myDylarama

Q&A with Sema Basharan, director of The Branches are Hope; The Roots are Memory - Leeds award winner

Mydylarama team — 2021-11-21T20:30:58Z

Sema Basharan's short documentary explores the history of peace activism and grassroots resistance in Bradford and the way the city's religious diversity inspired movements towards peacebuilding, through a creative use of experimental art and visuals, archive footage and interviews.

What inspired you to make a documentary about Bradford? And why the specific focus on concepts like peace?

I'd previously made a film exploring Christian attitudes to war and peace through the story of some conscientious objectors in WW2, so it was a subject I'd been interested in for a while. I was really interested in how they saw peace through the lens of their faith, and the actions it led them to take as a result. In The Branches are Hope; The Roots are Memory I wanted to explore this topic further by looking at other faith groups and how faith and peace work together in people's lives to inspire them to act. Finding myself back in my home city of Bradford at this time felt like the perfect place to explore this idea. It's a city with a rich heritage of peace and is a melting pot of cultures, with a real independent spirit, so there was so much to dig into. It was also a chance for me to explore my own connection with the city after some time away, which was part of the journey of this film.

Can you tell us a bit more about the process? How did you choose the archives, the testimonies... Was there some level of collaboration with the Peace Museum?

The testimonies mostly came by recommendation, although I put out an open call looking for people to take part. A lot of the faith communities in Bradford are well connected, as are people involved in the peace movement, so most people were suggested to me by others I'd met, including by the Peace Museum. Bradford is full of people who would fit what I was looking for though, I could have spent a year interviewing people! I only had a month to fit in as many as I could. Choosing the archive was more tricky and there was a lot of experimentation, along with the other visuals, to weave the images and testimonies together and build up the picture bit by bit. I worked with the Yorkshire Film Archive for this who were really supportive in helping me find what I needed.

You integrated art and experimental imagery into the documentary. What's your background in fine arts?

I originally studied fine art, but couldn't really see myself working as an artist at that time, and didn't pursue my own creative practice until I started making documentaries ten years later. My first two documentaries were more of a mainstream style, but with this one I was feeling much more confident in developing my own voice that I wanted to revisit some of my past work. What's interesting is that I discovered the themes I was working with way back on my art foundation and undergraduate degree were the same themes I'm interested in now as a filmmaker, such as memory and identity. It felt so easy and natural to bring these together in this film.

You're primarily a documentary filmmaker. Are you looking to explore other formats? What would you like to work on in the near future?

Right now I'm sticking with documentary, although I wouldn't rule out other genres in future! This was the first film where I'd written something of a script, and it turns out I really enjoy writing, so I would like to explore that more for sure! I have a couple of other ideas in development right now, but with very film I make, I try to challenge myself to try something new, or tell the story differently, so that's on my mind now with the next one. I like to build on what I've learned but also to experiment where I can.

What have been your highlights from the film's festival run? Any comments or reactions that stood out?

The film premiered at Sheffield DocFest this year, so I have to say that was a definite highlight and
completely outdid my expectations. It was nominated for an award there too, so the whole experience was really amazing! Picking up an award at Leeds International Film Festival was the absolute icing on the cake, and I'm still a bit shocked that a film about peacemakers in Bradford would be of interest to other people! But people really seem to connect with the film, and I've had some great conversations with people who were really touched by it and have wanted to screen it at local community events, including an inter-faith group run by one of my contributors. For me that's one of the big successes of the film, that it doesn't just appeal to festival audiences. It is screening in the communities that it came out of and inspires further discussion on topics of faith and peace.

What best bits of advice would you have for aspiring documentary filmmakers?

Honestly, just make films. Do what you can with the resources you have. You can do so much with a smartphone and a laptop. It doesn't matter how big an audience you get just keep making and honing your skills. The other thing I'd say is find people you trust who can give you really honest, constructive feedback, even if it's hard to hear sometimes. Those people are vital for the process so seek them out and take them on the journey with you.

Find out more about Sema's work on her website.

