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

aftersun-charlotte-wells-film-2022

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

the-good-nurse-netflix-2022

<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>

the-policeman-2022

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

Even in the darkened shelter of the cinema theatre, it has been hard these days not to think of the political instability and economic hardship outside of it. So, in this first Platform report from <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">BFI’s London Film Festival of 2022</a>, we try to find out which of the films will offer insight into our present predicaments. The twelve days of the festival start this Wednesday 5th October, so here’s what we made of it, politically speaking.
During an earlier crisis of capitalism, German radical playwright Bertolt Brecht once asked: “What’s robbing a bank, compared to owning one?” The film Emily Is a Criminal (John Patton Ford) seems like a relocation of this question to the modern gig economy. Aubrey Plaza offers a standout performance in this pretty decent combination of social realism and crime drama. She plays Emily, a woman whose job delivering food doesn’t even earn enough to pay off the mounting interest on her debts. Drawn into criminal fraud, her performance expresses an intense nervous vulnerability. Ironically however, organised fraud turns out to offer more opportunity for her entrepreneurial spirit than the legalised theft practised by employers who cancel shifts, offer unpaid internships, and bully the poor hopefuls at job interviews.

As American independent films often do, Emily Is a Criminal aims to show the reality behind the American dream. But to find an alternative vision of living we need to look elsewhere. Unrest (Cyril Schäublin) takes us to the late 19th century in a small watchmaking town in Switzerland, during the visit of Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin. He has come to make a geographical survey of the town, so as to find out how it can be organised not for the purposes of profit, but the needs of the people. At the same time, the town is being restructured by the local authorities according to the dictates of modern bureaucracy. This restructuring centres on regulating no less than four unsynchronised times that the town lives by: church time, train time, factory time and municipal time. Both the factory owners and local officials use the regulation of time as a way of imposing discipline and a mechanised order. In their turn, the workers, enthused by the ideas of revolution, share a vision of organising a collective life together where the labour of each benefits the development of all. 
The film is true to history. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin">Pyotr Kropotkin</a> was a real-life 19th century radical, and it wasn’t until well into the 20th century that the world worked according to a uniform, standard time, nor for that matter that the populace was subdued to the impersonal rhythms of the state and of industry. This is no straight-faced period drama however. The film’s innovative design turns the mechanism of the clock into a metaphor both for the inhuman strictures of capitalist production and the liberating possibilities of a collective re-organisation of life. 
Despite the massive changes in contemporary British society, the British films in the festival don’t seem that engaged with the problems of the present. It seems instead that they find more dramatic opportunity in our recent past. Maybe this is a form of nostalgia, or a way of working out where exactly it all went wrong. We will have a better idea once the big state-of-the-nation gala presentation premieres: Empire of Light, directed by Sam Mendes, his first film since the movie 1917, with <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/remorseless-cathartic-petty-but-just-revenge-films-paving-the-way-to-oscars-2019">Olivia Colman</a> leading an all-star cast. A seaside town is blighted by social decay and with a resurgent far right (who says history repeats itself?!). Meanwhile, the local cinema in the fictional town prepares for the regional premiere of Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson), a patriotic film set in the 1920s that typifies what is known as ‘the heritage film’, the costume dramas set among the nation’s middle and upper classes that were especially popular in the 1980s. I’m not sure whether the film is more This Is England (Shane Meadows) or The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo), but the publicity describes it as a testament to the magic of cinema. Let’s see whether it manages to uphold that claim.

