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East End Film Festival 2015 - Crumbs

Ryan Ormonde — 2015-08-10T13:26:00Z

East End Film Festival 2015: Crumbs (Miguel Llansó)

Last October, the Guardian's Africa Correspondent David Smith wrote a profile of Ethiopia, 30 years on from its infamous famine. Smith describes a country of ‘frenetic urban expansion', ‘an Orwellian surveillance state, breathtaking in scale and scope'. Crumbs, a post-apocalypse vision of Ethiopia from writer-director Miguel Llansó, shows us a country laid to waste. In the words of the apocryphal literary quotation that serves as a prelude to the film: ‘the survival instinct and the faith in the conservation of the human species had dissipated'. Historians consider Ethiopia to be the birthplace of the genus Homo, so it is fitting to imagine humanity's last days in that area of the earth.

Post-apocalypse films provide an opportunity for a particular kind of humour that trades off the perceptions our future descendants might have of us, their ancestors. Here, the ‘crumbs' of the title are mysterious and valuable antique objects, among them a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pendant; a poster of Michael Jordan, now refashioned as a shrine; a vinyl copy of Dangerous by Michael Jackson and a plastic toy gun attributed to Carrefour, believed to be one of history's last great artists. Carrefour is in fact the French version of Wal-Mart, its name emblazoned on the toy's flimsy packaging.

What is strange about this film is the sense of sadness that surrounds these misattributions. The central couple, played by Daniel Tadesse and Selam Tesfaye, imbue their possessions with more than just historical worth: they are sacred and auspicious signs. It is as if the performers are handling ancient tribal artefacts that have been replaced in post-production with tacky bits of plastic. The effect is to show how essential is belief for humanity, how arbitrary yet somehow vital are objects of faith and how the universal lie of culture is the only truth for humankind.

Events only get more absurd for Tadesse's and Tesfaye's characters, referred to as ‘Candy' and ‘Birdy': a quest centering on an old man who has adopted the identity of Santa Claus; an awkward confrontation with the mute operator of a ghost train; the goings-on of a seemingly haunted bowling alley. Candy does not have a conventional body shape: he is diminutive in stature and his bones protrude. In the language of the movies he is clearly an outsider, while Birdy is a Disney princess. All their hopes are symbolised by a daft, until recently decommissioned spaceship hovering in the sky, resembling Monty Python's hand of God.

For all its postmodern panache, this is a languid and sad tale. The camera lingers on the faces of its protagonists, on the region's extraordinary desert landscape, its lush vegetation and its forlorn architecture. Llansó lives in Addis Ababa but is originally from Spain and as such this is a view from the outside in (to compare, the first ever Ethiopian film to be shown at Cannes - this year's Lamb - has been described as ‘made entirely from the inside out'). There may be a lot to read between the lines: for example, a joke about bureaucracy seems particularly pertinent in the light of Smith's ‘Orwellian' characterisation of present day Ethiopia. At its primary level however, Crumbs is a tragic, short treatise on the cognitive dissonance of humankind, our pitiful dreams and our meaningless objects.

Crumbs, Dir. Miguel Llansó, 2015
Teasers and trailers at https://vimeo.com/lanzaderafilms

Above and Below - East End Film Festival

Miranda Mungai — 2015-07-06T16:55:50Z

Above and Below is a charming and inoffensive documentary surrounding the lives of a few outcasts who have completely distanced themselves from ‘ordinary' life and the society that this comprises. Whether this rejection is a result of their situation or a choice varies between each character. The film follows the lives of three sets of people – those living above the earth (mars), on ground level (the desert) or below the streets (in the tunnels of Las Vegas).

The documentary begins poetically and immediately brings to mind the similarly magical Bombay Beach (Dir. Alma Har'el) with it's sensational natural summer sun, lens flares and vast tundra landscapes that are desolate but not barren, still holding life and thriving livelihoods. Those documented are depicted as having a sensibility most of us lose to childhood – of engaging in eternal play thanks to their surroundings yet without the constraints of parental supervision. The charm of the film is held in this sense of youth and in the characters themselves, who develop from these images of juvenile contentment to more complex individuals. As the intimacy between audience and character evolves we learn who they are, why they are where they are and where they hope to be. Yet, as we learn more about them and the film develops, its initial sweetness morphs into a pseudo-intellectual perspective of the world. Although not overwhelming, when you listen to what these people are saying, really listen, you realise that it means nothing. Surprisingly, this doesn't greatly affect the overall quality of the film (though perhaps it could have been half an hour shorter).

