Borderlines 2017: the condensed version on Storify

2017-03-29T16:13:00.002+01:00

Kristen Stewart Magazine Covers

2017-03-28T16:27:00.003+01:00

Andrew Graham

To celebrate the release of Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper on March 17 our Media Partner Little White Lies, set a Creative Brief: to invent a fashion magazine featuring an original illustrated portrait of the film’s star, Kristen Stewart, on the cover.

Personal Shopper was shown at Borderlines 2017 as a preview.

Illustration students at Hereford College of Arts took part in the brief and Andrew Graham's illustration received an Honourable Mention and was displayed on the online version of the magazine. Congratulations to Andrew!

Other Hereford College of Arts entries:

Katie Barnett

Kedall Webb

Full gallery of entries

Thoughts on Moonlight

2017-03-28T16:02:00.000+01:00

'Why was he so angry?' I asked myself midway through the BBC adaption of Zadie Smith's novel NW.

A slim contorted Black youth face set in permanent grimace, de rigueur hood up despite the summer heat fatally wounds another Black man on the slightest provocation. The blot of red expands along the white top as the victim recoils in shock, sinks to the pavement, bleeds out. His assailant is gone, his rage released.

I had assumed that in a drama about seeing and illusion this act would take us on a journey into the internal world of this killer. Not so, he remains that 'menace to society' throughout. We are left with what society already accepts and what the screen has presented, a pumped up ball of Black rage without explanation or rather the axiomatic suggestion that he is a product of the 'Hood.' Fear them, pity them, but most of all fear them.

A brief summary of Moonlight might give the impression we are in familiar territory – absent father, crack addict mother, deprived community, rare violence - but Moonlight takes you where 'hood' dramas rarely tread to provide a compelling portrait of the world of that surly, angry Black man.

Split into three chapters, Moonlight charts main character Chiron's journey from self discovery and self acceptance. From an early age Chiron is an outcast among his young peers in the ironically titled Liberty Square district. He is just not like the other boys, he is different. It does not help that he is dark skinned, uncool and skinny.

We first meet Chiron as he is chased by a group of youths into a boarded up house along a derelict row. He is rescued by a drug dealer Juan played by (Mahershala Ali). Juan takes this boy who does not utter a word to the home he shares with his lover Teresa (Janelle Monae). We discover that Chiron has more than just his friends to contend with – his mother is a crack addict swinging between brief glimmers of maternal affection and the chaos of her addiction. To say Chiron is dragged up is an understatement: he is the epitome of neglect.

Chiron's struggles intensify as he grows older only now his peers begin to name his difference. In a scene of timeless cinematic beauty that difference - the discovery of his sexuality - becomes a moment of shared bliss rather than a curse. All this is taken away as Chiron's ostracism reaches a violent climax. In the final chapter we find Chiron transformed into a trap-loving, gold-toothed, hyper- muscled Hercules drug dealer. Beneath the muscles, little Chiron still lives. A twist of fate offers him an alternative to his bleak present.

This three part structure paints the reality behind the performance of identity and why therefore Moonlight is a education in (Black) masculinity. Each chapter is beautifully played by three different actors, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes, and Alex R Hibbert. Remarkably each actor rehearsed their parts separately but somehow between the alchemy of script, directing and fine acting Chiron's intense wounded, brave man-boy is consistently played throughout the film.

Amongst many things, Moonlight is a commentary on father-son relationships. Juan a drug dealer is an unlikely source of unconditional love. A Cuban American, perhaps Juan sees in the abandoned boy a mirror of himself and an opportunity for redemption. But he is not a romanticised figure and his alter-ego role as drug dealer has a direct bearing on Chiron's life. Through Juan, director Barry Jenkins makes a simple statement familiar to Black audiences but rarely seen on a cliché-ridden screens: that paternal love can be found in the most unlikely sources.

Juan's relationship with Chiron brings Moonlight's mythical quality to the fore in particular the scene in which Juan teaches Chiron to swim. The scene evokes Classical, Biblical and West African lore. The home provided by Juan and Teresa is a light filled place of haven while the home he shares with his mother is a stark underworld in the grip of his gorgon mother. It then must also be said that the film is a stark portrait of a mother-child relationship almost as disturbing as that between the main protagonists in Precious. Naomi Harris is darkly superb in her depiction of the highs and lows of addiction whilst also bringing a humanity to her role. She is an emotional coward, but also a child- woman ultimately unable to face the crushing responsibility of her failure.

The parent-child dynamic is one of several ways in which Moonlight closely mirrors the personal biographies of director Barry Jenkins and the writer of the original story, award-winning playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney. Both were born and raised where Moonlight is set: Liberty City, a nearly all Black poor, insular neighbourhood of Miami Florida.

McCraney describes Liberty City as“...the confluence of madness and urban blight/Yet, it is incredibly beautiful.” Both men had mothers who through drug addiction became HIV infected and both men were passed between or taken in by families and carers.