unrest-bfi-lff-2022

The trend for large-scale historical dramas with obvious contemporary relevance is not exclusive to the UK. Another gala performance is Till (Chinonye Chukwu), the story of the brutal killing of 14-year-old African-American <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till">Emmett Till </a>in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Rather than victimhood, the film promises to show the movement that made the tragedy into one of the key moments in the fight for civil rights in America. Meanwhile the ambitious political thriller Argentina, 1985 (Santiago Mitre) recounts the epic legal struggle to gain justice against the country’s deposed military dictatorship. We are also looking forward to 1976, a debut feature directed by Manuela Martelli set during the early years after General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup that overthrew Chile’s left-wing democratic government. My Imaginary Country is the latest film from veteran documentarist <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/the-pearl-button-documenting-the-shadow-of-water-and-tyranny">Patricio Guzmán</a>, an exile from Pinochet who has dedicated his life to exposing the abuses committed by the regime. 
The detective format can be an especially rich way of investigating both a specific violent crime and a broken social system. We’re looking forward to Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi), a film about a serial killer whose attacks on sex workers in the early 2000s in Iran enable a critique of the broader social position of women and the hypocrisy of harshly imposed moral codes. The film is especially timely given the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/03/iranian-students-defy-security-forces-as-anti-regime-protests-continue">protests that are transforming the country</a> since its release. Another film to look out for is Next Sohee (July Jung), a South Korean story about the suicide of a young intern, whose investigation reveals the everyday exploitation and oppression of call centre workers.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson) provides the festival’s closing night gala, by way of ending on a laugh. The sequel to the Hollywood comedy whodunnit Knives Out will offer the spectacle of the greedy rich as they fall about killing each other. Let’s hope it provides some relief to the more familiar story of them killing all the rest of us.
The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">5 to 16 October 2022</a>.
Preview by <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/louis-bayman">Louis Bayman</a> and <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/halima-a-hassan">Halima Hassan</a>. 
<pre>Featured photo: Empire of Light (Sam Mendes) via SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES</pre>

Empire of Light BFI LFF 2022

Louis Bayman and Halima Hassan offer a preview of the BFI London Film Festival of 2022 with real-life history, epic legal battles, and more political explorations.

Revolutionary time: Our critics’ picks for the BFI London Film Festival 2022

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>.

