Global Cinema 34: Chad – Grigris (2013)

Not ostensibly a major player in world cinema, Chad is probably the African country I’ve seen more films from, solely due to the work of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, who has carved out a distinctive an ongoing voice for himself representing the country. Works like Daratt and A Screaming Man made his name, and he’s also made work in France (with 2017’s A Season in France). His latest film was made last year, Lingui: The Sacred Bonds (set again in his native country).

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Republic of Chad (جمهورية تشاد aka République du Tchad)
population 16,245,000 | capital N’Djamena (951k) | largest cities N’Djamena, Moundou (137k), Abéché (98k), Sarh (97k), Kélo (58k) | area 1,284,000 km² | religion Islam (52%), Christianity (44%) | official language Arabic (اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ), French (français) | major ethnicity Sara (27%), Arab (13%), Kanembu (9%) | currency Central African CFA franc (FCFA) [XAF] | internet .td

A country which stretches from the arid Saharan north, through an arid Sahel belt in the centre to fertile savannah in the south. It is indeed named after the lake which is the second-largest wetland on the continent (though may have shrunk by up to 95% between the 1960s and 1990s), itself named from a Kanuri word meaning “large expanse of water”. Some of the most important archaeological sites are located in Chad and habitation became denser from the 7th millennium BCE. As a crossroad of civlisations, the earliest known were the Sao, but the Kanem Empire took over around 800 CE and lasted the longest, though the Bagirmi and Wadai emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries, and each raided for slaves from the south. French colonial expansion took hold in the late-19th century and by 1920 they had taken it in as a colony, part of French Equatorial Africa (with what are now CAR, the Republic of Congo and Gabon). Even compared with their other colonies, modernisation was slow and education was neglected, as France treated it merely as a source of cheap labour for the cotton industry. After WW2 it became an overseas territory and had an assembly, in which the largest party was the PPT (Chadian Progressive Party), and upon independence on 11 August 1960, the leader of the PPT became the first Prime Minister, François Tombalbaye. His autocratic rule sparked a northern insurgency and civil war, with Hissène Habry taking the capital in 1979 (several years after the deposition of Tombalbaye). Libya tried to use the fragile balance of power to take control (in the so-called Toyota War), but were repelled in 1987. Habré consolidated his dictatorship but was overthrown by his deputy Idriss Déby in 1990 (both died in 2021, the former from COVID while imprisoned in Senegal for war crimes, the latter in combat while fighting an insurgency). A transitional military government under his son Mahamat Déby is currently in power.

As a country blighted by civil wars and insurgencies, as well as chronic underinvestment while a colony of France, understandably cinema has not progressed quickly in the country. The first film made there appears to have been a 1958 John Huston film, and the earliest indigenous work documentary short films made by Edouard Sailly in the 1960s. The few cinemas which existed closed down due to civil war, but some stabilisation post-1990 allowed filmmakers like Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (the country’s best-known internationally) and Issa Serge Coelo to make a name. As of 2011, there is apparently only a single cinema in the country.

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Grigris (2013)

This is a stylish film from a director who has very much proved himself in his filmmaking, but it’s also one that is truly built around a riveting central performance (in this case from Souleymane Démé). The title character is a studio photographer by day (his dad’s trade) and a dancer in nightclubs by night. He loves the dancing, and even though his legs are paralysed, he makes such effective and spectacular use of them in his dance routines, but it’s a not a film about overcoming physical limitations, it’s about what happens when you need to make choices beyond your control. He falls in with some dodgy guys and ends up doing a bit of smuggling to make money and that’s when things start to unravel a bit. It all moves at a deliberate, slow pace but it’s never unclear about what’s going on or who’s motivated by what, and it all ends in a spectacular scene that I shan’t go into obviously but, well, just don’t mess with village women in Chad I guess.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Mahamat-Saleh Haroun محمد الصالح هارون; Cinematographer Antoine Héberlé; Starring Souleymane Démé, Mariam Monory; Length 101 minutes.

Seen at home (Mubi streaming), Wellington, Tuesday 2 March 2021.

