GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • Rewind and Play

    Rewind and Play starts with a white tv presenter lounging over Thelonious Monk’s piano, delivering a monologue in French directly to the camera, while Thelonious himself sits, soaked in sweat, poised to begin playing, breathing in deep deliberate breaths. You are immediately struck to ask what has brought him to look so wrung out while the other man looks languorous and self-possessed.

    The film skips back to footage of Thelonious getting off the plane in Paris, and the next hour unfolds all that was unseen in the actual programme. In 1969 Thelonious performed on a French tv programme, and this film is everything that was cut from the recording, all the background footage, outtakes of the interview, repositioning on set, and second takes. From what was deemed unnecessary for the actual programme, we see a whole other story. One in which the talented and dedicated Monk holds his dignity in the face of patronising racism from the white host.

    The host frames his questions to elicit from Monk the responses he wants, and when he finds the straightforward Monk less verbose than he’d like, proceeds to give translations more to his liking than what Monk actually said. He couches Monk’s directness as an unsophisticated inarticulateness. Despite Monk being considered a genius at his craft, the fact it has come from a man of colour without a formal education is, for the presenter, less evidence of skill and dedication, than a curious transmutation of unlikely factors, which Monk’s refusal to talk at length about, shows even he knows not from how it came.

    As I watched, I kept thinking of something I remember Oprah saying on one of her shows, that excellence is the best deterrent to racism. It has not been the case in my observation. Setting aside the enormous amount to unpack in that statement, as this film review is not the venue for it, racism has full enough breadth to recognise excellence, genius and extraordinary skill, and simply shrug it off as the exception, as the glass formed from a strike of lightning on the sand. The presenter constantly reiterates stories of Monk being asked for deeper analysis of his music, only for his replies to be construed as though even he himself is ignorant of how high art came from within him. The presenter acts as though Monk is a bird who, through unusual coincidence, has learned how to imitate a concerto with its call.

    When Monk discusses the racism he has faced in France, experiencing wage discrimination and dismissive attitudes in the industry, the presenter says to the director (in French so Monk won’t comprehend), “Erase it . . . it’s derogatory”. He feels not a twinge of self-consciousness at being a white man demanding the erasure of a Black man’s experience of racism so his white audience feels more comfortable. When Monk clocks it’s being cut, he asks why, and the presenter responds only “It’s not nice”. As though Monk is the one who is at fault for pointing it out.

    A slow moving documentary, but really fascinating way of telling a story from the celluloid marginalia.

  • Xiaodi

    Xiaodi is a documentary about a Chinese trans teenage girl’s multiple escape attempts from conversion therapy.

    Xiaodi herself is so impressive. She has a dead-centre strength, a ‘live free or die’ attitude. She narrates her story in the film through interviews and visits the sites of her escapes. She even stands outsides the conversion camp and shouts insults over the walls to the instructor who beat her. Her defiance puts you in awe.

    Also interviewed in the film is Xiaodi’s mum. Her mother fully participated in the transphobia towards her, committing her to the conversion camp and even returning her after her first escape attempt. Now, after it is clear Xiaodi would rather die than be broken by them, she has come to accept her daughter. But the relationship is strained by the damage done. Her mum sits knees tight together, handbag on lap, giving her version of events, as Xiaodi sits off to the side, out of focus, all attention on her phone. She only perks up to correct her mother when her attempts to minimise the abuse and trauma Xiaodi suffered strays into actual falsehood. “We didn’t know,” her mother says about the beatings at the conversion camp. “You did,” Xiaodi says, saying how she brought it up on their first visit to see her.

    The betrayal sits between them. Her mother has accepted Xiaodi only as the last option, and her support for her transition is overdue and begrudging. Xiaodi is giving her mother the space to make amends, but tolerates no comfortable lies between them. The film does a good job of striking a difficult balance in its portrayal of her mother. It would be easy to paint her as simply monstrous, given the suffering her actions caused Xiaodi, but it eschews being so reductive. Neither does it forgive her, as though to throw up your hands and shrug, how could she have known? It holds her to account for bad choices she’s made, which caused real harm, and that she should have known better. And yet, it is the eternal issue of mothers raising daughters under patriarchy, in preparing them for the way the world will try to break and bend them, being the very conduit for that breaking and bending. It is an intergenerational pattern that can only be broken when you stand together and fight. And Xiaodi has a bravery for that, and for giving her mother a second chance to stand by her side while she does so.

