Month: August 2022

Duthchas

GFFreviews

Duthchas is a beautiful film about life on the island of Berneray, combining a family archive of film shot in the 1960s with interviews with residents and their descendants. The title Duthchas is a word roughly translated here into Home, but has no direct translation in English, encompassing a wealth of ideas, including heritage, lineage, culture, and relationship with the world and each other.

My first thought when watching this film was about how different life is. Even when comparing the apples and oranges of the past and the present, I couldn’t help feeling that, despite being Scottish, my life has more in common with an English-speaking city dweller in another country than it has with a Gaelic-speaking Hebridean. Gloria, an Australian nurse who was the first non-Gaelic speaker to settle on the island, and whose wedding is captured on film, describes Berneray as so “foreign”, and I understood what she meant.

Language is a huge part of it, and you can trace the generational shifts in the loss of it. The older generation, who you can see as young men and women in the film, are native Gaelic speakers, and during their adolescence Gaelic was the only language spoken on the island. English was reserved for use on the mainland, and women who went rarely outside the islands would maybe not speak it at all. Language is such a cornerstone of culture, conveying a worldview, values, and intrinsic ideas. It is not simply different sounds for like-for-like subjects, it is a transmission of whole communal understanding of the world and ourselves.

In the 1960s, life on Berneray was one of tight knit community, with daily interaction and reliance on one another, for crofting, for fishing, for trading. In the evening was ceilidhing, going to the neighbours’ house for drinking and dancing. Churchgoing on the Sunday was an unspoken must, as was the rule that you never put your washing out on the Sabbath. People lived in the houses their grandfathers and great-grandfathers built. They could trace their lineage back through their patronymic, pass down tales and songs that existed for hundreds of years.

The interruption in that way of life was when time for secondary school came, and children were sent off the island to residential schools taught entirely in English. And if you couldn’t speak English, you were given the belt until you could. It was a brutal dislocation, and it beat Gaelic out an entire generation. Women especially, were not expected to return to the island, as all paying work there was seen as ‘for men’. Mothers are the best resource you can have for handing down knowledge and culture, and without a place for them on the island, young women married on the mainland or emigrated abroad, taking the next generation of family with them.

Television also ended the nightly ceilidhs, and made the intergenerational social cohesion decline. People became isolated in their own homes, creating gaps among the older Gaelic-speaking populace and the younger English-speaking families. Ceilidhs were not simply about dancing, but where language, music, song, history and story were handed down. Younger people just weren’t exposed to this.

But while this is a reminiscence, it isn’t a eulogy. A new generation is coming up, who have had the opportunity of being educated in Gaelic medium schools, and who have Gaelic and are keen to keep it. It may not be the Gaelic of their forefathers, but its very survival leaves open the door for all that to be preserved and rediscovered. The causeway has meant greater ease of travel and better economic prospects. And technology has meant that working on the mainland isn’t the absolute necessity it once was.

Duthchas charts the change and continuity of a way of life, of a home that has been kept by its people even when separated from it. Really beautiful film.

If you like this…

Off The Rails

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Ooft!

Off The Rails is a documentary about a group of young guys in Guildford into parkour. The film follows their story from 15 to 22, showing the ups and downs of their lives as they try to turn their passion into a career.

What this film is really about is class. It’s about the inescapability of class, and how every step forward is met with three pushes back. Yet it’s also a defiantly hopeful film, because despite these challenges (and by challenges, I mean god awful things that happen), the young men at the centre of the film continue to push, to pick themselves up, to dream of a better future for themselves, and try to create it. And regardless of success or failure, they have each other, bonds of friendship through thick and thin.

What I liked most was the way the documentary didn’t try to separate the good and the bad out. Parkour is a healthy outlet for their energy, keeps them fit, gives them a sense of athletic achievement; it’s empowering, it allows them to traverse and interact with their city in a way that gives them ownership of the place they live; it gives them an appreciation and love of architecture; it allows them to see vistas few ever would. At the same time, it’s an adrenaline hit that can become addictive, and the line between developing your skills and escalating for the rush blurs quickly; it’s spectacle, and as spectacle is subject to the pressure and demands of an audience; its transgressive nature puts it in conflict with the law, and can end up narrowing life options, rather than expanding them; it comes with genuine risk of injury and death. All of these things co-exist at the same time, and are inseparable from each other. This is not a story of how a positive thing got taken too far and became a negative thing, it’s far more complex than that.

