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E129: Highlights of 2022 fall film festivals

On this episode, we discuss some of our favourite films from the 2022 fall festivals, first features, and the dominance of Netflix Movies.

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This episode features Editor-in-Chief Alex Heeney and Executive Editor Orla Smith.

About the episode

On this members only episode, we discuss the highlights of the fall film festival circuit, the new and troubling dominance of Netflix (and other streamers’) films, and exciting (or not-so-exciting) first features. We discuss favourites like The Eternal Daughter, Saint Omer, Other People’s Children — many of which will get a full-length episode of their own in the coming months. We also discuss some of the biggest disappointments. Orla shares her experience at the London Film Festival. Alex shares her experience attending the Toronto International Film Festival.

On this episode

  • 00:00-5:24 – Intro to the episode and the festivals we’ve covered
  • 5:24-18:55 Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children and a new film grammar for women as multitaskers in Other People’s Children, Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, and Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter FREE EXCERPT ENDS HERE
  • 18:55-20:55 How many films we saw, and some of the downsides
  • 20:55-25:45 Orla’s favourites including Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and  Verena Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Jamie Dack’s Palm Trees and Power Lines
  • 25:45-31:14 Alex favourites including Alice Winocour’s Paris Memories and Darlene Naponse’s Stellar
  • 31:14-50:34 The dominance of Netflix and streamers, Matthew Warchus’s Matilda, Causeway
  • 50:34-56:50 The festival circuit: great festival films from earlier this year that disappeared (My Small Land, Lullaby, 32 Sounds), screened only at local festivals (Nelly and Nadine, Framing Agnes) and films that keep coming back. We also discuss the London Film Festival’s problematic approach to programming and why we love the Berlinale’s programming.
  • 56:50-1:00:24 The lack of live cinema experiences at festivals (like 32 Sounds) in a year when we are being forced to return to cinemas for festivals.
  • 1:00:24-1:05:50 Directors’ first features, Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, the rise of Paul Mescal, Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean
  • 1:05:50-1:16:15 Depressing trends in British cinema and the British film industry and how that relates to the country’s funding practices. We also draw comparisons to the Canadian film industry. Why is it so hard to get a second feature made? And why do first features have to conform so much to industry standards? We discuss Francis Lee’s films, Hope Dickson Leach’s film, and several Canadian filmmakers.
  • 1:16:15-1:25:29 Thinking about National Cinema at film festivals, especially Canadian cinema and British cinema
  • 1:25:29-1:31:36 Plan 75, Palm Trees and Power Lines, and other great under-seen first features that keep screening everywhere
  • 1:31:36 Sign offs and related episodes

Related episodes

  • Women at Cannes Season: Listen to our five-episode 2022 season on the history of Women directors at the Cannes Film Festival. We highlight some of the best films by women and women filmmakers to screen at the festival. We also discuss the festival’s ongoing poor track record of programming films directed by women.
  • Ep. 125: Berlinale 2022: On this omnibus episode, we discuss the highlights of the Berlin Film Festival screening in the festival’s under-discussed and under-appreciated (but excellently programmed) sidebars.
  • Ep. 109: TIFF 2021 Part 1: In last year’s counterpart to this episode, we discussed the highlights of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), including Terence Davies’s Benediction and Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World
  • Ep. 111: TIFF 2021 Part 2: Continuing our discussion on the fall film festivals in 2021, with a focus on TIFF, we discussed Power of the Dog, Ali & Ava, and more highlights from TIFF.
  • Ep. 49: Split screen storytelling in Lungs and Conversations with Other Women: Listen to our episode on Matilda director Matthew Warchus’s fantastic live-recorded theatre production of Lungs, (Members only)
  • Ep 60: Old Vic In Camera Productions: Three Kings and Faith Healer: Listen to our podcast on Matthew Warchus’s two follow-up live-broadcasted productions of Three Kings and Faith Healer (Members only)

Show Notes

The transcript for the free excerpt of this episode is AI-generated by Otter.ai.

[fusebox_transcript]

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A Tale of Love and Desire is a sensitive coming-of-ager

In Leyla Bouzid’s A Tale of Love and Desire, things get complicated for eighteen-year-old Ahmed (Sami Outabali) when love and desire become intertwined. The film is screening in person at the London Film Festival and Vancouver International Film Festival. The film is still seeking distribution in North America and the UK.

Still from Leyla Bouzid's A Tale of Love and Desire.
Still from Leyla Bouzid’s A Tale of Love and Desire.