The filmmaking is remarkable; the three main stories intertwine by surreal means, my favourite being their individual interactions with ping-pong balls. Above, ground level and below are all interconnected; a reminder that we are all connected in some way, regardless of distance and lifestyle. It's easy to forget that this film is a documentary- not only due to acts of performativity such as playing ping-pong, but also the stories which are so completely surreal in themselves, so unlike mainstream society that it stops feeling believable. Despite its understated structure and the characters speaking in balls of hot air, Above and Below has a lot to say; about human nature, survival and, bleaker still, the lifestyles people are forced to adopt due to the effects of a neoliberal economic agenda. There is a moral that lies beneath this serene and lazy story and this moral is easy to miss, as boredom or perhaps serenity begins to reign. But this film does say something, even if it's an idea shrouded in beauty, pretension and dreamlike living.

Dir. Nicolas Steiner, 2015

The film will be screened as part of the East End Film Festival at Rich Mix in London on 9 July, at 8.45. It will be followed by a Q&A. Tickets are available here.

Chameleon - East End Film Festival

Miranda Mungai — 2015-07-06T10:50:34Z

Chameleon is a light-hearted and genuinely interesting look at the “most successful investigative journalist in Africa:” Ghana-based Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who helps the police investigate serious crimes and reports them back to the public. The documentary follows Anas as he takes on several serious criminal cases and successfully raises awareness of these among the general public, seeking full transparency as a means to reduce corruption in Ghana. This is the recurrent message of the film; viewers are encouraged to remember the seriousness of the work that lies beneath Anas' s playful attitude.
Anas is essentially presented as a story-teller, a journalist with a greater ethical agenda. The fact that he hides his face from the world is an important way for him to promote his work over his character. Yet the film highlights his humanity by not solely focusing on his work, but also showing him interacting with schoolchildren and his family.

The documentary eschews sensationalism in favour of a sober and honest assessment of Anas's work, despite his secret identity and undercover police work, which could make him come across as some sort of Batman-like figure. But there is no sob story there to bring any sort of extra validation to his journalism. This is prevalent in the footage of arrests, which despite being tense, are not glamourised. They are given more weight by instances of ethical discussions: is what Anas and the police are doing actually effective, right or best for those involved? One case involving a cultish church camp shows his struggle to define the victims and accurately separate them from the perpetrators. These questions and the comparative structure of the film mean that the police's victory seems much less sweet when the ‘victims' look distressed and confused. Including such points allows for a more unbiased documentary, which doesn't automatically suggest that the job Anas and the Ghanaian police are doing is perfect, but rather presents it as a step in the right direction. Painful interviews with victims of the crimes that Anas aims to bring to public attention only serve to reinforce this point.

This film is engaging and offers audiences an important glimpse into Ghana's attempts to combat endemic corruption and, beyond that, into a society far removed from some oft-pedalled clichés of poverty and despair. It shows us self-sufficient, dignified people, striving to better conditions for their peers. This only serves to underline the importance of Anas's work and his success, despite the occasional ethical questions it raises.

Dir. Ryan Mullins, 2015

Chameleon will be screened as part of the East End Film Festival at Rich Mix, London on 8 July at 6.30.
Tickets available at the Rich Mix website here.

Generation Right - East End Film Festival

Andrea Enisuoh — 2015-07-04T16:05:28Z

It brought it all back, the years that formed the person I am today: the Thatcher Years. Generation Right is a powerful reminder of why I became a radical community activist. It tells the story of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Britain's first female Prime Minister. As a child I vaguely remember women celebrating at first (not so much by the end of her reign). But back then there was a sense of pride that a woman was in office - just like the the hope many of us felt when Obama became president. And now here we are, face to face with the limitations of identity politics.

Cooper expertly assembles a range of archival footage, including various talking heads, and in doing so Generation Right delivers more than a profile of Thatcher, it explores a major historical period. We see Maggie congratulate herself on her own historical significance- reflecting that she's altered the course of politics for a whole generation, and she wasn't wrong there. From the miners' strike to the Battle of Orgreave, from Stop and Search to the race riots, she changed the face of the country. She destroyed the country's manufacturing industry. I don't think she was very nice. The archive footage of scenes of police raging and shielding themselves from ordinary people – images that I first saw on my TV screen – are the images that made me join those people to fight against her. Thatcher, as the film explains, claimed to be big on law and order, she was ‘tough on crime'. Ironic now when we hear about some of the cover-ups she was complicit in, and the images of Leon Briton by her side are more unsettling now than ever before. Forget her famous Francis of Assisi quote where she waffles on about discord and harmony, despair and hope. Her real policies, her real strategy is laid bare. She wanted to smash the unions, privatise everything - though she never got the NHS and I hope they don't today. She wanted to crush the working class. She was proud to be called the Iron Lady, she rejected the idea of society. She took on the miners and destroyed whole communities. And let's not forget mass unemployment. I don't think she was very nice.

