Category: EIFF

Duthchas is a beautiful film about life on the island of Berneray, combining a family archive of film shot in the 1960s with interviews with residents and their descendants. The title Duthchas is a word roughly translated here into Home, but has no direct translation in English, encompassing a wealth of ideas, including heritage, lineage, culture, and relationship with the world and each other.

My first thought when watching this film was about how different life is. Even when comparing the apples and oranges of the past and the present, I couldn’t help feeling that, despite being Scottish, my life has more in common with an English-speaking city dweller in another country than it has with a Gaelic-speaking Hebridean. Gloria, an Australian nurse who was the first non-Gaelic speaker to settle on the island, and whose wedding is captured on film, describes Berneray as so “foreign”, and I understood what she meant.

Language is a huge part of it, and you can trace the generational shifts in the loss of it. The older generation, who you can see as young men and women in the film, are native Gaelic speakers, and during their adolescence Gaelic was the only language spoken on the island. English was reserved for use on the mainland, and women who went rarely outside the islands would maybe not speak it at all. Language is such a cornerstone of culture, conveying a worldview, values, and intrinsic ideas. It is not simply different sounds for like-for-like subjects, it is a transmission of whole communal understanding of the world and ourselves.

In the 1960s, life on Berneray was one of tight knit community, with daily interaction and reliance on one another, for crofting, for fishing, for trading. In the evening was ceilidhing, going to the neighbours’ house for drinking and dancing. Churchgoing on the Sunday was an unspoken must, as was the rule that you never put your washing out on the Sabbath. People lived in the houses their grandfathers and great-grandfathers built. They could trace their lineage back through their patronymic, pass down tales and songs that existed for hundreds of years.

The interruption in that way of life was when time for secondary school came, and children were sent off the island to residential schools taught entirely in English. And if you couldn’t speak English, you were given the belt until you could. It was a brutal dislocation, and it beat Gaelic out an entire generation. Women especially, were not expected to return to the island, as all paying work there was seen as ‘for men’. Mothers are the best resource you can have for handing down knowledge and culture, and without a place for them on the island, young women married on the mainland or emigrated abroad, taking the next generation of family with them.

Television also ended the nightly ceilidhs, and made the intergenerational social cohesion decline. People became isolated in their own homes, creating gaps among the older Gaelic-speaking populace and the younger English-speaking families. Ceilidhs were not simply about dancing, but where language, music, song, history and story were handed down. Younger people just weren’t exposed to this.

But while this is a reminiscence, it isn’t a eulogy. A new generation is coming up, who have had the opportunity of being educated in Gaelic medium schools, and who have Gaelic and are keen to keep it. It may not be the Gaelic of their forefathers, but its very survival leaves open the door for all that to be preserved and rediscovered. The causeway has meant greater ease of travel and better economic prospects. And technology has meant that working on the mainland isn’t the absolute necessity it once was.

Duthchas charts the change and continuity of a way of life, of a home that has been kept by its people even when separated from it. Really beautiful film.

Ooft!

Off The Rails is a documentary about a group of young guys in Guildford into parkour. The film follows their story from 15 to 22, showing the ups and downs of their lives as they try to turn their passion into a career.

What this film is really about is class. It’s about the inescapability of class, and how every step forward is met with three pushes back. Yet it’s also a defiantly hopeful film, because despite these challenges (and by challenges, I mean god awful things that happen), the young men at the centre of the film continue to push, to pick themselves up, to dream of a better future for themselves, and try to create it. And regardless of success or failure, they have each other, bonds of friendship through thick and thin.

What I liked most was the way the documentary didn’t try to separate the good and the bad out. Parkour is a healthy outlet for their energy, keeps them fit, gives them a sense of athletic achievement; it’s empowering, it allows them to traverse and interact with their city in a way that gives them ownership of the place they live; it gives them an appreciation and love of architecture; it allows them to see vistas few ever would. At the same time, it’s an adrenaline hit that can become addictive, and the line between developing your skills and escalating for the rush blurs quickly; it’s spectacle, and as spectacle is subject to the pressure and demands of an audience; its transgressive nature puts it in conflict with the law, and can end up narrowing life options, rather than expanding them; it comes with genuine risk of injury and death. All of these things co-exist at the same time, and are inseparable from each other. This is not a story of how a positive thing got taken too far and became a negative thing, it’s far more complex than that.

