GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • Remember the Promise of a Better Tomorrow

    Remember the Promise of a Better Tomorrow is a memoir of Agata Zbylut’s artistic career told in mockumentary format. I wasn’t so sure about this when it started, but it’s actually really fun. Agata lampoons the self-indulgence of such an exercise, playing the 3 talking heads being interviewed who fawn over her genius at first, then slowly lament her degradation into a cliched has-been.

    You don’t have to know anything about Agata Zbylut to enjoy watching this movie. The film itself shows her artwork and explores her motivations with each piece. She’s a Polish feminist artist who works mostly in photography and self-portrait. Her work explores the constant tension around the social pressure to fit into what society expects of women, the destiny decided by our biology, and the attempts to rebel against it, which still make it the central point of our focus. Agata’s work kinda explores the inescapability of that narrative, or her feelings of it being inescapable, even when you try to resist or subvert it.

    The supposed documentary starts with an art critic and curator, Joanna, lauding Agata’s work and place in history. It also features her lifelong friend Bella talking about what impressive achievements she’s made, and Joachim, an ex-lover and gallery worker, who talks about her eternal beauty and artistic spirit. At first they narrate between them Agata’s entrance into the world of art, her attempts to find her voice as an artist, and her joyful confidence in her first exhibitions.

    Then little by little, they start to drop in comments which show her to be callous, inconsiderate, and more than a little self-obsessed. While still ostensibly praising her, their portrait of her as a person starts to melt into that of a neurotic, someone defiantly feminist in their work, but a hot mess in person.

    Bella especially starts to lean in to differences between her and Agata, as Bella has married a well-to-do guy, fulfilling her role as wife, looking beautiful and relying on her husband’s money. While they were similar when they were younger, running round with a bunch of men, regrettably, according to Bella, Agata’s need to be the smartest person in room means she scorned settled married life, and decided to project a feminist image of herself, as if she was somehow above the petty concerns effecting other women’s lives. Referencing her work Still Nature, where single Agata takes couples shots with her dog, Bella sighs, “It’s pathetic.”

    Joachim plays a discarded lover, who moves around the country to her exhibitions so he can work hanging her photos in galleries. She lifts and lays him, despite him being obviously lovesick for her. When she then seems to have a life crisis in the run-up to 30, she marries and divorces 4 times in quick succession over 2 years. Joachim is heartbroken.

    As she starts to enter her 40s, Agata’s work begins to look into aging, and she takes photos of herself using neck tape on her body. Instead of using it to pin back her neck, she uses it to bring together her tummy, or create yonic shapes on her elbows and armpits. Joanna the art critic sighs, finding this exhibition of an aging woman tiresome, a desperate plea for attention devoid of artistic merit. Bella shares gossip with the camera, laughing that although Agata likes to make a show of making a feminist stance on aging, she’s actually had Botox, which was paid for by Bella’s husband. Joachim is just sad, saying Agata put the work up on Instagram for the likes, but got less followers that she thought.

    The whole thing is really funny, obviously because it turns one of these artist’s retrospectives into an absolute character assassination instead of the kiss-ass fest they usually are. Given that none of the character’s are real, and Agata herself is playing each role, gives it just a brutal black humour to their takedown of her. And the whole film itself is effectively a film version of what Agata does with her photographs, producing a self-portrait, which reveals insecurity as much as it projects an ideal. An artistic memoir is by its nature self-indulgent, so Agata’s is one where she overtly uses her characters to criticise how self-indulgent she is.

    If you are rolling your eyes at the meta, give it a chance. It’s actually really funny and entertaining.

  • UK Jewish Film Festival is over!

    With Sin La Habana, the UK Jewish Film Festival is over. Such good films! Really consistently high quality. The documentaries were fascinating, and really covered a broad spectrum of perspectives.

    One thing I’m definitely gonna do now is watch Yentl. In the wee UK JFF trailer that plays before each film, it had folk reacting to classic Jewish movies, including Yentl. I’d always assumed it was a gay classic because it was a musical with Barbara Streisand, I didn’t realise it has a bi guy in it and a lesbian wedding. Also Mandy Patinkin, who I adored as Inigo Montoya.

