Author: gffreviews

Huh. The Mushroom Speaks is a strange little film. In an experimental style, it combines interviews with scientists about the importance of fungi to life on earth, and its potential in countering human damage to the environment, with more philosophical musings told silently in captions on screen supposedly from the perspective of a mushroom. It’s eh . . . odd.

Some of this is extremely fascinating. I love to hear people, who are passionate about a subject, talk about it, no matter what it is. So hearing scientists tell you all about how fungi transforms the barren sand of an abandoned mining site into life-sustaining soil to support trees and plants is riveting. Hearing how fungi can be grown to eat up oil spills or heavy metals in waterways is incredible. The more woo-woo side of things – less so.

I mean I get that’s the whole point, interrogating the human social systems that have led us to this species-threatening event of climate change, and imagining new possibilities based on the social systems of other lifeforms. I’m here for that, and don’t disagree. It’s just . . . it starts to slide away from the scientific into the realms of more . . . Is there a word for where crust punks meet hippies and New Agers?

Anyway, I definitely feel I came away having learnt more about fungi and mushrooms.

Jesus, that was rough.

Delikado focuses on the work of indigenous land defenders in the Philippines, protecting their island against illegal logging. All the odds are stacked against them, and the film follows the huge sacrifices they make in trying to protect their land and people.

Let’s just start here – everyone knows that the law is only the law for the powerless. You don’t curtail people who are powerful and you don’t get between the rich and their money, those are the only rules that get enforced. So the fact that the logging is illegal, that is only a word used to give authorities permission to shake down poor people with no other choice for getting income. But actually impacting the bottom line of those whose wealth relies of the destruction of our natural resources? That’s never going to be on the table.

In response to the complete impunity abundant all around them, local people form PNNI, an organisation which co-ordinates citizen’s arrests of loggers, and the confiscation of their equipment. Kap and Tata go out to the forest barefoot and silent in small teams, and scout logging sites. When the loggers go for a fag break or a slash, Kap and Tata sneak up and swipe their chainsaw. They have so many that PNNI headquarters has a fence made out of rusting chainsaws.

If it’s safe to do so, and as the film progresses it becomes so less and less often, they make a citizen’s arrest. This involves making a record of the incident and explaining to the logger that what they are doing is illegal, and what penalties they can face under the law. Then they turn them loose, just without their chainsaws. It’s surprising how gentle and empathetic the guys are with the loggers. Given how strongly they feel the destruction of their land, given how many have lost friends at the hands of illegal loggers, you would expect they would see them as their enemies and treat them with contempt. But it’s the exact opposite. They tell them they understand what it is like to live in poverty, they understand what it is like to feel there is no other way. They tell them about the penalties but what they are really telling them is, the men who hired you, who will get rich off this, they won’t go to jail, but you will. The risk of being out here is all on you.

Bobby is the PNNI lawyer. He makes sure the team always keeps on the right side of the law. Everyone understands that the loggers could cut down thousands of trees with no reaction from the police, but if even one of the PNNI steps out of line on an action, they would come down on them like a ton of bricks. The classic old ‘the law is powerless to help you, not powerless to punish you’.

Watching Kap and Tata and the rest go on these raids is stomach-churningly tense. The loggers have lookouts, the lookouts have guns. Kap and the rest are there in t-shirts and flip-flops, with a spanner for dismantling the chainsaw. The bravery of these men, to try to sneak past armed guards all to defend the trees, it’s incredible. No one can question their dedication.

And the danger is very real. Under Duterte life is cheap in the Philippines. He openly advocates for extrajudicial killing, and he simply labels his enemies as drug traffickers to ensure that they can murdered without question. As long as there is money in it for him and his cronies, people can log as they like.

The Mayor of El Nido in Palawan is Nieves, a staunch ally of PNNI, indigenous people’s land rights and environmental protections. The saying goes that there is no such thing as an honest politician, and it is proven true as much because of what happens to the ones that are honest as to what happens to the ones that aren’t. Nieves has the gall to stand up against indiscriminate tourist expansion, advocating for sustainable eco-tourism that is proportionate and appropriate for the area. She pointed out how the inward expansion was necessitating roads which was contributing to vast swathes of illegal logging. No good news if, like the Governor, you ran a logging business, or like the President, you have money in tourist resorts. Nieves gets to find out what happens if you get between rich men and their money.

