Hearing the Holocaust in ‘The Zone of Interest’

“Did you hear that?” Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) asks a subordinate in German. They’re riding horses beside a field with tall weeds. We assume he’s referring to the agitated shouts just off-screen. But then he says, “It’s a bittern. A heron. A Eurasian grey heron.” They ride into the field in search of the bird, past the shouting Germans on horses herding along a line of prisoners obscured by the grasses.

When I revisited the scene, I noticed that there is indeed a bird call. It’s an example of what makes Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest (2023) a uniquely devastating Holocaust film. Unlike so many other films about Nazi Germany, the atrocities are all off-screen. It’s set in Auschwitz but we don’t see the internees. But we hear them, and the sounds of the genocidal factory system at work. It’s a rarity in cinema—a purely aural horror film.

The first challenge thrown at the viewer is one of sound: a black, empty screen following the film’s title. For three minutes, Mica Levi’s watery score is the only thing to engage with. After a minute, there’s a sudden cut to the countryside and bright sunlight, as we see the Höss family at a picnic. In an interview to Rolling Stone, Glazer, director of Sexy Beast and Under The Skin, explained how he wanted this to be a kind of guide for the viewer. “It was a way of tuning your ears before you tune your eyes to what you’re about to view. There is the movie you see here—and there is the movie you hear.”

The movie we hear is one of great violence and suffering. The movie we see is pristine, bucolic. The home of the Höss family—Rudolf, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and their five children—is right next door to the concentration camp he’s responsible for running. But they could be separated by an ocean for all it affects them. Hedwig takes tea in the garden, the kids splash in the pool, seemingly immune to the constant din of shouts, screams, barks, and the terrifying low noise of factories and furnaces. 

The visual information is minimal—like the disturbingly beautiful shot of smoke above the treetops from a train bringing in more internees—so one must parse the soundtrack for clues. Mostly Glazer lets the sounds remain indistinct, but on occasion they are audible, and subtitled. One of the Höss boys, maybe three or four, is playing by himself in his room. He hears distant raised voices and, curious, walks to the window. “What’s he done?” someone asks. Fighting over a stolen apple, he’s told. “Drown him in the river,” the voice says. The boy turns back to his room, says to no one in particular: “Don’t do that again.”

Through small, chilling moments, the film shows us how desensitised this family is to the horrors next door. Nearly all of these are built around the work of supervising sound editor Johnnie Burn and his team. In one of the most deserved awards at this year’s Oscars, Burn and Tarn Willers won for Best Sound. There’s a technical complexity and subtlety to the mix that might have impressed voters—scenes like the garden party, with its subtle layering of sounds. But I’d like to think the award was also given to this film because of how it forces the viewer to reckon with the implications of sounds. There's nothing as chilling as when the older brother locks his sibling in the greenhouse, then leers at him and hisses—the sound of the gas chambers.

The film’s boldest formal challenge, arriving towards the end, is at first visual. Without warning, the film jumps from 1943 to the present day, with the camp now a memorial to Holocaust victims. As two workers clean the premises before the day’s visitors arrive, sound again becomes important. The scrape of the brooms and the whine of the vacuum cleaner feel almost unseemly in their matter-of-factness. 

It’s a complex note to end on, to ask if time and familiarity have dimmed the horror of Auschwitz. Do we see—and hear—the signs? Or do we look past, like the Hösses? At the Oscars, hardly anyone gave an indication of hearing or seeing the protests en route to the venue against the war on Gaza. So it was heartening when Glazer, accepting the award for Best International Feature, said: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present—not to say ‘look what they did then’; rather, look what we do now… Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Pressure drop: ‘The Harder They Come’

Watching Bob Marley: One Love last week, I was distracted by a stray mention of Jimmy Cliff. Already exasperated with its cautiousness, I spent the rest of the biopic intermittently dreaming of The Harder They Come. Same era, same sounds, same politics, and yet this 1972 film starring Cliff is as rough and exciting as One Love is polished and inert.

By 1972, Cliff was already a hit artist, with a handful of reggae standards—'Many Rivers To Cross', the protest number ‘Vietnam’—to his name. Filmmaker Perry Henzell approached him with a script inspired by a gangster named Rhygin, who was a local sensation when Cliff was a schoolboy. They hit it off, and decided to work together. Their central character, Ivanhoe, was changed to a musician who takes up the gun. They had a certain type in mind—“an anti-hero in the way that Hollywood turns its bad guys into heroes,” Cliff recalled.

The Harder They Come opens with a near-bus collision, albeit a comic one. It’s a fitting start, for this is a film of constant disagreements and challenges and clashes. The Kingston we see is an endless series of shanty towns, where corrupt cops receive cutbacks from marijuana traders and all but a select few live in grinding poverty. Into this comes Ivan, a young man from the country. He’s a singer with no money or belongings, a hair-trigger temper and a taste for expensive toys.

Ivan manages to cut a record with a producer named Hilton (Bob Charlton), but is disgusted with the pittance he’s offered. He goes to jail after slashing a man with a knife, is humiliatingly flogged as punishment. He becomes a runner for ganja traders—even here he’s dissatisfied with his cut. Once he gets hold of a gun, you know it’s just a matter of time before he’s an outlaw. Ironically, as he gets deeper and deeper in trouble, his song becomes a sensation across the island.

There’s a clue to the kind of film Henzell is making in the early scene where the streetwise José takes Ivan, newly arrived in town, to the pictures. Sergio Corbucci’s Django is playing, the audience delighting in the bloody action. “The hero can’t die till the last reel,” José admonishes one of them. Though it isn’t as pitiless, The Harder They Come has some of the down-and-dirty spirit of a Corbucci western. The hero isn’t a moral man, or even particularly likeable, there’s barely any rule of law, and everyone’s desperate (“a hungry mob is an angry mob,” Bob Marley would sing a few years later). It’s also likely Henzell had his eye on the first rumblings of Blaxploitation in the US. Ivan’s taste for cars, nice clothes, women and guns is more in line with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, both released in 1971, than the western outlaws he models himself on.

For all its debts to the gangster film and the western, The Harder They Come is at heart a musical. The soundtrack is blessedly Marley-free. You have ‘Pressure Drop’ by The Maytals, a track so electrifying it’s used several times in the film. There’s ‘007 (Shanty Town)’ by Desmond Dekker, who had one of the first reggae hits, in 1968, with the haunting Israelites. There’s Cliff’s previous hits ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ and ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, and he sings the title track too. The deepest cut, though, might be Scotty’s ‘Draw Your Brakes’, a dub version of a 1967 rocksteady track. It’s cavernous, atmospheric, druggy and irresistible.

Reggae is mostly characterised as good-time music, but as Lester Bangs wrote in a 1976 piece, this belies the underlying violence. “Many of these records may be little more than a rhythm with a guitar chopping out two or three chords, no solos except a guy hollering things you can barely understand over the whole thing; but that rhythm is rock steady, the guitars chop to kill, and the singer is, often as not, describing class oppression or street war.” Keep this in mind and you’ll find Dekker singing “dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail” or even something as simple as Toots Hibbert accusingly going “It is youuuuuuu” assume a great urgency.

The Harder They Come isn’t a smooth film, but it doesn’t matter because it’s exhilarating. Henzell has an eye for striking images and the quicksilver editing feeds on the chaotic energy of the lead character. It’s on a short list of films—Black Orpheus and Buena Vista Social Club are two others—that introduced the world to an entire musical culture. While this is a wholly deserved reputation, it tends to underrate the effectiveness of the film itself. In moments like the ecstatic church scene with a few mischievous inserts of human desire, or the chase through the ghetto with a group of children cheering on a pistol-brandishing Ivan, The Harder They Come isn’t just a great reggae film but a great film, period.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Time after time: ‘The Delinquents’ and ‘Sixty Minutes’

"We have to find some sort of advantage. Outside, they don’t have any. And in here we have plenty of it. Time.” Morán (Daniel Elías), glowering and bloodied, listens to Garrincha (Germán de Silva) in the prison yard. He’s lingered too long on the communal phone and earned himself a beating. Soon, he’ll be paying a tribute to the old con for the privilege of an ‘easy time’ in prison. It’s unlikely he’s paying attention to the lecture, yet this is the most direct invocation of a central theme in The Delinquents: the passage of time.

Rodrigo Moreno’s 2023 film, streaming on MUBI, goes nowhere fast, in ways that are initially surprising and then beguiling. It’s three hours long, but Moreno doesn’t use the expansive length as many directors might, to add characters and subplots. Instead, there are discursions, repetitions, reveries. Time expands gently, turning our viewing meditative.

