To attend the London Film Festival (LFF) in October 2024 is to witness the expression of a world out of joint and to be urgently in search of new and liberatory stories that also engage with cinema in compelling ways. The genocide in Palestine; imperialist war in Ukraine and the fragile state of U.S. democracy featured in the program, reflecting the ways in which our world is out of joint. 

Kristy Matheson and her team worked hard to make this edition of LFF a mirror of the world that could still appeal to varied tastes. They captured the “big films” of the summer festival season (Sean Baker’s Anora, Mati Diop’s Dahomey and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light). While the gala presentations rolled out big names from directors like Andrea Arnold and Steve McQueen to public figures such as Pharrell Williams (subject of the Lego movie Piece by Piece) and Donald Trump (in Ali Abbasi’s biopic The Apprentice.) There was a varied and engaged program of shorts and documentaries as well as a new and stunning 45-minute autobiographical essay by Leos Carax, C’est Pas Moi (It’s Not Me).

Alongside these viewing pleasures, a real highlight of this year’s festival was the geography. As a Londoner, I relished revisiting the places where I fell in love with movies. Those who are able, can walk from most of the venues within about 30 minutes. Natives and visitors alike can dwell in some of London’s most evocative and generative corners, from the back alleys of Chinatown, past the Prince Charles Cinema (where, as a fourteen-year-old, I saw and was enchanted by Ingmar Bergman’s Sommarnattens leende, The Smiles of a Summer Night, 1955), cutting through Soho, Piccadilly Circus and Charing Cross Road to the South Bank.

Film timings and ticketing were more challenging, and it is worth reflecting on the fantasies the film industry has of who its audience is. The reality, expense and logistics of attending the festival are doubly challenging for anyone with access needs or caring responsibilities. The lottery played to gain access to press screenings at this year’s LFF and the consequent limited capacity for planning is an added challenge, though the online festival platform mitigates this somewhat. At times, watching from my laptop at home, I mused at who the Platonic festival delegate is, who marches from screening to screening, talk to networking event and beyond with ease and vim (and no other commitments)? 

Manji

One strand of the festival is the re-release of restored archival “treasures” (which this year included the late Shyam Benegal’s Manthan (The Churning, 1976). I attended a screening of Masumura Yasuzo’s intense 1964 story of obsession, Manji, at BFI Southbank’s NFT1 with an informative talk from the curator Robin Baker. Masumura plays with colour, space and furniture (at one point seamlessly using montage to turn the marital double bed into a pair of singles) deceptively. The film depicts the shifting power play between its ill-fated menage à trois, with striking settings and costumes (rendered in graphic Agfacolor). It plays with notions of consent and coercion, and at times undermines the characters’ agency and capacity for consent when their appetites are engaged. Ultimately, the film makes the somewhat Foucauldian point that there is no liberation in the exercise of libido. The narrator, Sonoko (Kishida Kyōko), finds solace not through love, sex or death but through the goddess of mercy, and the act of telling her story (the film is structured as a flashback) is also shown to be cathartic and redemptive. 

Hard Truths

It is hard to think about liberation without thinking about Mike Leigh’s Hackney set Hard Truths (starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin as sisters). Like many film lovers, I am an admirer of Leigh’s work and in awe of his process, as well as the quietly progressive ethos his movies engender. I was delighted to give the master a standing ovation, along with others, as he came to the stage at the Royal Festival Hall. Perhaps it is a characteristic of “late style”, but Hard Truths is a tricky film, and I came away wishing that all the wonderful character work had landed in a more worked out place. Knowing what we do about Leigh’s process (that the work is devised and workshopped heavily in collaboration with the actors – they create the characters with Leigh who then comes up with a script that is a reflection of this process), it is telling that the film doesn’t resolve anything for its central characters, leaving Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) and her husband Curtley (a moving portrayal by David Webber) in the middle of a domestic tragedy. Maybe, Mike Leigh did not feel entitled to frame these particular characters with a “finished” story. This is far less claustrophobic than a film which drags you through the inevitable “beats” of a formulaic story. 

Still, more commitment in relation to the central character Pansy’s hyper-vigilance, paranoia and anxiety (that point to some kind of trauma response) felt so possible. The film contains exquisite character studies and intense, believable scenes. It is hard not to feel deeply for all the wonderful, hurt people in the family at the centre of Hard Truths — and perhaps that is enough. Perhaps we don’t need the story to tell us more about the historical processes and social order that have failed them. But I would have liked a film that did more (as with Leigh’s Naked, 1993) to eviscerate the role of contemporary Britain in Pansy’s life. Hard Truths is funny, excruciating and deeply tragic (in the traditional/real sense of the word). There is something burning and buried in its heart that was never fully revealed to me. The hard truth of the film’s title felt like a whisper in the North East London wind. 