I really identified with the guys, Rikke, Aiden, Nye, Alex and Owen. Growing up in a shithole town, no prospects, hating school. You feel like a rat scratching at a wall. While I was able to hook on to my education to get me out of there, Rikke and Aiden leave school without any qualifications. The options are shit work, no work, drink, drugs, and the noose. There seems to be no way to actually change your life. But when a clip of them doing parkour goes viral, they become YouTube stars. Suddenly the possibility of making a living doing what they love seems possible.

But all the market forces come into play. Making a YouTube channel takes an enormous amount of work, and you are entirely dependent on the algorithm and monetisation to make any income. While there are flashes of success like booking a North Face ad photoshoot, you have no hourly rate, no benefits, no sick pay. Plus, you now have the appearance of success, with millions of views, so no one can believe it when you are still unable to afford to move out your parent’s house. And the algorithm, the audience, always demand fresh content, the bigger and more extreme the better.

Rikke and Aiden are very conscientious about the impact they have on their audience, they stress that they are effectively athletes, who have practiced and practiced to be able to do what they do. Yet that can never negate that there will always be viewers willing to emulate their most dangerous stunts without the proper precautions. And they themselves are pushed, by the nature of the medium, to do the most attention-grabbing stuff. They take to train surfing, as it brings in the most views, but as one guy points out, that’s not really about parkour skill, because the train is in control. One jolt and it’s all over, doesn’t matter how good you are. And as more and more legal problems mount in the UK, it means going abroad to do their surfs, where they are less familiar with the routes, the schedules, the dangers.

This film couldn’t have asked for a better marriage of subject and theme with young working class men trying to jump over walls, an act of elation, hope and defiance, but with no promise of what is on the other side.

I didn’t like it.

The Ballad of a Great Disordered Heart is a film made by Aidan O’Rourke, Mark Cousins and Becky Manson about the area known as Little Ireland in Edinburgh’s Old Town, and its cultural and musical legacy. I admit to a bit of trepidation going in, because I’d loved Iorram with Aidan O’Rourke’s beautiful score, but I’d been less enthused by Mark Cousins’s The Story of Looking, and I couldn’t help but wonder what that combo was gonna be like in this film.

I actually was really pleased at the start of the film. Aidan reflects on the impact of the Covid lockdowns in a positive way, as a shared cultural experience, that forced us to slow down and stay put, gave us time for thought and internal recalibration, as well as connection with our neighbours and surroundings. His neighbourhood in the centre of the city was usually an anonymous place, stacks of flats one on top of another, the majority let out through Air BnB, and a constant shuffle of tourists. No one connected with their neighbours because there were no neighbours, it was as impersonal as a bustling train station. Over the course of lockdown, with the tourists gone, Aidan connected with three elderly residents, who had lived there from the time of it being Little Ireland, filled with immigrants from Ireland, Lithuania, and Italy. All called Margaret, they shared with him their memories of the neighbourhood. Great, I thought. Sounds brilliant. A sort of ethnography of neighbourhood.

But the Margarets are given barely a few minutes’ space, and then their voices are then largely absent throughout the rest of the film. Instead it focuses on Aidan and his mates in the folk music scene, talking about what folk music means to them. And the whole thing sinks into being very self-indulgent.

In fact I felt I learnt very little about the area or the Margarets, and instead was just treated to a succession of interviews by musicians about themselves. While I’d been totally up for having musical heritage being a large strand of the film, and in fact was something I was looking forward to after Aidan’s Iorram score, it became disproportionately the focus, obscuring the context it was meant to be taking place in.

