What first made me want to come along to the Map of Mexican Dreams short film night was this last short film. Exile is a stop motion animation.
It depicts a woman, painting alone in her home, each one a self-portrait with her back to the viewer. Ignored in another room is a suitcase. It looms prominent, despite how it is studiously avoided, and it belches forth bursts of dust or sand or earth.
It reminds me of how in Ziyara, the guy who has created an exhibit display of the exodus of his Jewish neighbours, he says he put a suitcase there, because suitcases always mean sorrow, mean parting. In Exile, the suitcase seems to contains the soil of home, the sand and dust of miles travelled. In the memories that accompany the dirt, we see her with another figure, a father, there is a separation there, a grief.
Over and over she paints herself, but only with the back of her head towards the viewer. It is an inward-looking exercise, but without a confrontation, it speaks to her insular emotional state, which lacks the resolution of genuine insight. The journey she has made with the suitcase must always be going forward, to look back towards the viewer is to look back towards the past, and in doing, see herself. To do so would mean uniting who she is with who she was, to make a bridge to that place which has been ruptured in trauma. Whereas if she faces only forward, it remains forever behind her. Unhealed, but the fear is understandable.
Finally a storm comes, and blows open the window of her home. In facing the storm, in engaging with the intrusion of the outside world, in acknowledging the tempestuous state she finds herself in, the portraits all turn to face her.
Without dialogue, relying on imagery and score to tell an emotional journey, Exile conveys vulnerability and loss. Really liked it.
I’ll be honest, I have no idea what this one’s about.
There’s a cyborg, and a young dancer in a pink Lolita wig, and skateboarders, and a bunch of stuff. Colour and sound evokes a sense of otherworldliness. But whatever it was driving at was lost on me.
The blurb says it’s about a cyborg warning a lassie about her past life. Cool.
Lupita is a short documentary profiling the work of indigenous rights activist and Acteal massacre survivor, Guadalupe Vazquez Luna, known as Lupita.
In 1997, just before Christmas, a community of peaceful, unarmed, indigenous activists in the village of Acteal, were at prayer in church, when government-supported right-wing paramilitary soldiers burst in and opened fire. 45 people were brutally massacred, including 3 pregnant women. Lupita, only a child at the time, saw her mother shot first, then was told to run by her father before he also died. She lost almost a dozen family members, including both her parents. Her life’s mission has been to get justice for the dead.
Lupita’s fearlessness is a thing to behold as she leads a protest march to a nearby military post. The official national military initially denied all involvement, despite the fact that they stayed in their outpost in the hills above the village and didn’t intervene to stop the massacre, which lasted hours, as the paramilitary soldiers in the church below dispatched wounded survivors, and stabbed the pregnant bellies of dying women. Lupita’s march comes right to the gates of the military post and demands that they take responsibility and admit their involvement. The soldiers’ response is pitiful, as they mumble that they personally weren’t there at the time, and it wasn’t them who pulled the trigger in the church that day. But Lupita drives at them – but you are camped on our land, as part of the same army there to enforce the power of the same people with the same interests. Where is your conscience? She tells them that if they continue to take the money and shrug, to remain blind to the bloody establishment they are a part of, they will continue to be slaves, and raise their children to be slaves. She says all this to them while they stand there with automatic rifles, and she stands there with nothing but braids and a shawl.
For decades the struggle continues, with Lupita having to balance her fight for justice with living her life, growing up, becoming a mother, and continuing her way of life in Acteal. She passes down to the next generation the values her parents taught her, the solidarity she shares in the legacy of the Zapatista movement, and the hunger for justice for their slain kin. All the while, this young woman in a tiny village tries to take down the former president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, and numerous ex-government ministers.
Because of the efforts of Lupita and people like her, in 2020, 23 years after the massacre, the Mexican government admitted its involvement, and jailed over a dozen people for their crimes. The strength of this woman, to move such a mountain, to fight year after year for decades, is inspiring, and moving, and hopeful.