I’m Still Here

Loss and history loom across Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, like the ominous helicopters which judder overhead during the film. The first shot is of woman at sea and, above her, we hear then see a helicopter. Anyone who’s lived in a police state knows how a sound like that can freeze your blood and fill you with dread. And so, when we see Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), as she swims in the ocean, look up at the military helicopter overhead, we wonder (like her): should we be worried? But like the family, during the film’s first sequences, we are lulled into a sense of security by the sun, sea, music, joy and freedom that pulsates through their household. We are reassured by the sheer assurance of Salles’ free flowing camera, motivated as it is by ephemeral moments – the toss of a volleyball, the finding of a stray dog, the burial of a tooth. The first act goes by in a flurry of these moments. Moments that we look back at by the end of the film with a deep and aching sense of loss. 

Salles cuts to the heart of the cinematic image and impulse, what André Bazin understood to be The Ontology of the Photographic Image (a photograph makes us love an object in a way we couldn’t love it before).1 The film is a meditation on the role of photograph as index and evidence but also as simulacra and mockery. Salles plays with photographs and blends in ciné film to evoke memory and loss. 

In prison, Eunice is shown a gallery of numbered mugshots to be identified. She doesn’t recognise her own husband. And she enters a new kind of hell when, after a few days in prison, it’s her own face she recognises with a shock. Later, the role of the index and reality is brought home in an episode about the family’s red car – its physical presence a graphic reminder of their truth. And the film’s meditation on cinema and the trace is poignantly apparent in images of an empty family home. 

I’m Still Here 

This is properly painful viewing, masterfully put together. How can one not be moved by Salles’ rendering of the dictatorship? He brings us right up to the unpredictable and intractable logic of a militaristic regime to a degree that it becomes claustrophobic, bewildering, horrifying and inescapable. What he grasps (and how could he not, because it is so close to his own life – Paiva was a family friend) is how dictatorships work and how they get under your skin. If you’ve lived through a dictatorship and had relatives disappear, there’s a dread in the pit of your stomach as soon as Marcelo Rubens Paiva starts receiving clandestine letters. There is plenty of pathos and grim humour, too.

If this is a film about memory, it is partly about how it’s unreliable and how we struggle to hold onto it, but how, in holding onto it, we are resisting totalitarian systems. And in a film partly fed by political anger at injustice, remembering is an act of resistance. Indeed, one of Eunice’s first acts of resistance is to record and keep track of her days in captivity, as if remembering who she is and how much time has passed is vital to her survival. But this is also, achingly, a film about loss and consolation— about the records we keep as consolation for our losses. Three times in the film, Eunice says she needs to organise her photographs, and the act of locating and interpreting our archives (both personal and national) is one of the central actions in this film. Although she has Alzheimer’s by the end, Eunice remembers what matters. 

Grand Theft Hamlet

There were notable British films that tried to engage with bigger historical forces and significant social themes through personal stories. Sasha Nathwani’s Last Swim is an affectionate portrait of West London teenagers facing painful realities on A-Level results day.2 From its opening shot of the Earth as a swirly, blue marble, it seems to be reaching for the profound, but lands somewhere near the charming because it doesn’t seem to have translated its philosophy into a visual language. Meanwhile Amrou Al-Khadi’s Layla is a refreshingly competent and visually literate film that reaches for the sublime but never quite gets there. Watching it, I was grateful for Bilal Hasna’s central performance and a worldview which had so much to say about how we invent ourselves and come into the world. Perhaps the most successfully realised British film engaging with the world as we find it was Grand Theft Hamlet (Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane), a documentary shot entirely inside the video game Grand Theft Auto. It tells the story of how two actors, out of work during the Covid pandemic, struggle and eventually succeed in staging Hamlet inside the computer game. This is a clever and self-aware documentary that skilfully manages, with a light touch, to engage with themes like alienation, identity, authenticity and performance — as well as violence. 