Vanguard Film Festival at Arnolfini

Elizabeth Mizon — 2021-10-26T18:06:52Z

The Vanguard Film Festival was the final of three events making up Vanguard x Vans: On The Screen in Bristol this autumn, a “celebration of street art and skateboarding history”. An advertising boon for skateboarding apparel manufacturer Vans, no doubt, the festival also served to draw attention to street art collective Vanguard's debut exhibition at M Shed: Bristol Street Art: The Evolution of a Global Movement, which runs until 31st October.

That the organisations chose to split their festival into three smaller events seems unnecessary given the cohesion of their themes. However each event was distinct; the films at today's final offering, The Vanguard Film Festival, related specifically to the history of hip hop's street art elements, delivering an almost entirely documentary record of the birth of the graffiti movement, its political and economic fabric, and the connections made between US and UK grassroots cultures.

The line up comprised the world's “first hip-hop feature” and US cult classic Wild Style (1982); the UK documentary Bombin' (1988) featuring a young paint-can wielding Goldie; and Martha: A Picture Story (2019), a dynamic and touching documentary about veteran photographer Martha Cooper, who struggled to get the attention she deserved for devotedly capturing the 1970's NYC street art movement as it was born.

Cooper conducted this street photography around her assignments as the New York Post's first female photographer where her editor had directed her to simply “look for cleavage”. A favourite of mainstream documentary festivals around the world on its release, Martha: A Picture Story was an excellent choice to end on; it gave us a masterful, relatable character-led insight into a dynamic and resonant period of history and, unlike the film's direct contemporary Finding Vivian Maier, one from whom we can still hear. And we did - the festival flew Cooper herself over for a Q&A to finish the day's schedule.

The other two films were also plenty interesting, especially when viewed side by side. Wild Style is almost a drama-documentary; largely a fictionalised ‘slice of life' for street artist ‘Zoro' (played by legendary NYC graffiti artist Lee Quiñones), it has long segments showing parties, club nights headed by Grand Master Flash, montages of shuttling el-trains covered in technicolour lettering and (seemingly) improvised dialogue the authenticity of which is doubtless, if a little wooden. The film frequently makes for dated viewing, but is fun - and a crucial time capsule.

Bombin' then gave an insight into just how strongly the real-life characters of Wild Style would immediately influence art and culture in the UK, as young people discovering the messages of the hip-hop scene were also suffering at the hands of police, poverty, and inner city life. We saw young artist Brim Fuentes and his contemporaries invited to the UK to give hip-hop workshops, voraciously attended by young Thatcher-addled kids. We were also introduced to forerunning young British hip hop artists including a teenage Goldie who, in return, visits Brim in the Bronx. He, too, attended for a Q&A.

Vanguard x Vans: On The Screen was held entirely at the city's premier contemporary art gallery, the Arnolfini, which has often housed important and radical work. But the Arnolfini audience is staunchly white middle-class.

Hosting events celebrating ‘underground/radical/urban/[insert label]' culture in deeply white spaces is not uncommon for corporate funded events, but it was particularly rankling alongside the films characters' vocalisation of how poverty and lack of funding for their activities was affecting their lives. It wasn't a surprise that we didn't see today's Anglo-side equivalent of South Bronx youth turn up, even though the festival was free.

I often wonder in these situations whether the organisers explored holding the event in the community spaces of less affluent areas - numerous film festivals, events and individual screenings, almost certainly with less financial backing, do so throughout the year.

More importantly, it just seems like common sense; a clear effort towards making a small, but key, change to a segregated art scene almost 40 years after Wild Style and Bombin' showed us theirs.

Here's more info on the festival. All three film festivals ran alongside the exhibition Vanguard: Bristol Street Art which finishes on Sunday 31st October 2021.

The Viewing Booth - Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's thought experiment

Abla Kandalaft — 2021-01-28T11:06:14Z

In a lab-like location, Maia Levy, a young Jewish American woman, watches videos portraying life in the occupied West Bank, while verbalizing her thoughts and feelings in real time.

Director Alexandrowicz once again explores and denounces the injustices faced by Palestinians living under occupation this time in a clever experimental process whereby he aims to capture the viewer's emotional and verbal responses to a series of videos - many of them shot by Jerusalem-based human rights NGO Btselem- that expose acts of violence, humiliation and other injustices Palestinians face on a daily basis. His aim is to try and understand the dynamics at play between non-fiction images and the way they are received by their viewers. Do we all see the same thing? How much of our own beliefs and prejudices to we bring to the experience? How much do these skew what we are witnessing and how we process it? Ultimately, how much can documentary film affect the viewer's view of the world and drive them to act?