The overarching joke is that The Delinquents is, on the face of it, a heist movie. Indeed, the first 24 minutes detail the most leisurely bank robbery you are ever likely to see. Morán, a clerk in a Buenos Aires bank, goes about his day and eventually walks out with $650,000. Later, he meets up with Roman, a colleague from the bank. He tells him about the theft and proposes a deal: he will confess and go to jail for three years, while Roman keeps the money safe and splits it with him when he’s out. Roman isn’t keen but, after some convincing and a casual threat to implicate him, he agrees.

Roman—increasingly nervous to keep the money in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend—takes Morán’s advice and heads to the remote countryside. He stashes the loot there, and on the way back comes across three friendly strangers, who invite him over to share their lunch. He’s immediately infatuated with one of the women, who’s as carefree as he’s careworn. It’s the start of his growing realisation that, with the security of money, he now has time to reflect, even waste. We see him relax, speak ramblingly about a doggerel he once heard, play a geography game.

Visually too, Moreno shows time unfolding unhurriedly. Scenes are allowed to play out as they would in life—a cigarette break, a scooter pursuing a bus. The transitions are uniquely distended, images superimposed for 10, 15 seconds. It might sound like slow cinema but strikes me as more light-footed than what that genre usually offers. There’s Rohmer in the film’s talkiness and sun-kissed photography (by Alejo Maglio and Inés Duacastella), and Rivette and Ruiz in its sense of mischief (the names of five principal characters are anagrams). A revelation kicks off the final third of the film but this is just an excuse for the narrative to loop back in time and start another cycle of gradual self-discovery.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

No Bears: Autofiction at the border

Zara (Mina Kavani) is attending to customers at the Turkish café she works in when she gets a call. She runs to meet a gaunt, tense man, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjeei). They speak in Farsi. He shows her a fake passport he has arranged for her, so she can go to Europe. They have crossed borders illegally before—he tells her this time there will be “no risk, no danger, no death”. But Zara is upset that Bakhtiar is sending her off without arranging a passport for himself. She runs back into the café, leaving him to fret and smoke outside. The camera pans back to him—this has all been one shot—and then a new face pops up in front of the lens. “How was it?” he asks. The next shot reveals the person being addressed, Iranian director Jafar Panahi.

In three of the four feature films he made before No Bears (2022), Panahi presided as a mostly genial master of ceremonies. This Is Not A Film (2011) was made in reaction to the restrictions placed on him by the Iranian government in 2010: house arrest, no travel abroad, no directing or writing scripts. It showed Panahi in his apartment, talking about planned scenes, conferring with associates—all the while insisting he isn’t directing. The satire was extended in Taxi (2015) where, his restrictions relaxed somewhat, Panahi drives around Tehran talking to “passengers” ranging from his DVD supplier to activist Nasrin Sotoudeh. 3 Faces (2018) pushed the boundaries further—Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari travelling to a village to try and help a young woman.

No Bears continues the extraordinary “NotFilm” cycle but changes the direction of inquiry. From the assistant in the opening scene onwards, the film is full of people staring at the camera and asking Panahi increasingly pointed questions. Often, he deflects, or swats away the query. The Panahi of this film isn’t in a great place, literally and emotionally. He’s staying in a rented room in a village on the border with Turkey (“A film-maker banned from leaving the country, sitting on the edge of the border, you could have been recognized and arrested,” his assistant says). An innocent candid photograph he takes causes a scandal: of a young couple who plan to elope, though she has been promised at birth to another. Yet even before that, he’s moody and distracted.

The playfulness of the previous films in the cycle is largely absent. Panahi seems to be asking himself whether he has inadvertently caused others to suffer by making films about his troubles. Not only does the question of the photograph consume the village, Panahi’s film shoot, on the other side of the border, is barely holding itself together. The actors in the film-within-a-film are playing characters based on their own lives and are actually planning to flee with fake passports (Iranian cinema revels in this sort of meta-commentary). Even though his actors are plainly suffering, Panahi keeps filming. It’s not a flattering self-portrait.

Yet, it’s also important to remember that this is not documentary but autofiction. Flight from the country seems to have been a hot topic in the Panahi household around then—Jafar’s son, Panah, made his own directorial debut in 2021 with Hit The Road, about an Iranian family driving to the Turkish border to smuggle their older son across. In No Bears, Panahi’s midnight drive to the border is immediately set upon and discussed by the villagers and, we later learn, the authorities. As one of the locals speculates, “You don’t come to the border unless you’re up to something fishy.”

Though Panahi is as much interrogated as interrogator in the film, he hasn’t stopped needling the authorities for their obstruction to his art. In the film, he insists he hasn’t taken a photograph of the young couple but the locals aren’t satisfied. It’s not difficult to see a parallel to the Iranian state’s treatment of Panahi: vague, sinister charges drummed up for taking a few pictures. The corruption of the whole process comes to a head when Panahi is asked to take a ceremonial oath. An elder tells him conspiratorially, “Even lying is acceptable, as long as it’s for peace-making.”

The film returns Panahi to the tension and paranoia of Closed Curtain (2013), a stylistic and conceptual outlier in his post-This Is Not A Film work. The sense of profound unease running through No Bears had a grim coda in real life. About a month after production wrapped, he was arrested when he went to inquire about an imprisoned director, Mohammad Rasoulof. He spent the next six months in prison. It was only after he went on hunger strike that he was released. In the meantime, No Bears played at the Venice Film Festival.

Worried about taking a desolate road alone at night, Panahi asks his companion, “What about the bears?” There aren’t any, the man replies, just made-up tales. “Our fear empowers others. No bears!” Panahi’s films, with their logical, humane, witty gaze, are all about dispelling myths. He may not have chosen to make so many self-reflexive films, to turn the camera on himself repeatedly. His predicament is our gain. The cycle from This Is Not A Film to No Bears is something unique in the entirety of cinema.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.  

The Dupes: A classic of Arab cinema tackles the Palestine question

The Dupes opens with a close-up of a human skeleton and the distant figure of someone making their way across the burning desert. The credits end with the warning: “A man without a country will have no grave in the earth.” Tewfik Saleh’s film is wedded to death from the start, a scorching blast from a time when the Palestine question was no less tragic but perhaps more hopeful.

It has been almost three weeks of relentless bombing of Gaza by Israel, with no signs of an end. More than 6,000 Palestinians have died but there is no time to dig graves. The dire situation of Palestine charges the already fraught atmosphere of Saleh’s 1972 film, which is playing as part of the Restored Classics section at the Mumbai Film Festival (27 October-5 November). It’s based on a 1963 novella by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, Men In The Sun, about three Palestinian refugees who undertake a fraught journey from Basra in Iraq across the border to the promised land of Kuwait.

The Dupes was one of the first films to take a definitive pro-Palestine stance. Director Saleh was Egyptian and the film was funded by Syria’s National Film Organization. There are no Israeli characters in the film, though mentions of Zionists are frequent. The Arab nations are also criticised, both as historical actors and as part of the film’s plot. There’s a brilliant montage of still images showing political leaders in the aftermath of the 1948 Naqba that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Abou Keïss’ narration over this speaks of the betrayal of his people: “Talks, talks, talks… discussing nonsense… They bought you and sold you. You have been waiting 10 years over their words. For nothing. You have the Zionists before you and the traitors behind.”

Abou Keïss (Mohamed Kheir-Halouani) is the oldest of the three refugees, the only one with clear memories of the Naqba. Assaad (Bassan Lofti Abou-Ghazala) is the most charismatic of the trio, a young man on the run for his part in armed struggles. And there’s baby-faced schoolboy Marwan (Saleh Kholoki), whose father has divorced his mother and left him with the responsibility of providing for his mother and three siblings. These three converge on a corrupt smuggler in Basra, the closest this film comes to comic relief (there are no song sequences either—unusual for an Arab film of that era—though there’s a haunting a cappella refrain sung by a boatman). The smuggler is discarded in favour of Palestinian Abou Kheizarane (Abderrahman Alrahy), less shady and charging less to get them across the border.

There’s a catch, though. Abou Kheizarane drives a water tanker for a rich patron. His plan hinges on the trio getting into the tanker at the two border checkpoints and sitting quietly for the six minutes it will take for him to get the formalities done. In the 50 degrees Celsius desert heat, this is not a sauna (as Abou Kheizarane jokingly calls it) but a potential death trap. The expertly ratcheted tension recalls another great film about four men and a truck, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages Of Fear (1953). There’s also the possible influence of The Battle Of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s revolutionary 1966 film: in Bahgat Heider’s high-contrast black and white photography with its haunting faces, and the way Salhi El Wadi’s score resembles Ennio Morricone’s at times.