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In Leyla Bouzid’s second feature, A Tale of Love and Desire, things get complicated for eighteen-year-old Ahmed (Sami Outabali) — the Parisian child of Algerian refugees who has never been to Algeria — when love and desire become intertwined. Bouzid’s thoughtful, sensitive, and sensual first feature, As I Open My Eyes, was the story of a young Tunisian woman coming up against patriarchy and government oppression as she tries to find her place in the world; A Tale of Love and Desire is a much more internal story. That’s not to say that Ahmed doesn’t face casual racism and classism or the pressures to conform to two different standards of masculinity — a French, sexually liberal, cosmopolitan ideal and a more conservative but virile Arabic ideal. But none of these forces are actually stopping him from getting what he wants when it comes to love and desire. They’re just causing immense inner turmoil. 

Ahmed is a smart, sensitive, and introverted young man, who is caught between two worlds he can never fully be a part of: the white, middle-class society of his university, La Sorbonne; and the Algerian culture to which he was born and is identified with on sight, but which he has never had the opportunity to fully connect with. His full on identity crisis is sparked when he meets Farah (Zbeida Belhajamor), a Tunisian woman who is studying literature with him at La Sorbonne. After Ahmed shoots her many longing looks across hallways and rooms (and Bouzid’s frames), they finally talk to each other on the metro. Farah’s voluminous curls take up more space than Ahmed ever allows himself; he curls his body around the pole on the metro, avoiding eye contact as they talk, while her stance is open. 

Ahmed and Farah go book shopping in Leyla Bouzid's A Tale of Love and Desire
Ahmed and Farah go book shopping in Leyla Bouzid’s A Tale of Love and Desire

Farah is, in many ways, Ahmed’s opposite. She’s extroverted and sexually experienced, strongly connected to her Tunisian and Arabic origins, and unafraid to take up space. At a bookstore, picking up their assigned reading, Farah is fascinated by the modernity of the erotic Arab literature she discovers from hundreds of years past. Ahmed is uncomfortable and embarrassed, and reacts by getting judgemental and cruel. New to the city, but excited to explore it, Farah asks Ahmed to show her around; as someone who grew up in the banlieues, he suddenly finds himself adrift as a presumed Parisian who has never really explored Paris at all. Their attraction to each other, even before they talk to one another, is immediate. But it’s their conversations and budding friendship that really challenges Ahmed. Farah has reconciled the contradictory aspects of her identity while Ahmed has barely even managed to acknowledge them to himself. 

The opening scene of the film is a particularly apt series of images that represent where Ahmed is at in his life. Ahmed’s naked body is glimpsed only in fragments, through the blurred glass of the shower, evoking someone who refuses to be looked at too closely. After, Bouzid captures water droplets falling from his hair onto his naked back as he dries off. It’s a hugely sensual image but also a somewhat standoffish one. We soon learn that Ahmed is more comfortable with jacking off to porn than exploring his sexuality with another person he actually likes. To explore sex with Farah would mean reconciling sex, intimacy, and desire and what they mean to him, his identity, and his feelings for Farah. His unwillingness to deal with this leads him to repeatedly send Farah mixed and hurtful signals. For his oral exam on an work of erotic Arab poetry, he chooses to interpret the text as being about the impossibility of acting on desire when love is involved because it suits his fears; his professor points out that that this is hardly the only reading, and he failed to acknowledge the alternatives.

Bouzid’s film is, in many ways, an unconventional sexual coming-of-age story. It’s about a young man dealing with having sex for the first time, and about all the hangups he has and feels like he shouldn’t have. It’s also a very internal story: Ahmed’s inarticulacy when it comes to his feelings is his whole problem. But lingering closeups on Outabli, coupled with his uncomfortable body language allows us to understand Ahmed better than he does himself. His insecurities are not about his virility or attractiveness or ability to perform in the bedroom; instead, it’s about identity, something we often see in stories about women but rarely in those about men. 

Ahmed’s romance with Farah is one of fits and starts, of her sometimes seemingly infinite patience because she knows he’s a sweet guy who is struggling, and how his confusion gets them both hurt. What A Tale of Love and Desire gets is that first love is as much about what doesn’t happen as what does. It’s significant that the turning point in Ahmed’s story comes in a conversation with his father, rather than in any interaction with Farah. His father has been emotionally and physically closed off, and so this is what Ahmed has learned as the standard for male behaviour. By finding a way to bridge that gap, getting his father to open up and opening up to him, he’s able to take steps toward figuring out who he is.