The documentary centres on Maia who is by all intent an keen supporter of Israel and who volunteers to watch these videos, which trigger all sorts of conflicting responses and emotions as her views are challenged and her beliefs are put under the spotlight.

In his director's statement, Alexandrowicz writes "The introspective nature of The Viewing Booth determined its unconventional form and structure – one that often evokes the idea of a mirror, or a hall of mirrors. As the work on the film progressed, I realized that it is not only Maia and myself, who are facing our own reflections through this film."

It really brings home the reasons why horrific, explicit images of say, the bombing of Gaza don't automatically lead to unequivocal revulsion. As you watch these images, you think 'surely, surely, nobody could justify this. There is no world in which this isn't indiscriminate, unjustified killing/humiliation/destruction.' And yet that's under-estimating just how much one's internalised view of the world around them shapes the way they interpret these images. Post-modernism, digital manipulation and the filter of social media have all added extra layers of complexity to what an image conveys and how it is interpreted. The repercussions are all-encompassing. The Viewing Booth intelligently exposes the limits of documentaries and news footage in terms of relaying the reality on the ground.

The film has enjoyed a number of screenings as part of events and festivals, more recently through the ICA, but the simplest way to watch it is probably on its official website here!

Our Picks And The Staircase

Abla Kandalaft, Coco Green — 2020-07-21T11:32:33Z

In this episode, we discuss our picks of the fortnight and focus on true crime documentary The Staircase and the issues that it brings up.

The Dark finale was definitely a highlight, a truly gripping series, with twists and turns as bonkers as those in Lost, with none of the incoherence and sheer wackiness. Palestinian filmmaker Sameer Qumsieh's doc Walled Citizen, in which he explores travelling with the world's lowest ranking passport was screened as part of the Galway FF selection. You will hopefully be able to catch it at the UK Adventure Travel film festival and the Manhattan Film Festival in August.

Kaveh Abbasian's A Long Distance podcast is on Soundcloud. Art of Persia is still available on BBC iPlayer.

Korean Film Nights and Birkbeck's season- Trapped! The Cinema of Confinementstarts this week.

Made-for-TV movie The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel(2019) proved to be more than a melodrama. It's about the price one family paid to change the gospel genre forever and the moving concert scenes are the icing on the cake. Other top picks are College Behind Bars (2019), a four-part documentary series profiling the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) which is a vehicle for inmate rehabilitation, redemption and transformation; and Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado (2020) which raises questions around gender and sexuality in Latin American media representation, but bizarrely not race, providing a cautionary tale of ownership and exploitation in show business.

We'll be focusing on Secorro's recommendation - The Staircase, currently available on Netflix, and discuss issues it brings up around culpability, social and marital expectations, the nature of factual evidence and all sorts of anecdotes. Tip: Watch ALL 13 episodes to understand the full scope of the discussion!

Three New Documentaries To Watch Now

Benjamin Hollis — 2020-04-01T10:48:37Z

Documentary Weekly creator Benjamin Hollis shares his top three doc picks available to watch online.

Cunningham – Curzon Home Cinema, Amazon Prime, iTunes

Trailer

As unfortunate and disruptive as the Covid-19 outbreak has been for the film industry, the resulting boom of online releases will be welcomed by cinephiles around the world. On March 20th, Alla Kovga's highly anticipated « Cunningham » joined the growing list of films forced into an early online release.

An ode to legendary dance choreographer Merce Cunningham, the film blends artistic performance with archival footage, interviews and excerpts from letters to provide a fascinating account of his phenomenal career that spanned the best part of the 20th century.

But it's the dazzling modern-day interpretations of Cunningham's dances that will keep you watching. These are beautiful, modern, trance-like performances enhanced with cutting-edge camera work and breathtaking sets, whether shot in the courtyard of a French chateau or in the midst of a pine forest.

Despite being originally slated as a 3D cinematic experience, this documentary and dance performance hybrid serves well as a refreshing escape from isolation via the small screen.

