Category: GFF strand – Stranger Than Fiction

This film is a real accomplishment. It takes contemporary footage of Stalin’s funeral and cuts it together with foley. It makes you feel like you’re watching it on 24-hour news, not as historical archive footage.

That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s like watching 2 and quarter hours of a state funeral on rolling news. Think Diana’s funeral but double-plus. I fell asleep for 15 minutes at one point and when I woke they were still shuffling past Stalin’s body for a peek. Bury the cunt already!

What was really interesting was to see the diversity of Soviet people. There’s black Russians, there are Asiatic peoples herding with reindeer, an entire continent’s worth of people all hearing the news at once. Puts you in awe of the scale of everything.

Pictures From Afghanistan is a film memoir of Glaswegian BBC photojournalist David Pratt of his time reporting on Afghanistan from the 1980s to present day.

I like the way this was filmed, really grounding Afghanistan as a place, not a news item. It’s strange to see a guy get in a taxi outside O’Neills pub in Glasgow and get out a taxi in Kabul. But it’s also interesting seeing him revisit places where he took photos in the 90s and contrast the bombed-out horrors to the tentative rebuilding that’s going on now.

Always In Season focuses on the death of Lennon Lacy, through the wider context of the history of denial, impunity and erasure of lynchings in the States.

Lennon Lacy was a 17-year-old boy who was found hanged from a swingset in the public green behind the house where he lived. Local police immediately ruled it a suicide, without investigating any other possibility. He told his Mum he was going out to take his washing in off the line just as she was going to bed, then when she woke the washing was still there, and he was dead.

Many avenues went uninvestigated, like the presence of white supremacist neighbours who had previously threatened Lennon with a gun, and that they might have opinions on Lennon starting to date a local white woman. A medical examiner, who saw the body, reported the presence of multiple injuries and defensive wounds.

A word of warning before you watch this – there are a LOT of pictures of lynchings in this movie. It is used to give perspective to how common lynchings were, that they happened everywhere, for centuries, and happened in the open where all could see. No one was ever charged for almost any of the deaths. And their existence was cloaked in silence, something unspeakable by the black community and something refused to be spoken of by the white community. And with each new generation of lynchings, the narrative was that lynchings were a thing of the past. In this denial, any contemporary injustices were also silenced.

As a reaction to this, and the current tendency to rule black men found hanged in public as suicides, of which Lennon is only one of many, there has been a growing urge to bring these cases to light, to not let them be swept away again. One of the stranger solutions that has emerged is lynching re-enactments. That’s something I did not see coming.

In the South there is a tradition of historical re-enactments, with Civil War battles being a favourite, and there never being any shortage of men willing to represent Confederate soldiers. Significantly less volunteer to represent KKK members and lynch mob members. Lynch re-enactments kinda turn the tables on how comfortable the South is with venerating its racist past. Everywhere you go there are Confederate flag merchandise, statues of Confederate soldiers, streets named after slave owners, and if you challenge any of it, you will be decried for trying to take away their history. But at the lynching re-enactments, tumbleweed.

The re-enactments also serve another purpose. These are unsolved cases. Every year they go to the crime site and reconstruct the crime. Maybe it will jog someone’s memory. Maybe it will finally shame someone who has buried it all deep inside. Whoever did this in the 60s or 50s or 40s, they could still be around today. And the KKK took their kids to lynchings, they considered it fun for all the family. So those kids may now be more aware of the significance of the things they saw.

All in all, a difficult watch, because there is no happy ending. This long legacy of injustice continues, and the victims are just supposed to live with it. But for a crime which is meant to have been erased, the most important thing you can do is acknowledge it and speak up.

As anyone who knows me knows, Toni Morrison is my favourite ever author, along with Sylvia Plath. Toni Morrison has a large body of work, each one of which is unique and interesting in its own way, and deeply moving.

This a gentle documentary, letting Toni tell her story in her own words, while her more famous fans provide a greek chorus of celebration and inspiration from her work. For a woman whose books are full of such suffering, Toni tells her story as one of good fortune becoming greater fortune. Any discrimination or challenge she faced never seem to discourage her, she seemed to feel pity for any poor fool who thought they could stand in her way.

And she is like a juggernaut. She becomes the first African-American senior editor at Random House while raising two kids by herself, while also writing her novels and teaching at Yale. She ensures through her editing position that other African-American talent gets the recognition it deserves, and lifts others up.

And every time she is asked about her continued dismissal as a “black writer” who “limits herself” to writing about the experiences of African-American women, she meets it with humour, and not bitterness. She seems more bemused by it, as she continues right on outstripping her critics in success after success.

A lovely look at the very down-to-earth woman behind these very emotionally cataclysmic novels.

