Really interesting micro-budget practically homemade horror. Shot during lockdown by a family in the Appalachian mountains, it is a pared down coming-of-age horror focused on a mother-daughter relationship.
Izzy and her mum live alone in the hills. It’s a peaceful and happy existence, surrounded by nature, a warm friendship between the two of them. They play in their own band in the garage, and forage nuts and berries to eat. The only quiet seed of discontent is that Izzy is not allowed to go into town when her mum drives down for supplies. Her mum has told Izzy that she has a precarious health condition that means she can only have limited contact with others, keeping her isolated at home. Izzy longs for friends and a life of her own, beyond just her mother’s company.
One day she stumbles upon a girl her own age, whom she desperately tries to befriend. At a party the girl throws, she and her mates trick Izzy into swallowing a worm. The result is an unravelling of the lies her mother has taught her all her life.
Izzy is not sick. She is like her mother, a hellbender. She feeds off the fear of the living.
Izzy’s mum has rejected her nature, giving up the cruelty and killing which imbues them with power, magic and ecstatics. She’s tried to ensure Izzy never knows the temptations of that way of life. But now she knows the truth, Izzy stands at a crossroads. Which path will she choose?
Liked this film, simple story, keeps a consistent focus on the relationship at its centre. It uses its limitations – the pandemic, the small budget – to its advantage, leaning into the sense of isolation and domestic claustrophobia. It’s also a great play on the classic pull and tear at mother-daughter relationships during adolescence.
Really wanted to see this when it came out, kept arranging with my sister to go, but we kept missing it. So delighted to get another chance to see it.
Alice Krige gives the lifeblood performance of this film as Veronica Ghent, an aging actress recovering from breast cancer surgery, who seeks solace in a Highland retreat. Unfortunately she is greeted by a shower of self-improvement enthusiasts who are all characters from a different genre of movie. She is in a feminist psychological folk horror, they are in a twee teatime comedy. You imagine them back home saying, “We went on one of them retreats, didn’t we Linda? The man who ran it was a right character!” Meanwhile Krige is drenched in blood having her third eye opened.
Initially aghast at having to share this very vulnerable and painful time with fools, Veronica eventually comes to believe she is being healed by the soil surrounding the retreat, nourished as it is on the ashes of all the women burnt as witches centuries before. Their pain mingles with her pain, their rage mingles with her rage, and she hopes to make a common cause in avenging injustice.
Because as Veronica withers and fades from public view, as she keeps her mastectomy a secret, and struggles even to recognise herself in the mirror, the director who made her his pet project at 13, who launched her career and raped her, that bastard is getting a knighthood. No fading from the limelight for him, no concerns about his aging or the longevity of his career. Still hailed as a genius, he’s going to be making a sequel to that first film of hers, and he’s auditioning so many young girls to find his new star.
In visions, Veronica sees a woman, an accused witch, bound and bloody, tarred and gagged with a scold’s bridle. And Veronica, here at what she considers the end of her career, the end of her womanhood, potentially even at the end of her life, she still can’t say what was done to her.
So that’s the plot, how was the film as a whole? Eh. Alice Krige is amazing, and if not for her performance, this film would struggle. Kota Eberhardt gives a strong showing as Desi, Ghent’s carer, and their relationship is the most resonant one in the film. In fact, at first I was a little irritated by interruption of all the flashes of visions and memories, because I felt it broke the flow of their back-and-forth, cut into the time need to establish their relationship and anchor the story in the real world. The film as a whole though I felt needed to be trimmer, tighter, that it could have just done with another going over in the edit.
And while this is a feminist horror, it is very much a white feminist horror. From the first scenes of this rich white woman snapping at the working class woman of colour employed as her servant, I was like, eeee. Please don’t let this be another film about how a rich white woman reveals that her life is in fact not perfect, to elicit the sympathy and support of other women, about whose lives she shows not a molecule of interest or solidarity. Please don’t let this be a ‘hug the maid’ moment.
Nae luck. That’s exactly what it is. Their relationship, despite it being one of the strongest parts of the film, goes absolutely uninterrogated, with Desi finding fulfillment through her support and growing admiration and affection for Veronica. Veronica even symbolically adopts Desi as her daughter by giving her a family heirloom, in a scene which has no inkling as to how paternalistic it looks. Veronica even criticises Desi’s androgynous appearance, which firstly fuck you, and secondly even if I kinda understand what you think you’re saying about the celebration of the feminine, fuck you.
