Our film reviewers below headed to the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/social-realism-meets-sci-fi-at-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2023">BFI London Film Festival</a> to search for the films of the year for you to seek. Ranging from the big releases to smaller rewarding films, we arrange them according to our very own special categories.
<h5>Heavyweight Champion of the World Award</h5>
This year’s London Film Festival was dominated by the return of the heavy-weight auteur, with new films from Michael Mann, David Fincher, Todd Haynes, Hayao Miyazaki, Sofia Coppola, Wim Wenders, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Errol Morris, Catherine Breillat, Jonathan Glazer and even Victor Erice (his last film The Quince Tree Sun was released over 30 years ago).
But in a year where the future of cinema has come under existential threat – actors and writers <a href="https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/hollywood-actors-on-strike-why-sag-walkout-how-long-last-explained-2478793">striking for better pay</a> and better job security against the looming backdrop of artificial intelligence and the streaming boom – it’s fitting that one of the industry’s most revered and outspoken filmmakers returns with a late-career masterpiece.
At 81 years old, Martin Scorsese is finding a new lease of life thanks to an impressive late-career run in Silence (2016), The Irishman (2019) and now his latest American epic Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), an extraordinary dramatization of David Grann’s novel that systemically examines the industrialised gangsterism behind the 1920s Osage County murders of the local Native American population to powerful effect. As Scorsese said on the LFF red carpet when adapting these kinds of stories, “The aesthetics of it [the film] should enhance the journalistic idea”. Killers of the Flower Moon achieves this through a scope matched by unapologetic rage over historical injustice.
Killers of the Flower Moon is available to stream from January 2024 – TS 
<h5>Most Touching Story Award</h5>
In Past Lives, written and directed by Celine Song, we follow Greta Lee’s character Nora reconnecting with her childhood friend Hae Sung (played by Teo Yoo) from her youth in South Korea, where her family emigrated from to settle in Canada. We are taken back to scenes from their childhood together, then fast forward to their early adulthood where they find each other again, a virtual reunion filled with feeling and romantic potential. But, as life often reminds us, some things aren’t meant to be: the stars do not align and the couple drift apart once again.
As more time passes, Nora and Hae Sung settle into trajectories that separate and differentiate them, yet life brings them together again. Reconnecting with someone, something or some place that played a part in who you once were can be a challenging confrontation. How does it feel to observe or engage with what could have been? How will you deal with what you find? Past Lives explores just this, subtly and tenderly.
I often find myself wondering about what could have been if my parents made a different choice for their lives, our lives. What they had to let go. Who they would have been. In Past Lives, I see that being content doesn’t mean you are immune to imagining possibilities and mourning lost potential. There is so much feeling in this film, I loved it.
Past Lives is available to stream now – HH
<h5>The Everyday Evil Award for Global Trade</h5>
Any pact with the devil begins with an attractive proposition. Europa, directed by Austrian-Iranian Sudabeh Mortezai and set in a remote valley in Albania, begins with businesswoman Beate (Lilith Stangenberg) addressing a crowd of female university graduates to tell them they can be anything they want in life. Beate follows with remorseless zeal her mission on behalf of the multinational EUROPA company: to get the custom-bound farmers of a local village to sign away their land. So, be whatever you want to be, so long as it is within the terms and conditions stipulated in the contract. The precise business of the company is never stated, but Beate attempts to achieve their aims with a single-mindedness that begins with bonhomie and the promise to share the miracles of progress, but turns increasingly imploring, cajoling, then threatening, until finally relying on the brutal reality of force. This satire of contemporary neoliberalism exposes the smiling face of corporate practice to be the mask of an occupying power. Meanwhile, the local village heads of family maintain a power of refusal whose steadfastness attains an almost mystical quality.
Europa does not have a release date yet – LB

<h5>Best British Film Award</h5>
As well as the auteurs, a number of British films appeared in the programme, from crowd-pleasers like Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget to Molly Manning Walker’s immensely powerful debut on female adolescence and rape culture in How To Have Sex that left me emotionally drained exiting the cinema.
But two homegrown products occupied the opening and closing night gala slots representing two class ends of British society. First up was Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s stylish mystery drama about an Oxford Uni student (a type-cast Barry Keoghan) who gets drawn into the world of an aristocrat (Jacob Elordi) in his same year.
More successful was the closing night gala The Kitchen, a brilliant debut from Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares set in a dystopian London where all forms of social housing have been eradicated except for a rundown housing block, nicknamed <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/social-realism-meets-sci-fi-at-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2023">The Kitchen</a>, whose community refuses to move out despite orders from the authorities. The film centres on an unlikely relationship formed between Izi (Kane Robinson, better known by his rapper name Kano), who’s desperate to leave The Kitchen, and 12-year-old Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman, in an exceptional debut performance) who has lost his mother and is searching for familial stability. It includes an outstanding supporting role from football legend Ian Wright as the in-house DJ! Its references to Attack the Block (2011), Blade Runner (1982), Blue Story (2019) and television crime drama Top Boy (2011-2023) – which also stars Kano – add up to a very effective allegory that resoundingly speaks to the current climate of social exclusion, gentrification and knife crime in London. Crucially, it’s a film made by Londoners about London and we thoroughly recommended it when it drops on Netflix in January.
The Kitchen is available to stream from 19 January 2024 on Netflix – TS

bikeriders-2023-film-still

Bikeriders 2023 film still

<h5>“Hand Me the Tissues” Award for Most Tears in the Audience</h5>
 We go through life like rough-hewn lumps of rock, shaped by the impact from billions of years of astral explosions. Distant stars may draw us for a time into their orbit, before their light goes out and we are once more alone in the cold, dark solitude of the cosmos. This metaphor underlies All of Us Strangers, a relationship drama about the things we wish we could say to those who have long since left us, and the love we neglect while it is by our side. Andrew Haigh (45 Years) directs a dream team of Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, Jamie Bell and star Andrew Scott, who render each character in the fine detail of their warmth and their flaws, their hopes and their traumas. Scott plays a middle-aged screenwriter whose encounter with a younger man prompts him to re-evaluate his life as a gay man and his relationship to his parents. In a story that blends fantasy, memory, feeling and reality, Scott embodies the subtle strength of a subjectivity that defines our relations to others at the same time that it inhibits our ability to fully reach them. It is a film of a devastating sadness and beauty.
All of Us Strangers is in cinemas from 26 January 2024 – LB
<h5>Stylish but Disappointing Award</h5>
The Bikeriders is a fictional film directed by Jeff Nichols and inspired by photojournalist Danny Lyon’s photo book of the same name. The photos depict the lives of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club of Chicago, a community on the outskirts of society who Lyon spent four years documenting.
Impenetrable and elusive, Lyon’s work gives us an insight to a lifestyle and people many will never encounter, let alone be welcomed into. I find the photographs of this fringe community fascinating and romantic, so I understand director and writer Jeff Nichols’ drive to create a fiction around these evocative photographs.
The result fails to inspire. This film features beautiful shots and an ensemble cast to match, but it’s tied together by a shallow narrative. There is something here about oral histories being held and stewarded by women, namely Jodie Comer’s character Kathy, but the focus persists on the central male characters, Benny (Austin Butler) and Johnny (Tom Hardy) playing out a tale about succession. The jumps in time, and the numerous underdeveloped (though intriguing) characters, left me wanting. Comer’s performance stands out the most and I wish more of the events of the film prioritised her perspective.
The Bikeriders’ release date has been postponed – HH
HH – <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/halima-a-hassan">Halima A. Hassan</a> 
LB – <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/louis-bayman">Louis Bayman</a> 
TS – Theo Smith

Past-Lives-Still-1 copy

As we come to the end of a turbulent year in global news, we look ahead to find radical joy, meaning and imagination in the cinema.

