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

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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

While 2023 will go down in film history as the year that, inexplicably in my opinion, audiences chose Oppenheimer over The Flash, the BFI London Film Festival offers a chance to look ahead to the year to come. It is a prestigious affair, which means that it is dominated by big-name directors whose films will soon be queueing up for Oscars recognition, along with many lesser-known films that won&#8217;t make it to UK cinemas outside of the festival.
This year is especially notable for the number of distinguished directors lining up who are returning to the big screen for the first time in years. Wim Wenders makes a return with not one but two films: the documentary profile of artist Anselm Kiefer Anselm and the Tokyo-set drama Perfect Days. David Fincher teams up again with his co-writer from Seven for The Killer and Lukas Moodysson presents the sequel Together 99. Meanwhile Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes wins the prize for longest absence, coming a full 30 years since the Spanish director last made a feature film.
Joining them are Sofia Coppola’s biopic of Elvis’s wife, Priscilla, Richard Linklater’s neo-noir comedy Hit Man and festival favourite Koreeda with Monster. Steve McQueen widens his epic vision after the Small Axe film series that chronicled racism and immigration in the UK, with Occupied City. Occupied City is a four-and-a-half-hour chronicle of 130 locations in Amsterdam, contrasting their present-day to historical footage when they still hosted the persecuted Jewish community. The Nazi past is also revisited in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which promises a more dreamlike or hallucinatory experience than McQueen’s exploration of archival memory.
If instead it is actors who draw you to the cinema, then you will keenly await All of Us Strangers, an intimate portrait of a friendship that brings Andrew Scott (the ‘hot priest’ from Fleabag) together with man of the moment Paul Mescal. Bradley Cooper stars in and directs Maestro, about the life of legendary 20th century conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick feature in the Australian Outback thriller The Royal Hotel, reuniting Garner with director Kitty Green after the excellent study of workplace abuse The Assistant.

The film that picked up the greatest buzz over the summer festival circuit is Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo star in this Victorian-set sci-fi adaptation of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. Lanthimos has made a career in staging the unruly clash between imprisoning convention and sexual desire, each time in a more outlandish setting. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon instead plays its historical re-enactment in a more sombre key, recounting one of the most unremittingly grim episodes in the genocide of the Native American population – with Lily Gladstone and <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/how-david-attenborough-is-getting-planet-earth-wrong">Leonardo DiCaprio</a> playing the leads. Intersecting with the discovery of oil in Oklahoma and the beginnings of the FBI, the story is a reminder of the brutality underlying capitalism, racism and state force.

the-kitchen-kano-kaluuya

The-kitchen-kano-kaluuya

Two British productions provide the opening and closing night galas, neatly representing two contrasting views of the nation. The first is Saltburn, a tale of privilege and desire in Oxford University with an ensemble cast that includes Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant. The second is The Kitchen, the directorial debut of actor Daniel Kaluuya. Set on an estate in 2040, the film is a near-future critique of gentrification and its effect on working class family and community.
You may have noticed that both The Kitchen and Poor Things use sci-fi to insert flights of creative imagination in the otherwise more imprisoning genres of, respectively, social realism and costume drama. This seems in fact to constitute a new trend. Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal are taken into space in the relationship drama Foe, while the 80s-set coming of age story Croma Kid promises to be ‘the <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=croma-kid-lff23">only Dominican-set scifi</a> you will see this year’ according to the BFI’s programme. Add to this the romance Fingernail and the character study Sky Peals and sci-fi is now boldly going into genres where it had rarely gone before. While the sci-fi boom of the 50s came at a time of the space race and the atom bomb, this intimate, lower-budget sci-fi is perhaps more appropriate to a time when technological change has more lowly ambitions than the post-war attempt to conquer the universe.
Before we go, we would like to draw your attention some films that are unlikely to make it to the multiplex – but will be well worth your time to seek out. Cobweb is a 70s-set thriller comedy amid the South Korean film industry. Housekeeping for Beginners provides a queer perspective on status and sexuality in what is the latest entry from the small but impressive Macedonian film industry. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of the slow, beautiful Drive My Car, takes a poetic look at community and the environment in Evil Does Not Exist. Europa promises a thrilling critique of neoliberal capital and rural landscapes by Austrian-Iranian director Sudabeh Mortezai. Starve Acre is a return for Daniel Kokotajlo after his impressive debut Apostasy. While Apostasy examined the cult mindset of a Jehovah’s Witness, Starve Acre sees him move more firmly into folk horror, a genre which is now everywhere, offering as it does the chance to expose the unsettling weirdness underlying the everyday habits we take for granted.
See <a href="https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526164926/folk-horror-on-film/">new book</a>, Folk horror on film: Return of the British repressed, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly and Louis Bayman, out this October. The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">4 to 15 October 2023</a>.
<pre>Featured photo: Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)</pre>

