If we were to sum up the main gala presentations at the festival in a word, it would be: mixed. Sam Mendes’ 1980s-set Empire of Light offers some touching moments. But its shifts from comedy to more serious political and emotional subject matter don’t really come off as all that convincing, leaving this a pleasant but insubstantial experience. Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry make Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway a watchable character study. An army vet finds difficulty overcoming her injuries – both physical and emotional – but, rather like its central character, this film struggles to really go anywhere beyond its opening premise. The Wonder, which sees Florence Pugh’s English nurse called to a rural town in 1860s Ireland to attest to the miracle of a girl who apparently survives without eating, has moments of psychological thriller, religious commentary and folk horror that were a bit too sporadic for us to really enjoy. We were surprised that Corsage won the Official Competition for the Best Film of the festival. Last year’s winner, the Iranian comedy-drama Hit the Road, was a classic for the ages, whereas Corsage’s intriguing aspects make it worth a watch but don’t really merit the highest accolade of the festival.
A number of international auteurs polarised critical opinion at the festival. Alejandro Iñárriu’s <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/venice-international-film-festival-2022-competition-u-turns-and-talent-packed-surprises">Bardo</a> was either visionary self-referentiality or bloated self-indulgence. Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave had some audience members falling asleep and others praising a return to the crime-story verve of Oldboy and sexual tension of The Handmaiden. Both Florian Zeller’s The Son and Darren Aronofsky’s The Wale were praised, respectively, as touching portrayals of mental illness and eating disorders, while also receiving criticism for being mawkish exploitation. Noah Baumbach either succeeded in filming Don DeLillo’s ‘unfilmable’ postmodernist novel White Noise or produced an incoherent mess.
So here we get to the good news: our critics’ picks of the festival. Unlike the films already mentioned which divided opinion, we have decided to make our picks the unambiguous winners of their own custom-made categories, all the better to guide you through this autumn’s upcoming cinema releases. – LB

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Aftersun Charlotte Wells Film 2022

<h5>Best female feature debut</h5>
The year 2022 will easily go down as a vintage year for debuts by women filmmakers at the festival. From Australia, there was artist Del Kathryn Barton’s Blaze, a visually sublime and audaciously crafted portrayal of a young suburban girl (Julie Savage) who retreats into a fantasy world constructed in her bedroom after witnessing a horrific act of sexual violence. This was a fascinating yet riveting watch from a neurodivergent stance. From the crowded American indie market rose Liquor Store Dreams, a personal documentary from So Yun Um that uses her father’s business as a springboard to explore generational family gaps, historical Asian stereotypes in pop culture and racial tension between Korean-American and Black-American communities – a sweet sincere film from a distinctively fresh voice. Meanwhile, on UK shores, Georgia Oakley’s low-key drama Blue Jean (nominated for Best First Feature Award at the festival) is a quietly searing look at the plight of the queer community in Thatcherite Britain when a woman’s dual life from PE teacher by day to frequenter at a local lesbian bar by night comes under threat.
But amid this rich selection, nothing came close to topping one of the festival’s most sought-after entrees, Aftersun. Hot off the heels from critical acclaim in Cannes and Edinburgh, Charlotte Wells’ debut arrived with huge anticipation amongst critics and public audiences alike, especially with involvement of rising star Paul Mescal from Normal People playing a divorced father who takes his young daughter (newcomer Frankie Corio in a breakout role) on holiday in Turkey. But within this deceptively simple premise evoking summery nostalgia in its ‘90s setting (particularly in its subtle music choices taken from bands like The Lightning Seeds and Catatonia) is an autumnal reflection on childhood memories, how they get framed in our subconscious or become relics on camcorders, and how the naïve innocence of childhood our own parents’ struggles. And it is the achingly sad afterthought at the end of these long reflections which Wells sharply articulates through subtle visual suggestions and carefully crafted performances from Corio and Mescal, where the film finds a devastating emotional tug. Not just an impressively confident opening statement from Wells, but one of the finest films to be released this year and we urge you to seek it out when it hits UK screens in November. – TS

<h5>Best blockbusting entertainment</h5>
We were asked to give away none of the many spoilers to this sequel to whodunnit <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/revolutionary-time-our-critics-picks-for-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2022">Knives Out</a>. So let’s just say that it joins the exclusive ranks of a sequel that actually improves on the original film. Knives Out was best when its ensemble cast bounced off each other to showcase the devious stupidity of the idle rich. Such moments are extended here to cover the entire runtime of the film, making this the best-orchestrated, paciest, most note-perfect film you’re likely to see all year. – LB
<h5>Most bittersweet feelgood film</h5>
Just as a sequel will nearly always fail to live up to the original, one of the key rules of filmmaking is that only fools remake a classic. We therefore didn’t go into Living with especially high expectations. The original film, 1952’s Ikiru, is acclaimed director Akira Kurosawa at his bitter, philosophical finest, with a story about a lowly clerk who finds out he only has a few months left to live. The remake is not better than Kurosawa’s original, but its retro evocation of the final actions of a 1950s bureaucrat, played by Bill Nighy, has more than enough heart to make it well worth your time. The setting displays the manners and understatement of a lost world of regulation, hierarchy and colourless administration. However, the film’s nostalgic longing is for the possibility that this same world of constraint might also contain the values of mutual assistance that really make life worth living. – LB
<h5>Best extended display of evil</h5>
The festival continued Netflix’s reputation for dramatic adaptations of true crime stories, with two films that are already available to watch on the platform at the time of writing. Joel Edgerton stars in The Stranger, about the undercover operation that captured a child murderer. Meanwhile, Jessica Chastain discovers the gruesome truth about Eddie Redmayne’s treatment of vulnerable patients in <a href="https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81260083">The Good Nurse</a>. These are grim stories taken from real life told with sombre thoughtfulness. If you want to revel in the pure wicked fun of evil then try instead to see L’origine Du Mal, a French thriller in the mould of the suspense dramas of Claude Chabrol. A worker from an anchovy-packing plant arrives at a luxurious family mansion claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of its commanding, but ailing, patriarch. The question is not so much whether she has secrets to hide, but which family member’s wicked secrets will ultimately triumph in this domestic battle of mutual self-interest. – LB

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<h5>Tommy Wiseau tribute act award</h5>
And then there was My Policeman, an adaptation of Bethan Roberts’s novel about a policeman called Tom in a friendship triangle involving two conflicting relationships: one is a closeted sexual relationship with art curator Patrick (David Dawson) and the other is his own marriage to schoolteacher Marion (Emma Corrin from The Crown). It has the middle-class comfortability of an early-2000s TV Soap drama destined for repeat on ITV3 but, most intriguingly, features a leading performance from current music sensation Harry Styles as Tom in his second film outing of 2022. I think Styles has the potential of becoming a fine actor in the future which is evident in his brief impactful appearance in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and even in Don’t Worry Darling as Florence Pugh’s picture-perfect husband. But his performance in My Policeman is the result of shoving a very inexperienced actor into a lead role requiring complexity that takes years of work to achieve, and the acting deficiencies are accentuated by a terrible screenplay and inert directing. One-note lines like “I think you have a dirty mind” are delivered with such emotional bluntness, plates are thrown across dinner tables in child-like tantrums, and orgasms are confusingly expressed; to say there was inappropriate laughter during the screening is an understatement. – TS
<h5>Most batshit crazy film</h5>
This year’s festival served up some enchanting animated films. From <a href="https://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/">Cartoon Saloon’s</a> latest tale, My Father’s Dragon, set on a sinking island with adorable animal designs that effectively harness the studio’s trademark 2D animation, to a more robust auteur offer in Guillermo Del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Pinocchio, which uses gorgeous stop-motion set against the backdrop of 1930s fascist Italy. But none of these are as batshit crazy and idiosyncratic than Spanish-French anti-war animation Unicorn Wars, about an army of religiously bigoted teddy bears raging a bloody war against environmentally friendly unicorns who reside in the magic forest. It is quite literally a fever dream hybrid of Care Bears meets Apocalypse Now as it delves into areas of phantasmagorical grotesque, even though its allegorical rhetoric is well-worn (for one, all the bears are male while all the unicorns are female). To put it simply, if a teddy bear priest throwing a grenade with a pink love heart on it into a bunch of charging unicorns sounds like a perfect night at the movies then be our guest. – TS
The <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">BFI London Film Festival</a> took place 5 to 16 October 2022. Select films mentioned in this review are now available to see at the cinema or on Netflix.
LB – Louis Bayman 
TS – Theo Smith
<pre>Featured Photo: My Policeman (Michael Grandage)</pre>