Also, I absolutely hated the way a lot of this was shot. Constant close-ups of folk’s left nostril, earlobe or eyebrow hairs, while an interview was going on. Each time jittery or swaying out of focus. I understand that there was maybe an attempt to pair the soliloquising on the transcendental nature of music with a dreamy visual meditation on the curls in someone’s hair. But it just totally fought your ability to listen and focus on what was being said, or have the emotion conveyed, when you seemed to be viewing it through the short attention span of a director who seemed now to be counting the freckles on someone’s face, or pondering the beard scruff on someone’s cheek. It actively fought the content. And as time went on, it became infuriating. I ended up shutting my eyes a lot of the time so I could listen to what was being said, instead of being taken on a shuddering ghost train ride around the pores of someone’s face. I think you’ll agree that’s not ideal for a film.

So in the end, despite liking the music it contained, I’ve got to say I didn’t like The Ballad of a Great Disordered Heart. I feel it lost its grounding, lost its focus, and became far too centred on the filmmaker.

Billy Crystal writes, directs, produces and stars in Here Today. The character seems based on him, an aging comedy writer, who has lived through fame and success, and now is enjoying a more settled and obscure time in his twilight years. Which is not say he’s idle, he’s vital and enthusiastic and still chipping in in the writers’ room of a SNL-style show. In fact, it is his undimming lust for life that is what makes it so hard for him to accept his diagnosis of dementia.

There’s been a lot of dementia films lately, The Father, Supernova and now this. Don’t know why.

Anyway, Crystal’s character, Charlie Burns, has a quirky meet-cute with Tiffany Haddish’s Emma, a manic pixie dream nurse. She is this larger-than-life character, singing in a swing band on the streets of New York, dressing in retro vintage fashion, and wolfing down any food she finds. As a young woman at the beginning of her story, Charlie is enthralled with how alive she is. Emma, on the other hand, is endeared by Charlie’s kindness, and enjoys hearing Charlie’s stories about a New York from another time. As she sits in his livingroom, beautiful violin music drifts through the window, and Charlie explains Itzhak Perlman lives opposite and practices in the evenings. She has no idea who that is, but encourages his to get up and dance. That’s their complementary dynamic.

In the Q&A afterwards, Crystal said he wanted Here Today to refute the proposition put forward in When Harry Met Sally, that men and women cannot be friends, sex will always get in the way. Here Today is about falling in friendship.

Mmmmmmmm.

This is an incredibly sweet and warm movie (straying into saccharine at times, especially towards the end) but it dances over a lot of problematic notions baked into the premise. Ultimately, Emma cancels going on tour with her band to look after Charlie as his live-in caregiver in the prognosed last year of his life. Which is a happy ending for the rich, white man who now employs(?) her. But Emma’s happy ending is to, uh, bask in his company? Like, this black woman’s happy ending is to provide round-the-clock medical and emotional care for this white dude. It kinda papers over a lot of unquestioned notions.

Plus, Emma isn’t shown as having much life beyond Charlie’s time with her. It’s established her family are all in another state, and she has an ex-boyfriend, but you never really see her living her life outwith Charlie, so it kinda lessens any impact of what she’s sacrificing to stay and look after him. Because as far as the film’s concerned, what else is she gonna do? When she can be helping heal this dude’s relationship with his family, and make him feel better?

So yeah, there’s a lot one-sidedness to the story, and it’s not, like, super funny, but it does kinda glow with a good-natured humour and a pleasantness that’s sort of classic to Billy Crystal films that I just miss, and enjoy seeing. A nice movie.

When I was a little girl, one of my favourite things to do was go for a walk with my grandpa, and listen to all the stuff he told me. That’s what watching Prince of Muck feels like. Like going on a walk with Lawrence McEwan, listening to him tell you about his island, about his farm, about his life, about his family.