For all its thoughtfulness and many pleasures, A Tale of Love and Desire does fall into some frustrating tropes of coming-of-age stories. It’s rather convenient that Ahmed is studying literature and that the texts he studies in class end up being directly relevant to his personal crisis. But at least A Tale of Love and Desire introduces Ahmed, and many audiences, to texts that they would not have otherwise encountered from centuries past in the Arab world. For all of the film’s modernity, it’s also a reminder that love and desire are timeless struggles in stories; Bouzid is merely telling the twenty-first century version of them. Most disappointingly, though, is that one small step toward understanding his identity is rewarded with what many French films, like Mes jours de gloire (Antoine de Bary, 2019), consider the ultimate statement of male healing: finally having sex.

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Mangrove and Ultraviolence are two angles on UK police brutality

Films about police brutality in the UK are sorely lacking, but this year’s London Film Festival gave us two: Ken Fero’s mishandled Ultraviolence and Steve McQueen’s brilliant Mangrove. Read more coverage of the London Film Festival.

An image collage of stills from groups of characters in Mangrove and Ultraviolence.
Mangrove and Ultraviolence are two angles on UK police brutality.

Films about police brutality in the UK are sorely lacking, which contributes to the harmful idea that it’s not a problem on our island. While plenty of US cinema has tackled the topic — Blindspotting, The Hate U Give, Monsters and Men, and Fruitvale Station to name a few — police brutality is still largely ignored by British cinema. At this year’s London Film Festival, however, there were two: Steve McQueen’s rousing Mangrove and Ken Fero’s mishandled documentary Ultraviolence. Mangrove, the first chapter in McQueen’s five-part film series, Small Axe, tells the story of The Mangrove Nine who were arrested after protesting outside a police station in 1968 and fought for justice in the High Court the next year. Ultraviolence methodically chronicles the deaths in police custody of several Black men and one Brazilian man. While Mangrove is a detailed look at the systemic racism on every level of the British justice system, the latter verges on misery porn.

Through verité footage, found footage, animation, and interviews with family members, Ultraviolence conveys the horror faced by the men who died in police custody, and the tragedy their families suffered in the aftermath. But was Fero the right person to tell this story? His long-term commitment to bringing issues of police brutality to light is admirable; 18 years ago, in 2002, he made another documentary on the subject called Injustice. But throughout Ultraviolence, you can feel his gaze as a white person who sympathises for, but isn’t directly affected by, racialized violence. (It’s worth noting that Fero’s co-writer, Tariq Mehmood, isn’t white.) 

A woman speaks into a mic while a man holds up the megaphone for her.
A still from Ken Fero’s Ultraviolence

For one, Fero crassly frames the film around himself and his own experiences. The majority of the film’s narration is voiced by him, which centres his interpretation of the horrifying images we’re seeing rather than the images themselves or the interpretations of people of colour. He constantly shows us a scene, and then includes narration that reiterates exactly what we’ve just seen, as if it doesn’t matter until Fero has personally explained to us why it matters. Most egregiously, the framing device of the film is that this narration is a ‘letter’ Fero is writing to his son to warn him that there is violence in the world that he should fight against. One of the first images in the film is a family photo of Fero’s children, which comes before a photo of a Black family that was directly affected by police brutality. This implicitly frames all the violence against people of colour that we witness in the film as a learning opportunity, particularly for white people.

There is a fine line between depicting violence as a wake-up call versus misery porn, and Fero crosses over to the latter by providing little context for the brutality. He seems more concerned with making himself seem smart: at one point, over a traumatising minutes-long snippet of CCTV footage of a Black man dying, he briefly interrupts the audio to quote Pasolini’s theory about the cinematic long take.Fero also frequently blasts big, lurid, brightly-coloured block letters on the screen that shout words and phrases like “LIAR” and “WE ARE BEING CONTAINED,” as if these messages weren’t already obvious. The film is so preoccupied with showing us the spectacle of tragedy and violence that there’s no time to explore how systemic racism brews and functions. There’s so little screen space dedicated to how we might dismantle it, beyond campaigning for the cops involved with specific murders to be locked up.

A woman stands on a platform with a a megaphone at a protest, her fist raised in the air.
Letitia Wright in Mangrove.

Where Ultraviolence is all about the violence, as its title indicates, Mangrove demonstrates both the physical brutality and the brutality of the justice system, before going on to illustrate what it actually means to fight against it. McQueen places the subtler systemic racism faced by The Mangrove Nine in the High Court on the same level as the racist physical abuse of the police. He dedicates the whole second half of the film, which is set almost entirely in a courtroom, to exploring this. 

McQueen’s film pulls no punches when it comes to exhibiting the callous brutality of London’s police force, but he focuses on how their violence disrupts peace and community over how it damages the human body. The first half of the film establishes the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill as a hub for the West Indies community: it’s a place for them to eat food that reminds them of home and chat with friendly faces; McQueen shoots the interior in warm yellows while outside is a harsh blue. It’s a shock, then, when this safe haven gets interrupted by a raid of police, who burst in through the doors without a word of warning and immediately start smashing the walls and furniture with their batons.