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Our film editor Louis Bayman previews the 67th BFI London Film Festival. Here’s what to look out for.

Social realism meets sci-fi at the BFI London Film Festival 2023

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

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Aftersun Charlotte Wells Film 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the last few years, the <a href="https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2022">Venice International Film Festival</a> has established itself as the launchpad for films which aspire to win an Oscar. This year, the presence of the major US film companies at the Lido seems to have also had a trickle effect: the quality of the line-up for the main competition was consistently high and the minor sections of the programme offered plenty of pleasant surprises. In the last few years, Venice has benefited from a more relaxed stance towards Netflix productions – at least, compared to Cannes. In 2018, this approach was crucial for securing the premiere of Roma, which then went to win the Academy Award for best film. This year, the streaming giant was behind several of the films selected in the main competition including Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde and Alejandro Iñarritu’s Bardo.
In the past, Venice has had some troubles with gender representation. In 2018, while at the Berlinale almost half of the selections were films made by women, Venice had only one film directed by a woman in the main competition (Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale). On that occasion, following much criticism within the industry, the response of the festival director, Alberto Barbera, appeared inadequate. “We look at the quality not at the gender [of the directors]”, he claimed. Ever since that incident, Barbera and his programming team seem to have learned their lesson. This year, incidentally, the two top prizes went to two films made by female filmmakers. The Golden Lion was awarded to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a documentary on legendary photographer Nan Goldin’s career and her fight against the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharmaceutical, whose shameless promotion of the highly addictive drug OxiContin has been deemed responsible for the worst opioid epidemic in US history.
The Silver Lion went to Saint Omer, the first feature film directed by documentarist Alice Diop. Inspired by the real-life case of a French-Senegalese woman who killed her baby in 2016, Saint Omer was one of the bravest, most uncompromising films seen this year at Venice. A writer, Rama (played by Kayije Kegame), has come to observe the trial of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a young African woman who is accused of drowning her one-year-old baby in the sea. Laurence has pleaded guilty. Like almost everyone in the court room, she seems bewildered by what she has done.

The central dilemma that the film explores is why this young woman has committed such a horrific act. Much of the emotional sway of this film comes from the protracted long-takes of Laurence during the trial, which exalt the outstanding performance of Malanda. The conflict between, on one hand, the horror that the monstrous act of this Medea-like figure may generate in us and, on the other hand, our fascination with this highly educated, eloquent philosophy graduate, turns the trial into a compelling prism refracting questions about motherhood and issues around race, postcoloniality and class. As the film explicitly reminds us, a young black woman in 21st century France is not supposed to sound the way Laurence speaks. Interestingly, this defamiliarising narrative device, ingeniously exploiting a collective racist mindset, is precisely the trick that draws us in to listen and pay attention to what this woman is saying, as she tries to make sense of what she has done.
One of the most exquisite findings at Venice for me was Without Her, the debut film by Iranian director Arian Vazirdaftari. Partly psychological thriller and partly absurdist drama, this is a film that challenges our expectations about what an Iranian film reaching the international film market is supposed to look like. There is no apparent gesture toward social realism here. Gifted with a captivating soundtrack that accompanies the maddening journey of its female protagonist, Without Her is a film about an identity crisis that evokes George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944). The protagonist of the film is Roya (Tannaz Tabatabei), a young woman living in Tehran who is getting ready to move to Denmark with her husband. One evening, she finds a young, distressed woman (Shadi Karamroudi) outside her building. Roya takes her in. The nameless girl becomes increasingly attached to Roya and her husband. Gradually she starts behaving like Roya, who becomes more and more invisible to her husband and to the people around her. Informed by the experiences of several Iranian women who tried to emigrate, the film also adds an extra dimension to current discussions inspired by the ongoing protests for women’s rights in Iran. Without Her may perhaps suggest the distinctive identity crisis of Iranian women facing a new life in the West, with the radical changes that such an experience entails. In another sense, the film is a mesmerising journey through the mind of a woman who feels that the world around her has gone mad and sees no way out.