الميدان Al Midan (The Square, 2013)

Taking us back a few years to a time when it seemed the world could change for the better. I think the full accounting of the cause and effects of the Arab Spring are probably still quite far away, and this film was made in the ferment of the initial action, at least as it took place in Egypt. It’s a great piece of documentary work, urgent and compelling. Even almost 10 years on, it’s still not clear the direction things have taken, but it’s always useful to show that the people are not entirely without voice in such moments.

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There are a lot of documentaries and films about protest (plenty indeed just about the Arab Spring, like the Tunisian film A Revolution in Four Seasons), but The Square — which comes quite soon after the initial events — really seems to capture something of what this means, both in practice, with the immediacy of reportage from sites of revolutionary insurrection and activist struggle, and also in thought. This latter is served by a number of individuals, who perhaps represent a wider cross-section, if not of the full range of society, but of its most reflective participants. Egypt is still working through the legacy of 2011, and the documentary acknowledges that at the end, but the couple of years we see here are pretty compelling.

CREDITS
Director Jehane Noujaim چيهان نچيم; Cinematographers Noujaim, Muhammad Hamdy محمد حمدي, Ahmed Hassan أحمد حسن and Cressida Trew; Length 108 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), London, Wednesday 7 December 2016.

Global Cinema 13: Bahrain – Dead Sands (2013)

Bahrain is a small country, though it is a densely-populated one. Sadly, it hasn’t had much of a film industry so there aren’t many films to focus on for my regular feature. That is why I’ve gone to YouTube to find a student production, which has the weaknesses of that kind of output, but also, I think, has an energy to it that I rather like. It doesn’t look great, but it gives a little sense of what perhaps Bahrain is like to live in.

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Kingdom of Bahrain (البحرين al-Bahrayn)
population 1,569,400 | capital Manama (411k) المنامة | largest cities Manama, Muharraq (177k), Riffa (111k), Hamad Town (57k), A’ali (51k) | area 780 km² | religion Islam | official language Arabic (العربية) | major ethnicity Arab (51%), Asian (46%) | currency Bahraini Dinar (د.ب/BD) [BHD] | internet .bh

An flat, arid island nation in the Persian Gulf comprising an archipelago of around 40 islands (and some artificial ones), centred on the largest one, Bahrain Island. The name derives from the Arabic for “two seas”, though the island was originally called Awal and until the Middle Ages “Bahrain” referred to larger area of Eastern Arabia (including Kuwait and southern Iraq); the name was also often anglicised as Bahrein until the mid-20th century. It was first settled as the trade centre Dilmun from the 3rd millennium BCE, and later ruled by Assyrians, Babylonians, Achaemenids and Parthians. It was called Tylos by the ancient Greeks, and came under Alexander’s rule for a while. Christianity took hold by the 5th century CE, but converted to Islam in the 7th century, and went through a series of regional dynasties. The Portuguese ruled for much of the 16th century, before the area was taken by the Safavids under Persian rule for a few centuries. The British came in during the 19th century, but revolts started to take place towards the end of that century, continuing sporadically over the ensuing decades. Post-World War II, competing claims by Iran and Britain led to independence on 15 August 1971, and a popular uprising towards the end of the century led to the Emir instituting elections, and the country formally became a Kingdom in 2002. There are some elections but the Prime Minister is appointed by the King, and much of the government is drawn from the Al Khalifa ruling family.

The cinema industry in the country is very small, with a handful of shorts and only about five feature films in its history. The first cinema was established in 1937, and there are around 40-50 screens now.

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رمال ميتة Rimal Mayta (Dead Sands, 2013)

I mean, sure, on a certain level this isn’t a great film, but if it looks and feels a little amateurish that’s because it appears to be a student production. It’s also a film made in a country that has, as far as I can tell, no real cinema industry. So if it doesn’t quite hit the polished marks we’re used to, even in a zombie flick — with some fairly unconvincing performances, scene set-ups that almost taunt us with the obviousness of what’s about to happen, and muddy cinematography — that’s because it never had the ability to do so in the first place. Instead, I like to see it as a noble attempt to learn by doing, an undaunted group of student friends banding together to make a movie (the credits roll over the blooper reel) and seeming to have a fair amount of fun with the gore and the effects. It also gives me a sense of what it’s like in Bahrain, which I think is a particular selling point, because how many other films are going to give you that, albeit in some rather indistinguishable malls and movie theatres and dusty outdoor spaces. I admired its willingness to try and make a Bahraini zombie flick.

