Category: GFF strand – Official Selection

Set on the Montreal drag scene, Solo follows Simon, a young drag queen as he falls in love for the first time.

Simon is surrounded by love, his sister makes his outfits, his family celebrate his performances, his friends at the club all form a tight-knit group, and his drag mother is a constant support in his life. And then into this steps Olivier.

Full praise should go to Theodore Pellerin who plays Simon, because his performance is really what keeps this film going. He plays this with such young, open, vulnerability. Simon falls in love with Olivier, and you see entirely in his face that he holds nothing back. He loves like someone who’s never been hurt, and is too young to know that it can feel this right and still not be. When he tells his sister he met someone, he is positively glowing.

And when Olivier turns almost immediately into a bastard, you see every hurt written there. First, small sharp edges which leave him with a look of shocked confusion. He looks about 9 years old, or like a baby bird. Then as Olivier begins to alienate Simon from everyone around him and systematically destroy his self-esteem, you just watch this thin rictus grin of “I’m fine” get plastered over what looks like a thousand shattered pieces. He’s always anxious, jittery, barely keeping from crying, permanently uncertain and unsure from which direction the next hurt will come.

While the performances are commendable, Solo does just have that one note though. Like, half an hour in, Olivier is already coming off as a bunch of red flags stuffed into sequins and high heels, and Simon is on the most by-the-numbers slide into an abusive relationship, and I was just like, “That’s it, that’s the movie, what the hell is the next hour of this film?” The answer is more of the same.

There’s not even really a B-plot. There is a tiny bit of conflict where Simon’s estranged mother comes to town, and his desperate need to seek her attention, approval and love is there to emphasise his mommy issues as a reason he’s not just kicking Olivier the fuck out. But honestly, it can’t really be considered a B-plot because it’s so A-plot adjacent. It’s just more “someone not giving a fuck about you and calling it love”.

I suppose it’s good to see a queer film tackling domestic abuse, especially among young gay men, because messaging around domestic violence and the tactics used to grind you down long-term are primarily aimed at women. And gay men, especially flamboyant boys on the drag scene, have been told so often that they are dramatic and extra, have been dismissed and not taken seriously, that it’s hard not to believe that’s what they’ll meet with if they speak out about what’s going on in their relationship. Hell, it’s hard not to internalise and minimise all your own feelings about what you’re experiencing. Especially if you are being gaslit to fuck.

So that’s good, but other than that, Solo is really a short film with an extra hour attached, to spell out something already obvious to the viewer from quite early in.

Sorcery is a folk tale about vengeance.

The main character is an indigenous girl who, at the start of the film, is exactly what the white colonisers want her to be. She is a servant, she is a Christian, her name is Rosa. Despite this, when the settler’s sheep are struck down, he accuses Rosa’s father of witchcraft, sets his dogs on him, and makes her watch as her dad is torn apart. Even when she tries to bury him, the settler’s wife desecrates his grave while Rosa is trying to pray over him, because her father was not a Christian.

Initially she seeks justice the way she should. She goes to the mayor of the nearby town and asks for the arrest of the settler. The mayor is not about to side with some penniless Native girl against a white landowner. He tells her to go to the Church and pray on it.

The person who comes to her aid is Mateo, an indigenous man who lets her stay with him and who educates her more about her people, the Huilliche. When he sees her suffering and how she prays for vengeance, he tries to help her, offering up his services as a brujo, a witch or sorcerer. In retribution for killing Rosa’s father with dogs, he transforms the settler’s sons into dogs.

But the settlers and the townsfolk won’t stand for this, and round up anyone Huilliche they can find, and arrest Mateo. Free but alone, Rosa must decide whether she is willing to follow the path of sorcery herself to get the justice she wants.

A slow, quiet film, brimming with beautiful shots of landscape.

Okay. This is gonna be a hard one. Not an easy watch. Nor should it be.

Origin is an unusual and unlikely concept for a film. It is not a direct adaptation of the non-fiction book it’s based on, but a biopic of the author during her process of conceiving, researching and writing that book. Why would you do that? Why not a straight adaption?

