GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • Revolution of our Times

    Another one for the All Cops Are Bastards file.

    This movie blew me away. Really powerful and moving.

    This film follows the protests against the erosion of democracy in Hong Kong in 2019. For those that don’t know a whole lot about Hong Kong, the film does a really good job of explaining it in about 5 minutes, while the rest of film watches the reaction to the encroachment of authoritarian power unfold.

    Because everyone now has a camera in their pocket which can stream images online in real time all across the world that never disappear, these protests might be the best documented ever. Spontaneous, pivotal moments in the struggle are all caught on camera because there is always someone rolling.

    As well as contemporary footage, the film is comprised of interviews with a broad range of protestors. They range from 11 years old to 70, from every walk of life, farmers, students, business managers, mums and kids. There’s a wide range of opinions on how to protest, yet all are united in the cause. I’ve also never seen such efficient division of labour, with people splitting into different groups to service a need, and organising to switch whenever someone needed a break. It’s really incredible.

    You have ‘parent-cars’, which Nobody is. (Almost everyone in this has their faces blurred, and is referred to by their nom-de-guerre, to protect their identity). Nobody is a 22-year-old student and his job is to get protestors home safe. It tells you something about the average age of a protestor that 22 is considered old enough to take on a care-taking role. While many protestors have the support of their parents, there are still plenty of parents who are scared for their kids and don’t want them attending rallies. So you’ll get young people attending actions, but who need a way to get home on time safely. That’s where the parent-cars come in, people whose job is to find safe ways in and out of action zones. Sometimes this is ferrying people on foot through alleyways, sometimes it is literally driving up and getting folk to hop in the back of your motor to take them home.

    32-year old business manager Dad goes out to just make sure everyone is ok, as does Mum, another volunteer. They do everything from comforting shook up kids after they’ve been teargassed, to hiding them in safehouses and playing videogames with them when they need a break from the madness. We meet one of the medics, and it’s a 14-year-old schoolboy first-aider. You are in awe of the bravery of this young kid, rushing in to tend to the shot and wounded right beneath guns and clubs of the police. There are the sentries, some on the ground standing lookout, shouting police locations to the protestors, and the map team back in a safe house, co-ordinating reports over Telegram, figuring out where police are converging and how many, to alert people on the ground. You’ve got the elders, like 70-year-old Uncle Chen, who go out to try to de-escalate things with the police and protect the kids. And you’ve got the Valiants, those at the most dangerous end of things, taking direct action, and coming under attack from the cops.

    And people can change depending on how they feel. If you get injured, fall back and help the sentries. If you learn first aid, join the medics. If you feel the need to be at the front of a particular action, let the Valiants show you how. Everybody in turn finding a way they can be most useful. I’m used to groups that cannae organise 6 people who all agree to pull together in the same direction, or where the division of labour is hard and fast, and leads to power-hording. It seems incredible to see 2 million people work together, successfully, across a year.

    And all without a leader, or a party, or an orator to unite them. The cause unites them. And while they are organised, they are not an organisation. They are just people demonstrating for their human rights and democracy. It is so effective, because you cannot cut the head off the snake. The police don’t know who to strike at. Almost a third of the population takes up action against them, and there is no one they can assassinate or arrest to stop it. There is no one icon they can break down to make the others lose hope. The fight will not be over until the last one of the 2 million are in jail.

    And you think, surely these kids are shitting it about going to jail? And some are scared, I mean, no one wants to go to jail. But as one teenager puts it, regarding the 10 year sentence for ‘rioting’, “I’ll be in my 20s when I get out”. They’ll still be young, still be angry, and all vow they will simply return to the fight upon release. The mettle of these motherfuckers.

    What I also loved about the lack of factionalism is the constant emphasis on this as an action for the people, for human rights. This isn’t about get one side or another in power. This isn’t about our nationalism being better than their nationalism. This is not about some administrative district. It is for the people of Hong Kong that they fight. This is about a place which has enjoyed relatively good human rights and civil freedoms, understanding with complete clarity what they will lose if they don’t fight. Despite the horrific images of violence throughout, what finally broke me and left me in tears, was when a schoolteacher, who had been sitting listening to what her teenage pupils had done over the past year, braving teargas, treating the injured, stopping the illegal arrest and torture of other protestors, she was moved to tears, and she said to them, ‘I feel guilty for not doing more. I’m so grateful to you’, and the kid replies, “No worries, Hongkonger”.