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Louis Bayman and Theo Smith offer a glimpse of the films that will be jostling for position come awards season, as well as a chance to find out about the films that won’t appear elsewhere on British screens.

Films of the season: The Platform’s special categories following the BFI London Film Festival 2022

Running from 17th October to 31st December this year, the BFI’s exciting, nationwide horror season <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/in-dreams-are-monsters">‘In Dreams are Monsters’</a> introduces itself with the claim that “Horror is the genre of our times; it speaks both to and for everyone.” Certainly, horror does have a special ability to resonate with marginal voices. Monstrous concepts walk the shadowy hinterlands of human knowledge – the realms of the barely thought and the unthinkable.
The genre’s transgressive and affective qualities can therefore, speak “to and for everyone”, but the claim that horror is the “genre of our times”, is more complicated. Horror monsters mutate; they evolve with our changing dreams and nightmares. As John Carpenter, director of horror classics including Halloween (1978) says: “Every culture, every few years, it morphs, it changes into something else. It brings the sensibilities of the age in which it’s made and that’s what’s so fabulous.” Horror, then, has the capacity to evolve alongside our anxieties and in this sense, it is the genre of all times.
Yet our time is a particularly unsettling one. In Britain we have been under attack from a pincer movement of <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/a-new-uk-prime-minister-is-not-enough-the-current-economic-model-needs-a-radical-overhaul">existential challenges</a> since 2016: <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/brexit">Brexit</a>, <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/coronavirus-pandemic">Covid</a> and now war in Europe with its attendant threats of economic and perhaps even nuclear catastrophe. And all of this against the backdrop of big data, algorithms and AI technologies that seem capable of manipulating us like some spectral puppeteer hidden within the devices that dominate so much of our lives. But before we turn to contemporary monsters, let us consider horror’s historical appeal, with reference to some of the highlights from the BFI’s wide-ranging retrospective.

James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), screening until the 27th November, is widely considered to be one of the great Universal monster movies. Made 114 years after the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel, the treatment shifts the emphasis somewhat from man versus nature, to technology versus man. In the paper James Whale’s Frankensteins: re-animating the Great War (2011), Christiane Gerblinger suggests the film resonates with a dominant trauma of its time: the mechanised slaughter of the first world war. A comparison between Shelley and Whale’s monsters helps to illustrate this argument. While Shelley’s is gigantic and grotesque, it is also erudite, well-mannered and emotionally sophisticated. Whale’s on the other hand is mute, lumbering and bestial, corrupted and defiled by the techno-scientific power that gave it life. Like the victims of the first mass conflict of the industrial age, the monster suffers at the hands of technology and male hubris, invested with great pathos by Boris Karloff’s haunting performance. In addition, Gerblinger suggests that the monster’s repeated rejection and eventual persecution at the hands of the villagers, resonates with the plight of first world war veterans, doubly dehumanised by the horrors of war and the economic hardship of The Great Depression. Whale’s monster is an image of the period’s broken man, whose needs society is incapable and unwilling to meet. Frankenstein offers a bleak vision of humanity in a deeply troubled time and, as such, we might think of it as a critical horror film: its sympathetic monstrosity engages with cultural problems, but does not easily yield solutions.
Screening until the 1st November, Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954), is a seminal 1950s monster movie. In the study Race, Gender and Terror: The Primitive in 1950s Horror Films (2004), Patrick Gonder argues that Creature illuminates the post-war fear among white Americans, of desegregation and interracial sex. According to Gonder, Gill-Man’s exaggerated lips and half-beast, half-human taxonomy “concretize racial difference” by transcribing racist African American stereotypes onto the monstrous body. He is figured as an unevolved primitive, driven by bestial urges to prey on a group of ‘evolved’ white scientists on a quest for knowledge. As the narrative proceeds, Gill-Man develops a fascination for the party’s damsel-in-distress, Kay Lawrence. He makes repeated attempts to capture her, attacking from the Black Lagoon’s weedy depths, with the setting amplifying his primeval nature. In stark contrast, Kay’s lover David is a male hero in classical mould. With his colleagues in tow, he pursues enlightened knowledge of Gill-Man’s origins, while flaunting a muscular, athletic torso, accentuated by flattering, low-key lighting. Indeed, one could argue that David’s name hints at the racial politics written on his body; Michelangelo’s David is after all, an iconic representation of idealised notions of white civilisation. Resolution comes when David nullifies the threat from the not-quite-human, racial other, and re-establishes the white, patriarchal order. On this reading, Creature from the Black Lagoon is horror in reactionary mode. Its monstrous motifs trace dominant anxieties, but refuse to map those anxieties to the potential that lurks in the transgressive heart of all monstrosity.

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Julie Adams and the Gill Man in CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, 1954.

Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1985), screening until 30th November, is a different beast, however. Its narrative and thematic sophistication demonstrates the capacity of horror to produce progressive ideas as well as reproduce oppressive ones. In some ways, Freddie Kruger is a typical slasher antagonist – an emasculated male killer that stalks teenage victims, brutally murdering them with phallic stabbing weapons. In Nancy, the film also boasts a powerful example of the ‘final girl’ archetype, attributed by Carol Clover to the slasher film in Men, Women and Chainsaws (1999). Yet Freddie’s explicitly supernatural status is unusual. He possesses his victims’ dreams and inflicts harm that manifests in their waking worlds. In this sense, Freddie is a liminal entity who complicates the distinction between monster and non-monster. He is also a striking example of the ‘abject’ horror Julia Kristeva discusses in her 1980 book, Powers of Horror. For Kristeva, the abject monster is particularly disturbing because it is neither wholly a part of, nor external to, the body. Like Freddie, Nancy is an atypical character. She has more agency and resourcefulness than most final girls, and her heroism is further amplified by her refusal to copy the brutal violence of her male assailant. Instead, she realises that the secret to defeating Freddie (albeit briefly!) is a refusal of his power over her. As horror scholar Kyle Christensen argues in The Final Girl versus Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (2011), Nancy is no mere surrogate for the male gaze – she destroys it by refusing to be subsumed within it. Nightmare then, seems to resonate with two prominent movements of the 1980s, second wave feminism and postmodernism. The former sought to dismantle the gender inequalities of patriarchal society, while postmodernist thought rejects rigid categories like monster/non-monster and masculine/feminine. An unusually progressive slasher film, A Nightmare on Elm Street suggests that monstrosity is not confined to the other, and that heroic agency transcends hegemonic notions of binary gender.
The monstrous jamboree that has stalked through cinemas since Georges Méliès first ever horror film The Devil’s Castle in 1896, demonstrates the genre’s capacity to illuminate the nightmares and dreams of their time; but what of the horrors of our time? My PhD research proposes one answer to this question: those brought forth by what I call ‘datafied selfhood’. Datafied selfhood is my term for the technologically mediated experience of the individual in a world increasingly constituted by computational technology.

