Author: gffreviews

That was great.

The Earth is Blue as an Orange is a documentary following a family as they make a movie about their experiences living through the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is incredibly warm and intimate, like watching a little boat, aglow with light, weather a stormy sea.

The film is set in Donbass, which was a city before the war, and now looks like a ragged collections of mostly abandoned neighbourhoods, giving it a feel more like a small town, since the people are so sparse. There is this strange straddling of worlds that pervades the film, because Donbass is at once a big city, and at the same time a small community. The signs of war are everywhere, yet the fighting has mostly now ceased. Yet the silence is not safety, and an occasional shell will fall, or shot fired, letting everyone know the war is not yet over. And yet, when the mum takes her eldest into the capital to get her into university to study cinematography, life there seems completely normal, as though there were no war at all. This unreal blend of how normal everything can be, when things are also chaotic and in peril, is a theme throughout the film.

You see it especially in the life of this little family, as Anna, a single mother, tries to keep this home a haven for her children, give them stability, normality, and inspire their creativity and humanity through art. I don’t know how she does it. There’s four weans, a house full of cats, and a tortoise cutting about, and she not only gets them fed and raised, but educated and in university, and painting and filming and photographing and singing and playing the ukulele and accordion and flute.

I don’t know if it’s just watching this off the back of To See You Again, but all I could think was, you don’t know how much love a mother has for her children, you can’t measure it or see the sides of it. A mother will do anything for her children. She will move heaven and earth. She will give them laughter and music and art even in war. She will make their spirits blossom even in the darkest times. You can not imagine what a mother will do for her children.

I gret, I’m not gonna lie. It was a happy crying, it just moved me to tears.

What I liked so much about this film was, by focusing on the family making a movie, it didn’t show Anna and her kids just passively experiencing the war, being done-to. It shows how they took their experiences, what they chose to do with them, how they had something to say about them, how they turned their hardships into a work of creativity, were given shells and bullets and made film and photographs, and how they shared their art with their community. That’s their story.

The Earth is Blue as an Orange is a film that gives agency to its subjects, and shows the indomitable spirit behind ordinary people, and how people need art to survive.

No Data Plan is a film depicting a train journey taken across America by the director, an undocumented resident. He and his family came from the Philippines as a kid, and he has spent his life living in America, but is still seen as an illegal immigrant. The permanent sense of the fragility upon which your life is based, and the ever-present threat of discovery by the authorities, is quietly conveyed in this normal everyday experience of travelling by train.

The film is mostly shots out the window of the train, as you listen to the sounds around you, the benign chatter of the other passengers, the hum of music from other people’s headphones, the sounds of the train on the tracks. It kinda has a soporific quality, that you get with things like those late night shows of real-time journeys on steam trains. The rocking sound of the train, the blur of the image, it kinda lulls you to sleep. Which is why it works when your ears prick up that a conductor is checking IDs along with tickets, or you see a Border Patrol van out the window. This sense of never being able to rest is what is being conveyed.

Infinity Minus Infinity is an experimental art film on the theme of British racism.

I’ll be honest this exactly the kind of thing I’d be invited to by a pal in art school and afterwards stand around with my hands in my pockets, going, “Mmm . . . Yeah.”

Strike or Die is an odd wee documentary. It’s very loose in its formation, and the story it tells is much more a watercolour of the sense of its subject, than a linear, stark polemic. It juxtaposes memories and footage of the miners strike in the French industrial town of Merlebach in the early 90s as the mines were being shut down, with the current inhabitants, living a generation on, and paints the impact, even indirectly, upon them.

This probably isn’t how I would have told this story. Strike or Die starts from the outside and winds in, whereas I would have perhaps started from the centre and wound out. Because the film seems a little disjointed to start. You have these separate, disparate stories. There is a boxing club, where the coach trains the upcoming generation of fighters. There are the teenage pals, who bum about the shows, eating toffee apples, and trying to figure out how they’ll make a living after school. There is an older couple sitting in their livingroom, coming to terms with the result of a work accident which has left the husband unable to play the guitar – his trade of 30 years. There is an ex-miner, trying to collect in a single room the history of the miner’s strike, filling plastic tubs full of tear gas cannister shrapnel that was shot at them. At first it feels quite disjointed, but slowly it grows together to show a portrait of a community, and while the miner’s strike seems quite removed from these random threads of everyday life, as they wind closer together a common theme appears – one of fighters, of those who endure, who insist on their own worth, their own dignity, their own right to a good life. This is their inheritance.

My favourite scene in this is when the two teenagers go to the official mining museum for a cheap day out. (This is not the one-room makeshift job being put together by ex-miners, but the tourist attraction that was made out the old mine, with beautiful glass displays and scrolling videos.) They ask the tour guide, “What about the strikes?” The tour guide tells them, “Well, of course, there were strikes but obviously the history of the mine is not one of conflicts, we wouldn’t put up anything about that.” The teenager asks, “What about the diseases the miners got? Black lung, emphysema, that sort of thing. Were they well paid because the work was so dangerous?” “Oh,” says the tour guide, “the contribution the miners made could never be paid enough, their contribution was always more than their wage could reflect,” he philosophises next to the oil paintings of the mine owners who never spent a day working in that mine.

It reminds me of how American plantations were often painted in U.S. histories, everyone working together happily for a common purpose, dignified industry. How ludicrous and transparent a lie it seems to outsiders, that one folk were doing the working, and one folk were making the wealth. That one folk had oil paintings of themselves in finery, and one folk had their backs broken. And all resistance and revolt erased, because there could be no such dissent when there could be no such reason for it in this harmonious idyll. The European version of erasure of history seems subtler to us because we are in it.

Throughout the film there is a visual motif. The skeins of smoke that blew through the streets in the 90s from 5000 tear gas bombs dropped by helicopter on striking miners, drift through the scenes in current day, through this community of people trying to carve out their piece of life. The message is clear: The smoke has not yet cleared. The dust has not yet settled. This battle is not over. And we have yet to see who will win.