Indeed echoing the mythic elements Jenkins was looked after by a woman called Minerva for a number of years during his childhood. He and McCraney attended the same High School although their paths did not cross until years later when the script was passed onto Jenkins by mutual friends. It was a combination of story, the potential to display his craft as a film maker seeped in cinema's heritage but mostly its proximity to his personal story that inspired Jenkins to make this film. Colour, texture, the Chiron's childhood rituals are all inspired by the lives of director and original writer.

Moonlight then comes from a place of truth. It does not wave a rainbow flag nor a Black Lives Matter banner, it does not need to. At every level it beautifully but simply captures a community, a people a young man in pain and searching for a way to heal.

To discuss Moonlight in the context of #OscarssoWhite, as some commentators have done, is reductive. It risks the implying that praise for the movie is informed by a guilt-ridden response to 2016's absence of Black Academy Award nominations. This would be a gross injustice. Moonlight is a unique powerful yet understated wonder that will reverberate long after the award season. This will be a competitive year for the Oscars - for me Moonlight will be at the head of the table whatever decisions are made. It is unique. It resonated with me on so many frequencies that I was caught between whooping and tears of joy.

Returning to my starting point Moonlight differs from the back catalogue of 'Hood' films because most are based upon the mythologies which the 'Hood' tries to sell. A story told through the eyes of the Other amongst Others bears witness to a truth that many are not yet ready to reveal.

Edson Burton (Come the Revolution)
Edson introduced the screening of Moonlight on Friday 10 March at Borderlines 2017

...To Be Rid of N...rs

2017-03-25T18:44:00.000+00:00

Edson Burton speaking at the I Am Not Your Negro screening

A Comment on I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck

This is an edited version of the introduction to the screening of the film at Borderlines on Friday 10 March by Dr Edson Burton of Come the Revolution

I want to start with a spoiler but one, which I hope will enhance rather than ruin your viewing. The title of the Raoul Peck's documentary is a softened version of a question raised by African American author James Baldwin upon whose unfinished work this film is based.

The question the White population of this country has to ask itself is why was it necessary to have a nigger in the first place? But I'm not a nigger I am a man? But if you think I'm a nigger that means you need him and you have to find out why?

The question is posed in the final third of this searing examination of race in the USA. Having pushed through the permutations of racism in the USA the question attains a climatic power found in the best works of fiction.

'Negro', 'coloured', 'Black, 'African American' these terms have been the accepted parlance among Whites and Blacks. 'Nigger' was the coarse, constant, counterpart to these terms. Nigger opened the door to a more brutal relationship, a more brutal reality which has been the subtext to race relations in America and Europe.

Peck's impeccable visual choices provide layer upon layer of our understanding of the term. At 'worst' Nigger is criminal, licentious, and deceitful, at best lazy, deceitful, cretinous, impotent and servile – the antithesis of all that is good, pure, virtuous White. 'The Nigger is a dread figure an entity that exists only in his [White society's] mind.'

Baldwin's extraordinary understanding of Black America lies at the heart of the documentary. His unfinished essay 'Remember this House' is structured around his profound connection to the civil rights leaders Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. But beyond the great and good his work explores the lives of the preachers, the hustlers, the junkies, the intellectuals, the lovers. He knew the high and low places, the celebrities, the hustlers the civil rights leaders, the intellectuals.

His fury is directed against White ignorance of this rich and varied world. As he surmised Black Americans were intimately aware of white realities – after all survival depends on being highly sensitive to the whims of one's oppressor - the same could not be said in reverse. 'I know more about you than you know about me.' This ignorance was the child of segregation. To Baldwin ignorance and apathy were more perniciously pervasive in American society than hate. In the absence of knowledge the Black person become an object of fear and dread. But moreover this object this entity was an essential building block to a 'euphoric' construction of Whiteness. A Whiteness which however infantalized those who believed in it.

Baldwin, voiced unrecognisably, by Samuel Jackson, speaks in broad strokes - 'White', 'White America.' Subsuming all Whites within such broad strokes risks his dismissal as a wounded victim of racism with no great insight. But Baldwin the essayist must be experienced alongside his fictional works. His novels such as Another Country, Giovanni's Room, and short stories transcend race. They ooze a compassion for White and Black subjects, for men and women. While he had wished for the sake of ease, to be a racist, his formative experiences barred the door to that particular sanctuary. Peck incorporates Baldwin's TV interview to give us an insight to Baldwin.

Baldwin defends his use of race as a primary marker of social reality as empirically drawn from lived experience. As stated in the film he does not know what every White person thinks or feels about the Negro but 'we can conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions.' The evidence writ large in schools, housing, policing suggest that White society is comfortable with Black marginalization. Comfortable as it confirms the mythology of the 'Nigger.'