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Amanda was the debut feature film for the hugely talented Carolina Cavalli, delighting the Venice audience with one of the wittiest films shown at the festival. Amanda succeeds in that very rare balancing act between being a quirky, elegant film with a very personal cinematic language and one that is undeniably funny, despite its dark undertones. The homonymous protagonist of the title is a jobless – and friendless – twenty-something played by Benedetta Porcaroli, who, after her debut in the Netflix series Baby, here reaches a level of maturity that gives much hope about her acting future. Porcaroli brings to life an eccentric character who goes on a mission to make an agoraphobic girl her new best friend. Despite her fanatical resolve, Amanda fails miserably. It is this obsessive aspect of Amanda’s personality that makes this character both hugely funny and, as the story develops, movingly vulnerable. Is this the story of a young woman on the spectrum? It does not matter, because through Amanda, Cavalli ends up celebrating a kind of difference that, divested of any judgment, strikes for its warm-hearted imaginative power.
Historically, one of the prerogatives of top film festivals such as Venice has been to support and promote the rise of emerging auteurs, those filmmakers eventually developing a loyal relation to the festival that has launched them. The most recent ‘adoptive’ child of Venice has been Luca Guadagnino, who came back this year with Bones and All and won the award for best director.
It is hard at this stage to anticipate which emerging filmmaker will be the next to receive the Venice stamp of approval, but the young directing talents that we have seen this year at the Lido may indicate that perhaps something is moving.
The <a href="https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2022">Lido Di Venezia</a> ran from 31st August to 10th September 2022, organised by La Biennale di Venezia. It was the 79th Venice International Film Festival.
<pre>Featured Photo: Saint Omer (Alice Diop)</pre>

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Films to look out for from this year’s Venice International Film Festival, which finds mesmerising talent among a wealth of new female-directed films.

Venice Film Festival 2022: Competition u-turns and talent-packed surprises

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

The Gold Machine (2022) is a dense documentary. Featuring an aging man’s poetic musings on his colonial ancestry and historical, geographical and sociological factual content, it demands attention. Writer Iain Sinclair worked on the documentary alongside director Grant Gee to adapt his <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Gold-Machine/Iain-Sinclair/9781786079190">2021 book</a> of the same name, which explores the legacy of his great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair by retracing his journey in Peru.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Arthur was sent by the Peruvian Corporation of London to discover fertile land for coffee plantations, and he documented his expedition in his imperial, diaristic book In Tropical Lands (1895). His mission ultimately contributed to the gross exploitation of the surrounding land and <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/battling-for-the-earth-the-huicholes">indigenous</a> Ashéninka people.
Gee melds documentary and fiction in this film. A fictional writer named Andrew Norton acts as the stylistic voice of Iain Sinclair. Norton speaks from his home, a block of flats on the despairing Hastings seafront. Sinclair’s daughter Farne also features, doubling as Andrew’s daughter, and she travels to Peru for her father as a messenger and family representative (in reality, Iain also travelled to Peru with Farne). This level of disconnect, at once based on reality and divorced from it, gives Norton’s thoughts a dramatic staging in the film: “I stalked the treadmill corridors of future nightmares,” he says whilst pacing the claustrophobic Hastings block and considering his bloody family history. Perhaps Gee used a fictional character in order to pursue this overriding tone of solitary, introspective melodrama. Would it feel too stark and earnest if Iain Sinclair voiced these thoughts himself?

