GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • LBJ

    The retrospective on the work of Santiago Alvarez kicked off with LBJ, an acerbic look at the career of US President Lindon B. Johnson.

    Santiago basically made newsreels, like the Pathe News reels we had here. But with the Cuban embargo ensuring a dearth of equipment and, well, everything needed to make a film, Santiago had to get creative. He used still photos, emotive music, and skillful editing to create a signature style of ‘nervous montage’. These are surprisingly effective and still stand up today.

    In LBJ, we see a puggy display with spinning icons, which stops to read LBJ. Johnson is painted as almost comically twee, growing up in the lap of luxury, surrounded by his privilege, playing with guns and acting the soldier, the knight, the cowboy. He seems childish and faintly ridiculous. As the slots spin again, we get the single letter J, and the film focuses on JFK, a man who seems to dwarf LBJ in both politics and history. The slots spin again and we get the letter L, and we get footage of Martin Luther King’s anti-racism activism. Combining shots of police brutality towards African-Americans and civil rights protestors, with shots of the Klan, Nazis and white supremacists to show deep divisions of racial injustice. Played over this frenetic cacophony of violence is Nina Simone’s ‘Mississippi Goddamn’. As the song reaches the crescendo of its outrage, we get King’s I Have A Dream speech, punctuated the footage of gun shots from a Nazi firing squad, and news of his assassination. The film contrasts his short life of worthy work, with Johnson’s older years of empty politicking and political posturing. The slots spins again and it lands at the letter B, for Bobby Kennedy. RFK’s run against Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president showcases a number of reasons people thought Bobby would be the better man, before he too is gunned down. The film ends on LBJ, a ridiculous knight’s helmet imposed on his face, as we get footage of US violence against Native Americans, African-Americans, and those opposing racism and state oppression.

    Now seems a good time to bring up the point of propaganda, which these obviously are, in the same way that Pathe News, with its RP accent narrating how our brave boys were contending with savages to bring civilisation to the colonies, obviously were. The best person to make your propaganda is a true believer, which Santiago was. This is the world as he saw it. He had stayed some time in the US, where he saw racial and social injustices first-hand.

    Watching this film in 2022 makes for interesting viewing. We’ve went through a post-ideological age where neither grand theory provided the utopia it promised, but are now moving on past even that, as younger generations cotton on to the fact that while the idealists may have become disillusioned, the machinery of capitalism and the state never did, and their ideology of accruing as much power as possible has continued unimpeded.

    The style of his films I found really interesting, that exciting intercutting between still images, stock footage and film, choosing to allow editing to steer your meaning rather than a narrator. Combing that with the use of music, rather than sound or narration, reminded me of music videos, which we think of belonging to a later age. It also reminded me of the frantic, machine-gun barrage of clips from the deluge of popular media in documentaries, like Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares, and in films, like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.

    Really interesting as both a view on how the world looked then, and what it shows us about today.

  • Sierra

    A energetic and amusing animated short film, about a boy finding his identity in a tug of war between his parents.

    Told without dialogue, the boy is shown growing up between his mother’s place, a greenhouse full of plants, where she grew him in a pot, and his father’s place, a car garage, where he constantly tinkers on motors while chain-smoking. Equidistant between is a tree with an old tyre swing, surrounded by croaking frogs. This the boy’s favourite place, lazing on the tyre and croaking back at the frogs.

    The father attempts to involve his son in his passion for cars, sneaking him away without the mum knowing, to take him rally car racing. In this funny animation, all sorts of hijinks ensues, with his father literally forcing him like a square peg into a round hole.

    With gentle humour and playing on the ambiguity of the relationships we have with our parents, Sierra is about how our parents indelibly shape us, but how we can nonetheless find ourselves and our happiness.

  • Further And Further Away

    A breathtakingly beautiful short film about a brother and sister dealing differently with wrapping up their lives before moving to the big city.

    The brother is facing the future, he is eager to get on with living his life in the city, and all the opportunities it might afford. The sister wants to go one last time to the old village where they grew up, now completely flooded and partly submerged. She wants to pay her respects at the tomb of her parents, and hopes that the move won’t break her relationship with their spirits. She goes once again to mourn, a process that takes as long as loving.

    She and her brother are moving further and further away from their past, but also from each other, in attitude and outlook. But the hope of the movie is all distances can close.

  • There Is Exactly Enough Time

    Oskar Salomonowitz was a 12-year-old boy who drew 206 pages on a flip book to make his first animation, when he was suddenly killed in an accident. His father finishes the story.

    The animation itself is a delightfully childlike cartoon of two stickmen fighting with swords while flying with jetpacks on their feet. The joyful pew-pew of their dynamic aerial fight slows as it reaches Oskar’s last images. When his father completes it, combining sputtering jet-boots and parachutes and bombs, it is a triumphant end to the story.

    It’s 2 minutes long. It’s simple and silly. It’ll make you cry.

  • Dad’s Sneakers

    It’s Sasha’s last day in the orphanage. He’s about to be adopted by a nice woman and taken to America. He’s meant to be acting like he’s won the jackpot but he’s not.

