London Film Festival 2020 Part 2 by Helen M Jerome

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London Film Festival 2020 Part 2: Here we go – straight into part two of our round up of the London Film Festival 2020 (part one is where to get your fix of reviews of the new feature-length ‘fiction’ movies). Here we’re focusing on the best of the documentaries from a very strong selection, some archive films, plus episodic releases, and shorts. And we round off the whole overview with our much-coveted 2020 DVDfever Awards.

DOCUMENTARIES

The Painter and the Thief (above), from director Benjamin Roe, is one of those documentaries that are almost too fantastical to make up. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. And there are multiple twists and cliff-hangers along the way to keep you guessing. Set in Norway, it foregrounds an artist who is the victim of a theft, and the addict who has stolen two of her artworks. We follow the narrative from both their points of view, with haunting music flowing through and gluing the pieces together. Both individuals are damaged and haunted, as we see when she reaches out to him, and there’s a feelgood, redemptive passage of the film… until a car crash changes everything. Real people and their real lives, yet surreal.

Another accused man is at the heart of Garrett Bradley’s remarkable film, Time – although the focus is really on the effect of one African American man’s incarceration on his wife, Fox Richardson, and children across the years. We are thrust into the story of their lives via black and white diary footage, with a jumble of happy memories. Then we peel back any layers of artifice when Fox talks straight to camera as if to her imprisoned spouse. Acting perhaps as a neat companion piece to Ava DuVernay’s The 13th, this ongoing filming and access to Fox carries us through decades as she narrates her campaign for her husband. Solo, jazzy piano also helps pull strands together, as we marvel at her strength in adversity, and her overachieving, equally inspirational sons. And long before the end, you’ll be genuinely cheering her on in her fight for justice.

The Reason I Jump has already won the Sundance Audience Award, and it’s easy to see why Jerry Rothwell’s multi-layered film is such a crowd-pleaser. Based on Naoki Higashida’s book of the same title, and shining a light on autism, it leaps around the world to show different journeys for young people. Amrit in India explains and interprets the world through her drawings. Author David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) has an autistic son himself, and appreciates the Higashida book’s cartography; how it maps the mind. Joss, in Kent, has a memory like “an out of control slideshow”. Ben in the US uses a letterboard to communicate, and is incredibly articulate once he can express himself, as is his lifelong friend Emma, who he calls “my North Star”. Meanwhile, Jestina is up against centuries of stigma and misunderstandings – and not just at home in Sierra Leone, but worldwide – and her mother is desperate for other families to open up.

One Man and his Shoes, from Yemi Bamiro, seems to be telling another version of the Great American Myth, that anyone can make it up the ladder, and that sport is microcosm of society. It’s initially and superficially about the making of an icon, and an iconic sports shoe… and then it goes deeper and explores how monetisation and capitalism and ‘coolwashing’ can quickly become exploitative, turning kids into consumers and even seeing youths murdered for their sneakers. The darker side of the American Myth.

JOURNEYS

With no narration, just the power of its images, Notturno (above) is Gianfranco Rosi’s vision of the precariousness of everyday life. Focusing on the borders in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon, we see soldiers training, bereaved mothers and widows, city horses, moments of quiet amidst gunfire – every scene a perfect miniature with minimal night lighting from headlights or a flickering generator, and just the noise of wind, flies and footsteps. Particularly affecting is hearing little kids with PTSD recounting their traumatic memories with pictures they’ve drawn. Quietly very moving.

In what becomes a bloody travelogue, African Apocalypse has director Rob Lemkin follow writer Femi Nylander as he goes in search of the real Mr Kurtz (from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness) across time and space. Starting their journey in Oxford, they head to Niger, where French Captain Paul Voulet cut a violent, brutal swathe in 1899, and it remains ‘engraved on their hearts’. Nylander looks at his own twin heritage and sees how colonialism still rears its ugly head with the continued mining of uranium powering France, and there’s a neat connection bringing it all up to date with statue toppling debates and BLM protests back in Oxford. An interesting, provocative film.

MUSIC

I’m a massive fan of Talking Heads, but couldn’t get tickets to see David Byrne’s American Utopia on Broadway, so I was (as they say) stoked to see it on film, as directed by Spike Lee. It starts with Byrne holding a pink brain in front of a live and lively Hudson Theatre audience. He and his fellow performers are all barefoot and clad in identical grey suits, with typical Byrne choreography. The show tries to make sense of life, exploring through song – some new and many Talking Heads classics like Burning Down The House, Once In A Lifetime, Slippery People and crucially Don’t Worry About The Government – which all spring back to life in this reimagined form, and take on new meaning. Byrne also speaks on power and politics for his entire ensemble: “most of us are immigrants and we couldn’t do without them.” Now I want to see this live even more!