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Sinclair is best known for his acclaimed London novel <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/54749/downriver-by-iain-sinclair/9780141014852">Downriver</a>, released in 1991, which explores the stories of the Thames shores (think dark surrealism and Thatcher’s legacy). The book won him the <a href="https://www.foyles.co.uk/public/biblio/prizedetails.aspx?prizeid=1014">James Tait Black Memorial Prize</a> the year of its release and remains influential for its ominous, offbeat prose and its practice of <a href="https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purposeful-drift-through-the-city/">psychogeography</a>. In keeping with this, The Gold Machine is edited to give off a strong feeling of unease linked to the spaces captured. Shots from Peru include the distorted barbecued faces of the local delicacy <a href="https://travelfoodatlas.com/peruvian-guinea-pig-cuy-recipe">Cuy</a>, train journeys through mountainous landscapes, and the littered shores and areas inhabited by the Ashéninka. This looks like the footage of a disillusioned tourist and it is uncomfortable to watch through the eyes of the conflicted narrator. I think this is the intended effect.
It would be wrong to say the documentary is one-sided. The past and present are dually considered, and interviews with researchers and locals provide detail of the colonial mission to exploit the mineral-rich Peruvian land and the ensuing effects this had. We learn of the city of <a href="https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/la-oroya-peru-poisoned-town/">La Oroya</a> which suffers from toxic lead contamination due to poor mining practices, only worsened by the shirking of responsibility by US-multinational Doe Run Peru. We also hear from the Ashéninka and their call for financial reparations. Farne presents them with copies of the original papers which show the wrongful sale of land to the Peruvian Corporation. We are left hoping that these documents prove to be the solid legal evidence needed for remediation.
Throughout these interviews and stories of damage inflicted by the global North, the voice of Norton interjects a bit too often for my taste. In these moments, a shift in mood occurs as we find ourselves back to Hastings’s haunted, introspective walls. The dark building Andrew Norton speaks from feels stuffy and tired. Is colonial guilt the sticky feeling of going nowhere? This is a question we are left to grapple with. The corridors we see Norton pace through could be a metaphor for the linear routes Arthur Sinclair and the colonisers mapped for themselves. To counteract the colonial mindset of missions and linear routes, we need to reconfigure space as expansive, generous and giving. As activism and the fight for land restitution. Gee and Sinclair would agree, however, the documentary’s stylistic gloom sometimes feels at odds with a call for action. It is a difficult but necessary task, to acknowledge dark truths whilst nourishing hopeful futures.
<iframe loading="lazy" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/666841688?h=ffb6015152" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" data-mce-fragment="1"></iframe>
<a href="https://vimeo.com/666841688">The Gold Machine trailer 2022 (1080p)</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user37932622">Hot Property Films</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.
Dartmouth Films present The Gold Machine in <a href="https://www.dartmouthfilms.com/thegoldmachine">select cinemas</a> from 2 September 2022.

In this blend of documentary and fiction, a writer follows his bloody family history back to the Peruvian land his grandfather exploited for profit.

The Gold Machine: Retracing colonial footsteps in Peru

The image conjured in most people’s minds at the mention of the ‘Wild West’ is that of cowboys and gun-slinging outlaws – almost always white men. Cowboys, as the name suggests, were experts in herding and caring for cattle. Historians estimate that, at the height of their time, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lesser-known-history-african-american-cowboys-180962144/">1 in every 4 cowboys was Black</a>. Yet <a href="https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/ranchhouse/pop_blackcowboy.html">Black cowboys</a> are kept out of most of the narratives and lore of the American West today.
The appeal of the classic Western film for many people is the idea of justice. Westerns value honour, and the stories often depict one or several individuals seeking revenge or retribution against someone who has wronged them. The justice systems of today operate around abstract laws that are often inherently unjust, contrasting to what we find in the world of the Western, where the ‘heroes’ take the law into their own hands.
In almost every way except for the actors we see on screen, <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/our-critics-picks-for-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2021">The Harder They Fall</a> is a typical Western. The film opens with the protagonist Nat Love’s (Jonathan Majors) origin story, setting the scene for the adventure that’s about to unfold. After witnessing the brutal murder of his parents at the hands of outlaw Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) and his gang, Nat Love makes it his mission to exact revenge. Along the way we encounter numerous impressive characters, especially Stagecoach Mary (Regina King), a strong woman in her own right who also serves as the ‘damsel in distress’, and Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield), infamous for his quick-draw abilities and calm demeanour, to name a few.