Isle of Muck is one of the smallest Scottish islands, and it was purchased by a relative of McEwan’s at the end of the 19th century. In 1922, his father became laird of the island, and decided to live there, start a farm there, and help the community to prosper. Lawrence was born to that life, and loved it, and never wanted to be anywhere else. He grew up running barefoot up the hills, camping out among the windswept rocks, and reading poetry while watching the tide go in and out. Now in his 80s, he has passed the farm on to his son, and hopes his grandchildren will also want to continue on this way of life.

This film is a love letter from a man to his home. He has dedicated 8 decades of hard work to it, and as he takes stock of a life well-lived, hopes only to see its preciousness protected and endure. With striking cinematography, as you see the howling gales whip the heather, and the freezing spray break against the harbour walls, and the sky become a changeable masterpiece of colour and mood, you kinda start to fall in love with it too.

Lawrence lives like a man from a bygone time. He bathes in cold water every morning, drives a tractor from the 60s, milks his cows by hand, and ties up the animals in a barn at the back of the house every night. Each day he still goes out with his cows across the fields, leaning on his stick, the dogs running at his feet. A theme throughout the movie is that Lawrence is having a hard time letting go of a life he loves so dearly, whether that means doing less manual work, or letting his son make more of the decisions about the farm, or simply accepting the limitations of his body in old age.

“A good life and a quick death,” says Lawrence, is what every man desires, and what a farmer should give his animals. He calls all his cows by name, and scratches their backs affectionately, but a farm is not a place where the realities of life and death can hide. Mortality feels like a constant presence in every scene, a keen awareness of times passing, of inevitable change, and the fear of what it might bring, but the need to make peace with it as part of nature, and surrender to it, rather than struggle.

Pig, or Taken for bacon, is about the theft of truffle pig, and its reclusive owner’s journey to save it.

Nicolas Cage is such a liability for a movie. I watched the trailer, and was like, is this for real? Like, is this meant to be funny? Cage growls about wanting his pig back in a manner reminiscent of “Put the bunny back”. At one point in the cinema, this trailer played and folk were openly laughing. Trouble is when you’ve played a parody of yourself for 15 years, it’s hard to pivot back when you wanna be taken seriously. I remember him having to explicitly state he wasn’t just pulling another manic caricature when Mandy came out, and similarly with Color Out of Space. Attaching a former, or arguably still, A-list name to your film is a good way to get financing and attention, but Cage is really a double-edged sword.

All of which is to say, Pig is not a comedy. There are a few moments of congenial levity, but no. It is instead a mournful journey back into the world of the main character’s old life, and in many ways confirming why he left. It has a melancholy tone, and despite one or two scenes of rough-and-tumble, largely is compromised of going places and sitting down at a table and having a conversation with someone. The main character is taciturn, so these scenes aren’t even necessarily that heavy on dialogue. In tone, it’s closer to something like Blue Ruin.

The annoying thing about Nicolas Cage is, he can actually act. He’s actually great in this. He conveys a sense of loss and self-sufficiency throughout his performance, but can bring a wealth of emotion out from behind his barricades, turning this closed-off character inside out and open, in a way that rings with real vulnerability. It’s understated and it’s nuanced.

Which makes you wonder, so you can do this, you just choose not to? Whatever.

Also coming in hot with a strong performance is Alex Wolff, of Hereditary fame. He contrasts Cage’s silence and internal conflict with a chatty and flashy over-compensation. Yet, he equally manages to convey the fundamental human longing for fulfilment.

Together, their road trip takes them through questions of what we are looking for, and how we try to find it, successfully or unsuccessfully, in a variety of places. The main character is a man whose life burnt down, and who, in the ashes, took real stock of what he needed and what he didn’t need, what he wanted and what he didn’t want, and what mattered and what didn’t matter. His clarity contrasts with the markers of wealth, fame, and fashion of the Portland restaurant scene. The constant to-and-fro of seeking validation and a reflection of a satisfying self-image in the eyes of others.

But even in a life so pared down, loss is loss and grief is grief. And what we do in times of such challenges, is still a journey of discovery.