Baldwin's is part of the canon of American writing. His work is poured over by scholars, post and undergraduates, discovered by niche activists groups, the self educators and literary circles. But Peck does not excavate Baldwin for the sake of nostalgia but to force us to see his contemporary relevance. I Am Not Your Negro restores Baldwin to a vitality he enjoyed in life. His voice is once more that of the writer intellectual, sage orator who cuts through the social smog. Peck's flawless reaches into and beyond the meaning which Baldwin articulates in words. Peck not only offers the visual narratives and answers to Baldwin's rhetoric he supplies the continuity with current discourses through powerful juxtaposition. We are in short treated to a dialogue between film maker and writer that gives rise to a new bolder, complete work.

Baldwin did not write for his time but for those generations to come which he knew would still be grappling with this problem and it is a testament to Peck that he has visualised the prescience in Baldwin's work. It is therefore entirely apt that we consider the LA riots, the Black Lives Matter campaign both sparked by police brutality that had been legitimised by a White judicial system that failed to supply redress.

With the passing of Obama's presidency I Am Not Your Negro becomes all the more urgent. Donald Trump is not an extraordinary figure 'bully' 'manboy' 'buffon' 'narcissist' the list of descriptors for this most egregious character are almost endless. What is more alarming is why would millions vote in his favour.

Sympathetic narratives towards displaced Whites have silenced the reality that many African Americans feel – Trump's victory cannot be explained without reference to race. Loss and greatness remain the watchwords of Trump's strangely ongoing campaign but whose loss? Whose greatness will be recovered? It is clear from those who are now to be subdued that this White President for a White masculinist America feels mandated to protect a supposedly threatened White privilege. To borrow the lens used by Peck and Baldwin the new president and his supporters are united in an attempt to roll back the civil rights gains that opened the flood gates to the Women's Movement, the Gay Rights movement' and return to psychic infancy with all the ugly ignorance that entails. I Am Not Your Negro cuts to the chase when political language dog whistles and the press are hesitant if not obsequious.

This is not a safely American (his)story documentary. While the documentary notes the freedoms which Baldwin enjoyed in Europe the line 'the West has no moral authority' shows writer and film maker are under no illusions.

The 'Nigger' is an invention of the 'Euro-American imagination' exported, refined, and re-exported much like the traded goods which gave birth to the trope of the Nigger in the first place. Post slavery we have been even more circumspect in describing racism in Britain preferring the more genteel 'colour-bar' to legalized segregation. This partly in order to preserve our good standing in the world' – the counterpart rhetoric to America as the land of the free. But beneath this semantic dance are realities as stark as that which occurred on US soil.

The atrocities of slavery and Empire are too varied to be recounted in this short piece moreover they have the safety of distance and time.

But the trope of the 'Nigger' lies behind the troubled history of race inside Britain's borders. Fears of interracial relationships propelled the 1919 race riots in Liverpool and Cardiff and years later in the 1958 Notting Hill. In the wake of the latter racism swept into mainstream political discourse most crudely in the 1964 'Do you want a Nigger for a Neighbour campaign' in Smethwick Birmingham.

The Sun newspaper's hyper reporting of sexual crimes, street robbery, and scroungers during the 1970s & 80s reproduced the trope in bold.

Today of course we are reassured that Brexit has nothing to do with immigration. But on the morning after the debate the discussion hinged on controlling our 'borders.' But for who's sake and who should be kept out. Visual language during this campaign was explicit. The spike in racist attacks suggest that this was not confined to the so called 'new communities.' Black and Asian second and third generation migrants experienced a new question mark over their right to claim belonging. Our discourse creates new 'Niggers' that share the traits but not the colour of the original trope.

But moral panics and legislative moments are flashpoints played out against a general acceptance of racial inequality that mirrors that which is found in Baldwin's America. Arguably we manage inequality rather than truly attempt to transform the conditions upon which it is built. To accept such an unequal society raises the question of whether we take seriously our commitment to diversity, multiculturalism, or meritocracy. The words of Baldwin return to haunt us ' I know what you think from the state of your institutions.'

One might be tempted to avoid such a visceral portrait of racism at a time which is already bleak. But this is to miss an essential albeit understated aspect of the film. Baldwin is an optimist: 'I still believe we can do something with this country that has never been done before.'

To do so we may first have to be rid of 'Niggers.'

N.B. Quotes (and images) are from I Am Not Your Negro.

Dr Edson Burton is a member of the programming collective Come the Revolution.

Café Society review

2017-03-16T17:18:00.001+00:00

A film most at home described as a ‘visual novel’, Woody Allen’s most recent drama, Café Society, set in 1930’s Hollywood/New York, has a clean, rolling style that plays on the strengths of the writer/directors love for whimsically authentic, lavishly flowing dialogue.

The story of young, Jewish, New Yorker, Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), who decides to leave the shackles of his fathers New York jewellery business with the hopes of pursuing some form of a career in Tinsel Town, the film follows the smirk-inducing domino of events that are instigated as a result of this decision. A meeting with his uncle, Phill Stern (Steve Carrell) - who happens to be a big shot producer in town - finds Bobby not only a job but an addictive fascination in the form of Stern’s Personal Secretary “Vonnie” (Kristen Stewart), a character with whom ‘deer in the headlights’ Bobby falls deeply infatuated. However the dynamics of this relationship and, in fact, Vonnie’s other ‘relationships’ promise to threaten the electric chemistry between these two while spurring the city-hopping story that unfolds as Bobby tries to understand what makes him truly happy.