Midnight Family – Curzon Home Cinema, Amazon Prime, iTunes

Trailer

The Ochoa family operates a private ambulance in Mexico City, where only 45 publicly funded ambulances watch over 9,000,000 people. That's one ambulance per 200,000 citizens. The Ochoas help to fill the gap, saving lives as they go, but they don't do it out of charity, they do it for a living.

After befriending the Ochoas on his walk to work, director Luke Lorentzen joined them in the back of their van for a night. Gobsmacked by what he witnessed, he grabbed his filming gear and lived out of the ambulance for 6 months. The result is a thrilling first-person account that charts not only the shocking cases they come across, but also their increasingly desperate financial plight and the tough decisions they're led to make.

Indeed, despite patrolling wealthier areas of the city, the Ochoas are not paid often. Even when they beat rival ambulances to the scene, many patients won't, or simply can't, pay them. On top of that, they're alert to marauding police, more likely to request a bribe than to help them get paid.

“Midnight Family” inevitably asks a lot of questions of the system it portrays, most of which go unanswered. But as debate rages on healthcare systems in both the US and the UK, the film serves as a gut-wrenching insight into what a fully privatised system can look like.

Tell Me Who I Am - Netflix

Trailer:

Although not as recent a release as the previous two, “Tell Me Who I Am” can't be missed. This is one of 2019's best documentaries with a truly unbelievable story at its heart. If you've already heard about it, you've probably been told of how disturbing it is, but don't let that put you off.

After falling into a coma, 18-year-old Alex Lewis wakes up in hospital. He recognises his identical twin brother Marcus but is confused by the anxious woman beside him and unable to recall his own name. Marcus starts by reintroducing Alex to his own mother and showing him how to tie his shoelaces but before long, he starts re-writing his brother's past, omitting a horrific childhood that Marcus himself doesn't have the strength to relive.

Upon making a peculiar discovery in his thirties at his recently deceased mother's house, Alex discovers the brothers' secret. But Marcus refuses to tell the whole story, leaving Alex with a gaping hole in his memories and identity.

Twenty years later, in the process of making their documentary, the brothers are seen together on screen for the first time in a surreal and cathartic unscripted climax nearly 40 years in the making. Finally, Marcus is able to tell his brother, and us, what happened all those years ago.

Q&A with Yves Gellie, dir. L'Année du robot - Clermont 2020

Elise Loiseau — 2020-02-07T14:39:05Z

At the crossroads of art and science, this film centers on human beings and robots as their artificial counterparts. Like a series of archival documents detailing the first contacts and exchanges between human beings and a robot, the film studies cognitive dissonance, a minuscule, mysterious relational space lying between them both.

A thoroughly exhaustive but at moments frankly alarming - the growth of emotional tech - look at our ever-changing relationships with robots. Yves Gellie's film, which took two years to make, looks at current, pragmatic, often laudable uses for robots - helping autistic people or those with Alzheimer's for example - and more philosophically, at our own fascination with their development and creation. The painstaking approach he has taken offers us a complex, rich and nuanced series of experiences and arguments, as he interviews a wide range of professionals, patients and enthusiasts and really takes the time to follow their own interactions and thoughts.

Trailer

L'année du robot - Extrait 1 from Upian on Vimeo.

More on the film...

L'année du robot touches upon the relationship between humans and robotics, including their introduction into the field of caregiving. Why did you embrace this theme?