Through an amazing layered montage, the documentary provides an undogmatic presentation of Thatcher's war on the working class. The film jolts us back to the present, but how could it fail to? Thatcher championed austerity, championed selling off social housing. Ring any bells? But just as there was a fight back then, there will be a fight back today in Cameron's Britain. Whether this movement is systemic or focused around single issues like housing , whether it's union-led or whether community groups are at the forefront, the fight back has already started. The current movement of resistance would benefit from a film which dwelled more on the tactics of the Poll Tax struggle - a mass movement of community resistance, blocking bailiffs and supporting people, most of all a movement of mass non-payment. That was the one that ultimately brought her down. I am proud to have played a role in it. Close to the end of the film where an activist talks about how, with Cameron etc. we will never really get rid of Thatcher. I so want to prove him wrong.

Andrea Enisuoh is a writer, journalist and community activist.

Dir. Michelle Coomber, 2015

Generation Right is screening on 5 July as part of the East End Film Festival, followed by a Q&A- tickets and more information here:

http://www.eastendfilmfestival.com/programme-2015/15034/generation-right

Welcome to Leith - East End Film Festival 2015

Judy Harris — 2015-07-01T11:57:58Z

Watching Welcome to Leith weeks after the shooting in Charleston the stakes are high. The film has at its centre the white supremacist Craig Cobb and is being seen around the world at a time when the reality of racist violence is (momentarily) palpable to a wide audience. Yet even in this context the film's most powerful element isn't its depiction of the threat of a white supremacist organisation, but its presentation of the futility of a resistance which fails to cohere and the melancholy of any opposition which lacks a powerful ethical imagination. When Cobb arrives in town the tiny population of Leith, North Dakota firmly articulate their rejection of his particular set of racist beliefs. The residents are likeable, courageous even, putting themselves in potentially dangerous situations and they clearly long for a cause to rally around (‘I've not had a fire in my belly for 25 years' exclaims Gregory Bruce, a local web developer), yet it's never clear exactly what Bruce and the other anti- Cobb Leithians are fighting for. It is in this capacity that Welcome to Leith provides a truly illuminating depiction of small-town America's civic culture and conservative discourses of ‘home', ‘safety' and ‘family'.

Feelings of empathy and discomfort prevail when residents tell the newly arrived Cobb and his white supremacist allies to ‘go home'. What does it mean to tell a white supremacist to ‘go home'? Does it encourage the idea that everyone has a ‘home'? If so, wouldn't it be better to burn the home of such a socially destructive force to the ground, rather than to encourage Cobb to return there and set up camp? In fact, setting up a base was exactly what Cobb intended to do in Leith, where land was cheap and the population so minuscule (under 40) that Cobb's group immigration could, theoretically, gain political control of the town. In any case, discovering the political and economic roots of white supremacist organising is not the concern of the film. At times this lack of analysis is infuriating given that there are so many opportunities to pull apart Cobb's ideas or to discuss the concept of race itself and its social construction. Rather than interrogating Cobb's racist, ahistorical and incoherent ideology, or exploring its development in the context of US colonialism, slavery and capitalism, directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker focus on the idiosyncratic responses of the townspeople and their tactics to force Cobb and his national socialist allies out of town.

There are several scenes in which the bravery of the local people is startling, especially given the fact that Cobb and his friends are also pretty well armed. Yet, however courageous the local residents may be, their resistance neither challenges Cobb's racial logic nor his conservative outlook. Against white supremacy the Leithians invoke ‘family' and ‘safety', rather than setting out their own vision for the kind of community in which they want to live. Granted, no one is encouraged to develop these kinds of ideas these days (if they ever were) save for a widespread, superficial commitment to ‘diversity', but the language and terminology used in the local fight is telling of American ideas of freedom, belonging and individualism (and eventually vigilantism). Despite, or perhaps because of, these glaring omissions the film does provide a unique portrayal of the fate of one tiny, Middle American ghost town at a political and economic crossroads.

