Author: gffreviews

A visual poem. As two friends backpack across the beautiful South African landscape, the narration speaks poetry about passion. The shots in this are just stunning, and the sexual tension between the two actors is palpable. Just gorgeous.

The main character goes out to meet a Grindr date at a gay club called Cosmopolitan. The entire short film is basically composed of this one scene of him trying to get into the club. He’s the only Black guy in the queue and this proves a problem for admittance. An indictment of racism within the queer community.

A few days before Issa is about to be released from prison, a new fish appears, Gaetan. This short film encapsulates a world of drama. You can see a history stretching behind and a future ahead, and these scenes as the turning point between it all.

To begin, prison is the place where Issa has nothing and can’t wait to leave. Being gay, he is ostracised. Violence and intimidation, even sexual, is the only interaction you see him have with other prisoners. He keeps his head down and learns the skills needed to make a living on the outside.

That changes when Gaetan arrives. He is kind and curious, and senses a kindred spirit in Issa. They cautiously circle each other, each waiting for the other to open up.

As Issa’s deadline approaches, he begins to really take stock of what he has out there versus what he has in here. Great wee film.

Using animation and archival footage, Half A Life is a short film in which a gay Egyptian guy discusses what instigated him to get into activism and what he thinks about his country.

After witnessing a homophobic attack, with the collusion of the police, the main character takes the shame and helplessness he feels and becomes involved in queer activism. This involved spreading slogans on bank notes, and trying to raise people’s awareness of human rights issues.

When the revolution comes, he is out on the streets, and he gets a wider education in politics. But as things sink back into a new normal, is there a place for him in Egypt? Will he have to decide between his home and his sexuality? The sense of danger is always there, and the possibility of seeking asylum abroad is a long-thought over option.

But for now, he is ready to try to heal the rift, and use his voice to make Egypt a better place, one where he and all Egyptian people can feel safe and hopeful.

Beautifully animated, vulnerable and honest.

Tang Jer is a short film about a vampire’s roadside cafe. The film mixes the surreal and the everyday, so the busy businesswoman reads cowries and uses her divinations to guide her investments. A chicken walks in and demands to be fed but is unemployed and cannot pay. A strange little girl does her homework while the canteen’s disembodied serving arms try to distract her.

Mad.

Waited til Halloween to watch Juju Stories. An anthology film of 3 stories of the supernatural.

In the first, a woman casts a love spell on her crush, but is he the man she wants? In the second, a pair of scoundrels are cursed to receive punishment for their misdeeds. And in the last, a frenemy may be a witch.

Nice to see Nigeria repping on the horror stage.

The assassination of Marielle Franco mobilised an entire generation of Black women into Brazilian politics. From street demonstrations to the ballot box, Seeds: Black Women to the Front follows the journeys of women who stand in the 2018 election.

The murder of Marielle Franco sent a message loud and clear: “If you are a Black woman who fights for Black women, you will be killed”. The intention was to silence them, but instead it got the opposite reaction. Black women took to the streets to make their voices heard, and when election time came, there was a 93% increase in Black women volunteering to stand for political office.

Marielle’s death also brought home just how far Brazil was tipping into fascism under Bolsenaro. There was a need to present anti-fascist candidates across the board. If the rise of the far right went unchallenged, there soon might be no democracy left to defend.

Seeds is a great documentary for showing a wide diversity of women who stand, from different parties, from different backgrounds, trans women, religious women, working class and educated women, women from favelas. They stand on an anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-queerphobic platform.

Come ups and downs, come win or lose, there is no going back, they have the inspiration and the confidence, they understand their worth and importance of their voice. This is Marielle’s legacy.

The Colonel’s Stray Dogs refers the opponents of Gaddafi who went into exile, one of which was the filmmaker’s father. For 40 years Ashur Shamis’s life revolved around the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, but in the Libya that has emerged he still has no place, and no way to return home. In the aftermath of the accomplishment and destruction of his dream, his son sits him down to take an honest accounting of his life.

When Colonel Gaddafi took power in a military coup in 1969, Ashur was an idealistic young man. He was attracted to the pan-Arabic teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was an outspoken activist, and when it was clear that this would cost him his life, he fled to Britain.

Khalid, his son, was born in the leafy suburbs of London. He grew up like any other kid on his street and all he knew of Libya is that it is where his dad is from. In some ways there is a resentment there, that they have such a happy home life in London, but his father is constantly living in Libya, in his thoughts, in his work, in what he gives his time and energy to.

What has his father been doing all these years? As part of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, he mostly handled press interviews, denouncing the dictatorship, talking about human rights abuses. He’s smart, articulate and likeable. He did all he could to bring media attention to the crimes of Gaddafi.

But the NFSL wasn’t just a talking shop, and their tactics included violent resistance. They armed and trained paramilitary forces to try to overthrow Gaddafi. And here we get into the more questionable of his father’s actions. Because these groups were cobbled together from idealistic young men, armed with whatever they could find the money for, and trained in whatever country also had reason to hate Gaddafi and would allow them to play soldier in their backyard. They launch a number of attacks, with Ashur doing the drumbeat of propaganda from afar, and they are slaughtered. The media characterises them as suicide missions.