As we can see from the films screened in <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/in-dreams-are-monsters">this season at the BFI</a>, the horror monster can terrify but it can also reveal new ways to become human. I think of this paradox as ‘monstrous potentiality’. In addition, horror has an affective force that sidesteps culturally specific spectatorship and, instead, hardwires audiences to an imminent, bodily experience with the terrors on screen.
Like horror film, datafied selfhood has monstrous potentiality. It has the capacity to augment and liberate, but also to subjugate and oppress. Our personal devices interface us with technologies of mass communication and participation, but they do so according to the values of capitalist rationality: productivity, efficiency and competition. Thus, we are caught between the promise of extended freedoms and agency on the one hand, and day-to-day conformity to the operation of computational capitalism on the other. Datafied selfhood may extend us beyond the body into networks of interaction that facilitate new abilities, but it also threatens our subjective coherence.
This monstrous tension (perhaps even paradox) is at the centre of our datafied age. It is also increasingly visible in our horror cinema. Cam (2018), Black Box (2020), Daniel Isn’t Real (2019) and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) for example, all offer fascinating insights when considered from this perspective. An extended discussion on this topic is for another time, however. For now, as the nights lengthen and Halloween is upon us, I look forward to the BFI’s expertly curated horror season. May it remind us in these troubled times that monsters can be the stuff of dreams as well as nightmares.
BFI&#8217;s <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/in-dreams-are-monsters">‘In Dreams Are Monsters’</a> is a season of horror films in cinemas across the UK and on BFI Player (17 October to 31 December 2022).

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From horror in reactionary mode, to the monsters that show us how to become more human, here is a close look at some of the classics featured at the BFI&#8217;s curated season, ‘In Dreams Are Monsters’, available now.

A monster for every age: Discovering ‘In Dreams Are Monsters’ film season at the BFI

This year was a truly classic edition of the London Film Festival, which returned to public screenings after last year’s online-only event. The winner of the Official Festival Competition was the excellent Hit the Road, an Iranian road movie that was also the debut film from Panah Panahi, son of Jafar Panahi, the veteran director whose satirical visions of contemporary Iran got him arrested and banned from filmmaking. Not that this has softened his son’s filmmaking, who directs a road movie about a chaotic family in what starts out as very funny and ends up as deeply moving, even fantastical by its end. The emotional range develops with the varied landscape they travel, as the family get further away from Tehran and end up near the mist-strewn border with Turkey. Perhaps also paying tribute to the fractious closeness of family, the six-year-old Rayan Sarlak gives one of the all-time greatest child performances in cinema as the family’s younger son. While this was a worthy winner amid a wonderful year’s array of films, we thought we’d give you the results from a few of our own categories.
<h5>Best artistic use of black and white</h5>
I’m still a little bit conflicted on whether this one should go to Belfast, a surprisingly touching drama directed by Kenneth Branagh set on a residential street in the Northern Irish capital amid the beginning of the Troubles. It’s more a family drama than an exhaustive political account, but no the worse for demonstrating how history determines even the most private situations. The black and white gives a retro quality that is less nostalgic than it is a reminder of what violence and pain take away.
But for sheer artistic brio the award must go to The Tragedy of Macbeth, the festival’s closing gala, and the first ever film made by Joel Coen without his brother Ethan in tow. Denzel Washington plays the title role and Joel’s wife Frances McDormand plays Lady Macbeth, perhaps an in-joke given the character’s classic role in driving her husband’s solo ambitions. The dialogue moves at quite a pace, but the swirling fog, the jet-black ravens and the air of violent fantasy in the monochrome film stock convey enough of the dramatic atmosphere for anyone not already familiar with Shakespeare’s play.
A special mention for the least artistic use of black and white goes to Paris, 13th District. This is a partnership between Jacques Audiard, whose role on films like A Prophet make him a worthy contender for France’s most macho filmmaker, and scriptwriter Celine Sciamma of Portrait of a Lady of Fire, whose Petite Maman also premiered at the festival and which extends her interest in the workings of female subjectivity. This partnership surely had great potential. But Paris, 13th District is never more than a plodding romantic drama with neither romance nor drama, which believes itself more edgy than it actually is. Its black and white is thus only a pointless stylistic flourish designed to mask these deficiencies.
<h5>Worst misuse of 20th century history</h5>
There were some fantastic period dramas in this year’s festival, with Spencer giving an intense glimpse into Christmas Day 1992 when Diana decided to divorce Charles, and Power of the Dog marking Jane Campion’s return to the cinema with an anti-western set in Montana in 1925. Then there was Munich – Edge of War, an attempted resuscitation of the reputation of Neville Chamberlain, the man who decided that appeasing Hitler would save Europe. This large production, based on the book by Robert Harris, begins promisingly enough, with George McKay a nervy but patriotic translator roped into an espionage plot to steal Hitler’s secret briefing papers and thereby halt the invasion of Europe. Unfortunately the spy drama never really gets anywhere, leaving us instead with a tribute to Neville Chamberlain, played in stolid costume-drama form by Jeremy Irons. A closing intertitle helpfully informs us that appeasement was part of a chain of events that ‘eventually’ led to Hitler’s defeat. I must have missed the intertitle reminding the viewer that this was only after the fall of mainland Europe and the Holocaust. I can only guess that the target market is anyone who finds arguments about Winston Churchill’s legacy so interesting that they want to move onto a more challenging recipient of their admiration.
<h5>Best &#8216;spooky season&#8217; picks for Halloween </h5>
Cannes festival winner Julia Ducournau comes in at a near-miss for this award with Titane. This blend of serial killer, body horror, sci-fi and art film would have been a sure-fire winner for an award for best sex scene with a car – not in a car, but with one. Yet in a film that is all about the difficulties of classification, what starts out as horror ends up as a love story. Even if it then blurs the line between sexual and familial love, by way of a fugitive killer breaking her own nose and hiding her own impregnation by a car – that is not a typo – to impersonate the missing child of a lonely firefighter.
And so our hands-down, guts out, scream-till-you-embarrass-the-person-next-to-you winner of this particular award is DASHCAM. It’s a sillier, bigger budget, somewhat less focused but still highly enjoyable follow up by Rob Savage to last year’s Host, which was set entirely within the 55 minutes of a deeply scary Zoom call. The premise behind DASHCAM is instead a livestream by freestyling rapper and online anti-masker controversialist Annie Hardy as she comes to Britain to visit a friend, steals his car and gives a ride to the wrong prematurely-aged stranger with a mystery disease. The limitations of the dashcam technology are used to exploit the fact that what we can’t see is often scarier than what we can. And the constant comment stream, although hard to follow alongside the action, is hilariously familiar to anyone who has ever participated in an online community. It will be interesting to see if this updating of the ‘found footage’ film (such as The Blair Witch Project) will offer filmmakers enough mileage to become a new subgenre of horror for the internet age. I’d say this gross-out, jump-scare film is definitely one to enjoy alongside a packed, groaning audience at the cinema, although I can’t help wondering if maybe the true authentic viewing experience would, for once, be a cracked iPhone with a dodgy connection.
The BFI London Film Festival took place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">6 to 17 October 2021</a>.

