It’s interesting how one’s perception can change during a pandemic. People wandering around in hazmat suits, once unusual, begin to look ordinary. Things that may have appeared unfamiliar only a few months ago, seem quite normal now. Krabi 2562, no relation to Beverly Hills 90210, refers to the current year in the Thai Buddhist calendar.
It’s the type of film where nothing much appears to be happening, but you’ll be thinking about it for days afterwards. A man with not much to say and nowhere to go; a forgotten wardrobe assistant; a guide’s commentary drowned out by a boat’s motor; and a wandering woman in search of something mysterious, that is not a fertility elixir. The curious mix of what appears to be both documentary and fiction keeps you questioning what it is exactly that you’re watching, appealing to a desire to understand what is indeed the truth.
If you can get beyond needing to classify by genre, then Krabi 2562 is both an intriguing look at the way people may interact in and around the southern Thai town of Krabi, as well as a series of amusing discords and daily banalities. It incorporates the substance that makes up the life of a community, with the occasional cultural contrast, while exploring the landscape and stories.
The eclectic characters merge with stunning images including an enigmatic woman slowly disappearing into the mouth of a cave, and birds fleeing a desolate cinema.
Krabi 2562 is Anocha Suwichakornpong’s third feature film as writer-director. Mundane History (2009) being the first, along with five shorts and the omnibus movie Breakfast Lunch Dinner (2010).
Shepherds In The Cave: Review – The shepherd has a responsibility offering humanity a guarantee that natural laws will be respected. There are spaces that exist to be travelled across and spaces that exist to be cultivated. The shepherd must know and respect these rules that are part of a social conflict between the shepherd and farmer. The shepherd recognises and respects the growth of the flock because this brings serenity.
As a child in the south-eastern Italian region of Puglia, Tonio Creanza helped harvest the durum wheat, vineyards, and olive tree cultivation on his family farm, while constantly observing archaeological features – cave settlements and frescos – which were all part of his daily landscape. Always curious about these artefacts, he questioned where they came from and which culture they were related to. Turning his childhood curiosity into a career as an archaeologist, Tonio travelled the world until he was summonsed home to help harvest the olives. From 1995 he organised the first archaeological workshop at the site of Jesce, Fornello, a transportation stop during the Roman empire along the Via Appia (Appian Way).
A self-confessed pragmatist and idealist who acts, Tonio named the project Eutropia, after the imaginary city in Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. It was to be a place where people would meet and trade experiences, while coming into contact with grassroots cultural conservation. Restoration of stone walls and frescoes, and the cleaning of caves took place and the group continued in an unofficial capacity for fifteen years. According to Tonio, the municipality just had other more urgent matters to attend to so they handed them the keys and left them to it.
It was a way of avoiding the habitual red-tape that had previously prevented projects progressing, but at the same time meant that sites and museums which held all the artefacts, had appeared to have been mismanaged: “In a country like Italy, where there’s a tremendous amount of antiquity, the question is where to spend the available funds”. Now officially called The Fornello Restoration Project, this cultural conservation initiative founded by Tonio and agronomist Giovanni Ragone, is devoted to restoring medieval frescoes and traditional cultural practices in an extensive network of caves near Altamura.
The project continues to welcome groups of people for twelve days each summer, all working together on sites in Altamura and Puglia, Matera & Metaponto. Participants come from all over the world, a working vacation for some and research gathering for others. Sites previously owned by farmers, some now owned by the municipality, continue to be in daily use. The caves continue to be used for cheese-making and protecting sheep in bad weather. These caves possess fresco-covered walls – the art-work of 12th century Byzantine monks who fled persecution in the Balkans and took refuge here. To the visiting foreigners these are exotic treasures – « If you grow up living in this neighbourhood, well then frescoes are just ordinary, aren’t they? », observed one participant.
However, the young Italian participants state that they themselves are often unaware of the treasure the country possesses. Meanwhile the weather-beaten Italian farmers discuss the sale of some of the caves to the municipality, and their memories of wandering tourists visiting the living sites, some of which have now become locked up treasures, away from the gaze of admiring visitors. Their work as regional storytellers has diminished. « Knowing these things connects you to your roots », states a young Italian engineer. I suspect this is the same sentiment experienced by the farmers.
https://vimeo.com/173711361
Inspired by a friend working on the project, Canadian director and producer Anthony Grieco’s interest in making a film grew when he discovered that the caves were still being used. “The area’s caves and frescoes have suffered from neglect”, he said, “but not necessarily mishandling.” The striking images by cinematographer Jon Thomas mean that the scenes glide slowly, reflecting the measured work – artisanal and restorative – as well as the long summer days, the working farmers, and prolonged communal meals.
