Chorizo the cat has died and Eva’s mum Germaine (Geraldine Chaplin) has given it a spectacular burial. On their return to their houseboat, talk turns to Roger (David Verdaguer), a friend from Barcelona about to arrive in London. “If we let him stay one night, he’ll never leave”, says Eva (Oona Chaplin) to her girlfriend Kat (Natalia Tena).
So begins an absorbing story full of questions regarding the creation of a baby: Is it possible to not conform to a typical plan when planning on having a baby? Or to live on a canal boat, not have traditional jobs, and have a live-in friend who donates his sperm? And when Eva’s plan does become a reality, the complications of exchanges like this: “You’re not the father” says Eva to Roger: “Yeah, but you needed me to make it real”.
The premise is interesting and timely. The pragmatic and hardened Kat, offering cups of tea and ready to do almost anything but imagine herself as a mother, speaks the truth throughout the film and in a passionate retort to Germaine questions how ready people really are for non-conforming families: “I think you like the idea of rebellion but you always knew that you’d eventually conform. Two women can reproduce but only if we reproduce exactly what straight people have always been doing. Be a safe family unit and make money”.
Based on the 2015 book Maternidades Subversivas (Subversive Motherhood) by renowned Spanish feminist and activist Maria Llopis. Marques-Marcet and his co-screenwriter Jules Nurrish have transformed the book vividly and with just the right amount of humour, gravity and beauty. The star of the film are London’s canals, and cinematographer Dagmar Weaver-Madsen has created some really stunning scenes – from Eva emerging from the darkness of a bridge to the reflections in the water. The film is full of real and well-portrayed awkwardness, incorporating deep sadness as well as comedy thanks to Verdaguer’s Roger (Best Male Lead 2018 Gaudí Awards), brilliantly straight-faced, inept but loving. A co-production between Spain and the UK, the film was world-premiered at the most recent London Film Festival, and in November opened the Official Section of the 2017 Seville European Film Festival where it won Best Film.
Director, screenwriter, and editor Carlos Marques-Marcet (Barcelona, 1983) won the Goya Award from the Spanish Film Academy for Best New Director for his first feature film 10,000km (2014). He went on to win the Special Jury Prize at South By Southwest Film Festival SXSW (2014) and five awards at the Spanish Malaga Film Festival
In 2015 he directed 13 Dies d’ Octubre, winner of the Gaudi Award for Best Film for Television in 2016.
Reposted from the archives, to help celebrate #BRWC10.
“Too much intimacy, love overload!” – Trainwreck
Amy is a Trainwreck.
Amy (Amy Schumer) shrieks as she is being group-hugged by her sister Kim (Brie Larson) and family. When she was nine years old, Amy’s dad Gordon (Colin Quinn) gave his daughters a message in the midst of divorcing their mother: “Avoiding intimacy and monogamy is the way to survive.”
Amy took the message seriously, despite him being an offensive racist, homophobic misogynist, yet funny, despite all that. Trainwreck takes us through Amy’s failed very short term relationships, apparently semi-autobiographical. Full of good dialogue, and laugh-out-loud funny, the film has enough depth to take Amy’s self-realisation, endearingly assisted by Aaron (Bill Hader) seriously. Trainwreck is Schumer’s first film screenplay where she also holds the title role, and is one of the best romantic comedies in years and has good odds at the Golden Globes. Yes, the trainwreck is Amy, something she does face up to.
Eventually.
In his recently released book of conversations with comedians ‘Sick in the Head’, Judd Apatow includes an interview with Schumer: “…I was blown away by how funny and intimate and fresh she was. You could sense that she had stories to tell and was a lot more than just a comedian.” Apatow, also instrumental in bringing Lena Dunham to the public, in his role as executive producer of Girls, champions young comedians, from his first TV series Freaks and Geeks to Knocked Up, Bridesmaids and This is 40. His casts are always entertaining and well-selected, featuring people he has wanted to work with and comedians he has admired.