Nat Love is one of the most famous Black cowboys, thanks to a memoir he wrote which cemented his legacy. The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (1907) describes how Love, born into slavery in Tennessee, headed West aged 14 and began working as a cowboy for large cattle operations in Texas and Arizona. Over the years he spent as a cowboy, Love drove cattle across the United States and down into Mexico. He writes about encountering a range of infamous figures of the old West on his travels (including Buffalo Bill and Jesse James) and stumbling into a number of thrilling situations, from being captured by Native Americans and escaping, to witnessing and participating in gunfights.
Though the veracity of some of the stories recounted in this memoir has been questioned by historians, it is one of the only first-hand accounts of a Black American cowboy from the late 19th century, thus incredibly valuable in recording the existence of Black Cowboys. Love quit the cowboy business in 1890 and his memoir was published in 1907. To this day, he remains a Black folk hero to many.
Director and co-writer Jaymes Samuel says the idea to make a Western came to him while strolling through Kilburn, London. Having grown up watching classic Westerns on the BBC, he became enamoured with the genre and wanted to tell a story that put Black cowboys at the forefront. In Samuel’s The Harder They Fall, Nat Love is described as an outlaw who targets other outlaws, and it becomes evident that he and the Nat Love of history share only a name and an era.

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The Harder They Fall succeeds as a Western. Accompanied by an exciting <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/3whjvbBxG7j2FfTImRdqBw?si=EcITQCqkQESH5cw4u64KUg">soundtrack</a> consisting of music from across the Black Diaspora, and filmed against stunning landscapes, the film is invigorating and seductive. I find myself unable to take my eyes off the screen. Having fallen for the allure of the old West myself earlier this year, it is fitting that the first proper Western film I see is one with all the visual energy I associate with the genre, but filled with faces like mine. I was engrossed by everything, from the range of distinct characters, to the costumes and the sharp-tongued dialogue. Everything about this film is enticing. Granted, the vastness of the story being told and the number of characters means that they are quite two-dimensional, though attempts are made to give some background and purpose to a few. The comic-book style of the action is, however, the main attraction. Though the pacing falls off slightly in the final third of the film, the meeting between Nat Love and Rufus Buck all but makes up for it, revealing a ‘truth’ which changes your perspective on the earlier events of the film.
Not a lot is known about the real Rufus Buck, other than that he and his gang went on a crime spree in 1895, attacking people indiscriminately on the Indian territory of the Arkansas and Oklahoma area. They were captured and hanged by law enforcement not long after. His character in the film is a notorious and ruthless outlaw with a dedicated gang. The story gives Buck two ‘shots’ at redemption, the first being early in the film when he and his gang take over a Black settlement and set their sights on buying it to give the citizens a fixed home, during a time when Black people were not allowed to settle anywhere for long. He attempts this with brutality and little mercy. Then there is his character&#8217;s origin story, only revealed in the final confrontation with Love.

This film would stand on two strong, Western legs even without using the names of real historical figures. The risk that audience members might confuse the story they see on screen with the lives these people lived is abated with a disclaimer before the film opens, but why use those names at all? Considering how the existence and contributions of Black cowboys is still mostly unknown, The Harder They Fall could bring these names into homes worldwide thanks to its Netflix distribution. The film will also introduce Black cowboys into the popular imagination, which is vital when too many of the Black stories told constrain us to a set of roles and particular narratives.
Nat Love’s first-hand account of life as a Black cowboy made him a hero to many, and his portrayal in The Harder They Fall will hopefully only extend this legacy and prompt more people to look into his vast and fascinating life. I enjoyed the fact that race was not the explicit point of the story, though there are subtle suggestions of its significance throughout. Films with majority Black casts and/or Black leads have become associated with narratives which centre racial trauma – as if joy, complexity and the full scope of life cannot be imagined for such characters. It is high time that this changes. In period films like The Harder They Fall, it is hard and disingenuous to dissociate entirely from race; but the film succeeds at acknowledging the history, without centring Black pain for the sake of it.
The Harder They Fall has everything that makes the Western genre so exciting: a compelling protagonist on a mission, beautiful imagery, exciting action, a sprinkling of romance and lots of music. An enthralling way to expand existing imaginations. In Westerns, justice is always served, a fantasy with never-ending appeal.

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An enthralling depiction of social justice and retribution in the Old West blows apart the typical narratives of the Western and brings new possibilities to life.