The gay couple at the retreat are handed the most explicitly misogynistic monologue of the film, despite being a film which features two (hetero) rapists. One half of the couple eyerolls at the notion of patriarchy and when gesturing with his limp wrist has his hand magically set alight. Which, yeah, feels of a piece with the digs at Desi’s androgyny. So yeah, She Will needs to take another look at itself.
So a mixed bag, but still worth a watch in my opinion.
Wonderful getting to watch Haxan on the big screen with a specially created score.
The classic 1920s silent film examines the witch myth, the mass hysteria of the witch hunt, and its modern explanations of neuroses. In doing so, it births just about every trope of the horror genre to follow.
Surprisingly easy watch, given its age and how foreign that style of silent film is to us now, like reading Shakespeare in school. But Haxan is actually still very entertaining, and funny. And sexy. Like, really really filthy for its time. While tastefully keeping key areas out of view, there is no end of folk being stripped, whether to go out carousing with the devil, or to be poked and prodded by inquisitors. And the devil is overtly sexual, wiggling his tongue suggestively, or presenting his arse to be kissed by a line of witches.
(Side note: I’ve read witchcraft history some, and you’d be surprised how often arse-kissing comes up again and again. They were obsessed with it. Which given that the accounts are pure nonsense, the articulation of collective nightmares, makes you wonder if that wasn’t the medieval equivalent of the ultimate taboo sex act. The lack of adequate sanitary conditions probably made rimming a do-or-die sport so it would have been something you daren’t ask for, and thus its unattainability making it the object of obsession. Pet theory, nothing to do with the film.)
The filmmaker presents Haxan as a lecture in the history of the witch and the witch hunt. It explains the medieval worldview, and what the witch represented in that time. He even uses a pointer to gesture to interesting features in paintings and artwork from the time. The stern seriousness of these moments are used as permission to go into dramatisations of witch tales, complete with scantily clad women dancing to the devil’s piping, or nuns breaking into hysterical mass possession and casting aside propriety, or a pious man of the cloth begging to be flogged for his sinful thoughts. It’s actually very funny, leaning into the ridiculous, by showing women dressed as cats sneak into a church, supposedly as the story goes, to defecate on the holy altar.
Which, again, gotta say, the costuming is amazing. 1922 this film was made, and it actually still looks really good. The devil’s imps that accompany him on fife and drum remind me of nothing so much as the Fireys from Labyrinth, a movie made more than 60 years later. From the skeleton horse to the demonic pig, the costume design is just excellent.
The film concludes by rejoicing that we live in more enlightened times, where women are not decried as witches, but instead diagnosed as hysterics. Don’t know how to break it to the director but electroshock treatment and lobotomies were not the huge step forward he thought they were. And in making the connection, articulates so precisely who came to regulate and oppress women in the modern era.
Possibly the best part of Haxan is, after all the women in the nip being caressed by demons, after the men being driven wild with lust due to spells, after the demonstration of the modes of restraint and torture for scientific and totally not titillating reasons, the word for The End comes up on the screen in Swedish: SLUT.
The Deathless Woman is a documentary about the persecution of Roma framed around the legend of an undying Roma woman.
The unnamed woman was the pregnant wife of the leader of a group of Roma people in Poland during the 40s. When a pig went missing in the nearby village, a local man accused the Roma of the theft, and the Nazi occupiers massacred the whole community. The woman was shot and thrown in the unmarked mass grave, but in the legend, she does not die, becoming eternal in her rage, crying out for justice, for someone to bear witness to the suffering of her people.
The film starts with the buried woman narrating her story, and telling how she bewitches a London artist, subtly steering her towards uncovering her story. The artist, beset with omens, finding birds native to Poland dead her garden in England, begins to research the history of the Roma in the Holocaust. In Auschwitz, 21,000 Roma people were murdered, but on one night in May 1945, they rose up in defiance, turned on their Nazi guards, and refused to go to the gas chambers, a single act of extraordinary resistance in an impossible time. She visits a still and placid lake in Hungary, where over a hundred men, women and children lie in an unmarked mass grave hidden beneath the water.
