The artistry of Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s sophisticated drama, Evil Does Not Exist, signposts a bleak future for nature’s few standing reserves. Director Hamaguchi does this in ways that are as much haunting as perceptible. The subtle pace of the film’s rhythm left me thinking a long after leaving the cinema because it is a praise to humanity and its people who have had enough from the failures of capitalism. When everything looks doomed and sold for big private cash in the post-Covid era, Evil Does Not Exist underlines the tragedy of our society in which people’s intelligence is being undermined by private enterprises.
Takumi (played by Hitoshi Omika, Hamaguchi’s assistant director to his previous films) and his young daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) live in the serene Mizubiki village, an idyllic deer trail spot near Tokyo of circa 6000 inhabitants. Together with their neighbours they’ve created a simple community based on helping each other with their own labor. But their peaceful life is disrupted by the arrival of a Tokyo company that intends to buy nearby swathes of land and turn it into glamping – a glamorous camping site for the wealthy to escape from Tokyo’s busy life and concrete architecture. The proposed site’s septic tank, it turns out, threatens to poison the water supply in the village, and the company’s indifference to local concerns becomes evident during a town meeting with the project’s PR employees.
From the opening sequence, Hamaguchi’s gaze has a wondrous pace curried slowly by a current of air through the forest trees and up on the sky, providing a harmonious refuge from the complicating world we inhabit. Together with the film’s soundtrack by award winning Eiko Ishibashi, Hamaguchi’s earlier collaborator for his Academy Award winning Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist has beyond doubt a powerful effect and a leading sense of emotional processing. Indeed the film was originally shot as material to accompany a live musical performance for multi-instrumentalist Ishibashi. The result is a compelling visual and sound eco-thriller experience and a radical act of awareness through powerful storytelling. So far, for me, it’s Hamaguchi’s best.
Evil Does Not Exist is released in the UK and Ireland by Modern Films on 5 April 2024.
I come out of the tube at High Street Kensington on Saturday 6 May. It is a rainy day, the traffic is sparse, the usual city-dwellers on the streets. Police sirens, I am reminded of the coronation 3 miles away.
I enter Kensington Gardens. A crow baths in rain water. I walk up and towards the gallery. I read on its wall, “Steve McQueen makes sure that Grenfell will never be forgotten.”
We fly high and across residential land. This is London. We arrive at Grenfell Tower. No words, no sound, immeasurable silence.
Naked steel windows. Grenfell is deserted. Debris-filled plastic sacks and scaffoldings replace human ashes. Forensics in white PPE scattered around the crime scene.
Grenfell is coal black, burnt.
Filmed 6 months after the tragic fire, we are guided by the light of the afternoon sun, where once was life, hope, sunlit drapes on the walls at magic hour, soft shades of glorious plant leaves… These are no more.
There’s only death.
Hell.
How can this be possible? Warnings were alarmed. It was not an accident. 72 lives lost.
Seventy-two human beings, Londoners, siblings, mothers, fathers, seventeen kids, an unborn child, died in the fire.
Silence.
We go around another panoramic look. Cruelty. Look again. The accomplishment of crime.
The killing of Grenfell community. Unfulfilled dreams burnt by corporate myths and neglect. Violence. The burnt cladding, a carnivorous, now snake-looking relief.
What was once the heart of a community, the heart of new beginnings, burnt remains of the tower rises where human beings once lived. Irreplaceable lives lost a grotesque tragedy, of towering xenophobia and governmental impunity. A divided London.
We fly like burnt souls until we’re woken up to the urban soundscape:
We will never forget Grenfell.
14 June 2023 marks 72 months since 72 people lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. Grenfell United
Grenfell (2019) by Steve McQueen screens at the Serpentine South Gallery from 7 April – 10 May 2023.
Actress-turned director Manuela Martelli‘s debut feature 1976 offers a picture of Chile during the dictatorship. What seems like an invisible terror at the start of the film, the director plunges further to uncover the dreadful times that people experienced during the seventies. The film is dominated by Carmen’s bourgeois life, a superb performance by Aline Küppenheim (The Good Life), and its orchestrated sound design that echoes psychological turmoil and humility.
