Author: gffreviews

I fell in love with the very first shot. The cinematography is so gorgeous, I was like, literally wherever this movie goes, I am in.

Neighbours tells the story of Sero’s first year of school. Set in Syria in the 80s, Sero is a 6-years-old Kurdish boy. We see the world through his eyes, as his whole world is his village, and his greatest wish is to get a tv to watch cartoons on.

The land he lives on was divided in his grandfather’s time by the English and French, and is now seperated into Syria and Turkey. Despite the fact they are close enough to see the Turkish border, they can’t get there to visit his mother’s family, who were on the wrong side when the border went up. Both states are virulently nationalistic, which leaves the stateless Kurds as a problem viewed with suspicion. Even when there is an annual holiday that allows relatives to speak across the barbed wire fence at the border, the guard orders, “Speak Arabic!” On the Turkish side they scream, “Speak Turkish!” Sero’s mother and grandmother speak neither language, and the absurdity is obvious to a child’s eyes.

A new teacher arrives at the village, aghast at what a backwater he’s been relegated to, and the obvious lack of nationalist enthusiasm from the residents. A Baathist zealot, he sets about posting photos of Asad everywhere, playing his speeches, and planting a palm tree in the playground. The palm tree is a symbol of Arab identity, and the teacher has a full-grown tree brought from the south to plant like a flag defiantly in this Kurdish village. “The palm tree grows everywhere on Arab soil,” he states proudly. Sero’s grandfather regards him, “It won’t survive our winter”.

The Baathist propaganda the teacher promotes is also viciously antisemitic. Opposed to the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land, all Jews become blamed as responsible, and viewed with suspicion by the regime. Jewish Syrians are stripped of their nationality, which effectively makes them non-persons in their own country, but also stops them from being able to apply for a passport to leave.

Sero’s next door neighbours are a Jewish family. They are as good as an extended family, with Sero as at home in their house as in his own. He comes over every Sabbath to light their lamps and stove in the evening. Their daughter Hannah is clearly in love with Sero’s uncle Alam. They stand sighing at each other across the garden wall.

The film begins by following the adventures of an ordinary 6-year-old. Seeing how high up a post he and his pals can pee. Making pictures with the set of paints Hannah gets him. Releasing balloons with the Kurdish colours near the border to bam up the soldiers, who machine-gun them.

The hardness of the world starts to creep in the edges of his innocence. The balloons are a good example. The children mull over their teacher’s rants, trying to figure our what Zionism and Imperialism are. His mate says they are two different kinds of scorpion, and he caught them once in a jar behind his outhouse. When the teacher asks how they are going to defeat the Jews, one kid suggests beating them at football.

Soon the darkness pushes further and further into Sero’s world. His teacher’s tales of Jews killing little children to use their blood in rituals, makes him hesitant to go next door to light lamps on Sabbath. Tragedy befalls the family, and his Uncle Aram mouths off about it, attracting the attention of the secret service. The village-world of Sero’s, which used to make sense, no longer seems to hang together or feel safe.

An amazing film, so well done. The cinematography is outstanding, the balloon dream sequence alone was stunning. The wee boy that plays the main character is fabulous! He’s so tiny, you can hardly believe he can convey so much emotion so vividly at such a young age.

A film about good neighbours and bad, about how respect for each other’s differences actually unites rather than divides. And at heart, a film about family, whether than be of blood or of choosing. Just a wonderful film.

The World Without You tells the story of a family coming together over a weekend for the one year anniversary memorial for their son who was slain overseas.

The son, Leo, was a war reporter who was killed in Iraq. The grief has caused his parents’ marriage to disintegrate, and they are now considering divorce. His three sisters quarrel constantly amongst each other, and there is a sense that he was both a buffer and the glue that held them all together. Returning home causes the sisters to regress into old dynamics, which grind up against the people they are now.

Clarissa and Nathan are struggling to conceive, and Clarissa’s mum keeps trampling tactlessly over that subject. Noelle has become super religious now that she’s moved to Israel, which makes Lily, an anti-Zionist atheist feel judged, which just escalates into both of them seeing each other as self-righteous and condescending. Noelle’s relationship with her husband Amram suffers, as Lily teases him about throwing himself into being more Jewish than anyone despite have grown up as bacon-loving Arthur.

Amram and Noelle’s relationship feels the most real of anyone’s there. He comes off as this whiny, smug, little manchild, but behind closed doors, you can tell all this is really getting to him. He has a total inferiority complex and is over-compensating at every turn. Which then becomes completely counter-productive as evidenced by his relationship with Lily. Because if he was just happy in his own skin, he could shrug and say, hey, I’m not the smartest guy in the world, I’m not an athlete, no I wasn’t always as religious as I am now, but hey, who cares? We all have our good points and bad. But instead it becomes this constant need to project an unrealistic self-image, and have his ego shored up, and dominate others in one-upmanship. It’s exhausting for his wife.

