MIFF 2023: Documentary Films from Africa

Following on from my post about African fiction films at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2023, here are the documentaries. The first, admittedly, isn’t precisely speaking a documentary but it’s at least in an adjacent space, where it uses a hybrid format to get into an understanding of the issues and the way they can pull apart a family (this is terrorist radicalisation). The second also touches on terrorism but again is more focused on the community in relation to the threat than the threat itself. And the third is a personal essay film about growing up in South Africa, which given the history of apartheid is its own form of terrorism I suppose.

Four Daughters (2023). The Tunisian director, Kaouther Ben Hania, has a history in documentary film, but her last few features have gone down a narrative fiction route (and I didn’t love Beauty and the Dogs a few years back). This film marks something of a return to a documentary, but in a hybrid form that folds in fictional re-enactments by actors playing two of the titular (in the original Arabic and French) mother Olfa’s daughters, as well as Hend Sabri playing Olfa herself. The way this is done tries to be as honest as possible, and results in something closer to some of the documentary work of, say, Alma Har’el where the lines between documentary and fiction are the subject of the film itself, and where we get to see the actor approaching the role quite directly. This is most apparent as the real Olfa tags in her actor double for scenes involving great emotional distress, and it’s compelling to see the mother admit to her own abusive behaviour as a legacy of growing up with the traditional attitudes in circulation at the time of her youth, but likewise the way that these traditional attitudes are reinforced in a sequence where the daughters don hijabs (and the more restrictive niqab). The slide into fundamentalism comes quickly and surprisingly easily, and the way that this move can happen and can tear apart relationships is part of the story the film is telling, which creates quite a bit of emotional resonance when we see the women’s stories portrayed by actors at the same time as those participants are facing up to their own past actions and the way those actions resonate.

Le Spectre de Boko Haram (2023). This is the kind of documentary I like, with no narration (though there’s a minimum of on-screen text bookending the film) and using instead the setting and the scenes that have been filmed to fill in the context—though the title sets up the framework well enough. We’re in northern Cameroon, very near the Nigerian border, and it’s essentially a film about village life, focusing on the youngest kids and their education (or lack of, as many of them need to tend to the fields or animals instead as part of their chores). We see their daily life, their time in school, their families and their routines, we follow their play with one another, and their religious practise, and then of course there’s this looming threat that we never really see, but the soldiers that are posted around the village make it clear that the threat is real. However, for the most part this plays out as a story that is anchored in a very specific place and which gives a great sense of quotidian life: probably the film’s biggest narrative journey involves a late twist regarding two young brothers we hear talking to one another throughout the piece, who have been separated from their parents (it’s unclear whether they are in another town, or actually with Boko Haram), but even that seems to work out.

Milisuthando (2023). Maybe it’s just because after 50-something films in two weeks I’m getting weary and everything is just merging together, but I really liked this poetic personal essay film about growing up in Transkei/South Africa. It’s about that history, which pulls in late-20th century political changes and apartheid, but it’s also about family and identity, about shifting (psycho)geography, about negotiating racial politics with (white) friends, and about trying to navigate the peculiar ways in which South African identity manifests. It’s not always straightforward, and it’s not always visual, but it has a sort of simple beauty to it, and is told straightforwardly.

CREDITS



بنات ألفة Banat Olfa (Four Daughters aka Les Filles d’Olfa, 2023) [Tunisia/France/Saudi Arabia/Germany] — Director/Writer Kaouther Ben Hania كوثر بن هنية; Cinematographer Farouk Laaridh فاروق لاریض; Starring Hend Sabri هند صبري, Nour Karoui نور کروی, Ichraq Matar ایکراق مطر; Length 107 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Monday 7 August 2023.

Le Spectre de Boko Haram (2023) [Cameroon/France] — Director/Writer Cyrielle Raingou; Cinematographers Raingou and Bertin Fotso; Length 75 minutes. Seen at Kino, Melbourne, Friday 18 August 2023.

Milisuthando (2023) [South Africa/Colombia] — Director/Writer Milisuthando Bongela; Cinematographer Hankyeol Lee; Length 115 minutes. Seen at Kino, Melbourne, Sunday 20 August 2023.