From heavyweights to debuts – The Platform&#8217;s 2023 film awards

Zainab 
Gosh, Martin. We’re a day away from the World Cup final [at the time of recording]. Exciting times, right? I know it’s going to be difficult for you. It’s not England!
Martin
I&#8217;m very excited, it’s all going to come to its culmination! I wanted England, I wanted Mexico. And then I wanted Morocco. None of those three teams have made it. So I will just be watching it as an avid football fan and hoping that the best team wins.
Zainab 
Fantastic. So that <a href="https://twitter.com/mertesakib/status/1598698752574996480">viral video</a> of you, featuring the now famous pairing, “it’s coming home” followed by Falasteen Hurra (“Free Palestine”), has been viewed at least 5.5 million times the last time I checked, and that&#8217;s just one video on Twitter. How does it feel to be an icon at World Cup 2022?
Martin 
Imagine you&#8217;re just going about your daily life minding your own business. And then all of a sudden you have 850 messages on every social media platform, including from people that you haven&#8217;t seen in years. It&#8217;s really bizarre.
I left the England v Wales match full of adrenaline, you know. There was a camera crew. They saw me with my England shirt, the ghutra on my head, and the England flag painted on my face. They probably thought he looks absolutely ridiculous – we should get him on TV. Yeah, so it just kind of took off. I wasn&#8217;t expecting it.
In fact, you know, “never read the comments” is probably the most important rule you should ever stick to if you go viral. I did read those comments. Some people are like “he&#8217;s a plant”, “he&#8217;s actually a fair-skinned Qatari”, “he&#8217;s not from England at all”. Those are just the ones I can repeat. It’s been a whirlwind.
But more than anything, I&#8217;ve been touched by all the support that people have shown, including people from Palestine, who’ve written to me or commented on the video. I think we can see by the support generally at this World Cup in Qatar that, as <a href="https://johnpilger.com/videos/palestine-is-still-the-issue">John Pilger</a> said, “Palestine is still the issue.”

<blockquote class="tiktok-embed" style="max-width: 605px; min-width: 325px;" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@footballjoe/video/7172604241020833030" data-video-id="7172604241020833030">
<section><a title="@footballjoe" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@footballjoe?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@footballjoe</a> This England fan says Free Palestine 🇵🇸 🎥 Al Jazeera <a title="fyp" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fyp?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#fyp</a> <a title="palestine" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/palestine?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#palestine</a> <a title="israel" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/israel?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#israel</a> <a title="qatar" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/qatar?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#qatar</a> <a title="qatar2022" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/qatar2022?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#qatar2022</a> <a title="englandfootball" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/englandfootball?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#englandfootball</a> <a title="itscominghome" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/itscominghome?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#itscominghome</a> <a title="threelions" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/threelions?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#threelions</a> <a title="soccertiktok" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/soccertiktok?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#soccertiktok</a> <a title="soccerboy" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/soccerboy?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#soccerboy</a> <a title="footballedit" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/footballedit?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#footballedit</a> <a title="aljazeera" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/aljazeera?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#aljazeera</a> <a title="fypシ" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fyp%E3%82%B7?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#fypシ</a> <a title="fypage" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fypage?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#fypage</a> <a title="♬ original sound - FootballJOE" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-7172604246364408581?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">♬ original sound &#8211; FootballJOE</a></section>
</blockquote>
<script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script>

Zainab
I do sense that there&#8217;s been a shift in consciousness on this issue, even prior to the World Cup. <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution">Human Rights Watch</a> and <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/#:~:text=This%20is%20apartheid.,order%20to%20benefit%20Jewish%20Israelis.">Amnesty International</a> both released reports in the past year or two, calling out Israeli apartheid. I think that&#8217;s the first time that&#8217;s happened. Why do you think it was so important to put Palestine on the agenda?
Martin
I think we&#8217;re seeing a disconnect between local governments in the Arab world, and their relations with Israel, and what people on the ground are saying and feeling. If we&#8217;re talking about the UK or the European context, I really think there&#8217;s been a shift in attitudes and even a softening in mainstream media, which a couple of decades ago was just ardently 100% staunchly pro-Israel. Many years ago, people who would talk about Palestine were often put into one little box. “You’re only complaining because you&#8217;re Muslim,” or “you&#8217;re only complaining because you&#8217;re a far-left trot”. That&#8217;s not the case anymore.
Zainab
And you&#8217;ve been to Palestine yourself. What was that like?
Martin
Palestine? Wow. Palestine was an amazing experience for me. I went about four or five years ago. It touched me on an emotional level, in a big way. You know, I went there, because I’d always wanted to visit. I was shown around by a local Palestinian guide, I went and met many Palestinian people, and I&#8217;m not shy – if they don&#8217;t speak the same language as me, I still try and get into conversations.
You just see an incredible strength in the Palestinian people in a way that is so inspiring. They face some of the harshest conditions, their lives are made to be very, very difficult. I spoke with one guy, and it’s something very simple but touching, he&#8217;s like, I&#8217;d love to be able to take my kids to the zoo, but I&#8217;ve not been able to get a permit, because the zoo’s on the other side of the separation wall. Going there and seeing things for yourself, with your own eyes, is a completely different kettle of fish.
Zainab 
Were there any towns that stood out to you?
Martin
One of the areas that, for sure, was the most impactful was Hebron. You have the Palestinian markets at the bottom with all the traders, then you have literally above them, the settlers. So when I went there with my guide, he took me up as far as he could go, to the entrance of the settlement. And, you know, he is from Palestine and his great, great, great grandparents were too, and he&#8217;s not allowed in. I just kind of rock up as a tourist with a British passport, and they let me in, which for a start made me think “there’s something wrong about that, but okay”.
So you go in there and… all of Palestine has gone through great injustice, but Hebron felt like next level. And then, you know, we started to talk to people, some of the shop sellers in the market, and they tell stories about the settlers throwing faeces and urine down from up there, and all sorts of things about police brutality. People being taken away in the middle of the night. Kids not just being attacked, but dying. Just absolutely heartbreaking.

Zainab 
Really heartbreaking. Okay, so back to football for a moment. We all know the stereotypes around being a football fan, not least an England football fan! Always getting drunk and causing mayhem. Just wondering what your perspective is on that from the stands?
Martin
I&#8217;ve been going to England football matches for about 20 years, possibly more. You know, a lot of the time the loudest or most extreme example of something is the one that&#8217;s the most newsworthy, but that&#8217;s not really representative. When we&#8217;re talking about England fans specifically, the vast majority are well behaved, they don&#8217;t get into fights, they don&#8217;t get in trouble.
Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve seen a change. For a start, we&#8217;ve got a much more diverse football team now, but we&#8217;ve also got more diverse fans going into the game. The British media likes to make out that the only fans in the world that have a problem with hooliganism is England, and that&#8217;s not true. England is not even in the top three worst. It did have a great problem with it in the 1980s and beforehand, but we don&#8217;t have the same levels today as many parts of Latin America, as Indonesia, as many others. That’s why it was great to have <a href="https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/no-british-fans-arrested-world-cup-report-2022-12-15/">read the news</a> that there wasn&#8217;t a single arrest of any British fans at Qatar. I was there. People were just having a good time, smiling, laughing, just supporting their football team.

In particular, I want to say, the Moroccan and the Iranian fans. Wow! You know, I was lucky enough to go to a game featuring both teams. Let&#8217;s talk about the England v Iran game. 6-1 down. And the Iranian fans were still jumping up and down, they were singing… I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s many nations in the world that when they&#8217;re 6-1-down are still drowning out their opponents, and they were, so all credit to them. That was fantastic.
The World Cup is kind of like this international party atmosphere, it&#8217;s people getting together, having coffees, exchanging ideas. You know, I made a friend at a World Cup in South Africa that I then ended up working with. Qatar is very much a coffee culture kind of place and I love coffee, you know, having a sit down and just talking about the world and talking about life is amazing.
Zainab 
I love coffee too, so we’ll need to meet somewhere in the world.
Martin
Probably, let&#8217;s do that.