  • Sin La Habana

    Closing out the UK Jewish Film Festival is Sin La Habana, which is a funny coincidence with all the Cuban movies I’ve been watching with Havana Glasgow. Sin La Habana is about a Cuban ballet dancer who makes a plan to get him and his girl out the country.

    The opening scene is of Leo getting a Santeria blessing for good luck so that he might get the part of Romeo in the upcoming production of Havana’s ballet company. They are going on a worldwide tour, and Leo desperately wants to get out of the country, and start a new life with his girlfriend, Sara. All the good advice he gets from the Orisha, they tell him, “You must improve your character and be more equanimous”, he then soundly ignores, leading to his journey in the film to go astray.

    When the company post the parts for the production, he is given the part of Prince of Verona, instead of the lead, Romeo. He is enraged, marches into the director’s office, demanding to know why he’s not the lead when he is the best dancer. Now, if he’d even stopped there, he might have still been ok, but when the director tells him that he might be the best dancer, but his attitude stinks, he’s entitled, he’s arrogant, and just like this right here, he doesn’t take instruction and work together with the ensemble, always charging in like he is a soloist, Leo doesn’t take the criticism well. He calls the director a racist, and is promptly fired.

    So he and Sara come up with another plan. He starts teaching samba to tourists, where he meets Nasim, a Jewish Iranian-Canadian. They decide he will seduce Nasim, get her to bring him to Canada, where he will marry her, and arrange for Sara to come after. Sara is not precious about sexual fidelity, but tells him not to look Nasim in the eyes when he has sex with her, this one intimacy being the bulwark against genuine love.

    Everything goes to plan at first, but once Leo is in Canada, he feels totally lost. He finds it difficult to practice Santeria, casting offerings into frozen rivers. His auditions for dance companies don’t meet with the immediate success he was expecting, and he frequently finds the encounters humiliating. The only other Cuban he meets in Montreal manages to get him a job in a fish factory, earning dogshit wages.

    He is desperate to see Sara again, so goes in debt to pay his Cuban-Canadian mate to marry her and bring her back. Meanwhile, his relationship with Nasim is not as straightforward as he thought. Her father is a racist who doesn’t even want Leo in his house, and tells Nasim she should have stayed with her physically abusive ex-husband. Nasim doesn’t really understand anything about Santeria customs and he doesn’t really understand anything about Jewish customs. She half-knows he’s using her, but enjoys their relationship too much to really let herself think about it.

    The whole story is one of self-sabotage, miscommunication, and disconnection. Leo’s dream is closest at the beginning of the film, and if he’d just played the Prince of Verona, he might have achieved his goals without much complication. But the path he follows is nothing but complication, and with every step it seems to pull the relationship he values most out of alignment.

    I didn’t like some of the directorial choices. When the film tries to be stylistic, it comes off as affected and jarring, kinda takes you out of the flow of the story. Actually, when the focus is on just telling the beats of the story, it’s much better, giving the performances room. In fact, some of the most beautiful shots in the film are the ones where the director does the least, allowing them to speak for themselves.

    The performances are all strong. I really like the guy who plays Leo, Yonah Acosta Gonzalez, because fundamentally the character is an asshole, and it’s hard to make that sympathetic. He doesn’t try to distract and overcompensate by making the character charismatic or bombastic. He also doesn’t let him off the hook by acting like he’s some poverty-stricken soul desperately trying to make it in any way to a better life. Leo’s life in Havana is pretty sweet, with the love of a beautiful woman, doing what he loves for a living by dancing, with his mother lovingly supporting him. He isn’t in some terrible situation that justifies hurting Nasim to get out. He’s selfish, he’s arrogant, he’s the cause of a lot of his own problems. So it’s amazing that Yonah manages to make him sympathetic. He looks lost, he looks vulnerable, he looks disappointed when he can’t understand what he’s doing wrong to thwart all his plans. He does come to care for Nasim, and is angry when he sees she doesn’t have the kind of support from her family that he has always received from his. The Havana dance director fires him, telling him he has no humility, and this whole journey is humbling for him. He just gets more and more lost and confused. Yonah really manages to capture the audience’s empathy, without altering the reality of the character’s flaws.