You know if there’s a story about a 13-year-old girls being raped, and the assault being filmed, and the video being distributed at her school, with impunity, before the title card even comes up, the movie’s going to be brutal.

Netizens is a documentary about online gender violence and harassment. It features names you may know like Anita Sarkeesian from Tropes Versus Women, but also names you don’t, from women who didn’t make content and put it out there but just broke up with their boyfriend or turned down a date, and had their whole life turned upside down as a result.

The trouble with attitudes towards harassment and abuse is that people always want to visualise it as a discreet event, in the past, get over it. The problem with online abuse is that the internet has no past, it is just one continuous present, and that anything that has ever been done against you there, is still there. There is no future beyond the assault to recover to, because that place doesn’t exist. There is no getting over, only every day being retraumatised.

When Anita Sarkeesian launched Tropes Versus Women, it was to death threats, rape threats, and bomb threats. 4 years on, people say to her, “It must have be over now though, right?” She tells them, “No, what makes you think it would be any better now?” No one wants to deal with online gender violence as something ongoing, a problem that will never go away.

And the repeated refrain from all the women involved is that any attempt to end the violence against them is decried as an attack on free speech. Free speech has become the abuser’s shield, a mantra to justify ruining someone’s life, destroying their sense of safety, security and privacy, and driving them to suicide. The way this robs women of their voices, the confidence to speak in safety, both online and offline, doesn’t appear to be a concern for free speech advocates. Free speech is only free to some.

This documentary is terrifying. In that, ‘don’t think about all the nuclear weapons the Russians lost track of during the fall of the U.S.S.R. because it’ll keep you up at night’ kinda way. Because the truth is, this could happen to any of us, at any time, for any reason, and it could ruin your life. And one thing this documentary struggles to do is balance that message with any hope.

Because the truth is, it’s probably already too late for you to protect yourself. Unless you’ve been on the dark web since 93, your IP address is trackable all through time, if you’ve had the same email address all your days, if you’re reading this through a Facebook account, enough of you exists on the internet to be used to destroy you at any time.

And with all gender-based violence, the law is woefully inadequate and rarely enforced. So this becomes yet another unwanted testament to the fortitude of women preserving through continuous trauma and injustice.

Stomach-churningly frightening.

Freedom Fields is a documentary following the women of the Libyan national football team. Kinda like Permission, this movie is about female athletes being thrown under the bus, but this time in real life.

On the eve of the team’s journey abroad for their first international tournament match, the football federation cancels their flight and withdraws them from the match. They cite security reasons. Now, is security in Libya an absolute shitshow? Yes. Are they receiving death threats because it has been deemed un-Islamic and immodest for women to play football? Yes. Is their safety the reason the federation is cancelling it? Fuck no. Because you know if there was one red cent to be made off playing this match, they’d have them out there. But if socially speaking, you look like you’re never going to bring in sponsorships or ticket sales – because who would want to be associated with or support immodest girls? – then they will dump you as fast as they can.

The film follows them in the aftermath to see if they can keep their dream of playing as a team alive.

The Feeling of Being Watched is a documentary about a journalist’s struggle to uncover the decades-long mass surveillance of her hometown community of Muslim Arab-Americans in Bearview, Illinois. In some ways the film ends up focusing more on her than on the subject she’s covering because she can never concretely get tangible proof and the FBI refuses to release any information to do with the case.

Basically, in the 90s, one of the guys from the mosque raised money for humanitarian aid for Palestine, went over to deliver it, and was immediately arrest by Israel for providing financial support for Hamas. From that one guy, who was found not guilty in a fair trial in the States, the FBI launched Operation Vulgar Betrayal, pushing the investigation wider, into the mosque itself, and then into pretty much every Islamic charity and everyone who donated to them. This basically meant that by being Muslim, being active in your mosque, or fundraising for the welfare of others, you were making yourself a target for a terrorist investigation.

Ironically, as the filmmaker points out, the very thing that people in immigrant communities typically do – actively participate in their community, establish philanthropic organisations to help their own and others in need (everything that if you were a white Christian would be considered what makes America great) – became grounds for criminal suspicion.

And it’s almost like, the FBI were sooo sure they would find wrongdoing, they couldn’t believe it when it didn’t turn up. So it must be they just weren’t looking hard enough. So after 10 years of wiretaps, and drive-bys, and photos through long-distance lenses, when they got nothing, they couldn’t admit they’d wasted 10 years of manpower and resources. So it went on for another 10 years.

The filmmaker kinda hits the nail on the head when she finally reaches the conclusion that paranoia was not a by-product of the surveillance, but the purpose of it. The FBI knew there was no terrorist links in the community. They had decades of invasive investigation to prove it. But making every Muslim in that community fear the FBI like the eye of God, that was real benefit to the American government. That’s how a state ensures peace.