Eephus

Eephus was an assured debut from Carson Lund who is part of an American filmmakers’ collective, Omnes Films (who also made Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, which I missed). It is satisfying how an eephus (a kind of throw in baseball, slow and elliptical) becomes a metaphor for Lund’s whole aesthetic, but the movie left me cold. The narrative was too diffuse, and my sympathy was thinly spread between too many characters. These seem to have been a deliberate part of Lund’s design, a kind of homage to baseball and its team spirit. While I can admire this, I am not sure it works, even though the ensemble cast is about as lived in, authentic and believable as an old shoe. Aesthetically, Eephus knows exactly what it’s doing with its camera and its mise-en-scène. One of the last shots holds on a coach of one of the teams as he literally turns his back on the fireworks going off behind him, off screen. This image sums up the movie’s approach: look, the fireworks and the cliches are elsewhere. Sure, this is a baseball movie with a difference, and the inclusion of Frederick Wiseman’s voice (a documentarian whose work is synonymous with painstaking observational truth) is a kind of blazon. This is considered and knowing filmmaking, it’s just a shame that I couldn’t’t find a throbbing pulse — or much to care about. But I don’t play baseball. I did wonder if Lund might have benefitted from having someone other than himself (who loved baseball less) edit it?

All We Imagine as Light is the kind of Indian film that European festivals can digest gleefully. I was excited to see it, and disappointed. From its generous (indeed courageous) central performances from Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha and Chhaya Kadam, to its unmediated gaze at the ultimate cinematic subject — Mumbai — there is a lot to be beguiled by. It is a pleasure to watch a film that embraces three women whose lives are conventionally overlooked. I especially enjoyed a reference to Nargis and Raj Kapoor under an umbrella (a nod to Kapoor’s 1955 musical comedy, Shree 420). Yet, in spite of its courageous cast and dedication to capturing a rawer Mumbai than we are used to seeing, I was left feeling that (as a South Asian Muslim) I was not its target audience. As the joke about the Hindi/Urdu word kal, stolen masterfully from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and inserted in an early piece of dialogue3 evinced, I had been here before. And as the ultimate cliche of sexual discovery in a cave approached (and the ineluctable association with poor Doctor Aziz’s fate in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India hit me), I gave up on the film.

All We Imagine as Light

If one of the intentions was to make a film that doesn’t re-inscribe the lies of Modi’s India, then All We Imagine as Light has shot far from the target as far as Indian Muslims are concerned. To paraphrase Céline Sciamma’s admission after the backlash to Girlhood (2014): this is no way of being an ally. Mumbai is a city with a 26% Muslim population. It would not have been unbelievable for one of the film’s three nurse protagonists to be a Muslim. Given that Muslims are being evicted or denied housing throughout today’s Mumbai, it would not have been unthinkable for the one character who is evicted by an aspirational high rise to be Muslim (although this may have muddied the film’s themes). The film’s only speaking Muslim character is a love interest (with the unlikely name “Shiaz”), who isn’t dignified with a profession.4 Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) is drawn from a well of stereotypes: the charming lay-about Muslim youth – loitering, living with his family, and chasing girls. His only purpose in the story is to service his own and Anu (Prabha)’s appetites: for food, sexual adventure or sunglasses. Film is fantasy and this is a communally charged stereotype of a fantasy. It was compounded by an unsettling sequence where Anu cosplays in a burqa, which takes on the Orientalist habit of flattening Muslims to a single item of fetish clothing. Precisely because of paranoid fantasies around Muslim men wanting to have premarital sex with or marry and convert Hindu women (also known as “love jihad” in the Hindutva lexicon) none of this is emancipatory.

In a different vein, and with great integrity, Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s Sujo is an impressive film with a powerful and important story at its heart. Shot with a deeply felt aesthetic and a vision grounded in a poetic and ethic reminiscent of Thomas Hardy (there’s a pointed reference to Jude the Obscure, and just enough lyricism, nature and magic to keep Hardy fans happy), the story manages to find seeds of hope in the otherwise bleak and violent world of Mexican drug cartels. Sujo is a film about growing up and intergenerational guilt and trauma. Made with a largely non-professional cast and deeply rooted in a specific place it manages to feel very immediate. It tells a story as much about the angels who deliver us from our evil fates, as about the banal evils of this world. 

Growing up is also one of the subjects of Andrea Arnold’s characteristically lyrical and at times sublime Bird. There are moments in this movie that felt genuinely transcendent and transformative, even if Arnold’s troubling exorcism of ghosts relating to working class mothers is once again on display (somehow fathers — however flawed — get a heroic moment that mothers are never allowed, but maybe that’s just life as she knows it). There is enough in this movie to make it absolutely worth watching; it is deeply moving and impressive. Though there was something niggling in my mind about how race was dissolved into a non-issue when, in real life, it is anything but. However, as the ending of Bird inscribes, Arnold isn’t just interested in real life, but in magic, artifice and self-invention too.

While Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s Mother Vera, a beautiful and striking portrait of a very unique woman at a crossroads in her life, took the Grierson Award for the best documentary, the two documentaries that lived on with me were Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and Mati Diop’s Dahomey. They couldn’t be more different in terms of viewing experience or form, but they are part of a larger conversation around the legacies of colonialism today. A lot of ink has been spilled about Dahomey already, but the one thing I will add is that here we have a film, that is genuinely polyphonic, the power of which grows in your mind long after you’ve seen it. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat operates very differently: through its profusion of archival material, it recreates a historical crisis and exposes one of the most dastardly chapters in the 20th century. 

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

It is curious that we keep returning to the 1960s, to moments such as Patrice Lumumba’s assassination — as if we were still fighting the same battles today. Anyone paying attention — like Diop, Grimonprez and Raoul Peck— knows we still are. And the highlight of my festival was meeting and talking to Raoul Peck, a filmmaker who has invented ways of reckoning with the past in order to open up a more hopeful and equal future. Peck had come to London with his elegant documentary Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, which tells the story of South African photographer Cole’s (1940-1990) tragic life. The film outlines the photographer’s rise and decline, capturing with moving clarity how “exile is a terrible, terrible thing”. Peck has made a string of excellent documentaries and historical fiction, all of which challenge, and give us a language to dismantle, enduring colonial power structures (his film Lumumba, 2000, is one of the best historical biopics I have ever seen – doing for Lumumba what Andrzej Wajda and Georg Büchner did for Danton).

Ernest Cole was a gifted photographer exiled from his homeland after the publication of his groundbreaking book, House of Bondage (1967) which was banned in South Africa and documents the truth of everyday life for black South Africans under Apartheid. Ironically, he escaped Apartheid only to fall prey to racialising dynamics in the United States where he had hoped he might be free from the logic of segregation; instead, he was boxed in and re-traumatised by being repeatedly assigned to document the misery of Black America. He had wanted to document a range of human experience (in Frantz Fanon’s words “All I wanted to be was a man among other men”). Recapturing Cole’s voice, Peck’s film explores Cole’s lifelong struggle and the mysterious afterlife of his work. Archives are at the centre of Cole’s story and the third act of Peck’s documentary charts the return of Cole’s lost prints, negatives and correspondence to South Africa. Hidden in a Swedish bank vault until 2017, Cole’s archive did not return to South Africa until this year.

This documentary is a masterclass in the careful use of archival material, and the blending of different sources to create new meaning. The gift of making a film about a photographer as brilliant as Cole is that his archive images are stunning, and Peck is adept at blending these with his own footage. As in I am Not Your Negro (2016) and Exterminate All the Brutes (2021), he brings music and voiceover together with images in provocative yet seamless ways. When we met, Peck talked about being a bricoleur, of it being part of his identity as a Haitian filmmaker, to work with whatever he could get his hands on, like a sculptor refashioning discarded tyres from a scrap heap. He talked about this being a consequence of not having official archives, of his stories, his mother, his siblings, his history not being archived in the way European and white history has been archived. And for all its bricolage roots, Peck’s work is never rough-hewn, always polished in a way that adds to its authority. 

I came away from the 64th edition of LFF thinking hard about what it takes to make a genuinely emancipatory movie — or to tell a tale of freedom that is true to its own espoused values. Sometimes the answer can be deceptively simple. In Raoul Peck’s words, “We don’t have to re-invent the wheel — there are plenty of wheels!” A.S.M. Kobayashi’s elegant and hard-hitting short film File No. 2034 is an example of how going back and simply looking at the past, and an archive, with fresh eyes, can be transformative. Kobayashi is an artist who has spent her career reinterpreting other people’s found objects, but in confronting her family’s past through a single microfilm file, she manages to perform a radical reckoning with Canadian history. The restitution of misappropriated artefacts; the re-situation and reinterpretation of an archive; reviving the voices of people, objects and spirits that have been silent for too long — these are impulses which for me, united some of most interesting and liberatory work at LFF. 

BFI London Film Festival
9 – 20 October 2024
https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/

Endnotes

  1. Bazin, André, and Hugh Gray. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 4–9. https://doi.org/10.2307/1210183.
  2. A Levels are ‘Advanced Level’ qualifications, a set of subject-based exams that highschoolers in the UK take in their final year. The grades are used in the university admissions process.
  3. No people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”
  4. Prabhas love interest, Dr Manoj is not only a medical expert but capable of writing touching and genuinely felt poetry; her absent husband works in a factory.

About The Author

Nasheed is a director and screenwriter who makes documentary and fiction about people negotiating cultural differences. Driven by a love of truth, beauty and justice, she combines filmmaking with occasional writing about cinema. Her films have been supported by international festivals/symposia, the BBC, BFI and Wellcome Trust.

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