CREDITS
Director Ameera Al-Qaed أميرة القائد; Writer Ahmed Zayani أحمد الزياني; Cinematographers Al-Qaed and Zayani; Starring Şenay Dincsoy, Miraya Varma, Ahmed Zayani أحمد الزياني; Length 87 minutes.
Seen at home (Amazon streaming), London, Saturday 1 August 2020.

The Stuart Hall Project (2013)

In a sense this film is about one person, Stuart Hall, a prominent cultural theorist who sadly died the year after this was made, but in talking about his work and life, it touches on the history of the United Kingdom, its colonialism and its own struggles in relationship to that colonial past, that continue to echo today, that continue to in fact resound very loudly at this very specific moment.

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Despite being born in the UK, I wasn’t educated here and therefore was never really introduced to the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, having found out about him near the end of his life when this film was made (he died in 2014). However, the archival clips orchestrated here by John Akomfrah, with a backing of musical clips from Miles Davis records, impresses upon me that he really was one of that dying breed of accessible public intellectuals, so thin on the ground in contemporary discourse and surely never more sorely needed. He speaks of his West Indian roots, of coming to Britain to study at Oxford, and of the persistent racism and colonialist attitudes he encountered. In dealing with periods of his life, and of the history of late-20th century Britain, the film also elucidates the social changes that Hall dealt with in his work, the ways that dreams of the past may have died and that other newer ideals came to replace them, but with a throughline relating to the immigrant and postcolonial experience. The film is as much about the construction of identity itself as it is about telling a story of Hall, but it sort of manages to do all of these things, and though I can’t claim to be a great intellectual, it was persuasive and likeable, and idiosyncratic in its ways as something of a multimedia art project (which Akomfrah has done several of, including about Hall), but also a compelling documentary.

CREDITS
Director/Writer John Akomfrah; Cinematographer Dewald Aukema; Length 96 minutes.
Seen at home (BFI Player on Amazon streaming), London, Wednesday 10 June 2020.

夢と狂気の王国 Yume to Kyoki no Okoku (The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, 2013)

Since seeing my first Studio Ghibli film in 2015, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, I’ve spent the last five years trying to catch up on some of their key works. That project remains ongoing, though the appearance of many of them on Netflix doesn’t hurt, but this documentary gives an insight into their working methods. It’s comforting to see these figures at work, knowing the care and effort they put into each film, which unlike a lot of contemporary animation in the cinemas, aren’t just blatant attempts to make money by any means necessary.

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I’m fairly recently new to Studio Ghibli’s films, having spent much of my teens and 20s resisting going to see any (which in retrospect was obviously a very foolish decision), but watching these key figures in the world of animation at work — along with their studio of animators (and producer Toshio Suzuki) — is a fascinating insight. The gentle, beautiful, sometimes dark films of Miyazaki and Takahata are not born out of chaos and noise, but a similar kind of peaceful dedication to craft. Miya-san (as he’s called) wears an apron for much of when he’s working, while Paku-san (that’s Takahata) barely ever shows up at all, though he’s much discussed, not least his infuriating inability to complete projects to any kind of schedule. There’s a gentle humour at work, but also just a sense of a really grounded and open central figure in that of Miyazaki, as he works through the last year of making his film The Wind Rises. It may have been billed at the time as his last one, but even his retirement letter wished for 10 more years of work, and one can but hope to continue to hear from him (indeed, he has a film currently in production).

CREDITS
Director/Cinematographer Mami Sunada 砂田麻美; Starring Hayao Miyazaki 宮崎駿, Toshio Suzuki 鈴木敏夫, Isao Takahata 高畑勲; Length 118 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Saturday 13 April 2019.