Criticised for being a touch too long at two hours, Apatow seems to be going for every laugh he can get and I loved it all. A scene with cameos by LeBron James, Chris Evert (Lloyd) and Matthew Broderick although slightly where-did-this-come-from awkward, steers the focus away from the stereotypical nutty female character, to a balance where the male protagonist can’t seem to work out relationships either.
Amy Schumer answering the question on why her humour connects with people, really sums up the film in her response: “Just the feeling of losing all your confidence and feeling like you’re worthless because of how other people are treating you. And then having to realise that the real issue is actually how you’re treating yourself. I think that’s something most people have experienced, feeling like they don’t deserve love.”
Highlights were Tilda Swinton as Dianna, Amy’s editor at the lad-mag S’NUFF; Basketball star LeBron James playing himself, a well-buffed friend looking out for Aaron, the easygoing sports doctor superstar who befriends Amy; and the honest eulogy Amy presents. The mixture of truth and humour brought to you by Schumer and Apatow. A fantastic combination.
People began queuing thirty minutes before each film and the competition to get a seat for the best films was fierce. The Cinéma du Réel film festival is a risky one to attend. The challenge being to get into a screening and hope that it will be a good film. It is usually impossible to see everything and highly probable that you won’t see much at all.
Towards the end of the screening of a mostly silent short French film incorporating the occasional sounds of flutes, a gentle rhythmic sound filled the room. People looked at each other wondering whether the previously modest sound track had taken a new direction. I turned around to discover a woman in a deep sleep, lulled by the peacefulness. With five minutes remaining I gently prodded her with the program. She awoke with a terrified look and wide-eyed gaze and I left, onto the next scheduled film, only to discover it had already begun and there were no available seats. During last year’s festival, the staff of the Centre Pompidou went on strike, essentially closing down the festival. For an event organised by and at the Centre, it was certainly an unusual move, wasting a year of work and preparation as well as disappointing many filmmakers. Was it possible to get into the off-site locations? With difficulty.
By the end of the festival I discovered that it was possible to book an individual booth in the Centre’s library (BPI) and view the films on a small screen. Eight hours later, I had watched an eclectic selection of films including Fail to Appear (2017), the story of petty thief Eric Edwards, and Isolde, his caseworker. I was intrigued by what sounded like a strong story. The film is Toronto-based French director Antoine Bourges’ first feature film after East Hastings Pharmacy (2011). Like his previous film, he portrayed those who fall through the cracks and those who try to help them, providing a poignant reflection on the struggle of human connection across social levels. In an interview with Mubi, Bourges mentioned that he was initially interested in the subject after overhearing conversations in cafés between caseworkers and clients. The character of the caseworker was created to facilitate access to a certain world that Bourges was interested in representing. The premise is interesting but as Bourges himself states in response to the question about the difficulty of such a subject: “Which I suppose is why you chose to make the film a narrative as opposed to a documentary?” “Definitely”, responded Bourges “the film is mainly a fiction. I have an interest in these institutions that is documentary-like.” Documentary-like?
The BPI (Bibilotheque Publique d’Information) who organise the Cinéma du Réel have created La Cinémathèque du Documentaire to screen films all year round: “In tune with society, its hopes, its concerns and its dreams, documentary creation is experiencing an extraordinary vibrancy […] Exhibiting these films is nevertheless a major challenge and the overarching goal.” Documentary film has never been screened as much as now, thanks to digital networks, festivals (in 2017 there were at least 227 film festivals around the world screening documentaries ), television, and mainstream cinemas. So why, when the medium has had such success does a festival like Cinéma du Réel make documentary-watching so difficult?