    A really interesting documentary about an extraordinary young girl.

  • Baby Girl

    Baby Girl is a short documentary about Cunenk, an Indonesian trans woman who is living with the loss of her mother. Her mother always told her to be a useful person, so Cunenk decides to raise money for the local hospital maternity ward in her memory.

    We get to see Cunenk confident and outgoing in queer spaces and social media, turning her grief into joyful fundraising and community. The film also shows her negotiating more conservative spaces. At one point she receives a private donation from a well-to-do religious family, and must collect it from their home, so she calls ahead and lets them know she is a trans woman and discusses with them how to receive her. Without denying her transness, she opts to go in modest dress without make-up, wearing a pink shirt with elbow-length sleeves, and they sit together in their livingroom, discussing the work she hopes to achieve and providing her with cash to help her do so. Respectful balances are struck and common good is found.

    It is a short documentary but a beautiful window into good being put into the world. The hopeful and nourishing sight of good people taking their pain and turning it into kindness for others.

  • 101 Butterflies

    In much the same tradition as getting a telegram from the Queen here, in the Philippines when you turn 100 you get a payment of 100,000 pesos from the government. Lola, a modest trans woman living alone in her small home, has waited patiently for a year for her payment to arrive. While her home help prattles endlessly on what she could use the money for, Lola is silent and peaceful. She is finally going to have her gender confirmation surgery.

    Only one sadness still touches her. The photos on her table shows the love of her life, a man now passed and gone. She still dances with him in her loneliness.

    His son is young and wild, and he has finally ended up in jail. Lola brings him food and sees in him what remains of the man she loved.

    101 Butterflies is a quiet and sensitive story about what matters in life, with a rare and respectful portrait of a trans elder.

  • Harriet

    I love Harriet Tubman. I read about her as a teenager and had her picture on my wall for years. So when I found out they were making a movie about life, I was super psyched. Then, like a dafty, when it came out at the pictures, I missed it! So happy the GFT decided to show it for Black History Month so I had another chance to see it on the big screen.

    Harriet was an extraordinary woman and her story is incredible, so I really wanted the movie to show that properly. I was pleased when I heard it was Kasi Lemmons directing as she’s so talented. Also delighted when I heard Cynthia Erivo was playing Harriet, she is such an expressive actor.

    There are so many different ways you could tell Harriet’s story, I wasn’t sure how they were going to do it. From the opening scene, Lemmons decides to place the film squarely in the tradition of American historical dramas. Shot sweeping through the trees, the rising brass and strings of the score, with the handwritten font of the film’s title, it’s immediately stylistically recognisable. It evokes a romanticism that is almost conservative in how expected it is in a portrayal of America’s past. All those films of the by-gone times with their larger-than-life heroes. But in this film a Black woman is the hero, and this is how she shaped America.

    The plot begins with Harriet’s frustration that she and her mother have been kept in slavery illegally after they were meant to be freed under the terms of the will of their first master. Harriet is desperate to escape with her husband, a freedman, in order that her children not be born slaves. When she gets word she is to be sold away from him, she makes a break for it. With almost nothing with her, on foot and alone, she traverses forest, rivers and roads across a 100-mile journey to freedom.

    Far from being contented with her amazing feat, Harriet returned to free others, ferrying them on their journey on the Underground Railroad to freedom. Across her life, she saved hundreds of souls from slavery.

    Much is made in the film of visions Harriet sees, something which Harriet herself described as messages from God. She was a deeply spiritual woman, and after an overseer cracked her skull when she was a teenager, throughout her life she would periodically fall into seizures and hallucinate, which she interpreted as providing divine guidance. The film acknowledges that the non-religious might see this as the products of a brain injury; to me it is miracle enough that a woman with a disability which would put her so at the mercy of others and her surroundings, still fearlessly crossed a hostile country alone to freedom. But the film squarely takes Harriet’s spiritual perspective of her visions, that she was touched by God.