Screened as part of the First Feature Competition at the 66th BFI London Film Festival, Martelli’s debut is a remarkable addition to Chile’s groundbreaking film movement of the recent years – one that sees directors including Pablo Larraín, Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, Sebastián Lelio and documentary pioneer Patricio Guzmán whose works focus on the psychological trauma that was inflicted by Pinochet‘s dictatorship. Moving away from telling the story of a coup event, with 1976 Martelli directs from a domestic space and through the eyes of a wife, mother and grandmother who lives a bourgeoisie life and spends time in her summer house near the beach.
The richness of Martelli’s film relies on the uniqueness of a story that’s not been seen before. Soledad Rodríguez’s fine cinematography of pastel colours and layers from a soil blush palette add up to the film’s coarse texture. With brief glances of home video footage of a summer long lost, Martelli’s film culminates into a flash of remembrance emerging from the ashes of a nation’s erased memory.
We met with Manuela Martelli during the BFI London Film Festival to tell us more about her film.
Manuela Martelli
What was it like to direct your first film?
It was a great experience. I always wanted to direct a film since I was a teenager. But I went into acting for several years and I was writing this project for a while. Development and pre-production started eight years ago, with the pandemic in between. So, when I finally was able to shoot, there was just so much pleasure. Even when we were shooting in the middle of the pandemic, it was exciting.
How did you develop Carmen’s persona?
The idea came from my grandmother’s story. This was my mom’s mother who I never met, and I was always curious about her. She went into art school after she became a mother and a housewife. She wanted to change her life after doing all that a woman had to do or supposed to be doing during the 50s and 60s, and suddenly she decided to do something different. But at the age of 40-something there weren’t many possibilities for her, so she left school and didn’t pursuit her interest in becoming an artist.
Then at a certain point in writing, I realised that I had to free myself from the real story of my grandmother’s because it was trapping me. It was inspiring to me, but at the same time it was not giving me the freedom that I needed. So, then I said, I need to depart from this and make a fictional character of a woman who was able to see outside and has the chance to do something that a woman from a bourgeoisie class in the 70s, wasn’t supposed to do. And then the idea of her entering a clandestine world came in.
Would you say that politics is central to your film?
This is why I really want to direct films but I always felt that I needed to go through life and live before having something to say. But when I started writing 1976, I realised that there was no chance that I would do anything without it being political. You have a plain paper and as soon as you write a word on it, it‘s already political.
Did the October 2019 uprising and the women’s movement in Chile have an impact to your story?
I was there since the beginning, and I lived all this closely. In the last few years many things have happened and shaped a new history for Chile. Every time something new happened, I would think of the film and I would wonder, does the film make sense now? Because when I started writing, the feminist movement didn’t have the force that it has now.
After the referendum, many things became clear to me. The main question that I had about the film was how can you live thinking that your privilege is more important than democracy? And I think that this was clear with the referendum, how a group of people with power want things to stay as they are. And they would rather have a constitution written during the dictatorship, like a non-democratic constitution to keep their privilege.
All this process, from the outburst until now, canalized in the writing of a new constitution after a plebiscite where 80% of democratically elected people decided that they wanted a new constitution that’s written with the main human rights guaranteed. But I’m now frustrated because a year and a half later there was a referendum that didn’t approve this constitution! And you wonder, why did this phenomenon happen. Like Brexit, for example. These phenomena that are so hard to understand.
For example, water in Chile is private property, it doesn’t belong to the people. There is a place in Chile where there’s no water left, it’s totally dry. And this place, this town, voted against the constitution guaranteeing that water goes to public hands. These kinds of paradoxes are the things that are so hard to understand. But I hope that we will start again the process of writing a new constitution.
The film is praised for its sound design. Tell me about the process behind it.
I always thought that this film should have music and I felt that sound in general is so important. The film is about a year when things were invisible, but things were happening, and people didn’t want to look at these. At least this is what happened with a lot of people that were silent witnesses. For me, a way to reflect this atmosphere of fear and horror is through sound because it was like invisible material. Sound is the invisible corpse of film, but it’s there. You feel it, but you don’t see it. And I think that this was such an amazing resource to portray the invisible horror that was happening. So, I always imagined that all this out of frame, all this off-space, would be reflected through sound, from dogs barking to the sound of the ocean.
A Polish bourgeois couple arrive on a sunny Italian island to relax and spend time doing little but drink by the swimming pool, have sex, read high-life magazines under the sun and eat delicious mediterranean food. As soon as their holiday begins they notice that the pool of their reserved villa on the shoreline is empty due to water shortage in the area.