McQueen examines how the power and prejudices of the police are learned and enforced through a sequence where he briefly invites us into the police station. At the station, a new recruit is inducted into the force’s racist attitudes as if it’s some kind of game: they play cards, and the loser has to arrest the first Black man they see on the street. The scene that follows is chilling not just for the violence it implies but for how McQueen uses the camera to demonstrate the policemen’s power. We watch the incident from the cold remove of the police van’s front window — the glass blocking out any sounds of panic just as the police ignore the humanity of their victim. While the victim runs for his life, the driver of the van barely needs to speed up in order to catch up to him; the power of a vehicle over a man on foot becomes a metaphor for the police’s power over the marginalised.

A group of Black Londoners protest against the police in Mangrove.
A protest against the police in Mangrove.

In Mangrove, racialized violence doesn’t stop with police brutality; it’s baked into the UK justice system. McQueen’s film spends half of its runtime on the police violence and the other half on the systemic racism of the courtroom where it seems impossible for The Mangrove Nine to be exonerated. First, some of The Nine’s family members are barred at the door from watching the proceedings, even though they have a ticket to get in. Then the Nine’s request for an all-Black jury is denied, so they’re immediately set back by having to argue a case that involves racism to a majority-white jury. Throughout the trial, the judge displays a short temper with the Black defendants and gives leeway to the white prosecution, even as he claims impartiality. At one point, a guard even attacks two of the Nine unprovoked and locks them in a cell during a court break. The Nine are tasked with not just presenting a compelling case but circumventing the racist biases of the court while they do it.

So perhaps we don’t need Ultraviolence when we have Mangrove. Or perhaps the ignorance around police brutality in the UK is so dire that we need both. It’s worth noting that the acclaimed final film in McQueen’s Small Axe series, Red, White and Blue, which I haven’t seen yet, deals with the police even more directly. John Boyega plays a young Black Londoner who witnesses the racism of the police force and decides to join up so he can change it from within. The differences between Ultraviolence and Mangrove are evidence enough that the UK needs Black filmmakers, not well-meaning white filmmakers, making films that address the nuance of racist violence. As McQueen wrote in a June op-ed for The Observer: “I made three films in the States, and it seems like nothing has really changed in the interim in Britain. The UK is so far behind in terms of representation, it’s shameful.”

READ: More coverage of the London Film Festival >>

Read more coverage of the London Film Festival…

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LFF Review: Safe spaces and gendered violence in Lovers Rock

Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock, the second installment in his Small Axe film anthology, celebrates the highs of a house party. It also explores the gendered violence that can brew in these spaces. Read more coverage of the London Film Festival.

A man and a woman smile together in Lovers Rock. The word 'Review' is on the image.
LFF Review: Safe spaces and gendered violence in Lovers Rock.

Lovers Rock, the second installment in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology of five films, seems, at first, to be the most lighthearted of the series. Small Axe chronicles stories from London’s West Indies community between the ‘60s and ‘80s, and all of them but Lovers Rock are true stories that tackle racism. Lovers Rock stands apart as the most lighthearted of the films, the only fictional story, and the only one with a female protagonist. The entire 70-minute film is set over one night, at a raucous and joyous house party run and attended by Black Londoners, where Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) dances with her best friend, Patty (Shaniqua Okwok), and falls for a charming stranger, Franklyn (Micheal Ward). It’s a love story, but one with a keen eye for the racial and gendered violence in the periphery while Martha and Franklyn pursue a sweet courtship.

Lovers Rock is episode two in the series after Mangrove, and while the two films are starkly different — the former a dance film, the latter a courtroom drama — there are already patterns emerging. Both films are named after a safe space created by and for the Black community: the Mangrove restaurant that serves cuisine from the West Indies, and the Lover’s Rock house party. McQueen emphasises how welcoming these safe spaces — the restaurant and the dance floor — are by lighting them with a warm, yellow hue, whereas hostile spaces, from the street to the courtroom, are a cold blue. Within, Black Londoners can chat, laugh, and flirt away from the hostile, racist society outside.

Two men lean over a DJ set.
The DJs at the Lover’s Rock party.

But both films are also about how these spaces risk infiltration: that’s more overt in Mangrove, but watching that film first made me really notice the danger in Lovers Rock. The comforts and the community of the restaurant and the party lull the viewer, and the characters, into a false sense of security. The Mangrove restaurant is suddenly and brutally invaded by police several times; police officers are never seen in Lovers Rock, but their sirens are heard, and at one point, a police car rolls up in front of the house, lurking there like a warning. In Lovers Rock, we get to see what one of these safe spaces looks like when, for one sweet night, it’s spared from police invasion.