Zainab 
With football at home, there have been instances of racism, particularly when it comes to Black players, or the problem of Islamophobia. How do you reconcile those kinds of contradictions in football?
Martin
Yeah, I mean, it&#8217;s very interesting. I&#8217;ve had messages from many British Muslims directly, and somebody said they didn&#8217;t feel that they could support England until my video. Pretty mind-blowing to me. There&#8217;s definitely been issues, like at the <a href="https://www.skysports.com/football/news/12016/12360852/fans-in-england-surveyed-on-racism-in-football-after-abuse-of-england-players-following-euro-2020-final#:~:text=Over%2070%20per%20cent%20of,of%20Euro%202020%20in%20June.">Euros</a>, although I think that actually says more about the organising and lack of policing at that particular event.
I&#8217;m very aware of the fact that I wouldn&#8217;t necessarily see a lot of racism. I don&#8217;t want to be the white guy that just says, there&#8217;s no racism here. What I can say for sure, as somebody who used to work for a social media company, a lot of that is because you&#8217;re clicking on things, and we&#8217;re being polarised, and extreme positions are being given a platform that they wouldn&#8217;t have got before.
I remember when BBC Panorama did a special on hooliganism after England fans were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2003/apr/27/newsstory.sport5">banned from travelling</a> to the Euro 2004 decider in Turkey. Fast forward 20 odd years later, and you’ve got multiple England fans, shouting “Free Palestine” on TV. That, to me, is indicative of how things have changed. Is there racism among some of our fans? Sure. That&#8217;s because England fans are a reflection of society. I think some of these things are not necessarily a football issue, they’re more of a society issue. And so whatever problems are in society, well, obviously, they&#8217;re going to be reflected when you get a stadium of 80,000 people together.

Zainab
What team do you support at home, by the way?
Martin
I&#8217;m a Liverpool fan, for my sins.
Zainab
Liverpool fans will always have the exemplary legacy of <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/making-doodles-and-recording-history-hamja-ahsan-on-diy-cultures-2017">campaigning at Hillsborough</a> for 20 years. Could you tell us a little bit about that, or how football intersects with politics in that way?
Martin
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I am a ‘wool’ as they call me in Liverpool, ‘<a href="https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/origin-woolyback-what-makes-someone-22693259">a wooly back</a>’. So I&#8217;m from the outskirts in Cheshire. People back home are incredibly political, especially in Liverpool where I spent a lot of my youth, in a way that they aren&#8217;t in the rest of the country. So for a very working class, socialist city, like Liverpool, to have the kind of issues that we had with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/oct/21/the-great-betrayal-how-the-hillsborough-families-were-failed-by-the-justice-system">Hillsborough</a>, which is not just an incredible human tragedy, with the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-61079095">loss of 97 lives</a> now. But also the terrible injustice that happened right afterwards, whether that&#8217;s from disgusting rag newspapers (I won&#8217;t even mention the name of) maligning Liverpool fans, playing on all sorts of negative stereotypes about Liverpool fans – stealing money off corpses, urinating on policemen – these were 100% lies. I was very young at the time, but there was somebody at my school who lost a family member, so this is something that&#8217;s personal for me as well. Finally, it was given away that it wasn&#8217;t the fans, it was <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-hillsborough-idUKKCN0XN14W">the police that were at fault</a>. Now, there&#8217;s been no criminal proceedings against any police officers in particular, but yeah, it was a big deal.

The people of Liverpool are very strong people. They are salt of the earth kind of people. They care about other people, they are collectivists. Whether it&#8217;s the Dockers Liverpool Football Club, which has had a strong association with socialism over the years. Or whether it’s Bob Shankly, talking about his favourite type of socialism, or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/gallery/2008/dec/03/1">Robbie Fowler lifting up his shirt</a> after a goal to show support with the striking Dockers, you know, all the way to today. Different views on modern-day politics compared to the rest of the country, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/27/liverpool-sun-boycott-remain-vote-hillsborough-disaster-eu">different voting patterns</a>, when it comes to party politics or Brexit, then all the way to today where we&#8217;ve got the Egyptian king – Mo Salah, Mo Salah.
Liverpool is already famous for being a very multicultural and accepting city, but ever since he&#8217;s arrived, the <a href="https://www.skysports.com/amp/football/news/11669/11734787/mohamed-salah-signing-has-reduced-islamophobia-and-hate-crime-rates-in-liverpool-study-finds">rates of Islamophobia are reduced</a> – what better way to prove or to show that football can be a uniting force. Mo Salah prays on the field, which for many people is the first time they&#8217;ve ever seen a Muslim pray. So I think that football has a way of breaking down barriers, of bringing people together. Having one of the best players in the world, come on to the pitch, score a goal, and then get down and pray in front of everyone is really touching. And that builds relations that no politician, no PR company, nobody can do.

Zainab
True! Returning to the World Cup for a moment. There’s been significant attention on human rights issues and workers’ rights issues in Qatar, and I guess the scale of these kinds of issues are unbelievable. What were your thoughts on World Cup 2022 being held there?
Martin
Football is the beautiful game and it’s a global sport. So if we really want to be taken seriously in saying that it is a sport around the world, that means we need to host tournaments and games around the world, and we need to accept that not every country is the same. Some countries have different beliefs. Some countries have different religions. Some countries have different ways of viewing the world.
I think Qatar gets spoken about in a way that other places don&#8217;t, you know. I don&#8217;t remember all these cries of boycotts, or “don&#8217;t show the opening ceremony” when it comes to the Beijing Olympics or Russia. All sorts of potential issues there, the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/uyghur">treatment of the Uyghur people</a> in particular.
We’ve really picked on Qatar. It&#8217;s a small country, but a rich country too. It&#8217;s also a country that the UK and Europe does a lot of business with, we all get our gas from Qatar. So why are we picking on football – is it just because football is a soft target? So are we saying that we should not put the opening ceremony on, but our politicians continue to receive financial donations from Qatar? Germany itself did a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/29/germany-agrees-15-year-liquid-gas-supply-deal-with-qatar">15-year gas supply deal</a> right after that famous photo of the footballers covering their mouth. So what are we expecting exactly? I just don&#8217;t think football fans need to be the ones that suffer for their politicians being the ones that are doing all sorts of deals.
Zainab
Did anyone buy you a ticket to the World Cup final?
Martin
No, no one bought me a ticket sadly!
Zainab
What next for you? Are you going to <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/martin">write for the platform again</a>, sometime?
Martin
Yeah, I mean, I&#8217;ll just keep on doing my thing. I think I will write for the platform again, that&#8217;s a good idea. I miss my creative outlets. I will just have to find the right topic!
Zainab
We can’t wait. Thank you so much for your time.
This interview took place on 17 December 2022. This is a shortened transcript edited by <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/zainab-rahim">Zainab Rahim</a>.

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Our editor Zainab Rahim sat down with the World Cup viral sensation Martin Near to discuss football, politics and the many shades of an international sports tournament.

“Free Palestine” viral England fan gives us an insider account of World Cup 2022 at Qatar

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>

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.