Tonio accepts diverse people from around the world into the project. During the summer of the film he welcomed icon restorers, speleologists, art historians, engineers, biological and apprentice anthropologists, and even an asylum-seeker who arrived on the nearby Puglian shore from Libya. All silently working on their own piece of the caves, collaborating and learning as they go. In this rural place, these caves cannot become a museum. The only way they can be preserved is to integrate them, as has always been the way, with the activities and lifestyle of the local shepherds. Cheese is still made in the traditional way, using rennet, and shepherds still have the right of way, their sheep naturally fertilizing the olive fields as they pass.
Stories from participants are woven together throughout the film as they reflect on the treasure they have in front of them and under their feet. For the participants, the value lies in participating in the discovery as well as the community. Donato, poet, musician, and storyteller is an integral part of the project with his stories and meditations infiltrating the process: “The cave offers us the chance to rediscover our solitude (…) The cave is the heart of the earth. It teaches us to be accepting of ourselves and one another because we’re all strangers on this earth. We are all strangers…”.
As the summer’s project comes to an end and Tonio listens to the participants reflect on their experience, the words community and connection are repeated – to the site, land, people, both visitors and locals. Tonio embraces everyone, and waves them off back out into the world as they promise to return the following year.
Grieco’s film admirably brings together history, storytelling, grief, community and the connection that is created from working together. At the heart of the story is the question of the exotic. What is strange and beautiful to one person appears ordinary and banal to the person who sees it and lives with it daily. What is of intrinsic value is essentially the premise of the film, with the film’s aesthetic successfully incorporating the restoration project as well as the locals, who continue their work throughout the summer, observing and being observed by the project participants. The restoration of the caves in Puglia is not just about renovation and repair but also about something being both functional and valuable, while enabling a richer understanding of our world today.
SHEPHERDS IN THE CAVE was produced with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and Red Mammoth Media. (Screened at Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival (UK), Ethnografilm Festival (Paris, France), Cinema on the Bayou (Louisiana, USA), Italian Film Festival (Vancouver, Canada), Cinema Grande (Altamura, Italy), Teatro della Memoria (Jesce, Italy), Casa Artelor Gallery (Timisoara, Romania), and the Archaeology Channel Film Festival (Eugene, Oregon).
Do you remember that feeling at the start of the summer holidays – no alarm clock, warm days, no school, time to dream… and in Lola’s case, a forced friendship with Zack. Lola is a teenager with a worried mother, time to fill, and a lot of pink stuff. Instructing a teenager to be productive and not mope suggests that things are not as they seem.
Add in upbeat Zack, and life appears to improve however Lola continues to have days where “it’s hard to get out of bed”, and not many people to whom she can tell the truth. Putting any hopes on hold, she attempts, at her own pace, to function.
Discussing illness, particularly mental health, can be a delicate premise in film. However, I can think of a few great examples involving both teenagers and health: Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980); John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985); Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), with all its secrets and repression; The Fault in our Stars (2014), based on John Green’s book of the same name; and of course Little Miss Sunshine (2006).
Actor/director Ella Greenwood wrote the Faulty Roots screenplay as a way to accurately articulate her own experience of being a teenager with a mental illness. First-time director Greenwood managed to finance the film using crowd-funding, and attract a remarkably large crew.
The film was made with the goal to promote mental health awareness in teenagers, as well as show the way it affects relationships and life. The visual distraction of the jolly colours and deco was obviously used as a device to counteract the nature of the topic – depression. Or perhaps they were used as a symbol of how we use more appealing things in life to divert us from the less lovely things, the subjects we’re told to keep private.
Zack (Sani Thabo) and Lola (Ella Greenwood) successfully portray the whole range of teenage awkwardness and discomfort and leave us with the question: Is it enough to ride on another person’s enthusiasm rather than dealing with your own demons?
Produced by Greenwood’s company Broken Flames Productions, that focuses on female-centered stories. Look out for their next short film, Dreary Days, currently in production.