For Anna (Agnieszka Żulewska) and Adam (Dobromir Dymecki), a reduced rent is not an option. They demand from the owner a fixed and filled swimming pool and that’s their only compromise. So the owner sends Rahim (Ibrahim Keshk), a young migrant without the legal papers he‘s required to have to do the job. Language barrier create an instant alienation between the three. When an unfortunate event happens, asking for an investigation by the police, the couple’s relationship transitions to a stifling anticlimax that drives both Anna and Adam to a psychological turmoil and an array of misconducts. But will they survive their dark thoughts and guilt?
Silent Land. Image ⓒ Lava Films
Aga Woszczyńska’s debut film, is a chilling story and an observation of the moral emptiness of the holidaying bourgeoisie. When asked about her biggest influences in an interview for The Irish Times, the director said, “…my biggest reference and influence is reality. I want to make a comment on reality, not just watch other films and images to put them in my own work.”
Indeed, the sequences in which the characters are going through complex emotions have a docudrama inclination. While the scenes of the couple wondering the alleys of the rural Italian village at night are reminiscent of Roberto Rossellini‘s Stromboli, Woszczyńska is also documenting island life with her refined gaze. In Anna‘s euphoria when she is asked to join in the local dance, she looses Adam. He goes adrift in the narrow streets of the stone-paved village whose community is celebrating a cultural event. But for Adam this is no longer the place he‘d imagined it to be, for their relaxing paradise.
Silent Land. Image ⓒ Lava Films
Long, captivating shots of silent forests meet passing clouds, raging waves and the moon. They are conducted by cinematographer Bartosz Swiniarski (Apples) giving Silent Land a cosmic angle in parallel to the gradual vulnerability of the characters‘ psychology. The film‘s richness is inspired by terrific performances including Jean-Marc Barr‘s (The Big Blue) and Alma Jodorowsky‘s (Blue Is the Warmest Colour). But its authenticity is in the writing, a collaboration between the director and Piotr Jaksa, that‘s powerfully reflecting on natural resources, sustainability, white guilt and human rights. You will want to watch it until the film‘s credits roll.
Silent Land is in UK cinemas from 23 September and on BFI Player from 24 October 2022.
Thelonious Monk in Rewind & Play (2022) by Alain Gomis. All rights reserved.
A world premiere in the Forum section for this year’s Berlinale programme, Rewind & Play, is a documentary by director Alain Gomis about American jazz musician and composer Thelonious Monk when he visited Paris in 1969. Yet Gomis also makes a powerful comment about the machine of manufactured media before the film’s zenith half way through its duration, when the artistic marvel of Monk begins to unravel before our eyes.
Rewind & Play (2022) film poster
Rewind & Play is just a little over an hour long and it is one of these rear moments in the archive history of film and TV that underlines the importance of moving image heritage. For his new film, Gomis, whose previous feature Félicité was honoured in 2017 Berlinale’s main competition, unearthed a treasure that’s never seen before. He used uncut material from the production of a filmed interview between Thelonious Monk and Henri Renaud, host of a French TV programme called ‘Jazz Portrait’.
We don’t know if Gomis edited the sequence of how the interview recording progressed during that December date of 1969 in Paris. However, its reductive style conducted by Monk’s interviewer, surprisingly also a jazz pianist himself, is illiterate enough for an uncomfortable watch. Significantly though, it’s Thelonious Monk who was repelled by the interviewer’s frivolous questions. But Monk’s artistic genius becomes the driving force for a spellbinding set, a piano performance that concludes an otherwise insulting interview in a glorious way.
Rewind & Play is a work of art against the media factory but also a unique insight into journalism. Besides, it’s a remarkable example of archive film usage in contemporary filmmaking and a glimpse of 1960s fashion with elegant Monk and his chic wife Nellie arriving in Paris. Watch out for her gorgeous shades!
Here at 11polaroids desk we wish Rewind & Play a worldwide success and most importantly, a release in UK and Greece soon.
Rewind & Play is produced by Sphere Films and Andolfi. It is funded by INA, ARTE France – La Lucarne, Les Films du Worso, Schortcut Films, Die Gesellschaft DGS and Le Studio Orlando.