Through disruptive, associative editing, Saleh conveys a sense of perpetual displacement that matches the characters’ own experiences. A flashback with Abou Kheizarane in a hospital cuts abruptly to a black screen, lit a second later with the striking of a match. Abou Keïss lifts a handful of rich soil as a happy younger man; when he puts it down, he’s an old, broken refugee. Sometimes the editing is on allegorical lines: Two separate conversations with Assad are cross-cut, both involving foreigners and about rats.

Throughout the film, there are reminders of how little has changed in the lives of the Palestinian people. The radio is “a prophet… (that sows) the seeds of nonsense”. Abou Keïss wonders whether he should have accepted defeat and eaten “the flour of the UNRWA”. Above all, there is the idea the film begins with: people on the move, without a country. In an interview on 24 October in The Drift magazine, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, says: “Nobody who’s kicked out is ever allowed to return. Every Arab, every Palestinian knows that. Nobody driven into Egypt will ever come back to Gaza or any other part of Palestine. Most of these people, of course, have already been displaced.” The Dupes gives us a glimpse into the lives of the first generations of displaced Palestinians, at a time when so many others are being violently forced to accept a similar fate.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.  

Watching ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ after ‘Oppenheimer’

“These things are hard on your heart.” Seconds before the “Trinity” nuclear test, its architect, J. Robert Oppenheimer, utters these haunting words. It’s a pivotal moment in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, even though it’s not readily clear what the director of the Manhattan Project is referring to. The unbearable tension of the test? The pre-emptive guilt of dropping an atomic bomb? Or does he choose this moment to think of the woman he loved and let down, whose shadow looms over the film?

It’s one of the few lines in Oppenheimer that could have been from another, very different film about the shadow of the atomic bomb. This is Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, a 1959 film that also has a sad, sensual affair at its heart. It was a co-production: French and Japanese studios produced the film. It was decided that one of the central characters would be French, the other Japanese; Eiji Okada, who didn’t speak French but was willing to learn, and Emmanuelle Riva were cast. The camerapersons were Sacha Vierny, who had shot Resnais’ acclaimed 1956 concentration camp documentary, Night And Fog, and Michio Takahashi. 

It has one of the most charged beginnings in cinema history. Giovanni Fusco’s cerebral ostinato theme plays over the opening credits. Then we see two intertwined bodies, in a series of close-ups. Sand (or could it be radioactive ash?) falls on them. We don’t see the faces, only fragments of bodies, glistening with sweat. Then a man’s voice is heard on the soundtrack. “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” A woman counters: “I saw everything. Everything.”

It’s telling that Hiroshima Mon Amour starts with both repetition and contradiction. Through the film, the unnamed couple speak in epigrams, often circling back to previous statements and contradicting each other or themselves. “You’re destroying me. You’re good for me…. I waited for you calmly, with boundless impatience,” the woman says. Much of the script, by novelist Marguerite Duras and Resnais, is spoken by Riva in voice-over, in a hushed, dream-like tone (the director wanted an “incantatory” quality). It’s worth remembering that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot was five years old then, its unsettling, fragmented dialogue still a recent revelation. As in the play, Resnais’ woman can’t seem to leave Hiroshima, even though she keeps saying she wants to. A bar called Casablanca reinforces the idea: Michael Curtiz’s 1942 film is, after all, about a place where different races meet and can’t get out of (both films also have flashbacks to a pivotal episode in France). 

There’s more Beckett in Hiroshima Mon Amour than may seem likely at first. When she recounts her doomed affair with a German soldier in Nevers in occupied France, the woman addresses her old lover as “you”, though she’s talking to her Japanese lover. It’s almost like she’s watching a film of her younger days (the impetus may have been practical, but having different cinematographers work on the French and Japanese portions deepens this impression). In Samuel Beckett And Cinema, Anthony Paraskeva writes about the film and Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958): “Divided voice and image, or speech and gesture, creates in Krapp, as it does in Hiroshima, an effect of split consciousness which allows the protagonist to watch and listen to themselves, or versions of themselves, as though they were someone else.”

The basic plot in Hiroshima Mon Amour is as simple as Oppenheimer’s is complicated: A married Frenchwoman has an affair with a married Japanese man while shooting an anti-war film in Hiroshima. Over the course of two days, they meet, part, meet up again, and she tells him about her past. Yet, the film itself is a tangle of overlapping memories and incomplete narrations, the past bleeding into the present. Even the past is divided between the woman’s actual past and the one she feels she lived in Hiroshima—a hospital with deformed victims, a museum dedicated to the attacks—though the latter is probably impressions gathered from films (“I saw the newsreels. I saw them. Of the first day, the second day, the third day”). Accompanying her voice-over, Resnais uses images from Japanese films about the bomb, edited skilfully so they blend into Takahashi’s work. 

Oppenheimer’s success has brought with it debate about the responsibilities of a film on the bomb—whether it should have included Japanese “voices” or shown the actual attacks. I think it’s more provocative for Nolan to have made a film from Oppenheimer’s perspective, one that shows him and other scientists discussing the bomb almost as an abstraction, and which crackles with the seductive beauty of nuclear science. Resnais’ film has its own provocations. Watching Hiroshima Mon Amour even as I was still thinking about Oppenheimer made me wonder how audiences today might feel about a film in which a white foreigner appears to make Hiroshima “about herself” (“…the beginning of an unknown fear for us as well. And then indifference. And fear of indifference as well.”) She’s calmly contradicted by her lover but has the last word when she calls him Hiroshima, thus giving the film its title. I can’t imagine a comparable scene in a European film with a lover being called “Auschwitz”. 

Resnais’ film is ultimately less about the bomb than it is about living in the post-Hiroshima world, where nuclear war is not only possible but likely and all survival comes with a certain amount of guilt. The words “remember” and “forget” recur through the film. “I’ll think of this story as of the horror of forgetting,” the woman says about her time in Nevers. And later, to the Japanese man: “I’ll forget you. I’m forgetting you already! Look how I’m forgetting you!” For Oppenheimer, there is no forgetting. Nolan’s film ends with him convinced that he has started something that can’t be stopped. Duras’ words  are just as ominous. “It will begin again.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Outside the frame: Davy Chou on ‘Return to Seoul’

From the moment we see Freddie, eyes shining, impossible to read before she has even said a word, she occupies the film’s centre. But what an unstable centre it is, and what a mercurial performance by Park Ji-min, always on the move, keeping the world guessing.

In 2011, director Davy Chou accompanied his friend Laure Badufle, a French woman, on a trip to meet her biological Korean father. From that sprung Return To Seoul all these years later, a wonderful film about a young French woman, Freddie, given up for adoption by her parents in Korea at a young age. The film catches up with her after intervals of time as her attitudes to life, relationships, Korea and her birth parents undergo subtle changes. Chou’s visuals carry an echo of other neon-soaked Asian films about dislocated youth, such as Rebels Of The Neon God (1992) and Millennium Mambo (2001). We spoke to the French-Cambodian director about his mercurial star and some unlikely inspirations. Edited excerpts:

 The film grew out of a trip your friend made to meet her birth father.

She invited me to go with her. We met her biological father and grandma. It’s a scene that really stayed with me. I kept thinking about it. When I was looking for a project in 2017, I recalled that moment. I told my friend that I was thinking of making a film about this and she was immediately very enthusiastic. She shared information with me, about her life and her relationship with South Korea. That was the starting point of the film.

Did you have her sign off on the script?

Yeah, but I have to say honestly, there was some kind of apprehension to find the right moment to share it. She was not asking, so I procrastinated. I waited till a final version to show it to her. I think I was afraid she would be disappointed, which is possible when it’s your life. Luckily, she was very positive in her first reading.

Park Ji-min had never acted before. Did she take some convincing to step into a part that had resonances with her own life?

It wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to be pushy because I felt if I was, she will step back. There was a progressive attempt to know each other, talking about the script. I was not so concerned about her not being able to act because she very quickly showed natural skills.

She was born in Korea and moved to France when she was nine; she calls herself Korean. So it was a bit different from the character. With me, for example, I talk for one minute and you can see I didn’t grow up in Asia. I didn’t want people to watch the film and say, she didn’t grow up in France. I was worried that Ji-min looks too Korean. But she trusted that she could slip into character and work on the little details.

There’s a fascinating scene at a bar. She takes control and starts bringing strangers together at one table...

There are different ways of interpreting that. I wanted to show that she does have a social force, this charisma. She feels pressurised by her friends telling her what she should do, which she hates. She needs to counter. The idea of control is very important because she never had it in the first part of her life, being sent to another country.

There’s also a question of territory. She’s coming for the first time to a place that maybe seems hostile because it rejected her. So she takes control of the territory by deciding who will sit where. She remakes the map of the restaurant. That might seem small but she has this survival instinct of remapping.