    Sin La Habana is interesting because in a lot of the Cuban documentaries I just watched, they can barely convince people to move a town over, people in Cuba have a really strong connection to the place they’re from, and people in Havana love it fiercely. Leo is desperate to leave, but once he does, he’s adrift in Canada, unable to do the things he considers integral to his identity, like dance and practice Santeria. In Havana, he knows who he is. Without it, he feels lost.

    A solid film, which despite some distracting stylistic flourishes, manages to take you on a really interesting character journey.

  • Havana Glasgow Film Festival over!

    The Havana Glasgow Film Festival is over. That’s the first time I’ve really binged their movies, and I totally missed a couple I was gonna watch online. But it’s 3am, and I’ve got to get up for work in 5 hours, so I’m calling it a win.

    It’s really interesting to see a diversity of films on Cuba. From features to documentaries, encompassing climate change, economic start-ups, sex and sexuality. I feel like I learned a lot, and also got a better idea of what a multiplicity of cultures there are there.

    Will defo tune in next year.

  • Queens of the Revolution

    We close out the Havana Glasgow Film Festival with Queens of the Revolution, and what a closer! Really interesting, really moving, really inspiring. It features the single most powerful drag performance I have ever seen.

    Queens of the Revolution tells the story of queer liberation in Cuba, through the people of Mejunje, a queer cultural centre in Santa Clara. Mejunje means mixture, and was set up as a safe space for queer people to be as well as their allies. It was a hangout, for club nights, for music gigs, for drag performances, a place that could be used by the community for whatever they needed.

    While every country’s path to queer liberation is different, most European countries were heavily influenced by Stonewall in the States, and you get queer rights movements developing alongside women’s lib and anti-racism organisation. Cuba’s history is a little different. They still struggled with oppression and formed grassroots resistance, but their timeline isn’t the same. Due to the Revolution, discussions about class and race were all happening simultaneously to that defining social event. And in its aftermath, there was a belief in the birth ‘the new man’, who lived for his community, who was not self-serving, who was a revolutionary. And that image was not gay and was not gender non-conforming.

    The state repression of queer people in Cuba lasted right into the 90s. One guy talks about having been given a physical at his work, and being told he was HIV positive, and that just heralding his life being over. Because he lost his job, the government relocated him to a new settlement exclusively for HIV positive people. Which seems to have been set up as a temporary measure when they were still trying to find out how HIV spread but which quickly became a homophobic open-air prison. It was a ghetto, and if you left it, the only other place you could stay was jail. And he was there for 15 years. It’s unreal.

    Mejunje helped him heal a lot. He says it’s the only place in the world he feels at peace. Everyone knows him there, everyone treats him with respect.

    You have the Queen Mother, a trans elder, who was imprisoned repeatedly across decades. When she arrived in jail, being housed in a men’s prison, she was the only trans woman, so the other inmates dubbed her Queen of the Criminals. As more trans prisoners showed up, she took them under her wing, and got the name Queen Mother.

    In some aspects, you have universal queer experiences, such as fear of rejection by family. Queen Mother was taken to psychiatrists repeatedly, for conversion therapy and other damaging interventions. Eventually she ran away from home, and when her father found her and attempted to take her back, she tried to kill herself. After that, her father decided to accept her rather than lose her, but it was an uneasy co-existence.

    Nomi had a similar story, where her father refused to speak to her for 5 years, and then after 5 years said he accepted her as gay, but still wouldn’t accept her as trans. It’s clearly hard, but at least there does seem to be movement towards acceptance, even if it is painfully slow. Lola, on the other hand, says she was always accepted by her family, that she never was rejected. And while she’s experienced discrimination for being trans in jobs and education, she could always rely on her family for support.