The filmmaker uses the story of the search for the undying woman as a framing device for interviews with survivors. In Poland, a local man tells of when he was a teenager, being forced to dig the grave the Roma were thrown in after being shot. In Hungary a Roma woman tells how her mother, as a little girl, survived by hiding beneath her own mother’s body until after the shooting was done. Roma people speak of how present the fear still feels, that the majority will turn on them suddenly, and prejudice will catch alight into genocidal violence once more.
And as the film draws to a close, the quest becomes less about unearthing the deathless woman, but joining in her vigil, her eternal watch over her people, and sharing in her rage at the injustices done to them. It ends with the testimony of the mother of a man murdered in 2008 as part of a string of attacks by neo-Nazis on Roma people in Hungary. Separated by more than half a century, her story is eerily similar, the same elements, the guns, the fire, the chaos of not being able to find loved ones, the grief, the ash. Across Europe, the right is one the rise, and divisions and hatred are being stirred once more for political gain. The film asks us to keep watch.
Now, if you’d think that a film about the reporter who broke the story about the Holodomor would be about the Holodomor, and not about the reporter, then you’d make the same mistake I did going into this film. It’s called Mr. Jones for a reason, and that’s because it’s about Mr. Jones. To which all I could ask was, whyyy?
It’s almost an hour into the film before he even gets to Ukraine, and you are only there for about 20 minutes. None of the Ukrainians are named characters, you don’t get to meet them, or hear their stories, this is very much a walk-through the sites of devastation.
And that looked-at feeling stays throughout the film, as if the upper-class white male protagonist is the only real person, and the rest just part of the scenery, just images on the zoetrope. The few female characters are knee-dandlers, who despite holding positions in international affairs are treated as though they are primarily there to support, guide and reward the male characters. Queers show up only in one scene of hedonistic debauchery, an orgy put on by the Soviets for Westerners, a reflection of how they see them as having been seduced away from higher morals and values. You know, the classic schtick of using us to symbolically indicate degradation and degeneration, like this film was made in 1950s.
The majority of the film is about Gareth Jones’s time at the Home Office under Lloyd George, getting made redundant and deciding to become a freelance journalist in the Soviet Union, his frustration at the subterfuge which keeps him confined to Moscow and the lead that takes him to Ukraine. After the 20 minutes of touring the utter devastation in Ukraine, the film follows him trying to publicise the story, its subsequent denial and burial out of political expediency, and trying to find a new job. Eventually he comes into contact with George Orwell, whose narration of his work Animal Farm bookends the film.
The decision to start and end the film on Orwell is also baffling, he’s not the titular character, nor is he any of the people suffering in Ukraine. He has only two scenes outside of narrating Animal Farm, and that is meeting and then taking his leave of the main character, both at almost the very end of the film. Yet his placement in the introduction and ending gives him a significance totally disproportionate to his place in the narrative. And I get that the film is saying, because of Jones’s work on uncovering the mass murder in Ukraine, Orwell wrote Animal Farm, warning of the evils of the Soviet Union. But why would that be what you want to emphasise in a film which is, or should be, about the deaths of almost 5 million people? It’s like the film thinks we won’t care unless it relates it back to a book we’ve all heard of.
All the decisions on how this film was put together are baffling. From the relatively tiny amount of time actually spent in Ukraine, to keeping those directly impacted nameless and with only a few lines of spoken dialogue, to keeping attention not on what happened in Ukraine after the story broke, but on the fact a man who had once been in the employ of Lloyd George ends up having to work in a local newspaper in a small Welsh town, like that was the great tragedy here. To the choice to end the film by putting up information on screen about how Walter Duranty, the Soviet propagansist and genocide-denier who is set up as antagonist to Jones in the movie, still has never had his Pulitzer Prize revoked – which again, why? Why would that be what we came away caring about? Millions of people died! And this film doesn’t say almost anything about them, but expects us to care about an American award.
Overlong, badly constructed, and seems to miss its own point.
Some news that went under the radar during the great Covid contraction/spoon collapse of October, was the first films of the GFF were announced – yaldi!
