Europa is about a teenage Iraqi boy trying to reach Europe. I read the film’s synopsis and was immediately interested, but also had a bit of hesitancy about sitting down to watch it, coz I knew it was going to be brutal. And it is, it’s about how traumatising the whole thing is.
I think when you see some people talk about migration in the media, they talk about returning migrants in light tones, like folk are getting off a comfy flight at Gatwick and being told their holiday is cancelled and they’ve to turn around and get back on the next flight home. And yes, that’s usually because the person speaking is deliberately trying to deny, downplay and outright misrepresent the migrant experience for reasons that are about power and racism. But I also think one of the reasons they do that is because the reality is so far removed from their experience, that is the closest thing from their own lives they can imagine. And that goes also for the people who they are trying to talk to, ordinary people in Europe, who have never had to run for their lives to another continent, and have few similar life experiences they can equate it to.
Which is to say, it is wonderful to see a film which is so visceral, that it blows away all that crap. You follow the main character, seeing over his shoulder, or watching his face as he deals with this run for his life. This is not a film with wide shots of open vistas, you can only see as far as the main character can. You have no idea where he is, just as he has no idea where he is. You hope he’s going in the right direction, but you don’t know, and the whole time you have no idea what to expect with every step.
You feel this film in your body. There’s very little dialogue, as keeping quiet and undetected is vital to survival, so scenes are made gripping by conveying the bodily experience. The main character’s hypervigilance, flinching at every sound or movement at the camera edge. His breathing heavy and ragged as he runs, or stifled and controlled as he hides. His utter exhaustion that causes drops to black. His thirst, his hunger, his cuts, his bruises. The difficulty of having to scale mossy rock or drag your way up crumbling stone. Everything feels insurmountable, when tested against nothing but human skin.
The film is set near the Turkish-Bulgarian border, so the terrain is rocky, leafy wood. For me watching it, it’s the kind of landscape associated with gentle walks, something benign. Normally if you are watching someone flee for their life in a hostile landscape, it doesn’t look like that. But Europe is a hostile land, where people like this teenage boy die every day, and it is treated as of no consequence. This is a place where he is a stranger, whose life is worth very little. From border police, to far-right militia patrols, to the local populace, the very sight of him brings the possibility of death.
The idea of enduring all that, knowing at any point he might be caught and returned, that all this horror, trauma and fear, might be for nothing . . . Europa is a film that tries to give people some idea of what this does to people, what it is we are talking about when we talk about returning migrants. It is a brutal film, but one with such a vital job of making seen that which, by its nature, must remain unseen to survive. Excellent movie.
I really liked this short animation, thought it was funny and sweet. But in the Q&A afterwards, there was a variety of interpretation of it that was surprising.
Largely dialogue-free, Flamingo Pride focuses on one grumpy and withdrawn curmudgeon in a flock of queer flamingos, who sulks all through the Pride party. He clocks a beautiful female swan flying past and follows her to the resolutely heteronormative pond nearby. There, his overtures of romance meet with mockery from the surrounding fowl, and as his attempts become more desperate, hilarity ensues. The final shot is of the demure swan emerging from the reeds in dominatrix gear with a kinky look in her eye.
I thought it was funny. My reading was that the main character was bi, and feeling alienated at the solely gay-focused Pride party, but then seen as way too queer when in straight spaces like the pond. I thought it was about crossing social boundaries, built up by conscious and unconscious biases, one which the swan’s kinkiness shows are artificial – normativity doesn’t represent the diversity in straight sexuality either.
But perhaps that reading has a lot to do with my own experience. In the Q&A, the room read the main character as straight, and the depiction of the queer Pride party as somehow comparably exclusionary as the hetero pond was seen as controversial. When checking out the creator online, it seems a lot of people found the animation to be actively homophobic, showing an oppressed straight main character isolated in a gay world. I was really surprised by this, because the queer flamingos are joyous and always trying to include him in their revelries. Unlike the birds at hetero pond, the flamingos don’t mock him for pursuing the swan, or hinder him in any way. It’s totally ok for him to do his own thing, and the worst they can be accused of is not realising the type of loud party Pride they are enjoying is maybe not for everyone.
The other criticism is that it deals too much in stereotypical clichés, like the pink flamingos as gay, the fact that Pride is shown as such a monolithic party experience, the flamingos act in a stereotypical way. In the absence of dialogue, the animation is reliant on visual cues, and clearly there is a good argument to be made that in this case those have been exaggerated to a potentially offensive level.