It's a long story that began in 2007 when I started a photography project around research areas and researchers' tools. The ‘laboratory' as a space interested me because it is a recurring space found in literature and in cinema that expresses human aspirations quite well. My inspiration was the novel l'Eve future by Villiers l'Isle-Adams, which describes the advent of an artificial creature in a laboratory at the dawn of the electric era. During a site scouting trip to Japan I came across the robot Kotaro at Tokyo University. A decisive meeting which led me to visit the 50 laboratories around the world that were using humanoid programs. The success of this series of photos encouraged me to continue this work on robots through commissions, for example the creation of a series of 7 bas-relief of giant robots and hieratic figures 15 meters high covering the façade of the Versailles School of Fine Arts or a forest of posters questioning the future of these artificial machines and the relationship to humans. During a visit to Afghanistan, where I was during research on the Sala, I observed the cognitive dissonance of mine sweepers who were using robots. Certain mine sweepers put themselves in danger in order to save their robot trapped in a difficult situation. I wanted to develop this fleeting image of this American soldier, put it into images, explore this strange, nearly invisible link between man and machine that I often compare to trying to photograph a breath of air. It's a mysterious moment of balance and very personal. Therefore, I did an art/science residency in a French research laboratory working on social-service robots but didn't really find what I was looking for. The procedure was always the same. The robot was placed in front of a group of people and used as an auxiliary in music, poetry and drawing workshops. The studies focused on the robot and its capacity to trigger interactions with humans. My approach was totally different; I wanted to observe, to capture the moment when a human being decides by himself to establish a relationship with this machine, at what point and by what means could this relationship take shape. It just so happens that it was in the health field, and moreover in hospitals and establishments taking care of elderly people, some of whom were suffering from Alzheimer's, that I was able to observe this relationship daily.

Is the objective of this documentary to serve as medium for the numerous questions on ethics that this theme poses?

I don't consider this film as a documentary but as a film that explores a possible relationship between humans and robots. When beginning this work, I didn't have any certainty that I'd arrive at any particular result. What I was looking for didn't exist; you only found it in science-fiction movies. It took me nearly three years to get a fleeting glimpse of the onset of this almost intimate relationship. It was “looking for the Green Ray”, does it really exist? This film asks a lot of questions especially around ethics. But that wasn't my initial intention. I simply wanted to capture this strange desire for a relationship that I myself experienced facing Kotaro, the Japanese robot.

Would you say that, for the spectator, the film sheds more light on human relations, empathy and the relationship to old age rather than on the question of artificial intelligence?

It's a film about humans, not robots. People often ask me questions about the robot's performance in the film. But my answer is always the same. We decided that the robot was equipped with an intelligence capable of exchanging with humans. This AI capability doesn't exist today, but we needed it for the film. We made sure, along with my assistant, Maxime Jacobs, that it did exist in the film. Once this problem resolved, we focused 100% on the human being. This film explores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance that I observed in Afghanistan. The speakers are fully aware that the robot's functionality is totally artificial, but they develop nonetheless a personal and intimate relationship with the machine in the presence of the technical team operating it. Everything that happens in the scenes that follow do indeed speak about emotion, empathy and the relationship to aging. The film can be viewed from multiple angles.

Did you work with elderly people and autistic people beforehand or did you simply put them in front of the robot to capture their spontaneous reactions?

The robot was introduced progressively in the institutions although some institutions already had one. First, we observed the residents' daily routine, their habits, their attitudes in the psychomotricity workshops and others. The robot was introduced progressively in their daily routine first with no interaction, then through a relationship with the workshop personnel. The goal was to reach the moment where the patients would decide for themselves to establish a relationship. This is why the work took so long.

What are your works of reference?

Once someone said to me jokingly, “Your film is the world after 2001, Space Odyssey by Stanely Kubrick.” Does it have a hint, a scent of a future relationship with machines? However, I think it is man who is going to enhance himself more that the humanoid machine is going to make progress. Man is obsessed with his finitude. I don't really have works of reference but many writers such as the philosopher Jean Michel Besnier, the lawyer Alain Bensoussan, the anthropologist Denis Vidal or the robotics engineers Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Jean-Paul Laumond or Abderrahmane Kheddar contributed greatly through the series of exchanges I had with them.

Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?

Yes, in the shape of the film. Fixed images, wide shots, minimalist decors, a fuzzy atmosphere, tendency to use a monochromatic scheme. I wanted a film without the subjective intervention of several cameras, without demonstrative intention. The general idea was to be a researcher who sets up a camera in a corner of his lab. The short film corresponds to such a preconceived approach.

Gaza, dir: Gary Keane & Andrew McConnell

Tommy Hodgson — 2020-01-09T21:24:59Z

Gaza never falters in its intimate portrayal of humans whose lives have been profoundly affected by political decisions made without their consent or interests at heart. The footage is unmanufactured; it is not a passive news report about the body count of an active war zone but a real character study of personal and societal perseverance through the most devastating circumstances. It is both destruction and happiness; pain and dancing; and only political insofar as it spells out that sympathy is not enough consolation for an idea of a free and just Gaza.