As ever, Allen’s greatest strength in this film is his wondrous skill with character and dialogue - something that definitely makes itself heard as one would struggle to find a section of this film not commentated, either by the onscreen characters or by Woody himself. Combined with a redolent
score of intercutting, ever-present Jazz - much of which sports recognisable melodies such as the likes of Lorenz Hart’s ‘The Lady is a Tramp’ - Allen manages to capture a picture postcard cross section of the era that establishes a flowing, exotic, atmosphere that suitably accompanying the whimsy of his plot.

This atmospheric approach to his films sound, combined with Allen’s decision to play down his use of cinematography - often doing little more than introducing a scene with a push in followed by conversational intercuts - makes the film a visual vessel for what is essentially as close as one can get to a physical novel on screen. Instead of taking the classic liberties of cinema - emotion through cinematography, creation of atmosphere through soundscapes, dictation of dialogue tempo - this film instead pushes all of its content through its ever-present blanket of dialogue and simplistically elegant mise en scene (the two elements that film shares directly with writing). With this in mind, the film is heavily stylised and the atmosphere it creates is far more reminiscent of written stories than visual ones.

Working in this way, Allen asks his audience to really listen to the dialogue, much as one reads a book - you have to really engage with the language to understand the emotion because you’re always hearing words, there’s no pause to tell you when things are sad. One's memories of the film and its characters become much more like those of a fond book than of a film. It feels to watch much as Fitzgerald's Gatsby feels to read.

Chris Usher

6th Form Ambassador

Interview with Kelly Reichardt, director of Certain Women

2017-03-14T17:39:00.002+00:00

This interview was circulated via Film Hub SWWM and will be of interest to anyone who came to see Certain Women at Borderlines 2017.

Mia Bays: Can you talk a bit about how you came to the stories of Maile Meloy and what attracted you to their situations and characters?

Kelly Reichardt: I can't remember where I first read the stories or even which one I read first. All the characters are so good and she has a beautiful way of writing and a really relaxed way at getting at things. The characters were just people you wanted to stay with longer and they were all built into the environment they were from, and that's up my alley. I get hooked in pretty quickly and then spent a long time trying to make these stories work together. She was very generous let me have my way with her fine work.

MB: Did you work with her on the adaption?

KR: No.I didn't really know her. I had made the last four movies with John Raymond and we were very good friends, so we worked really closely together and hung out a lot but this was a much more lonely. But it was good for me,

MB: You swop the gender of the character played by Lily Gladstone.

KR: I can't remember where exactly when that happened but made the whole work better. In Maile's story it's a boy with Polio and it is set in a different time. I was trying to make the whole thing more contemporary and I thought that the lonely old rancher was something that had been done as far as cinema went.

MB: Making her a woman and then the power of the interaction with Kristen Stewart's character just frames it in a very different way.

KR: It leaves room for different interpretations. From my point of view, and I don't know if this was true from Lily's point of view, the teacher was someone you might have a crush on her or might have a crush on her life and you might wish that you had more access to the things she had access to. There's more ambiguity to it.

MB: There is a sense of people looking in some way to connect.

KR: There is also the lack of connection. I think there is a sense of this in all my work. It’s also in the writing of Raymond. I was influenced by Chantal Ackerman. I even have a book of hers with me. I really had not shot interiors, a lot and I was worried about whether I could afford to do it. I could never afford the lighting set up so I became very accustomed to shooting outside. This was especially true on Night Moves and the anticipation of shooting the scene at the dam. But I was also worried about the fact that I had a kitchen scene to shoot on Thursday with four walls and have four walls and what the fuck do you do with four walls? So, in Certain Women one of the things I wanted to conquer was, how to shoot inside. When I was leaving New York, I put this Ackerman book in my bag, in case I should I get stuck in a space . And I did, in the bedroom scene.

MB: And Chantal Ackerman guarded you?

KR: She’s a good guide. I keep being guided by Chantal...

Interview conducted by Mia Bays, Director-at-large, Birds Eye View Film. Spotlighting the best work by women to UK audiences
www.birds-eye-view.co.uk
@birdseyeviewff
@miafilms Mia Bays

Certain Women, Simple Life

2017-03-10T17:27:00.001+00:00

Certain Women (2016) is a drama which offers a glimpse into four women's lives in Montana. It features Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone who plays the role of a rather lost ranch hand - whilst Michelle Williams and Laura Dern play even more contrasting roles to Lily, they are women in control in a town which doesn't seem to have any element of rushing.

The scenic shots of the American Northwest feel more like pictures than in motion. The film is very slow paced and offers a glimpse into people's lives - there is no ‘spectacle’ as such like most Hollywood films. To me it feels almost though someone is telling a story but emphasising the minor details of the plot. We are left waiting for more.