    So moving, a must-see. Free Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times.

  • Jordi’s Letters

    Really interesting documentary about Jordi, a man with cerebral palsy who experiences a crisis of faith after moving into a care home.

    Jordi has lived at home with his parents his whole life, but they are getting older and are unable to care for him full-time anymore. Jordi is extremely close to his parents, and extremely close to God. He hears the voice of God. And this new separation is quite jarring and he has not heard God’s voice throughout. He asks the filmmaker Maider to go on pilgrimage with him to Lourdes.

    The film foregrounds the collaborative nature of the film, eschewing the artifice of the unseen director with the omniscient eye of the camera. Its opening shots are of Jordi and Maider’s hands over the letter grid that Jordi uses to communicate. Jordi is unable to speak, but he can point to letters to spell out what he wants to say. In reality, he forms an abbreviated code with whoever he is speaking to; as Maider knows him well he can simply point to the first letter of the next word and she will be able to guess what he is saying. It’s like predictive text, but subjective. The subjectivity is very much centre-stage in these early scenes, as we are shown the working of their collaboration, that both Maider and Jordi are working together on what is said.

    Maider is present in the film, in front of the camera, sitting with Jordi, gauging his expression and gestures as well as his letters to get his meaning. She shows herself positioning shots, and talking to Jordi about what she’d like to get out a scene, and listening to what he wants from it. There is an implicit acknowledgement of the inescapability of the power dynamics in which this film is being made, and rather than deny it, Maider chooses to show how it is negotiated. The audience can judge for themselves.

    Jordi’s Letters is a journey following a big life change for Jordi, and how he deals with that emotionally, socially and spiritually. It is a film about faith, and the inner well of religious experience.

  • Good Day For The Bad Guys

    Good Day For The Bad Guys is a short film about an insufferable and tyrannical actor in a pantomime. Filled to the brim with that Scottish black humour, it’s written and directed by Peter Mullan, a man I only associate with films that are bleak as fuck, a man who would read Dostoyevsky for the lols.

    In Good Day For The Bad Guys, Mullan plays John, as ground down, washed up, alcoholic actor. He plays The Big Bad Wolf in a low-budget Christmas panto rendition of Red Riding Hood. The bane of the cast’s lives is the actor playing the hero, Wee Jockie. An evil gnome of a man, he delights in humiliating other actors, while revelling in the applause of the audience. The film follows as John is pushed to breaking point, between the constant abuse from Jockie, and the constant boos on stage.

    Grim, funny, bleak, and brutal. Merry Christmas.

  • The Witches

    Funny, quirky animated short film about a group of women who decide to take action on King James VI for the reign of terror on the country’s women during his witch hunts. It has a really interesting animation style, with these water colour drawings leaving ghosts of the previous frames.

    Based on the real, and much less humorous, witch trials of North Berwick, the protagonists are ordinary women, with maybe a touch of shine and some folk knowledge. As the rotter James makes his paranoid declarations to underlings who can’t see his problem, he spearheads a push for dooking nigh on every woman in the country, save possibly the young and pretty.

    Margaret, Ina and Sandra are no having it, and decide the best defence is a good offence, so set out to do him in by sailing after him in a big sieve. What’s quite funny is, the women attempt to make the sieve seaworthy with magic without much success, but it is James, miles away, whose declaration that witches float, that causes the sieve to become buoyant. A wee hint that the problem James seeks is actually much closer to home.

    A good laugh, and nice to see the history of persecution of women being turned on its head, with women themselves being the ones doing the hunting.

  • Ruby

    A romantic short film about a film archivist and a struggling actress.

    Thomas works in the dingy depths of an old film archive, but the one highlight of his job is Ruby. He has worked loose a brick in the adjoining wall of her dressing room, and spies on her like a massive creep. Ruby is only an understudy and spends her time done up in full makeup, waiting for her chance to go on, but it never comes.