I really identified with the guys, Rikke, Aiden, Nye, Alex and Owen. Growing up in a shithole town, no prospects, hating school. You feel like a rat scratching at a wall. While I was able to hook on to my education to get me out of there, Rikke and Aiden leave school without any qualifications. The options are shit work, no work, drink, drugs, and the noose. There seems to be no way to actually change your life. But when a clip of them doing parkour goes viral, they become YouTube stars. Suddenly the possibility of making a living doing what they love seems possible.

But all the market forces come into play. Making a YouTube channel takes an enormous amount of work, and you are entirely dependent on the algorithm and monetisation to make any income. While there are flashes of success like booking a North Face ad photoshoot, you have no hourly rate, no benefits, no sick pay. Plus, you now have the appearance of success, with millions of views, so no one can believe it when you are still unable to afford to move out your parent’s house. And the algorithm, the audience, always demand fresh content, the bigger and more extreme the better.

Rikke and Aiden are very conscientious about the impact they have on their audience, they stress that they are effectively athletes, who have practiced and practiced to be able to do what they do. Yet that can never negate that there will always be viewers willing to emulate their most dangerous stunts without the proper precautions. And they themselves are pushed, by the nature of the medium, to do the most attention-grabbing stuff. They take to train surfing, as it brings in the most views, but as one guy points out, that’s not really about parkour skill, because the train is in control. One jolt and it’s all over, doesn’t matter how good you are. And as more and more legal problems mount in the UK, it means going abroad to do their surfs, where they are less familiar with the routes, the schedules, the dangers.

This film couldn’t have asked for a better marriage of subject and theme with young working class men trying to jump over walls, an act of elation, hope and defiance, but with no promise of what is on the other side.

The Ballad of a Great Disordered Heart

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I didn’t like it.

The Ballad of a Great Disordered Heart is a film made by Aidan O’Rourke, Mark Cousins and Becky Manson about the area known as Little Ireland in Edinburgh’s Old Town, and its cultural and musical legacy. I admit to a bit of trepidation going in, because I’d loved Iorram with Aidan O’Rourke’s beautiful score, but I’d been less enthused by Mark Cousins’s The Story of Looking, and I couldn’t help but wonder what that combo was gonna be like in this film.

I actually was really pleased at the start of the film. Aidan reflects on the impact of the Covid lockdowns in a positive way, as a shared cultural experience, that forced us to slow down and stay put, gave us time for thought and internal recalibration, as well as connection with our neighbours and surroundings. His neighbourhood in the centre of the city was usually an anonymous place, stacks of flats one on top of another, the majority let out through Air BnB, and a constant shuffle of tourists. No one connected with their neighbours because there were no neighbours, it was as impersonal as a bustling train station. Over the course of lockdown, with the tourists gone, Aidan connected with three elderly residents, who had lived there from the time of it being Little Ireland, filled with immigrants from Ireland, Lithuania, and Italy. All called Margaret, they shared with him their memories of the neighbourhood. Great, I thought. Sounds brilliant. A sort of ethnography of neighbourhood.

But the Margarets are given barely a few minutes’ space, and then their voices are then largely absent throughout the rest of the film. Instead it focuses on Aidan and his mates in the folk music scene, talking about what folk music means to them. And the whole thing sinks into being very self-indulgent.

In fact I felt I learnt very little about the area or the Margarets, and instead was just treated to a succession of interviews by musicians about themselves. While I’d been totally up for having musical heritage being a large strand of the film, and in fact was something I was looking forward to after Aidan’s Iorram score, it became disproportionately the focus, obscuring the context it was meant to be taking place in.