The characters seem quite isolated and withdrawn from Native American life except for Jamie (Lily Gladstone) who seems as though life is almost passing her by. There's almost a sense that she is blending in with her background of gentle landscapes.

The film resonates with me because I couldn't imagine such a simplistic life. Certain Women really gives an insight into the way people live in Montana, this dedramatisation of narrative leaves us with questions that we realise we can probably answer ourselves.

Whilst watching the film we are waiting for the next thing to happen - something that is usually fulfilled in mainstream cinema. The simple dialogue allows for the images and emblems to tell the story instead of big dramatic plot points.

My final thoughts are that this film like most, certainly isn’t for everyone and to each person will mean something else, some may see it as a work of art and some depressingly dull. The film shows audiences a different life, a very simplistic and mostly lonely life. If it wasn't for the technology used by characters you may think you have been taken back to a more modest time. As a viewer you almost forget about the materialistic society in which we live because this seems so far detached.

Iona Francis

6th Form Ambassador

Film Festival viewing: memories, masks and true stories

2017-03-03T12:34:00.000+00:00

One of the pleasures of watching films at a film festival is how you come to notice common themes. Both Jackie and Lion, which I took in as a double bill yesterday at Malvern, are based on true stories, and true stories are there again in Denial and in The Viceroy’s House, also in the Borderlines programme. In Lion, the story of how an Indian child was lost, adopted, grew up and retrieved his memories and his original home and biological mother becomes a semi-miraculous tale of survival and healing. The first half of the film, showing Saroo as a child blessed with resilience and luck, accrues incredible power from its undeniable documentary dimension. It was heartbreaking to watch the child unknowingly swept away, negotiating a place to sleep with other street children in Calcutta, and at the mercy of a range of adult strangers. Dev Patel as the adult Saroo has less to do in the second half, but the passages where he begins to remember through a Proustian encounter with the food he yearned for as a child, and as he eventually journeys back, back, along the alleys of his old home village, are archetypal. It’s a deeply satisfying film about regaining our childhood pasts.

If a true-life story can authenticate the untold experience of a street child, though (and offer a rare happy ending), a film like Jackie has a different task. The project here is surely to offer a new twist to one of the most familiar events of the twentieth century, and clearly the focus on Jackie Kennedy was always going to be about the tensions between her public role and her private emotion. Those images of her in the blood-stained pink suit, her dramatic black veil as she walked behind the coffin at the funeral, have always been memorable, and they are right at the centre of the film, a disconcerting combination of anguish and control. I was rather distracted, though, by the fairly extensive sections about Jackie’s ambitious ideals for the White House while she was First Lady. This was a different story, about the abrupt indignities of losing both status and home, immediately after undergoing the violent traumas of the assassination.

We see rather a lot of close-ups of Jackie as she ‘unwinds’ in private, which seems to amount to rather repetitive instances of staring into a mirror and of smoking. Natalie Portman gives a mannered performance of someone who was also a mannered performer for much of the time. In the end, the brittle persona of the young woman in the midst of immense loss (we are also reminded that she lost two babies) remains a bit of a mystery.

So, what about some common themes? In Saroo’s memories and dreams in Lion there was some consonance with the manipulation of Lee’s flashbacks and suppressed memories in Manchester by the Sea – both directors give us a fresh take on a conventional technique. In terms of the camera’s love affair with the human face, the scrutiny of a woman’s mask in Jackie was fascinating to compare with Asta Nielsen in the 1921 Hamlet, screened last Sunday at Hereford Courtyard. This by the way was a wonderful opportunity to enjoy a hugely complex performance – and it was a treat to enjoy the live piano accompaniment by Lillian Henley. Worth it just to appreciate the music and the skill.

Finally, houses, homes and bigwigs. I’m not sure that I can face The Viceroy’s House, with Hugh Bonneville playing another toff (why doesn’t he make more of the comedic abilities he displayed in 2012?) but there’s clearly a current preoccupation with the symbolism of bricks and mortar – the White House, Lutyen’s imperial buildings of Delhi - representing both state and family. Let’s hope that budding screenwriters are not seduced into thinking that this one has legs. I couldn’t bear a story about the pain of giving up No. 10.

Catherine Neale

The Making of Soy Cuba

2017-03-02T11:29:00.000+00:00

Anyone fascinated by the very excellent Soy Cuba, or indeed by cinema as a whole, would find Vicente Perrez 2004 documentary about the making of 'Soy Cuba’, the oddly named I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth, well worth seeking out. It can be hard to find, but, fortunately for afficionados, it is available to watch online at the IDFA (Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival) website. That site is a little idiosyncratic, but a search under ‘I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth | IDF’ should put you in the right place (more hit and miss: even more hit and miss: ). It’’s well worth persisting - Perrez documentary covers far more than just the making of ‘Soy Cuba’, though it does that in satisfying detail - it sketches a history of Cuban cinema (and beyond), the technical aspects of making the film, discusses the terrible reception Soy Cuba got when screened in ’64, its rediscovery and critical re-appraisal, and all usually through the eyes of those who spent fourteen months or more making Soy Cuba back in 1962. Terrific.