    The care workers are harassed with him, he hasn’t packed, he’s left his bed a mess, he hasn’t rehearsed the speech thanking his new mother in English. He tries to sneak off with the other boys, but their jealousy and resentment soon breaks down into open aggression. The adults regard his hesitancy as willfulness and shilly-shallying. No one seems to consider what it’s like for this boy to leave Ukraine, the only home he’s ever known, and the last chance to be reclaimed by his biological family.

    A film about the difficulty of forging and breaking the bonds of family.

  • Noir-soleil

    Noir-soleil is animated short about an unforeseen family reunion.

    Everything in the film is about incongruous contrasts. The beautiful artwork, at times so gentle and soft, provides an unlikely medium for a story with such dark subjects.

    The volcano rumblings around Pompeii set off a minor earthquake, which causes it to release one of its secrets. A body concealed beneath the water is set free, and rises to the surface. Miles away, in an isolated cabin, a man gets a voicemail to come ID the corpse.

    On the boat crossing the Bay of Naples, the man, Dino, runs into his daughter, Victoria. Both were contacted by the police to give a DNA test to identify the body. What follows is an odd couple of days, which are half like a holiday, with Victoria, who has never been to her father’s old home, taking in the tourist sites, and half like a wake, filled with tension and frustrated grief.

    Victoria and Dino’s relationship runs both in parallels and contrasts with his relationship with his father. Dino’s father was abusive when he was around, and when he disappeared, he assumed he had abandoned the family to start a new life in America. He was absent for most of Dino’s life and not approachable even before that. Dino’s relationship with Victoria is different, loving, but he still struggles to talk, to express his feelings. She is an adult, and they are not in close contact, but nonetheless she shows support, patience and love for him. Dino has clearly tried to be a better father than he got, but his upbringing has left its mark on him, and there is a silence and a distance that will always be there.

    A film about the intergenerational legacy of trauma, told with both understanding and hope.

  • Fireflies

    As night descends on Rio de Janiero, the fireflies come out. Equally beautiful are the nocturnal inhabitants of Flamingo Park. There they pray, bathe, and make love beneath the moonlight.

    The nightlife of a city always represents its unseen self, the truth we deny in ourselves in the bright light of day, beneath the righteous judgement of how we should be. Ironic then that castigated to the dark should be scenes so reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. Naked and unashamed, queer men cruise the avenues of trees. With kindness and care towards animals, a woman pushing a shopping trolley distributes food to the city’s stray cats. An old man prays to the traditional gods, giving thanks for the trees that surround him.

    A beautiful film, showing what is often unseen, but in its own way holy.

  • Love, Dad

    One of my favourites of the festival.

    Breathtakingly honest to the point of being painfully vulnerable, Diana Nguyen confronts the heartbreak at the centre of her and her father’s relationship. She rediscovers a cache of letters her father sent her when she was a child. He was in prison when she was young, but they wrote back and forth all the time, telling each other about their day, and being open about the things that mattered to them. Despite the physical distance, Diana felt supported, loved and seen.

    That changed when he got out of prison. He seemed driven by the need to have a son, and after her mother had three miscarriages, he abandoned the family. He now has a new family, back in Vietnam, with a son, and doesn’t keep in touch with his daughter.

    While her father is Vietnamese, Diana is Czech, and she doesn’t understand the hold the old traditions had over him, the idea that if he didn’t bear a son, he would be responsible for the end of his bloodline. The whole film takes the form of a letter, as Diana attempts to comprehend his choice, despite the obvious pain it causes her.

    The visuals of the film are made up of these old letters, old family photos and videos. While I normally wouldn’t recommend collage animation and mixed media films for everyone, this is one I definitely would, because it is the most fitting match of media and subject, and while creative, its meaning remains perfectly clear.

    The legacy of a love interrupted is laid bare in this brave and intimate film.

  • Squish!

    I . . . I have no idea.

    Basically visual ASMR around the theme of squish.

  • A Present Light

    A depressed insomniac is driving in the rain at night when a tall, buxom woman in a glittering evening dress calls out, “Beware of the slippery road – it’s dangerous!” He comes off his moped, and so begins the start of tentative but nurturing friendship.

    Diana is the woman. Despite her flashy dress and her ample frame, she is surprisingly gentle and tender. She visits him in the hospital, mending his torn up clothes. I like how the film doesn’t just expect us to assume that Diana is kind, like so many films just expect you to think well of the main character. We see Diana howf Goncalo’s moped up 4 flights of stairs to her flat, to keep it safe. When she scrapes the bannister, we see her go back and paint over the scratch using her nail varnish. In this small unnoticed act, you see her consideration for others.

    Goncalo’s more stand-offish. Previous to coming off his bike, he had visited his therapist in the middle of the night, who fed him a sleeping pill for his insomnia. It’s probably that which made him come off his bike, but given his state of mind, it’s possible it wasn’t entirely an accident. He feels quite closed in his early interactions with Diana.

    Slowly as they begin their friendship, after Goncalo leaves hospital, they bring a hope and companionship to one another’s lives. A straightforward and tender story.