Country Focus for ’23 will be Spain, with a really nice selection of new movies. There’s On The Fringe, starring Luis Tosar, who gave that spectular performance in Maixabel, playing opposite Penelope Cruz, telling the story of an activist lawyer trying to stop ordinary people from being evicted from their homes, only for his own life to start to fray and unravel under the strain. Prison 77 looks at prison reform in the aftermath of Franco’s fascist rule. And Lullaby, dealing with the a young mother’s personal journey.
2023’s Retrospective strand will be In The Driving Seat, focusing on women’s voyages of self-discovery. There’s The Piano, the absolutely smouldering classic starring Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel. A great chance to see the timeless romance Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Also showing is It Happened One Night, with Colette Colbert starring opposite Clark Gable in Frank Capra’s odd-couple rom-com about a headstrong heiress. And the original ride-or-die story, Bonnie and Clyde.
GFF is also running a strand shining a light on the works of Lee Grant, a socially conscious actor/director who was blacklisted in Hollywood in the era of McCarthyism. The strand will feature the documentaries she made under Regan’s tenure as President, like Down and Out in America, exposing the lie of the economic resurgence, by examining the recession leaving folk destitute and homeless in a time when the motto was Greed Is Good. In The Willmar 8, she follows the strike of a group of women workers at a bank in a small Minnesota town, who persist despite the decidely tepid support from the rest of their tightknit community. Her film Battered laid bare the reality of millions of women experiencing domestic abuse behind the closed doors. She made What Sex Am I? in 1985, giving a platform to the stories of trans people, and questioning why acceptance in society should be based on how closely one adheres to their assigned gender. Looks fascinating.
The sad news though is that Allan Hunter is retiring, so this will be his last GFF. Pure scunnered, him and Allison have been like the twin pillars of the festival every year I’ve been going, and it just won’t be the same without him. I loved hearing him giving his film recommendations during introductions in that gentle, soft-spoken voice of his. I loved his enthusiasm for the free films and classics. I remember him fondly saying that seeing us all lined up at 10am to come see Tarkovsky’s Stalker had warmed his heart. I loved his friendly rivalry with Allison over whose pics for the line-up would prove most popular. It just won’t the same.
Either way, GFF23 looks set to be a memorable festival, cannae wait!
Really interesting documentary about South Africa’s first multiracial punk band under apartheid, National Wake.
In the late 70s, brought together by a shared love of music and as a fuck-you to apartheid, a bunch of students started living in a house together. By the very fact that some were Black and some were white, this was an illegal act. Out of the nightly jam sessions and friendships formed came National Wake. Made up of brothers Gary and Punka Khoza from Soweto, and Ivan Kadey, a white Jewish architecture student, with Mike Lebesi, Paul Giraud, and Steve Moni rotating in and out, the music they played was punk infused with African rhythms and identity, and with explicitly anti-apartheid, anti-colonial and anti-racist lyrics.
From the first they faced push-back from the police. The band was illegal, them playing together was illegal, them living together was illegal. They were stopped and fucked with at every available opportunity. If the Black members of the band didn’t have the right papers to be in white areas for gigs, the police stopped and lifted them. When they put out their first record, the copies were seized and selling it was forbidden. The police drew them all in for questioning at one point and advised them how much more money they could make as a band in exile, what it would do for their image and sales, in what was the smoothest death threat ever.
For the guys themselves, being an integrated band, playing to integrated crowds, it felt like an act of hope. When they played gigs out in the streets, seeing people come together, regardless of race, to dance together, it felt like a defiant message of equality. The colour line in South Africa was so rigid, many people knew almost no one outside their race, except for in formal work settings. To mingle socially, to make connections with others on a personal level, while dancing at a National Wake gig, it was a rare opportunity. Ivan speaks of the sense of healing they got from playing, of his experience as a white musician, going to play a gig in Sharpeville, the site of a police massacre, and playing for the crowd and watching people dance together. It was a beautiful thing.