After the film screening at Soho's Curzon, the co-director Andrew McConnell spoke of how he was welcomed overwhelmingly into the local community; approaching Gaza as an outsider actually created the impetus for the most intimate and heart-wrenching moments of the film. In accessing these stories, building relationships and foundations, the directors were able to breach the only realistic difference between Gaza as a ‘big open air prison' and an actual prison. Lack of drinkable water, electricity shortages and barriers to travel render this obviously stunning and culturally rich land a zone of restrictions. It is thus sadly relevant that the directors use imagery of the sea, which is culturally important to the Gazan psyche and way of life but ultimately serves as a false symbol of freedom and escape. This gives the undeniably beautiful shots of Gazans socialising by the beach, silhouetted against the backdrop of sunsets over a long flat sea, a bittersweet feeling.

[1]

Everything in Gaza is told through the eyes of its subjects; fishermen, taxi drivers, tailors and lifeguards create the actual scope of Gazan life, the directors are just a conduit. It is apparent, and indeed painfully so, that Gazans are trying to forge their own expression out of a dire situation, evident through profiles of a disabled Palestinian rapper and a family of aspiring models creating their own catwalk at home. For such dreams to flourish even in a limited sense, in a land under massive blockade and siege, truly speaks to the spirit that the directors gleaned in their exploration of Gaza. This holds even more weight given that the directors' original film idea was just to document the surprisingly popular pastime of surfing in Gaza. Both the original niche approach and the broader final project are powerful in that they deflate the conflict narrative surrounding merely the mention of the word ‘Gaza'.

The biggest revelation of the film, an underlying gut punch lurking throughout, comes as many Gazans, often young unemployed men, approach the Israeli border fence – a symbol of oppression and denial of a future. The harrowing scenes depict the futility of Gazans throwing rocks up against a much more powerful and ruthless enemy, but doing so out of frustration and lack of opportunities; as an outlet not as a solution. Seeing sieges in real time, concerning people and families the film has already fleshed out, brings home the devastation and misery of the cycle of conflict on the ground in this region. It is a reminder of the reality of Gazans, that the humour, the singing and the brotherhood of its people happen not just in spite of the terror and violence but because of it; this is the crux of solidarity and resistance.

[1] all photos from gazadocumentary.com

Soviet Hippies, directed by Terje Toomistu - UK Premiere

Tommy Hodgson — 2019-11-14T14:09:33Z

Soviet Hippies, director Terje Toomistu's second creation, is a thoughtful, insightful piece which effortlessly draws you into a counter-cultural pocket of resistance, transporting you to a time of contrasting repression and upheaval. Through the use of archival footage - crisp, clear and naked material - this film documents not just the developments of a hippie subculture in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 70s, but the mood surrounding the ongoing passive resistance against the state. From its inception, the film produces a pang of nostalgia - even for a time and place you have no stake in - through the use of grainy and intimate footage, and splashes of dated, psychedelic animations to ensure you step lively into the time warp before you.

The narrative of the film follows a loose thread of hazy tales, heady beliefs, mystic societies and psychedelic exploration. The viewer is invited to examine the hippie warriors of yesteryear in their shaggy prime - optimistic and adamant – then, directly alongside, as starkly aged relics still grasping a core belief system, just as righteous if a bit weathered. The archival footage is incredible and really makes the film, which is all the more remarkable as Toomistu only stumbled upon the footage – a box of Super 8mm film rolls - during her research, giving the project a generous artistic boost by way of this never before seen hippie treasure trove. Considering that the history of the hippie movement in the USSR was previously widely unknown, partly due to Soviet archives which were closed until fairly recently, this was a feat – the director worked from scratch and interviewed all the participants anew, and this hard work is reflected through the consistent tone of the movie. In the Q&A after the premiere, Toomistu articulated that the original plan was to focus primarily on a reunion of old hippies in the present day. But without the real, raw historic material, the movie surely would not have been as impactful or clear in its narrative.