Also, I absolutely hated the way a lot of this was shot. Constant close-ups of folk’s left nostril, earlobe or eyebrow hairs, while an interview was going on. Each time jittery or swaying out of focus. I understand that there was maybe an attempt to pair the soliloquising on the transcendental nature of music with a dreamy visual meditation on the curls in someone’s hair. But it just totally fought your ability to listen and focus on what was being said, or have the emotion conveyed, when you seemed to be viewing it through the short attention span of a director who seemed now to be counting the freckles on someone’s face, or pondering the beard scruff on someone’s cheek. It actively fought the content. And as time went on, it became infuriating. I ended up shutting my eyes a lot of the time so I could listen to what was being said, instead of being taken on a shuddering ghost train ride around the pores of someone’s face. I think you’ll agree that’s not ideal for a film.

So in the end, despite liking the music it contained, I’ve got to say I didn’t like The Ballad of a Great Disordered Heart. I feel it lost its grounding, lost its focus, and became far too centred on the filmmaker.

Chance

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Really fascinating film. Taking place almost entirely inside the back of a truck, four migrants hope that the journey from Belgium to the UK will provide them with a chance at a better life.

The film exists somewhere between documentary and fiction, as the directors film from within a reconstructed space, but the four guys on screen are all real migrants living Belgium, and all the words are their own, as they improvise based on their own experience. It brings home what an achievement it is, to have this really compelling, full length feature film, with entirely improvised performances.

The film is claustrophobic. I mean, you probably could have guessed that when I said it takes place almost entirely inside the back of a truck, but it’s one thing to register it and another thing to feel it for 75 minutes. The bit where one of the guys goes round the seams of the doors looking for some crack to get fresh air is particularly upsetting to watch. Because this is a time game. They have to be patient and wait for the truck to reach its destination, at the same time, they have to judge how long they can survive in this airless box. There is a constant tension of trying to figure out where they are, whether the driver has gone off for a pee or a kip or the weekend, and if silence means impending danger or respite from it.

The whole thing is so tense. They have to judge from the mumbles and bangs from outside, has the driver heard them? If he has, is it better to run now before the cops show up? And where would they even run, coz where the fuck even are they? They try to sus their location and route by checking the GPS on their phones but that can only tell them so much. When the van parks, are they at a service station, a car park, a warehouse lot? The whole thing brings home how precarious their lives are, how the big wins and losses are entirely outwith their control. And all they can do is make the choice to take that risk, to see if this time it will be their chance.

If you like this…

Space is the Place

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Right, so it’s a 70s Afrofuturist blaxploitation flick created by cosmic jazz artist and absolute legend Sun Ra. Knowing that going in, it still somehow managed not to be what I was expecting.

First things first, like most blaxploitation movies, it’s made on a budget of £2.50, so bear that in mind going in. Despite this, there’s a lot of ambitious stuff, Sun Ra kicking about an alien planet, then landing his spaceship in the Oakland-San Francisco area, then engaging in a war for the souls of African-Americans in an astral card game with the embodiment of the Overseer mentality, the co-operation and collaboration with the systems that oppress Black people. For that alone, it’s worth sticking your head round the door to have a look.

It does have that vanity project problem, where you make film about yourself as the saviour of your people because your mind is so opened and enlightened. Reminds me (as much as I liked it) of Slam, where Saul Williams stops a prisonyard fight with his slam poetry. It doesn’t help that Sun Ra delivers a lot of his lines while looking directly down the camera, or reading his lines held up just the right of it.

It does nonetheless draw you in, with an optimism and hope that manages to fight against its limitations at every step. There are plenty of funny bits, and the whole thing is a bit of a romp.

The liberation, equality and dignity that Sun Ra fights for doesn’t apply to women however, and the film’s only female characters, one white woman and one black woman, are stripped to provide full frontal nudity, the only characters in the film to do so. They are initially used as trophies and objects to confirm manhood and status, then laterally are subjected to misogynistic violence. So, yeah.