Delikado shows the price of concerted community resistance, and how having the law on your side can only take you so far. It gives a face and a family to those who risk death rather than let our natural world be lost forever. We owe them a huge irreparable debt.

Hostile is a look at the hostile environment policies implemented by the UK government, and tracing both its origins and impact. The hostile environment policy follows the same tack that you find in a lot of government services with lists that target reduction – the dole, disability allowance, mental health care – in that the hope is you will kill yourself and help them get the numbers down. The point is to make attempting to get what you have every right to so difficult you will just give up and go away, or despair and go mad. The Kafka grinder.

The phrase ‘hostile environment’ is a great soundbite euphemism used by the government to sell its racist persecution of migrants. To those who support the policies, they hear ‘hostile’ and it sounds like a clear denunciation, strong and violent, a call to open hostility. To those who might not support it, but are not going to be directly effected by these policies, they hear ‘environment’ and it sounds passive, more of a change in tone, a background administrative tightening up. It describes an abstract culture, not a list of actions. So what does it actually mean for people on the ground?

Farrukh came to the UK as a student. He studied, got his degree here. He worked and raised his family here. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, he worked tirelessly at the NHS, keeping the place functioning, making sure it could be there to support and care for people facing a life-or-death illness. He couldn’t see his kids while he worked flat out, as his little boy’s health was vulnerable. He’s almost 40 years old and lived his entire adult life in the UK. And he may be deported at any time.

He has applied to the Home Office year after year, each time costing him thousands upon thousands of pounds. Each time denied for spurious reasons. He’s never had so much as a parking ticket, but he’s twice been rejected under the provisions for threats to national security. Even when they walk it back on appeal, they reject him again on other equally ridiculous reasons.

He’s not some oligarch, he’s an ordinary working bloke. He doesn’t have the money for a legal team, and Legal Aid has been paired back to nothing. So any minute he gets not spent working to pay off the debt from all these attempts, he’s trying to put together a needlessly labyrinthian application and understand the complexities of ever-changing migration law. He lays out on the dining room table tomes and tomes of paper. Folders, binders, photocopies of photocopies.

If your application is rejected, your right to work can be immediately suspended as well. So on any given day, you can receive word you are no longer allowed to work, and immediately lose your job. And as you are a rejected migrant, you have no recourse to public funds, meaning you can’t claim unemployment benefit, even though you’ve paid in decades’ worth of tax.

When this happened to Farrukh, he had no other option but to take out loans and put household expenses on credit cards. It was only until he could appeal the decision and get a new job, but combined with the cost of the applications themselves, he’s now in more than £50,000’s worth of debt. His wife says he won’t discuss it, because when they do, they can’t sleep at night. They have no idea how they are ever gonna repay it.

He says he would have given up and gone home by now if it weren’t for his children. He has two kids. They were both born here. They are British by birth, and have never known any other country or home. Yet despite being born here, they are both ‘illegal immigrants’. Their legal status depends on their father’s status, which remains unsettled after decades, and if he was deported, they would be sent with him. Just think about that for a minute.

Farrukh came here for a better life. He did exactly what was asked of him, entered legally, worked hard, got his degree, got a job after uni, paid his taxes. Yet the life he has made for his children is even more precarious than the one he had. Everything they have can be snatched away from them at a moment’s notice. Even as the years pass, they have no sense of security, the sword of Damocles is forever over their heads.

Ironically all the things that they say about migrants – that they are illegal, that they are scroungers, that they don’t integrate with the community – these are products of Home Office policy, not the people themselves. It’s an astonishing piece of projection. They call them illegal, even though they entered legally, never broken a law, and have complied with every effort to ensure their legal status. They call them scroungers, even though it’s government policies that put them out of work, drove them into destitution with exorbitant costs, and that deny them recourse to public funds so charitable community support is the only fallback. They say that they don’t integrate with the community, but they are the ones preventing them from putting down roots, withholding from them the security of a real home, of isolating them in a permanent limbo.