Because the book, Caste: The Origin of our Discontents, is all about dehumanisation, the process of dehumanisation, the perpetuation of dehumanisation, the horrific consequences of dehumanisation. And the author’s message, over and over again, is we are not groups, we are people. Both the oppressed and the oppressors, we are people. So this film, about a huge span of inestimable suffering is told through the journey of one person.

It grounds the story, makes it tangible, means that every person’s experience she draws upon is not a nameless statistic or number, but someone she meets, someone you as the audience get to meet. Each story is a human story.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this technique when the movie began. I dislike the trend in documentaries of focusing on the documentarian’s journey into learning about their subject rather than the subject itself, an obnoxious and arrogant branding exercise. Was Origin just going to be a fictionalised version of that?

I also was unsure about Origin when it opened on a dramatisation of the moments before Trayvon Martin’s death. I did not want to see a pantomime production of the murder of a real child used for shock value and emotional shortcut in the opening scenes of a film.

But I stuck with it.

Aujanue Ellis-Taylor plays Isabel Wilkerson, a celebrated author and journalist, who is asked to write a piece about race in America in the wake of Trayvon’s killing, but is met with personal tragedy before she can decide to do so. In the same year, in quick succession, she loses her husband and her mother. The deaths are sudden and unexpected. And she is totally at sea, completely devastated, utterly lost.

And into the stew of seemingly unending grief, colleagues try to pull her back on her feet by discussing work, and the thing everyone is discussing – race in America. And Isabel, exhausted, says she doesn’t want to talk about racism, it’s a word so broad it’s meant to encapsulate everything from how someone hands you your change through to whether you are denied a loan or pain medication through to bodies hanging from trees. The same questions get asked and the same answers get given and around and around we go.

Isabel decides she wants to talk about what’s happening in terms of caste, not race. It is about what happens when you create a category of people that anything can be done to with impunity.

To that end she journeys to Germany, and then to India, talking to Jews and Dalits, seeing and hearing the stories of their suffering, their degradation and their constant fight for their own humanity. She reads about how, in Nazi meetings discussing the creation of the Nuremberg laws, American’s segregation system is quoted as an inspiration and model. She reads Martin Luther King’s writings about his travels in India and his solidarity with Dalits.

This is a hard watch. The build begins of stories of every individual, about being singled out, about being humiliated, about being denied that which everyone else is entitled to, and always the ever present threat of violence if they fight back or try to retain their dignity. Over and over again, across the world the same patterns, the same horrors, the same fear. Until that pervasive, choking threat bursts out into realised violence, gallows noose, gunshots, gas chambers.

It’s a strange and difficult thing, to balance going between these scenes and utterly domestic scenes of Isabel trying to sell her mother’s house. Surely it would be easier to make either one type of movie or the other. The hard-hitting plea for rejection of systems of injustice, or the quiet emotional drama about grief. But that presumes those stories belong outside of our ordinariness. That those things happen elsewhere than our mundane and quiet lives.

The last story in the film was the most horrendous to watch. Not one of those explosions of violence or those large scale calamities. No bones are broken, no lives are lost, but I sobbed uncontrollably throughout. It is about a boy whose team wins a baseball match, then goes for a swim. One of those ordinary occurrences that happen in our quiet mundane lives. And because it happens in the midst of friendly, happy people, among friends and neighbours, you are utterly defenceless against its raw horror and injustice. And the thought that anybody, any child should be singled out and made to feel different, or less than, makes you wrack with fury and dry with grief at what is being taken from them.

Origin is not a simple movie or an easy movie. It is however profoundly moving. A call to see the humanity in all of us, and to hold accountable the humanity in all of us.

This movie is a good example of how you don’t need a lot of special effects and convolution to make a good horror film. Just a simple story told well.

Sleep begins like a classic spooky story. A woman wakes to find her husband sat bolt upright at the end of the bed. “Someone’s inside,” he says. When she reaches for him, he falls back, dead asleep.

What follows is a straightforward three-act plot of domestic bliss descending to horror. The first act is about the wife witnessing the husband’s increasingly disturbing and dangerous night-time activities. The second is of the wife’s growing paranoia and unravelling mental state as she stays awake to protect herself and their newborn daughter from the sinister figure of her husband. And finally the climax.

The characters are almost archetypal as the young, happy, married couple expecting their first child. The plot is a classic ghost story. Yet it is not boring or predictable. It is tense, claustrophobic, and deeply unsettling.