This year marked the return of gallery and cinema exhibition but 2021 also put brave new works in the spotlight. This list features exhibitions and films that had an enduring influence towards my own practice.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition at Tate Britain, Fly in League with the Night, was probably one of the most popular this year. Quite rightly so. Painting felt current, modern, with black hair and black characters. Oil painted fictions, not video or photography or interactive art. The exhibition was cut short by lockdown. It is currently touring internationally before being restaged at Tate Britain for a full 3-month run from 24 November 2022 until 26 Febraury 2023.
Acclaimed photographer, visual activist Zanele Muholi’s first major UK survey at Tate Modern featured over 260 photographs including Faces and Phases, Brave Beauties and the ongoing series Somnyama Ngonyama. They challenge South Africa’s oppression, discrimination and violence towards its LGBTQIA+ community, despite its equality promised 1996 constitution.
Eileen Agar’s retrospective exhibition Angel of Anarchy at the Whitechapel Gallery brought together over 150 works from the 1920s to the 1990s. It was a journey through her unique multi-disciplinary style in painting, collage, photography, sculpture and hats.
The first touring retrospective of Isamu Noguchi’s work in Europe in 20 years covered 6 decades of his risk taking practice. His celebrated coffee table and washi paper Akari electric lights were among some of the treasures in the exhibition that delved into his vast output from public to political art projects, sculptures, ceramics and radical dance projects.
An internationalist who travelled extensively, Noguchi’s work is engaged with the aura of a range of disciplines and schools through his many collaborations. From his early years in Paris as an apprentice to modern sculptor Constantin Brancusi, then an apprentice to Chinese ink-brush master Qi Baishi in Beijing and his lifelong collaborations with artists including composer John Cage, architect Louis Kahn and dancer Martha Graham, Noguchi’s practice is one to remember. The exhibition at the Barbican was a highlight because it had the power to influence on a cosmic level.
Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle exhibition at Barbican’s The Curve space was photographer and activist Claudia Andujar’s 5-decade work of documenting and defending Brazil’s largest indigenous peoples. Through her photographs, audio-visual recordings and drawings, the Barbican’s exhibition surveyed the art and culture of the Yanomami through Andujar’s commitment and activism. A glorious achievement.
The retrospective exhibition of Vangelis Gokas’s work at the Municipal Gallery of Athens, Greece, during the summer, attempted to show how the post-mortem influences the artist’s work through a selection of large-scale charcoal drawings, oil paintings on postcards and studies from his recent work since 2018. Primarily a selection of portraits and landscapes, Gokas experiments with flare. His small-scale paintings are especially well defined and absorbing. But his larger drawings, though eerie, at times they were lost in their enormous size.
This year’s Athens Biennial (7th edition) took place in 3 main spaces, one of which was an abandoned department store Fokas. With Greece’s deep economic uncertainty, it was a huge effort from the production team to bring it all together. All the rest was about exploring the offerings from curators Omsk Social Club and Larry Ossei-Mensah who curated this year’s edition. Some highlights included multimedia platform Contemporary And (C&), sculptor Vasilis Papageorgiou, photographers Yorgos Prinos and Zohra Opoku, the chaotic ecosystems on digital screens by Theo Triantafyllidis, ceramicist Eugenia Vereli and the playful drawings by Suzanne Treister.
A new documentary feature revealed the untold story of Anglo-Somali punk icon Poly Styrene, the first woman of colour in the UK to front a rock band (X-Ray Spex). Directed by Styrene’s daughter Celeste Bell and Paul Sng, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché is a powerful film about identity, surviving misogyny and racism in 1970s Britain and coming out of it mentally ill. It unveils the punk singer’s unopened artistic archive and features readings from her diary.
John Akomfrah’s new multiscreen video installation Four Nocturnes (2019) had its UK premier at Lisson Gallery this year as part of the artist’s show, The Unintended Beauty of Disaster. In its furious succession of footage images and newly filmed staged scenes, we are witnessing our position as refugees at a time when we’re steadily loosing our natural world. It’s probably Akomfrah’s most haunting and naturalistic film to date. The show at Lisson Gallery included a series of photo-text and print works and it was a direct response to the Black Lives Matter protests and the demonstrations against the imperialist monuments in 2020.
Raoul Peck’s documentary for mainstream American television HBO, Exterminate All the Brutes, tells the history of colonialism and slavery from a nonwhite, non-Western viewpoint. It is necessary to watch not just because it’s food for thought but because it’s a new perspective of history. The film is divided in four chapters-episode and it’s still available on major streaming platforms.