But what happens is what always happens. As the years go on, as the pressure mounts from the police, as they grow from being students to being young men with families, the wear and tear of the harassment, the persistent racism, and how those things are impacting differently on the band members, takes its toll. Ivan talks about how the white members of the band would always go out walking with the Black members when they went anywhere, because of the fear that the police would just lift Gary, Punka or Mike, and do god knows what with them. Using their whiteness as a shield introduces a dynamic within the band that Ivan admits he didn’t fully appreciate at the time. It seemed like no more than an act of solidarity, and natural you would go with your friends if the situation was dodgy, but never really considering what that experience must have been like from the other side. Equally, Ivan reflects on turning up in white bars for gigs, and the owner immediately assuming he was the leader of the band and addressing all his comments to him. As a young man, this laid back guy, the whole reason he was in a multiracial punk band was because he just took people as he found them, but when he did the same when accepting these racist microaggressions, it laid down resentments that festered. Racism was so big in their world, it was racism with a capital R, with separate benches and bathrooms, with police firing on peaceful protestors, with activists disappearing or showing up dead. It didn’t occur to young white men under a system like that to peer into the nuances of their interactions and behaviours. Those tiny gestures seemed a very long way off from the problem. But in fact it was this drip-drip-drip from within as much as it was the clashes from without, that wore away at their bonds and the band eventually broke up.
One thing to say about this film is Ivan is pretty much the only original band member interviewed. Gary and Punka have both passed now, so what they could say about these events from their perspective is lost. It’s something to bear in mind, especially as Ivan freely admits there were things he didn’t see and didn’t understand until years later.
Really interesting piece of South African history, a small pocket of defiance and hope existing long before its goal became a reality.
Absolutely fascinating documentary. Saying it now, this is gonna be a long review, because this film is packed and to even give an outline of the setup is to dive into a thoroughly messy time in history.
Reckonings outlines the story of how Germany came to agree to pay reparations for the Jews killed in the Holocaust. If you are thinking, “Aye, well obviously you would”, you don’t know how complicated this story is. If anything I wish this film had been longer, more detailed. I wanna go away and read more about the subject.
I knew absolutely nothing about the Luxembourg Agreement coming into this. I had never given much thought for how compensation came to be, as it seemed the most normal, natural, and only moral response. But it was a very different world in 1952. The Nazis didn’t evaporate at the end of the war, and they were still part of the social fabric of Germany. Even if someone wasn’t a card-carrying member, the entire population had been subject to years of indoctrination that they, their loved ones and their way of life were under attack from Jews, that Jews had been a legitimate and real threat, whose defeat was simple self-defence. To put it in disgustingly reductive terms, Germany had been defeated by the Allies, the Jews had been defeated by Germany, and that was just the way things were, like it or not; the idea that Germany would pay not only those who had triumphed over them, but also those who they had subdued seemed to fly in the face of logic. It was unprecedented.
And not popular. The German Chancellor Adenauer spearheaded the push for compensation to be given, and received a bomb in the post for his views. Even those who didn’t object on the basis of antisemitism, objected on the basis of self-interest. Germany had been bombed flat by the Allied forces. It had been economically destroyed by the cost the war. It had been split into two, and East Germany under the Soviets took absolutely no responsibility for actions of the Nazis. So West Germany, who I’m just gonna be referring to as Germany here, felt they had enough on their plate, and enough understandable excuses to get out of paying.
Luckily Adenauer wasn’t swayed. A devout Catholic, he was convinced something must be done for the victims of the Holocaust, and that Germany must show its rejection of the their legacy. When Jewish representatives came to the negotiating table, they expected to see the same old faces, the people who had thrived under Nazi rule and continued to enjoy power and status in the new Germany. What they got was Adenauer, a man who so vehemently spoke out against the Nazis that he was suspected, although incorrectly, of being behind the assassination plot that almost killed Hitler. He was lifted by the Gestapo for questioning, but managed to escape the interrogation centre. However they then lifted his wife and did god knows what to her to get her to tell them where he was hiding. She withstood everything until they threatened to bring in her children, at which point she caved and told them what they wanted to hear. Adenauer understood her decision completely and forgave it utterly, but she could not live with it and took her own life. He was a man well acquainted with the Nazi capacity for barbarity.
However, not everyone shared his commitment to ensuring the horrors of the Nazi regime were acknowledged and its victims made amends. His Finance Secretary Fritz Schaffer felt like the one billion dollars promised was just an utterly unworkable sum of money, and undermined the entire negotiation process by trying to barter down the price. He was trying to balance Adenauer’s push for compensation with the influence of Hermann Josef Abs, a banker who had been a Nazi collaborator and was now in charge of trying to argue down the Allied powers on terms of war reparations. Pincered between the two, and responsible for keeping Germany solvent in these tentative years after the war, he looked for any way to get that number down.