In an absolute stroke of genius, the film scheduled in that screen right after was Team America: World Police Sing-A-Long.

Bravo GFF programmers!

Aquarela started 15 minutes late because the producer decided to introduce the movie by giving its entire thesis. As she did so, I had a sinking feeling the movie might be shit. This was compounded when the opening theme music, repeated intermittently throughout the film, was a bash of utterly shit nu metal. When it became apparent I was going to be in for 1 hour and 40 minutes of shots of creaking ice and crashing waves, I sat back resigned to the situation.

I don’t have a problem with long slow movies with no traditional plot, characters or dialogue, but they have to be good. Even a middling movie with a clear story and punchy dialogue will carry you along, but if a contemplative helioscope of a movie isn’t good, it is interminable. That was this movie. As for a movie told about and through water, I’ve seen it done before and better (The Pearl Button for example).

The only piece of incident throughout the film, and the only part to give me hope for improvement, was of Russian rescue services fishing motors out a frozen lake when eejits thought it’d be wise to drive across it after thaw began. Watching people disappear under the ice in an instant was horrifying. Luckily we didn’t stay with anything that engaging for very long, and swiftly moved on to more creaking icebergs.

If you want to recreate this movie at home, just queue up videos of icebergs on YouTube and play the most deservedly forgettable nu metal from the early 2000s. Same experience.

A documentary about the refugee crisis and its media coverage. Really difficult in places, had me in tears, watching people desperately trying to throw their children across police lines, lifting them up and on to trains, trying in any way to save them. This is juxtaposed with the omnipresent media contingent, who maintain an invisibility in their reports but are very much there and part of this situation.

There’s a discussion throughout the film of the media’s role in all this, to what extent it is a noble throwing of light on an issue that needs public attention, and to what extent it is an exploitative business feeding the news cycle churn. As one reporter says, “It’s news. It’s TV. You’re not meant to think about it.” It called to mind the line from Natural Born Killers, “Media is weather, but it’s man-made weather.”

Some of the younger, newer reporters talk about how hard the stories hit and the responsibility they feel about making sure the story is heard. The older ones are more cynical, to them its a job. They are shooting all this horror, but they’re thinking about what they’re gonna have for tea, when they’re gonna get home tonight. Most acknowledge that what they are in is a business, and so exploitation will always be an issue, but what you bring to the table does not disappear because of that, your sincerity, your integrity, your desire to help.

In many ways this is a story about what you choose to do, help or hinder. This matters whether you’re reporting or policing or voting or simply speaking out for those in need.

A beautiful, vibrant, colourful documentary on the armed conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I didn’t realise this, but a lot of these rebellions are just a grift for soldiers to raise their wages. If you’re sick of shit at your work, you go, “I want a raise or I’m leaving”. In the army, your employer’s got a monopoly on hiring soldiers, so they’re like, “Where ya gonna go?” So you set a rebellion faction, make yourself a pain in the arse, and then make it a demand of any ceasefire that you get your old job back with a higher wage, or with a promotion. A lot of this shit is a lot less ideologically motivated than you would assume.

However they all have a valid point to hang their hat on, which is that the president is corrupt, and the people of the country are not benefitting from the wealth of the country. There does need to be reform.

Into this morass steps Mamadou Ngela, a man so incredibly earnest and sincere he feels like he’s wandered into this documentary from a fable. He is a commander in the Congalese army, trying to maintain the country’s stability and security in the face of these numerous uprisings. He has such a profound degree of naiveity about the army and the government and how this game all works, that you assume he must be new to all this, but no, he’s been at this so long he has 16 bullet wounds across his body. He has the honest open manner of a child, still believing that it is his honoured duty to protect the people of the Congo from those that would drag it into war for their own personal gain. He is what he should be, unlike so many of us.

Yet he seems oblivious to the fact that the army is incredibly corrupt, that the army is as much the problem as the rebels, and that they are one and the same much of the time. He doesn’t seem to be living in the same reality where Congolese army soldiers rape women, massacre whole villages and contribute to the cycle of neverending misery in the country.

And watching Mamadou, you can understand how people come to follow and believe in a man like that, whose sincerity shines out him and whose devotion is mapped on his body in a series of scars. Over the course of the film you see Mamadou be appointed to the division in North Kivu, reform it to a much more professional body, lead the frontline attack on the local rebel group, and get a hero’s welcome from the townspeople who revere him as having saved their home. Then. What happens always happens. You can guess, or watch it for yourself.

But it is an excellent essay on how the richest resource a country has is its people, and how all and any solutions must come from them. If peace will happen, it will be because Congolese people make it happen.

P.S. Made me think I might see if I can’t get a job as an international peace keeper. It seems like a cushy job that mostly involves wearing a blue hat.