Time and the Seashell is a short film in which an indigenous man meditates on time and the changes he has seen in his lifetime.
The film begins with a young boy picking up a seashell and listening to it to hear the sound of the ocean. As the young boy imagines his life to come, a man picks up and listens to the same seashell, remembering the boy he was. Time, and the patterns of life are eternal, yet we have such a brief and transient existence.
The man ruminates on the changes he has seen to the land, the ecological shifts as a result of climate change and exploitation. In places which were abundant and dense with life, there is now stone and dust. He asks, “How could the seas become mountains?”
In his childhood, he was taught how from just a seed grows corn, and from corn comes many seeds, and the plentiful, self-perpetuating cycle of life goes on as such, from seed to corn to seed to corn. As a man, he worries that as the land changes, and people change, the way of caring for the corn will be forgotten, and the ancient line of self-sustaining life will be broken.
This short film conveys a sense of Mayan life, through the stories of children, the bodies of trees, the canopy of the night sky. It tries to communicate a worldview in which all cosmology is connected, from the stars to the ceiba to the self.
The ceiba tree is at the centre of this film. Children play on it, lie on it, listen with their ears pressed to the bark. They say they can hear their ancestors through the tree. With roots that reach under the world and branches that stretch up to the heavens, the dead are connected to the living world and may still be heard through its skin.
In Mayan cosmology the ceiba is the central pillar holding up the sky, giving structure to creation. It is a world tree, growing through the plains of existence from the underworld, to living world, to the heavens. Yollotl means heart, and the ceiba is the heart of creation.
As the children play on the ceiba, they sing a traditional song, and the narrator tells a story of the love of the tule tree for the ceiba. The ceiba is also the heart of Mayan culture, sacred and beloved.
Through art, song, story and documentary, Yollotl tries to place us for a moment in a place of understanding, to see the Mayan world from the inside out, to understand its heart.
Went along to the CCA for a night of short films being put on by CinemaAttic, Map of Mexican Dreams. Absolutely stowed it was.
It kicked off with Arcangel. The title character is a man who travels to the city, carrying an old woman on his back, in an attempt to try to find a place where she will be taken care of, now that he is losing his sight. Amid the bustle and beeps of the strange and indifferent city, Arcangel wades through bureaucracy to try to get his charge Patro in a state-run old folk’s home.
Only elderly people with no family can be taken in by the state, and the tenderness with which Arcangel cares for Patro makes the administrators believe he is her son, which would give them grounds to dismiss their claim. Whether he is or not is kinda besides the point, the film shows a world where kindness and doing for others is not valued, even treated with suspicion, and pitiless and ruthless indifference to the suffering of others is the status quo of the state. Arcangel arrives in the city with the bonds of community literally tying Patro to him, yet as he becomes an anonymous indigent sleeping on the streets of the city, they seem like they will become hopelessly and inevitably undone.
Several times in the film we see the world through Arcangel’s eyes. His blurring eyesight settles on, then with effort brings into view, the sign on the building for the old folk’s home. His world is becoming full of shadows instead of people. His blindness is contrasted to the blindness of those in the city. Their blurred figures walk past him on the street, and they do not see him at all. The clerks at the old folk’s home accepts a fake ID paper, but refuses to accept the obvious need of an elderly and infirm woman. They have chosen to be blind to him, and yet, with his failing eyesight, Arcangel is the only one able to see Patro’s suffering.
Welcome back after the New Year break! And we are hitting the ground rolling with the new reveals of what is up for grabs at this year’s GFF.