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Our film editor, Louis Bayman, tells us how the 65th BFI London Film Festival went down, including road movies and Halloween picks.

The Hits and Misses from the 2021 BFI London Film Festival

In-person screenings and gala events are back at this year’s <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">BFI London Film Festival</a> (6 to 17 October) after last year’s online event. This time, you can watch your festival picks at London’s South Bank and West End cinemas, with a number of viewings expanding across the country. Tickets are on sale now, and The Platform’s Louis Bayman and Halima Hassan are here to tell us what to look out for.
If you’re in the mood for a headliner, there are plenty of star-studded events each year at the festival, and here are four of the big releases we’re looking forward to:
<h5>THE FRENCH DISPATCH 
Dir. Wes Anderson (USA)</h5>
Described as a “star-studded homage to journalism and literary magazines”, The French Dispatch is also the name of a high-brow magazine that’s reached the end of its run. Sharp, weird and aesthetically pleasing is what I’ve come to expect from Wes Anderson – and from the trailer, it looks like this film will deliver. Granted, there are many ways Anderson’s films may not be for everyone, with odd storylines and unrepresentative casts leaving much to desire. But I don&#8217;t need representation all the time and fantasy is fun. – HH
<h5>SPENCER 
Dir. Pablo Larrain (UK / Germany)</h5>
Kristen Stewart stars in this drama about the late Diana Spencer, aka Princess of Wales. Director Pablo Larraìn’s previous films include explorations of Pinochet-era Chile and a recently widowed Jackie Kennedy. That promises to make this a thoughtful and politically astute contribution to the ‘90s nostalgia that has recently been gathering pace. – LB 
<h5>THE HARDER THEY FALL 
Dir. Jeymes Samuel (USA)</h5>
I have found myself enamoured with all things relating to the American West. Stories of outlaws and cowboys, operating in a lawless time so vastly different from our hyper-surveilled present. The Harder They Fall is inspired by the real-life stories of African-American cowboys and features an incredible cast (Idris Elba, Regina King, LaKeith Stanfield). I am expecting something epic and beautiful and satisfying. – HH
<h5>LAST NIGHT IN SOHO 
Dir. Diana Rigg (UK)</h5>
Although it played to a standing ovation by critics at the Venice Film Festival, I don’t quite know what this sci-fi/horror hybrid by Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright will hold in store. But it promises to get its audience high on style and atmosphere with a time-travel plot that travels back to the Soho clubs of London in 1966. The ensemble cast is worth the price of admission alone, starring Anya Taylor-Joy but also showcasing Rita Tushingham, Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg in her last ever role. – LB
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Last-Night-in-Soho

Away from the noise of the red carpet here, are a few personal critics’ choices:
<h5>RED ROCKET 
Dir: Sean Baker (USA)</h5>
Director/Writer Sean Baker’s third feature’s premise is an uncomfortable one but I’m hopeful considering how his debut (Tangerine) and sophomore (The Florida Project) films are some of my favourites. A once successful LA porn star goes back to his old ways and his ex-wife, and finds himself fixated on an underage girl who he decides should join him for his adult movie comeback. I’m curious to see what this film is about. – HH
<h5>IL BUCO 
Dir. Michelangelo Frammartino (Italy / Germany / France)</h5>
This film is in the official competition for an award for best film. While I would think a film about speleology – cave-mapping – is probably a bit too left-field to win, it offers a rhythmic, poetic view from the mountains of southern Italy. Director Michelangelo Frammartino last film, Le quattro volte, was similarly a tale of goat-herding mountain-dwellers that hovered somewhere between documentary and art installation with one single word – ‘grazie’ – in its hour and a half runtime. A bold filmmaker returning with a unique vision. – LB
<h5>ENCOUNTER 
Dir. Michael Pearce (USA / UK)</h5>
Science fiction x Riz Ahmed?! Sign me up. Something strange is afoot and Riz Ahmed’s character, a war-veteran, is in the know and desperate to warn his family of the danger (an impending alien invasion!). – HH
<h5>THE SOUVENIR II 
Dir. Joanna Hogg (UK)</h5>
An autobiographical tale of her own ‘80s art school experiences and a slow, almost plotless reverie on disappointment, Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir wouldn’t really strike us as the typical film to make a franchise out of. The title sounds to me like deliberate provocation from a director whose scrutiny is always on the awkwardness of the deficiencies of the upper-middle classes. Hogg’s attention on the most privileged sections of British society is too narrow a perspective for some viewers, but she always succeeds in wreaking a devastation that is all the more effective for its quietness.  – LB

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THE HARDER THEY FALL

Last but not least, we’ve picked a few titles especially for The Platform’s readers. Here are some of the politically conscious films with a global reach at this year’s London Film Festival:
<h5>THE GRAVEDIGGER’S WIFE 
Dir. Khadar Ayderus Ahmed (Finland / France / Germany)</h5>
This film is directed by Somali filmmaker Khadar Ahmed and stars a Somali cast. It follows Guled, played by Omar Abdi, a gravedigger whose wife falls ill. To raise the money for her treatment, he is forced to leave his ailing wife in the care of their son to seek the help from his community. Filmed in Djibouti, I cannot wait to see this story set in East Africa, with East African leads. I think it’ll be an exciting and important addition to the African film canon. – HH
<h5>A HERO 
Dir. Asghar Farhadi (Iran / France)</h5>
Asghar Farhadi is already well known to international audiences, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2011 with The Separation and then refusing to travel to the ceremony in 2017 for The Salesman in protest against Trump’s Muslim ban. He specialises in family dramas whose moments of acute personal crises still succeed in drawing a broader picture of contemporary Iranian society. This should particularly be the case in his latest film, where a man in debtors’ prison tries to confront his creditor. – LB
<h5>ALL THESE SONS 
Dir. Bing Liu and Joshua Altman (USA)</h5>
All These Sons is a documentary about two Chicago organisations, The Inner City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) and MAAFA, which recruit young Black men to get them off the streets and tackle gun violence. I’m interested in this documentary from a reform and prevention perspective. – HH
<h5>LEAVE NO TRACES 
Dir. Jan P. Matuszyński (France / Poland / Czechia)</h5>
This Polish film is set amid the military dictatorship in 1983 and concerns the killing of a student by security forces. This will be a new discovery for me, as I am not familiar with its cast and crew. However its historical investigation into not just one act of violence, but the whole system that sustains it, has brought comparisons with classic Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda and that’s enough to get me interested! – LB

the_gravediggers_wife_-copy

The_gravediggers_wife_ copy

The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">6 to 17 October 2021</a>. 
HH – Halima A. Hassan 
LB – Louis Bayman

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Louis Bayman and Halima Hassan preview the BFI London Film Festival of 2021 as it returns to cinemas this year.