Noelle is stuck between wanting to defend and stand by the man she loves, and actually trying to get him to deal with real issues they are facing, like a lack of money because he is out of work. She gets sick of her husband always being treated like a joke, and herself and her marriage by extension. Yet at the same time, she has to ground him when his delusions of self-image stray towards the ludicrous. She spends so much time managing his issues for him, that she barely has any time to notice what she needs.

But when they’re alone and he can feel safe to be real with her, a totally different dynamic unfolds. They have intense sexual chemistry, and she really, truly loves him, and wouldn’t have any other man.

The whole family struggle to communicate, constantly descending into arguments, and pulling secrets from each other like teeth. Each sister in turn seems to articulate themselves better when talking their brother’s widow Thisbe, as though they are talking to their brother by proxy. But she has her own stuff to deal with, and is trying to work out how to break it to them that she’s moving in with a new man.

In some way, The World Without You is about the inconclusive nature of grief and family. While the delivery might be a little saccharin, the film says one of the reasons relationships are so hard and grief so lingering is that they are not given to resolutions, only transformations, and the accumulation of history. Even in death, it may end the person, but not the relationship, and his mother, his father, his sisters, their relationship with him is only transforming, not ending.

I went into this film knowing nothing and the last thing I expected to see was Kai Winn. Louise Fletcher is in this, as a good guy for once, and she’s great as always. Rod Steiger also appears as a Nazi colonel, bringing his signature moral ambivalence to the role. And Brett Marx, the kid who plays the film’s protagonist David, is also great, making believable a very naive and hopelessly idealistic character.

The other thing I didn’t expect was to laugh so much. This is actually really funny. Marx has great comic timing and physicality.

The film is about David, a Dutch Jewish boy who has seen one too many cowboy films. He practices for his bar mitzvah, then sneaks up onto the roof at night to practice his quick-draw. He falls asleep up there the night the Nazis come for the Jews of Amsterdam, and wakes in the morning to find himself alone in the world.

Saddling up his only belongings, he makes his way to a backwater town, where Louise Fletcher’s Mrs. Bakker takes him in and becomes his second mother. There, David’s cowboy fantasies come to life, and while working as her farmhand, learning to ride a horse and make a lasso.

But when the burgomeister draws him in to get his yellow star, the transformation is complete, and David imagines himself deputised the sheriff. When the Nazis arrive even in this peaceful little town, it comes down to its sheriff to stand up against the gang of no-goods.

Like Life is Beautiful, The Lucky Star is about children escaping into fantasy from the horrors of war. It is also a wish fulfilment for us as an audience, to see David take on Goliath, to see the innocent defeat the monstrous by the very virtue of that innocence. Surprisingly funny and surprisingly touching, a really enjoyable film.

Wow.

Final Account is an incredible documentary, interviewing the last remaining Nazis. And these are not, ‘I had to be a Nazi to keep my job as a paralegal’ kinda Nazis. We’re talking Waffen SS, the Death’s Head squad. We’re talking camp guards, people who were right in the thick of it.

My first thought was, “Why are they not in jail?” You know, in that naive way of thinking you assist in the murder of millions of people, you know, there might be some punishment. But no, they’re all in their picket-fence houses, in the same towns and cities where they grew up and wore their uniform. They wave to their neighbours, and their neighbours wave back and say, “Hi Mister So-and-So”. Evil is so mundane.

Which is kinda the point of the Final Account. It always was mundane. These men weren’t born with marks on their head saying, “You will participate in one of the greatest evils to take place on European soil”. Nah, they were born and grew up in small towns and villages, and dreamed of being a knight or a cowboy or a soldier, and when they came of age, the way to be a glorious hero was to join the SS.

What’s interesting is the range of opinion and reflections of these last surviving few.

Some are completely unrepentant, totally defiant, nostalgic for the camaraderie and grandeur of their youth, proud of their achievements, of what made them part of elite forces. “No regrets,” says one. Another has kept all his badges. “The idea was correct,” he says.

But interestingly that doesn’t equate as directly as you’d think to holocaust denial. Yes, some of them outright deny it, some claim the numbers were exaggerated, some claim that it was kept so secret no one could have known to intervene until liberation exposed it. But your auld yin with the badges, someone who is still committed to the Nazi ideals, he says it was wrong. That the Jews should have been expelled only, that to kill them was unnecessarily cruel.