dashcam film 2021

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

The online film festival ‘<a href="https://sites.google.com/brookes.ac.uk/cinemobility/home?authuser=0">Cine/Mobility</a> &#8211; Latin American cinema across borders’ has launched in the UK (5 October to 5 November), opening with a conversation with director Icíar Bollaín about her film Yuli: The Carlos Acosta Story.
The new festival is dedicated to Latin American migrations, social movements and transatlantic exchanges. A feast for students, scholars and film lovers, the virtual festival showcases the work of filmmakers from Argentina, France, Spain, Chile, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, paying particular attention to women and LGBTQ issues.
A selection of four full-length films is accompanied by a programme of shorts with an activist spirit, introducing complex struggles and political movements animating today’s Latin America, on topics including migrant rights, the murder of Afro-Brazilian politician Marielle Franco, and the role of women in the rewriting of Chile’s constitution.
As well as screenings and Q&amp;As, the festival will host roundtable discussions with industry professionals with one session focusing on the impact of feminism on the Latin American and European film industries and another discussing the challenges of bringing Latin American cinema to UK and Catalan audiences.
Here’s my preview of the four full-length films featured in Cine/Mobility: 
<h5>Yuli/Yuli: The Carlos Acosta Story 
Dir. Icíar Bollaín (Spain / Germany / UK, 2018) </h5>
Yuli is a touching biopic packed with dance sequences and Cuban history, based on the life of the Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta. After his training in Cuba, Carlos became one of the best dancers of his generation, and the first Black artist to dance Romeo in the Royal Ballet in London, where he forged a legendary career as a principal dancer for 17 years. Cuba is seen from the eyes of Carlos and his family, marked by experiences of migration and displacement. It is a film about passion, talent and nostalgia, which Bollaín directs with great attention to aesthetics and with affection for her characters.
<h5>El diablo es magnifico / The Devil is Magnificent 
Dir. Nicolás Videla (Chile, 2016)</h5>
Like its main character, Manu, El diablo es magnífico is one of a kind. Blending fiction and documentary, the film tells the story of a Chilean trans migrant, who struggles to see her future in Paris. Manu’s memories and distinct views on culture, art and life intersect with her experiences of love and sex, and her decision to stay or return. This film is a little gem, a unique take on migration which is also a wonderful example of queer cinema, done with passion and a subversive touch.
<h5>Miriam Miente / Miriam Lies 
Dir. Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada (Dominican Republic, 2017)</h5>
This is a fantastic coming-of-age film that deals with the complex intersections of race and class in contemporary Dominican Republic, from the perspective of a teenager and her everyday concerns. The film tells the story of Miriam, a mixed-race 14-year-old who meets her boyfriend on the internet. While her friends enthusiastically prepare the traditional quinceañera party, Miriam does not know how to explain to her family that her boyfriend is Black. Miriam’s character is memorable and is bound to leave an emotional impact on viewers.
<h5>Estoy Acá (Mangui Fi) / I am here 
Dir. Juan Manuel Bramuglia and Esteban Tabacznik (Argentina, 2017)</h5>
At its heart, this documentary is a story of friendship, and the complexities of relationships as we age and grow as individuals. The film follows Ababacar and Mbaye, two Senegalese migrants who met in Buenos Aires. We see their friendship grow and become stronger, until they decide to take different paths. With a delicate and close understanding of its characters, the film engages with a complex set of emotions, expectations and desires that fill Ababacar and Mbaye’s everyday life, offering an original and nuanced perspective on South-to-South migration. 
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The Cine/Mobility festival, hosted by Oxford Brookes University, runs from 5 October to 5 November 2021. It was created by Dalila Missero in collaboration with the film programmer Analía Fraser. All events and screenings are free (registration via <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cinemobility-on-line-film-festlatin-american-cinema-across-the-atlantic-tickets-158700652925">Eventbrite</a>) and the full schedule is available at the <a href="https://sites.google.com/brookes.ac.uk/cinemobility/home?authuser=0">Cine/Mobility website</a> and on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Cinemobility">Facebook</a>.
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New perspectives on Latin American migration and movements in the Cine/Mobility festival – catch it online now.

Cine/Mobility: The Latin American Film Festival Erasing Borders

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:

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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.

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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>