Our Critics’ Picks for the BFI London Film Festival 2021

We reported <a href="https://www.the-platform.org.uk/2020/10/06/the-platform-preview-to-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2020/">earlier this month</a> that the London Film Festival would be a more intimate affair than usual, much of it at home, with no gala performances and a smaller selection of films.
Of course, the festival did still have its headline acts. Ammonite, its closing finale, was a touching tale of love set in 1840s Lyme Regis (which we will review at greater length soon), with Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan as its leads. It was an effective if conventional choice, like the festival opener, Steve McQueen’s historical recreation Mangrove. Personally, I found McQueen’s other entry to the festival, Lovers Rock, more interesting, although a minor film and a kind of ‘B-side’ to Mangrove. McQueen’s genius is more for establishing a certain setting than in plot and it is put to especially good use in this almost non-narrative film of a Ladbroke Grove house party thrown at some point in the 1980s.
In the absence of an official competition the online audience picked the festival winner, awarding the prize to Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, about a group of schoolteachers who realise that their job is more fun if they drink every day. While there’s no arguing with taste I found this somewhat moralistic film a rather white, male and middle-aged choice compared to the diversity that the festival had put effort into displaying elsewhere.
The clear winner for me of the more crowd-pleasing films was the gorgeous, touching, One Night in Miami. Based on a stage play by first-time director Regina King, it imagines a meeting in a Miami hotel room between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown, as they each contemplate a life changing decision: Clay to join the Muslim Brotherhood and Malcolm to leave it, Cooke to address social change in his music and Brown to depart the NFL to try a career in Hollywood. The decisions are as personal as they are political, and its central question – what does black success mean in a white society – is made to resound with a contemporary relevance despite the retro setting.
However, the festival is a chance to see films which won’t ever get the red carpet treatment. So here’s my list of six of the best to look out for beyond the big releases:

one-night-in-miami

one night in miami

<h5>UNDINE 
Dir. Christian Petzold (Germany/France)</h5>
Undine turns the conventional romance of a random city encounter into an absorbing and ultimately disquieting tale of love and pain. It will be familiar territory for viewers already acquainted with director Christian Petzold and lead actress Paula Beer, but it develops his concern with Europe’s historical scars in a more allegorical direction. Its lead character, Undine, is a guide to the architectural history of Berlin and is named after a water nymph of ancient legend. She becomes a figure who skirts the enigmatic realms of fantasy and disappointment, memory and myth.
<h5>NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN 
Dir. Małgorzata Szumowska, Michael Englert (Poland/Germany)</h5>
Another film that holds a delicate balance between social commentary and fantasy is this film about a Ukranian masseur who accrues a cult following in a wealthy Polish suburb. Born in Pripyat in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, masseur Zhenia seems at first like he might have arrived as part of a moral lesson about migrant labour for the privileged members of the gated community, who simultaneously depend upon and look down on him. But as they fetishise the healing power of his tender strength, the near-wordless presence of this mysterious outsider comes to take on an altogether different, almost magical-realist quality, as the possibly sacred emissary of some cosmic power.
<h5>THE INTRUDER 
Dir. Natalia Meta (Argentina/Mexico)</h5>
This Argentine film takes its enigmas in a creepier direction. Starting out in comic vein as a woman realises that she doesn’t actually like the man she has gone on holiday with, his death soon after their arrival paradoxically makes him someone she can never truly be rid of. Meanwhile, she becomes the subject of the rather insistent attentions of an admirer she meets in the church where she sings, and, in a further inconvenience, her mother randomly decides to move in indefinitely. As a voiceover artist for horror films, this film is also part of a sub-genre of thrillers about a sound recordist, along with Blow Out, The Conversation and Berberian Sound Studio, that explore the eerily disembodied nature of the voice. The intruder of the title could thus be any one of a number of uncomfortably close beings, including her relationship to her own physical self.
<h5>A COMMON CRIME 
Dir. Francisco Márquez (Argentina)</h5>
This second Argentine thriller is another imaginative recreation of the slow falling apart of the boundaries, and the sanity, of its central female protagonist, but the dissolution here reveals a series of uncomfortable truths about social class. Cecilia is a university lecturer, happily able to quote Althusser and Gramsci on bourgeois ideology. But when her maid’s son knocks on her door, her refusal to help him has fateful consequences. While showing up her conformity to the ultimately brutal logic that it is her day job to critique, this is also the first film I have ever seen that manages to find dramatic material in a dissertation supervision session, and a superb combination of psychological and political insight.
<h5>AFTER LOVE 
Dir. Aleem Khan (UK)</h5>
The success of this deeply moving British drama owes in large part to the central performance of Joana Scanlan, who plays Mary Husain, a resident of Dover whose ferry-captain husband Husain dies unexpectedly in the opening sequence, only for her to find out that he had a secret life just over the border in Calais. The film follows her as she works her way into the household of his secret mistress and son. While such a plot would in less capable hands be barely credible, the quiet brilliance of Scanlan’s performance means that the themes of betrayal, race, death and mourning are played with intelligent subtlety and heart-breaking conviction.
<h5>LIMBO 
Dir. Ben Sharrock (UK)</h5>
It was a good year for British features, as shown by this comedy-drama about refugees seeking asylum in Scotland. What begins as a deadpan, rather absurdist culture-clash comedy turns to an intense portrait of the tragedies of dislocation. The humour’s absurdism is a nice way to show up both the awkwardness of cultural awareness and the bureaucratic cruelty of the exile situation. But it reaches real emotional depth in its second half as it probes the travails of Omar, a gifted young musician and Syrian refugee who must contend with the family he has left behind, the war he has fled and the music he may never play again.

limbo-film-1

Limbo Film 2020

<pre>Featured: After Love (Aleem Khan)</pre>

After Love Film 2020 cropped

A Chernobyl-born cult leader, a hypocritical university lecturer, and a Syrian musician turned refugee are some of the memorable characters in our selection from this year’s London Film Festival.