Dirs, Nichols and Walker, 2015

Welcome to Leith is showing as part of the East End Film Festival on July 3rd - tickets and more information here:
https://www.picturehouses.com/cinema/Hackney_Picturehouse/film/eeff-2015-welcome-to-leith-uk-premiere

The Divide - East End Film Festival (preview)

Miranda Mungai — 2015-06-30T19:49:12Z

An interesting and well-meaning documentary, The Divide presents audiences with a frequently mentioned, though infrequently interrogated, phenomenon- the divide of the rich and the poor in the Western world. The film begins with a quote from Warren Buffett, “the most successful investor of the 20th century": “There's a class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.” This beginning sets us up with the impression that the film promises an explanation of what went wrong here, this ironic quote doing nothing but creating questions. However, these questions unfortunately appear to go unanswered by the film's end, setting out The Divide in purely human terms rather than presenting a global, structural analysis.

The trajectory that this film follows concentrates on a few extremely wealthy people and a few of the poorest people mostly from America but also with a few from the UK. We follow their struggles as portraits of their home life are presented in tandem with that of their working lives. It is not a film that aims to understand and address the gap that these sets of people face, but it is purely a look at rich people and poor people, doing nothing more than suggesting that this gap could be closed if everyone became rich. It looks at everyone's struggle but does little to fulfil the promise of the initial quote – it does not suggest why this gap is here. It is the exceptional amounts of sympathy, however, that this film provides those from these seemingly happy, affluent homes that becomes increasingly aggravating. We watch wealthy, stable Jen complain about the mistreatment of her “blonde haired, blue eyed” children in her gated community who are treated as pariahs due to their relative lack of wealth - neighbouring children allegedly run away, screaming. She appears trapped and persecuted- but why not move to another gated community and be the wealthiest family there? Mesmerised by wealth, the film focuses an inordinate amount of time on the lives of the rich until eventually they come to appear shackled and enslaved by their own privilege and greed, another example of society's ongoing fetishisation of the lives of the rich.

The film is interspersed with interviews with Wall Street analysts, lecturers, and social commentators, including Noam Chomsky, which are the most thought provoking moments in the film, revealing the reality of the problem on a large scale, they seriously discuss and hypothesise The Divide. Unfortunately these moments are few and far between, leaving a yearning to learn more and perhaps pick up a book of Mr. Chomsky's instead. This film chooses to concentrate on empathising with the ‘struggles' of the richest more than anything. It's disturbing that rather than enquiring into the structural causes of poverty, we keep idealising and sympathising with the richest. Perhaps the message that this documentary sends in laymen's terms is that the poor should just become richer to close the gap rather than presenting an analysis of the original causes of the eponymous Divide.

Dir. Katherine Round, 2015

The Divide is showing as part of the East End Film Festival on July 2nd- tickets and more information here:

https://www.genesiscinema.co.uk/films/events/eeff-the-divide-qa-thurs-2nd-july/

Drama - East End Film Festival (preview)

Abla Kandalaft — 2015-06-27T10:53:19Z

Struggling actress Anna is at the end of her tether. Still reeling from a recent breakup with dial-a-scumbag John and a failed audition, she packs up and heads for Paris to spend a few days with her gay best friend, Jean. Meanwhile, John is in Paris on business and Jean's relationship with Philippe is going sour. So far so common or garden chick flick. But director Sophie Mathisen, who also plays Anna, eschews the usual hysterical escalations and slapstick and instead gives the space and time for moments between the various characters to unravel, allowing us to see them as much more than the grating clichés they could so easily be.

From Anna's desperate attempts to rekindle the romance with an obviously disdainful John to Jean's growing, nerve-wracking annoyance at Philippe, the film is rife with moments that make for uncomfortable viewing; a credit to Sophie's work in this understated, sharply-observed and genuinely enjoyable tragicomedy.

Dir: Sophie Mathisen, 2014

Drama will be screened as part of the East End Film Festival at the Genesis Cinema on 8 July 2015. Followed by a Q&A. More info here.

East End Film Festival 1-12 July 2015

Abla Kandalaft — 2015-06-22T18:22:24Z

The East End Film Festival is still going strong, still showcasing an incredibly eclectic selection of first and second films, shorts, docs and other cinematic gems.

The full programme is available on the festival's website.

We will be posting reviews, interviews and some audio on the website so keep an eye out, and there's no better place to start than with a phone interview with head programmer Andrew Simpson.

More to come!