There are metaphoric layers as well. She’s arriving as French girl, very sure of herself. French tourists in countries like these—sorry for the generalisation, which I will make only because I am French—sometimes have this neocolonial behaviour of thinking everything belongs to them. So there’s a layer of Freddie having this French arrogance.

Even before that, she doesn’t allow her friends to pour her drinks: another way of saying I am not Korean.

Yes, certainly. Anyone going to Korea has this experience of being explained who will pour. Her not doing it is like, woah.

I know Freddie is not an easy character. But at the end of the film, whether you like or hate her, I hope viewers understand where this anger comes from.

As someone who was left early on in life, it seems important to her as a grown-up to be able to leave, whether it’s cities, conversations, relationships…even the film frame.

Two things to say on that. When you say she wants to be able to leave anytime—that’s correct. The film that changed my life when I was 12 was Heat by Michael Mann. I watched it maybe 100 times. Neil McCauley’s philosophy of life is, whatever happens, you need to be able to leave. Like Neil McCauley, Freddie is lonely but her survival instinct is telling her this the only thing she can do.

On what you said about her leaving the frame: The idea is, Freddie absolutely refuses to be labelled. Everyone tries to put identities and definitions on her—her family, her new family, her friends. So my idea was this rebellious spirit of hers will try to not be framed by the camera. I got inspired by a few films that have this kind of meta aspect. One was Carlito’s Way (1993) by Brian De Palma. Carlito is a dancer, in one-two moves he’s always out and the editing and the camera need to reframe him.

The most illustrative scene in my film is the dancing scene. There was no choreography. Ji-min could do whatever she wanted. And we were there with the camera, trying to catch her.

That scene reminded me of the dances in Philippe Garrel films, which seem to have no centre.

The dance scene in Regular Lovers (2005) is one of my favourites. I don’t think I followed it (in Return To Seoul) but the films that you love are here with you.

Ji-Min has an unpredictable quality as an actor, which feeds into the character’s impulsiveness.

It’s a strange coincidence, which I would call a miracle, that the one actress I wanted to play the character, who retrospectively feels like the only one who could play her, had this kind of unpredictability herself. She was always challenging me. When you are young and making films, you have a lot of people telling you, that’s the way we do things. Sometimes you just accept it. But she had no reason to accept it because she was not an actress, she didn’t expect to be acting after this.

(Director) Claire Denis saw the film and said what impressed her most was she could see the actress resisting the film. Which is what happened—although Ji-min had a great relationship and are best friends today. I wasn’t so aware of this on set because you want to be in control as a director. But I see the traces of that struggle in the film, and that’s very special.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Once Upon a Time In China's secret ingredient

In the early days of cable TV in India, which were my early days as well, two credit sequences set my imagination on fire. The first was Chariots Of Fire (1981), for the Vangelis theme, of course, but also Nigel Havers’ beatific smile registering among the serious runners on the beach. The other was also a beach scene, also partly in slow motion, with a theme song almost as catchy. This was from Tsui Hark’s Once Upon A Time In China (1991), a phalanx of bare-chested martial club students executing a series of strenuous, eye-catching workouts.

By the time the 1990s got under way, Hong Kong film-maker Tsui Hark had already made cult favourite Zu Warriors From Magic Mountain (1983) and the masterful Peking Opera Blues (1986) and produced John Woo’s heroic bloodshed classics A Better Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989). In 1991, he embarked on the project he’s arguably most associated with today, a six-film cycle chronicling the adventures of medic and martial artist Wong Fei-hung in late 19th century Foshan. It made a star of Jet Li, who played Wong in the first three films (he was replaced by Vincent Zhao in the fourth and fifth instalments). The final entry, Once Upon A Time In China And America (1997), which predates Jackie Chan’s kung fu Western Shanghai Noon (2000), was directed by Sammo Hung, with Li back in the lead. 

Wong Fei-hung was an actual medicine man and folk hero who died in 1925. Films on his life started being made in 1948 and never let up. Audiences in 1991 would have been familiar with Jackie Chan’s comic portrayal of Wong in the classic Drunken Master (1978) and perhaps even Gordon Liu in  Challenge of the Masters (1976) and Martial Club (1981). Li’s performance was strikingly different, though. While the films are fairly comedic, the humour doesn’t derive from Wong. Instead, Li presents him as a figure of immense dignity, formally polite and painfully conscientious. This makes Wong the perfect straight man to chaotic disciple Leung Foon (and Bucktooth So and Porky Wing in the first film) and the hapless object of Yee Siu-kwan’s affections. 

Unlike the strictly fight-oriented Chan and Liu films, Hark makes use of a historical period of great ferment in China, turning the films into riotous time capsules. Once Upon A Time In China I begins with French troops mistaking firecrackers during a ceremonial lion dance for an attack and returning fire; Wong jumps in and continues the dance himself. There are also Americans (running a human trafficking ring), British (ineffectual in II) and Russians (plotting to assassinate the empress in III). But for all the nationalistic satisfaction of clobbering or bettering foreign adversaries, the primary antagonists in the three Hark-Li films are Chinese. In I, it’s the nefarious Shaho gang and a wandering kung fu master they enlist. In Canton-set II, it’s the psychotic White Lotus sect, out to destroy all things foreign, and a wily military officer played by Donnie Yen. And in the third film, which unfolds in Beijing, it’s Chiu Tin-bak, a gangster bent on winning the lion dance martial arts competition.

Hark’s eye for scale and colour and Li’s poise and economy of movement combine to make these some of the most pleasurable martial arts films ever made. The legendary Yuen Woo-ping was enlisted to choreograph the fights in the first two films. The second film is legendary for the face-offs between Li and Yen. The climactic fight, with the actors balancing high in the air on a flimsy bamboo structure while wielding long poles, is rated as of the greatest in martial arts cinema. I also love their first meeting: Yen tosses Li a bamboo stick, and, without any warning, starts whacking away at him. This continues for a ferocious minute or so before Yen stops and says, “I just wanted to spar with you a little.” As is usually the case with Hark, the scene is capped with an extra payoff. A couple of spectators grumble that the pole Wong struck during the fight didn’t even move, let alone splinter. Foon walks up to the pole and touches it. The rope around it uncoils and it breaks in two.

Revisiting the Hark-Li films made me realise the series has a secret weapon that has nothing to do with kung fu—Rosamund Kwan as the foreign-returned Yee Siu-kwan, a character invented for the films, whom Wong insists on addressing formally as “13th Aunt” (Siu-kwan’s father was a blood brother of Wong’s grandfather). As the one romantic foil, she spends a lot of time being rescued by Wong. Yet, Yee’s curiosity and pluck means she’s rarely far from the action herself. She’s at her most useful in III, where her dedication to her motion picture camera—we see her graduate from still camera to film over the course of the trilogy—ends up foiling the assassination plot. 

Tsui Hark films often play like screwball comedy—Peking Opera Blues is perhaps the finest example. In the Once Upon films, Kwan is best suited to pull this off, the lone actor in a cast of action specialists. She doesn’t have their physical quickness but makes up for it with an ever-changing array of expressions. In the classic screwball sense, 13th Aunt is a great match for Wong: she’s chaotic and modern, he’s methodical and square. His inability to recognise her attraction to him, and then his panicked dodging of that attraction, takes up a large part of the three films, but never gets old. 

None of this could work without Kwan’s endless good cheer in the face of constant frustration. When Wong finally comes around at the end of the third film, Hark frames this with the momentousness it deserves. Wong, who thinks Yee has left forever, sees her across the room. He calls out to her, using her real name, not 13th Aunt. He then runs towards her, the shot of scurrying feet a neat parody of kung fu films. To the surprise of everyone in the room, most of all Yee, he lifts her up and whirls her in a most un-Wong-like fashion. Kwan laughs in delight, then looks shocked, relieved, exhausted and content. A few seconds that sum up an indelible performance.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

EO: A vivid update on the most famous of donkey films

A beautifully off-kilter moment at the Cannes Film Festival last year was when Jerzy Skolimowski was awarded the Jury Prize for his film, EO. “I would like to thank my donkeys,” he began his acceptance speech. The Polish director proceeded to list, by region, with great care, all six donkeys who played the titular character in his film. He ended with a bray: “Eeeeoo”.

In telling the story of a donkey navigating a corrupt, venal, violent human world, Skolimowski tips his hat to a film over five decades old. Au Hasard Balthazar, directed by Robert Bresson, is often cited as one of the greatest films ever made. A donkey named Balthazar is separated from the only human who loves it, Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), and passes from one cruel owner to another. The Balthazar of legend was one of three Magi in the Bible—given Bresson’s Catholic upbringing, it’s no surprise that the donkey Balthazar’s sufferings have a Christ-like aspect.

