Category: non-fest

Criatura is the kind of short film you should feel, rather than figure out. Intense orchestral music, vivid colour, and shots evoking disjointed memory or dream, combine to give a sense of a character’s inner journey.

It opens with the narrator saying that a monster entered her, created a void within her, and thus “you were torn from my body”. The ‘you’ the narrator is talking about is open for discussion. Is it a part of the main character’s self? As the visuals show two women meeting, and falling in love, are they referring to their lover as the other half of their soul?

The mixed images add to that state of confusion, as the couple seem to break up, perhaps because the main character cannot tell if she is trying to interact with another person or a projection of her fractured self. The imagery and music seem to reach for a healing of one’s self after division being experienced both within and without.

An interesting sensory journey.

This short film is about the filmmaker’s marriage, the part that is the struggle for government recognition and the part that is about loving intimacy. Only 6 minutes long, it features thousands of images of their joined life, snapshots, wedding photos, documents and paperwork, all frenetically flashing up on screen, like a strobing fast-forward effect. Breaking through this wall of never-ending documentation and justification, is a rotoscoped animation of him and his husband immersing themselves in water, their gestures gentle, loving, and intimate.

Mikveh is a ritual bathing done by brides-to-be. It is cleansing and purifying. The husbands’ bathing is similar, providing breaks from the helter-skelter stress of the bureaucratic merry-go-round that seems set on doubting and invalidating their relationship. They float, freed from the weight of having to prove anything. The reality of their love self-evident. And these intermissions are restorative, grounding, and bring peace.

What first made me want to come along to the Map of Mexican Dreams short film night was this last short film. Exile is a stop motion animation.

It depicts a woman, painting alone in her home, each one a self-portrait with her back to the viewer. Ignored in another room is a suitcase. It looms prominent, despite how it is studiously avoided, and it belches forth bursts of dust or sand or earth.

It reminds me of how in Ziyara, the guy who has created an exhibit display of the exodus of his Jewish neighbours, he says he put a suitcase there, because suitcases always mean sorrow, mean parting. In Exile, the suitcase seems to contains the soil of home, the sand and dust of miles travelled. In the memories that accompany the dirt, we see her with another figure, a father, there is a separation there, a grief.

Over and over she paints herself, but only with the back of her head towards the viewer. It is an inward-looking exercise, but without a confrontation, it speaks to her insular emotional state, which lacks the resolution of genuine insight. The journey she has made with the suitcase must always be going forward, to look back towards the viewer is to look back towards the past, and in doing, see herself. To do so would mean uniting who she is with who she was, to make a bridge to that place which has been ruptured in trauma. Whereas if she faces only forward, it remains forever behind her. Unhealed, but the fear is understandable.

Finally a storm comes, and blows open the window of her home. In facing the storm, in engaging with the intrusion of the outside world, in acknowledging the tempestuous state she finds herself in, the portraits all turn to face her.

Without dialogue, relying on imagery and score to tell an emotional journey, Exile conveys vulnerability and loss. Really liked it.

I’ll be honest, I have no idea what this one’s about.

There’s a cyborg, and a young dancer in a pink Lolita wig, and skateboarders, and a bunch of stuff. Colour and sound evokes a sense of otherworldliness. But whatever it was driving at was lost on me.

The blurb says it’s about a cyborg warning a lassie about her past life. Cool.

Have a go at it and see what you think.

Lupita is a short documentary profiling the work of indigenous rights activist and Acteal massacre survivor, Guadalupe Vazquez Luna, known as Lupita.

In 1997, just before Christmas, a community of peaceful, unarmed, indigenous activists in the village of Acteal, were at prayer in church, when government-supported right-wing paramilitary soldiers burst in and opened fire. 45 people were brutally massacred, including 3 pregnant women. Lupita, only a child at the time, saw her mother shot first, then was told to run by her father before he also died. She lost almost a dozen family members, including both her parents. Her life’s mission has been to get justice for the dead.

Lupita’s fearlessness is a thing to behold as she leads a protest march to a nearby military post. The official national military initially denied all involvement, despite the fact that they stayed in their outpost in the hills above the village and didn’t intervene to stop the massacre, which lasted hours, as the paramilitary soldiers in the church below dispatched wounded survivors, and stabbed the pregnant bellies of dying women. Lupita’s march comes right to the gates of the military post and demands that they take responsibility and admit their involvement. The soldiers’ response is pitiful, as they mumble that they personally weren’t there at the time, and it wasn’t them who pulled the trigger in the church that day. But Lupita drives at them – but you are camped on our land, as part of the same army there to enforce the power of the same people with the same interests. Where is your conscience? She tells them that if they continue to take the money and shrug, to remain blind to the bloody establishment they are a part of, they will continue to be slaves, and raise their children to be slaves. She says all this to them while they stand there with automatic rifles, and she stands there with nothing but braids and a shawl.