nomadland-01

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

Expectations were high for the 70th edition of the Berlinale. This year’s anniversary edition coincided with the much-awaited debut of the new festival director duo Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian. The Berlinale was never a glamorous red carpet-oriented film festival. Yet, this year’s edition felt even more sombre than usual. There were no big Netflix productions. Though, contrary to what happened at Cannes in the last couple of years, this did not seem like a political decision. There were also hardly any big Hollywood stars or directors. Some losses come with gains, however: the level of the main competition line-up was consistently higher than in the last few years and included the kinds of gems one would expect from the curatorial talent of Chatran, who has gained the respect of the film festival community during his much-acclaimed seven-year stint as the artistic director of the <a href="https://www.the-platform.org.uk/tag/locarno/">Locarno Film Festival</a>.
One of the most remarkable films shown at this year’s Berlinale was <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11697690/">The Woman Who Ran</a>, a beautifully unassuming film by Korean director Hong Sang-Soo. Over the course of three days, a young woman called Gambhee visits three old female acquaintances. The women have not seen each other for a while. Gambhee compliments them on the furniture of the houses they have bought; they talk about the weather and their everyday routines. There is something deeper behind these deceptively simple, almost banal exchanges. “How can he be sincere, if he only repeats himself,” asks Gambhee about her friend’s novelist husband, who always says the same things in his frequent TV appearances.
The Woman Who Ran celebrates the value of unhurried, subdued exchanges between people who try to do their best to be kind to each other. These people are women and this seems to matter. All the encounters are interrupted by men who turn out to be quite unpleasant. One of them knocks on the door of the first house that Gambhee visits to complain about the stray cats that the women feed, explaining that his wife is scared of cats and that they should stop. The exchange is extremely courteous and yet the women stand their ground, asserting that cats are not less important than human beings and that they need food too, to the disbelief of the man who thinks humans should come first. The Woman Who Ran contains one of the best cat scenes in the history of cinema, but I will not say more so as not to spoil the fun! “I never start from any kind of generalisation about topics,” said Hong Sang-Soon during the post-screening press conference. It is a comment that might explain why this film seems so interested in the truths that lie in the small, unspectacular moments of our lives. This is not really a cinema of endurance, but a kind of cinema which is inviting us not to look for fireworks, because the fun – and the substance – may be just there, in the everyday scenarios that most of us already live.
A big favourite for the Golden Bear, Kelly Reichardt’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9231040/">First Cow</a> was unfairly snubbed at the awards ceremony. It is a real shame because this was the kind of film that, for its gentleness and modesty, would have been a very fitting winner of this year’s edition of the Berlinale. First Cow could be jokingly summarised as a film about two men in the Old West living together under the same roof, making scones. Cookie is a shy young man from Maryland, while King Lu is a savvy business-minded labourer from China who has travelled the world before reaching the Oregon Trail to seek his fortune. The two men team up to share a shack in a remote settlement. The outpost is sparsely populated by brutish rogues and a pretentious English man who acts as the colony’s chief. Cookie and King Lu are the kinds of men that the cinema of the old American frontier has rarely shown us. They are gentle and reserved men, a far cry from the kind of aggressive pioneer masculinity that we have come to know through cinema history. One of the most exquisite pleasures of this film comes from the candle-lit night scenes inside the shack, Cookie and King Lu quietly busy with their domestic chores and occasionally exchanging a few words like a couple of married pensioners. They could be lovers but there is no evidence of any romantic feelings between them, only kindness and mutually supportive comradeship. It feels as though, with this film, Reichardt wants to rewrite a foundational American story, inviting us to imagine an alternative genealogy of US masculinity, one based on cooperation and resourcefulness, rather than aggressive individualism and competitiveness
For me, the third and final highlight of this year’s Berlinale was <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8478554/">Hidden Away</a>, Giorgio Diritti’s magnificent biopic on Italian artist Antonio Ligabue. The narrative arc of the film is fairly conventional. It follows Ligabue’s life from his childhood in native Switzerland, where he was put into confinement due to his mental illness, to his mature years in northern Italy. An untrained sculptor and painter, Ligabue became one of the most influential Italian artists of the 20th century. Boasting an extraordinary performance by Elio Giordano in the role of Ligabue, Hidden Away does more than simply celebrate the genius of a great artist. The film makes viewers embrace the perspective of someone who was mistreated all his life for being different, even in the face of the great admiration that his work inspired. Firmly aligned with Ligabue’s subjective experience of the world, Hidden Away attempts to articulate his unframed perspective. Signalled by frequent subjective shots conveying a blurred peripheral vision, this perspective seems to express optically the special connectedness to the world that this artist developed through his art. It is a type of connectedness which at times strikes one as primitive and unhinged, and other times appears surprisingly full of wisdom and tenderness. Giordano’s highly physical performance combines feral abruptness and child-like vulnerability. Giordano is truly magnificent at embodying the loneliness and anguish experienced by Ligabue throughout this life. Yet, this is far from a tragic story. Hidden Away is a film about an irrepressible man who has fought all his life to assert his humanity and different way of being in the world against the bigotry surrounding him.
The Golden Bear for Best Film went to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11697844/">There is No Evil</a> (Mohammad Rasoulof). The full list of awards can be viewed <a href="https://www.berlinale.de/en/festival/awards-and-juries/international-juy.html">here</a>.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Allyson Riggs via A24 Films (First Cow)</pre>

FIRST COW

With new festival curators, this year’s Berlinale showcased new and underrated film talent. Enjoy three selections below.

