Category: Govanhill

Really fascinating film. Taking place almost entirely inside the back of a truck, four migrants hope that the journey from Belgium to the UK will provide them with a chance at a better life.

The film exists somewhere between documentary and fiction, as the directors film from within a reconstructed space, but the four guys on screen are all real migrants living Belgium, and all the words are their own, as they improvise based on their own experience. It brings home what an achievement it is, to have this really compelling, full length feature film, with entirely improvised performances.

The film is claustrophobic. I mean, you probably could have guessed that when I said it takes place almost entirely inside the back of a truck, but it’s one thing to register it and another thing to feel it for 75 minutes. The bit where one of the guys goes round the seams of the doors looking for some crack to get fresh air is particularly upsetting to watch. Because this is a time game. They have to be patient and wait for the truck to reach its destination, at the same time, they have to judge how long they can survive in this airless box. There is a constant tension of trying to figure out where they are, whether the driver has gone off for a pee or a kip or the weekend, and if silence means impending danger or respite from it.

The whole thing is so tense. They have to judge from the mumbles and bangs from outside, has the driver heard them? If he has, is it better to run now before the cops show up? And where would they even run, coz where the fuck even are they? They try to sus their location and route by checking the GPS on their phones but that can only tell them so much. When the van parks, are they at a service station, a car park, a warehouse lot? The whole thing brings home how precarious their lives are, how the big wins and losses are entirely outwith their control. And all they can do is make the choice to take that risk, to see if this time it will be their chance.

Right, so it’s a 70s Afrofuturist blaxploitation flick created by cosmic jazz artist and absolute legend Sun Ra. Knowing that going in, it still somehow managed not to be what I was expecting.

First things first, like most blaxploitation movies, it’s made on a budget of £2.50, so bear that in mind going in. Despite this, there’s a lot of ambitious stuff, Sun Ra kicking about an alien planet, then landing his spaceship in the Oakland-San Francisco area, then engaging in a war for the souls of African-Americans in an astral card game with the embodiment of the Overseer mentality, the co-operation and collaboration with the systems that oppress Black people. For that alone, it’s worth sticking your head round the door to have a look.

It does have that vanity project problem, where you make film about yourself as the saviour of your people because your mind is so opened and enlightened. Reminds me (as much as I liked it) of Slam, where Saul Williams stops a prisonyard fight with his slam poetry. It doesn’t help that Sun Ra delivers a lot of his lines while looking directly down the camera, or reading his lines held up just the right of it.

It does nonetheless draw you in, with an optimism and hope that manages to fight against its limitations at every step. There are plenty of funny bits, and the whole thing is a bit of a romp.

The liberation, equality and dignity that Sun Ra fights for doesn’t apply to women however, and the film’s only female characters, one white woman and one black woman, are stripped to provide full frontal nudity, the only characters in the film to do so. They are initially used as trophies and objects to confirm manhood and status, then laterally are subjected to misogynistic violence. So, yeah.

Space is the Place is an interesting snapshot of a time where rising optimism seemed pitted against longstanding cynicism, a place which seen from 2022 was a high point that peaked and receeded in the wake of a starker reality. The magic and kookiness Sun Ra brings tries to keep alive a childhood in the weary adults that populate his world and the world of the viewer. Despite its limitations, for such efforts, it still has merit.

Afronauts is an atmospheric short film about a girl preparing to go into space, as Zambia tries to beat the U.S. to be the first on the moon.

The film has this early sci-fi feel, filmed in black-and-white on the rocky gravel of a quarry. The homemade aluminium spacesuit made for the main character has that classic 50s look. That style has been so spoofed in the interceding decades that watching it from the 2020s, you are not sure if it’s meant to be comical. It inspires both a sincere nostalgia, and also a melancholy for imagined futures now past. That mixture of being almost laughably strange and humblingly sincere pervades the film, with the girl being rolled downhill in a barrel as weightlessness training.

As the hour of take-off approaches, I became apprehensive about how much of what we were seeing was real, in world. Within the world of the film, was a 4-foot metal tube enough to launch a person to the moon? Or would this come crashing down into insufficiently magical reality?

Using the language of sci-fi, Afronauts evokes a hopeful innocence, a harkening back to a childhood of possibilities. It is by turns comforting and unsettling, as this young girl places her life in the hands of those driven more by belief than experience. Interesting film.

What I liked about Does Your House Have Lions is that it tries to be a documentary without being a documentary, it tries to be with its people rather than show its people. The people in the film, vqueeram, Dhiren, and Devangana, are living through extraordinary times, documentary-worthy times, but rather than pull back and explain a national narrative, the film resolutely remains on their lives, their friendships. These are conversations taking place in their livingrooms, their bedrooms, that we manage, through the camera, to be present for.

The rise of fascism across the globe has been rightly discussed at length, but one nation which has been underrepresented in discussions is India. I think because, from here, we recognise fascism from its use of white supremacist iconography, and can therefore link up different national movements that share Nazi swastikas or American Confederate flags or Nordic runes. But India’s Hindu nationalism falls outside this, so the emotional punch of recognising the repeated signature that signposts the route to fascism is largely absent for those observing from outside the nation. Modi has definitely been able to use this to his advantage, as the political violence he has incited has went unnamed abroad, and without being named as fascism it cannot be tackled as fascism.

vqueeram, Dhiren and their friends are queer university activists in Dehli. Vishal, the co-director with vqueeram, an American from the Indian diaspora, is present on screen, in discussions, is heard over the phone, or seen setting up shots. There is a definite intent to be as transparent as possible, of showing the artifice of trying to light a shot while at the same time capturing the naturalness of conversation taking place. Sometimes vqueeram will explain things to Vishal that he was not aware of, that happened while he was out the country or which didn’t get attention on the news. There is not a presumption of an omniscient documentary-maker, this is very much a space for listening.

What I liked was that it showed how political movements function mostly through social bonds. When people scoff at left-leaning or anti-authoritarian politics, there is usually the question asked rhetorically of how folk would get anything done, anything organised? I always find it funny when this gets asked because most relationships in our lives are not boss/subordinate or police/prisoner. Most relationships that we have with friends, neighbours, lovers, and co-workers strive, despite power structures, towards an equalitarian nature. Empathy is the currency of our interactions far more than dominance. Yet most documentaries like to show political conflict as two opposing structures, two hierarchical organisations vying for control. It is harder to capture what a lot of activism really is, which is checking in to see if someone’s doing alright, knowing who is struggling just now, phoning someone’s loved ones to give them information and support. What builds a movement and keeps it functioning is what is shown in Does Your House Have Lions, conversations in livingrooms, holding your friend’s hand while he tells you about something that happened to him, sitting on the porch and processing the fallouts of protests.

Both in what is shown and how it is shown, there is an attempt to make a film which eschews the norms and formats of a documentary film, and co-authors a recorded piece of people’s lives, lives which are inherently political, not just when on the streets or in a rally, but every day in their homes, their kitchens, their hearths.