And it mostly is sweet and joyous, but I’m curious at reactions to the film that only discuss how fun it is when McQueen takes pains to highlight the threat of gendered violence lurking in every corner of the party. A subplot involves a man who is consistently creepy throughout the night and ends up raping one of the guests. But McQueen ensures we understand this isn’t just one bad apple: from the very start, he sets up the house party as a gendered space. The opening sequence of the film sees a group of men maneuvering furniture and setting up sound systems to prepare the party space. Meanwhile, a trio of women stand cramped in the small kitchen, cooking several dishes to sell as party food to the guests. There’s a shot of them through the doorway, so they’re boxed into a narrow, restrictive rectangle. Everyone in the house is happy, smiling, laughing, and singing together in anticipation of the night to come. But McQueen prompts us to note the strict divide of gender roles: men doing manual labour, women in the kitchen. 

When the party gets underway, McQueen’s camera documents, but never replicates, the men’s objectification of women. As the dance floor fills up with singles who are yet to partner up, the men lurk, still and silent, at the edge of the room while the women dance excitedly in the centre. The women’s dancing is joyous to watch — emphasised by Martha’s and Patty’s excited squeals when a song they love comes on. But the scene is tinged with a hint of threat, as McQueen cuts to the men gazing on like predators sizing up their prey. Later, McQueen includes a montage of men approaching women from behind, grabbing their shoulders, and sliding down to hold their hands. By cutting together three different men making this exact same motion, one after the other, McQueen draws attention to how this physical possessiveness is part of a cultural script they’re all playing out.

A crowded party, with main characters Franklyn and Martha in the center of the crowd.
Franklyn and Martha push through the party crowd in Lovers Rock.

Martha and Franklyn’s romance acts as a counterpoint: when they dance, it’s both extremely sexy and explicitly consensual. McQueen shoots them as equals in the frame as they dance together. When they grind on the dance floor, it’s shot as a closeup of the fabric on their clothes pushing against each other, both partners equally enthusiastic, and neither more in control than the other. Oscar winner Jacqueline Durran’s (Little Women, Atonement) costumes are reliably amazing, but particularly Martha’s dress. It’s purple, loose, and extremely shiny: each time Franklyn touches Martha, the material creases and reflects more light, which registers dynamically on the camera. 

Lovers Rock is at its weakest when it loses its focus on Martha and Franklyn amid the spectacle of dance. McQueen does a good job of giving many of the anonymous faces on the dance floor their moment in the spotlight; the way each actor moves and the uniqueness of each of their outfits hint at a whole life off screen that McQueen’s film doesn’t have time to explore. Unfortunately, the camera often loses track of Martha and Franklyn during these wordless dance scenes. It feels like a lost opportunity to further develop their relationship through movement. Then again, the mass of bodies writhing on the dance floor is so entrancing, you can hardly blame McQueen for getting distracted.

Read more coverage of the London Film Festival…

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The six best short films at LFF 2020

This year’s London Film Festival shorts programme was a win for accessibility, even if the shorts were up and down in quality. Here are 6 favorites. Read more coverage of the London Film Festival.

A collage of stills from LFF shorts films, with the word LFF in the centre.
The six best short films at LFF 2020. (Clockwise from top left) Bittu, Dungarees, Chicken, Stray Dogs Come Out at Night.

Pandemic life has opened up opportunities for film festivals to be more accessible, which some, like TIFF, have steadfastly circumvented. I have mixed feeling about the London Film Festival in this regard. While the majority of the programme is screening digitally, only a handful were available with captions. A lot of titles were also available in cinemas, and I’m worried that we might see the health repercussions of that in the coming weeks. The festival also held nationwide screenings for some of their larger titles, so you could watch Ammonite at local independent cinemas throughout the UK. It’s great that more of Britain is getting access to high profile festival screenings that are usually only reserved for insular London. But it leads me to wonder, why only this year, when ‘nationwide cinema event’ is just another way of saying ‘pandemic super spreader’? I hope they make these simultaneous screenings a yearly tradition when it’s safer to do so, rather than just a one-off.

The biggest win at the 2020 London Film Festival, in my book, is the shorts. Not necessarily their quality, but the fact that they were made available to the whole of the UK online, and for free. Plus, all of the ones I watched were captioned. This is the most accessible the shorts programme has ever been, which also means that these films will get more eyes on them than they ever have. It’s another pandemic-era innovation that I hope will continue in future years.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the quality of the shorts was less than stellar — although there were some gems among the bunch. I can’t help but be disappointed after watching through the incredible Canadian shorts at TIFF, which outclassed the feature programme in terms of consistent quality across the board. The talent is out there. Still, myself and contributing writer Ben Flanagan found six films between us that are must-sees. Today is your last day to watch them, so get to it. Orla Smith

Bittu (Karishma Dube, India)

A still of a young girl in Bittu, one of the best short films at LFF 2020.
Bittu is one of the best short films at LFF 2020.