    For those without support Mejunje has been there. It was set up in 91, and its presence, the very fact that it’s not going anywhere, has opened Santa Clara up to the acceptance of queer people. Although a vital resource for the queer community, it is also a cultural centre for Santa Clara, so everyone is welcome. With it having such lively events, like drag performances, music and entertainment, it is part of the cultural life of the city and its residents.

    You’d think with all the repression they face, the queer elders would be bitter, but, although the grief and trauma can be scalding, they remain dearly devoted to their homeland. They are proud Cubans, and lovers of the Revolution. But as people say over and over again in this film, revolution is eternal, it is continual, it is personal, it is one’s duty to work for the society they want to live in. For the Cuban queers in this film, Revolution wasn’t something that happened, it is something that is happening, it is how Cuba happens, with the daily decision of ordinary Cubans to strive to make the society they want to see, and they are working to make it a queer-inclusive society.

    That outlook has a strong influence on how they view Cuban emigres, especially queers who fled persecution. You would expect that no one could understand more why you left than someone who suffered the same oppression alongside you, but there is a tinge of bitterness when talking about them. Because it is not viewed as some academic issue of loyalty to a nation state, but a very real and tangible sense of personal betrayal, that the community here was fighting for their rights, fighting for their very survival, and some people up and bailed. This is not on some intellectual level of political discourse, but a real heartfelt sense of being abandoned by friends, people you knew and were close to you, who knew just as well as you how bad it could get, and instead of staying in the fight and working to make things better, fucked off to somewhere where someone else had done all that work, so they could enjoy what they’d built there.

    Still, if it was me, if my country locked me up for my sexuality, I might just say, Fuck this for a game of sodgies, I’m awa. For the queer elders in the film, it’s seen as cowardly, taking the easy way out. Personally, I think it’s a more than understandable choice to make.

    There are so many personal stories in this. The people of Mejunje are so open, so raw. This is not a film that pulls its punches, showing the bad along with the good, and the trauma as well as the healing.

    (Spoilers for the end of the film, maybe stop here if you’re already convinced to watch the movie.)

    The film finishes on drag queen Crystal, on stage at Mejunje, talking about when they experienced a homophobic attack. A guy rushed Crystal and stabbed her half a dozen times in the neck and chest. She had to have 47 surgeries. She had over 200 stitches in her neck, and she thought that was the end of her singing, the end of her drag career, the end of her even being able to speak. And here she is now, back on stage, singing out and speaking up in her own voice, a survivor. And there she is, in her fancy outfit, her hairdo, and bling, and she starts to sing My Way. It’s a song which in recent years has been all too often co-opted by arseholes and narcissists (see Undergods as an example), but this is it delivered in the best spirit of the song. And as she sings, she takes off her rings, one by one, and drops her shrug. As the chorus swells she pulls the padding from her bra, and tugs off her wig. And as song hits its crescendo, she pulls down her top to reveal her torso covered in scars, the scars that were meant to stop her, the scars that could never stop her, as she stands before the audience shorn, naked, and vulnerable, and sings, “I did it MY WAY!”

    Chills, tears and applause rippled through the audience in the cinema. It was an ending that just hit you full force in the chest. Such a great film.

  • On The Roof

    A really lovely film about three friends kicking about on their roof. With that aimlessness that follows after leaving high school, it kinda reminds me a little of Ghost World. These pals spend their time talking shit and coming up with ideas of what to do with their future.

    Victor Jose, nicknamed Vito, goes on about his supposed Sicilian ancestry. His grandmother told him his grandfather was a Sicilian who came to Cuba without a cent and built up an empire of businesses around their block. Although likely untrue, Victor has an entrepreneurial spirit, seeing opportunity everywhere, and never deadened by setback or disappointment. Over the course of the film he uses his resourceful Cuban attitude to build a makeshift pizza restaurant on the roof.

    Anita’s already pregnant, which she seems surprisingly chill about. While she’s confident about being able to cope as a single parent, she’s wistful for nice things for the baby. She’s scrubbing up hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs, and it would just be nice to buy the baby new stuff.