Films by Khalik Allah

Khalik Allah has built up a distinct style over a number of short films and now a couple of feature films — lyrical imagery of people at the bottom of the power structure, previously the down and out denizens of NYC street corners (of his early shorts and first feature), as well as the inhabitants of Jamaica in his most recent feature Black Mother and an earlier short. His filmmaking seems to have predated his photography, but having taken up the latter form, it has become integral to his vision as a filmmaker, it appears. Sound and image, in particular, are usually rendered separately in his films, often working together but sometimes juxtaposed to make points that photography itself cannot always do so successfully. His art feels particularly masculine, though even in the gritty urban portraits there’s a softness to his approach, an empathy so often lacking in such environments. He has also notably contributed to Beyoncé’s film Lemonade as a cinematographer. A number of his short films are available on YouTube, which is where I watched many of them and hence I’m fitting this post into my seen-on-YouTube themed week.

War Is a Tender Thing (2013)

A Filipino film set in the southern, more contested, part of the country, around the second-largest island of Mindanao. This is a personal documentary that looks at the conflicts from one woman’s point of view, and that of her family, and deals with interfaith marriage.

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A personal essay film about the filmmaker’s family in Mindanao (an area also known as the Southern Philippines), this uses family history as a way to represent and interrogate ideas about the past, not least a long-running conflict ostensibly between Christian and Islamic populations in the area. Mindanao isn’t much represented in mainstream cinema, so it’s good to see some attention paid to the area and its people and histories. Certainly, the filmmaker’s family are sceptical about this idea of religious conflict, given that many members of their family have intermarried, and that becomes a theme that moves through the film, of understanding political turbulence through personal connections, and the film eschews any editorial contextualising of the conflict, aside from occasional snippets of television news. Technically, there are some messy edges to the filmmaking (a lot of shaky handheld shots), but it captures a lot of beauty of the region, and there’s an abiding mystery at the film’s heart.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Adjani Guerrero Arumpac; Cinematographers Arumpac and Victor Delotavo Tagaro; Length 74 minutes.
Seen at Genesis, London, Monday 15 April 2019.

Films by Kevin Jerome Everson

Kevin Jerome Everson has been working for fewer than two decades but has already amassed a prodigious body of work, including a huge number of short films. A number of his features and a few short films were presented online as part of a retrospective on Mubi in 2018, which introduced this filmmaker to my attention. Clearly he has his themes and his interests, but with so many films it’s difficult to give more than a hint at his distinctive style.

عمر Omar (2013)

I’ve already covered the Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir in a separate feature, but another critically-acclaimed filmmaker from the region (albeit one who has grown up and been educated in the Netherlands) has been Hany Abu-Assad, whose 2005 film Paradise Now put him on the map. He has most recently moved rather surprisingly into the big-budget Hollywood realm with the Idris Elba/Kate Winslet drama The Mountain Between Us (2017)

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I didn’t expect to very much more than merely admire this film, given its Academy Awards nomination and fairly dour subject matter — it’s about a group of Palestinian friends whose lives and relationships are pulled apart in fighting against the Israeli occupation. But as so often I was wrong, because it’s not just a well-crafted film (that much is evident from the very start, with precise framing and careful editing) but also a tense thriller, well-mounted and with plenty of twists and turns, not unlike the narrow streets we see our titular protagonist (Adam Bakri) running through. The cinematography in particular is unshowily excellent: dominated by frontal faces in clean, uncluttered frames.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Hany Abu-Assad هاني أبو أسعد; Cinematographer Ehab Assal إيهاب عسل; Starring Adam Bakri آدم بكري, Leem Lubany ليم لوباني; Length 96 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Wednesday 15 March 2017.

Women Filmmakers: Lina Rodriguez

I’m going to kick off my (hopefully regular) Wednesday series on women filmmakers with the one to whom I’ve most recently been introduced, courtesy of the streaming platform Mubi, whose canny programming has brought my attention to a number of directors I’d never previously encountered. Latin American cinema, in particular right now, seems to be booming with talented women directors, and in that regard one may look to the career of Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, who came to prominence at the turn of the millennium with La Ciénaga (2001), and about whom I shall undoubtedly write in coming months. She is hardly the first woman to direct films in the Latin American world, but she is among the most rigorous and visually precise of all active filmmakers in the region, and one of the foremost (and most championed) auteurs in the world, I would say. In her wake there has been no shortage of excellent films by women working in the cinemas of Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Brazil and Peru, amongst others.