MIFF 2023: Fiction Films from Africa

A thing I like to do at film festivals is go see the African films, because to my mind, or at least in my experience, those are the least likely to get a regular release after a festival. They also interest me, because the experience of the African continent feels quite different from that elsewhere in the filmmaking world, and I am always open to new experiences (in film, if not so much in life). So I had plenty to see at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2023. There was indeed an entire retrospective devoted to Safi Faye (mentioned below), and whose shorter works I wasn’t able to write sufficient words about to include, though she has a small role in the Jean Rouch film (below). I’ll do a second post about the African documentaries, including one that probably qualifies more as a fiction film.

Banel & Adama (2023). This is a debut film by a French woman filmmaker whose family background is in Senegal, and she’s made a film based in a rural village there. The Melbourne festival is also showing a retrospective of films by the Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye and so there is a feeling in common there, in terms of the setting and the interest in women’s stories, though a lot of African filmmaking has focused on these more traditional communities, suggesting a way of life that predates colonialism. Of course, the characters here—though there’s little that ties them to any specific point of time—are hardly unaffected by the West, most prominently I think via what I see as the strongest underlying theme here, which is climate change and climate crisis. The herds are dying, the maintenance of the village continuity is slender, and our male protagonist (Adama, played by Khady Mane) has to make some tough decisions that eventually put him at odds with his headstrong and independent wife Banel (Mamadou Diallo), who wants something more and better for them, free of what she seems to see as patriarchal impositions. As a lead character, she has complexity: she’s right in some ways but she’s also difficult and uncompromising in ways that make her a pariah to her village. There are other themes too, and a great deal of feeling to the lush cinematography of the desert setting, but if there are flaws, it’s worth remembering this is a debut and I think the filmmaker has a lot of promise to keep making great African cinema.

Goodbye Julia (2023). I had no expectations from this film set in Sudan’s capital Khartoum in the years leading up to the secession of the south, but it ended up winning me over. Some of it is a little clunky and there is a tendency to over explaining the personal relationships between the central characters and particularly the artistic dreams of one of the leads, but the performances are all great and it looks gorgeous. It hinges around a moral quandary of a rich ‘northerner’ who feels guilty for the death of a South Sudanese man at the hands of her more orthodox husband (who despite his actions also expresses some fairly nuanced points about racism and privilege). She takes in the murdered man’s widow as her servant and things move on from there. A fine début.

Deserts (2023). I booked this, perhaps because I was hoping for some of the same deadpan humour of Moroccan film The Unknown Saint of a few years back (which shares a cinematographer), and to be fair there is some comedy in shots of these two hapless bank employees sent to collect debts from poor people who clearly have no way of repaying their debts, and so find themselves carting off carpets and goats for their resale value. So the set-up is promising. It’s just that this film clearly has deeper metaphysical ideas at play, and there’s a sort of fabulistic quality to it, as the journey gets darker and eventually starts following another character entirely, moving from the light comedy of the start into something properly existential. The problem for me is that it’s difficult to follow quite what’s going on, and despite some gorgeous shots and a commitment to the long-take, it’s rather slow in a way that doesn’t feel like it really pays off.

Little by Little (1970). A productive and fascinating satire from French filmmaker Jean Rouch, it’s set in Niger and follows a Nigérien man as he travels to Paris to research multi-storey architecture, intending to make Niamey a capital with a skyscraper. There’s a delightful sequence that applies ethnography from the reversed perspective of an African coming to a European capital city that’s funny and revealing, but the rest of the film follows through on the plot in ways that feel a little peripatetic. There’s a documentary quality to the unforced camerawork, a little out of focus, zooming to catch details, and it never lost me entirely as a project, it just felt unfocused narratively somehow, though at its best it really is a great film.

CREDITS



Banel e Adama (Banel & Adama, 2023) [Senegal/Mali/France] — Director/Writer Ramata-Toulaye Sy; Cinematographer Amine Berrada; Starring Mamadou Diallo, Khady Mane; Length 87 minutes. Seen at the Capitol, Melbourne, Wednesday 16 August 2023.

