This year has a handful of fictionalised tellings of real events. They sit somewhere between documentaries and fiction: the people and the events are real, the dialogue and the details are imagined. The Red Hangar takes place on a Chilean air force base in the hours around the 1973 coup. Heysel 85 zooms in on the stadium disaster of a Liverpool–Juventus match in Belgium. It’s fair to say neither is a cheerful watch.
It’s not a (sub)genre I’ve much considered. There’s a faint aura of something distasteful – making entertainment from real-world tragedies – but it’s countered by a sense of warmth and humanity – putting humans and emotions back into stories that are told in timelines, statistics, diagrams.
This carries over into the visual language of the two. The Red Hangar is shot in glorious crisp black and white. Heysel 85 is fuzzy 16mm, designed to echo the homemade and news footage that gets spliced in, both in texture and in warm 80s colours. Both presentations give the films texture, and make clear that this is neither a dry documentary nor a modern Hollywood-style retelling.
I loved both. Despite being obviously, unavoidably, grim, they both managed to keep a sense of taut, breathless action, and flesh out the characters into real people.
It’s a stone-cold classic.
Leeds Film Festival always has a stand of ‘retrospectives’ – older films they’re bringing back to the festival. In recent years I’ve tried to be a bit picky about which of these I go to, restricting myself to either things that are super rare and hard to see, or that are dramatically cinematic and cry out for the big screen.
It’s arguable that The Third Man falls into the latter camp, but only just. The 4K restoration looks nice, but still a little fuzzy round the edges, and there were a few moments when I questioned whether I was getting a better experience in the cinema than I would at home (compare against seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey on an enormous screen at the town hall. That was a huge difference from watching at home).
But this is quibbling. The film is great. The glasses of schnapps. The cigarettes. The heavy wooden coats. The stiff-upper-lip Brits. The chase sequences down bombed-out streets. The sewers.
An absolute joy to watch.
This was just so, so good. It’s the sort of film that for a good while I tended to shy away from as being too heavy, too glum, but it’s such a mistake. This is an excellent entry in the canon of Muslim-family-dramas-where-someone-is-gay. See also The Blue Caftan.
It’s a pretty familiar setup: we have a strong-willed, opinionated grandmother - loved, tolerated and resented in equal measures - we have long-suffering daughters, playing second fiddle to their brothers, never quite good enough to be accepted, and then we have the feisty, independent granddaughter - living in France, free from the shackles of Tunisia, seen with a mix of resentment and jealousy by those who remain.
It’s a funeral that brings them all together. 6 days of each other’s company, of probing the habits of their dead son/brother/uncle, of hushing up investigations for the sake of avoiding gossip. The tensions build and simmer. It’s a very well-paced film. Highly recommended!
Rafael Manuel’s extraordinary debut is a razor-sharp satire of wealth and exploitation in the Philippines, every shot perfectly manicured as the fairways in the elite country club where it’s set.
Isabel, a 17-year-old from the rural north, gets a new job pampering powerful men, but soon uncovers the ugly truths behind the veneer of luxury as she encounters the patriarchal director of the club and uncovers her country’s history of violence.
This is a decent new entry in the documenting-gross-inequality subgenre. I very much liked the quote from the director about golf courses being a silent violence committed against a land.
There are parts of this that are lovely. It has an episodic, Greek epic feel about it — we encounter different characters going about their lives, absurd little vignettes of life amongst the servants of the country club.
Unfortunately, it’s incredibly slow and the dramatic tension only really ramps up at the very end of the film. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I felt it pulled its punches rather: it had the chance to explode from its reserved, mannered start into something quite cutting but never quite does. Still a very enjoyable watch.
Oh, but the pine trees are not happy.
Show, don’t tell. It’s easier said than done, especially in documentary cinema, which so often feels like an extended news report. I’m all for an essay film, but Daughters of the Forest was far from it and much the better for it.
The film revolves around two indigenous women in different Mexican states, both balancing between their communities and the call of academia. They’re keen to write down the knowledge of their ancestors and parents, but wary of perpetuating a cycle of exploitation — academic strip mining of local knowledge that moves on without even paying its way with so much as a bottle of mezcal.
Oh. And the mushrooms. So many mushrooms. Some edible. Some loco. Some white. Some blue. The footage of fungi is astonishing.
It’s a powerful film with a strong message that manages to never feel preachy. (Although I guess I’m already in the choir.) Add in a very nice soundtrack by Hannah Peel and I’ve got my first five stars of the festival.