EO is immediately recognisable as an update on Au Hasard Balthazar—the same essential story with a few tweaks. EO starts the film as part of a travelling circus in Poland. He has a close bond with the performer Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), whose act he’s part of. When animal rights activists shut down the circus, he’s taken to a horse stable, then to a petting farm, and so on. Whatever new situation EO finds himself in, he remains unhappy and listless. In flashbacks, we seem to see him remember his time with Kasandra.

Yet, Skolimowski’s film also has its own concerns and vision. Bresson was interested in Balthazar as an allegory and an object of pity but no real affection for the animal comes through in his film. Skolimoswki, on the other hand, is clearly enamoured of these gentle creatures. The religious overtones of Bresson are gone, replaced by a protagonist so sympathetic we feel we can read his thoughts. In one scene, Kasandra has a touching reunion with EO across a fence on his birthday in the dead of night. As she’s driven away by her friend, she hears a long bray in the distance. It’s a heartrending sound—or it could be me projecting my feelings onto a regular bray.

Skolimowski seems fascinated by nature in general, filling his film with fields, farms, snowy mountains, forests. He gives over long sequences to horses running in a field at dusk or nocturnal creatures watching the donkey by a stream by moonlight. Au Hasard Balthazar was set in a human world, with multiple speaking characters and storylines. EO, by contrast, is a largely wordless film. The humans are of little importance here, barely registering as characters (including the countess played by Isabelle Huppert). Michał Dymek’s camera is often right up against the animals. This is the donkey’s story, and, often, we are literally seeing the world from his point of view.

I knew Skolimowski from his work as an actor and a writer: a small but memorable turn as a boxer in Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers (a film he co-wrote), the dialogue for Roman Polanski’s Knife In The Water, a part in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. But he has also been a director since 1960’s The Menacing Eye, with over 20 films, notably Deep End, starring Jane Asher, and The Departure, Golden Bear winner at the 1967 Berlinale. EO isn’t the kind of work you would expect from an 80-something film-maker—the acid tinges are more like something Carlos Reygadas or Gaspar Noé might attempt. Had EO released in the 1960s, it would have been called a “head trip”. Sometimes the screen turns dark red or blue, like colourised silent film; sometimes strobe lights flash. There are interludes that come out of nowhere—why are we suddenly following a robot dog in a field? The images bend and warp on occasion, as if we are seeing through an animal’s eyes. Dymek works subtler wonders as well—there’s a trick shot towards the end when the donkey and the trees in the back seem to blend into one.

One particular sequence made me smile at the audacity of the film-making. EO is jogging across the wilderness when the camera takes off. It zooms over a forest towards a menacingly scything windmill, does a 360-degree loop and then another, the soundtrack switching from strings to grinding electric guitar. It ends with EO under the giant windmill, the sky a hellish red, like an F.W. Murnau horror frame.

EO is a strange mix: part eco-horror, part morality tale, part psychedelic freakout. Somehow Skolimowski, his co-writer and wife, Ewa Piaskowska, Dymek and inventive composer Paweł Mykietyn make it work, continually finding ways to expand their canvas, though always returning to their determined little protagonist. One of EO’s many escapes comes when an Italian priest finds him by the roadside. “Did I just save you or have I stolen you?” he muses as he unties the rope attached to a pole. “I hope you’re not a criminal,” he adds. It’s in keeping with EO’s philosophy that the priest is actually sinning and the donkey is the only one who’s wholly innocent.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Meet the new boss

Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) is being reprimanded by his boss (Nobuo Kaneko), head of the Yamamori crime family in Hiroshima, for picking a fight with a distant cousin of a yakuza elder. The tough-as-nails Hirono offers to perform yubitsume—to cut off his little finger as penitence. When the boss leaves the room, the scene turns comic. As one of the gangsters asks, “Are you really going to do it?”, another glances, with perfect timing, at his own hand, as if contemplating whether he would be able to. No one knows how the ceremony is done until the boss’ wife offers instruction. The cutting is grisly but then there’s another layer of farce as the finger goes missing, eventually being retrieved from a hen coop.

Even the elder in whose name the sacrifice is made is surprised when Yamamori takes him the severed finger. “You didn’t have to go this far,” he says. “It was just a quarrel between hot-blooded youth.” This passage from Battles Without Honor And Humanity (1973) flies in the face of a decade or more of Japanese gangster films that emphasised the importance of rituals like yubitsume. By treating a genre mainstay like a joke and a meaningless gesture, director Kinji Fukasaku is bluntly saying that the old rules no longer apply. Tradition is only useful as far as it helps the powerful retain power. Cutting off one’s finger has as much meaning as the pledges of honour and chivalry that once meant so much to yakuza.

In the 1960s, the Japanese studio Toei churned out ninkyo eiga, or “chivalry films”. The yakuza in these films were updates on samurai, bound by codes of honour. Nikkatsu, meanwhile, dealt in a highly entertaining style called “borderless action”, which borrowed from America and Europe to make stylistically arresting gangster films. Fukasaku had been making features since 1961, including several for Toei. “The first film of mine that I felt really successfully blended the documentary feel with the fictitious drama was Street Mobster,” he said in an interview of a 1972 film starring Sugawara. This new style would explode in Battles and its four sequels, the ‘Yakuza Papers’ series that he made in a creative burst over 1973-74.

Battles Without Honor And Humanity was a challenge to both the Nikkatsu and Toei gangster styles. That this was no ninkyo eiga should have been clear from the title. Fukasaku’s gangsters are cowardly, self-serving, unreliable, scheming. Hirono still carries certains ideas of yakuza honour, but he's also a man out of time, repeatedly sacrificing himself for a craven boss who doesn’t care about him. Fukasaku also changed the way gangster films looked in Japan. Unlike the stylish Nikkatsu films, the action in Battles is brutal and chaotic, shot with hand-held camera, lending it the feel of documentary (the director was inspired by the newsreels of student protests at the time). The first image in the film is the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb: both a newsreel still, and the destruction of an old world. The hard, desperate world that emerged after World War II is the one in which Fukasaku’s film is set (screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara adapted a series of articles by journalist Kōichi Iiboshi, which in turn were based on the memoirs of a real-life yakuza in Hiroshima).

The opening 10 minutes have some of the most kinetic, brutal film-making you can imagine. There’s an attempted rape, two dismemberments, a police raid, a chase, a shooting. Barely have you caught your breath than there’s a massive prison brawl, followed soon after by a gangster cutting open his stomach as a means of getting out of prison (the doctors aren’t equipped to patch him up). Occasionally, the action will pause on a freeze-frame of a character with his name and the position, present or future, he will occupy in the crime business (Quentin Tarantino, a big Fukasaku fan, used this device in Inglourious Basterds). When the camera isn’t whirling around, Fukasaku films his suited and hatted gangsters in crowded tableau. Someone’s always doing something in these scenes—I was reminded of the packed frames in Pa. Ranjith’s Sarpatta Parambarai (2021)—a clue to personality or plot or just a throwaway gesture.

Fifty years on, Battles has become part of the DNA of gangster film. It started the trend of jitsuroku eiga (actual record film) in Japan; such was its popularity that Fukasaku started a separate series, ‘New Battles Without Honor And Humanity’, with an unrelated storyline, in 1974. Fukasaku continued to influence Japanese directors—Takashi Miike made his own version of Fukasaku’s Graveyard Of Honor (1975). In 2009, the magazine Kinema Junpo placed Battles fifth on a list of top 10 Japanese films of all time. Fukasaku’s influence extended beyond his own shores: His swan song, Battle Royale, was a precursor to the Hunger Games films and his jitsuroku eiga have inspired others as The Battle Of Algiers (1966) once inspired him.

An Indian film that might owe something directly to the Yakuza Papers is Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs Of Wasseypur. Like Fukasaku’s series, this 2012 film tracks the development of independent India over several decades through the prism of gang wars. There’s a similarity to the way both films use a clipped, unemotional voice-over, as well as documentary footage that grounds the action in a specific time and place (though Kashyap’s film is a lot more stylistically extravagant than Fukasaku’s).

Towards the end of the film, Hirono is sent to kill a former colleague, Sakai, but is captured. Sakai tells him to go, though, saying: “I can’t kill you today. Some other day.” Soon after, Sakai is shot in a market. Hirono turns up at his funeral, to everyone’s surprise, and shoots the “tributes” laid out in his honour. It’s a parting bullet in the body of orthodoxy. And not to forget, there are four films to go, so much more tradition to be violently severed.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Lukas Dhont on 'Close'

Before Close turns devastating, it unfolds in a kind of luminous hush. Director Lukas Dhont films Eden Dambrine, playing Léo, and Gustav De Waele, playing Rémi, in fields of blooming dahlias, and in soft golden light indoors. The two of them talk unhurriedly, tenderly. However, there’s a sense that it cannot last; this softness isn’t something we are used to seeing, in films or in our lives. Soon, their schoolmates ask them point blank if they are a couple. This question knocks their world on its axis, with Léo in particular reluctant to put a label to the relationship. 