    Of the three of them, Yasmani is the most frustrated. Looking after his own pigeon coop, he struggles to see himself making it, being the first to find the flaws in Victor’s plans. He longs for the hot lassie on the terrace below, and gets snippy with the local grifter who comes by trying to sell clothes. He’s outward-looking, seeing with clarity what they don’t have. But he may be missing what he does have, including the quiet love of Anita.

    The roof is basically just the close, but on top of the building. The kids use it to go from house to house, catching up on the news, helping neighbours, running errands. Everybody’s up there, hanging out washing, watering plants, or sunbathing. Victor, Anita and Yasma spend their time there bumming about, taking selfies, and practicing dancing.

    While this film is about young adult rudderlessness, it’s not a film about impotence or hopelessness. The exact opposite, it is about resourcefulness, imagination, and the support of friends, family and neighbours. While the circumstances may be Cuban, the feelings are identifiable anywhere.

    Well-shot and well-written, On The Roof is a film which excludes quiet camaraderie in the face of the difficult transition into adulthood. Really nice film.

  • Los Zafiros: Music from the Edge of Time

    Los Zafiros: Music from the Edge of Time is a bittersweet documentary about the Cuban band Los Zafiros, meaning The Sapphires. Rising to fame in the 60s, their popularity endures to this day.

    Los Zafiros starts with very humble beginnings. A bunch of kids in Havana got together to sing and play guitar. There wasn’t much of a plan to it, other than they enjoyed making music and were delighted when they started to get paid for it.

    As their popularity grew, and record deals loomed, they settled on the name Los Zafiros. They became huge in Cuba, and soon their fame spread abroad, doing tours of Europe, the Soviet Union, and all over. They got caught up in the lifestyle of fast-living, heavy drinking, and women.

    Although they broke up in the 70s, the music of Los Zafiros had a lasting legacy in Cuba. It was iconic for combining Latin styles like calypso and rumba, with African rhythms, and the doo-wop style of the US. The combination was seen to convey a distinctly Cuban identity.

    Alas, the band hadn’t long split up when singer Ignatio died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage, only in his 30s. Then bandmate Kike died swiftly of an illness of the liver. In the 90s, El Chino also passed, and the remaining members live in Florida in the States.

    But although time takes its toll, their music is still played and appreciated by generations of Cubans to this day. A great legacy to leave as part of the country’s cultural fabric.

  • Boccaccerias Habaneras

    The last Arturo Sotto film of the festival, this one from 2014. It continues in his depiction of Cuba as full of shagging and domestic chaos.

    I kinda thought with this one being a more recent film it wouldn’t have the same gapingly problematic nature as stuff from the 90s, especially in its treatment of women, but no. I don’t know if that’s Arturo or if that’s Cuba. Obviously it’s a comedy, so it’s gonna be a light-hearted take on sex, but even still, there’s plenty of scenes that are a big clanging yikes.

    Anyway it’s an anthology of comical stories told through the framework of citizens of Havana trying to sell their story to a writer who will put them in a novel or film. There, he judges their worth and pays according to his estimation of their value. The writer is played by Arturo Sotto himself, the film’s writer and director, so as to make the obvious metaphor more obvious.

    This first story is of a couple of harassed parents who try to keep their daughter’s wedding day from flying from the rails. Beset by increasing misfortune on the morning of the wedding, the chances of getting through the ceremony start to dim. A funny little farce, in which a every member of a the family is a horny hot disaster.

    The second film is of two bungling crooks who attempt to flog a stolen antique trunk, not realising there’s a guy passed out in inside, inebriated. After being chased by the cops, and hoodwinked by hookers, and scammed by gangsters, they finally unload the trunk for barely any cash, and are stuffed when the buyer tries to leave the country, causing the sleeping occupant to be charged as an illegal stowaway.