Today the FrightFest lineup was announced – see details here: https://cloutcom.co.uk/frightfest-glasgow-2022/
Excited for The Execution, based on the hunt for Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. 14-year-old me is bouncing in her seat to see living ghoul Chikatilo brought to big screen by the Russians themselves. Also eager to see childhood crush Christina Ricci as a single mum trying to keep her kid safe in a haunted house in Monstrous. Also the loveable Anthony Stewart Head pops up in Let The Wrong One In, a vampire comedy. Another horror comedy that looks a ton of fun is Some Like It Rare, about butchers frustrated by losing business due to vegans, who turn to hunting them for sport and cannibalistic profit. Might bring my sis to see that one, sitting in her anti-carnist tshirt. Wyrmwood: Apocalypse also promises to be a riot, zombies and exploding heads everywhere. Freaks Out is a tale of the magic of the circus, with extraordinary people who really have extraordinary powers, who face the end of their age of innocence as Nazism sweeps Europe. The fight-back by those who are different against the forces of homogeneity will prove bombastic. For tension, The Ledge proves a struggle for survival, as one woman fights to outrun the killers of her sister on a sheer mountain wall. For the creeps of folk horror, we have You Are Not My Mother, about a reverse changeling situation, where the daughter suspects the mother of being some Other in her likeness. For thrills and chills of a variety of kinds, we have The Cellar, Homebound, Mandrake and A Cloud So High. Looks like a great smorgasbord of horror, with something for every mood. Yeay!
GFF have also announced their retrospective series for this year, Winds of Change: Cinema in ’62. Classics abound, with To Kill A Mockingbird, with the legendary Brock Peters as the man falsely accused of rape across the colour line in the segregated South, and Gregory Peck as the man who defends him. Peck also stars in Cape Fear, as a lawyer whose family is targeted for revenge by a ruthless convict, played by Robert Mitchum. More giants of cinema appear in the timeless western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with eternal cowboy John Wayne opposite fastidious James Stewart and the gremlin-faced Lee Marvin. Another legend of cinema, Kirk Douglas, appears in Lonely are the Brave, a western set a century later, of the last true cowboy trying to live free in the modern era. Lawrence of Arabia provides a chance to see the sweeping sandy vistas and the award-winning performances of Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole. For those of you missing the late great Sean Connery, Dr No will bring him back to the silver screen as the iconic Bond, James Bond. Cold war era paranoia reaches its heights with Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh in The Manchurian Candidate, and existential dread is omnipresent in real-time French classic Cleo, From 5 to 7. Jack Lemon stars in dark romance Days of Wine and Roses, about a couple whose shared alcoholism threatens to destroy them both, and Ann Bancroft stars in The Miracle Worker, as the woman trying to teach deaf-blind Helen Keller how to communicate with the world around her, and how to make the world believe she can be taught. For all the info see https://glasgowfilm.org/shows/winds-of-change-cinema-in-62
Another strand announced was a focus on the works of Edith Carlmar. The first female Norwegian film director, her debut feature is being shown, Death is a Caress, a noir complete with femme fatales and tempestuous love affairs. The Disappearance of a Young Wife follows the mystery of a young man who returns from a trip to find his wife missing, and The Wayward Girl is about first love between a teenage tearaway and her middle-class boyfriend, as they weather the overwhelming joy of discovering their feelings and the torturous fears of their first relationship. Fools in the Mountains shows Carlmar’s humour, with a romantic farce set in an alpine hotel, when two identical guests check in. For all the info see https://glasgowfilm.org/shows/edith-carlmar
More news to get excited about is the announcement of the African Stories strand, with a cracking line-up of new movies. There’s queer life in Kenya in I Am Samuel, which I can attest is great. Once Upon a Time in Uganda looks a blast, a documentary on the homegrown Ugandan action movies of Wakaliwood and the unforgettable characters who make them. Blind Ambition nearly has you greeting at the trailer, a documentary about a group of refugee Zimbabweans in South Africa who take part in an international wine tasting competition. Drama Casablanca Beats follows the ambitions of young Moroccans to tell their stories through hiphop, and the pushback when they try to show you can be a young, hijabi girl and a rapper. Documentary One Take Grace traces the life of Mothiba Grace Bapela, who throughout her career as a domestic worker has pursued her dream of acting. 70s classic Sambizanga dramatises the Angolan struggle for independence, and its cruel repression, with Domingos de Oliveira as the man whose resistance meets with violence at the hands of the police, and Elisa Andrade as his wife who must go from police station to police station to find out what has become of him. The violence of colonialism is the central theme in Heliopolis too, as the day the Second War World comes to an end turns from celebration to a massacre of unarmed independence demonstrators in French Algeria. The enduring effects of the repressive past become manifest in psychological horror, Good Madam, set in South Africa’s Cape Town, where a live-in carer and her daughter tend to a wealthy white woman whose eerie catatonia seems to fill the house with her silence. For all the info see https://glasgowfilm.org/shows/african-stories
Spoiled for choice! Cant wait, can’t wait, can’t wait!