    Great to see a big budget film about slavery that centres on the experience of a Black woman, directed by a Black woman, and which stays true to the events of the time. A worthy portrait that is deeply moving.

  • La Voluntaria

    La Volutaria asks is good a product of people or systems? Marisa is a retired doctor, and comes to volunteer at a refugee camp. Over dinner with the other volunteers, all of whom are in their 20s, they begin to lament the state of the Spanish public health care system. The younger volunteers confidently rattle off its systemic issues, but Marisa pushes back. It wasn’t a system that sold their health care off for profit, it was politicians. She resents the way their analysis seemingly obfuscates the personal moral responsibility of the individuals whose actions and choices created this situation. “I have all their names, ” she says. For her, it is not an abstract injustice of social forces bumping together indifferently like weather. It is a deeply personal betrayal of something she dedicated her life too, watched many good people give their blood, sweat and tears to, and which was dismantled and sold out from under them by people concerned only with their own greed.

    It’s one short conversation but it sets the mission statement for the film. Because here is Marisa again, trying to do good. She is convinced she can be of use here, in this refugee camp teeming with people in the most desperate form of need.

    Except it doesn’t go like she expects. The 20-somethings who have years of experience in this field keep chiding her to abide by the rules, something she finds chafing. She is told not to put a plaster on a skint knee, despite having a lifetime of medical expertise. She is asked not to hug and kiss the kids and show any favouritism. She doesn’t understand why these rules are in place, and finds them arbitrary, absurd and infantilising.

    Also, she seems to be a lot less useful than she expected to be. The women’s sewing group is full of women who can all sew and speak together in a language Marisa doesn’t understand. Other volunteers have more experience than her, can speak fluently in more languages, and look like they belong here. What exactly is Marisa bringing to the table?

    It’s impossible to watch La Voluntaria without talking about white saviour complex. Why does Marisa think they need her there? Does she think all these people have just been sitting around waiting for her to turn up to solve their problems? What makes her think she has any of the answers? She has no idea about what their lives have been like, and she doesn’t even speak the language. It’s an impossible leap of presumption that could only occur growing up white in the West, of having spent your life having it constantly reinforced to you that you and people like you are where solutions come from, and others and their lives are where problems come from.

    Without any self-reflection on these underlying assumptions, it could be easy to dislike Marisa, were it not for her deeply sincere wish to do good, to be of help and service to those she meets. She is trying to do what is right, and doesn’t see why that shouldn’t be a simple thing. Credit also has to go to Carmen Machi, who plays Marisa so openly and honestly.

    Ultimately La Voluntaria follows that theme of individual moral good versus systems to a place of tense emotional jeopardy. Without quite understanding how, everything Marisa believes about herself and her actions gets turned on its head, selflessness becomes selfishness, aid becomes imperilment, and who is helping who is thrown into stark relief.

  • The Staffroom

    As everyone who’s ever worked in education knows, dealing with the weans is the least of it. In The Staffroom, new start Anamarija discovers by trial and error the unwritten rules and social hierarchy of her new workplace.

    When you think of dramas, there is a tendency to focus on the exceptional – crime and violence, explosive events – but on a day to day basis, people’s highs and lows are much more akin to the drama that plays out in The Staffroom. The clash of personalities, the prickly unspoken backstories, the tension over status and resources, all of which are rarely stated aloud. And especially within a workplace setting, where we are forced to spend a third of our lives, and which we rely on for the ability to feed and house ourselves, the familiarity and mundanity belies the gravity of the stakes involved.

    Anamarija is a new school counsellor, but rather this being a film about her helping kids, it shows 90% of her time being absorbed with negotiating the interpersonal dynamics of the teachers and staff. Eager to please at first, she volunteers to help with a school show, having no idea of the quagmire of departmental rivalries she’s stepping into, or the sheer volume of work involved. She then discovers that one of the teachers appears to have mental issues, and is spending all his time in class ranting about a court case he has brought out of paranoid delusion. She flags this up to the principal, whose main priority is of course making the school look good. Too naive to realise she is politely being told to drop it, she takes the principal’s offer to gather evidence for her claim by sitting in on teachers’ classes at random, thus drawing the resentment and suspicion of every member of the teaching staff. Expertly isolated from any peer support, she is in an even weaker position to push any complaint forward.