I dunno, maybe it depends on the context in which you are watching it. I saw it as part of a series of shorts celebrating queer experience, so I took it in a positive light. And being bi, that’s what I saw in the story, a grumpy bisexual.
I can only speak for myself, I thought it was funny.
A great wee short film about the power of drag. Not many stories focus on drag kings, so it’s nice to see this for a change.
Sarah is running in the Queen of Sheppey pagaent, like her older sister and mother before her. Everything is pink dresses and big teeth. I love the sense of place this has. Never heard of Sheppey before, wasn’t even sure it was a real place, but the film instantly captures that dreich seaside town feel. It’s not quite a shithole, there’s too much love of the place in there, like it’s totally beautiful on the days you’re not fighting a seagull off your chips, but it’s not exactly the happening place to be.
Sarah’s mum and sister are stick-thin and hyperfemme, and have clearly never given any thought to the possibility of Sarah not following in their footsteps. Her mum keeps a space over the mantle for Sarah’s inevitable crowning photo. But it’s like they don’t see her. Uncomfortable in dresses, which are built for their frame and not hers, she seems awkward and out of place up on the stage. The first time we see her really relax is when she’s alone in the house and slaps on some Queen, and gets dragged up as Freddy Mercury to do the hoovering.
Hot new girl-next-door Scout spots her through the window, and soon their shared secret kicks off a fond friendship, and maybe more. Scout gives Sarah a space of acceptance, encouragement, and validation.
What I liked about this film was it didn’t say, you have to pick and choose. This is not part of the narrative of them and us, the straights and the gays, the femmes and the butches. Despite the social structure which creates division between people by ascribing preference and privilege to one over the other, people still manage every day to relate to each other with respect for their differences. And yeah, the heteronormativity of the pageant and her family feels stifling, but the film doesn’t then cast them as malevolent. An embrace of one doesn’t have to mean a rejection of the other.
Awesome to see drag kings getting some love, and for their need for drag as something transformative to also be acknowledged.
Lotus Lantern is a dreamy, musical short animation about the filmmaker’s identity as queer and Chinese. Suffused with song, objects and symbols, the short film follows pieces of their identity like a string of pearls. Entrancing.
So we kick off Encounters’ Queer Joy series with Red Aninsri, a spy film about a trans woman sent to seduce a gay student activist, set in Thailand. The film deliberately plays with anachronisms to highlight the impact of the past on the reality of today.
The short film starts by saying it is inspired by Thai cinema of the past. So rather than widescreen, it is shot in a square, rounded frame, similar to early films. The dialogue is dubbed, so there is an obvious artifice with how the film is being constructed. The film’s subtitle “Tiptoeing on the Still Trembling Berlin Wall” tells us about the era it is trying to evoke. There are shots of a round radio speaker with voiceover, a classic trope from spy thrillers back in the day, like Mission Impossible and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Smoking while conversing directly with camera, sneaking down darkened, slick city side streets, push-ins on briefcases of ominous significance, all of it orientates you in the films of the Cold War era.
Yet the film itself is set in today’s world, with the spy trying to clone the student’s mobile phone to track their contacts with other state targets. The film explicitly draws comparisons from the way Thailand treats activism today with the Cold War paranoia of the past. The ‘Boss’, whose disembodied voice gives the spy her instructions through the radio, talks of outside agents seeking to agitate and recruit students to become enemies of the state. All the while though, it belies its motivations by trying to suppress criticism that could jeopardise investment from a wealthier neighbouring country, obliquely referring to China.
Aninsri, or Eagle, is the code name for Ang, a trans woman who describes herself as a whore and spy. In exchange for a restaurant, a foot on the capitalist ladder, she agrees to go undercover as a cis gay man to seduce Jit, an idealistic student activist. Despite the state seeing Ang’s queerness as an interchangeable tool they can use in their service, and as a highly sexualised commodity, their relationship is naively sweet. Jit just wants to hold hands, talk passionately about politics and history, and cuddle in bed. Ang is disarmed by his sincerity and is caught on the dilemma of what to do, as their feelings for each other deepen.
In an act of real intimacy, while lying together, Ang drops her dubbed voice. The coquettish and ultra-feminine, high-pitched voice is replaced by Ang’s real voice. She describes it as flawed but authentic. Jit also drops his dubbed voice, and he sounds so young.