You can imagine how the Jews felt about that. It cannot be emphasised how deep the feelings were about these negotiations on the part of Jewish people. Every negotiator was there representing millions dead and hundreds of thousands still living and suffering from what was done. To look Germans in the eye and hear them quibble over pennies in the face of their loss was something the word ‘insult’ does not begin to cover.
From the get-go the idea of sitting down the Germans was utterly repugnant to many Jews. In Israel, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion suggested they hear the Germans out, Menachem Begin held a rally outside denouncing him as a traitor, and the crowd was so enflamed they attempted to storm the Knesset. Ben-Gurion argued, quite rightly, that the Nazis had stripped their victims of every financial asset they had, and to allow the Germans to continue to enjoy possession of it was a terrible injustice. He argued that it was Israel’s place to fight for the rights of the 700,000 Holocaust survivors within its borders. Even still, the motion passed by only one vote.
And while I have so far presented this process as a Germany vs the Jewish community negotiation, it was actually more complicated than that. Germany was jointly negotiating with the state of Israel and an international organisation set up to represent Holocaust survivors elsewhere globally. And all of Israeli politics also comes into play.
They were bankrupt after the Arab-Israeli War that led to the establishment of Israel and the Palestinian Catastrophe. After an all-consuming war on all sides against every neighbouring country, the survival and protection Holocaust victims was conflated with the survival and protection of the Israeli state, an attitude that went unchallenged at the negotiations and within this documentary. The means for the Israeli government to buy arms is put forward in the same breath as the means to feed and clothe refugees. And while this is a film that is packed with plenty already, and it is understandable that it wants to keep focus solely on the victims of the Holocaust, there is a big yikes! in the lacuna in this part of the story.
My favourite part of this film was Ben Ferencz, a wonderful man, who I was delighted to see again after his appearance in Getting Away With Murder(s). A life replete with good work, he pops up here as a negotiator on behalf of the international Jewish community, outlining the legal argument on which the basis of reparations should be made. A small man, with sharp, clever eyes, he is frank and fair in his assessment of the situation, direct and open in his interview. He has a calm and a kindness to the way he speaks that I find admirable. At 102 at the time of this interview, he is still incisive as ever. So glad he is still with us, the man’s a treasure.
As I said at the beginning, this is a long review, but even outlining the moving parts gives you some idea of just how packed this 75-minute documentary is. Deeply intriguing, great film.
We Left The Camp Singing is a look at the musical culture in Theresienstadt, the ‘model’ ghetto the Nazis used for propaganda purposes. It was considered by the Nazis to be one of the less harsh places Jews were sent, that there were enough vestiges of a normal life to give the appearance to others, such as humanitarian inspectors, that the prisoners’ conditions were hard but not inhumane. In reality over 30,000 people died there and approximately 88,000 were deported from there to die at Auschwitz.
But Theresienstadt was a unique place. Many of those sent were Jews whose immediate murder might provoke an unwanted social response, namely elderly people, children, veterans for the First World War, and people who were famous or well-respected in their field. So Theresienstadt ended up with a lot of top class musicians, people who were extremely gifted. And despite initial Nazi repression, their performances were then capitalised on for public performances for propaganda purposes. However, it was for the people of Theresienstadt that the musicians played, to give them brief respite from the reality around them.
Beautiful work was composed and written there. Some of which were hidden inside mattresses, some inside the roofs and walls. Even now we are still recovering music that was made there. Great composers such as Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Rafael Schachter and Alice Herz-Sommer all did work while at Theresienstadt.
It was the work of Pavel Haas that first caught the attention of the filmmaker. She is an Italian pianist, and she was gripped when hearing a piece of Haas’s work for the first time. When she subsequently discovered that he had composed the work while in Theresienstadt, she had to know more. Her research led her to create this documentary, interviewing survivors about life in the camps, and about the role music played.