For decades the struggle continues, with Lupita having to balance her fight for justice with living her life, growing up, becoming a mother, and continuing her way of life in Acteal. She passes down to the next generation the values her parents taught her, the solidarity she shares in the legacy of the Zapatista movement, and the hunger for justice for their slain kin. All the while, this young woman in a tiny village tries to take down the former president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, and numerous ex-government ministers.

Because of the efforts of Lupita and people like her, in 2020, 23 years after the massacre, the Mexican government admitted its involvement, and jailed over a dozen people for their crimes. The strength of this woman, to move such a mountain, to fight year after year for decades, is inspiring, and moving, and hopeful.

Time and the Seashell is a short film in which an indigenous man meditates on time and the changes he has seen in his lifetime.

The film begins with a young boy picking up a seashell and listening to it to hear the sound of the ocean. As the young boy imagines his life to come, a man picks up and listens to the same seashell, remembering the boy he was. Time, and the patterns of life are eternal, yet we have such a brief and transient existence.

The man ruminates on the changes he has seen to the land, the ecological shifts as a result of climate change and exploitation. In places which were abundant and dense with life, there is now stone and dust. He asks, “How could the seas become mountains?”

In his childhood, he was taught how from just a seed grows corn, and from corn comes many seeds, and the plentiful, self-perpetuating cycle of life goes on as such, from seed to corn to seed to corn. As a man, he worries that as the land changes, and people change, the way of caring for the corn will be forgotten, and the ancient line of self-sustaining life will be broken.

An existential soliloquy.

This short film conveys a sense of Mayan life, through the stories of children, the bodies of trees, the canopy of the night sky. It tries to communicate a worldview in which all cosmology is connected, from the stars to the ceiba to the self.

The ceiba tree is at the centre of this film. Children play on it, lie on it, listen with their ears pressed to the bark. They say they can hear their ancestors through the tree. With roots that reach under the world and branches that stretch up to the heavens, the dead are connected to the living world and may still be heard through its skin.

In Mayan cosmology the ceiba is the central pillar holding up the sky, giving structure to creation. It is a world tree, growing through the plains of existence from the underworld, to living world, to the heavens. Yollotl means heart, and the ceiba is the heart of creation.

As the children play on the ceiba, they sing a traditional song, and the narrator tells a story of the love of the tule tree for the ceiba. The ceiba is also the heart of Mayan culture, sacred and beloved.

Through art, song, story and documentary, Yollotl tries to place us for a moment in a place of understanding, to see the Mayan world from the inside out, to understand its heart.

Went along to the CCA for a night of short films being put on by CinemaAttic, Map of Mexican Dreams. Absolutely stowed it was.

It kicked off with Arcangel. The title character is a man who travels to the city, carrying an old woman on his back, in an attempt to try to find a place where she will be taken care of, now that he is losing his sight. Amid the bustle and beeps of the strange and indifferent city, Arcangel wades through bureaucracy to try to get his charge Patro in a state-run old folk’s home.

Only elderly people with no family can be taken in by the state, and the tenderness with which Arcangel cares for Patro makes the administrators believe he is her son, which would give them grounds to dismiss their claim. Whether he is or not is kinda besides the point, the film shows a world where kindness and doing for others is not valued, even treated with suspicion, and pitiless and ruthless indifference to the suffering of others is the status quo of the state. Arcangel arrives in the city with the bonds of community literally tying Patro to him, yet as he becomes an anonymous indigent sleeping on the streets of the city, they seem like they will become hopelessly and inevitably undone.

Several times in the film we see the world through Arcangel’s eyes. His blurring eyesight settles on, then with effort brings into view, the sign on the building for the old folk’s home. His world is becoming full of shadows instead of people. His blindness is contrasted to the blindness of those in the city. Their blurred figures walk past him on the street, and they do not see him at all. The clerks at the old folk’s home accepts a fake ID paper, but refuses to accept the obvious need of an elderly and infirm woman. They have chosen to be blind to him, and yet, with his failing eyesight, Arcangel is the only one able to see Patro’s suffering.

Really good wee film.

Fucking belter of a documentary about the 80s London S&M lesbian scene. Told by the legends that lived it, Rebel Dykes covers the founding of Chain Reaction, the publication of Quim, and the House of Lords abseil protest of Section 28. Yaldi!

It traces its roots to the Greenham Clapham peace camp, which was a women’s protest encampment around an army base. In an age before the internet, it had gained a reputation for being a lesbian cultural nexus. There were a lot earth mothers and hippies, ‘political lesbian’ feminist seperatists, and activists from across the board. These were marked into different zones, with the Green Zone being where the young and rowdy baby dykes went, as it was nearest the pub. There they bonded over hijinks including raiding the squaddies’ bar for booze and trashing the paint job on a stealth plane.