Really interestingly constructed tale, about the struggle for real connection and the authentic self in the face of state oppression and societal control.
Free Chol Soo Lee is a documentary examining the life of Chol Soo Lee, who he was as a person, and then as a symbol which forged the first Asian-American social justice movements. Despite knowing a fair bit about American racially-charged miscarriages of justice, I’d never heard of Chol Soo Lee. Unfortunately history is teeming with examples, and by the time I was a teenager reading about the police murder of Kuanchung Kao in the 90s, it was nearly 15 years after his case ended. But the legal case was not the end of the story, for Chol Soo or the communities that united around his cause.
On an early Sunday evening in 1973, Yip Yee Tak was gunned down in the street in front of dozens of witness in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The murder weapon was left at the scene, a .38 revolver. The police noted that the night before, a guy had accidentally discharged a .38 revolver into the wall of his hotel room. They looked him up, and sure enough, he was convicted felon, with a history of skirmishes with the law. They put him in a line-up, and three eyewitnesses IDed him as the shooter. Jobs a good un, let’s all go home and get our tea.
Except Chol Soo Lee, the man they arrested, was innocent. The eyewitnesses were white tourists, who had picked a 4-year-old mugshot of him out a book of Chinatown suspects, that the police had drawn a Fu Manchu caricature on the front. No other potential suspects were ever drawn in for a line-up, and one of the witnesses who IDed him as familiar turned out to be a guard who had seen him as a boy in juvenile detention. Neither the witnesses or the cops seemed to realise that far from being a member of a Chinese gang, Chol Soo Lee was Korean.
And also the bullets didn’t match. The one from the hotel wall and the one that killed Yip Yee Tak, they weren’t fired from the same .38. And the prosecution knew the whole time. But Chol Soo was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
4 years after his conviction, an investigative journalist K.W. Lee re-examined his case and started to raise community support for Chol Soo. It was a railroading, he claimed, and pointed to numerous flaws and racist prejudices throughout his arrest and trial. The documentary talks to many community figures who were pivotal to the campaign to free Chol Soo Lee, including friends, activists, lawyers and community leaders. Asian-American defence committees formed all across the country, each raising awareness and funds for his legal case.
Part of this story is about the impact and legacy of those community groups, of that first uprising of the Asian-American antiracism and social justice movement. But part of it is also about the man, Chol Soo Lee.
As he says of himself at the beginning, “I wasn’t an angel, but I also wasn’t the devil either”. Chol Soo was the son of an American soldier and a Korean woman, Puni, right at the end of the Korean War. Born out of wedlock, his mother was disowned by her family, and fled to America with another G.I. He was left to be raised by his aunt and uncle in a country devastated by war, poor and often hungry.
When he was 12, his estranged mother, having gotten herself settled in San Francisco, brought him to the States to live with her. She said she wanted to give him a chance of an education and a better life, but quickly things broke down between them. The profound disconnection in their relationship seemed to be the source of all his demons, and perhaps of hers too. She beat him mercilessly, until he eventually ran away and ended up being raised on the streets.
Hearing him discuss this vital absence, it seemed to tear a hole in him, giving him a loneliness that nothing could console. His whole life he never understood his mother, what drove her, why she beat him, why she abandoned him when he was put on Death Row. There was such a starvation of love between them, and yet, she had brought him to live with her in America, why? It is only when the filmmakers ask a friend of his mother’s, who feels she can finally say now both of them are dead, what Puni revealed to her. Puni was raped. While pregnant with Chol Soo, she had a dream of being pursued by a snake, which bit her, and no matter how much she beat at it, even taking a knife and chopping it to pieces, it would not let her go. Chol Soo never knew. Perhaps if they’d been able to acknowledge this truth, they may have understood each other a little better, maybe even been able to forgive each other a little.
Puni never supported Chol Soo in prison, and was extremely reticent to get involved with his liberation campaign. Quite frankly, she thought he did it, and took some persuading to be convinced he didn’t. When she eventually did get involved, she became very enthusiastic, speaking about his case on telly and turning up at his court appearances. Her anguish seemed palpable, which seems difficult to square with her coldness and abuse towards him. An ungenerous explanation was that she simply liked the limelight, but I think it was more complicated than that. I think she found him easiest to love when he was just the idea of a son, when they were at their furthest apart, and most removed from their domestic reality.