Bittu would make an intriguing double feature with Farnoosh Samadi’s 180° Rule, a feature film that’s also playing at LFF. The protagonists of both films rebel against a patriarchal society and face almost cosmic consequences: a shocking accident occurs that correlates with, but isn’t caused by, their rebellion. In 180° Rule, those consequences are horrific for protagonist Sara; for the young school child Bittu (Rani Kumari) in Bittu, her rebellion is what saves her. 

The first scene of Bittu, in which adult men encourage Bittu and her best friend to dance and sing lewd song lyrics, grounds us in a world where the exploitation of women starts as early as nursery. We follow Bittu during a day at school when she plays joyfully with her friend, gets kicked out of class for misbehaving, and restlessly wanders the school grounds. While Bittu is our focus, in the background, Dube portrays the adults in charge as cold and dismissive of those less powerful than them, whether that’s their employees or the kids in their care. It’s their unwillingness to listen that leads to a fatal accident; it’s Bittu’s questioning of authority that saves her from becoming a victim of their negligence. OS

Chicken (Alana Hicks, Australia)

A still of a young girl and her mother at a checkout counter in Chicken, one of the best short films at LFF 2020.
Chicken is one of the best short films at LFF 2020.

Chicken is probably one of the most purely enjoyable shorts playing at LFF. It’s a short that tackles racism in Australia, set in 1992. But director Alana Hicks foregrounds the wit and smarts of her main character, Barbara (Mariah Alone), a young Black girl whose mother has recently migrated from Papua New Guinea. When Barbara’s mother realises she’s been overcharged at the grocery store, she enlists her whip-smart daughter to go to the store and sort things out. Barbara does so reluctantly since she’s worried she won’t get home in time to watch The Simpsons. 

The film mostly takes place in the store where Barbara engages in a battle of wits with the hostile, racist shopkeeper — a battle Barbara takes pleasure in winning. Hicks has crafted a comedy that’s both funny and sweet. We feel the closeness of Barbara and her mother in how they work together to outsmart the shopkeeper, and we joyfully celebrate their victory together afterwards. OS

Dungarees (Abel Rubinstein, UK)

A still of two boys playing video games in their underwear in Dungarees.
Dungarees is one of the best short films at LFF 2020.

Dungarees is such a lovely, blissful respite from the harsh world and the heavy cinema that reflects it — I’ve seen it twice now, first at BFI Flare, and a second time at LFF, because I couldn’t resist.

At Flare, I wrote: “Abel Rubinstein’s Dungarees, is a charming, casual day-in-the-life study of Blake (Pete MacHale), a gay trans man who, after years spent transitioning and battling gender dysphoria, finally feels comfortable in his masculine presentation. After years of being asked to prove to people that he’s a man, Blake struggles with expressing himself in ways that might be considered feminine, like wearing nail polish. Surrounded by the supportive presences of his boyfriend and sister, we witness Blake take those first steps, during a day of lazing around in bed, playing video games, and having sex.” OS

Gramercy (Jamil McGinnis, Pat Heywood, USA) 

A still of a man in a clearing from Gramercy.
Gramercy is one of the best short films at LFF 2020.

Shaq’s (Shaq Bynes) emotional state on his return to the Louisiana town of Gramercy is delivered, in Jamil McGinnis and Pat Heywood’s Gramercy, through enigmatic signs and symbols. Lo-fi beats, ansafone messages, and chopped-and-screwed passages create a  playful aural and visual palette that represents a young man’s mind filled to bursting with intrusive thoughts. Returning home six months after his brother’s shooting, neither Shaq nor Gramercy slow down to fill in much backstory. Instead, images of bucolic rambling that could be from a dream, and monochrome sequences of reunions with boys from the block render the experience of coming home into a heartbreaking cocktail of excitement, nostalgia, and awkwardness. Gramercy captures spontaneous scenes of celebration and tension; its long takes turn youth rituals into something mythic. Some of the visual symbolism can be on the nose, but this barrage of sumptuous imagery collates it all into a veritable feast of atmosphere. Happy eating. Ben Flanagan

Mandem (John Ogunmuyiwa, UK)

A still off two men eating on the street from Mandem, one of the best short films at LFF 2020.
Mandem is one of the best short films at LFF 2020.