This year also saw the premier of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, the first academy award winning woman of colour Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, the restoration of the first ever feature film in the African language of Wolof Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968) and artist Lubaina Himid’s overdue retrospective at Tate Modern.
Khalik Allah returned to the streets of Harlem where he filmed a part of his 2015 film, Field Niggas. He went back to his city for a new, genre-bending work, a visual-sonic portrait of the lives and thoughts of street-wise outsiders.
I Walk on Water
Following up from his 2018 feature Black Mother, which he filmed in Jamaica, Allah started filming his friends on 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in East Harlem in 2019. We hear conversations including with members of rap groups Sunz of Man and Wu-Tang Clan, his former girlfriend Camilla, his friends Frenchie, Gabriel and Roger of K.O. Hair Design and his mother. They talk about relationships, separation, civil rights and survival. Despite the euphoric conversations, at times the portraits seem so intimate and familiar. To Allah’s advantage, this is a wonderful result of his connection to his subjects that gave him deep access to their inner worlds. This also earned him the most beautiful smiles on camera, smiles I’ve never seen on screen before.
IWOW: I Walk on Water is an ethnographic work in its best moment. Allah has succeeded in creating a visual essay that’s both an exemplary study of people and a much-awaited modern portrait of the big city that hasn’t been represented in such tremendous detail since Gordon Parks’ photographs in the 1940s. His latest documentary project has a rhythm of a long-needed mixtape. Harlem at its best.
IWOW: I Walk On Water is released on demand from Friday 26th February.
Queen & Slim Director: Melina Matsoukas + Summer of 85 Director: François Ozon
Just before Covid-19 forced everyone to quarantine, 2020 kicked off in style with a road movie that was probably a foretelling swagger for the year ahead. Melina Matsoukas’s Queen & Slim screened in cinemas in the first month of this strange year and at a time when nobody knew (or imagined) that cinema experience was about to be disrupted.
Who would have thought that cinemas would be forced to close for such a long time? With a magnetism that inspired us all, Daniel Kaluuya’s and Jodie Turner-Smith’s love at first sight was one of the two love stories to enjoy on the silver screen for a whole year. The other one was electric teenage love between Alexis and David in François Ozon’s Summer of 85. Both love stories lingered with us over the months that followed until the end of this strange year that saw film theatres open for short lengths and closed for long, uncertain months.
But we look into how it has come about this year and we look to the past and future of black stories, female filmmakers and TV in the UK and internationally. On 20 January 2020 the great Italian director, Federico Fellini was born 100 years ago this year. The BFI Player marked it by streaming a choice of the master’s films including La Dolce Vita (itself celebrating its 60th anniversary this year) and 8½. Juliet of the Spirits streamed on Amazon Prime, La Strada on YouTube and Fellini’s directorial debut The White Sheik on Mubi.
A career-best performance by Adam Sandler as Manhattan diamond dealer in Uncut Gems was another highlight from the film theatres in 2020. Directors Benny and Josh Safdie worked with longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein for an excellent crime drama script on toxic superpower delusion. Uncut Gems was executive produced by Martin Scorsese and lensed by Darius Khondji. The result was sensational and probably the funniest picture of the year.
Little Women (2019) Director: Greta Gerwig
Little Women
For those of you lucky enough to see Greta Gerwig’s Little Women on the big screen, I’m sure you’ll agree with me rating it as one of my ten top pictures this year. A blissfully gorgeous achievement, with performances that absorbed you in all sorts of trouble during a different Christmas. Yet humanity saves one from insanity and that’s exactly what this wonderful adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 19th century novel of the same title is about. It earned costume designer Jacqueline Durran an academy award and quite rightly so. You just want to to have every single piece of garment worn in the film.
Then everything went unexpectedly crazy. On 11 March the World Health Organisation declared the outbreak of Covid-19 a pandemic. Even worse, a few months later on 25 May, George Floyd was killed by a white police officer. Tens of thousands of us around the world were devastated by the injustice and protested against his death together with the Black Lives Matter movement and the George Floyd uprising.