This is Dhont’s second feature after Girl (2018), about a trans girl who wants to be a ballerina. Close, which releases on MUBI this weekend, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, winning the Grand Prix. It was later nominated for an Academy Award for International Feature. We spoke to the Belgian director over Zoom about his use of colour, using flower cultivation to show the passage of time, and why he regards his leads as co-authors. Edited excerpts:

Does it bother you that films like yours, both intimate character studies, are often evaluated in terms of broad statements on an issue?

First of all, you are right that what we show is a specific character with a specific experience that looks at the world through one pair of eyes. I think too often when we see one experience presented, we want it to be all experiences. So I resonate with that. But, on the other hand, I do think this film started from a more general political desire—there was this realisation for me that when it comes to expectations around masculinity, for the longest time we have been focusing more on men fighting with each other rather than finding intimacy within the masculine universe. The first desire was to really see the sort of connection between young men that is filled with tenderness and physicality without it having to be linked to their sexuality. I think we sexualise intimacy very easily. So if the film is, on the one hand, deeply personal and deeply specific, I think it has also always been a quest to make it somehow connected to all of us.

It reminded me at times of Ken Loach’s ‘Kes’, especially the sensitivity of the boys, and the casually brutal depiction of sports. 

Yeah, and I love that film. I think it’s an extraordinary portrait of the pressures that we feel from very young. When we went to look for portraits of that fragile age in the history of cinema, it was definitely one of the films that we saw. We, of course, also saw The 400 Blows (1959), Ratcatcher (1999), The Kid With A Bike (2011). It was very interesting seeing all these pieces on young male life. One thing we felt was underrepresented was the importance that boys find in other boys, this sort of connectedness, this tenderness.

Did your lead actors find each other naturally or did you put them together?

Our casting process was quite specific. We would work with groups of around 20-25 boys. We would organise a sort of workshop in which we would give them small exercises. Many of them had never acted before, had never done a casting before, so they were finding out whether they liked it. 

With Eden and Gustav, by coincidence they were in the same group. What was really remarkable is that they were immediately at eye level. It was clear from the beginning that a horizontal collaboration between them would be absolutely possible, maybe even a friendship. And that is unexplainable—you have that with some and you absolutely don’t have that with others. For us, it was important because we knew that so much of this film depends on the connection of the two main protagonists. 

You have said you treated the actors as co-authors. What does this look like in practice?

The boys read the script at the very last stage of casting. I think you have to imagine the script as a sort of choreography. It’s a full script with text and everything but not everything is pronounced precisely. We had very open conversations with them about masculinity because they are two young men. It was often a philosophical—though they are not aware it’s philosophical—conversation with them. Then I asked them to never read the script again. And they loved that, because their biggest fear was that they would have to study a text—in this case, 90 pages—by heart, which is something they have to do in school and which blocks, in many ways, every form of creativity. So from the moment they understood that it’s not going to be like that, they became active, because they had to remember parts of what they read, and at the same time fill in the blanks they did not remember. 

In the six months we rehearsed before the shoot, I would try to make them detectives, in the sense that I would ask questions like, why do you think Léo would not wait for his friend at this moment in time? And I wouldn’t give them my answer; they could make up their own. So what I saw happening is they felt more and more confident to take the lead in their own performance, because they understood that I am not going to dictate what I want them to say, but that it’s actually more about them speaking from a place that is authentic for them. This was not built immediately, this was something that had to be constructed and given time, but from the moment I felt we were there, I knew that our rehearsals were done.

There were other things that happened in those six months as well—for example, after the first month, I brought in the camera, because I wanted to arrive at this complete transparency between them and someone in the audience. I wanted them to get so used to the camera that it becomes this sort of organic object. Confidence takes for each person a different amount of time. Eden was faster in that confidence than Gustav, so it was just about giving them their personal time to arrive there. 

You use colour strikingly in the film. The first thing I recall about many scenes is a particular colour. 

Creativity for me has always been very linked to colour. My mother is a teacher but in her free time she would paint, so whenever I was next to her I always saw this very expressive use of colour. It’s something she passed on to me. 

I went to a film school that combined documentary and fiction. I have a very documentary approach when working with actors but a very stylistic approach when it comes to visuals. When I work with the cinematographer around the different spaces and tonalities throughout a film, we spend a lot of time working on the colour scheme of the piece. 

For example, I knew that in the middle of the film, there was a central image that needed to have impact, that needed to refer to a sense of violence, but which I didn’t want to be violent. I wanted an image that is concrete and, on the other hand, sparks the imagination profoundly. We had this idea of a door being smashed in, which showed the impact of violence. And then I thought, if we add the red, the tonality of that moment becomes so harrowing. The red that in the beginning of the film has a very different tonality, where the boys are in the room and it’s a safe space, a place of passion and of love that does not have a name. 

Léo’s family are flower cultivators; their work can be seen throughout the film. Was it beneficial to have this sort of seasonal underpinning? 

It was definitely one of the more challenging parts of production, because of course we knew that as we filmed different seasons, we would have to follow nature, to shoot both in summer and in autumn. So we had to divide our shooting period in blocks. But we were also working with 12-year-olds, who change rapidly. So there was a production challenge there that was very interesting. 

The flower farm gave us many gifts. I knew that the passing of time in this film would be incredibly important and I wanted to show that in an organic way. With the flower fields, when they get cut and then planted again, we know that time is moving on, seasons are changing. And there is a possibility to show grief in different stages. I also think there was a constant juxtaposition in this film between the fragile and the brutal. It’s present in the setting of the fields—the fragility of these flowers that get cut when the machines arrive. 

You have the same juxtaposition when Léo is in his ice hockey uniform.

Exactly. That’s why we felt Eden was great for the part because he had this sort of fragility and physicality that intrigued us. So many of us have this invisible armour. It seemed very powerful to be able to translate it through that hockey costume, in which this boy literally has a mask on and becomes twice his size. 

There was this image that we never filmed: this flock of black birds all flying in the same direction, in a harrowing and beautiful dance. In many ways this is what the ice hockey boys are in the film, black masses in which we don’t recognise personality, dancing and moving in the same rhythm and formation.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Unrest: An anarchist in the Swiss mountains

A photographer is selling portraits for 20 centimes each to a group of women in a small Swiss town. They recognise two of the subjects, Pyotr and Josephine, and speculate whether there might be a love story brewing between them. When they ask the photographer how much he wants, he raises the price to a franc. He shrugs when they question him about the price increase; he knows intuitively that the portraits are worth more now. As a souvenir of technological advancement in the 1870s, they are exciting but limited. But attach a story and their value is compounded. Cinema progressed like this too, relying on novelty at first but then realising viewers craved narrative.

Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest is obsessed with ideas of value and worth, and how to measure them. It’s a curious film, in both senses of the word, a strange, captivating story and a constantly inquisitive one. It’s set in the picturesque Jura mountains of Switzerland and revolves around the workings of a watch factory. A new resident is Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov), an anarchist from St Petersburg who is working as a cartographer. There are other anarchists too, some openly canvassing for money and new recruits, others—like the talented watchmaker Josephine (Clara Gostynski)— going about their work while supporting the cause.

Anarchist watchmakers—it seems like a contradiction in terms. Order and precision on one side, wilful chaos on the other. Yet the anarchists of this film aren’t bomb-throwers or even loud speakers. As the conversation in the first scene between Pyotr’s cousins back home shows, anarchism was just another political movement in a time of incredible ferment. “It’s like communism, but without a government,” one says. “They want to build a federation and to decentralise power,” another adds. A third woman poses the question: “Which concept will win, anarchism or nationalism?” The reply gives us an idea of the kind of film this will be: “What do you mean by winning?”

Pyotr Kropotkin was a real Russian anarchist and cartographer, who lived in exile in Switzerland for decades. Schäublin had earlier made a short documentary on Kropotkin and his life-changing stint in the Swiss mountains. He wrote of the watchmakers: “…the egalitarian relations which I found in the Jura Mountains, the independence of thought and expression which I saw developing among the workers, and their unlimited devotion to the cause appealed strongly to my feelings; and when I came away from the mountains, after a week’s stay with the watchmakers, my views on socialism were settled. I was an anarchist.”