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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

Najma Sharif
Hi, I’m Najma. I&#8217;m a culture writer. And when I say culture, I mean, I write about everything from film and music to politics. I try to analyse and theorise about the world in the ways I can. Aside from that, I guess I would be a critical thinker and Somali woman living in the US.
Shadee Malaklou 
It&#8217;s nice to meet you, Najma. I’m Dr Shadee Malaklou. I am the founder and inaugural director of the <a href="https://www.berea.edu/bhc/">bell hooks centre</a> of Berea College. I&#8217;m also the chair of the Women&#8217;s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department. I am a scholar of Black feminism and Black liberation thought in the vein of Franz Fanon, and I actually read Fanon as a Gender Studies text, much through the lens of bell hooks and other Black feminist writers. It&#8217;s a real joy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Najma 
Oh, nice! Fanon, I could talk about him all day. So where am I going to begin? In an interview, bell hooks once said that the line between culture and political writing was that the intent of political writing is to change how people think about their political reality, whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there. hooks is known for engaging in both.
Shadee 
I think bell was really invested in the feminist politic of making the personal political. I once asked her – I had the supreme pleasure and privilege of befriending her – if she would describe herself as a Black feminist, and bell said, “No, I&#8217;m a feminist”. Without the additive. And she took that seriously, insofar as she wanted to use feminism as an anti-racist analytic to think about the way the world worked, and her place in it, and our place in it.
She named those intersecting worldings “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”, and later, in the conversation with Laverne Cox, added “cis” and “hetero” to patriarchy. This is what is especially powerful about bell’s work: she locates, with precision, the intersections that others abstract. When we abstract intersectionality, we misunderstand it as an analytic of intersecting experiences of oppression. And that&#8217;s not what it means to analyse and really disarticulate the intersecting structures of oppression that bell named and agitated against, both in her writing and in her person.

bell was a contrarian. That much I can recount from sharing time and space and conversation with her. To those ends, I would actually argue that the cultural and political merged for bell, because to change how people “think about their political reality” requires helping folks see “what’s already there”. And I do think that social media is one way that we can help people see past “imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero-patriarchy” in order to re/think their political possibilities. However, bell did not personally engage social media platforms, and warned that “social media is clutter and life is already full of clutter”. So, I guess what I’m saying is that social media can be the space of vapid filtered selfies and images of food (as “clutter”), but it can also be the place where we rattle and rage.

bell wrote about popular culture as the political, and, before she fell ill, invited well-known folks to her Institute at Berea College to do this kind of thinking with her – like Emma Watson, Laverne Cox, Cornel West and Darnell Moore – all of whom (perhaps, excluding Emma Watson) straddle cultural and political critique in a public-facing way.
One thing that bell talked about a lot was her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/11/capitalism-of-beyonce-lemonade-album">critique of Beyoncé</a>. Until the day she died, she was upset about the amount of vitriol she received because of writing that. bell was a spitfire and a dissident, even (especially) when it got her in trouble. She was a critic of our time. I become quite frustrated when the public opines and obsesses about her love ethic and forgets the critic that she was. They really de-politicise what she means by love. But for bell, love is the way and justice is the destination. There can be no justice without love, and no love without justice. And so even as she drags Beyoncé, there&#8217;s a love there. And I have to be honest, I was one of her closest friends, and she dragged me too, sometimes. But it was always with care.
Najma
I remember the response to the Beyoncé essay, talking about criticism and love, right? Was that part of her radical approach to this fearless, bold critique too? Was love what empowered her to put herself out there, and face the vitriol, or was it just the love of the criticism? The theory, the thought, like, how did she think about that?

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Shadee 
On the voicemail recording that bell took with her from home to home in Berea, she says, “All awakening to love is spiritual awakening”, which is a quote from her book All About Love, but it&#8217;s also inspired by the writings of the Sufi poet Rumi. For her, love is a verb, an action, a community, a care, an accountability, a possibility. And all of these things are what creates an anti-racist feminist praxis for addressing the intersections that bell critiques.
I do think that she came to love out of her Buddhist practice. And that&#8217;s something that she found a little later in life, not in opposition to theory, but as its complement. In an interview about the first time that she met Thich Nhat Hanh, bell recounts that she came to him with anger and rage, and that he told her to use that anger as <a href="https://www.lionsroar.com/bell-hooks-on-meeting-thich-nhat-hanh/">“compost for her garden”</a>. Which is to say, theory (bell’s garden of possibility) was made possible when she turned her anger and rage into love. The two co-existed for her.
Najma
I’m very curious as to the boldness in her critique that we don&#8217;t see today, because if it is coming from a place of love, knowing that source is important.
Shadee 
bell was really skilled at making academic jargon accessible. We see that sometimes with academics who write for the public. Imani Perry and Cornel West do this, and I think that’s why they were invited to the Institute to have conversations with bell, because they similarly had one foot in the public sphere. They weren&#8217;t talking in this echo chamber of academia – a masturbatory practice in which one only speaks to other people who know their language, as a means of self-aggrandisement. You know, Dionne Brand says, “Black people are people without a translator”. And I think what is so beautiful about bell is that she tried to put words to something that is outside of language and its structuring logics of grammar – something that didn&#8217;t exist before she described it.
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Najma
I have this really big book of contemporary writers, and I found an interview with bell hooks and Cornel West, when she started moving away from the more academic work, the early stuff, and he called her a “Black prophet”. What do you think of that?
Shadee
I do think bell was a prophet. Absolutely. To name just one example: ten years ago, at the National Women&#8217;s Studies Association Conference in Puerto Rico, she said that, given the choice, white women will always choose their race over their gender. And then <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/donald-trump">Trump</a> happened.
Najma
So happy I asked that. I was very afraid of dehumanising her or making her out to be some sort of deity.
Shadee
She is an elder, an ancestor now, so I feel she was part of a Black prophetic tradition. I think that&#8217;s what Cornel West was getting at, too. That it wasn&#8217;t just that she was a prophet in the popular sense; she was engaging this prophetic tradition of call and response, and radical critique and liberation theology, to make her interventions known.
Najma
How did bell hooks approach transgression in the classroom? I saved this quote where she says, “The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility.” So…
Shadee
Yes, thank you for that quote! So Fred Moten, a cultural critic and Performance Studies professor at NYU, describes the classroom as a potential <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/_/sNGVmAEACAAJ?hl=en">“undercommons”</a>: a space of possibility within but not of the university. Another thinker, who publishes under the pen name ‘la paperson’, describes this mis/education as a project of the “third university”. <a href="https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing">Jared Sexton</a> talks about how under-the-radar, life-affirming socio-political spaces can exist: these are “not lived in the world that the rest of the world lives in, but [are]… underground, in outer space”, or underwater as the case may be. So for example, returning to Beyoncé, in Lemonade, she curates Black life almost entirely underwater, in an underworld where Black persons can actually breathe. I think that bell created a space in the classroom for those kinds of questions.

Najma 
It’s interesting you mention these third spaces, because bell hooks can be attributed to a lot of digital feminists, really. A lot of people learned about her work online. Was that something that she thought about, like how her work came into the Tumblr sphere? Someone was saying there is no golden age of Tumblr or digital feminism without bell hooks, and that&#8217;s how I came across her work, on Tumblr at 16 years old.
Shadee 
That’s so interesting, she would want nothing to do with that.
Najma 
I know she hates social media. [Laughs]
Shadee 
Yes, and she hated the computer. It was her sister and I who answered bell’s emails and received her correspondence. She didn&#8217;t have a mobile phone either; she only had a house line.