Stephen Hopkins

Audience Member

Remaining films in our Cuban strand: Return to Ithaca and A Wedding in Havana.

Coming Soon to a Peripatetic Projector Near You: Part 2

2017-03-01T08:35:00.000+00:00

After Almodóvar, and on the subject of singular directors: Café Society (Dir. Woody Allen, US, 2016). Every year I go to the latest Woody Allen movie. (I do know I didn’t back when they were better.) Everyone says it looks delightful – but even terrible movies can manage that these days. He deserves more respect. The movie starts very strongly, moves along nicely then fizzles out, perhaps because Steve Carell’s character just accepts his lot. There are many good gags and Ken Stott (Marty Dorfman) gets most of them. [Ken Stott’s agent: “Ken, I’ve got a Woody Allen film. Your character’s name is Marty Dorfman.” – “I can do that.”] Last year’s Allen, Irrational Man, was more satisfying in terms of plot, character development and a tidy ending. It reminded me of those American radio dramas from the 1940s that BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast occasionally, where Hollywood movie stars of the era give their reading of a James M. Cain script.

Some critics wonder why movie stars want an Allen movie on their CV. When his body of work is complete, and the reassessment comes, they will want to be part of it. There’s a story with acting required. Nice wardrobe, nothing dangerous. The shoot’s a wrap within a month. It’s an opportunity to make a studio-system-style movie few directors still know how to do. You know when you mooch about Freeview and you stumble across a 1950s B&W movie starring Humphrey Bogart so you give it a go. Then the opening credits reveal that it’s directed by John Huston, you wonder why the Information button never mentions the important details, and ninety minutes of enjoyable fluff ensue. That’s what I mean. Woody Allen is 81. Who else is going to make them?

The Borderlines 2017 programme features several ‘state of the nation’ movies from around the world: Aquarius (Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2016); Graduation (Dir. Cristian Mungia, Romania, 2016); Moonlight (Dir. Barry Jenkins, US, 2016); and, I, Daniel Blake (Dir. Ken Loach, UK, 2016) is ours. During December my home cinema, Number 8 Pershore, sequenced three trailers together: Allied (2016) – the UK news features graffiti; A Street Cat Named Bob (2016) – Luke Treadaway walks past graffiti; and, I, Daniel Blake (2016) – Dave Johns creates graffiti. The writing is on the wall. It recalls Loach’s My Name is Joe (1998) when Peter Mullan (Joe) daubs paint on the car of someone taking photographs of him. I, Daniel Blake also echoes Loach’s Poor Cow (1967), not to mention a thousand other examples of British social realist cinema, when a desperate young woman goes on the game. Ken Loach – his work has as many call backs as a Bond movie.

British films that comment upon recent UK social history have improved a great deal in the past 30 years. During the 1980s Channel 4 screened issue movies every month. There would be soap-box speeches and heavy-handed, broad-brush moralising – particularly during the comedies. Were The Comic Strip Presents that driven by a good word from the New Musical Express? A Keith Waterhouse script would include a rant about the friends he lost when he passed his eleven-plus. In Hanif Kureishi’s London Kills Me (1991) a young British-Asian man steals a police car, removes its roof, drives around – and nothing happens. Is it a dream sequence – or did I dream it? In Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Last Resort (2000), two policemen in a patrol car have nothing better to do than spend their shift spying on the common-or-garden asylum seeker housed in a Margate tower block. No they wouldn’t. It’s a good film otherwise. And as for that one with Pete Postlethwaite, rock climbing and electricity pylons, Among Giants (1998): it’s worse than water-boarding – but still preferable to Shopping (1994). When you’ve seen enough UK cinema you know what it is to suffer.

I, Daniel Blake merits its awards: Palme d’Or at Cannes, BAFTA Best British Film. Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) has no luck but his plight is entirely plausible and credible. Listen out for the opening bars of “Spring”, from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”, on the soundtrack – and by the knowing groans of laughter from members of the audience you will know their line of work. You yearn for Daniel to drop into Citizens Advice but, after a lifetime of paying his stamp, it’s understandable that he might expect a bit more help from the public sector than he gets. And the moral is: Deference Always.

I don’t know where to fit Sweet Bean (Dir. Naomi Kawase, Japan, 2015) into this preview – and that’s quite right. We adore Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies but his 1950s films set in post-war Tokyo are much less known in the West. They’re a bit long. I’ve only seen Stray Dog (1949), the baseball stadium sequence is much-stolen, and Ikiru (1952), a very moving political drama. To my delight the cheap, made in China, Kurosawa box-set I own also includes Late Chrysanthemums (1954) – even though it was directed by Mikio Naruse. Neorealism wasn’t confined to Italian film-makers. The undercover detective in Stray Dog and the dying bureaucrat in Ikiru are your guides to post-war Tokyo: the American night clubs, the huge difference a few more Yen each week can make to living standards, the corruption. Like the superb Nobody Knows (2004) you are there with them: the sun in your lungs, street dust up your nose. Sweet Bean fits into this tradition: its tone, pacing and humanity. William Blake could “see a world in a grain of sand” and Kawase finds it in a quick snack.