    Upon discovering his spyhole, Ruby gives him her showcase reel, and he weeps at her overlooked talent in all these bit-parts. Then Ruby ascends into the film, disappearing, and leaving him alone.

    Melancholy wee film.

  • Sisyphus

    A retelling of the myth of Sisyphus in Scots, with the man himself recast as a cairn builder, endlessly pushing stones uphill to mountaintop cairns. Tongue in cheek, with more than a little added humour, a great chance to see this little animated short from the 70s.

  • Dirty Diamonds

    A crime noir complete with grizzled detective, femme fatale, and a missing husband. Filmed on the streets of 90s Edinburgh, the smoky black-and-white plays to the mean side of a city increasingly being whitewashed for tourists. Funny and stylistic, both the tropes and the setting filled me with satisfied nostalgia.

  • 79 Springs

    79 Springs is a short documentary biopic of Ho Chi Minh.

    Now maybe, like me, you know sweet fuck all about Ho Chi Minh. I know that he wrote the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, which directly lifted words straight from the American Declaration of Independence in hopes that it might make the Americans not shit their breeks with fear and overreact, a play which did not land unfortunately. I know roughly how the Vietnam War went. I know that the city where the Americans choppered out at the end of the war, kicking their pals aff the legs of the helicopter, is now known as Ho Chi Minh City. But I didn’t know anything about the man.

    His life before politics and war was actually a pretty peaceful one. He was a student and a scholar, learning to speak many languages and writing poetry. Which is just never how I pictured Ho Chi Minh.

    The film is broken up into chapters of his life, marking out his age by saying so-many springs. Each chapter opens, then cycles through a descent into struggle and strife, before emerging again at a new ‘spring’.

    The footage of the years of the war are absolutely horrific. People here don’t realise just how sanitised our digest of war is, there’s a lot the news simply cannot show. And even as we move away from television broadcast news, those standards still stand in a lot of the online output of British news companies. Even when we do see acts of violence, it’s usually in a still photograph, to protect us against the natural stomach-churning reaction to seeing something horrific and traumatic happen in front of you. That’s why whenever they talk of the horrors of the Vietnam War here, the first thing your mind turns to is photos, the wee lassie running down the road, naked and burnt. In Santiago’s films, those guidelines/censorships or that culture of sanitation was not part of his Cuban experience, so the films don’t show still photos, but videos of napalm victims, some of them children, somehow living, despite their bodies being destroyed. Be warned it’s awful to watch.

    Ho Chi Minh died about three-quarters of the way through the Vietnam War. By that time he was 79 years old (hence the film’s title), and he effectively died of old age, in bed at home. The film shows the mourning of his followers, and his body lying in state. But the film frames this as just another winter of hardship, before the certain return of spring. This time it will be a spring for all his people, free from war and imperial rule.

    Really beautifully put together film. An uplifting obituary.

  • Hasta La Victoria Siempre

    When Che Guevara died, Fidel Castro himself told Santiago Alvarez to make his obituary film, and he gave him 48 hours in which to do it. What Santiago created was a feat in resourcefulness and ingenuity as well as a moving testament to a man who lived and died for his cause. As I said in my review of LBJ, because of the environment in which Santiago made his films, there is an obvious propaganda element to his work, but it’s also obvious that he took great pride and care in constructing this film on the life of a man revered as a hero the world over. It shows him fighting in Bolivia and giving speeches at the U.N. In the era to come, many leaders would betray their espoused principles and the people they were supposed to protect, but that cannot be said for Che. He lived and died true to his ideals. What Santiago’s film holds up highest is that, with an implicit admonishment to let it be said for all of us.

  • Now!

    Lena Horne’s song Now! was banned from the airwaves in the US, because its call for civil rights and racial equality was deemed in danger of starting a riot. Which, to quote Toni Morrison who had her book banned for the same reason, “How powerful is that!” Lena gave the song to Santiago Alvarez, who set it to some of the most unflinching images of racist violence. The result is a damning indictment of American society, a lesson in history, a music video, a piece of Cuban propaganda, and a moving and powerful call for equality, all rolled into one. Defying the labels of genre, it mixes art and activism in a manner both beautiful and brutal.