Najma 
I guess I&#8217;m talking about how the digital space becomes a space to learn. You know, she talked about transgressing academia, and a lot of folks study online and come to terms with her work online.
Shadee 
I agree with you, even if bell wouldn’t. I think that virtual and social media spaces can be a location of the Otherwise that bell wanted – an underground outside of the white gaze. Or, the space of an “oppositional gaze”, to use bell’s own language. It is very much a space where you can make your own possibilities. And to make your own possibilities is transgressive.
Having said that, we must beware – and I think that this is what bell feared – of how those spaces are appropriated. Representation will not save us. We see this with Black Twitter, for example. Spaces like Black Twitter are no longer sacred. They are available to woke, virtue-signal plucking and retweeting. bell was very much against that. Once usurped in this way, Black spaces are no longer the underground, undetectable, and yes, transgressive Otherwise of Black mutuality and care – those things that make Black life possible.
Najma 
I remember witnessing the beginning of all this, and it was that safe space for Black women. Black non-binary people, plus-size Black women, Black Muslims, where there was nuance in the discussions being had at the time, and now it&#8217;s very much what you describe.
I want to follow through a line of where all this leads to, like what&#8217;s going to be the future of this? I hate the word “wokeism” but it’s the best way to describe the kind of virtue-signalling, grandstanding, self-righteousness that happens online with young people. Because when I think of bell hooks I think of intersectionality, nuance. I think of not looking for the most oppressed person in the room – there’s also solidarity, right?
Shadee 
Well, bell was very concerned towards the end of her life about feminism, and that feminism was dying. She was very into feminist sisterhood beyond racial distinction.
Najma 
A lot of what I&#8217;m seeing happening today is people trying to re-package misogynistic white supremacist patriarchal dynamics as radical. Like all the girls are saying they want to be housewives right now, and it’s like, are we in the ‘50s? Um, I think we already went through that wave of feminism?
Shadee 
But also, which women have the privilege to be a housewife? Feminists of colour have held white feminism accountable for precisely this privilege. <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/we-need-to-talk-about-claudia-jones">Claudia Jones</a>, for example, and Toni Cade Bambara, to list another example, implored that we “get our house in order”– that we think first about our own participation in “imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero-patriarchy” before we go lead a march or participate in some movement out there. What about the Black and brown women who are cleaning these feminist activists’ homes, who these white feminists are paying under the table – in other words, not a living wage – so that they can go out and climb this patriarchal ladder at the behest of capitalism? “<a href="https://thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/">Lean in</a>”, and all that.

Najma 
And then there&#8217;s the other facet: this isn&#8217;t a reality at all because men aren’t even making money – they&#8217;re not even the capitalist patriarchs that they used to be.
Shadee 
Black men certainly aren&#8217;t.
Audre Lorde says Black people were “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147275/a-litany-for-survival">never meant to survive</a>”, and I think she means not just slavery, but its afterlife. People weren&#8217;t paid living wages on purpose, so they would starve and die out. I think it&#8217;s very, very intentional that communities of colour, especially Black communities, cannot find work that makes life possible.
Najma 
I would think that intersectional feminist lens, that nuanced, caring, holistic viewpoint of the world would come back as people struggle, but instead, people are reverting back to harmful ways of thinking, because they&#8217;re realising they didn&#8217;t benefit from the virtue signalling. They benefit more from performing, I guess, heteronormativity, hegemonic ways of living, like playing into these housewife dynamics. I feel very alienated as a Black Muslim woman, right now, so I&#8217;ve just been thinking a lot about how to make a u-turn on the thinking. What are we gonna have to do?…cause it’s bad out here.
Shadee 
There&#8217;s several strands to what you just said. I&#8217;m going to try to tease them out.
You talk about Black men and youth: bell was very, very invested in the children&#8217;s novels that she wrote. The thing that she was most concerned about at the end of her life was that she wanted to not write academic books, but more children&#8217;s novels. She wrote novels specifically about Black boys. She wanted Black boys to feel that they could be tender and soft.
The second thing I want to say is I actually see a different move from what you do in terms of romantic dynamics and gender and sexuality. As Hari Ziyad says, “<a href="https://afropunk.com/2017/07/my-gender-is-black/">My gender is Black</a>,” because gender in Black culture has always been fluid. Black genders and sexualities are not imagined as modern or postmodern, in other words, at the apex of human civilisation and progress. Instead, we locate them in “the bush”, in a time before human time, marked by sexual excess and gender ambiguity.
I think a lot of sex/gender performance in communities of colour, such as what you’re describing, is an attempt to climb that ladder of civilisation through white mimicry, to appeal to whiteness in order to accrue what Fanon describes as <a href="http://www.critical-theory.com/frantz-fanon-argues-no-being-through-others-for-people-of-color-in-1952/">“ontological resistance”</a>: the human recognition that makes secondary markers of identity like gender and sexuality cohere.
So, you go to any non-white country and the first thing that you see at the pharmacy is skin-lightening creams and hair removal products. Communities of colour have an obsession with laser hair removal and electrolysis, and an obsession with nose jobs, specifically, aquiline noses. I don’t think that this is just about being “marriage material” or having romantic sexual appeal. I think that it&#8217;s about having white feminine appeal specifically.
In terms of what bell might say about this, I encourage everyone to revisit her first book, taken from Sojourner Truth’s refrain, <a href="https://www.plutobooks.com/9780861043798/aint-i-a-woman/">“Ain&#8217;t I a woman”</a>.
Najma 
It&#8217;s very interesting that you say all that is for white appeal. Because there&#8217;s an entire genre on TikTok right now of women who teach each other etiquette and how to dress. And they&#8217;re getting nose jobs, and the amount of money they spend on just everything, filler, extensions. They&#8217;re teaching you where to grab the champagne flute from, because, you know, we all do that every day (!)
Shadee 
Do you think that this is about respectability? Respectability politics is always white. I was never invited to cotillion [a ‘ball’ in which children are taught etiquette] when I was growing up in multiculturalist Southern California. Yes, even (especially) in a liberal haven, one must perform the trappings of whiteness.
Najma 
Respectability politics is making a huge comeback, like for sure – there&#8217;s a whole culture of it – men and women, all genders, all races, across religions.
Shadee 
I’m not on TikTok so I feel like an idiot.

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20170411_bell hooks papers_Bethany Posey-49-2

Najma 
Don’t come! You don&#8217;t have to do that. [Laughs]
It has damaged my brain! But yeah, that was very illuminating because it definitely ties together something I have been witnessing in politics and culture and social media.
So, what do you think are bell hooks’ most underrated books and essays?
Shadee
I like Bone Black, mostly because she talks a lot (and lyrically) about her childhood in that book. I also like Appalachian Elegy, because in it she attributes her dissident feminism not to the cosmopolitanism of (post)modernity, but to the culture of hillbilly folks in the “Kentucky backwoods”, who she describes as her “ancestors and kin”. bell was Appalachian, but we don&#8217;t think of her that way, because she&#8217;s Black. Appalachia is imagined as this white coal mine region. There are plenty of Black and Indigenous Appalachians. bell was Indigenous as well, which again, we don&#8217;t talk about because she&#8217;s Black, and Black almost cancels out anything else. So, I think her books about growing up in Kentucky are really meaningful.
Najma
Before you dip on us, I wanted to know more about what bell was like as a friend and as a colleague?
Shadee 
Oh, she was a spitfire, and she was a gossip. She was obsessed with Juicy Fruit gum. I’d buy it for her in bulk. And she didn&#8217;t like the sugar free kind or the kind in a canister; she liked the old school Juicy Fruit gum packets. Before Juicy Fruit, she was obsessed with peppermints, specifically, soft fluffy peppermints. Not the hard kind.
She was the first person who called me in the morning and the last person who called me at night. And she&#8217;d want me to bring her coffee in the morning. And I&#8217;d be like, “bell, I have to teach!”, then she&#8217;d call me fifteen times during my class because she wanted a McDonald&#8217;s cheeseburger.
bell was in a lot of pain towards the end of her life. And she could be – well, she described me in this way, but I think this applies to her too – “strident”. But, you know what, I loved that about her. I loved that she was a truth teller. It was her love language. A tough love, but love. She wasn’t airing dirty laundry; she was curating an honest, intentional, beloved feminist community.