Which yeah, all these are only degrees of horrific, and some might say, who gives a fuck to what extent of antisemitism they would have stopped at? And yer man might have simply been lamenting that the holocaust justified German’s division and subsequent relegation among world powers, not the deaths of millions of people. So what does it matter?

The filmmaker, Luke Holland, his grandparents were killed by the Nazis, they died somewhere unknown in the death machine. And he spent 8 years sitting with these men, listening to them, gaining their trust, and providing a space of no judgement for them to speak freely. Why?

Because the past is speaking, and we need to listen. We live in a time where all across the world people are seeing the rise of the far-right, and the normalisation of talking about people who are ‘unworthy of life’. Back then the Lebensunwertes Leben weren’t worth concerning yourself about if they died, today it’s having ‘an underlying health condition’ which means the you are an acceptable loss. None of these issues have gone away, so we need to hear from those who reached the very crescendo of horror how they got there, and hopefully warn us of how to avoid it.

Some do feel ashamed, they speak about their experiences openly to young people, letting them know, don’t believe the denial, I was there, I saw it. It’s so little and far too late, but it’s all the amends they can make.

Some say honestly, it’s the greatest shame of my life, but if you put me back there and gave me my time over again, I still don’t know if I’d do any different. Because I didn’t know what to do then, and I don’t know if I’ve changed enough that I’d know what to do now. Some claim they were afraid that if they refused orders, they’d be shot too, although no one has ever heard of that actually happening. Would they be braver than their fear if put to the test again? They say they don’t know. They didn’t think they were capable of it the first time.

It’s amazing how many of them split hairs over who was a perpetrator. “If you volunteer,” says one. “But didn’t you put yourself forward to be SS?” asks the filmmaker. Aye, but that was different. “I was a soldier,” says another, “I fought on the front. How am I supposed to know what’s going on a home?” “Weren’t you in the Death’s Head Squad in the Ukraine?” asks the filmmaker. Even up to the death camp guards, who says, “I just stood guard.” Yes, I watched them beaten, yes I watched them killed, yes I watched them burned. But I wasn’t the one doing it.

Apparently 6 million people were murdered and absolutely no one was responsible for their deaths. All these stories people tell themselves, so that they can go on living with themselves.

One Austrian woman points out, when Hitler invaded, the first people rounded up and killed were anyone who had taken a stand politically against Nazism. So all that were left were people who didn’t have that kind of committed opposition to fascism. People who didn’t want to get involved in politics, just live their lives as comfortably as they could. People who didn’t really question the status quo. People who were not happy standing out.

Final Account is a testament to be handed down to the generations to come. Soon the last living memory will disappear, and we will no longer be able to interrogate or gain insights from our past. Those who operated, administered, and stood by as the Final Solution wiped Europe’s Jewry from the map, what they tell us is a warning from history. Maybe even, or especially, the lies. For almost a century to pass and to still be unable to face the horror of what you’ve done. To tell yourself a lie about who you are for so long, you now believe it yourself.

These people were quiet, unassuming, law-abiding citizens until the 1930s, then they were complicit in mass murder for a few years, then they were quiet, unassuming, law-abiding citizens for 8 decades. Look around now and understand the possibility for that, the capacity for that, is always there.

For last, I’ll finish with a quote from Kiran Desai:

“There they were, the most commonplace of them… the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event.”

A Starry Sky Above The Roman Ghetto is a teen drama following Sofia, who decides to track down a mysterious girl whose photo she finds in a suitcase. This leads her to make a play based on the story she uncovers, uniting the Christian and Jewish kids of Rome in its production.

She finds a letter in a second-hand suitcase in the loft, along with the photo of a young girl. The letter tells the girl, Sarah Cohen, that she is loved, and to take the love which has been given her on her journey to her new life. It turns out Sarah Cohen was a young Jewish girl saved by nuns, one of whom in particular had a deep affection for her and loved her like a daughter. But an unethical prioress effectively sold her after the war, baptising her and putting her up for adoption with Christian parents.

Sofia sets herself to tracking down Sarah Cohen to give her the lost letter with the help of her friends from her own and the Jewish school. They are all creative types so they set out to turn the story into a play, so its lessons from the past can be heard.

To be honest, the kids are a little too enthusiastic about the play, defying their parents and the wishes of the local Jewish community by staging an inter-faith production. Which, on one hand it’s good to show the next generation throwing off the divisions of the past, and on the other, it’s like hey, maybe respect people’s traumas. They’re all super excited, composing music and sorting out costumes, and it’s like, calm down Dawson’s Creek, this isn’t an episode of Glee, folk are deid. It does stray more than a little into cheesy, but in pursuit of a good cause.

A hopeful story about finding ways to cross divides and heal old wounds.