A couple of South London drug dealers drive around, drop off their wares to posh intelligentsia types, flirt with customers, and hang out in a takeaway place. So far, so High Maintenance. But what separates John Ogunmuyiwa’s 10-minute short from HBO’s Hallmark-card vision of gentrified drug consumption is the critique of performative masculinity that runs throughout. 

Moving from customer to customer, with one eruption of violence even seen as just a part of the job between banter sessions, London’s aesthetic beauty is a shield for shifting mores, desires, and social status. Stevie Basaula, an Eastenders actor who plays Malcom, is a serious talent, and his easy chemistry with Bradley Banton’s Ty, builds to a moment of romantic tenderness that is unexpected only because it is so rare to see between these character types. BF

Stray Dogs Come Out At Night (Hamza Bangash, Pakistan)

A still of two men riding a camel in Stray Dogs Come Out at Night
Stray Dogs Come Out at Night is one of the best short films at LFF 2020.

Away from home and now under the auspices of his uncle, Iqbal (Mohammad Ali Hashmi) is a sex worker in the big beachside city of Karachi. He talks to his family on the phone; they ask when he’ll send money, and when he’ll return. Iqbal tells them he’s going to work, but he and his uncle spend the day being tourists at the beach where stray dogs are pervasive. Iqbal has an STD diagnosis that throws everything into jeopardy. How can he return home to look after his wife and community without them knowing about his transmittable disease? What danger is he putting those around him in? 

His uncle shrugs it off: “I’ll send you medicine.” But Iqbal feels like a stray dog, and Hamza Bangash’s short film continually makes questionable parallels between abandoned animals and sex workers. Bangash cuts from a stray meandering on the beach to Iqubal, as he stares at the sea. Other times, Iqbal strolls with his back to camera while the sound of a panting dog is heard. Stray Dogs Come Out At Night brings that parallel together by ending at a moment of change that makes the viewer gasp. Bangash stops there, giving us enough to work out the morality afterwards. BF

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LFF Interview: 180° Rule reveals the secrets and lies of a patriarchal society

Farnoosh Samadi on her provocative new film, 180° Rule, which confronts the horrific consequences of robbing women of their agency. Read more coverage of the London Film Festival.

Director Farnoosh Samadi in front of a still from her film, 180 Degree Rule. The text reads: Interview.
Farnoosh Samadi’s 180° Rule reveals the secrets and lies of a patriarchal society.

When I saw 180° Rule at TIFF, I knew I had to get in touch with writer-director Farnoosh Samadi and pick her brain about what I’d just watched. The film is a meticulously-crafted drama that devolves into a psychological thriller when tragedy strikes partway through. It’s a provocative film, and it’s already polarising critics, but I admire its boldness. I appreciated the film even more after I saw Michel Franco’s New Order at the festival, a film that tries to be provocative by showing grizzly violence, but only comes off as excessive and insulting. Take note, Franco: the complex and harrowing moral choices the protagonist in 180° Rule faces are far more provocative than any of the violence in New Order.

Samadi also co-wrote one of the best short films of the year, Exam, and like that film, 180° Rule is a story of a woman in Iran who suffers under the ever-increasing weight of a dangerous secret. “When I decided to make my first feature film, I thought of making a trilogy about lies, secrets, and their consequences in the lives of the people.” Samadi wrote to me over email. “This is the main idea of my short films, too, and it’s such an important concept to me.” In addition to her three shorts — The Silence (2016), Gaze (2017), and The Role (2018) — Samadi has co-written several films with acclaimed Iranian director Ali Asgari, including the feature film Disappearance (2017). Their latest collaboration, the short film Witness, screened alongside 180° Rule at the London Film Festival. 

In 180° Rule, (which was loosely based on a true story that happened to a friend of hers), we follow school teacher Sara (Sahar Dolatshahi) leading up to and in the wake of a fateful decision: she chooses to defy her husband when he forbids her from going to a family member’s wedding. He was going to accompany Sara and their young daughter on the car journey to the wedding, which would take them out of Tehran and into the countryside. But when a work engagement comes up that clashes with the trip, he decides that if he isn’t going, then nobody is. Dolatshahi plays Sara as a woman who’s weary of patriarchal society but strong-willed all the same; it’s no surprise that she doesn’t take no for an answer. Instead, Sara says goodbye to her husband at the airport, and then drives to the wedding with her daughter, her husband none the wiser. 

A closeup of Sahar Dolatshahi as Sara with a bandage on her head.
Sahar Dolatshahi in Farnoosh Samadi’s 180° Rule.