Music is also at the heart of a couple of very different documentaries. Sound for the Future is a clever way to revisit Britain’s youngest post-punk band, the Hippies. Director Matt Hulse – who was one of the trio of siblings that comprised the band – takes the whole phenomenon of recreating photos from your childhood up several notches. He even builds a local project to recreate entire scenes, and revisit and interrogate the band’s golden, sepia-tinged 1979 memories. Using Scottish Youth Theatre kids, the film also becomes about the making of the film itself, in meta style. Joyous!

Another labour of musical love comes from director and star, Caroline Catz, in her doc, Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes. Known mainly as the composer of the Doctor Who classic theme tune, Derbyshire was underappreciated in her lifetime, and Catz straddles doc and drama reconstruction in reframing her work and legacy. That she’s now considered the godmother of EDM gives extra weight to this heartfelt tribute film.

If It Were Love, from Patric Chiha, is one for the danceaholics. This French film is ostensibly about precisely choreographed dance and expression – a rave in slow motion – while dipping into the idea of abandoning oneself, with a thin line between the dancers’ lives and what they are performing.

And there’s much music too in Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, from Bill and Turner Ross. Set around the time that a local bar with a close community is due to close its doors for the last time, this semi-documentary slows down the Roaring 20s bar’s ‘last day in paradise’ so we can see all the characters, the waifs and strays, in close-up and realise that all life is here. And even though the lens literally feels rose-tinted, with a red filter, there’s a harsh reality and finality at the heart of the film’s nostalgia.

Go to Page 2 for more of London Film Festival 2020 Part 2!

OUTSIDERS

Focusing on the homophobia so rife in Nairobi that it’s enshrined into law, I Am Samuel from Peter Murimi is shocking, and should be surprising, but violent attacks on gay people are sadly still commonplace. Even their parents won’t accept the couple at the heart of this documentary. Samuel’s father is a preacher and beatings and brutality are routine, making one wonder when they might finally be accepted.

Ultraviolence is a passion project for director Ken Fero with powerful content that doesn’t quite work despite having all the stats and facts to show the sheer number of deaths across many years that can be attributed to UK policing – including Fero’s own classmate. Not as effective as it might be – and you could argue that parts of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series of films highlight the issues more effectively – but it’s all there if you just look past the film’s execution.

Shot from the point of view of the dogs themselves, Stray (above) is Elizabeth Lo’s poetic documentary about the canines legally given free rein to roam in Turkey. One of them, Zeytin rules the roost on the streets, foraging, chasing cats in his leisure time, and hanging out with other dogs and fairly feral kids. Nazar lives with other dogs and kids – including refugees – on building sites, all getting by and eating what they can. Even the strays vaguely have owners and territory, and the puppies are adorable, of course. Indeed, it feels like the Istanbul citizens treat their stray dogs better than their homeless children, which may be Lo’s message.

UNDER THE RADAR

Sometimes you stumble across something that sandblasts its way into your consciousness, and Chess of the Wind, the amazing ‘lost classic’ from 1976 is exactly that. Mohammed Reza Aslani created something that bent all sorts of taboos, then it disappeared. Now this genuine treasure has been found and restored. Clashes between traditional and modern, medicine and religion dominate a plot centred on powerful women. Meanwhile, death and inheritance, a bullying, tyrannical stepfather and the prospect of revenge propel the story. This unexpected treat also delivers out-of-the-blue eroticism, and its high drama feels almost like a Lorca play or one of The Godfather trilogy. Recommend you track it down.

Five decades earlier, three Australian sisters the McDonaghs, made several silent movies including 1929’s The Cheaters. Now that’s been restored to tell its tale of grifters – much like Miranda July’s family in Kajillionaire – and its crisp, witty style still punches through.

Tilda Swinton almost certainly deserves the title of ‘National Treasure’ now, and some 33 years back, our own Peter Wollen used her talents in the short, but by no means sweet oddity, Friendship’s Death. Set in 1970s Jordan, Tilda gets to channel her inner Katherine Hepburn (opposite Bill Paterson), playing an extra terrestrial, chatting and discussing matters endlessly while gunfire pings around outside.