In the years after his case ended, Chol Soo Lee tried to live up to the legend that had been built around him, to prove worthy of the hard work and faith people had put in him. And for a while he was able to keep that up, visiting elders to thank them for their community efforts, touring the country visiting groups of activists who’d worked to free him, and working at a Korean community centre. But bit by bit, the old failings came back. As a man who’d spent all his young adulthood behind bars, he threw himself into excess upon his release, which led eventually to a coke addiction and a return to criminality. He was keenly aware of what a disappointment he was.
In the 90s, he accidentally set himself on fire while committing arson, burning his face, hands, and whole body. In footage taken later in his life, he is in visible pain. And I kept thinking about him and his mum. How they’d both had symbolic roles, mother and icon of a movement, how they’d been best at fulfilling those roles when there was the widest divide between themselves and those who had expectations of them. And how they’d both tried to fulfil those roles, and how they’d both failed. How they’d turned the pain they felt inside outwards, hurting those closest to them.
But that’s not all to Chol Soo Lee’s story, and the message of the film is to fight. Even if people are far from perfect, in a society that is far from perfect, for either to get better, you must fight. And there is no such thing as a defeat if you keep fighting.
Watching this, I kept thinking of the time Emma Thompson was on the My Dad Wrote A Porno podcast, how she spoke passionately about sex positive representation, and that the best way to demystify and destigmatise a taboo subject was a good old dose of laughter. Good Luck To You, Leo Grande embodies all of that, with the gusto and humour Emma brings to the subject.
Emma stars as Nancy Stokes, a pseudonym used by a retired widow when she hires a dashing young sex worker. Nancy is a woman who always did the right thing. She was one of the good girls. She did what she was told. Don’t run around with the boys, don’t have sex before marriage, and certainly don’t have affairs. And in reward for her constant obedience, she had 30 years of orgasmless, passionless sex. It was never upon her initiation or need. And after a lifetime of suppressing lust, she was so divorced from her own wants she wouldn’t have known where to begin to articulate them.
I’d love to say this is a generational thing, and it is to some extent, but far too often this still exists in our culture. The old chestnut – that women’s sexuality is to be feared and controlled. And importantly the film shows how women are just as important in upholding and transmitting patriarchal values. Nancy spent her career as an RE teacher, catechising young girls in the dangers of their lust and their bodies.
What I like about this film is the ability to show any number of changing dynamics in power and vulnerability from moment to moment. Nancy and Leo, the sex worker, cycle through numerous points of harmony and contention, repression and release. Such interactions are usually presented in a flat binary, with power sitting entirely with the party making the purchase. But in the film, every moment has a complex and layered negotiation of need, vulnerability, control, and loss of control.
What I also loved about the film is that is set almost entirely in one room. Like bottle episodes, almost the entire film is confined to the hotel suite Nancy rents for their visits. The only speaking roles are Nancy and Leo, with the exception of a waitress towards the end of the film (who is also beautifully played). The film rests entirely on the talented performances of Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack. They make an hour and 40 minute film whizz by, in turns gripping and funny and tragic and jubilant, and they do it with just the two of them alone in a room. No special effects, no dragons, no robots, just pure human drama.
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is so funny, and so poignant, and so fun. Just a great watch!
Splinters is a documentary about the Rio Tercero explosion, something I was completely ignorant of before watching this film. It is made almost entirely from home movies shot by the filmmaker as a 10-year-old kid.
Natalia Garayalde lived in Rio Tercero with her family, her mum and dad, brother Nicolas, and sisters Caro and Gabi. Her mum was a schoolteacher and her dad was a doctor, and they lived a comfortable and happy suburban life. Rio Tercero was a small town, with a church, school, park, town square, and sports clubs. The major employers were two nearby chemical plants and a munitions factory belonging to the military. Natalia’s home movies speak to the fun and freedom of a 90s childhood in a middle-class home in a safe neighbourhood. Jumping in the backyard pool, playing with their new camcorder, making news reports while hanging upside down from their bunkbeds, so their hair stood straight up. It’s the kind of scenes that make you realise these are your best years, these are what you will look back on as the good old days.
Then on November 3rd 1995, the munitions factory exploded. All the bombs, explosives and shrapnel were thrown high in the air over the town. On videotape is a stranger who has bundled Natalia and her brother into the back of his car, driving them to safety at the outskirts of town. He scoops up a woman franticly running down the street with a baby in her arms, as metal rains down, and dogs run through traffic, seeking cover. The noise is like engulfing thunder and the sky has a black, sooty mushroom cloud. Everywhere people are panicking and the secondary explosions of falling bombs echo around them. From behind me in the cinema, I hear someone faintly whisper, “Fuck.”
