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  • Hotel Mumbai

    Hotel Mumbai is a nail-bitingly tense dramatisation of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

    Now, my main concern about this movie was this that it was going to be a It Shouldn’t Happen To A White Guy movie. This is when a movie is made about an event that affected the lives of hundreds of people of colour, but the movie follows the one white guy who lives through it. Luckily this was not the case. A handful of white people have lines and only two could be said to be major characters. The main character is Arjun, the hero of the piece, a sikh waiter who stays behind to save the guests of the hotel, at risk to his own life.

    This is something that I hadn’t really grasped at the time in 2008. The hotel staff were initially able to escape as the attackers at first were not aware of the staff stairways, exits and entrances. Many staff in fact stayed behind voluntarily in order to clear the guests out the hotel. Many of them paid for this with their life. Over half the casualties inside the hotel were staff members.

    This film is brutal and intense. I had to decompress for a bit after seeing it. But it isn’t a film that comes off as exploitative or gratuitous, but a film that genuinely attempts to pay tribute to the bravery and heroism of the Taj Hotel staff. 

  • First week of the festival down

    28 films seen. 23 still to go. 

  • Dead Good

    Dead Good is a really interesting documentary about the movement in the UK away from traditional funeral directors and services towards more tailored and open ways of working with the bereaved.

    For most of us I think, after a loved one dies, a doctor comes to pronounce the death, followed by a funeral director. The deceased is then spirited away, not to be seen again until their funeral, or perhaps the wake the night before. In closed casket funerals, you may never see them again at all.

    The documentary follows Arka funeral service in Brighton and their choice work in a more open and engaged way with the bereaved. Relatives are able to come down to view the body, wash their loved one, dress them themselves. In every way, they are allowed to take part in the preparation of their loved one for burial. One woman even attends the workshop where her mother’s coffin is being made and helps make part of it.

    The women who run Arka want to empower relatives more, make people aware they have both the option and the right to be in control of this process.

    The film itself is neither sad nor judgmental, simply an attempt to open up dialogue on the subject. In places I found the camera work and music choices a bit clumsy, but that’s a small criticism of a director’s first full-length feature. Everything involving the relatives and the deceased themselves is tastefully, respectfully and sensitively done.

    I just came away from this with so much I wanted to talk about.

  • Chained For Life

    Chained For Life is a movie about an able-bodied actress playing a blind woman opposite a disabled and deformed man in a schlock horror film. The film is obviously about disability, representation and cripface casting. You’d think with such an explicit message as its main thrust, it would be heavy-handed and obvious. Instead, it’s actually hilarious.

    I’d actually say this is more a meta-horror. To me it was more reminiscent of something like Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace or Attack of the Bat Monsters from last year’s Frightfest. It’s more a deconstruction of a horror trope.

    Disability and deformity has stood for inner evil or movement away from complete humanity since the earliest days of horror film. Disabled actors have been exploited as horrifying freak show spectacles to be used for shock value and jump scares.

    As the able-bodied actors shoot their scenes, they don’t give much thought to the content. Yet when the disabled actors show up, that changes. At least, it does for the able-bodied actress playing the lead female role as Mabel. She gets to know her opposite, Rosenthal, played by Adam Pearson. Soon all the lines about him being hideous and how grateful he is expected to be for her kindness all sit less comfortably.

    While I thought this was going to be an ‘issue’ film, I’d say it’s actually more a genuinely funny take down of one of the staple tropes of the horror genre.

  • Yuli

    A biopic of dancer and choreographer Carlos Acosta. Such a beautiful film. It tells his life and journey alongside the actual Carlos Acosta dancing and directing his own pieces based on each period in his life. I just loved this mode of storytelling because with each struggle, you are seeing the actual outcome that they’re fighting for. Dance is not an abstract, it’s there for you to see what he achieved.

    A big theme in this film is dislocation. Geographically, because he grew up in Cuba but had to travel the world to get his education. Socially, because his family struggle by in poverty but he ends up in a relatively privileged position living in London. And also within the family bonds, as the son struggles with the life that his father has chosen for him, a path he would not have picked but which has had undeniable benefits.