Da 5 Bloods + David Byrne’s American Utopia Director: Spike Lee
Da 5 Bloods poster
On our home screens, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods captured the injustices that the forgotten black heroes of a ‘white man’s war’ faced during and after the Vietnam war. Now in quarantine when the film had its digital release in June, it was an invaluable response to the injustice of the horrible pictures that we saw in the news. Lee’s picture featured unforgettable performances from Clarke Peters and Delroy Lindo as well as sterling support by Jonathan Majors.
David Byrne’s American Utopia
Later in October Lee’s second feature for the year, David Byrne’s American Utopia, premiered at the BFI London Film Festival (7-18 October). This time a documentary – Lee follows former Talking Heads frontman during his timely Broadway show in 2019. It’s a superb satire, a comedy of horrors, sufficiently premiering at a time when the rollout of Donald Trump’s defeat in the presidential elections was about to begin.
Small Axe Mangrove, Lovers Rock, Red, White and Blue, Alex Wheatle and Education Director: Steve McQueen
Small Axe – Episode: Alex Wheatle (No. 4)
Also premiering at the BFI London Film Festival, Steve McQueen’s first two parts of his Small Axe project – Mangrove and Lovers Rock – paved the way for the type of filmmaking we should look forward to in the years to come. Starting with the 1970s Mangrove Nine 55-day court trial that changed racial justice in the UK forever (episode 1), Small Axe (BBC One) is a five-part series about black power and the resistance that exposed police racism. All five episodes are so good but Alex Wheatle (episode 4) is especially important because it powerfully captures wicked racism and its ability to harm young communities.
The Good Lord Bird Creators: Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard
The Good Lord Bird
Unusual, smart and funny, The Good Lord Bird (Sky) is awesome and refreshing. It’s based on the award-winning 2013 novel of the same title by James McBride and narrated by a fictional character, teenager Henry “Little Onion” Shackleford (an excellent Joshua Johnson) who joins abolitionist crusader John Brown (Ethan Hawke). When Henry’s father dies, Brown (Hawke in his career-best) takes him under his wing having mistaken him for a girl. But without trying to correct the weird-looking white man, trust and friendship begin to bond the two and so their camaraderie to end slavery.
I May Destroy You Creator: Michaela Coel
I May Destroy You
The most thrilling series on our small screen this year, I May Destroy You (BBC One) is a sexual-consent drama by creator-writer Michaela Coel who also performs in the role of Arabella. Once you start with the first episode, you’ll just want more. It’s delicate, deep and funny. I couldn’t recommend this wonderfully brave work more – just start watching, if you haven’t already.
Time Director: Garett Bradley
Time
Time is director Garrett Bradley’s remarkable documentary capturing a woman’s 20-year campaign to release her incarcerated husband from prison. It rightfully earned Bradley the Best Director award at Sundance Film Festival and it’s timeless for all around the world but especially for America now. A great achievement looking into the lives of Black communities that are repeatedly mass incarcerated and a powerful work of freedom and love.
+ 1 to begin 2021 with…
Funny Boy Director: Deepa Mehta
Volatile, beautifully crafted, rich in colours and interpreted by amazing acts, Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy is a love story set during Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war. Adapted from Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel of the same title, it follows a young Tamil boy growing up gay and falling in love during the escalating political tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamils. It is a ravishing achievement, an extremely effecting and warm portrait of romance and family bonding in devastating times that forced millions of people to leave their homes and became refugees. Funny Boy is now available to watch on Netflix.
Georgia Korossi is an activist and independent writer and curator. Her short film Devotion is available to watch on YouTube.
It was an extraordinary year for science but I’m concerned about the future of the arts. I’m overwhelmed about the lack of journalistic coverage on art practice and the meaning of art in a year like this. However, art continued, artists continued making works and art works were displayed in museums and galleries.
The rules of isolation persisted globally for most of 2020. Some governments felt it was wise to close art spaces and open retailers, which proved catastrophic and saw the rise and rise of the death toll. As a witness myself of the brief openings of art places, film theatres and other forms of creative spaces, I never felt safer from the threat of the pandemic by visiting galleries and museums. Visits could only be booked digitally and just a certain limit of people could be given entry each day. Unlike department stores and shops, major galleries have enough space for people to move without close proximity to other visitors who are outside their support bubble. So why art spaces are the first places to be imposed closure?
For almost a century art has been used to help people to heal. Now, more than ever, we need to strengthen this value and enforce safe access for the benefit of public health.