I listened to the audience’s gasps, heard myself mutter, “Jesus!”, and jumped in my seat more than once. I would not recommend watching before bed. Not because of any gore or extremes of violence, but for how it just keys into those evergreen anxieties, of sleeping completely vulnerable and helpless next to your partner, of the unknowable, unpredictable nature of the human beings we keep close, and of the fragility of the bonds we build our lives on. With little visual nods to Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, and Poltergeist, Sleep is an excellent addition to the catalogue of domestic horror.

Beautiful human drama filled with warmth and humour in the midst of tragedy.

Jaya is a school teacher. Jaya was not meant to be a school teacher, Jaya was destined to be a star! They’re a singer, an entertainer, a comedian. They had finally managed to get their own tv show and then . . . Typhoon Yolanda hit. The studio flooded, and their career ended.

That was the past, this is now.

Jaya is hilarious, playing a version of their real life self, going into class hungover, getting more hysterical than the kids if there’s a storm drill, and grumbling about being on their last nerve with the weans. They kick at the confines of what wasn’t the life they wanted for themself. It doesn’t help that it’s a lot of work for little pay and their boss is a dick.

Luckily Jaya has Cyrus. He’s the idiot who spills his breakfast all over the homework they’re marking, and whose farts wake them up. He’s the love of their life.

Across town is Arnel. He’s a kid in their class, who passes more or less unnoticed. He’s basically being raised by the tv. The anniversary of his mother’s death is coming up, and his aunties want to mark it. They ask him to chip in for food and stuff, so he needs to go to Sicogon, the next island over, to get money off his dad.

Jaya finally has a bust-up with their boss and quits. They declare their intention to take part in the Ms Gay Sicogon queer pageant being held at the island’s fancy tourist resort, prove that they still got it! Cyrus and Jaya fight, he is long past the point of wanting to be settled down, and Jaya’s attempt to reclaim their youth by partying and walking out of a paying job might be a dealbreaker for their relationship. Determined to show him, Jaya packs their gladrags and storms out.

Thus begins the road trip movie that is Asog. Jaya and Arnel are thrown together on this journey over to the next island, bumping into people and hearing their stories. Everyone’s life’s been changed by Typhoon Yolanda, everyone has been touched in some way. Whether it’s the couple who give them a ride, who lost half the coconut trees they harvest, or the little girl who tries to sell them sunglasses, who has to walk to the next village twice a day to collect water because the well in her place was compromised. Finally on Sicogon they meet the indigenous people whose land was snatched up to build the fancy tourist resort. In the aftermath of the typhoon, while they were homeless, starving, and struggling to bury their dead, they were asked to sign away the rights to their land in return for food aid. Over 800 resisted, and still resist to this day, many living in makeshift homes, while through chain-link fences, they watch Westerners come to swim in the infinity pools.

The journey puts Jaya in touch with what really matters in life, and encourages Arnel to start really living it again. Had a tear in my eye by the end, genuinely moving.

Something You Said Last Night is a warm-hearted film about a family holiday. Renata and Sierra are college-aged sisters who go away with their parents for a nice week near the beach for their father’s birthday. Cue classic sibling rivalry, pure regression, and the inevitable family argument.

This film is full of such good humour, borne from how totally identifiable all the interactions are, of Mum trying to get a sing-a-long going in the car, to getting ditched by your sister for some boy, to Dad trying to watch tv during quality time together. Despite Renata and Sierra being in their early 20s, being under the same roof with their parents just immediately makes them look more like sulking teenagers, as they roll their eyes at each other over their mum’s overenthusiasm, or stare at their phones to get an escape from the constant cacophony of family life.

The fact that this film has a trans lead and that’s allowed to be almost incidental, is such a welcome change. While it exists in the milieu of public interactions, Ren being aware of glances or half-overheard snatches, this is not a film that focuses on transphobia or being trans. We’re actually allowed to have a film about a family vacation and the main character is just trans.

