I’ve lumped these two together because they’re both showing in competition this year, but they are very different. Although perhaps they have as many similarities as they do differences.
Both take us to an island. They show us a generational gap being bridged. Both are deeply concerned with the old school—the analogue, the community, the heritage—crashing up against the modern—the impulsive, the independent.
Zejtune follows Mar, whose mother has recently died. Her remaining family are combative and cold, and it was clear she had some serious issues with her mother, but she’s been left three plots of land, with maps scrawled with illegible Italian text that state her right to it. She enlists a wedding singer she meets, who turns out to be a legend of għana (a sort of Maltese folk music, where flamenco meets rap-battle), and sets off around the island looking for her land.
The film isn’t really about that, though. It’s about family and tradition, about historical wrongs and whether they can be righted (or at least forgiven), about land and place and people. There are links back to the fabulous In a Whisper, in the determination of the older characters that the youth should not flee the land.
Memorizu cuts a much slighter figure. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens. Just life, moving along slowly. Yuta sets off from his wife and young daughter to keep his father-in-law company. He joins him in his old-school photographic studio, driving him about for school portraits and wedding snaps.
It’s a much more understated film, but the new runs up against the old—iPhone footage contrasted against the warm film grain—the modern and cosmopolitan crashing up against the fusty and old but deeply community-rooted ways of life.
I loved both.
I think both gave a beautiful slice of life in their respective cultures and took us with them on a journey that was small, personal but deeply satisfying.
A decent documentary about the life of one of the original phone phreakers, proto-hackers of the telephone age.
I’ll be honest—I found the hacking side a lot more interesting than the rest of it. The background to his life and all the parts up to his arrest for fraudulent long-distance calls was pretty fascinating. The later chunk about his answerphone message call line was a bit thin.
The curse of a film with a cracking title and a ridiculous concept (“a sewage system taken over by evil spirits”) is that it becomes very hard to live up to the expectations. For me, Bowels of Hell didn’t quite make it past this curse. It was a fun film. It was very silly. But the idea was probably still better than the execution.
There was a lot to enjoy: excruciating influencers, cashing in on their stepchild’s disability, a scat psychic (!), a cat eaten by a toilet, and waves and waves of shit. It leaned in hard to the gross and did a good job with it, proving once again how much more fun physical effects are.
I overheard someone explaining their film festival choices. They’d picked Bowels of Hell, they said, because however good or bad it might be, it was unlikely to be boring. A sound argument. This might not have been great, but it was quite good fun.
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.