    Race is also a big theme throughout the movie. His father pushes him so hard because he wants to see Carlos break down barriers, which he does. He becomes the first black dancer to play lead in a number of roles, including Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. If that doesn’t sound like much, Carlos himself is biracial, and one incident in the film shows his mother’s family emigrating to America and offering to take her and her light-skinned daughter, but not her 2 children that have inherited their father’s dark skin. So for Carlos to play Romeo and kiss a white woman on stage and have everyone applaud is kind of a big deal.

    Having just seen White Crow last night, it was a refreshing change in Yuli to see a dancer who was not driven, not ambitious, not consumed with a need to dance. As a child he shirks and bunks off and rebels. It is the decisions and sacrafices of others who put him in dance school and it is only once he is there, alone without family or friends, that dance becomes all he has.

    After Yuli, Girl and White Crow, one thing I’ve learned about ballet is that to be good at it, it must destroy the rest of your life. Everyone in ballet needs to chill.

  • Permission

    Permission is about a female football captain who is denied the right to leave the country for the cup final at the last minute by her husband. He is a slick looking Nice Guy TM who has been waiting for her to fall on her face and, since that hasn’t happened, has decided now is the time to bring her to heel. When she doesn’t beg sufficiently to his liking, he sets about destroying her life. Tough watch. 

  • Girls of the Sun

    Girls of the Sun is a fictionalised account of the unit of Yazidi and Kurdish women fighting Isis who were themselves former Isis captives. It even has its own Marie Colvinesque war reporter, complete with eye patch, documenting them taking back their home town.

    The main character is Bahar, a lawyer whose husband is killed and son is abducted by Isis. She herself in then abducted, raped, sold as a slave, and eventually finds her way to freedom. Her story is intercut with the fight to retake her home.

    For me, the most dramatic part of this film was during their escape from Isis, she has to help her pregnant friend, who is well into labour, walk the last 30 yards to freedom. If she delivers the baby or if she collapses and can’t walk, they’ll likely all die. Tense and heart-pounding, beautifully shot.

  • The White Crow

    A biopic of Rudolph Nuryev, centring mainly on his defection from the Soviet Union. It paints a man who is ambitious, mercurial, arrogant and steely-willed. Beautifully shot and performed. 

  • Murder Me, Monster

    Murder Me, Monster is a whole pile of nothing. The only interesting scene is when they finally find the monster and it has a prehensile dick for a tail and a fanny for a face. The main character fist fucks the monster’s face while it bums him with its tail. Nothing else happens in the movie and this scene adds nothing to actual explanation of what’s going on. Google that scene, don’t watch the film, not worth your time. 

  • Of Fish Or Foe

    Of Fish Or Foe is a documentary about one of the last coastal salmon netting fishing family businesses running in Scotland, and the pressure that is brought to bear on them over the course of a year to put them out of business. The pressure comes from 2 groups, a branch of hunt sabs called Sea Shepherd and the angling interests board.

    This is a culture clash film about people who want to carry on the family business that they’ve been raised and fed with for generations, and the animal rights activists who will stop at nothing to stop the death of any wildlife at their hands. There is not a clear side to come down on, both perspectives are given time and the audience is very much left to decide what they think.

    The central conflict is very much a war of attrition. There can be no compromise between their two positions without it meaning the end of one of them. This leads both groups to view the other as the devil incarnate. The fishermen view the sabs as idle, childish, spoiled, ignorant, crunchy students. The sabs view the fishermen as slathering psychopaths, foaming at the mouth for the extermination of innocent animals. It leads to a lot of comic scenes where they both stand holding cameras 2 inches from each others face, screaming, “You’re assaulting me! You’re assaulting me!” because their breath is disturbing the others hair. You just think, bunch of fucking weans.

    There’s no attempt to see things from each others perspective or give respect to the fact that others might not think like you or have your priorities. Any compromise to make the fishing less detrimental to wildlife, but still continue, would destroy the fishermen’s bottom line, and would violate the principles of the sabs that every animal has a right to its own life.

    The scales are finally tipped when the angling lobbyists take against the netters, saying their netting at the coast is preventing salmon from entering the inland rivers in sufficient numbers. Weirdly, they are the biggest allies to the sabs, despite the fact the anglers catch many more salmon that the netters do.

    It is a weird film, neither side is particularly likeable. But it definitely seems that times are changing, priorities are changing, and the winds of support are blowing against the fishermen.