I would sit with her as she devoured mystery novels. I think that the kind of friendship we had gave me a lot of love, because we would sit there, and she would be reading in silence or napping. And I would be working. And it was a kind of friendship where you didn&#8217;t have to talk. You know, there was an ease there.
She said it like it is and took no prisoners. You knew when she loved you, even when she knocked you around, even when her loving and doting gaze turned into her trademark side-eye. I loved her, too, and I&#8217;ll miss her forever.
Najma
Wow, that&#8217;s… wow. Thank you so much.
Shadee 
Thank you. I&#8217;d love to be in conversation again soon.
Najma
That&#8217;d be really dope.

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<a href="https://www.najmasharif.com/">Najma Sharif</a> is a culture and politics writer based in the USA. <a href="https://www.berea.edu/wgs/faculty-and-staff/dr-m-shadee-malaklou/">Dr Shadee Malaklou</a> is the founder and inaugural director of the bell hooks center of Berea College. This interview took place on 25 February 2022. This is a shortened transcript edited by <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/td">Theodora Danylevich</a> and <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/zainab-rahim">Zainab Rahim</a>.

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Featured photo: bell hooks speaks on campus at UW-Madison / University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives Photo Collection

bell_hooks_UW_Madison_Shadee_Malaklou_Najma_Sharif_The_Platform_Online

Dr Shadee Malaklou, director of the bell hooks center at Berea College, speaks with journalist Najma Sharif, sharing insights into bell hooks&#8217; life and work in light of our current social moment.

The critic of our time: An interview on bell hooks’ life, love and legacy

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

the-harder-they-fall

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

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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

a-hero-farhadi

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

The UK recently enacted the Global Human Rights Sanctions regime <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-announces-first-sanctions-under-new-global-human-rights-regime">announcing</a> the designation of “49 people and organisations for responsibility in some the worst human rights abuses in recent memory.” Notably absent from this list were those individuals responsible for one of the gravest human catastrophes of our time— the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/uyghur">Uyghur</a> genocide.
When the Foreign Secretary addressed the Uyghur cause, he used watered-down language, referring to “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-53463403">gross human rights abuses</a>”, and undermining the severity and urgency of the situation. The mass enslavement, systematic forced sterilisation of Uyghur women, kidnapping of Uyghur children, internment and torture of Uyghur men, deserves an urgent response in its own right. The Chinese government is perpetrating <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/">genocide</a> as defined under international law, so it deserves a formal declaration as such.
Evidence of genocide is in plain sight, and can be found in Chinese government documents, political speeches, and pronouncements. In 2019, the Chinese government <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/https:/foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/">planned</a> to sterilise 80% of child-bearing Uyghur women in Southern Xinjiang with sufficient funding for hundreds and thousands of forced sterilisations.
In a recent<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08l7q6z"> interview</a> with BBC’s Andrew Marr, China’s Ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, failed to refute the existence of the concentration camps, or so-called “re-education centres”, a term that now dominates public discourse due to his government’s disinformation campaign. The term “re-education” obfuscates the true nature and stated goals of the camps. The highest levels of the Chinese government repeatedly ordered officials to “<a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/China-re-engineer-uighur">break their [Uyghur] lineage</a>”, systematically prevent Uyghur births, and “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html">round up everyone who should be rounded up</a>”, including <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/us/politics/china-uighurs-arrest.html">Ekpar Asat </a>(brother of one of the authors here, Rayhan Asat). It defies logic that a model citizen like Ekpar, who was so well-integrated into Chinese society and even extolled by the Chinese government for his achievements, would require so-called “re-education”. The term is nothing but a euphemism for the physical and mental destruction of the Uyghur people as a whole.
Shown drone footage of Uyghurs blindfolded, shaven, shackled and herded onto trains, Ambassador Liu could not deny its authenticity, but instead, stammering, he sought to downplay the footage as a standard prison transfer. The real motives behind these transfers are far more sinister. Uyghur detainees are taken to new distant concentration camps or forced labour factories in a predominantly Han Chinese environment, further uprooting them from their communities and forcing them to accept their fate. These transfers also allow the Chinese government to destroy evidence of camps where they were previously detained. Therefore, dispatching a UN-led fact-finding mission to preserve evidence of genocide becomes evermore critical.

No one should sit idle in the face of genocide, let alone be complicit. Powerful business giants, from Wall Street to Dubai’s Financial Hub, and nearly the entire apparel industry, are profiting from the use of Uyghur slavery in their supply chains. According to the latest research,<a href="https://enduyghurforcedlabour.org/"> more than 20%</a> of the world’s entire cotton supply comes from Xinjiang, almost certainly produced by forced Uyghur labour.
Some tech companies even directly provided surveillance technology to sustain what has become the world’s most <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/">technologically sophisticated genocide</a>. Huawei, whose network of surveillance extends to foreign markets, including the UK, is a prime example. The UK rightly imposed a freeze on the use of Huawei’s equipment in its 5G networks, although this freeze only takes place in December of this year and existing infrastructure will remain intact for another seven years. This is hardly a practical timeline to counteract technology that “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/business/huawei-uk-5g.html">presents a real cybersecurity risk</a>” as emphasised by Robert Hannigan, former head of the British digital surveillance agency, GCHQ.
The partial removal of Huawei is a start, given the clear national security concerns. But the UK must take further steps to respond to the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang.
First, the UK should formally declare that these collective mass atrocities amount to genocide. The government should also form a coalition of concerned countries to dispatch an independent fact-finding mission to Xinjiang to preserve evidence of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Second, the Foreign Office should designate the architects of the genocide for human rights sanctions. These designations will send a message to the Chinese government and influence other countries to impose similar human rights sanctions to secure a measure of accountability for the victims and survivors.
Third, UK enforcement agencies should expand their slavery investigations into investments and businesses originating in China. Nearly every industry may be tainted by Uyghur forced labour due to China’s vast trading network.
Fourth, the UK should appoint a Special Envoy to Xinjiang to monitor the developing genocide, collect evidence, pursue international mechanisms of justice and coordinate a humanitarian response.
Finally, the UK and its allies should consider boycotting the Beijing-hosted 2022 Olympics. A government that is committing genocide should never be allowed to host the community of nations at an event whose purported mission is to build a better world for us all.

<div id="about_the_author">
<div class="description"><a href="https://twitter.com/yonahdiamond">Yonah Diamond</a> is legal counsel at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights &amp; <a href="https://twitter.com/RayhanAsat">Rayhan Asat</a> is a lawyer and the president of the American Turkic International Lawyers Association, and sister of Ekpar Asat.</div>
</div>
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<pre>Featured Image: Ekpar Asat</pre>

Rayhan and Yonah &#8211; Uyghur Article

China’s technologically sophisticated slavery and genocide have pervaded our industries. The UK government can no longer downplay it.