Khalid speaks to his mother in the kitchen while his father naps. “He was an arms dealer.” “He was not an arms dealer!” protests his mother, who seems to have stayed willfully ignorant of her husband’s activities, “Don’t be stupid!” He asks her, “Do you think he was a terrorist?” and she laughs at the question. There seems to have been a lack of critical examination of his actions during those times.

Gaddafi was such a monster of an enemy that any countermeasure seemed justified. But they sent those men to their deaths, in missions that impartial observers could clearly see had no chance of succeeding. Their judgement was clouded, by their underestimation of the stability of Gaddafi’s regime, by their distance from the reality on the ground, by their own desperation to succeed and go home. And perhaps their judgement was clouded for them, as Ashur eventually left the Front and gave up violent action when he felt they were all simply being used as pawns by the CIA.

As the years in exile grew into decades, Ashur’s hope came and went in ebbs and flows, and when he still tried to help it was again, mostly through speaking in the media. Satellite tv and the internet provided new opportunities for Libyans to get news from beyond state propaganda.

And then the Arab Spring came. Which no one saw coming. Least of all Ashur. And it was with absolute delight that he greeted the deposition and death of Gaddafi. He returned home to see his family and take up a role in the formation of a new government. And what happened?

He was irrelevant. He hadn’t been in the country for almost half a century. He knew no one on the ground. He didn’t understand the dynamics and nuances of power he was walking into. And the Libya he had envisioned it to be, it no longer was any more. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had believed that if they got rid of Gadaffi, the Libya of 1969 would return. That they would not simply depose him, but undo him.

The Colonel’s Stray Dogs is about the dislocation of exile experience, of the double-vision that occurs, and the questionable decisions that can be made when you live more for your dreams than for your reality. An absolutely fascinating film about the lives of people you would walk past on leafy suburban streets.

I really wanted to see this but missed it at the Take One Action film festival, so I was so glad to get another opportunity with Africa in Motion. It was well worth the watch.

In the city of Zinder in Niger, is the Kara Kara district, traditionally the home of lepers and pariahs, today it is an area known for its poverty and violence. Going beyond the headlines, this documentary follows the residents of Kara Kara, seeing their lives and their community from their perspective.

With sky-high youth unemployment, cut off from education, and no prospects, young men form gangs, or palais. There they hang out, shoot the shit with their friends and work out. And when I say work out, I mean work out. When everything costs money, working out is the only pastime that is free, and without a job to eat into your time, these guys are stacked. Like, lift a motorbike with your mates on it stacked.

This hypermasculinity compensates for any other societal measurement of success. But it is rare for toxicity not to accompany it, and the palais are no exception. Young men test themselves in street battles, and their bodies as scarred with the blades and makeshift weapons of hand-to-hand fighting. In turn, arrest and prison follows, and the cycle of oppression keeps on spinning.

After the arrest of three of his friends, Siniya Boy tries to find a better way, deciding to try and set up a security firm with the local lads. Given that they’re all young and built like tanks, it seems like a good idea. But when you are poor, every part of every step is difficult. Even sourcing the income for uniforms, clothes and boots, requires cash. So they take up work in a quarry, working by hand breaking rocks with a pick and sledgehammer. Honestly cannae watch, because you see him standing swinging that hammer, wearing flip-flops. Not a steel-toe boot among them, and you just tense up at every swing.

Bawa has already got out of the life. He states plainly that he just couldn’t live with the things he was did. He participated in the street violence, maiming others, and in gang rapes of local women. It is a life he wants to leave behind for good, although he says he is haunted by his memories. He now works as a taxi driver, providing for his family. He tries to do better for his community, and in some sort of amends, he tries to help the women of the red light district, encouraging trafficked children to return to their parents and working to get police attention to the murder of a sex worker.

But even Bawa is still part of the economy of the district that goes hand-in-hand with the gang life. Despite the fact Niger exports billions of dollars of oil every year, in Kara Kara in Zinder, there is a shortage of petrol. The price is too high for the residents, and it is regularly smuggled across the border from Nigeria and sold at half-price. Bawa fills his taxi on such stuff, at roadside stands run by palais members. Here we meet Ramasess.

Ramasess is a genderqueer smuggler who makes night runs to the border, dodging police patrols and customs agents. They have to support their mother and sisters. They describe themselves as hermaphrodite, but this seems less an indication of being intersex as it is an expression of trans non-binary identity. But this means they have the household cares from the female sphere as well as the responsibility accorded to the firstborn son. Ramasess says they wouldn’t be a smuggler if they had a better options. But the fact is it is steady paying work, and there is constant need for cheap petrol.

The thing Ramasess, Bawa, and Siniya Boy all have in common is the feeling that their reality is not acknowledged. That the cops and the border patrols, they all have no answer to the question, “What do you expect me to do?” Because the plans seems to be just starve. There is no employment paying a living wage for dignified work. In this district in this city in this country rich in oil, gold, and minerals, there seems to be no way open for folk to survive.

But this is not simply a bleak documentary on these bleak conditions. It is also an examination of the endless resourcefulness of a generation of young people finding a way to make a life, make a future for themselves. None of them are lying down, all of them are fighting. And as they turn themselves towards paths more beneficial to their community, that fight becomes a fiercer one for the future of Zinder.