Berlin Film Festival 2020: Redefining Masculinity and Masterminds

The Korean Film Festival of 2019 marks 100 years since the first Korean film was made, with special guests including a number of eminent Korean filmmakers. To observe this milestone, the festival will specifically focus on classic cinema from across the century. Other strands include Cinema Now, Women&#8217;s Voices and Documentary. We asked a group of Korean cinema scholars from Southampton University to give us their highlights, old and new.
The Korean Film Festival 2019 will take place in various London cinemas from <a href="http://koreanfilm.co.uk/">1 to 14 November</a>, and will then tour cinemas throughout the UK from 18 to 24 November.
<h5>The Seashore Village 
Dir: Kim Soo-Yong (1965)</h5>
Review by Hee-Young Chung
Hae-Soon prays for her husband’s safe return from fishing but, despite this, he drowns. After the funeral, her neighbour Sang-Soo makes advances on her. The young widow rejects him at first but soon accepts his proposal of remarriage. However, Hae-Soon is widowed once more as her new partner falls to his death in the mountains. She returns to the seaside village where her previous neighbours welcome her back.
Reversals of fortune are pivotal to the narrative of The Seashore Village (1965) directed by Soo-Yong Kim, a classic of South Korean cinema and an example of its tendency towards literary adaptation. An even more significant element in this film is its emphasis on depicting the space of the seaside village. Hae-Soon’s interest in and longing for seaside life has nothing to do with the loss of her partners. Her name Hae-Soon can be seen to imply her return to the seaside since one of the meanings of ‘Hae’ in Korean is ‘sea’. The village embraces her again as the sea remains an eternal presence. The seaside village constitutes not only the background of the narrative but also foregrounds the thematic spatiality of ordinary people’s lives.
Part of the festival’s Special Focus: a century of Korean cinema.

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Korean Film Festival - Seashore

<h5>Youngju 
Dir: Cha Sung-duk (2018)</h5>
Review by Jia Kang
Female director Cha Sung-duk’s debut feature Youngju (2018) is about a 19-year-old girl, Youngju, who takes care of her troublesome younger brother after their parents die in a traffic accident. Yongju is played by Kim Hyang-gi, previously a child actress and star of the Korean fantasy blockbusters, Along with the Golds (2017, 2018).
Revenge is common in Korean films, but Cha directs this film unconventionally. Five years after the accident, Youngju’s younger brother Youngin (Tang Jun-sang) takes part in a robbery and is arrested. She gets the money for his fine from the couple who were responsible for her parents’ death. Youngju decides to stop her vendetta against them, but the film takes an unexpected and tragic turn when a shocking revelation about her real relationship to them occurs.
The film uses the journey of Youngju to save her younger brother to highlight the many difficulties for the younger generation of women living in South Korean society. These include poverty, unemployment, social problems and family breakdown. The depressing narrative presents a continuing dilemma that might leave little space for viewers to breathe, but it is the way in which Cha designs this into a fantasy told from a female perspective that represents the film’s main achievement.
Part of the Women’s Voices strand.

<h5>Grass 
Dir: Hong Sangsoo (2017)</h5>
Review by Thomas Humpal
Areum, a sensitive yet distanced writer (Berlin 2017’s Best Actress winner, Kim Minhee), eavesdrops on a series of intertwining conversations and characters revolving around an alleyway coffee house in Seoul. Those familiar with Hong’s naturalistic style and gift for understated plot will not be disappointed in this black-and-white short about the fine line between observation and participation in the sorrow, inspiration and comfort of human connection.
Imposing her observational commentary into each dialogue, the beauty and clarity of her writing, as well as the gradually closing distance to her subjects, this series of repetitions and coincidences illustrate the connections that give us comfort despite the hardships of life.
Among the vignettes: a younger couple (Gong Minjeung and Ahn Jaehong) reconnect after the death of a friend, an older pair (Ki Joobong and Seo Younghwa) discuss winding down, and two writers (Jung Jinyoung and Kim Saebyuk) talk about collaborating. Pretence, pain, and soju (a Korean alcohol) are shared in equal measure. In usual Hong fashion, the lives of creatives are dramatised and punctuated with observational subtlety and thoughtful, personal flair. Comparisons to Hong’s other films are inevitable. However, the barebones cinematography and classical soundtrack ring with rare charm.
Part of the Cinema Now strand.