I first attended the Cinéma du Réel festival in 1992, when Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson won the major prize for Black Harvest, the last film in their series known as the Highland-trilogy, filmed in Papua New Guinea. Catherine Humblot described it in the newspaper Le Monde as follows: “…Here we discover what makes up the base of humanity: Easy gains, jealousy, the taste of power.” All three films won the festival’s Grand Prix award between 1982 and 1992. The key to their success was “they avoided voyeurism in favour of highly intelligent use of real human stories to draw attention to much wider social and political issues.” (Hughes, 2002). One could pose the question whether the success of Connolly and Anderson’s films was due to the exoticness of them: The end of colonization in Papua New Guinea as tribal ways violently met modern-day commerce.
However before Robin Anderson died in 2002, the filmmakers went on to make two more urban documentaries together in Australia. Both films attained a similar success to their Leahy family trilogy, confirming their talent for presenting a story, but neither were screened at the Cinéma du Réel. Nor was Mrs Carey’s Concert, Connolly’s last film and one of the most successful Australian films ever made. Their work was the opposite of the films that are now classed as docu-fiction, that are appearing in documentary festivals. As Bob Connolly put it: “The ground rules are that you don’t interfere with what is going on so that there is never an expectation on the part of the people that you want something from them.”
There has been substantial change since the festival began under Jean Rouch’s guidance when the programme was influenced more by ethnology and sociology, rather than docu-fiction.
The goal of this anniversary is to pay homage to the festival’s history”, said the newly-arrived 2018 festival director Andréa Picard, while also infusing it with a contemporary spirit open to a wide-range of documentary forms.” I It is Jean Rouch, co-creator of the festival, who is best known as the instigator of the term cinéma-verité, the 1960s film movement that showed people in everyday situations with authentic dialogue and action: “Rather than following the usual technique of shooting sound and pictures together, the film maker first tapes actual conversations, interviews, and opinions.” Rouch’s practice was never content with simplistic notions of ‘fly-on-the-wall’ filming. Decades before post-modernism recognised that ethnography was a form of writing, he was always conscious that the observer was a defining part of that action and discovered that a filmmaker interferes with the event he registers. “It is true that an ethnographer in the field, even without a camera, disturbs the life he wants to catch in its natural form…A camera is always noticed.” Two outstanding examples of cinéma vérité are Jean Rouch’s 1961 Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) and Chris Marker’s 1962 Le Joli Mai.
Moving on from Rouch’s cinema vérité or ethnofiction and Astruc’s camera-stylo are mockumentaries, films used to parody documentaries, also described as a documentary mocking a documentary. These are more and more common, with Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 film Borat being a classic example. Pseudo-documentaries are their dramatic equivalent followed by docudrama, a fictional genre in which dramatic techniques are combined with documentary elements to depict real events. Next is docufiction, different to docudrama, a genre in which documentaries are tainted with fictional elements. And finally, Mumblecore, a genre created by young(ish) independent filmmakers like brothers Jay and Mark Duplass who record themselves and their friends playing people like themselves and their friends in situations barely distinguishable from ordinary existence. The work produced feels and often is improvised and is usually a low-budget production.
The eclectic selection in the 2018 Cinéma du Réel – a diverse array of films to commemorate the forty-year anniversary of the festival – meant that it ranged from May 68, to the collective filmmaking of Shinsuke Ogawa, including the films of Tacita Dean, who was promoting film over digital filmmaking, as well as the usual eclectic range of short and feature films in competition. Both rich and chaotic, the programming meant it was impossible to see most of it or have a feeling of the styles of documentary-making over the past forty years.
There is a certain deception for a viewer who watches a documentary only to find at the end that in fact they were watching a film that is fiction. It is a question of trust: What do you believe? In literature there is a sharp demarcation between fiction and non-fiction and when fiction is disguised as non-fiction, there is a clear deception , which can end a writer’s career.