Bang up to date, Pedro Almodovar also uses Tilda as the focus/muse in his new short film, The Human Voice. Based loosely on the Jean Cocteau play, it starts with Tilda going shopping for axes! There’s a stirring big score, the colours of her clothing, pills, walls are also typically Almodovar, and there’s lots of hanging around as we see her destroying all trace of the person she’s awaiting, even though she’s clearly intoxicated by this relationship. Cleverly (as with Pain and Glory) the camera meanwhile pulls back to reveal that it’s all an artifice; all a film set, so as viewers we are ‘in on the joke’.

SHORT STUFF

Everyone who loved Shoplifters will be overjoyed to see the initial episode of TV series, The Day Off Of Kasimi Arimara, which Hirokazu Koreeda directs. Disarmingly charming, it has Arimara basically playing a version of herself – but not exactly her – an actor of the same age doing similar, everyday things. It’s quirky and cosy until…thwack… there’s a family revelation. Seems Koreeda really can do no wrong right now.

Crucially, it’s charm that is lacking from the TV series, Industry (above), which has an amazing line-up of talent in front of and behind the camera, including Lena Dunham (Girls) directing one episode. When it kicks off it seems to be full of the energy of The West Wing, but set in the brutal world of finance and city traders in a glossy, stylised London. All the young characters (including Nabhaan Rizwan’s Hari) have tics and foibles as they create their own set of morals, and seem like they’re constantly auditioning for The Apprentice. The acting is wildly, almost comically, variable, and the dialogue sometimes feels like endless one-liners stapled together, eg central character Harper’s boss saying: “If I wanted a story I’d read Moby Dick.” Feels like it was designed to appeal on both sides of the Atlantic, and may have ended up sinking somewhere in the middle.

In a smart move, the festival made all its shorts free to watch online this year, with abundant treats. The comically homoerotic Shuttlecock from Tommy Gillard won the festival’s audience prize, and masculinity is also undercut in John Ogunmuyiwa’s Mandem. Dolapo Is Fine, with ace soundtrack and smart narrative, has a young black British woman navigating the pressures of a possible job in the City, from assimilation to name to hairstyle, well directed by Ethoshela Hylton, starring Doyin Ajiboye, with co-stars including Gina McKee and Joseph Mydell.

Friends fall out and senseless tragedy unfolds in Karishma Dube’s Bittu, and there’s a sweetly charming trans story in Abel Rubinstein’s Dungarees. Chicken exposes and upends blatant Aussie racism with considerable skill and wit from director Alana Hicks. The atmospheric and beautifully shot Stray Dogs Come Out at Night from Hamza Bangash is worth checking out. And there’s stunning black and white and colour photography, with strong soundtrack, and naturalistic performances in Gramercy, directed by duo Jamil McGinnis and Pat Heywood. Seek them out!

Mads Mikkelsen in Another Round

AND NOW (CUE SOCIALLY-DISTANCED DRUM ROLL)… HERE ARE OUR DVDFEVER AWARDS FOR 2020 IN FULL:

15 Best Feature Films:

Rising Talent:

Best Comedy:

Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan in Ammonite

Best Romance:

Best Drama:

Best Director:

Best Actress:

Best Actor:

Best Ensembles:

Another Round, Bad Tales, Mangrove, Kajillionaire

Best Duo:

Garrett Bradley’s Time

Most Haunting:

The Salt In Our Waters, 180 Deg Rule, Shadow Country, which I just can’t shake.

Best Music:

American Utopia, Lovers Rock

Best Ending:

Another Round

Biggest Labour of Love:

Shadow Country, with screenplay written over many years by Ivan Arsenjev, and all filmed in director Bohdan Slama’s home village.

Annual Festival Ubiquity Award (aka the Kristin Scott Thomas Award):

Outright winner: Nabhaan Rizwan, as RPG, rival rapper to Riz Ahmed in Mogul Mowgli and as fated city trader Hari in Industry. Plus Simon McBurney in the terrible Siberia and his fabulous voice in Wolfwalkers. And if we bend the rules a little, and include restored archive films, then Tilda Swinton in both Human Voice and Friendship’s Death.

Second Chance Award:

Malgorzata Szumowska, who made The Other Lamb last year (which I hated) has turned it around in co-directing Never Gonna Snow Again

Most Disappointing:

Siberia, Possessor, Zanka Contact

Best Documentaries:

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London Film Festival 2020 Part 2 by Helen M Jerome – The DVDfever Review

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