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Korean Film Festival - Night Before the Strike

<h5>The Night Before the Strike 
Dir: Lee Eun, Lee Jae-gu, Chang Younhyun and Chang Dong-hong (1990)</h5>
Review by Thomas Humpal
As a forgotten classic of labour cinema, and a film that was forcefully banned by military riot police on university campuses showing it, The Night Before the Strike is an artefact from a time when cinema was a mobilising force for the people, and it inspired change at a time of dubious democracy in South Korea. Two hundred downtrodden steel workers at Dongsung Metal meet their newest co-worker Joo Wan-ik (for Lim Young-gu) and, during his welcoming dinner, a future is forged by the hands of those who dare organise. Each man has his reason for joining and seeking an existence where workers are more than just “machines that keep breaking down”. In a country built on cheap labour, at a time of democracy movements and student protests, the depictions of greed and insidious behaviour by the company directors and managers galvanised the 300,000 Koreans who watched the film under threat of incarceration.
Pulsating with a gritty and unforgiving rhythm, the film not only depicts the organisation of a steel union and their confrontations with the merciless management structure, but does so with an earnestness that cautions equally both fatalism and expectation. This is, in equal part, independent and industrial cinema.
Part of the Documentary strand.

<h5>Peppermint Candy 
Dir: Lee Chang-dong (1999)</h5>
Review by Jia Kang
Peppermint Candy (1999) is South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong’s second drama. It opened the 1999 Busan International Film Festival and was a commercial and critical success. Starting with the protagonist’s suicide on a railway bridge, the film unfolds in flashbacks to the protagonist Yong-ho’s (played by Sol Kyung-gu) personal life, up to the eve of the Kwangju Massacre. This social movement was a watershed in South Korea’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, and the film shows the national traumas behind socio-political change.
Yong-ho is a middle-aged homeless man who is abandoned by his family. In reverse order over 20 years, we see him as a suave businessman, an agitated policeman, and a young innocent man. Yong-ho is confronted with the question of whether life is beautiful. This also serves as the musings of director Lee regarding that troubled time.
However, life is cruel and painful. Yong-ho’s life is full of betrayal, corruption, financial crisis and social crime – but he is remembered by his first, terminally ill, girlfriend. Like the peppermint candy she gave Yong-ho before, his memory of her is the sweetest and purest thing in his life.
Part of the festival’s Special Focus: a century of Korean cinema.
For the full programme, booking, venues and further information, please see: <a href="http://koreanfilm.co.uk/">http://koreanfilm.co.uk/</a>.

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Korean Film Festival - Peppermint Candy

Hee-Young Chung is a PGR student at the University of Southampton. He’s interested in the representation of breath in South Korean cinema.
Jia Kang is a PhD student at University of Southampton. She is doing research on South Korean art cinema and interested in exploring South Korean art films’ narrative techniques and industrial strategies.
Thomas Humpal is a PhD candidate at the University of Southampton and an assistant professor at Dongseo University’s Im Kwon Taek College of Film and Media Arts in Busan, South Korea.
<pre>Photo Credits: London Korean Film Festival website</pre>

Korean Film Festival &#8211; Youngju

Three scholars preview the London Korean Film Festival for The Platform, which, this year, marks the centenary of the first Korean film made.