Here, in pictures, is just a handful of exhibitions that took place from the beginning to the end of 2020. And the many shapes that art exhibitions can have, physically, digitally and as sound landscapes.
Georgia Korossi is an activist and independent writer and curator of documentary, anthropological and experimental films. Her short film Devotion is available to watch on YouTube.
The highest in attendance on record, this year’s BFI London Film Festival revealed an open and inclusive way of film viewing experience with virtual premieres, incredible live events and live cinema screenings. Headlined with Steve McQueen’s momentous Mangrove in one of the most challenging years for independent cinema, the 2020 (64th festival edition) LFF team exceeded in putting together an incredible programme of more than sixty films from around the world and 100 plus live events that were screened virtually to audiences across the UK.
So, this is a list to celebrate an exciting achievement. Together with other film festivals across the globe that operated digitally to a great extend this year for Covid-19 reasons, the LFF kept film alive. Here are 10 +1 highlights and some ‘Also don’t miss’ suggestions.
Multi-award winning Steve McQueen directs this powerful story of the 1970s Mangrove Nine 55-day court trial that changed racial justice in the UK forever. Mangrove is part of a five-episodes BBC film series about black power and the resistance that exposed police racism. It follows nine campaigners in Notting Hill including Altheia Jones-LeCointe (Letitia Wright) and Darcus Howe (Malachi Kirby) and their struggle to defend justice for police-targeted Mangrove restaurant and black businesses at large.
Mangrove was presented alongside McQueen’s Lovers Rock at this year’s festival. Both films are part of the director’s Small Axe anthology series remembering critical and political events in London’s West Indian community between the 1960s and 1980s. Both films where shot by Shabier Kirchner’s finest cinematographic talent featuring scintillating dance sequences on the street (Mangrove) or indoors (Lovers Rock). Much shorter in length, Lovers Rock is a brilliant achievement of 1980s Black London sound systems that will make anyone fall for the rhythm of dab sounds (and a Red Stripe).
Limbo dir Ben Sharrock
Scottish writer-director Ben Sharrock’s second feature offers a stimulating take on the ‘limbo’ stage of refugee journeys. It follows promising Syrian musician Omar (Amir El-Masry) whose landing on a remote Scottish island has forced him to experience unfamiliar oddities away from his home and family. Inside this newly-found strangeness he bonds with three other men who are also seeking asylum. But the never-ending waiting, sitting at weird classes for English speaking lessons and their encounters with swaggering teenagers have potent reactions to all four.
It is beautifully photographed by Nick Cooke including great takes of the glorious Scottish outdoors. Limbo is one of my top recommendations from this year’s festival.
Undine dir Christian Petzold
Starring quintessential duo Paula Beer and Franz Rogowksi (Transit), Christian Petzold’s rewriting of the popular German myth of the water nymph is a fascinating take of love lost and life’s continuity. Alongside ultra-fine performances from both Beer and Rogowski, Undine exerts an exquisite kind of delicacy in story telling that’s keeping you alert.
I loved its perilous complexity and reference to architecture and urban life. But its reference to modern design versus old and its relation to humanity’s progress loomed ominously within.
Friendship’s Death (1987) dir Peter Wollen
A rare and wonderful chance to see influential film theorist late Peter Wollen’s 1987 film, restored by the BFI National Archive. Straight from featuring in Derek Jarman’s grand picture The Last of England on the same year, a young Tilda Swinton gives another highly impressive performance as extra-terrestrial robot called Friendship.
Sadly I didn’t have the chance to see Friendship’s Death before this year’s festival and this is testament how important festivals are to understanding film history, alongside encouraging new voices. Friendship’s Death is an essential viewing that opens up the way people see Wollen’s radical instinct for cinema. It is as hybrid notebook for the future of the image. Wollen’s fascination with patterns across history, art and writing is radical and mystical, to quote theorist Kodwo Eshun’s words, a “monument for the future”.
Another Round dir Thomas Vinterberg
Thomas Vinterberg was presented with the Best Film award for Another Round, the story of four school teachers who decide to put in practice Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud’s theory that drinking can increase social and professional performance. It’s riotous, funny and it gets messy. But as we tire with the rules of social distancing, you won’t regret watching this experiment of happiness. Greatest performance from Mads Mikkelsen too.