The following scenes are surprisingly light, because they are shot by a kid, and are from a child’s perspective. Kids are like plastic, they bounce back from anything. Natalia’s reaction is that of most 10-year-olds witnessing a huge explosion . . . cool! Once it’s clear everyone is safe and sound, in her family at least, all she can think about is how exciting it is to be on the news. Plus, there’s no school, so wahhay! She and her brother tour the town doing their own news reports on the debris, barely able to contain their excitement.
The President even shows up in town. He’s here to quell any potential panic, assuring everyone this has been merely an unfortunate accident. He tells a press conference that the media should act responsibly and inform people of this fact, and not work against the government by spreading unfounded rumours. The chemical plants were not damaged, and there is no possibility of chemical contamination of the shrapnel and debris. Everyone should just go about their lives as normal, and funds would be made available for repairs.
If your bullshit senses are tingling, you’re not the only one. Natalia’s neighbour Omar is blamed for the disaster. Initial investigators’ tests concluded a spark had ignited explosive as a result of his work. At home Omar tried to recreate their experiments to clear his name. Setting up his camcorder, he placed a square of the explosive concerned on a table, then took his grinder and a piece of steel and stood over it raining sparks down upon it, like a fucking boss. He was so certain is was bullshit, he was willing to recreate it in his kitchen with no safety equipment, at not even arm’s length from his face. And sure enough, no amount of sparks caused it to catch fire.
The full story would not come out until decades later, and it was one of corruption, international arms trafficking, and flagrant disregard for human life. Another film might pull back to make the perpetrators and their dealings the centre of the story. But in Splinters, the film remains steadfastly on her family and her hometown. The lies that were told that day to keep everyone sedate had repercussions for everyone in Rio Tercero. Her family, like many others, saw the buried truth sprout dark flowers.
Splinters is such an interesting documentary, forcing the viewer into a state of vulnerability along with the innocent people of the town, completely dependent on outside explanation for why their world has suddenly upended. Right up until almost the end, you only know what Natalia and her family knew, living through it, and at the mercy of media reports for any perspective or protection.
An intensely personal window into the lives of those who are so often are reported only as numbers.
Cinemaattic are doing their Adrift season, so I went along to see The Sacred Spirit. A deeply strange film, it follows an ordinary family with extraordinary beliefs in UFOs, clairvoyance, and ancient Egyptian mythology.
Watching the film, it reminded me of an article I read on serial killers and abnormal psychology. Why can’t we spot them? the article asked. Because we’re all fucking weird, was the answer. The author wrote the piece from a hotel hosting a furry convention. Even an interest viewed by the majority as strange, has a whole culture in which it is affirmed as normal, where you can disappear into a crowd, be insignificant or even boring.
The spirituality of this film’s family is the same. It’s a minority form of religiosity, and a mix peculiar to this family, but it is by no means any stranger than dominant forms, or society in general. The main character, Jose, is not alone in his belief in extra-terrestrial contact, either in the film or in real life. His parents’ obsession with Egyptology is not unique to them either, as there is no end of kitsch tat mass-manufactured for a market craving it. Jose’s niece Veronica is able to watch any number of YouTube videos on the ancestral astral forms of humans, each promising enlightenment for a price, and each warning to download the video, lest it be removed by those hoping to hide the truth. From both within and without, there is a constant reinforcement of the reality of the magical as part of everyday life.
And that’s what this film’s about, the mystical and the mundane. Everyday life is full of such extraordinary things. For Jose and his family, aliens and psychic powers are a day-to-day reality as much as tables and chairs. Even outwith his family, in the community there is a woman seeking an exorcism of what she believes is her abusive husband’s ghost, a schoolchild talks about the smell of flowers being affirmations from God, and a neighbour constantly harps on about nefarious and clandestine gangs of Eastern Europeans who are spiriting children away to harvest their organs and sell them into sex slavery. And all of this is set in the run up to Easter weekend, when the dominant and normalised religious expression prepares to celebrate the dead returning to life, the manifestation of a God on Earth, on a date based on the position of celestial bodies, by eating bread and drinking wine which a spell has transformed into flesh and blood.