Really enjoyed this film. Loved the relationship between the sisters especially, reminded me so much of my own sisters, where you could drive each other up the wall, but would actually die for one another. Loved them phoning the gran and Gran just giving the rundown of who died since they last spoke. Also loved the mum, who is great, just the best, but also a bit of a relentless nightmare at times. Spent the whole film looking at the mum going, “I know you from somewhere, I do,” then realised she played Ray’s sister in Due South. The whole cast worked brilliantly together, they really came across as a believable family.

Such a nice, warm, funny, family film.

Free Money is a documentary following a pilot scheme in Kenya to give every adult in a village universal basic income. It follows the recipients for 5 years to examine the long-term impact it has on their lives, the good, the bad, and the unexpected.

Right, so like this film, I’m not gonna go over the basics of this topic, how aid is intrinsically tied to the perpetuation and legacy of colonialism, how it reinforces those established power dynamics, and the multiple ways in which it has had damaging effects both in specific cases but also generally. The film doesn’t need to recap how decades of aid in its billions has somehow not brought an end to economic and social injustice, almost as though throwing money at problems doesn’t solve them. One of the biggest issues in international aid, as with so much else, is the people with money don’t experience the problem, and the people who experience the problem don’t have the money. So Give Directly decides to cut the Gordian knot by simple allowing people’s donations to go directly to people in need in cash form.

Sounds too good to be true! So simple, poor people getting money? Redistribution of wealth? Who wouldn’t want that? I mean, the usual bampots, but among decent people, who wouldn’t want that?

Here’s the problem with that. Charity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. No one steps outside of our racist, imperialist, capitalist systems when they engage in charitable giving and work. All of that is still at play. And it can be seen really clearly in why and how this pilot scheme is created.

The founder of Give Directly seems like a fun nice guy. Studied economics and international aid at Harvard, and found that a huge amount of money pours into NGOs but the quantifiable impact of what comes out is frequently marginal, certainly far less than the stated goals, and in many cases mixed with unanticipated negative outcomes. Universal basic income is an idea that has taken up interest among the left in the States, what would that look like as an aid model? And unlike other interventions, would it have a quantifiable, measurable impact?

And here we get to the nub of the matter, because what this pilot scheme is, at base, is an experiment. To suss out if universal basic income has any negative unanticipated effects, before we try it on white urban Westerners, we will try it on Black rural Africans. Because we can. Because we have the money and the power and they don’t. Because it’s the accepted dynamic that they are done-to. Because if anything goes wrong, it’s not like they’ll have the power or the money to do anything about it. Because if anything goes wrong, they’ll be expected to just be grateful for anything they get. Because if anything goes wrong, then it’s only happening to them. Because colonialism and aid are so intertwined we don’t think twice about making Africa a playground for our own social experiments and economic projects.

So what does happen when you directly give people money? Well, the obvious good that you would expect – being able to buy food, being able to pay school fees, being about to keep your motorbike running, being able to repair your house, being able to install electricity and clean drinking water. All that really impactful stuff you hope for when you set up an aid project. It’s absolutely fair enough to point out that none of that is to be sniffed at.

But when you build an experiment, you need a control group. In this case, the control group is all the villages in the surrounding area. And what happens to a community when people who were experiencing the same hardships suddenly become a group of have and have-nots? What happens in the religious life of that community when some people feel like their prayers are being answered and some are not? What happens in families, between friends, when some people are able to pursue their education and see a better future for themselves, and others have those opportunities withheld from them?

At the beginning of the film, skeptics in the village remind everyone, there’s no such thing as free money. And they’re right. But no one could know what they would pay for it.

I am still greeting from watching Amerikatsi. Haven’t cried all festival, not once, but this…

Amerikatsi is the Armenian word for American. It’s what they call the main character, Charlie, an Armenian-American who comes back to rebuild Armenia in the 40s.

Where to start? Although too young to really remember it, Charlie was one of the few members of his family to survive the Armenian genocide, and was smuggled out the country to safety. He grew up his whole life in the States, speaking only a smattering of Armenian. Despite this, he was determined to return home to the country his family were driven from. So in an act of what, to us, looks like startling naivety, he returns to Soviet-controlled Armenia.

I’m gonna pause here and just say, from that beginning, I know what you are expecting. It’s what I was expecting. Genocide survivor, Stalin’s Soviet Union, this is gonna be grim. But it’s not. It’s actually quite funny and full of humour. And even when the drama does weigh heavy, it is to show the how the best in someone rises to meet it.