Six of the Best from the BFI London Film Festival, 2020

What does a film festival do when festivity is banned?
It is often said that crises lead to change, but the changes we make when in crisis mode reveal our essential natures more than any planned or premeditated actions do. In the classic 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, when the US suburbs are infected by a zombie apocalypse, the mindless hordes continue to perform the one habitual ability they have left: they go to the mall. In times of coronavirus, when the higher functions of sociability are denied and even the malls close down, we go en masse online.
Lockdown has been a boom time for streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, whose captive global audience is of a scale that dwarfs the ‘Major Studios’ of Hollywood yore. But while film may be thriving as entertainment, cinema as an institution is in grave peril, its production halted; and theatrical exhibition trickled to a socially-distanced minimum.
The Cannes Festival <a href="https://ew.com/movies/film-festivals/cannes-2020-special-event-october/">cancelled</a> all its offline events as a response to the first wave of the pandemic back in June. If our autumn heralds a grim sequel to those early summer times, the BFI London Film Festival’s hybrid programme seeks to avoid such disruption, balancing online and in-person activity in a way that is neither lockdown nor normality. Tickets are on sale to reduced-capacity auditoriums over the festival. Around 100 fewer feature films are being exhibited this year, with only 58 titles to choose from and no Official Competition category. While film production was halted internationally this year, this slow-down will only really be apparent at next year’s festival. This year, one can assume that the larger distribution companies have decided to scale back their involvement, given that there are far fewer A-list titles than usual. Presumably the expense involved in shipping over the big stars and movie talent, plus all of the other promotional activities that the big companies usually devote to a festival, must not seem like a great investment when you’re playing to limited audiences, with no red carpet or gala events.
The withdrawal of the big-money releases leaves a more intimate and perhaps more diverse festival, which will play across the country both in cinemas and on streaming services. The festival opens with 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen’s Mangrove, an appropriate choice to coincide with Black History Month, centring on the landmark true-life battle of Black activists <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/frank-crichlow-and-the-mangrove">&#8216;The Mangrove Nine&#8217;</a> against police racism. It ends with Ammonite, about palaeontologist Mary Anning, played by Kate Winslet (co-starring Saoirse Ronan). Both of these films indicate the continuing importance of historical drama to prestige British cinema.
The big festival-circuit hit playing this year is Nomadland, a chronicle of recession-era America starring Frances McDormand, winner of both the Toronto and Venice festivals this summer. In a historical what-if, Regina King’s One Night in Miami puts Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, James Brown and Sam Cooke together for in a hotel room one evening in 1964. An artistic partnership we eagerly anticipate is Spike Lee’s direction of Talking Heads singer David Byrne in American Utopia, a film of the Broadway musical. Meanwhile Supernova promises a two-hander between Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci, both of whom advance previews report to be on top form.
Riz Ahmed stars as a British-Pakistani rapper who suffers a life-threatening illness in Mogul Mowgli. I also look forward to Relic, the directorial debut for Natalie Erika James and another entry into the increasingly rich body of contemporary horror cinema directed by women. Bad Tales promises a cynical take on human nature amid a group of family dramas set over one summer, a film made up of episodes and, thus, a format which seems to be making a comeback after films like Wild Tales, Certain Women and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I am also hoping it will provide a sighting of that <a>increasingly rare animal</a>, a modern Italian film worth getting excited about.
No contemporary director is better at bearing the continuing scars of Europe’s unhappy past than Christian Petzold, and so we are keen to watch Undine, a Berlin-set romance whose title refers to a mythic water nymph. Never Gonna Snow Again appears to be an intriguing Polish-German social satire on migration. Farewell Amor promises a more earnest, heartrending tale of exile as an Angolan man is reunited with his wife and daughter in New York.
From the still images I’ve seen, the Irish animation Wolfwalkers seems to be a beautifully inventive rendition of myth and legend in a time of colonialism. The festival also features a restoration of the banned and once presumed lost 1976 Iranian gothic film Chess of the Wind.
Perhaps the escapism of cinema and its grand picture palaces was always a historically limited model, destined one day inevitably to lose ground to the individualised, private sphere of the home. With video-on-demand already being the major way in which we watch films, driving the continuing proliferation of screen media into our homes, on our laps and our mobile devices, we were already a long way from the larger-than-life communal experience of the picture palace well before Covid-19 hit. The hybrid events at the festival, its nationwide reach and its more intimate roster suggest that even crisis can be a spur to new experiences and continued invention. We shall be back with our verdicts after a few weeks of assiduous home viewing.
The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/london-film-festival/strands/feature-films" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bfi.org.uk/london-film-festival/strands/feature-films&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1602061595870000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGioY1LUoVY_lvsmJtNPPihA-QLhA">7 to 18 October 2020</a>. 
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<pre>Photo Credit: Nomadland</pre>

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Our film editor Dr Louis Bayman previews the selection at this year’s online version of the BFI London Film Festival.

The Platform Preview to the BFI London Film Festival, 2020

As election fever takes hold and a weary populace is asked to steer the country away from the current political decade, we at The Platform take a look at the nation according to its cinema, with a glance at some of the British films featured at last month’s <a href="http://platformonline.uk/the-platform-preview-to-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2019">BFI London Film Festival</a>.
<h5>Official Secrets 
Dir: Gavin Hood (2019)</h5>
We start then with the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, in the first film I have seen that manages to make the early noughties look retro. It follows the real story of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/22/katharine-gun-whistleblower-iraq-official-secrets-film-keira-knightley">Katharine Gun</a>, the whistleblower who leaked a failed request by the US and UK to spy on UN Security Council delegates to blackmail them into passing a resolution supporting war. Keira Knightley plays the central role in what is both a slick thriller and an impassioned plea for public integrity, as Gun risks her livelihood and freedom against a war based on lies, a point that resonates with our post-truth age. Its espionage drama resembles Watergate saga All the President’s Men, but mixed with the heritage charm of the English countryside as Gun turns renegade amidst the rolling hills of Cheltenham. The pace is slow and the events of the case – the government drops the charges, but goes ahead with the war – are too recent to surprise, but the subplot of how it threatened her Kurdish husband with deportation holds real suspense.
Official Secrets is now showing at UK cinemas.
<h5>Greed 
Dir: Michael Winterbottom (2019)</h5>
The unfairness of systematic injustice is brought up-to-date in this satire that depicts ‘Greedy’ McCreadie, a fictional boss of a series of clothing firms. McCreadie plans a lavish party in a mocked-up amphitheatre on a Greek island to celebrate his 60th birthday. The ancient-world setting hints that the <a href="https://www.cityam.com/sir-philip-green-in-talks-to-secure-300m-by-christmas/">Philip Greens</a> and <a href="https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-7547543/Mike-Ashley-pledges-fight-House-Fraser.html">Mike Ashleys</a>, to whom the character clearly refers, are modern embodiments of the timeless cruelty of imperial ambition. Director Michael Winterbottom always does his best work with actor Steve Coogan, who plays McCreadie, and the film is further enlivened by a vast array of comic talent. But it strains under the weight of its own ambitions, as its 100 minutes tick off every topic from corporate greed, financialisation and Thatcherism, to sweatshop garment workers, migrant labour, the Greek debt crisis, Syrian refugees, reality TV, an Oedipal subplot and a Commons select committee investigation. Its political conclusions about the evil of the 1-percenters may come as no great revelation, but there is a lot of fun to be had along the way.
Greed is scheduled for UK release in February 2020.
<h5>Saint Maud 
Dir: Rose Glass (2019)</h5>
“Nothing worth trying comes easy,” repeats young nurse Maud to herself in this intimate drama from the debut for director Rose Glass that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/12/london-film-festival-morfydd-clark-saint-maud-monos">earned star Morfydd Clark a special mention</a> in the festival awards at the BFI. She plays Maud, the carer for louche and terminally ill dancer Amanda (Jennifer Elhe). Strangely attracted by Amanda’s charisma yet repulsed by her lifestyle, Maud increasingly isolates herself within the certainties of religion until she eventually envisages herself as a latter-day martyr. Her belief in her divine mission is at odds both with the fish-and-chips surroundings of her anonymous seaside town and the mortification of the flesh she decides to endure. This film plays out as a psychological horror, with similarities to The Exorcism of Emily Rose, or Midsommar, in that the mundane safety of an everyday modernity is at odds with a biblical world of gruesome suffering powered by the awe of metaphysical forces. The film hints that a guilty past motivates Maud’s conversion, but it is a shame that, unlike Midsommar, it isn’t able to use her deranged ecstasy to undercut our confidence in our own normality. Her irrationality is explained away as one feeble-minded woman’s psychosis (a similar problem to another psychological horror that played at the festival, the US/UK co-production The Lodge) and the film rather misses its opportunity to turn into something more unsettling.
Saint Maud is coming to UK cinemas soon but the release date is yet to be announced.