The survivors speak of the transformative power of music, its ability to release them from the place and time they found themselves in and transport them elsewhere. They talked of how it would nourish them, even when they were hungry. They talked of people working all day, exhausted from hunger and labour, still taking time at the end of their day to sing together in a choir. The filmmaker herself goes to the site where the ghetto stood, and in its old buildings, plays the music that was made here, letting the notes echo through its empty walls.
The subject is fascinating but I didn’t like how the documentary itself was put together. It was done in that style I dislike where the filmmaker centres themselves in the story, speaking about it as though it is their journey of discovery, showing their reactions while listening to interviews. I understand it’s meant to make the story personal and relatable, but it just gets my back up, it comes off as egotistical, like you are trying to eclipse your subject, believe your curiosity deserves to take screen-time away from those whose stories you are meant to be telling, that their stories somehow need your on-camera endorsement for an audience to listen, that you are taking the stories of others and slapping your branding over it to sell yourself. I know that’s not what’s intended in most cases, I know that this is a new filmmaker’s first film and that they trained as a pianist and not a documentary director, but still, I found it irksome. And because it was her first film, I can forgive a lot of it. It just bothered me.
Despite any flaws in its construction, this film shines a light on a fascinating subject.
I was in two minds about watching this documentary because I’m in such a happy queer space right now and I knew this was just going to be wall-to-wall religious trauma. But it’s such an important subject and it’s such a rare opportunity to have see inside what takes place in conversion therapy.
“The religious community offers very clear options,” says one survivor. “One is to marry a woman, even though you’re attracted to men. Two is to live alone. Three is to leave the Orthodox life. And four is suicide.”
The documentary follows two men, Ben and Lev, as they continue in the conversion therapy they’ve been undergoing for years in the hopes it might rid them of their attraction to other men. Ben is in his early 20s and has been in conversion therapy since he was 16, when he fell in love with another boy at yeshiva school, and their constant companionship and longing glances were noticed by the principal, who immediately outed him to his family and expelled him from the school. Lev is in his 50s and has been in conversion therapy for almost 30 years, since emigrating from the States to Israel. He fled New York in the early 90s, what would have been during the AIDS crisis, and became deeply religious, settled in the Holy Land and married a woman. Three decades on he is divorced, single, and still attending private and group therapy sessions to end his attractions.
The thing that sticks out from the get-go is how deeply lonely a life it makes. And you see how it works, this cult-like therapy, because you have literally no other support network. The only place where you are shown any kind of empathy and support is in the therapy. Because you can’t have authentic loving relationships, because you can’t establish honest and real friendships, because everything with your family is so conditional and always balanced on a precipice of world-shattering loss. You are utterly reliant on the therapy continuing because it’s the only connection that makes you feel hopeful and good about yourself.
And it’s so easy to see how you would not clock it as abusive. The conversion therapy in Israel originates and is evangelised from the religious right in the States. It was developed there in the 90s, again during the AIDS crisis, and seems to have grown like a weed based on collective queer trauma. And it is specifically dressed up not to look like the more traditional forms of conversion therapy, namely strapping your genitals to a car battery, inducing vomiting so you throw up when shown pornography, beatings, and nothing short of sexual assault. All of those things are hard to disguise as legitimate therapy, but talking? Pshh! Talking is free, and voluntary, and everything legitimate therapy is based on. So softly, softly, catchy monkey, you have these nice people, with kind voices, tell you that you can be everything you need to be, for your family, for your community, for your religion. You can have the happy and fulfilling cishet TM life. You are going to be able to be this person you feel like you should be, want to be, are desperate to be, and that they, and they alone, can help you get there.
They go into all this bollocks about how attraction to men is rooted in traumatic and difficult relationships your father, which is of course gonna resonate with everyone in the room, because if they had a loving father, he wouldn’t let them spend a single minute in conversion therapy. So of course in that room it hits as true 100% of the time. And that just reinforces that the therapy is insightful and based on tangible evidence.
Over the course of the film you are just begging for both these men to get out this situation. The traumatic scenes I had dreaded going into the film, something dramatic with vulnerable people having hateful scorn poured upon them, don’t materialise. Instead it manifests as this continual drip-drip, done with soft voices and gentle hands, of slowly mutilating people from the inside out.
Really excellent documentary, done with patience, understanding and empathy for its subjects, and eschewing anything gratuitous or retraumatising for the audience.