وداعا جوليا Wadaan Julia (Goodbye Julia, 2023) [Sudan/Egypt/France/Germany/Saudi Arabia/Sweden] — Director/Writer Mohamed Kordofani محمد كردفاني; Cinematographer Pierre de Villiers; Starring Siran Riak سيران رياك, Eiman Yousif إيمان يوسف, Nazar Gomaa نزار جمعة; Length 120 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Wednesday 9 August 2023.

Déserts (Deserts, 2023) [Morocco/France/Belgium/Germany] — Director/Writer Faouzi Bensaïdi فوزي بن السعيدي; Cinematographer Florian Berutti; Starring Fehd Benchemsi فهد بنشمسي, Abdelhadi Talbi عبدالهادي الطالب; Length 124 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Sunday 13 August 2023.

Petit à petit (Little by Little, 1970) [France/Niger; Rosenbaum 1000] — Director/Writer/Cinematographer Jean Rouch; Starring Damouré Zika; Length 96 minutes. Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Saturday 5 August 2023.

EEFF 2023: Plus que jamais (More Than Ever, 2022)

The fourth film I saw at the Europa! Europa Film Festival was the one I had heard a little about (and is from the German-French-Iranian director of 3 Days in Quiberon), but it turned out to be the one I liked the least. However! It is very much a film for Vicky Krieps to further blossom into the grand actress of European cinema that she has threatened to become the last few years. She really is one of the best.

For a film that could easily be a made-for-TV disease-of-the-week mawkish tearfest, this drama about a woman dying of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis steers clear of a lot of the particular pitfalls of that genre, though it can never entirely escape it. However, it’s about the way that Hélène (Vicky Krieps) comes to terms with her future, such as it is, and the way she has to hurt the ones she loves in order to protect both herself and them. Of course, it comes inbuilt with its own terrible additional layer of heart-wrenching irony, in that it’s the film’s co-star Gaspard Ulliel (playing Hélène’s husband Matthieu) who died in real life shortly after this film was made. If Krieps reminds me a bit of Julianne Moore, it’s only because she’s every bit as fine an actor as Moore (who hasn’t shied away from similar roles), and indeed has become one of the more dependable European actors in recent years (whether in films like Bergman Island, Corsage or of course the fine-toned comedy Phantom Thread).

CREDITS
Director Emily Atef; Writers Atef and Lars Hubrich;  Cinematographer Yves Cape; Starring Vicky Krieps, Gaspard Ulliel, Bjørn Floberg; Length 123 minutes. Seen at the Classic, Melbourne, Sunday 26 February 2022.

Criterion Sunday 619: Le Havre (2011)

Even working in France, with French actors (and he has done so before), the very specific style and timing of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki is extremely clear here from the very first frames. The way every shot is lit, carefully placed splashy lighting with a high contrast almost noirish feel, but via comic books, the saturated blocks of colour in the set design, and the pacing and deadpan humour. It all comes together beautifully for what is ultimately a fairy tale. We all know this isn’t how this story plays out but there’s also an inbuilt sense that people don’t want to see that, though in telling his story—of immigrants from Gabon trying to make their way to the UK, but discovered in a shipping container in the Normandy port town of Le Havre—he is also very much telling it from a European perspective, an idealised one of people just looking out for the best for their fellow humans (even the jaded police inspector). The Africans feel like set dressing to what is otherwise a perfectly pitched comedy—a comedy, partly because so abstracted from reality—of European tolerance to immigrants. So that—whether the film or reality—slightly sours what is otherwise a very lovely, laconic evocation of community.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Aki Kaurismäki; Cinematographer Timo Salminen; Starring André Wilms, Kati Outinen, Jean-Pierre Darroussin; Length 93 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Monday 27 February 2023 (and sometime on DVD at home, London, in the early-2010s).

Spencer (2021)

Following up the reviews of my favourite films of 2022 (full list here). This isn’t the only film on my list to have been comprehensively talked out already. You don’t need another review of it, you got everything you needed about a year ago. But it wasn’t released in NZ until into 2022, and despite all my many reservations, I really enjoyed it. Not because of any fondness for its subject, but because of the way it was done, the atmosphere it evoked. So here we go, another review.