French Tech is a comedy set in the gig economy. Three middle-aged single parents have to stick together in the 24/7 availability world of bullshit work.
Alexandre is a stay-at-home father whose submariner wife wants a separation after he had an affair with the woman at the unemployment office where he picks up his dole money. Desperate to prove to himself to her, and having to survive without her paycheck, he goes back out into a labour market he barely understands. He blags a job at a start-up where both the job and the business remains unclear to him. It’s one of those actualising integrated solution optimization horseshitathons. Everyone’s sitting around in deckchairs or yoga balls, wearing tshirts that say Be Kind or Total Wellbeing, while no one has sick pay or paid holiday leave.
He is helped by single father Arcimboldo, whose income is patched together from a thousand different app gigs. He Ubers, upcycles shit on ebay, collects and charges courier drones, and is a stand-in for folk who want to attend protests (but maybe don’t want to have their head caved in by the cops). Together they juggle childcare responsibilities as Arci explains some of the more basic jargon to Alex.
Alexandre’s work contact is Severine, a frazzled but efficient businesswoman, who understands and negotiates the bullshit soup that is her job but hates every minute of it. Alexandre finds her intimidating, but Arci takes a liking to her. She eventually reveals she is also struggling with the same issues as the others.
The film is about how the shine of technology and the Orwellian use of bullshit language have obscured the fact that labour rights have slid back to Victorian times. In a world where we are all constantly working, there seem to be no employers. In one scene, Alex’s Uber driver almost falls asleep at the wheel, apologising that he’s been driving for 14 hours. “They don’t let you take a break?” he asks him. “I’m my own boss,” the driver retorts.
For me personally, I almost couldn’t find this funny, because it’s so accurate. A joke’s sweet spot is to be somewhat true and somewhat an exaggeration, otherwise it’s just a statement of fact or it doesn’t make sense. French Tech falls too much towards the statement of fact end of the spectrum for me. I know too many people working 2 and 3 jobs – I’ve been someone working 2 and 3 jobs – and watching this, I wasn’t so much laughing as going, “Yup. That’s what it’s like.” As traditional employment gives way more and more to the gig economy, this dystopian hellscape is going to become our standard reality.
Favourite part of this was the banjo version of Daft Punk’s Da Funk.
Adrien is asked to give a speech at his sister’s wedding while sat round family dinner, which sends him spiralling back through his love-life in a state of existential dread. Narrated directly to camera by the main character, The Speech has the theatrical feel of a one-man play. He introduces characters by their foibles, mutes their conversation, or pauses the action. The scenery falls away or slides in as he moves from scene to scene in his memory.
In the repressed and ritualistic family dinner with his parents and sister, Adrien silently broods on the recent break in his relationship with his girlfriend, Sonia. In a family where everyone plays their parts, and the conversation is as predictable as it is repetitive, Adrien quietly cracks up over a text he sent after a month of ‘space’. To add to his stress level, his future brother-in-law asks him to give a speech at the wedding. Playing out every possible outcome, and tracing back the causes of its inevitable disaster, The Speech paints a comical portrait of a family of characters, helmed by a protagonist that is self-obsessed, neurotic, and identifiable.