<h5>Muscle 
Dir: Gerard Johnson (2019)</h5>
This rather blokey film is small in its ambition, shot in a stylish black and white, whose grim toughness plays nicely against the tense hilarity of the central relationship of its male leads. It features unsuccessful call centre salesman Simon, who joins a local gym in an attempt to regain some purpose. While his wife can’t stand his company, Simon finds a new buddy in the hulking shape of ex-army personal trainer Terry . Terry puts Simon on a strict new regime, but quickly appears to have a deeper motive than mere professional interest, as he insinuates himself with unhinged intent into every facet of Simon’s life. Simon is put on a regime that denies him carbs after 6pm, but can accommodate all-night sessions of cocaine and super-strength cider. The film’s concluding twenty minutes indicate an uncertainty about how to conclude things, but the crackling intensity of the muscular absurdity that bonds the two men makes this film well worth seeing.
UK release date is yet to be announced.

greed-film-2019

Greed-film-2019

So it would seem, from its films at least, that contemporary Britain is a place of unfairness and disappointment. It would also seem to be populated by lonely people whose attempts to escape failure only cause them further harm. Notably, all of the films mentioned above are set on the coast, with the exception of Muscle, whose South Shields is nevertheless on the banks of the Tyne. The water allows an idea of escape beyond the grey constraint of routine, while it also confirms our landlocked entrapment. Wherever the coming decade may take us as a society, as some of our films indicate, we shall not be sailing towards it on a wave of collective optimism.

<pre>Featured photo: Keira Knightley as whistleblower Katharine Gun in Official Secrets.</pre>

officialsecrets_keira_knightley

Four new British films to catch on the big screen

The Murky Coastal Waters of this Isle: New British Film Releases

*Contains spoilers
In 1963 Abraham B. Yehoshua — often dubbed the Israeli Faulkner — published a subversive short story titled Facing the Forests (Mool Ha’yearot). He tells the story of a young frustrated Israeli graduate student who decides to take up a job as a fire watcher in one of Israel’s forests, and soon finds that it is inhabited by a mute Arab and an Arab child — both of whom he befriends. One day, a group of hitchhikers pass by the forest asking him for directions to an Arab village. That’s when he quickly discovers that this forest was once an Arab village seized in 1948.
The short story goes on to reveal how the village had been turned into a forest to alter the geography of the land and to erase the memory of the Arab inhabitants that once lived there. The young watchman concludes that the forest must be burnt down to resurrect the remains of this village, so on the last day of his assignment, the protagonist prompts the mute Arab to burn the forest. Beyond the smoke, the remnants of the Arab village appear, as do all things past and all things buried. The authorities rush to the scene of the fire, and the Israeli protagonist, dumbfounded, points to the mute Arab. He alone carries all the blame.
Last week, a friend invited me to go watch The Report directed by Scott Z. Burns as a part of the BFI London Film Festival. The film follows the true story of the protagonist, Daniel Jones, a staffer in the Senate Intelligence Committee, who conducted an investigation on behalf of the senate on the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation programs’ (i.e. torture). The story tells a harrowing story of Jones’ attempts to get his 7000-page report released to the public and the CIA’s attempts to squash and intimidate him. After a decade of hard work and despite the intimidation tactics, Jones was able to release a 400-page abridged version to the public in the ‘right way’. As the protagonist affirms in the film, unlike Snowdon, he can either do it the right way or he has failed. After the report is released, the senators applaud American values of accountability and democracy.
Granted, this is in no way an attempt to undermine Jones’ work or even the film for that matter. Jones did spend a decade of his life fighting for accountability for profoundly horrific crimes. Nonetheless, something was troubling about The Report. The same thing that makes Platoon (1986) and virtually any American film against the Vietnam War deeply uncomfortable; it is the same trope magnified in Yehoshua’s short story mentioned above. Who gets to speak? And who is forever mute? How do these scenes of torture or genocide forever doom the victims to an existential silence? It is not merely a question of scope but a constant absent present. Scene after scene displayed different and exchangeable brown bodies battered, waterboarded, beaten up, tortured, and killed. They have no features and no stories; they are simply naked and helpless bodies. Except for their screams, they are silent. Almost a mise-en-scène, each torture scene is used to contextualise Jones’ frustration or the CIA’s strategy making. Just as the My Lai massacre served to contextualise Charlie Sheen’s own crisis of conscious in Platoon.

In this film, Jones states the most important fact for him and for the viewers over and over is – torture does not work. Torture is a bad strategy. It is quite likely that over 25% of those tortured were innocent. However, this review is to make a point beyond the film and beyond Daniel Jones as a character in the film or as a person. The mute victim has no story. The mute victim has no family or loved ones. The mute victim feels no pain and does not experience injustice.
We have somehow made images of a faceless naked man gagged and waterboarded into a story of our principles or ideals. Their screams are moral and ethical dilemmas that can either affirm or negate what we think about ourselves. They remain mute because the only stories we choose to tell are always about us. Will we live up to the heroic ideal of democracy we believe to embody? Or will we let ourselves down in our own eyes? And so, when Jones then allows for a semblance of accountability, somehow the moral order is restored, and we can once again celebrate American democracy. Just as the protagonist in Yehoshua’s story felt that the artificial forest threatened the myth of creation that he was made to believe. It tugged at his conscience because it didn’t live up to his ideals. And in that story, too, the mute Arab bears the consequences in the end.
Survivors of torture are made to negotiate their humanity daily. For those who got out and were able to share their stories, society advocates and even expects them to box their experiences and frame them as ‘why this is bad politics’ or ‘what does this mean for society’s ethical values?’ It is very disturbing once you sit down and hear the accounts of survivors of torture. The only way society allows for them to tell their stories is when they are not in it, their pain is abstract, their families do not exist, their voices do not exist, and only the ethical hypothetical needs to be answered. And by this, thousands of well-meaning liberal novels, stories, media reports and movies have allowed us to be the villains and heroes of the story.
The Report is on release at UK cinemas from November 2019.
<pre>Photo Credit: The Report / BFI</pre>

The Report &#8211; Still 1

An effort to portray accountability for torture in Scott Z. Burns’ new film is undercut by the silencing of the victims themselves.

The Report: Torture of the Mute and Voiceless

The 63rd edition of the BFI London Film Festival starts this Wednesday evening with the opening night gala The Personal History of David Copperfield. Starring Dev Patel in the title role, with performances from Ben Wishaw, Hugh Laurie, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Peter Capaldi and Tilda Swinton, this is an exciting choice for a festival that aims to show off British talent. More interesting still is its pairing of Charles Dickens’s Victorian social commentary with Armando Iannucci as director, a man known for the biting political satires The Thick of It, Veep and The Death of Stalin.
Meanwhile, the closing night gala on Sunday 13 October is Martin Scorsese’s epic tale of union boss and mobster Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman. Bringing together Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel, we wait to see whether this will be a legendary showstopper of veteran talent or the world’s most extravagant old dudes’ reunion, but let’s be positive and put our money on the former. The third of the big-budget showcases Knives Out, which brings together yet another cast to die for (geddit?) in a whodunnit that assembles Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon and Don Johnson.
As you might be able to tell, the festival veers towards more star-driven entertainment than many other festivals. Other galas we’ll be looking forward to include Greed, which is Michael Winterbottom’s critique of corporate chutzpah starring Steve Coogan, Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach’s account of a break-up featuring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, and Le Mans ’66, a retro account of a motor racing duo played by Matt Damon and Christian Bale. Meanwhile Taika Waititi follows Thor: Ragnarok with a raucous anti-fascist comedy Jojo Rabbit, set in the final days of the second world war about a boy whose imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler. Among the slightly less crowd-pleasing highlights is Ema from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, whose career continues to move into ever more poetic abstraction with a reverie on time, memory and dance. Céline Sciamma takes instead an abrupt move away from the setting of her 2014 social drama Girlhood with her new film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Exploring the intensity of female relationships instead in 1760, she shows desires igniting between a young noblewoman and the lady hired to paint her portrait.