Time dir Garett Bradley
A very special discovery, Time is director Garrett Bradley’s remarkable new documentary capturing a woman’s 20-year campaign to release her incarcerated husband from prison. Bradley powerfully combines home video and new footage to rewind times of hardship, social justice, family bonding and hope.
Time rightfully earned Bradley the Best Director award at Sundance Film Festival. Timeless for all around the world but especially for America now, this is a great achievement that looks into the lives of Black communities that are repeatedly mass incarcerated. It is a powerful work of freedom and love.
Ammonite dir Francis Lee
Following his acclaimed God’s Own Country, Francis Lee’s follow up Ammonite with Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan leading a 19th century same sex love story is frankly moving. Winslet is ferocious in her reading as paleontologist and fossil hunter Mary Anning. She falls under the spell of young gentlewoman Charlotte (Ronan) who slowly begins to feel erotically attracted to her once she moves into her house. Ammonite’s thrilling imagery begins with Stéphane Fontaine’s (A Prophet) sensuous lensed details despite uncomfortable walks on the beach dressed up with multiple petticoats, corsets and steel hoop skirts. But it reaches an euphoria of intimacy that’s undeniably searing, scarcely beating Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color.
Yet Ammonite’s urgency is quite a revelation. It demonstrates a natural intimacy between two women that was so much more acceptable two centuries ago than it is today. And it is devastating to realise that.
Zanka Contact dir Ismaël El Iraki
It is great to see a recent rock ‘n’roll genre whatsit racing our screens in the past few years. It’s perhaps a sign of our time but the fight for survival in American Honey (2016), In the Fade (2017), Mandy (2018), Bacurau (2019) and Queen and Slim (2020) captured audiences while intelligently commending on capitalism, political injustice and racism. And now this. Zanka Contact is Ismaël El Iraki’s debut that’s unforgettable in so many ways.
Set in Casablanca, it’s a love story between two fugitives: rockstar Larsen Snake and prostitute Rajae who met through a car crash! But aside the excellent performances, Zanka Contact has this single special quality in its story: it’s rising up to one’s vulnerable (and unresolved) past to dominate psychological traumas and look at life with a fresh eye. Don’t miss it.
Never Gonna Snow Again dirs Małgorzata Szumowska, Michał Englert
I also loved Małgorzata Szumowska’s Never Gonna Snow Again, a mysterious and provocative take on the Polish bourgeoisie and mental health. Co-directed and co-written with her long-time collaborator, cinematographer Michał Englert, it features Russian speaking immigrant Zenia who works as masseur with magical powers for wealthy people who are trapped in their own gated bubble.
The film’s transcendental nature evokes the Theorem effect with a dash of Mulholland Drive surrealism. Fusing alcoholism, loneliness, illness, sexuality and grief, it’s a mesmerising and provocative work accomplished with striking detail and hilarious rotations.
Chess of the Wind (1976) dir Mohammad-Reza Aslani
A rare work that will enrich your perception of Iranian cinema, Mohammad-Reza Aslani’s debut feature Chess of the Wind (Shatranj-e Baad) is a masterful study of aristocratic decadence and despair. Think of Luchino Visconti with a poetic reading of time and desire. Lensed by the excquisite Houshang Baharlou (watch out for the regular women at the fountain scene washing their clothes), it features a beautiful score by pioneer composer Sheyda Gharachdaghi.
Chess of the Wind was screened only twice in 1976 and later banned during the 1979 Revolution and considered lost until 2015. The original negatives were found in an antique shop in Tehran when they were then returned to the director who shipped them to a secure location in Paris. Still banned today, the 2020 4K restoration of Aslani’s film was done by Martin Scorsese’s non-profit organisation, The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with the director and his daughter Gita Aslani Shahrestani.
Also, don’t miss…
Mogul Mowgli
David Byrne’s American Utopia, dir Spike Lee; Ultraviolence, dir Ken Fero; One Man and His Shoes, dir Yemi Bamiro; Cronenberg legacy–drone warfare provocative Possessor, dir Brandon Cronenberg; The Reason I Jump, dir Jerry Rothwell; The Salt in Our Waters, dir Rezwan Shahriar Sumit; Shirley, dir Josephine Decker; and hot ticket in town, Mogul Mowgli, dir Bassam Tariq.
* Mogul Mowgli is released on Friday 30 October in UK cinemas and on BFI Player.
11polaroids.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.