The way Pyotr is set up in the early conversation, I expected the film to focus on his journey. Yet, he’s one of many characters in a film with no real centre. Schäublin composes the film as a series of vignettes, filmed with a static camera. Sometimes the figures are in closeup but more often the camera is at a remove, observing from a distance even though we hear the voices clearly on the soundtrack. This creates a Brechtian dissonance that’s apt for a film about questioning everything you see. Since the camera doesn’t move and we are at a distance, certain scenes unfold like a tableau. In an interview to RogerEbert.com, Schäublin said he did this “to give liberty (to the audience) of what to choose from this big tableau image, and what to do with it—but also to give the people who appear in the film, who are all non-professional actors, space to just do what they do and not be too (restrictive to them)”.

This might sound forbiddingly dense but Unrest has a dry deadpan humour running through it. Matches must be scarce because everyone’s lighting each other’s cigarettes and there are no less than three instances of someone saying, you can keep the box. The town runs on four different times—local, municipal, factory and church—which inevitably causes all sorts of complications. There’s something Keatonian about an outwardly calm place in the lap of nature that’s a vortex of various competing interests, from timings to language (German, French, Russian, English) to politics (both the anarchists and the authorities are selling raffle tickets). There’s also a precise beauty to the scenes in the factory, where we see workers assembling watches by hand, handling minute parts with the deftness of surgeons.

What the watchmakers do seems magical. It takes two-and-a-half minutes for Josephine to just explain her job to Pyotr. But it’s treated as labour in any factory system would. Time is literally money in this town. Workers are timed constantly, measured against previous times, and paid accordingly. One running gag has the factory owners timing themselves and others as they try out different routes across the premises. Factory time is set eight minutes ahead of the railway station’s; the owner explains that this way “my workers are eight minutes ahead of everybody else”. A sign at the telegraph office reads: “Keep it short. Your minutes are as precious as ours.”

Had this been a more conventional film, future revolutionary Pyotr would have been inciting the watchmakers to rise up. But Schäublin’s Pyotr is more of an observer and the workers are informed and individualistic before his arrival. It’s only right that the film reserves its closeups for skilled work and keeps other human activities in long shot. When asked if the raffle prize, a portrait with a representative of the anarchist movement, will be with him, Pyotr replies, “I am not a protagonist.” He tries to recruit Josephine for their staging of the Paris Commune. Smiling, she declines, also saying, “I am not a protagonist.”

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

‘You have to be distant and yet be close’: Sarvnik Kaur on ‘Against the Tide’

Though Against The Tide has as dramatic a story arc as any fiction film, it first snares the viewer with image and sound. The first shot is of a baby being massaged lovingly by his grandmother. We see the baby’s father, Rakesh, head into the sea, to the accompaniment of a Koli work song that goes “Fear not, fear not, fear not.” Later, Rakesh talks to his friend Ganesh, another fisherman, who says that if the catch is good, they should go to Scotland. We see Ganesh in his car, metal blaring, and then in the glorious chaos of a pre-dawn Mumbai fish market.

Against The Tide is Sarvnik Kaur’s second feature documentary after the National Award-winning Soz: A Ballad Of Maladies (2016), co-directed with Tushar Madhav, about music and personal expression in militarised Kashmir. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award: Vérité. This film, some six years in the making, follows Rakesh and Ganesh as they negotiate a competitive, shrinking market. Rakesh is a traditional Koli fisherman, who goes out alone with his boat. Ganesh has a bigger boat with a crew; he fishes in the deep sea, which Rakesh is opposed to. Kaur captures their banter and lively debates and their lives with their families, creating an intimate portrait of a friendship caught between progress and tradition, identity and ambition. Edited excerpts from a Zoom interview with Kaur:

This was your first feature film after ‘Soz’. What drew you to the Koli community?

On Soz, I was filming in Kashmir as a mainlander. After the shoot was done, I realised I had no business being there. Someone in Kashmir had told me, why don’t you pick up a camera and make a film on your backyard? That stung but it made a lot of sense.

I have lived next to a Koli village for all my time in Bombay. While I was in Kashmir, there was a news story that caught my attention, about the displacement of Kolis from their villages for the sake of a coastal road. That’s really what drew me to it, the fact that it was right in my backyard, an opportunity to tell a story in which I could immerse my life and the viewer eventually.

I started working with a Koli fisherwomen’s collective at that time, around May-June 2017. There was a woman at the collective called Bhanu Vasudev Koli who invited me home for lunch one day, where I met Rakesh, her son. He took me fishing in a small boat. We caught the fish, ate it. He said something wonderful—“Koli aadmi kabhi bhooka nahi marega. Mujhe sirf paani mein jaana hai and main apne family ka pet bhar sakta hoon (a Koli will never go hungry. I only need to go into the water to feed my family).”

He says something like that in the film too.

That was his favourite (thing to say). Traditional fishermen have bamboos embedded in the seabed, upon which they tie their nets and catch fish. If Sagarmala (a Union government port development project) were to happen, they would be displaced and lose their place in the sea too. This brought all the Kolis together, from all of Bombay and Gujarat. It was at this protest that I met Ganesh for the first time. Ganesh wasn’t talking the language of protest, he was talking scientifically—nautical miles, pollution, plastic. He said Kolis are the last bastion of Bombay, that without them the city would drown, because they are standing between the mangroves and the city.

It was about a month later that I went to meet Rakesh. And there was Ganesh, sitting and drinking with him. Over the next year or so, the three of us would meet and drink whisky, and these two would debate, argue, fight, get up and swear not to talk to each other, and then get back together. Their arguments were reflective of not just the difference in their fishing but also their approach to life. It was almost like I was looking at two different sides of a coin. And still there was this common love for the sea, for fishing, for identity. I knew this was going to be the backbone of my film. A series of conversations between two men who belonged to two different spectrums but found themselves tied together.

We knew there was a crisis on the sea. The first time I went with Rakesh, he got tons of plastic and very little fish. I knew we would find jellyfish infestation, chemical pollution. But I wanted to connect my story to the fact that everything that happens on the sea also happens in their personal lives.

This film has taken a long time in shaping. It could only happen because the three of us had a bond.

There are moments in the film when the men must be vulnerable, like when they fight with each other or argue with their wives. How did you tackle the power dynamic between yourself as film-maker and them?

I was never asking them to be my subjects. I was seeking collaboration. I was filming, I was making short edits, which I would show them. We would discuss these. They would sometimes guide me. At no point did I want to make them look like anything they didn’t feel is true. And only once I had their blessing could I continue. So every step of the way was a litmus test.

The camera became a way of catharsis, of saying things that would go unheard otherwise. That’s the craft, and that’s the trust-building exercise. How do you stay there with your camera when the moment is so fragile? You have to make your presence as small as possible, you don’t even want to breathe in case it disturbs the moment. You have to be distant and yet be close.

A lot of the imagery in the film is so arresting. Tell us about your collaboration with cinematographer Ashok Meena.

Many DoPs (directors of photography) came and went, no one could give me the language I was looking for. Then one day I saw (Kamal Swaroop’s) Pushkar Puran (2017) and I asked, who is this magician? Ashok does this because he loves doing it. That’s why the Vérité award was special because it says so much about collaboration. He engages with the moment not just with his mind but with his heart. He’s so aware of what’s happening around.

Our unit was always three people: me, the camera and sound. I didn’t want anything bigger because then it becomes intrusive. Our cameras were always tiny, we were always working with DSLRs. It was often not possible for me to watch the frame constantly. I had to trust my DoP. And my DoP had to trust me to know what I was doing. Because we were filming for 10 hours a day, because we wanted the everyday-ness in the film. That’s something Ashok understood, that we are aiming for the mundane, that beauty in detail.

Though it isn’t a musical film like ‘Soz’, you do use music to establish setting and character, from the work songs the fishermen sing to ‘Mi Dolkara Daryacha Raja’ playing on the radio.

When you are working with artists, everyone wants to add value to the film. It’s difficult to keep people understated. I did not want “story interventions”. I would say (to composer Igor Vasilev Novogradska), don’t bring me pictures, I want colours. He would bring these complex melodies inspired by Koli spaces and I would say, this needs to change. It took us four-five months of deletion. I wanted anything that would tell me how beautiful this ordinary, this everyday is.

Was securing funding a struggle?

I have done everything from selling off my gold to crowdfunding to eventually finding the support. I think the support came through once I had more clarity on where the story was going, which is very important for funders to know. It has been a very production-heavy, cost-intensive film because we needed two boats, we needed to go into the deep sea. But I never let money be the reason why we would stop. I have done whatever was needed at the moment.

You have to think on your feet. If you are willing, you will find a way to do it. The commitment you have to your film, the clarity with which you approach it, the relationship you have to the process will eventually be reflected in the money you are able to raise.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Fantastic Machine, The Tuba Thieves: Sundance 2023 reviews

“Our programming aims to make their brains accessible. To keep them entertained and disconnected. Our product is available brain time.” These lines—something John Berger might have written—are from a book by the CEO of France’s first commercial channel, in which he suggests his job, the job of TV, is to sell Coca-Cola. It’s quoted in Fantastic Machine, which played at the Sundance Film Festival last week. Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck’s documentary is a lively, thoughtful look at the essential slipperiness of the moving image.