Uyghur Genocide in China: What the UK and its Allies Must Do to Confront the Mass Atrocities

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

<h5>Sumercé 
Dir. Victoria Solano 
(Colombia, UK)</h5>
Review by Sharaiz Chaudhry
“My homeland is not for sale!” These words by César Pachón, a community organiser in rural Colombia and an aspiring politician, summarise the David vs Goliath battle at the centre of Sumercé.
The film follows protagonists Pachón, Eduardo Moreno and Rosa Rodriguez in their travels around the páramos of Colombia, as they talk to campesinos, or farmers, and try to organise their resistance to the distant (both physically and figuratively) government in Bogotá and the big corporations that back them. False government promises, electoral corruption, authoritarian landowners, big business interests, the environment and tourism are some of the key themes touched upon, which illustrates the scale of problems they face.
The film shows these people’s determination to continue their resistance and tackle these problems head on. In my favourite scene, Rodriguez sits down with her children and explains her family’s history of activism, finishing by asking: “When your mother is gone, who will lead the people’s struggle?”
Sumercé is a stark reminder that free trade policies implemented by a faceless government, which is completely out of touch with rural life, affects the livelihoods of countless individuals. It is not only a tale of resistance against predatory capitalism and government policies, but a reaffirmation that these campesinos and their livelihoods matter.
9 and 11 June
<h5>Tiny Souls 
Dir. Dina Naser 
(Jordan)</h5>
Review by Tijen Horoz 
Tiny Souls explores the Syrian refugee crisis through the lens of one family staying in a camp in Jordan. Although the personal stories delivered from these white tent cities are nothing new, the way director Dina Naser becomes part of the family – sharing in their joy and pain over a period of four years – creates an intimacy between subject and viewer that feels unique.
Naser is welcomed into the most private spaces of their makeshift home, becoming particularly close with sisters, Marwa and Ayah. As their story unfolds, even the most mundane aspects of family life become compelling against the backdrop of conflict and exile and delivered from the pair’s warm, bubbly and often hilarious perspectives.
Recalling a conversation with her own father, a Palestinian child refugee in 1948, Naser says: “I asked my father once, ‘Is there war in a camp?’ He said, ‘there’s no war…no peace either. Every day there is anticipation and fear.’” War and displacement weigh heavily on the girls, who memorise every minute detail of the conflict, yet anticipate their return to Syria with excitement.
By following their routines and adventures, the viewer may be lulled into a false sense of security, but when the family’s deepest fears are realised, we are reminded just how fragile and unpredictable the life of a refugee is. 
8 and 9 June 
<h5>Hi, AI 
Dir. Isa Willinger 
(Germany)</h5>
Review by Umar Ali
Hi, AI explores the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics, examining how this exciting new technology could be integrated into society and what these developments could mean for humanity.
While the robots are the obvious stars of the show, ranging from simple household helpers to horrifying rubbery ghouls, what really makes them stand out isn’t what they say or do, but how humans react to them.
Humanity has created a life of sorts in its own image, and the interactions with artificial intelligence throughout the documentary reveal as much about the human condition as it does about the non-human. It’s difficult not to form an attachment to the robots, even as they rattle off facts from Wikipedia.
Hi, AI is under no illusions about the nature of robots, sending its audience careening into the uncanny valley from the first shot, but these efforts at transparency, stressing that robots are not truly alive, don’t detract from the emotional core of the piece. In fact, the documentary’s deconstruction of itself ends up enhancing its narrative, proving its points by tearing them down.
10 and 11 June

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Hi, AI - Still 4 New_Site

<h5>Being White 
Dir: Albany Video 
(UK)</h5>
Review by Shireen Hilmi
An eye-opening yet sadly unsurprising delve into race, Being White explores what whiteness meant to Brits in 1980s London. When asked what being white meant, the response that it felt “normal” is telling, that lack of a need to define an identity, where any other identity is “not normal”. An attitude that, even today, is not uncommon.
The views of non-English white communities still told of discrimination that is reminiscent of the treatment of Eastern European immigrants today, that pure Englishness is superior to everything, except the white, middle class status quo. Most striking, however, is the lack of progression that the English psyche has made since these dark, Thatcherite times. Rhetoric still defined by the front pages of The Sun, generalising comments based on the actions of ethnic individuals, bananas and monkey chants being thrown at Premier League football players are all still happening today, only now they mostly take the form of comments sections online.
Being White is a haunting reminder that 2019 hasn’t seen the evolution of a more civilised society where equality reigns true, it’s merely the same society, simply with new tools, such as wifi and smart phones. 
10 June 
<h5>Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl 
Dir. Amy Goldstein 
(USA)</h5>
Review by Louis Bayman
This documentary follows Harrow-born singer-songwriter Kate Nash in a reflective mood as she recounts her journey from a Nando’s employee who took up the electric guitar when signed off work with a broken foot, to the runaway success of her 2007 single ‘Foundations’ and the subsequent tribulations of the limelight. 
The title, ‘Underestimate the Girl’, is in tune with her story of a success not quite against the odds, but certainly against the occasional meanness of the press and the industry, and especially her ex-manager who she is now taking to court. This theme is in keeping with her persona as a vocalist, which combines a certain fragility with an emotional openness that suggests resilience. 
The documentary is made up almost entirely of interviews with Nash as well as of her friends and family, so one shouldn’t expect any sense of exposé nor indeed any criticism at all. It is very much her own official story, and would be a bit boring for anyone not already committed to Nash&#8217;s personality or to her music.
10 and 11 June 
<h5>La Vida En Común 
Dir. Ezequiel Yanco 
(Argentina, France)</h5>
Review by Zainab Rahim
Spanning a landscape of desolate fields, lakes and sandy grounds, this documentary is a gentle view into the lives on an indigenous community in the north of Argentina. It’s carried along by the mellow but endearing voiceover of the young unnamed protagonist. He imagines the movements and ruthless nature of a puma, while building up an urgency to hunt the beast with his friends.
La Vida En Común focuses on these young adolescents, their facial expressions often appearing more mature than their age. Whether taking their dogs on a hunting trip, recounting a story of a parental break-up, or helping each other shave, there is a sustained thread of quiet innocence in their interactions.
The film doesn’t try to exoticise the indigenous experience, nor does it seek to separate it from the modern world; rather, it offers a glimpse into how a rural lifestyle can be integrated with a national school system and new social trends. We do see, however, what seems to be a twinge of sadness as the kids watch videos of their history and heritage. The film eventually reaches its crux by magnifying our connection to the natural elements. 
If you like slow-paced documentaries, you’ll enjoy this pensive but strangely calming film. 
7 and 10 June

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Tiny Souls - Still 2 - New_Site

Louis Bayman is film editor at The Platform and an academic based at the University of Southampton.
Tijen Horoz is World editor at The Platform. She completed a BA in English at KCL University, followed by an MA in Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS University.
Sharaiz Chaudhry is spirituality editor at The Platform who studied Middle East Politics at university before pursuing traditional Islamic studies.
Shireen Hilmi is the Health Editor at The Platform. She is currently working as a doctor in London.
Umar Ali is an editorial assistant on The Platform who studied Comparative Literature before pursuing a masters in newspaper journalism.
Zainab Rahim is the editor-in-chief of The Platform.
&nbsp;
<pre>Photo Credits Sheffield Doc/Fest

Featured: Sumercé</pre>

Sumerce &#8211; Sheffield Documentary Festival

Our editorial team takes a look at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, ‘Ways of Seeing’, with a review of six festival picks – from new explorations of the refugee crisis to intimate views of rural communities. The festival takes place 6 to 11 June.