A 76-year-old woman, Tokue (Kirin Kiki), short of money, wishes to work for a dorayaki pancake franchise owner, Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase). She has a superior sweet bean paste recipe she would like to live on after her death. Inter-generational understanding, a trade-off between business and teaching, develops gradually into friendship. I heard this film, and Ethel & Ernest (2016), described as “gentle”. Only if you’ve forgotten what bereavement feels like. They mean that it’s a thoughtful film with few characters. It’s also a food film: like Tampopo (1985 - noodles), Babette’s Feast (1987 – seven course banquet), Big Night (1996 - omelette), even Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014 – I don’t know but they looked delicious). The most humble of food films: a pancake paste.

Robin Clarke

Volunteer

North La La Land

2017-02-26T15:30:00.000+00:00

Howdy from California! So here I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, overlooking the famous
bay and San Francisco itself, while wearing my Borderlines Film Festival t-shirt kindly sent from Hereford, 5242 miles away! This is my third year of writing for the festival, but I haven't always been a "foreign correspondent". Back when I proudly lived in Hereford, I remember the old Ritz cinema only seemed to show films at weekends, and mostly blockbuster fare, and then The Courtyard Arts Centre opened in 1998, bestowing a new source of independent cinema upon the local cinephiles. Unfortunately, I left Hereford just before Borderlines Film Festival began, or else I'm sure I would have been keenly involved from the get-go. A few relocations later and now I am settled in the sunshine state, where cinema was born.

Where multiscreen cinemas are now the norm in the UK (indeed, my home town had Europe's first multiplex), many neighbourhoods here within the various Bay Area cities have their own independent "movie theater". My local cinema is an opulent art deco building that somehow survived the 1989 earthquake and a modern renovation. The next closest cinema has a Wurlitzer organ ascend from its main auditorium’s stage, as if to play-in the evening's films. Across the Bay Area, and California itself, these old local cinemas are often downtown focal points, somewhat mirroring the local demographic in their film programming.

I think this local investment in, at times, quite esoteric independent and international films is a positive knock-on effect of being in relative proximity to Hollywood. It may be sunny all year round down in Los Angeles, but here in Northern California there is less sheen, perhaps a holdover from the gold rush pioneers who braved the Sierra Nevada mountains to settle amongst the redwoods of the Pacific northwest. I like to imagine them imbuing the Bay Area with a progressive attitude that lives on in the creative industries, as we have so many film production luminaries based locally, including Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, and Lucasfilm. Living close to such a breadth of cinematic expertise is certainly a privilege, and Hereford and its surrounding countryside is lucky to have the equally pioneering Borderlines.

In recent months I've been fortunate to see films as diverse as Check It, Jackie, and Moonlight all in local independent cinemas that proudly screened them as part of film festivals (such as Frameline, or tangentially to the typically more mainstream Hollywood movies. It feels almost meta to have grown up with the first multiplex blockbusters in the middle of the UK, to living where scores of those movies were produced and filmed. There's certainly something uncanny about attending to one's daily business, only to recognise a hilly vista from Vertigo, or noticing that the latest Godzilla wasn't actually shot by the Golden Gate Bridge after all.

So, leading up to the 89th Academy Awards ceremony this Sunday, celebrating what I would humbly say is a year of especially outstanding cinema, it dawns on me that I will do as I often have since falling in love with film in Hereford and look forward to the glitz of it all - except now from within the same time zone as Hollywood! Surreal. Hopefully there'll be some colourful wins this year. Now all I need to decide is whether to watch the Oscars on television from the comfort of home, or screening live down the block at the independent art deco flicks, here in North La La Land...

Duncan Wardlaw

Coming Soon to a Peripatetic Projector Near You: Part 1

2017-02-25T15:51:00.005+00:00

I’ve seen a few of Flicks in the Sticks picks in the past year. I looked forward to Hell or High Water (Dir. David Mackenzie, US, 2016) – currently nominated for 4 Oscars. There was a steady stream of independent films from America’s dark heart a quarter-century ago – the American outback, big blue skies, black humour, determined criminals and jaded detectives: Red Rock West (1993), The Last Seduction (1994), To Die For (1995). Some of them starred Jeff Bridges: American Heart (1992). He’s on top Jeff Bridges form here – playing a less sympathetic character than, say, his country music performer in Crazy Heart (2009). I don’t recall any genre business involving a soft drinks vending machine but the comic relief cameo in an eatery was good work.