Many had faced family rejection and had travelled the length of the country to find other women like themselves. Many were effectively homeless, and after finding their tribe at the peace camp, took up residence in London as squatters. This whole new family formed, with an out and proud attitude. They formed a motorcycle gang, kicked about in their leathers, and celebrated butch identity unapologetically.

Club nights started, with them setting up Chain Reaction for lesbian S&M. This was pretty radical, because the queer scene was pretty divided between gay men’s culture, which had a lot of fuck-friendly establishments, bars, clubs, and cruising spots, and lesbian culture, which had gone heavy into feminist intellectual discourse to the point of dogma. The idea of women occupying a sex-positive, hedonistic and transgressive S&M space was pretty singular. As one critic from within the lesbian community put it to them, all clad in their leather and chains, “You don’t look like dykes, you look like poofs”.

The frenzy of affirmation and acceptance within the community just galvanised a whole lot of creative and expressive endeavours. You get musicians, DJs, drag kings, cabaret performers, artists, photographers, everything. You get the publication of Quim, a zine exploring lesbian sexuality, which featured photos by artist Della Grace.

And I’m looking at the photos feeling they look familiar, and it cuts to an interview with the artist themselves, and it’s Del LaGrace Volanco. And I’m like, I know them! I remember going to a thing on LGBT art, which in typical fashion was in actuality about GGGG art, and then Dr. Lucy Weir came on and talked about Del LaGrace Volcano’s stuff. So watching the documentary, I was like, that was their early work, no way!

Del’s book, Love Bites, featuring their photography of lesbian sexual expression, was banned as pornography. This was as the 80s started to edge into the 90s, and you have Del being attacked on two fronts. First by the unfortunately expected homophobia and misogyny of the mainstream culture, but also within the lesbian community, where self-appointed sex police and keepers of the feminist monolith commandments had decreed the sadomasochistic sex portrayed between women by women as anti-feminist. Queer bookshops refused to carry it.

The sex wars were raging in the late 80s and into the early 90s, where an understandable need to de-indoctrinate oneself from the internalised misogyny of heteropatriarchy got warped into gatekeeping of acceptable lesbian sex. Which I’d love to say is unbelievable, but alas, some of these relics still walk among us. The decision from on-high was that lesbians shouldn’t practice penetrative sex, because it ‘aped’ straight sex and the oppressive heteronormativity. Use of dildoes was a no-no, and S&M was beyond the pale. They were accused of re-enacting domestic abuse and rape, and of contributing to a culture of danger towards women.

I suspect these arbiters of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sex were the aforementioned ‘political lesbians’, i.e. straight women who were telling queer women how to fuck in accordance with their own ideas and philosophies. The fact that Chain Reaction was trans-inclusive and sex worker-inclusive probably didn’t do them any favours with these community gatekeepers either. You will still see the legacy of this faction in the TERFs and SWERFs today, who, like then, team up with the conservative right in society to stamp down on boundary-smashing expression within the queer community.

The late 80s and 90s were a time of increasing repression, not just in print, but in schools with section 28 forbidding any teacher “promoting” homosexuality by saying it was valid. Something that stayed in place right through til I was in secondary school, and is why our sex education was so shit. Section 28 was itself a response to the AIDS crisis, as though, if we were all silent about sexuality, a sexually-transmitted disease would just vanish. To be honest, that’s too kind an interpretation, they wanted us to die off, and be quiet about doing so.

You have these increased attempts at erasure of the queer community, especially its less respectable elements, so activism became a necessity. Lisa Power founds Stonewall, and you get the UK chapter of Act-Up. The invasion of the BBC news, and the abseiling into the House of Lords to protest Section 28. Really great to see the overlooked contribution of lesbians to the queer rights and AIDS activism movements being highlighted, because it’s very much sidelined or forgotten.

Just such a kickass film, showing how a scene spirals out into the fabric of history, in every corner of culture and politics. A movie that just leaves you going, “Fuck yeah!”

When the credits rolled on Belle, it was a standing ovation. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house. Spectacular.

Belle is the story of a shy young girl whose avatar becomes the biggest singing sensation in the online world of U. When her concert is interrupted by the renegade user labelled The Beast, she is the only voice of understanding and patience in a firestorm of backlash. A retelling of Beauty and the Beast for the internet age, its message of not letting appearance blind you to someone’s character, emotions and value, is perfect for the era of trolls, doxxing, and global shaming.

Everything about this is just 100%. The rich and imaginative world, the gorgeous character design, the music which is going straight on my Spotify, everything is just brilliant. The emotional rawness of the characters, even when having comedy moments, is just done perfectly. Despite how small the challenges might seem from the outside, like singing in front of people or telling someone how you feel, the film manages to transport you into the character’s shoes, where that small step seems like a chasm leap. And however it might seem to others, it takes all one’s bravery to take it.

Just a brilliant film. I am so glad I got to see it in the cinema, because this really is one to see on the big screen. The huge vistas, the scale, the intricacy, it just blows you away.