Throughout the documentary, the contrast between the uniformity of Soviet culture and the hippies' pursuit of individualistic rebellion is blunt; an obvious juxtaposition which means that sprinkling the film with snapshots of regular Soviet life as way of illustration merely underlines the point. But the bigger takeaway from the film is that the repressive aspects of any society harbours dissent, and the example of Soviet hippies, which took huge inspiration from their Western and more well-known counterparts, followed a loose pattern of international turmoil and exploration of new ideas in the post-war era. And based on the film's archival interviews with older or more conservative members of the Soviet public, reaction to these long- haired ‘modern forest folk' would have elicited the same reactionary sentiments in Los Angeles or London (‘get a haircut!').

One of the most interesting aspects of the film was the network that Soviet hippies established, pre-mass communication, simply using notebooks and word of mouth. Ironically named ‘the system', its creation allowed the freedom of movement of like-minded outsiders from across the Soviet states to find each other and know where to stay in each city, outside of KGB detection. It speaks to the wonderfully subversive nature of these Soviet hippies, and of humans in difficult situations more widely. That feeling of not being alone should not be underestimated, in any cultural endeavours. As one of the many hippies interviewed in the film put it, ‘deviance was an act of power'. One suspects Toomistu, whose academic research includes transgender women in Indonesia, meant her documentary as a celebration of diversity of thought and experimentation – and ‘the system' is a good illustration of this.

The Soviet hippie movement itself was forced underground - to the fringes of an already-hostile society or even externally - when a public meeting was shut down by the authorities on 1st June 1971. Though the annual meeting of hippies still takes place on the same date every year in Moscow, the film truly emphasises how, though traces remain, this movement really existed in not just a different time but a separate sociopolitical space. The challenges and backlash of the counterculture years, viewed through the prism of this subculture but widely applicable, are ultimately captured here through music, visuals, deeply-held opinions and emotion – building up to a worldly but raw experience, courtesy of a thorough, research-minded director. The night, hosted by Dash Arts and featuring an extensive Q&A, was even followed by a mystic ritual courtesy of one of the film's stars Vladimir Wiedemann, just to try to keep some essence of the Soviet hippies alive. Overall, the film succeeds in giving a little burst of recognition and life to a movement which, in the words of Toomistu, had ‘no centre, no edges'.

More info on the film's website!

Our picks of Arab docs 2: Papa Hedi - the Man Behind the Microphone

Abla Kandalaft — 2019-09-30T16:17:10Z

Filmmaker Claire Belhassime unbelievably randomly finds out that her grandfather is none other than legendary Tunisian singer Hedi Jouini. As she decides to retrace his life, she uncovers both Hedi's role in political and social movements and Tunisia's art scene and secrets and drama at the very heart of her family, shedding light on why his real identity was kept hidden. Even if you've never heard of Hedi Jouini, Belhassine's thoroughly engaging storytelling skills and her expert use of archive footage and music are sure to get you on board that tumultuous and emotional journey with her.

Find out more on screenings and the film's subject on the official website and Facebook page.

Our pick of Arab docs 1

Abla Kandalaft — 2019-09-23T14:47:31Z

We've been watching recently - and not quite yet - released documentaries by Arab filmmakers. We'll be posting our picks and where to find them in the next few days and weeks, starting with the below.

Counting Tiles, dir. Cynthia Choucair

Lebanese filmmaker Cynthia Choucair travels to the Greek island of Lesvos with her sister, a member of Clowns Without Borders, volunteers who seek to bring a bit of laughter and levity to the refugees that have ended up there. Once they arrive on the island, they are met with closed gates and piles of life jackets, and the new restrictions and policies introduced by the EU. As they attempt to negotiate the red-tape separating them from the refugees they try to reach, the two sisters reflect on their own history of displacement following the war in Lebanon. Moving, with some beautiful contemplative sequences that allow us as viewers the same space to reflect on the plight of people forced to flee their homes.

State of Siege, dir. Wassim Safadi

This doc is freely available on YouTube until the end of October 2019, so make sure you catch it in time.

Safadi's short doc gives us a personal account of an oft-ignored community: the Syrians living in the occupied Golan Heights, currently caught between instability in Syria, their own various allegiances and the perils of Israeli occupation. The slightly lo-fi aspects of the production are overshadowed by the unprompted, raw, intimate conversations and interjections of the residents interviewed by Safadi, allowing us a privileged and powerful glimpse into the mundane reality of their everyday existence.