We’re in present-day Texas. (It was filmed in New Mexico.) Bridges first came to attention in The Last Picture Show (1971), summarised online as: “In 1951, a group of high schoolers come of age in a bleak, isolated, atrophied West Texas town that is slowly dying, both culturally and economically.” Those characters would be in their 80s today and, if they had an opportunity, no longer living in West Texas. Hell or High Water focuses on two brothers in their 40s (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) robbing a chain of banks they believe is robbing them, whilst two Texan Rangers (Bridges and Gil Birmingham) visit various ghost towns in pursuit. It’s not 1951 and there’s not much for anyone to look forward to.

Gil Birmingham is a Comanche actor. I was delighted to see a realistic role for a Native American in an American small town movie. I have been introduced to the short stories of Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene) and Louise Erdrich (Chippewa) in the past year. There are many tribes but it doesn’t take too much effort to get it right. Not that Jeff Bridges’ character cares about that. Soundtrack by Nick Cave and The Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis. It’s all good.

There is a fascinating work of 1936 British science fiction / modern art called Things to Come – produced by Alexander Korda, directed by William Cameron Menzies, written by H. G. Wells, starring Ralph Richardson. It predicted a 30-year war 5 years after it was made. Three years later Menzies was directing sequences in Gone with the Wind. This has nothing to do with Things to Come (Dir. Mia Hanson-Løve, France/Germany, 2016). I saw Isabelle Huppert advertised on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as “The French Meryl Streep”: some people adore everything she does. Huppert has been extremely productive recently: 8 movies in the past 2 years with another 6 in production. These range from as-silly-as-you-make-it Valley of Love, opposite a barrel-gutted Gérard Depardieu sweating buckets in Death Valley, an estranged couple reunited by their son’s final wishes, to Elle, Paul Verhoeven’s much-anticipated latest, to Souvenir, where she plays the (fictional) runner-up in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. Many of those film critics who got to see Elle during 2016 put it in their Top Ten of the year.

Watching Violette (2013), the bio-pic of French writer Violette Leduc, where the audience is invited to give itself a point for every one of her friends they’ve heard of, I identified the three act structure of several, recent, women’s movies depuis la France. Act One – great personal misery. Act Two – great personal achievements. Act Three – walking holiday in a place of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Huppert’s character’s circumstances alter and, after a mis-step or two, she responds to new challenges. Will she adapt to changing times? This is the plot of most dramas. Does it tell us much about present-day France, the careers and relationships of women approaching retirement age, family life or current trends in philosophy and publishing? I don’t think so. Is Huppert very watchable for 100 minutes? As ever.

Talking of communes: Captain Fantastic (Dir. Matt Ross, US, 2016). And I’m sure this American family would relish a debate with the French anarchists from Things to Come. It stars George MacKay as Viggo Mortensen’s character’s eldest son. You may remember MacKay from Pride (2014) – he was the shy, young man with the camera. He was 21 in that; he’s 19 in this. In the British movie he’s required to drink pints of beer in various clubs. In Hollywood he climbs a cliff, plays acoustic guitar to a solid standard, delivers long speeches involving political theory like he understands their differences and carries off a very demanding yoga routine. He’s ripped. He’s good. I hope he gets a big role now he’s made the ‘eligible virgin in a mini-bus’ part his own. Can Eddie Redmayne OBE kill a stag?

In a year of thin (English language) movies Captain Fantastic offers plenty to cogitate. A society of six people isn’t big enough to find solutions for every disagreement. It keeps credible: serving wine to children; reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus to a six-year old; replacing Christmas with Noam Chomsky Day. Haven’t we all. And the movie side-steps a number of blind alleys: it could have taken the ‘fish out of water’ or the ‘brainwashed cult’ route. There’s a nod to convention and it moves on. It’s not Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) – and The Courtyard must have sold a lot of stiff drinks that day. I’ve never seen a cinema empty so fast. It’s not Little Miss Sunshine (2006) either, whatever its trailer suggests – but there are several genuine laughs. Given that three generations challenge one another’s value systems, from positions of near incomprehension, there’s even a late-1960s, early-1970s counter-culture movie vibe. I predict, given recent events in America, that we will get more movies like this. I hope so.

Another family breakdown, another commune: Julieta (Dir. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2016). It interweaves three Alice Munro short stories featuring the same eponymous character, played by Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte, at different points in her life. I had an Almodóvar season of my own when this was released – so excuse me whilst I work out which bits belong to which Almodóvar. No extremely extrovert gay men in this one. The actors aren’t told to play it like a Spanish-speaking soap opera. His previous movie I’m So Excited! (2013) featured no subtlety whatsoever. That experiment must have refreshed him because, in part, Julieta explores the understated grief and guilt of an abandoned mother. Almodóvar loves his female characters best when they demonstrate their emotional strength. The male characters tend to offer them the opportunity – but not violently this time. A rebuffed suitor abandons his ‘research’ into ‘accidentally’ seeing Julieta again because he’d noticed he was at risk of becoming a character from a Patricia Wentworth novel. I like a minor character that’s self-aware. If you don’t know Almodóvar’s work Julieta is a fine place to start. And if you do, get ready to soak it up.

Robin Clarke

Festival Volunteer