As awful as all these tangible things are, there are also the intangible things. Like the mental torture of waiting for someone to decide your fate for almost 20 years. Of the strain it puts on your marriage to be in tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of debt. As you watch Farrukh sit chain-smoking over his bundles and bundles of papers, you wonder what all this must be doing for his blood pressure.

And Farrukh’s story is just one in this film. There are, unfortunately, so many people like him. So many people have stories just like this. People whose lives have been utterly destroyed by cruel, dehumanising, racist policies.

This is an excellent film. I found the score and some of the directing choices too heavy-handed at times, which is a shame because it’s completely unnecessary, the subject of the film speaks for itself. Chalk it up to a first-time filmmaker finding their feet. And whatever quibbles you may have with it on a technical level, Hostile is a powerful portrait of the impact of racist state policy on the lives of ordinary people, a violence which goes unnamed and largely hidden from the public eye. This film puts a face on the ephemeral rhetoric and to show how, when these abstract ideas touch ground, they hit like a hurricane.

P.S. Good to see Glasgow get a look-in at the end, with the Kenmure Street action being one bright ray in an otherwise dark vista. Glad to see us on screen for the right reasons for once.

Foragers looks at the criminalisation of gathering Palestinian cooking herbs and vegetables on traditional Palestinian land by the Israeli state.

The problem for those who seek power is that we actually live in a world with an overflowing abundance capable of meeting our needs. That is why separation from the land is such a vital condition for creating scarcity. Colonialism relied on successive waves of dispossession, dependency, and deculturation. Removal from land, removal from self-sustenance, removal from culture.

As one of our most basic needs, food is at the heart of these struggles. In the Palestinian kitchen, za’atar bread is a staple. Folk could go out, pick some za’atar in the fields, and bring it home for cooking. Whenever people would gather together for a meal, there is the smell of za’atar.

Now much of Palestinian land has been appropriated and used as Israeli capital. The za’atar is cultivated for market production, and Palestinians must pay to buy back their own food from their own lands. It is another mechanism to put them at the mercy of Israeli power. It also has a disruptive cultural impact, as eating traditional food, whether at a family meal, social gatherings or community celebrations, must now also be an act of financial support to the Occupying state.

But it can be really hard to get people to buy your product if they can just go outside and pick it out the earth for free. So even after the dispossession of their lands, it becomes necessary to make it illegal to pick wild za’atar. How do you do this? By claiming it must be protected under conservation.

Now, this is a classic move. Despite the cuddly, irreproachably moral image of conservation here in the coloniser countries, conservation is and always has been a tool for the powerful to control access to land by the powerless. It is also super steeped in fascism and eugenics, in a big ole yikes! way.

In Foragers, it is almost laughably Orwellian, with enforcement officers chasing down people in fields teeming with za’atar to fine them for picking it. It is a ‘species under threat’, they say straight-faced, looking directly at Palestinians.

Under such circumstances, foraging and feeding oneself becomes an act of defiance. To insist on one’s right to food, right to life, to continue to maintain a sustaining relationship with the land, are acts of national rebellion. The foragers in the film find it to be a source of dignity, their own act of resistance.

Really interesting documentary, deftly handled, with use of constructed scenes allowing us to see this (by virtue of its nature) hidden practice.

Coming Home is a short film about the Freedom Dabka Group, a group of Palestinian-Americans in Brooklyn who use the traditional dance of dabka to connect with their heritage and keep it alive.

The guys in this film grew up on the basketball courts of Brooklyn, but their parents still remember the Palestine they were forced to flee. They live in hope of returning, but how do they pass that on to their children who have spent their whole lives in America? The answer for these guys is dabka.

Dabka for them is not simply a dance move, it is connection and community. It connects them to a tradition that reaches back through generations of their people, and bonds them together in a joyous celebration. They do it anywhere, dancing on the streets, in stores, wherever they can practice a little footwork.

While in exile, Palestine is kept alive by its people, in its people, and in dance is expressed, and shared collectively. It is made real for generations born separated from it. Great little film.