Korean Cinema Scholars Preview the London Korean Film Festival of 2019

Imagine a world that appears as if a child had perceived it. Where fear manifests itself in the most mundane of items, where the purity of magic prevails when the sun goes down, where everything exists with the charm of a children’s pop-up book imbued within it. Amanda Strong makes this fantasy a reality in her stop-frame animation Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes).
The film is based on the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, an Indigenous writer belonging to the Mississauga subtribe of the First Nations located in Ontario, Canada. Simpson is known for utilising the wonders of magic and spirituality to convey her passion for reviving Indigenous culture. In this story, we meet the eccentric Biidaaban and her 10,000-year-old shapeshifting companion Sabe, while they undertake a crucial quest to reclaim the beauty of Indigenous tradition and resist against a dark contemporary world that wants to bury it and forget.
Masked by the cover of nightfall, Biidaaban and Sabe take to the streets of a Canadian suburban town that appears ordinary on the surface, but is steeped in fantastical danger. The two characters attempt to collect sap from maple trees in order to make maple sugar, a task that had been practiced by their ancestors generations before. Throughout their journey, they are under the watchful eye of two hypnotically beautiful ghosts taking the shape of a wolf and a caribou – representing nature’s lost past and forming a key element of the story’s imagery.
The 19-minute film took two years to make and the attention to detail woven throughout the tale does not go unnoticed. Strong utilises the charms and quirks of traditional animation with such artistry in her miniature sets and puppets, and it injects this twee yet poignant story with the Hollywood auteurship of Tim Burton or Wes Anderson. Strong takes the art of cinematic visuals to otherworldly places that even transcend the need for dialogue. The majority of the narrative remains wordless, aside from the poetry that appears at the beginning and end of the story, sandwiching the message of tradition between realities of a contemporary world. Strong excels at executing a meaningful wordless narrative by turning it into a highly effective storytelling tool that deserves praise in and of itself.
There is an abundance of striking imagery running throughout the film to address a number of critical issues faced by Indigenous communities. These include fears around the loss of their culture, history and land – something that is cultivated in the film by recalling childhood fears. For instance, supposedly harmless everyday objects like a garden hose are brought to life and used to attack Biidaaban, standing in the way of her fight to reclaim her ceremonial heritage. Strong also draws attention to modernity’s oppression of Indigenous land through varying shots of electricity running through the depths of nature, a stark contrast forming between the two. The critiques do not end there, as it is evident Strong is alluding to the environmental problems the world is experiencing currently, where the ghosts of the wolf and the caribou, although beautiful, stand to represent the animals who have been chased out of their homes by land development – further acting as a metaphor for how Indigenous people has been treated, as their culture is too at risk of extinction. Strong has voiced that we are forgetting to honour the ancestors and animals that were here long before us, particularly in Canada where this story is set. This short film is a call to action, encouraging Indigenous viewers to prevent their culture from being drowned out by the white noise of modernity, to fight against land development and reclaim their rich history.
The characters of Biidaaban and Sabe embody this desired strength and tell their audiences there is no need to be afraid anymore. The final frame of the film reminds us that although tradition and modernity still stand north and south of one another, the fight to reclaim ceremonial custom lies between them in an electric space ready to collide. I would highly recommend this short for its beautifully creative form of storytelling and using this dreamlike world to unite a diverse set of cultures in understanding the issues impacting Indigenous communities that are far from fiction. It is a celebration of both the heritage of Indigenous culture and the artistry of animation.
Biidaaban is part of the Native Spirit Indigenous Film Festival, which continues in London. <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/native-spirit-uk-17728364903">Register here</a>. This film was created by CBC Arts and is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWjnYKyiUB8">available to watch</a> on their YouTube channel.

Biidaaban Still Large _newsite

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson&#8217;s story inspired the creation of this beautifully realised, but critically powerful movie that explores the most pertinent issues facing Indigenous peoples.

Biidaaban: A Powerful Indigenous Tale of Magic and Resistance Brought to Life

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.