‘Here in Britain, we know much about the Americas…slavery, civil rights, but very little is known about the black British struggle. It’s not just people abroad, Britains living here are very unaware of what it is to be born and raised in a country that’s foreign; and on a wider level I think it just humanises the immigrant experience. In my story I just hope to show the love and heart of who I am as a black person.’
Adewale ‘Eni’ Akinnuoye Agbaje
Here’s an incredible premise: In the 1967 right-wing English town of Tilbury, a Yorubá-Nigerian couple, in the UK to study law and accountancy, hand over their 6-week-old baby, Eni, to an unknown illiterate couple, after placing an ad in the newspaper.
That baby grew up to create an identity for himself in a violently racist local skinhead gang. The protagonist of the story, actor Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje (The Bourne Identity, Lost…), says he started writing the screenplay years ago because he couldn’t sleep at night. In development since 2012, the script progressed while he was part of the Sundance Film Institute.
Until 1960, Nigeria was a British colony and had been for the previous 70 years. Once liberated, British imperial administrators departed, leaving a system of government with few skilled leaders. Suddenly professional possibilities opened up to Nigerian citizens. Akinnuoye Agbaje’s parents were among a generation of Nigerians to come to the “mother country” to get a university education they could take home and use to build democracy in their newly independent nation.
However, with no extended family to turn to, young couples went looking for childcare, providing a way for parents to work and study before their return home, and their children to be immersed in English culture. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, thousands of Nigerian children were informally fostered out by their educated parents to white working-class families, who often took in too many children, attracted by the undeclared payments, and lack of supervision from welfare services. “Every day we get to make a new choice”, Eni’s teacher Ms. Dapo (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) tells him; the one person looking out for him.
She had seen a disturbed but clever teenager amongst the mediocre, bored, discriminatory small-town life of Tilbury, a fertile recruiting ground for nascent far-right groups in the years after Enoch Powell made his “rivers of blood” speech. A place where bingo and the pub were the highlights of the 80s; and the practice of fostering small children was called farming – children were goods to be bartered and manipulated as a means to an end. Their names were changed to ‘Boy, Divvy Cods, Dopey, Mingle, Madam and the rest of them…’ and their dog shears were used to cut the children’s hair.
The film is both important and brutal to watch. The violence is incessant and vivid, earning it an R rating in the US. Containing some of the most humiliating scenes I’ve seen in a film, young Eni is transformed from an imaginative young boy seeking love and solace to a young man (Damson Idris) desperately needing self-protection. Amongst the swollen-lipped and broken-toothed gang members, Levi (John Dagliesh), the manipulative leader of the Tilbury Skins, brings a particularly malevolent edge to the film. One that is shaped by ambiguous relationships.
This is a film principally about self-protection and urban day-to-day survival. Akinnuoye Agbaje describes it as “…about triumph over adversity, challenges and obstacles, finding a sense of belonging, finding self-worth, learning how to love one’s self and these are things that everyone can relate to.” Not only did he play the role of his father, Femi, he also wrote, directed and produced as well as writing, performing and producing most of the soundtrack. He describes it as “…only a low budget film in terms of finance, but not in terms of aspiration.”
What do you do when you’ve been endlessly rejected by both societies into which you were born? In Eni’s case, use your imagination. How did a young man move into such extreme self-protection? With nobody to rely on, he’d been practising for 17 years.
Sports Day: Final Girls Berlin Review – A pink-tinged room, wandering hands, and a sensual rite of passage, Sports Day is not what you might have imagined.
Chinese screenwriter/director/editor Lin Tu’s intriguing short film takes us into the mind of a young woman, Bai (Jingling Li), who had other plans for the day.
Escaping the obligatory school sports day and booking a room (one that looks like someone has just walked out of), Zhao (Xiaojun Gong) surprises Bai and hopes that they’re about to spend a couple of intimate hours there together.
She however, is not prepared, nor ready for what he had in mind. While Zhao is out, Bai makes all sorts of discoveries about the room and then herself. The most important being, is she alone or not? The imagination is a powerful tool and Bai’s acts out what she thinks is about to happen, exploring both the physical world and her own inner-self at the same time.
Lin Tu has created a really clever way of showing the mix of trepidation and longing in a young woman who almost knows what she wants, but also wants to believe that it won’t happen until she’s ready.
In just under 11 minutes, she has done a fantastic job of leaving the viewer both mystified and enlightened. Creating an evocative experience that I’m still contemplating hours later.
SPORTS DAY has deservedly spent the past year in the official selections of multiple film festivals worldwide.