Charlie shows up in Soviet Armenia every inch the irritatingly cheerful American, stumbling roughshod over the minefield of unspoken rules in Soviet society. He makes a friend in a Soviet commander’s wife and is simple enough to think that is actually a good thing. Needless to say, the commander immediately finds a reason to get him locked up. Sentenced to 10 years hard labour in Siberia, he is saved when an earthquake brings down the prison walls, and he is kept on to rebuild it.

And it’s here the film really begins. Because in this darkest hour, what Charlie discovers is he can see through a crack in the wall, into the flat in the nearby building, and in watching their daily life, he feels connected to the world around him and has reason to go on living.

After the comedy of errors that brings him to this point, I was not prepared for how incredibly moving this film was about to become. So far the film had ducked and weaved between my expectations, having this sunny, optimistic, good humour at odds with its very bleak turn of events. From this point on though, it becomes this ode to the endurance of the human spirit.

The flat he can see into, it belongs to one of the prison guards, Tigran, and he learns pretty quickly that the man doesn’t want to be a guard, he wants to be a painter. He creates these beautiful paintings of Mount Ararat, but has to hide everything due to fear of Soviet censorship. Charlie watches from his cell, eating along with his meals, drinking along with his toasts, and making paintings of his own from the stone and sand around the prison, to paint alongside the man who also yearns for a softer, more beautiful world.

And through this keyhole, Charlie gets what he came to Armenia for. He sees the celebrations, with traditional songs and dances. He learns to speak Armenian, and all the manners and customs. He sees it survive. And he survives.

Amerikatsi is based on the experience of the filmmaker’s grandfather, this was his story, his life. And it is one of a light burning in the darkness, of humanity preserved against all odds, of the unbreakable human spirit.

My favourite film of the festival.

Hong Kong Mixtape documents the activist art of the Free Hong Kong movement, from the street art, to the music, the songs, the dances, the performance art, posters, sculptures, illustrations, photos, films, everything!

As Hongkongers fight back against attack on their freedom by the Chinese government, taking to the streets in unprecedented numbers, so many iconic moments are captured, and come to symbolise the hope of the movement. What happens when the wave breaks, and in the renewed tyranny, so much of that creativity is made illegal? The film charts what happens when images, gestures, and words are all criminalised. It is not simply the threat of imprisonment itself, it is cutting the chords of solidarity, isolating people in their sense of powerlessness, and slowly choking out hope.

Amazingly so many people, especially young people, find a way to persist. Luna raps, Kacey creates these beautiful artworks, and an anonymous art collective sneak their sculpture of a defiant protestor into a gallery show. Even where they are being erased, the political slogans washed off, the stickers pulled down, their ghosts are everywhere.

This is a realistic film, as the conditions to create get harder and harder, the danger closer and closer, many artist-activists are forced into exile. But as one slogan goes, ideas are bulletproof, and for as long as there are Hongkongers, wherever they might be in the world, there will be the hope of a free Hong Kong.

I spent the whole of that film waiting for it to it to be the usual retread of queer trauma, full of the same tired tropes. How delighted I am to have been wrong.

Eismayer is the hard-ass drill instructor who terrifies all the new recruits. In the new batch that need whipped into shape is Falak, an openly gay Bosnian lad. His presence forces Eismayer to confront his own long-held secrets.

I spent the first act of this film comparing it in my head to Moffie. All the shouting and screaming, the arbitrary abuse and punitive punishments, the racism and homophobia, I just thought, “Here we go. Another movie about folk shoring up racist, homophobic institutions brimming with toxic masculinity and violence, then sitting around going, “This made me sad!” Maybe don’t do that then pal.” But that’s not what this film is.

Because Falak’s defiant refusal to be shamed demonstrates that the world has moved on. It rocks Eismayer’s whole worldview to see Falak be open about being gay and the other men in the company . . . are just fine with it. They don’t see him as a predator or a threat or a joke or an embarrassment. He’s just Falak, a cheeky bastard. By living out and proud in the army, he demonstrates the potential for a life that Eismayer, a couple decades his senior, had never thought possible.

Based on a true story, this is a tale of gay hope.