Samadi described to me the patriarchal society in Iran as “a society that is fighting between tradition and modernism. On one hand, a woman has rights such as working outside, driving, etc., and on the other hand, she needs her husband’s permission for a short trip.” This fight is dramatised through Sara, an opinionated woman who has freedom insofar as she has a job and a driver’s licence, but whose life is still somewhat dictated by her husband. Yes, Sara rebels against him by secretly defying his orders. But the joyful scenes of her enjoying the singing, dancing, and food at the wedding are a pitiful trade-off for the horror, shame, and guilt that follows the next morning. In fact, even in this fairly low-key section of the film, a taut thriller-esque score creates dread that prefigures the hardships Sara is about to face. Samadi told me, she “wanted the audience to feel the panic before discovering the reason.”

I’m skirting around talking about the pivotal plot development that comes 30 minutes into 180° Rule because it’s best you go into the film not knowing the specifics — all the better to experience the same shock and helplessness that Sara feels. “The pace of the film is something close to the reality of our lives,” Samadi wrote to me, elaborating on her decision to include this plot ‘twist’ and whether or not she wants to provoke her audience. “Everything changes very quickly and is chained to the force and regulations of our society… I knew it would be a shocking film from the start. Rewriting each of the key dramatic scenes, I would go through an awful emotional ride and would lose a complete working day before I could get back together. So I think it was obvious to me what it could do to the audience.”

Rather than suggesting that this ‘twist’ is some kind of cosmic punishment that Sara deserves for rebelling, Samadi uses it as an extreme setup through which to explore the horror of being a woman in a society that doesn’t respect your agency. It’s a tragic accident, but it happens at the wedding — if Sara hadn’t rebelled everything would be OK — so the rest of the film grapples with Sara’s responsibility for what happened in the eyes of those around her. The film isn’t too interested in asking whether Sara is at fault or not; she feels immense guilt, but, as her family reassures her, it’s nothing she could have foreseen. Instead, Samadi explores how a society that places moral responsibility on women to do as they’re told breeds shame and guilt and places unfair responsibility — both in the eyes of others and in the eyes of the law — on women.

A family gathers happily together at a wedding, all dressed in white.
Sara’s family at the wedding in Farnoosh Samadi’s 180° Rule.

“In a male-dominant world, us women are left with chests full of secrets and untold stories,” Samadi wrote to me. “It doesn’t end with Iran. In all male-dominant communities, women are under so much suppression and pressure.” This weight lies heavily on Sara throughout the last two acts of 180° Rule; Dolatshahi looks constantly ill and exhausted. Not only is Sara processing the tragedy, she’s also panicking over how to explain it to her husband who will undoubtedly blame her. She settles on an elaborate lie that she can only keep up so long. In Samadi’s words, “We [women] learn to lie because we can’t bear the consequences.” Some viewers may bristle at how extreme and perhaps even callous Sara’s lie is, but as Samadi told me, “We all act differently facing the same circumstances. We might behave strangely because we are raised in different cultures and with various mindsets, so morality may have numerous meanings for us.”

In order to critique patriarchal society writ large, Samadi decided to expand the story to include a parallel story to Sara’s: Sadaf, a pregnant student at Sara’s school, comes to Sara for confidential as Sadaf is afraid of how Sadaf’s family will react to the pregnancy. Like Sara, Sadaf finds herself in a dilemma with no good solution: either ask her family for help and be punished, or deal with it alone and risk harming herself. 

Sara's husband looks toward the camera, concerned.
Sara’s husband in Farnoosh Samadi’s 180° Rule.

Samadi explained, “The story of the young pregnant girl is [related to] the script I wrote for, Disappearance (2017) [directed and co-written by Ali Asgari]. I had the impulse to use my previously-made characters from my other films, so I added the pregnant young girl [to 180° Rule] and chained her story to Sara’s. Even this tiny parallel narration would be a moral challenge for the audience. Which one is right: to say or not to say? I personally love this sub-story. A part of this film is about the mothers and daughters in various ages and their problems in this society: Sara and Raha [Sara’s daughter], Sara and her mother, Sadaf and her mother.”

Farnoosh Samadi is by no means done telling bold and provocative stories about secrets and lies. In fact, she’s planning a trilogy. “When I decided to make my first feature film,” she explained, “I thought of making a trilogy about lies, secrets, and their consequences in the lives of the people. This is the main idea of my short films, too, and it’s such an important concept to me. The story of 180° Rule was long with me, and I thought it was a perfect first episode of the trilogy… Right now, I’m [working on] the next episode of this trilogy. This episode is a psychodrama with a male leading role who is keeping a secret which has enormous [consequences] in his life. The main plot is already done, and I am preparing to start the screenplay.”

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