Though the film tracks back to 1828 and the first still photograph, and on to Muybridge, Edison and the Lumière brothers, its thematic tale begins with another pioneer. George Méliès, the narrator says, is “one of the first examples of man manipulating the moving image”. In 1902, Méliès staged the coronation of British king Edward VII in his studio with French actors, after failing to get permission to shoot the real thing. The king enjoyed the re-enactment; his admiring description of a movie camera gives this film its title. “Honourable Englishmen, you’re being fooled,” a reporter at the time warned. Over a century later, the machines are still fantastic and their images still deceptive, despite our familiarity with them.

Danielson and Van Aertryck run pell-mell down the decades, stopping at the various points you would expect (Leni Reifenstahl, Ted Turner) and some you might not. They don’t focus on cinema much; instead, they examine TV, news, advertising, viral video, livestreams for signs of manipulation and unruliness. They show the award-winning photograph of a dead girl taken during the 2010 Haiti earthquake, then follow it up with another, taken from a different angle, of a battery of photographers looking for a shot. This feeling that deception may be lurking just a few feet away is not a new concern. Peter Tanner, talking about capturing the first filmed evidence of concentration camps, says, “We tried to make shots as long as possible, use panning shots so there was no possibility of trickery.” 

In the way it connects cultural flotsam and jetsam, Fantastic Machine resembles the work of English documentarian Adam Curtis, though without his laser focus. We go from the viral video of the man who ended up imitating a music biz/business expert on the BBC to a little boy doing note-perfect imitations of Bruce Lee, to spectators at a children’s theatre in Riga in 1970. Ruben Östlund (The Square, Triangle Of Sadness) is one of the executive producers; the film has his sense of mischief. An earnest TED talk clip about YouTube in which the speaker tells his audience, “You are the teachers,” is followed by a man showing how to escape a fall into an ice pond. This is followed by a tutorial by ISIS on how to make a home-made bomb. 

Fantastic Machine asks viewers to look closer. The Tuba Thieves asks them to listen more carefully. I started watching after skimming the description on the Sundance Film Festival site. I was expecting a wry mockumentary of sorts. Instead, Alison O’Daniel’s film turned out to be a ceaselessly inventive and thoughtful consideration of sound in cinema, one of my favourite titles at the festival.

It’s a wordless film for long stretches, yet the polar opposite of a silent film. This is a film that asks the viewer to pay special attention to on-screen sounds and how they are described. O’Daniel, a deaf filmmaker, pushes us to think about captioning, about how the richness of sound is rarely captured even in close captioning. Her own captions have imagination, beauty: “thin wind”, “hum of the forest”. Freed from the supremacy of image, this film becomes a unique viewing experience. After a while, I was hearing the images.

The title is a sly misdirection. A mysterious spate of tuba thefts across universities would seem to be central to the film: It records at regular intervals the location and content of the robberies, and even has a journalist talk about the crime spree on the radio. But as the film progresses, you realise O’Daniel is just using the robberies themselves as a jumping-off point—and perhaps a little dig at how films, fiction and non-fiction, must have a “story” in order to be saleable. There are fictional (semi-fictional?) performances by Nyke, a deaf woman, and Geovanny, a saxophone player. But the impression left behind by the film is a series of unhurried images in place of what we might think of as “narrative”.

O’Daniel finds inventive and often witty ways to attune our ears and eyes to what is happening on screen. As a tuba plays a long note on the soundtrack, we first see:

[A TUBE STRETCHED]

But when the note is elongated further, the caption becomes:

[A TUBA S T R E T C H E D]

(In another playful moment, plants start to hum, captioned as multiple Mmmmmmms) 

There’s a passage that seems to encompass the different kinds of on-screen silence. A panoramic shot of nature is first soundtracked by absolutely nothing. Then we start hearing the whistling of wind, bird calls. This cuts to a scene of a small audience waiting for a pianist to play. He takes out a stop clock, which we hear ticking, but the scene changes before we hear any music from him. From the imposed silence of no sound to a more natural silence to a silence of denial.

O’Daniel allows viewers the space to form their own ideas. There are dots to connect, though rarely obvious. At one point, a voice on the radio is heard describing California wildfires as the sound of “hundreds of animals growling”. Later, the film shows us an actual wildfire. It’s soundtracked, hilariously, by unmistakable animal growls.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Pianoforte: Review

Alex is getting his body worked over by his coach. And he’s getting a pep talk, the usual stuff—let go of the stress, the people will love you. Alex could be a boxer before a big fight. He’s about to go play piano on stage. “Chopin will be alive,” the coach says. “You’ll be playing for him.” 

At several points during Pianoforte, Jakub Piątek’s mesmerizing account of the 2021 edition of the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, I felt I could be watching a sports documentary. A slim young man limbers up with his entire body. Poland’s Marcin jumps up and down, then takes the stage at a light run. Later, we see him use an app to meaure if a vigorous piano exercise to warm his muscles has taken him to 110 bpm. As China’s Hao plays in his room, his coach massages his shoulders. When Russian pianist Eva receives seven specific and different instructions in seven seconds from her coach, it reminded me of the demanding practice scenes with the gymnast—also named Eva—in Věra Chytilová's 1963 film Something Different. 

The Chopin Competition has been held 18 times since 1927. It takes place over 21 days, with no break. It’s a prestigious tournament for young players, and competition is intense. One pianist, dissatisfied with his own performance, rants entertainingly about his opponents’ flawless recitals. “They’re like CIA or marines, you know? They wake up early morning and do push-ups. Then they do etudes.” Leonora, the sunniest character in the documentary, describes it as the ‘Olympics of piano’, adding: “If you win the 40,000 (Euro), you might be using it to go to therapy.” 

Leonora says this jokingly, but it’s probably not far from the truth. At the level these pianists are playing, where a flub or two could mean elimination, mental fortitude becomes crucial. At one point we see Hao—who’s still in high school—do ‘mental practice’, sitting in front of the piano without touching the keys. As the film progresses, you get a sense of who might handle the pressure and who might crack. It’s especially evident in 17-year-old Eva, who keeps advancing in the competition but never seems to find the calm she’s looking for. “Flat. Everything is flat,” her coach says. “The piano or…?” someone asks. Eva just looks on, her eyes searching for an answer that isn’t forthcoming. 

Pianoforte is composed and handsome, far from the Pennebaker tradition of musical verité. Unlike another great Polish documentary, All These Sleepless Nights (2016), it doesn’t redraw the boundaries of the fly-on-the-wall film. Its success is almost entirely derived from how sympathetic and interesting it makes its protagonists. There’s Marcin, who resembles a young Jean-Pierre Léaud, playing for his cat, who’s more interested in pizza. There’s the straight-shooting Michelle, who packs off the filmmakers with a firm “Now it's time”. We see Hao practice in a tiny apartment in Guangzhou, his father looking on, his mother cooking. The ease of the film belies the work that must have gone into building relationships with so many young musicians, earning their trust till they’re comfortable with being recorded at their most vulnerable. 

The editing by Ula Klimek-Piątek is a masterclass of precision and canny choices. Five minutes into the film, we haven't heard anyone play. There's a quick series of shots showing the participants poised to play the first note. We focus on Leonora. Her fingers descend. We expect Chopin. Instead, as the film’s title appears onscreen, it's the rumbling beat of Elephant by Tame Impala, a choice so witty and so perfectly executed, it made me laugh. Later, there’s another musical montage, set to Arcade Fire’s Rococo, as the pianists unwind, stroll, play football. Here, too, is smart little decision: as the song explodes, the camerawork does too, turning frenetic for once as it follows Alex bearing down on goal. 

I would’ve been happy with any of the protagonists winning, so appealing does Piątek make them. However, the stakes are clearly the highest for Eva. The film knows this, focusing on her as the final results are announced. That scene is wrenching, but then Pianoforte is full of dreams deferred and denied. Vivian, Hao’s coach, was a talented young player herself, but, as she says ruefully, she never had the ambition for competition. Michelle predicts she won’t advance in the tournament beyond that night’s performance, saying “I don’t believe in unicorns.” But even in defeat, there's grace. A musician from China, eliminated in an early round, is at the airport. He sees a piano. You’d think he’d be sick of pianos by then, but his face lights up. He sits down and plays, beautifully. A small crowd gathers; one woman seems overcome. Michelle would roll her eyes at the sentiment, but to be able to move people this way must be its own reward.    

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.