There is a bizarreness with which we watch the family in The Sacred Spirit, but as the film goes on, you find yourself questioning if this is all going to follow the reality of the characters involved. As a viewer, you can see how the conviction your beliefs are reality can make you vulnerable, but within the world of the characters, there are constant reinforcements and confirmations. The feeling of being sucked in transfers from the characters to the viewer at times.
The Sacred Spirit, in many places is very funny, but it almost feels too strange to laugh. Because the whole thing is played absolutely straight, you almost can’t let out your giggles at Jose and his UFO group standing in wee light-up pyramids, waiting to be beamed up. Throughout the film, there is a look at the weirdness of the forms of human spirituality, and while there is humour there, this is no contemptuous mocking. There is a sincere respect for ordinary people wanting to make sense of life and death.
A very strange film, with an edge of darkness bordering the playfully weird and wonderful.
An intimate portrait of a family still searching for answers 50 years after the suicide of their brother.
Marco Bellocchio is a legendary acclaimed filmmaker, with a lifetime of success. However he describes himself and his siblings as sharing an “arid unhappiness” from growing up in a house where they were provided with all the basics, but it was “a desert of affection”. Indeed mental illness and misery ran through the family, and each of them struggled to find their own way of surviving their childhood.
Their mother was a religious zealot, who saw her duty towards her children as primarily ensuring the salvation of their souls. She loved them passionately but it was an impersonal love. She loved them as a cypher for motherhood, and the devotion of a madonna. She didn’t really know them as people, or see their inner selves and struggles. Her intensity was something for her children to manage, a martyrdom that they daren’t speak ill of. Yet she was never a comfort or refuge for them. Their emotional needs were trifling matters compared to the war for their souls.
Whether her suffering drove her religiosity or her religiosity drove her suffering, it’s hard to say, but she got both in plenty measure. Her son Paolo had some kind of mental illness, or learning disability, or developmental issue. Marco describes his brother as a “lunatic”. He would scream and rage and have violent episodes and kept the rest of his siblings in fear. His mother, partly out of maternal devotion, partly out of fear of middle-class shame, kept Paolo in the family home, despite his erratic behaviour. But she never sought to treat or temper his evident disturbance, only checking him when he blasphemed in his ravings. Nor did she protect her other children from the effects of Paolo’s cacophonies. They all felt like they were just left to deal with things on their own.
Paolo and his deaf sister Letizia took up all their mother’s attention, and the other kids were left to fend for themselves. But it was from Marco’s twin brother Camillo the tragedy would come. Sandwiched between the profound needs of Paolo and Letizia, and his over-achieving brothers (as well as Marco becoming an internationally lauded director at 26, their older brother Piergiorgio was a prize winning writer) Camillo got lost in the cracks. He always had an air of melancholy about him, but he was so deft at turning everything into a joke and laughing it off, his siblings always laughed it off too. He did reasonably well academically until high school, when he was moved into sharing a room with Paolo. Marco laments that none of them really considered what that must have been like for him. They were all terrified of Paolo, but gave no thought what it must be like to have to sleep next to him.
The whole film is about the remaining questions after his suicide. No one saw it coming. No one had any inkling it would happen. Camillo had a hard time finding his way in adult life, struggling in secondary school, technical school, then the army. Unlike his prodigy brothers, he has no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and instead of seeing this as normal part of learning about yourself in your 20s, viewed it as a succession of failures. Perhaps if his suicide followed one of these disappointments, it would have been easier to understand, but it came when, at 29, he was teacher with a long-term girlfriend. Everyone had begun to believe they didn’t need to worry about him.
This film is a searingly intimate watch. Marco reproaches himself for being wrapped up in his work, his passion for cinema and politics. The title comes from an occasion when Camillo reached out to Marco for help, describing his struggle with depression. Marco offered a Marxist analysis of Camillo’s melancholy, and extorted him to read political literature. Camillo simply replied, “Marx can wait”. None of them seemed to see how immediate his need was.
As hard as it is to hear the story of a 29-year old man committing suicide, it is in some ways harder to see 80-year-olds sitting around discussing it. It is a loss that never leaves them, questions they never have answers to. 50 years have passed and Marco now looks like an old man, while his twin is forever a fresh-faced man of 29, frozen in photographs.
This film is about the lingering legacy of grief. Camillo is painted in negative space in this film, the ghost where the hole is.