How is it then that a documentary festival like Cinéma du Réel can include a film that is simultaneously a fictionalisation and a reconstruction? Antoine Bourges is open about his film-making method: “I never really understood this notion of real in cinema. If a simple camera placement suggests an intention, a fragmentation, and ultimately a position taken in regards to the world, it is hard to imagine how this capturing of “vérité” is even remotely possible. It simply didn’t make sense to try to highlight this divide between “real” and “staged,” or jump back and forth between them in a noticeable way. » One of the world’s most reputable and watched film festivals is the Utah-based Sundance. Their submission regulations for documentary are very clear: Any non-fiction film not including entirely scripted or improvised fictionalizations of actual events. Charlotte Cook, Director of Programming at the Canadian International Documentary Festival Hot Docs says: “There is a broadening of the scope of what we think documentary is. I hope in my lifetime there will be no more ‘documentary’ film festivals. Documentary still isn’t seen on the level of ‘film’ … It’s as simple as storytelling and craft. Documentary is an art form, so I want to see high levels of craft and excellent filmmaking.”
According to Pille Runner, director of the Estonian World Film Festival, “Even though ethnographic films have the reputation of documentaries with no special artistic ambition, the films are actually very rich in language and range from stories of cultural value to experimental films.”
Runner’s experience has shown that ethnographic and anthropologic films have proven to be versatile and in-depth documentaries “that are not afraid to experiment and carry a key role in the development of the documentary field.” The annual ethnographic film festival in Paris has even changed its name to include Jean Rouch in the title. Could it be to create a separation from the festival he co-created that no longer resembles his work?
A first date using Cosmopolitan magazine’s ‘no-fail’ questions – how could that go wrong? Mary (Harrie Hayes) expresses brilliant awkwardness faced with po-faced Jason (Nick Read) until question 3: What’s a secret you have never told anyone?
As she reflects on how much to say, Mary’s gawkiness reaches a new level as she blunderingly tells Jason one of the most interestingly offbeat responses I imagine ever to be heard on a first date. Jason whispers his response in Mary’s ear, leaving the viewer to contemplate whether anything could possibly emerge from this doomed beginning.
Writer, director, producer Alexei Slater has crafted a captivating short film with an illuminating title, which by the end may leave you repeating the same. The film spent 2017 touring around US and European film festivals, receiving many accolades, and was the winner of the Best Comedy Award at the 2017 Crystal Palace International Film Festival in London.
In 2011 Alexei Slater and producer Jessica Turner set up award-winning Turn The Slate Productions and amongst other projects wrote and co-produced the company’s first short film 82 directed by Calum Macdiarmid. Have a look at what a spiteful postman (Nick Moran) can get up to during his daily rounds. Alexei’s second short as writer/producer Scarlet Says (2014) was screened in multiple festivals. Both films and more are available on their website.
Anxiety-filled, stimulating and dull could describe those distressingly fabulous years between twelve and twenty. HEARTSTONE, Icelandic writer-director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s first feature-length film, has managed to capture all of this. The story was partially inspired by his own experience: “The village was an environment full of contrasts, where the sun shines without rest during the summer and barely rises at all in winter. A place where the same things you love and give you freedom also tie you down. The years of our youth reflect our lives in a very clear, beautiful, and often harsh manner.”
The heart of the film is the friendship between two teenage boys, Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Christian (Blær Hinriksson). Best friends and neighbours, they live in a remote Icelandic fishing village where during a summer they are left to their own devices and largely ignored by their parents, who are navigating their own problems. An ambivalent pursuit of a girl called Beta (Diljá Valsdóttir), unsettles their simple friendship. From the impressive fishing in the first scene to mountain camping, the strong visual aesthetic of a wild Iceland stands out.
The film has vividly depicted not only the estrangement that takes place between parents and children, but the risks and negotiations that take place in adolescent relationships, thick with attraction and desire. The underlying core is the ambiguous bonds people share that can be trustworthy and binding, or harmful.
Gudmundsson developed and wrote his first feature film HEARTSTONE during a Cannes Cinéfondation Residency due to his successful short film Whale Valley (2013), which received a Special Mention in the Official Competition of the Cannes Film Festival. HEARTSTONE was screened in the Discovery section at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival and won the Queer Lion at the 73rd Venice Film Festival. It was also nominated for the 2017 Nordic Council Film Prize.