bfi-preview-the-last-black-man-in-san-francisco

BFI Preview - The Last Black Man in San Francisco

We at The Platform would also recommend you to take this opportunity to see some of the films that may create less of a buzz, but that you should definitely try to catch on the big screen. First up is The Last Black Man in San Francisco, an account of gentrification in the city and a highly creative vision of attachment and loss within a changing city. I also enjoyed Lara for reasons I find it harder to put my finger on, but this tale of one lonely woman on her 60th birthday and her difficult relationship with her concert pianist son had me thinking deeply about both undeveloped talent and the passions we all carry within us. Waiting for the Barbarians sees Ciro Guerra encapsulating once more the self-defeating violence of colonialism as he depicts an organised descent into brutality in an unnamed outpost of Britain’s Asian empire. François Ozon likes to probe the mysteries behind the stories we recount; he takes this theme into much darker territory in By the Grace of God, which follows the personal testimonies of campaigners against abuse committed by the Catholic Church in Lyon. Back in America, Clemency takes a close-up view of what is, at times, excruciating detail of the last weeks of a prisoner on death row.
We couldn’t finish this round-up without a few recommendations that pay tribute to the fantastical ability of cinema to conjure up new worlds. So why not go see Nicholas Cage flip out in Color Out of Space, a hallucinatory vision a rural family whose garden is struck by a meteor that brings with it a legion of trippy horrors. Or for more earthbound psychopathy, try Deerskin, in which Jean Dujardin falls so in love with his new deerskin cowboy jacket that he will literally kill for it. The Whistlers sees the Romanian New Wave’s trailblazer Corneliu Porumboiu take on the crime genre in a more action-packed way than his previous Police, Adjective, featuring a corrupt cop who learns to communicate with and work out the plots of an international criminal gang who whistle to each other. And the first English-language movie by Jessica Hausner, Little Joe, imagines an environment in which a new breed of flower is genetically modified to induce happiness in its owner. What begins as a subtle sci-fi meditation on nature and motherhood turns with a consummate lightness of touch into a serious philosophical question about the sincerity of all emotional expressivity.
These are our recommendations for now. We’ll be back with some further reflections once the festival is underway!
The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">2 to 13 October 2019</a>.
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<pre>Featured: The Irishman, Netflix
Body: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, BFI LFF </pre>

BFI Preview &#8211; The Irishman _newsite

Changing cities and fantastical worlds lie beyond the star-studded galas and British talent on display at this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

The Platform Preview to the BFI London Film Festival, 2019

By the end of the year, cinemas are dominated by high-end dramas, many hoping for <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/tag/oscars/">Oscar success</a>. This year a striking number of them have one feature in common. Whether it’s Widows, The Favourite, Dogman, Assassination Nation, <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2018/10/11/films-for-the-metoo-era-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2018-round-up/">If Beale Street Could Talk</a>, Happy New Year Colin Burstead, Lizzie or Wildlife, each story is in some way set in motion by revenge. In exploring the different facets of the revenge motif, they encapsulate film’s continued ability, even in this small-screen 21st century, to offer a larger than life canvas on which to project both the viler fantasies, and the social conscience, of our wider culture. 
Revenge works to intertwine at least two stories at once: the initial grievance and the quest for redress. It is then inherently dramatic, offering the decisive culminating action lacking from its near cousin, the grudge, yet with a suspense that is absent from the simple outburst. Widows, Steve McQueen’s female heist drama, exploits this multi-story potential most fully, weaving together a panorama of male aggressions that move from the criminal underworld and ever further outwards into the political field, the city police, and the women’s home lives. Revenge consumes the men in the film, who find in it an indispensable way of asserting their power in the world. The women are simply trying to keep alive, yet in so doing, they discover the strength of a mutual reliance that propels them towards the twists of the finale. 
Revenge is played instead for all its petty ridiculousness in costume drama The Favourite. Set during an intractable war with France, a dispossessed Abigail (Emma Stone) works her way up from servant and into the very bosom of Queen Anne’s trust (Olivia Colman), displacing the Queen’s advisor Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz). The setting of the royal court stages a grotesque caricature of established power, which director Yorgos Lanthimos previously found in the patriarchal family in Dogtooth and the dystopic institution for middle-aged singles in The Lobster. Nobody here comes out smelling of roses. Abigail first arrives at the court covered in shit, pushed out of her carriage into the muddy grounds where the disaffected local peasantry defecate in disapproval at the monarch. Lady Sarah ends up literally disfigured by spite, trapped in this absurd cycle of retribution. 
Revenge inevitably embitters those whose hearts it grips, yet its power lies in the universal appeal of getting one’s own back. From this perspective, revenge is not demeaning but fulfilling, offering an irresistible fantasy of catharsis for the weak. Such it is in Dogman (dir. Matteo Garrone), whose unflinchingly trusting dog-groomer protagonist embodies the loyalty ascribed to his canine clients. This man’s best friend, however, is a local bully on whose behalf our hero even serves a prison sentence. Will one final betrayal push him too far? This beautifully told story is my own personal favourite of 2018. 
Common to all the films above is how they reveal revenge’s double character, involving the indulgence of animalistic anger and the ennobling pursuit of justice. The Furies were the origins of justice in classical mythology, goddesses of vengeance who in Hesiod’s Theogony were born from the drops of blood which fell to earth when Uranus’s castrated genitalia were thrown into the sea. Revenge was at the centre of the theatrical revolution of the Elizabethan stage, considered to be a primary virtue and a necessary defence of honour. But as Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet were only the most famous fictional characters to discover, revenge has a remorseless capacity to draw in innocent and guilty alike. 
In this vein, Assassination Nation tells the how a middle-class American community becomes in a few short weeks beset by a modern witch-hunt. In a fantasy of social disintegration for the social media age, an anonymous hacker causes chaos by revealing the online private selves of the town’s authority figures to public scrutiny. With the frenetic energy of a hyperactive teenager, social cohesion quickly breaks down amidst the hysteria of a moral panic. It is common for high-school movies to present their juvenile protagonists as subjects of the laws of the jungle. This film extends the logic to the rest of the adult community, and by extension to contemporary America. The town focuses its testosterone-driven aggression on our heroines, who become the scapegoats – and eventual punishers – of a world driven mad by the contradictions of its own hypocrisy. 
As the witch-hunt allegory suggests, vengeance all too often provides the cloak by which aggression masks itself as defence. Marcel Proust observed that only in the rare cases of direct sadism does cruelty recognise itself as such; much more often, persecutors need a scenario in which their cruelty can be imagined as only a righteous response to a perceived attack. In our current times of right-wing extremism, hatred is legitimised through narratives of false victimhood; blaming migrants for economic devastation while rewarding bankers, and appointing sex attackers to the Supreme Court while their accusers pay the price in public vilification. 
This contemporary context gives added relevance to the elegiac If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2017/03/03/hidden-figures-celebrating-inconvenient-black-women/">Moonlight</a>. It tells the story of a romance conducted through the glass of a prison visiting-room, after a vindictive white policeman makes an innocent young black man pay for the crime of standing up for his girlfriend. The setting of this adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel of racism and love in a divided America is the 1970s. Its vision of the complexities of relationships conducted under broader conditions of oppression is only too relevant, in a poignant drama of black America kept down by a white power structure enforced through a false claim to protecting public safety. 
While revenge in all its different forms is manifest upon our screens as this year comes to a close, the possibility to really put things right will have to wait until we have changed our world for the better. In this, next year’s cinema will need to take its cue from reality.
<pre>Image via Vox</pre>

How upcoming Oscar contenders and Oscar snubs explored the types of revenge that make up our society