Space is the Place is an interesting snapshot of a time where rising optimism seemed pitted against longstanding cynicism, a place which seen from 2022 was a high point that peaked and receeded in the wake of a starker reality. The magic and kookiness Sun Ra brings tries to keep alive a childhood in the weary adults that populate his world and the world of the viewer. Despite its limitations, for such efforts, it still has merit.

Afronauts

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Afronauts is an atmospheric short film about a girl preparing to go into space, as Zambia tries to beat the U.S. to be the first on the moon.

The film has this early sci-fi feel, filmed in black-and-white on the rocky gravel of a quarry. The homemade aluminium spacesuit made for the main character has that classic 50s look. That style has been so spoofed in the interceding decades that watching it from the 2020s, you are not sure if it’s meant to be comical. It inspires both a sincere nostalgia, and also a melancholy for imagined futures now past. That mixture of being almost laughably strange and humblingly sincere pervades the film, with the girl being rolled downhill in a barrel as weightlessness training.

As the hour of take-off approaches, I became apprehensive about how much of what we were seeing was real, in world. Within the world of the film, was a 4-foot metal tube enough to launch a person to the moon? Or would this come crashing down into insufficiently magical reality?

Using the language of sci-fi, Afronauts evokes a hopeful innocence, a harkening back to a childhood of possibilities. It is by turns comforting and unsettling, as this young girl places her life in the hands of those driven more by belief than experience. Interesting film.

Does Your House Have Lions

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What I liked about Does Your House Have Lions is that it tries to be a documentary without being a documentary, it tries to be with its people rather than show its people. The people in the film, vqueeram, Dhiren, and Devangana, are living through extraordinary times, documentary-worthy times, but rather than pull back and explain a national narrative, the film resolutely remains on their lives, their friendships. These are conversations taking place in their livingrooms, their bedrooms, that we manage, through the camera, to be present for.

The rise of fascism across the globe has been rightly discussed at length, but one nation which has been underrepresented in discussions is India. I think because, from here, we recognise fascism from its use of white supremacist iconography, and can therefore link up different national movements that share Nazi swastikas or American Confederate flags or Nordic runes. But India’s Hindu nationalism falls outside this, so the emotional punch of recognising the repeated signature that signposts the route to fascism is largely absent for those observing from outside the nation. Modi has definitely been able to use this to his advantage, as the political violence he has incited has went unnamed abroad, and without being named as fascism it cannot be tackled as fascism.

vqueeram, Dhiren and their friends are queer university activists in Dehli. Vishal, the co-director with vqueeram, an American from the Indian diaspora, is present on screen, in discussions, is heard over the phone, or seen setting up shots. There is a definite intent to be as transparent as possible, of showing the artifice of trying to light a shot while at the same time capturing the naturalness of conversation taking place. Sometimes vqueeram will explain things to Vishal that he was not aware of, that happened while he was out the country or which didn’t get attention on the news. There is not a presumption of an omniscient documentary-maker, this is very much a space for listening.

What I liked was that it showed how political movements function mostly through social bonds. When people scoff at left-leaning or anti-authoritarian politics, there is usually the question asked rhetorically of how folk would get anything done, anything organised? I always find it funny when this gets asked because most relationships in our lives are not boss/subordinate or police/prisoner. Most relationships that we have with friends, neighbours, lovers, and co-workers strive, despite power structures, towards an equalitarian nature. Empathy is the currency of our interactions far more than dominance. Yet most documentaries like to show political conflict as two opposing structures, two hierarchical organisations vying for control. It is harder to capture what a lot of activism really is, which is checking in to see if someone’s doing alright, knowing who is struggling just now, phoning someone’s loved ones to give them information and support. What builds a movement and keeps it functioning is what is shown in Does Your House Have Lions, conversations in livingrooms, holding your friend’s hand while he tells you about something that happened to him, sitting on the porch and processing the fallouts of protests.

Both in what is shown and how it is shown, there is an attempt to make a film which eschews the norms and formats of a documentary film, and co-authors a recorded piece of people’s lives, lives which are inherently political, not just when on the streets or in a rally, but every day in their homes, their kitchens, their hearths.