The Harder They Fall: Reimagining Westerns for the Netflix generation

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

dashcam film 2021

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

The Hits and Misses from the 2021 BFI London Film Festival

The online film festival ‘<a href="https://sites.google.com/brookes.ac.uk/cinemobility/home?authuser=0">Cine/Mobility</a> &#8211; Latin American cinema across borders’ has launched in the UK (5 October to 5 November), opening with a conversation with director Icíar Bollaín about her film Yuli: The Carlos Acosta Story.
The new festival is dedicated to Latin American migrations, social movements and transatlantic exchanges. A feast for students, scholars and film lovers, the virtual festival showcases the work of filmmakers from Argentina, France, Spain, Chile, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, paying particular attention to women and LGBTQ issues.
A selection of four full-length films is accompanied by a programme of shorts with an activist spirit, introducing complex struggles and political movements animating today’s Latin America, on topics including migrant rights, the murder of Afro-Brazilian politician Marielle Franco, and the role of women in the rewriting of Chile’s constitution.
As well as screenings and Q&amp;As, the festival will host roundtable discussions with industry professionals with one session focusing on the impact of feminism on the Latin American and European film industries and another discussing the challenges of bringing Latin American cinema to UK and Catalan audiences.
Here’s my preview of the four full-length films featured in Cine/Mobility: 
<h5>Yuli/Yuli: The Carlos Acosta Story 
Dir. Icíar Bollaín (Spain / Germany / UK, 2018) </h5>
Yuli is a touching biopic packed with dance sequences and Cuban history, based on the life of the Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta. After his training in Cuba, Carlos became one of the best dancers of his generation, and the first Black artist to dance Romeo in the Royal Ballet in London, where he forged a legendary career as a principal dancer for 17 years. Cuba is seen from the eyes of Carlos and his family, marked by experiences of migration and displacement. It is a film about passion, talent and nostalgia, which Bollaín directs with great attention to aesthetics and with affection for her characters.
<h5>El diablo es magnifico / The Devil is Magnificent 
Dir. Nicolás Videla (Chile, 2016)</h5>
Like its main character, Manu, El diablo es magnífico is one of a kind. Blending fiction and documentary, the film tells the story of a Chilean trans migrant, who struggles to see her future in Paris. Manu’s memories and distinct views on culture, art and life intersect with her experiences of love and sex, and her decision to stay or return. This film is a little gem, a unique take on migration which is also a wonderful example of queer cinema, done with passion and a subversive touch.
<h5>Miriam Miente / Miriam Lies 
Dir. Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada (Dominican Republic, 2017)</h5>
This is a fantastic coming-of-age film that deals with the complex intersections of race and class in contemporary Dominican Republic, from the perspective of a teenager and her everyday concerns. The film tells the story of Miriam, a mixed-race 14-year-old who meets her boyfriend on the internet. While her friends enthusiastically prepare the traditional quinceañera party, Miriam does not know how to explain to her family that her boyfriend is Black. Miriam’s character is memorable and is bound to leave an emotional impact on viewers.
<h5>Estoy Acá (Mangui Fi) / I am here 
Dir. Juan Manuel Bramuglia and Esteban Tabacznik (Argentina, 2017)</h5>
At its heart, this documentary is a story of friendship, and the complexities of relationships as we age and grow as individuals. The film follows Ababacar and Mbaye, two Senegalese migrants who met in Buenos Aires. We see their friendship grow and become stronger, until they decide to take different paths. With a delicate and close understanding of its characters, the film engages with a complex set of emotions, expectations and desires that fill Ababacar and Mbaye’s everyday life, offering an original and nuanced perspective on South-to-South migration. 
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The Cine/Mobility festival, hosted by Oxford Brookes University, runs from 5 October to 5 November 2021. It was created by Dalila Missero in collaboration with the film programmer Analía Fraser. All events and screenings are free (registration via <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cinemobility-on-line-film-festlatin-american-cinema-across-the-atlantic-tickets-158700652925">Eventbrite</a>) and the full schedule is available at the <a href="https://sites.google.com/brookes.ac.uk/cinemobility/home?authuser=0">Cine/Mobility website</a> and on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Cinemobility">Facebook</a>.
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2_Mangui Fi

New perspectives on Latin American migration and movements in the Cine/Mobility festival – catch it online now.