This film is a whole vibe, and either you get with it or you don’t, I somewhat suspect. I did, but I can understand people who go the other way. In terms of its felicity to ‘real life’, well I think that’s a fraught question at the very least; I’ve seen some people marvel at the accuracy of Kristen Stewart’s performance. I’m not enough of a devoted royal watcher to really know how much she captured Diana, but I don’t really see her specifically in Stewart’s portrayal. This is as much a story about a woman in a particular situation, imagining how it might go down; it’s a fable and a fantasy, it’s shot in a hazy, gauzy, pastel-hued way yet somehow also manages to channel gothic horror. But Stewart’s Diana is trapped from the start, a doomed woman, even if around her the royal family seem nothing so much as zombies, not least Charles (Jack Farthing) and Her Majesty, who have the deadest of eyes. This leaves only her head to delve further into; she gets visions of Anne Boleyn and increasingly dissociative fragments of an alternate reality, which we know is not her own because she’s giddy and happy, moving down endless corridors like Kubrick’s The Shining, cautiously at first perhaps, but with an increasing abandon as the film progresses. Against my best instincts—because at this point, I really do not like or want to hear about the British royal family—it manages to be a beautiful film, and showcases an excellent performance as ever by Stewart who goes in fully and bodily to the whole thing. Whether it captures Diana per se, I can’t say, but it captures something fleeting, somehow both archly camp and deeply felt, about an impossible life.

CREDITS
Director Pablo Larraín; Writer Steven Knight; Cinematographer Claire Mathon; Starring Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Farthing, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins; Length 117 minutes. Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Sunday 6 February 2022.

Criterion Sunday 582: Carlos (2010)

I’ve seen this before, as a feature-length film, and found it passably enjoyable, but the almost six-hour miniseries version (perhaps unsurprisingly) has a lot more depth to it, as it pulls out this character of ‘the jackal’, a terrorist in a very self-consciously revolutionary mould, whose idealism gives way to a sort of middle-age bloat (both literally and figuratively). The strength and clarity of his cause in the early part of the film, as this Venezuelan man of the world (a fantastic central performance from fellow countryman Édgar Ramírez) affects a Che-like posture in his belief in the liberation of the oppressed, is over the course of the film chipped away. The man is shown to be fallible, a little bit pathetic, never truly as ideologically pure as he believes, and prone to all kinds of peccadilloes. The violence of his cause isn’t glamorised or downplayed, and it’s pretty clear that he is—at the very least—a pawn of more powerful global actors, who pull him first this way and then that, as what seemed like hard and fast principles are won over by competing demands, new inflammatory rhetoric, and then money, luxury, younger girlfriends, an easy life. The film (and Ramírez) still allows him a certain dented nobility, but the miniseries length ensures no facet of his facade is left entirely intact, and Assayas is as ever adept at capturing his milieu and gives plenty of time to some of his most prominent missions.

CREDITS
Director Olivier Assayas; Writers Assayas, Dan Franck and Daniel Leconte; Cinematographers Yorick Le Saux and Denis Lenoir; Starring Édgar Ramírez, Nora von Waldstätten, Christoph Bach, Alexander Scheer, Ahmad Kaabour أحمد قعبور; Length 339 minutes (in three parts). Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 22, Sunday 23 and Tuesday 25 October 2022 (and earlier in a shorter version at home, London, in the 2010s).

Criterion Sunday 569: Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930)

A lovely silent film, somewhat akin to a city symphony documentary but with elements of narrative drama, it opens expressively with shots of Berlin (the hustle and bustle of the city, people at work on a Friday) along with vignettes depicting various peoples’ lives, such that it’s not immediately clear when the written portions of the film start (though Billy Wilder is given writing credit up front). Still, once our (anti?)-hero Wolfgang is seen chatting up a young woman called Christl, it becomes clear this isn’t quite a documentary. At length a plot develops whereby Wolfgang and his friend Erwin head to the Wannsee lake and Wolfgang soon gets flirtatious with Christl’s friend Brigitte, much to the former’s annoyance. Throughout the film remains focused on its milieu, frequently showing us the faces of those around our central characters, giving expression to both a time and a place in history. The film thus provides a vivid sense of (middle-class and working) life prior to the Nazis in Germany, a sort of carefree modern life that can’t help but be imbued with poignancy given what we know.

CREDITS
Directors Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer; Writers Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak and Curt Siodmak; Cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan; Starring Wolfgang von Waltershausen, Brigitte Borchert; Length 73 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 11 September 2022.