    This is a long game, and the people who play it the best have years of experience and inexhaustible energy. Ana is a novice, and it takes the school year over the course of the film for her to find her feet. The interactions are deftly done and immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with such settings.

  • Maixabel

    Phhffffftt!

    This film hits like a sledgehammer.

    Based on the true story of Maixabel Lasa, whose husband was killed by ETA and whose subsequent work supporting victims of violence led her to meet with her husband’s killers.

    Now. I am actually a bad one for going into a story like this, because films about the effects of violence only seem to recognise it as violence when it’s wielded by those deemed ‘illegitimate’ actors. State violence is omnipresent and invisible in the way that fish have no word for water, but those who use similar tactics against the state are violent. So my worry was that was how this would all be framed.

    But Maixabel specifically pushed for the inclusion of victims of all violence, including those of police and state forces. In the aftermath of years of violence and the legacy of fascism, she wanted a rehumanisation in how people saw each other. After decades of entrenchment along dividing lines, of ‘them and us’ mentality, she wanted people to look forward, build something beyond repeating what had gone before. She’s actually an extraordinary woman.

    And this film does an excellent job of paying homage to that. Maixabel is played beautifully by Blanca Portillo, and Luis Tosar gives an extraordinary performance as Ibon Etxezarreta, the man who pulled the trigger.

    Arguably Tosar has the harder job, because his character starts from such an unlikeable place. He starts not just as a killer, but is shown jubilant and carefree in the immediate aftermath of the murder, while Maixabel and her teenage daughter have their lives ripped apart. Even at the trial, he is defiant, unrepentant, chest-thumping, spouting ideological slogans. But the film follows his character arc, as he slowly, step-by-step, reconnects to his own basic humanity. The war he is involved in, whether it is legitimate or illegitimate, whether you see him as a soldier or a terrorist, has done what it always does. It has blunted him to empathy, to his own trauma in the acts he was involved in, to the impact upon his own sense of self. As much as sorrow for the victims of his crime is a huge motivating factor, his repentance is as much a rejection of the person who he used to be. In being able to see the humanity of his victims, he is able to see it in himself once more.

    Despite all the weight of politics, this film is at base a deeply personal drama between these two characters. And one that is full of hope for healing, not just for the victims who need it most, but a collective healing.

    Breathtaking film.

  • Laika and Nemo

    A short animation about a submariner who meets an astronaut. A sweet tale of friendship about being different in the same way.

  • Colour!

    Great little animated short. Colour! is dialogue-free, but uses colour and music to illustrate the daunting experience of being the odd-one-out from a child’s perspective. It tells a story about race, but strips it back, without dialogue to articulate the historically- and socially-laden topic, to just the way it makes you feel.

    The main character is a little pink girl who has moved to a blue town and is starting at a blue school. She starts off happy and cheerful, undaunted by the prospect of meeting new people and making new friends. She understands she is different but doesn’t see that as an issue.

    Little by little, her difference is highlighted, stumbled over, rejected and corrected by others. Her difference is framed as a problem by those around her. By the teacher who struggles and fails to pronounce her name correctly. By the kids who are disgusted by the smell of her packed lunch. By the art teacher who criticises her way of painting. Everything she does is expressive of a different viewpoint in life, but given the consensus among everyone from the uniform group, a difference, an outlier, is seen as wrong.

    Your heart sinks as you see her try to dull or change her colour. It makes you realise that so often we portray the effects of racism as violent and explosive, when a lot of the time, it can just feel like death by a thousand cuts.

    But the story doesn’t end on a sad note, and emphasises the importance of representation, as the wee girl sees her colour reflected back at her in a piece of media, takes courage, and dares to live bravely as herself. And her classmates take a keener interest, valuing her difference as something that enriches their lives too.

    Lovely wee film.