    The last film is of a femme fatale, who tells the story of how she blackmails a university student into sex after falsely accusing him of sexual harassment in the workplace. Yeah, I know. The writer likes this story best, pumps her, and sends her off with a Modigliani hanging on his wall. Ew.

    I find the writer character insufferable, and this is maybe my least favourite of Arturo’s films. The comedy works in some of the stories better than others, but it just didn’t do much for me.

  • Kings Of Capitol Hill

    Wow. That was amazing.

    In a fortnight of watching some really excellent documentaries, this one is something else. I highly recommend you watch it.

    Kings of Capitol Hill is about the powerful Washington lobbying group AIPAC, which stands for American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Its job is to ensure the US supports policies that favour Israel, and lobbies lawmakers to get them onside. They are formidable, and are seen as having the ability to make or break politicians.

    For the whole of my lifetime, AIPAC has been synonymous with a juggernaut of lobbyist power, and why you’ll never get America to do anything about Israel, in a reigning in sense. So it was really interesting for me to see the founders of AIPAC were actually all a bunch of hippies. This documentary interviews prominent AIPAC office holders from its inception through to 2016. So you really get to see how a well-meaning project designed to protect Jewish lives in the Middle East became a runaway nightmare, monstrous to the people who created it.

    AIPAC was originally founded by young activists who been involved in the civil rights movement, in the opposition to the Vietnam War, and other causes for peace and justice. They were concerned that Israel, a state in its infancy at the time, and the people who lived there, including many survivors of the Shoah, were going to be wiped out in a co-ordinated attack by its surrounding countries, like in the 6-Day War. They felt a responsibility as American Jews to do what they could to protect Jewish lives.

    Something which started out with a handful of people grew and grew, and eventually reached a point where they were pretty successful in reaching politicians of either party in every state. An early test of their strength was when Senator Charles Percy, a Republican, began to question the amount of aid that was consistently being sent to Israel. Like many Republicans, Percy wasn’t a fan of foreign aid, seeing it as sending American tax dollars abroad, and while I doubt he and I probably couldn’t have less in common, I have to agree he makes a fair point about $3 billion dollars being spent annually on Israel without scrutiny, when you couldn’t spend $3 billion dollars domestically without scrutiny. Now, the guy wasn’t anti-Israel, he wasn’t saying Israel shouldn’t be recognised as a state or some shit. He wasn’t even saying let’s dial back the aid we send to Israel or stop sending it altogether. No, he was saying there isn’t sufficient scrutiny of what we’re sending and why we’re sending it, and for every dollar of foreign aid fought over, debate on this topic is silent, and that’s not a good thing when flinging around billions of dollars. And they canned his ass. I mean, there are lots of reasons not to vote Republican, but AIPAC actively supported his ousting in favour of his more vocally pro-Israel opponent, and it was seen both by politicians and within AIPAC as a show of their might.

    And that blind loyalty, and smashing of even calls for discussion on the subject, is how we got here. Because when the 70s became the 80s, and Reagan rose to power, the makeup of AIPAC’s rank and file flipped from being hippie Democrats to being staunchly Republican. The more Reagan emphasised Israel as a key player in his militaristic outlook on the Middle East, the more the view shifted from Israel needs America for its safety and security to American needs Israel for its safety and security. Thus support for Israel became a nationalistic duty, and any failure to commit to it fully was a treachery.

    All the old hippies got fired. Executive Director Dine went on record for his support for a Palestinian state, and was promptly given his pink slip. And I don’t think they’d really realised up until that point what a political weapon they’d created. But now it was in the hands of a bunch of hardened neocons.

    And then you get the peace process in the 90s. And as one former AIPAC officer puts it, “AIPAC wants peace like Yasser Arafat wants a bar mitzvah.” Because there’s no money in peace. During the Oslo Accords, donations to AIPAC tanked. Because who needs a lobby to protect Israel from its enemies, if Israel makes peace with its enemies?