The Platform Preview to the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, 2019

<h5>ESTA TODO BIEN (IT&#8217;S ALL GOOD) 
Dir: Tuki Jencquel</h5>
Review by Sharaiz Chaudhry
Está Todo Bien (ironically named It’s All Good) is a powerful story that puts a human face to the crisis in Venezuela. It reminds us that, while the political posturing by both sides has divided people domestically and internationally, there are very real consequences for the people of Venezuela, who suffer daily as a result.
The documentary follows the stories of several people impacted by the health crisis in the country. By shadowing a doctor, NGO worker, pharmacist and several patients, it provides a multidimensional narrative that seeks to illustrate how different people are affected in different ways by the same issue.
Whether it is through seeing all your colleagues seeking asylum abroad, or having to resort to social media to acquire life saving medicines, the film shows that the ongoing crisis in the country should not be seen as just an ideological battle between the right and the left in Venezuela, but as a very real and tangible everyday struggle.
While portraying a bleak outlook for the country, Está Todo Bien provides a glimmer of hope in the everyday kindness of the Venezuelan people. As a radio host says, &#8220;There&#8217;s a great sense of solidarity in the country because we are all suffering.&#8221; After watching this film, one cannot help but feel that the end of the suffering could not come soon enough.
<a href="https://ff.hrw.org/film/esta-todo-bien-its-all-good?city=London">20 March, 8.45 PM, Barbican</a> 
<a href="https://ff.hrw.org/film/esta-todo-bien-its-all-good?city=London">21 March, 7.30pm, Regent Street Cinema</a>
<h5>THE CLEANERS 
Dir: Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck</h5>
Review by Louis Bayman
Who decides what you see online, and how? This documentary exposes the world of the content moderators, the people who “do what algorithms can’t”. It is a lonely job, outsourced to firms in the Philippines and operating in the shadows of clients like Facebook and Google. This is a noir-ish realm of workers in isolated office booths lit only by a cold blue screen, who describe themselves as online detectives “cleaning up” the sewers of the worldwide web, where child pornography and terrorist propaganda proliferate.
Social media channels help define contemporary reality, aided by political strongmen from the Philippines’ Hitler-praising Duterte to Twitter’s most famous user Donald Trump. These companies are more likely to follow such figures than any legal, democratic or trading standards, determining for instance what we see from the Syrian war, or removing anything requested by the <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2018/09/13/the-crackdown-on-journalism-in-erdogans-turkey/">Turkish authorities</a>, the world’s most avid internet censors. While Facebook and Google avoid doing this undemocratic dirty work, they still gain favoured access to authoritarian regimes’ populaces.
The film also brings up an age-old question for censors. What effect might constant exposure to brutality have on those for whom it is a full-time occupation? “I’ve seen hundreds of beheadings in my life as a content moderator,” says one interviewee, before describing the quality of the wound and amount of blood produced by different decapitation tools. Another worker hanged himself in front of his laptop.
For these corporate saviours of the public good, concern for individual wellbeing is not company policy.
<a href="https://ff.hrw.org/film/cleaners?city=London">13 March, 6.15pm, Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA)</a>
<h5>THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED 
Dir: Assia Boundaoui</h5>
Review by Fatima Jichi
One community, two decades of FBI counter-terror surveillance, zero convictions for terrorism. The Feeling of Being Watched is a documentary which follows journalist Assia Boundaoui’s investigation into the surveillance of her community in Bridgeview, Illinois, which began in 1990.
Boundaoui takes the FBI to court for access to secret records, which reveal that her community was part of a decades-long investigation, code-named “Operation Vulgar Betrayal”, into money laundering in the US to support terrorist activity in the Middle East. The investigation, she says, extended to all major Muslim organisations in America. During the two decades, the FBI collected data on 600 American Muslim mosques, schools, businesses, charities and individuals across the US, and generated 33,120 pages of records.
The Feeling of Being Watched explores the impact of this surveillance on the community. Boundaoui tells us the story of a friend, later diagnosed with schizophrenia, who complained of being constantly followed, but the community were too paranoid to notice she was in fact sick. She describes a community stuck in the “grey area between paranoia and truth”. Boundaoui shows us how the surveillance contributed to a breakdown of trust between the community and law enforcement.
The documentary centres Boundaoui in the middle of the story she is investigating. Her unique access to community members makes for compelling viewing. The received wisdom is that Muslim communities became “suspects” following 9/11 and the War on Terror. But what is clear from Boundaoui’s documentary is that the Muslim community in the US was under surveillance long before then. As one community member says, “I don’t remember how it felt to just know that I am free in my home.”
<a href="https://ff.hrw.org/film/feeling-being-watched?city=London">19 March, 8.45pm, Regent Street Cinema</a> 
<a href="https://ff.hrw.org/film/feeling-being-watched?city=London">20 March, 6.15pm, Barbican</a>

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EFM_South_Africa_Body_NewSite

<h5>EVERYTHING MUST FALL 
Dir. Rehad Desai</h5>
Review by Umar Ali
Everything Must Fall tells the story of South Africa’s #FeesMustFall movement, charting its development from a protest against tuition fees at the University of the Witwatersrand (or “Wits”) to a nation-wide social revolution.
The story is primarily told through four student leaders and Vice Chancellor of Wits, Adam Habib, and this multi-faceted narrative paints an engaging and complex picture of the movement. It’s all focused around one event, but the diverse perspectives give a real sense of the revolution as a living, breathing entity rather than a simple route from A to B.
It’s an uncompromising and unflinching account, dissecting the struggle across a number of axes over an hour and twenty minutes. Classism, racism, misogyny and homophobia all weave into each other, and these conflicting ideologies manifest in both the institutions that enforce them and the protesters that fight them. “Our history is a nightmare from which we are still trying to wake,” says student leader Shaeera Kalla, and Everything Must Fall wears its history – and its nightmare – on its sleeve.
<a href="https://ff.hrw.org/film/everything-must-fall?city=London">22 March, 6.15pm, Barbican</a>
<h5>THE SWEET REQUIEM (KYOYANG NGARMO) 
Dir. Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam</h5>
Review by Zainab Rahim
The Sweet Requiem opens in the unforgiving slopes of the Himalayan terrain. A Tibetan family trudges uphill through the snow under the looming threat of the Chinese forces who pace the mountains to take out their next victim. Then, gunshots and darkness.
The viewer is transported to South Delhi, years later, the lens encasing the audience with the warmth of pollution and the pulsing noise of the city’s traffic. Dolkar is the quiet, observant protagonist, played so effortlessly by first-time actor Tenzin Dolker – herself a daughter of a refugee settlement in India.
Amid the humble lodgings, Dolkar’s routine includes a daily prayer, laughter, dance and shaping the eyebrows of India’s elite. But when an older Tibetan refugee enters her community, the story takes a turn, and we see Dolker plagued by the political realities of achieving self-determination. She cannot stop watching videos of self-immolations on her phone. The pain of separation from her mother hits her badly.
Filmmaking duo Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam introduce the plight of a people so gently and convincingly, it almost feels like an artful documentary. Cutting between Dolkar’s childhood journey across the Nangpa-La Pass and her turbulent adult search for belonging, this film was crowdfunded and made with due care. It subtly conveys what it means to accept fate – also laying bare the searing agony of a mother who seeks only a safe future for her child.
<a href="https://ff.hrw.org/film/sweet-requiem-kyoyang-ngarmo">17 March, 5.50pm, BFI Southbank</a>

the-sweet-requiem-directed-and-produced-by-ritu-sarin-and-tenzing-sonam-of-white-crane-films-photo-credit-pablo-bartholomewall-rights-reserved-for-permission-and-licensing-rights-please-cont

"The  Sweet Requiem" directed and produced by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam of White Crane Films, Photo credit: PABLO BARTHOLOMEWAll rights reserved. For permission and licensing rights: PLEASE CONTACT: pablo@bartholomew.tvOr by cellphone +91 98100 14131

Fatima Jichi is legal affairs editor at The Platform and is training to be a barrister. She is interested in human rights and criminal justice.
Sharaiz Chaudhry is spirituality editor at The Platform who studied Middle East Politics at university before pursuing traditional Islamic studies.
Louis Bayman is film editor at The Platform and an academic based at the University of Southampton.
Umar Ali is an editorial assistant on The Platform who studied Comparative Literature before pursuing a masters in newspaper journalism.
Zainab Rahim is the joint editor-in-chief of The Platform.
&nbsp;
<pre>Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Featured: The Cleaners</pre>

HRW_THE CLEANERS_New_Site

Under surveillance and in search for equality – our editorial team delve into the subject matter of this year’s Human Rights Watch (HRW) film festival with a review of five festival picks. The festival takes place 13 to 22 March in London.

Co-Authors