Criterion Sunday 542: Antichrist (2009)

I know that Lars von Trier wants us to hate his movies, because he wants us to have that authentic visceral reaction to them, whether it be love or hate. That seems fairly clear both from his pronouncements as from the films themselves, and therefore I want to respond by saying I found his film—surely one of the films that most potently distils everything that he wants to assault the viewer with—to be merely middling. However, I cannot lie: I disliked it a lot. Not that it wasn’t acted with great power by both Gainsbourg and Dafoe, who are pretty much the only humans we see for much of the film (aside from their infant son who dies in the prologue and whose death hangs over the entire psychodramatic dynamic that ensues). Not that it wasn’t filmed with customary elegance by Anthony Dod Mantle. Not that there weren’t elements that worked well and could be appreciated. But just that constant assault of images and ideas that serve no purpose other than to evoke grand emotions. Well, I’m glad people can embrace those and I don’t doubt that it’s all very intentionally done. I could dispassionately render a critique on its artistry. But I feel like a more honest response—and perhaps the one that Trier would prefer—is just: f*ck that guy. I didn’t hate his film, and maybe even one day I can come to it with understanding, but I don’t have to watch it again, and I’m glad about that.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Lars von Trier; Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle; Starring Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg; Length 108 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 18 June 2022.

Criterion Sunday 523: Night Train to Munich (1940)

This British film, made near the outset of World War II, certainly seems to aspire to that Lubitsch touch, and if it doesn’t quite succeed it still has a daffy charm. After all, I can’t fully take against any film that treats Nazis as quite this contemptible and foolish (there’s even a lovely moment where a guard has been gagged with a copy of Mein Kampf, a neat visual metaphor of sorts), even if apparently Rex Harrison did enjoy wearing the uniform a little bit too much. He has a dashing presence that makes up for Margaret Lockwood, who has that prim quality so beloved of wartime films, and the cast is rounded out by some fine turns, including a reappearance for the cricket-loving fuddy-duddies first seen in The Lady Vanishes (penned by the same writers). It’s very English in that way of the period, but ultimately its heart is in the right place and so it’s a fun ride.

CREDITS
Director Carol Reed; Writers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (based on the short story “Report on a Fugitive” by Gordon Wellesley); Cinematographer Otto Kanturek; Starring Margaret Lockwood, Rex Harrison, Paul Henreid [as “Paul von Hernreid”]; Length 95 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 9 April 2022.

Criterion Sunday 499: Germania anno zero (aka Deutschland im Jahre Null) (Germany Year Zero, 1948)

After two Italian films (Rome Open City filmed during WW2, and Paisan after it), the third in Rossellini’s “War Trilogy” turns to the bombed-out ruins of Germany, with not a word of Italian spoken throughout. And somehow it manages to be not just the bleakest of the trilogy but perhaps amongst just about any film. That’s not evoked by anything graphic, though, but merely through the pathos of this character he follows, a young boy called Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) who is torn between childhood and the need if not the desire to be a man and help his impoverished family. In the background there are all kinds of hints towards the kind of behaviour that flourishes in this environment—albeit none ever spelled out, but left as rather disturbing little asides—such as of women and girls like Christl turning to prostitution, and of predatory older men. The most disturbing characters are probably thus Edmund’s former teacher Herr Henning (Erich Gühne) and a mysterious almost aristocratic figure he seems to be sending boys to (it’s unclear exactly what’s happening there), but who seem to express their feelings pretty clearly in the way they caress Edmund. Henning is still openly devoted to Hitler and has Edmund flog recordings of the Führer to occupying troops on the down low, while feeding him lines about sacrificing the weak to ensure the strong can survive, which gives Edmund ideas when he sees his father slowly dying and drives him to the film’s denouement, a bleak trawl back through everything we’ve seen as Edmund looks for some kind of absolution. Even more so than in Rome, perhaps, this is a city of bleak finality and that’s where the film leaves Edmund and us as viewers.

CREDITS
Director Roberto Rossellini; Writers Rossellini, Max Kolpé and Carlo Lizzani; Cinematographer Robert Juillard; Starring Edmund Moeschke, Erich Gühne, Ernst Pittschau; Length 73 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 5 February 2022.