    And even though AIPAC bills itself as bipartisan, that obviously doesn’t seem to extend to Israeli politics, because when the left gets in, when anyone committed to peace gets in, AIPAC’s objectives remain right-wing with an emphasis on military solutions. So even during the Oslo negotiations, AIPAC actively undermined them by lobbying for limitations on what money could be spent in Palestine or on Palestinians. They did their best to narrow the wiggle-room America had during talks, and ensure that all Palestinian engagement was viewed with skepticism and distrust.

    Then Rabin gets shot dead by an Israeli right-winger, and the Israeli right-wing comes to power, the Oslo Accords go in the bin, and AIPAC is back in its comfort zone. So what you have in AIPAC is two right-wing blocs coming together, feeding on each other’s fear and paranoia, spurring each other further and further right.

    Until eventually, you get Trump. And here we have the situation where a leader of the extreme far-right, who is supported by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, KKK, and antisemites of every stripe, is being supported by AIPAC. And for a lot of people still inside AIPAC at that time, that was a real wake-up call. How can we possibly have drifted into the situation where a Jewish lobbying group who was founded to protect Jewish lives is now supporting the candidate of antisemites and holocaust-deniers?

    The people who founded AIPAC look on in horror, feeling like they’ve wandered into a Kafkaesque nightmare, where it’s like a bad joke. You have the biggest antisemitic attack in American history happening during Trump’s presidency, and there’s not a peep. Netanyahu made a statement of offering sanctuary to France’s Jews when hate crimes there rose slightly, but said nada about evaccing residents of Pittsburg after the massacre in a synagogue there. You’ve got an American-Israeli Jewish advocacy group supporting an American president who oversees, or arguably even incites, rising violence against Jews, and Israeli Prime Minister who turns a blind eye to it.

    And Trump also put a lot of fear in America’s Jewish community for just the basic fact he was not a massive fan of democracy. He actively undermined democratic processes and norms, that were put in place to protect against a totalitarian regime. So suddenly after all these years of focusing outwardly on sustaining the democracy of Israel, American Jews start to realise that they’ve neglected their vigilance on the democracy of the USA.

    So yeah, that’s where we are. And hopefully the tide is turning on AIPAC, and young activists are beginning to rise up against it. But holy shit, that is some journey.

    Honestly, you need to watch this documentary. So interesting, what I’ve mentioned here is little more than the timeline it follows, there is so much more packed into the actual film. Including spying, the FBI, and backroom deals, the whole shebang. Highly, highly recommended.

  • Mantis Nest

    After the pandemonium of the other Arturo Sotto films shown today, Mantis Nest came as a bit of a surprise. A more or less straightforward murder mystery, with a love triangle and a noirish bent.

    It’s bloody brilliant too. Really compelling, keeps you gripped.

    Elena has, since childhood, inspired the love of two men, Tomas a humble worker and revolutionary, and Emilio who comes from a family of wealthy, middle-class American emigrees. Love and fortune keep them running into each other over the years, forcing Elena to choose and choose again.

    The movie itself is set in contemporary Cuba when it was made in the 90s, and Elena’s story is told in flashback over the course of the film. Because… dun dun duh!… all three of them appear to have been murdered by their daughter Azucar. Or perhaps by Elena in a murder-suicide designed to put an end to their heartbreak once and for all.

    Elena is clearly an allegory for Cuba, being torn between two vastly different men who love her dearly. The constant interruption of the war as a seperator of the couple(s) makes clear that this tug of war between the different ideologies is for possession of Elena, the island.

    But Azucar also becomes a symbol of Cuba, taking after her mother, but the Cuba of the next generation, the kids born after the revolution and wars have been settled. Elena grows desperate to spare her daughter the torment that she has perpetually faced.

    Stylistically smooth, with humour lifting the drama, the writing and performances make believable the idea that a woman could keep two warring lovers in close quarters, where hatred as well as love means they can’t leave, turn away, or accept defeat.

    Also, I take back everything I said about the French being over-sexed, the Cubans have them beat. From watching this movie, you’d think that their biggest gripe against the Americans was how often that nuisance keeps them from fucking.

    Thoroughly enjoyable movie, Cuban noir with the classic femme fatale.