myDylarama

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!

Q&A with Paul Howard Allen, dir. Mega Sexy Robot Dinosaur - Clermont 2020

Abla Kandalaft — 2020-02-12T12:44:23Z

INTERVIEW VIDEO TO COME

A silly (in all the best ways) short very much made for fun that certainly made me laugh! Glad it made it into the Clermont competition.

How much do you enjoy artistic experiments?

Cinema audiences these days are incredibly smart and cinema literate so it's really fun to be mischievous and play with people's expectations. This is the beauty of short film, it allows you to explore your weirdest ideas without having to satisfy a commercial agenda.

Why was the Kubrick reference important?

Kubrick epitomises the cinematic auteur, someone who defines the idea of pushing boundaries through a singular artistic vision. The absurdity of referencing such a cinematic legend in a film that uses Comic Sans amused me.

Is the word “Fin” only for French viewers or is it from the original English speaking version?

‘Fin' is in the original English version and plays with British/Americans caricatures of European arthouse films as pretentious. I was hoping to satirically embody pretention and therefore it felt like a natural way to end the film. Being at the most prestigious short film festival in the world, in France, it's starting to look like a bad judgement call.

To conclude, what did inspire you most : sex, robots or dinosaurs?

Ha, I tried to pick three of the most interesting and intriguing words I could for the title – self consciously making the equivalent of film festival ‘click bait'. But in answer to your question, robots. Who am I kidding – sex. No, it's robots.

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

I made a feature film 10 years ago and freedom is definitely something that I have experienced coming back to the short film format. The feature film world is moving to safer and safer places with endless sequels and projects based on established franchises, so it's liberating to see bold, uninhibited ideas being expressed in this space.

What are your works of reference?

The main inspiration for this film was a short film called Iranium directed by Harald Hund that I watched at a documentary film festival in Eindhoven called DocFeed. It playfully challenged the documentary form in a way I'd never seen before and got me thinking about just how much you could play with the expectations of an audience.

Q&A with Baloji, dir. Zombies - Clermont 2020 PRIX FESTIVALS CONNEXION AUVERGNE-RHÔNE-ALPES

Clotilde Couturier — 2020-02-11T17:26:17Z

The film "Zombie" is a journey between hope and dystopia in a hallucinated Kinhsasa, from the culture of the hair salon to futuristic solitary clubbing, from the urban parade to the glory of a dictator in campaign (Papa Bollo) to modern western in the Takeshi Kitano style. In parallel, the film is based on the almost carnal relationship we have with our phones. The device becoming like an outgrowth of the hand and giving us the talent of digital ubiquity...

Baloji is a multidisciplinary artist; filmmaker, musician, poet... Zombies is a testimony to his dexterity as a multidisciplinary artist. From disparate elements and urban chaos, the film comes beautifully together, leaving us dazed and uneasy at the multitude of screens.

The film is available to watch online!

Baloji - ZOMBIES (Official Short film) from BALOJI on Vimeo.

Find out more about Baloji's work on his website.

Q&A with Gabrielle Stemmer, dir. Clean With Me (After Dark)

Abla Kandalaft — 2020-02-07T16:11:27Z

Through a very clever and revealing video montage, Gabrielle Stemmer not only sheds light on somewhat depressing phenomenon of cleaning videos on YouTube but silently and subtly unearths the loneliness and neuroses that often underpin it, in a society in which women are homemakers and the home is their gilded cage.

How did you discover the “world” of YouTube?

I've been a heavy YouTube user for seven or eight years now – it's TV for me. I'd say that from the beginning I've been watching stuff that's 90% female-oriented. I started with videos on beauty, cooking, interior decorating, areas that I only have a scant interest in in real life. The conclusion I drew from this paradox is that what interested me was watching how other women experienced their own femininity, and seeing how far the mental burden could be constructed as a life strategy. The videos relax me since I watch them with a certain detachment, and at the same time they awaken a sort of quasi-anthropological curiosity in me. YouTube's algorithm decided it was time for me to explore the domestic side of the platform when CLEAN WITH ME appeared in my “recommendations based on my subscriptions”.

Did you contact any of those YouTubers?

I got into contact with each of the women who appear in the film, even if it was just to let them know that I intended to use their content. At the beginning of the project I was mostly corresponding with Jessica of “Keep Calm and Clean”, the YouTuber you see most in the film and who seesaws with the nervous off-camera of the cleaning videos. At the time, I'd talked to her about the project and suggested we meet on Skype later that year when the film would be further along. She was very open and enthusiastic but I ended up going down a different path that precluded that type of interview. I sent her the finished film by email, carefully explaining my approach and the viewer comments relative to her words, but she didn't reply. I don't know if she watched the film.

Tell us a bit about your cinematic choice. Why did you opt for this form of documentary (video montage, no voice-over, etc.)?

The topic and the form came together at the same time. And after I discovered Kevin B. Lee's film Transformers: The Premake, which blazed the trail, there was never a question in my mind about making the film in any other way than as a “desktop documentary”. I was also lucky enough to be able to talk to Lee several times throughout the film's production. The form makes it possible to get directly to the heart of the matter: the whole context is there on the screen, the images are connected to their manner of broadcasting but also to their position within a community. You also immediately put the viewer in a familiar environment that's part of their daily life as an internet user. That's why I made my narrator's presence more and more discrete throughout the editing process, in order to reinforce the viewer's identification with the consciousness that clicks. They forget the narrator-clicker in favor of the women who appear one-by-one on the screen and whose words I wanted them to hear. That's also why I wanted there not to be a voice-over. I wanted the film to move forward exclusively through the mouse, the keyboard, the windows that open and close, I wanted the viewer's gaze to be guided by the silent narrator, to be led on almost despite themselves, in a relentless march. Doubtless that was partially due to my fantasy as an editor, which is my initial calling, creating meaning exclusively by organizing images, their sequencing, their placement, their relationship to sounds.

These types of videos mostly come from the United States.Why do you think that is the case? Is the trend spreading?

That's a very good question. It's tempting to answer that American YouTubers make up the majority of this type of production on YouTube, but that's difficult to say given that through their algorithms, YouTube, like social networks in general, only show us what we're in the habit of watching. There are French housekeeping videos, for example, but they either copy American ones with less success, or they play on another niche that is more natural and biographical, which is very interesting but also very different. What made me want to use the American images was the fact that they all look the same. It was the uniformity of their appearance and of their houses that made me want to make a film about these women, because that produces infinitely meaningful images. Yes, of course, the trend is spreading and in quite vicious guises, which don't balk at using feminist terms, or the very trendy word “empowering”, to spur a return to the hearth that I personally find very disturbing.

What would you like people to take from your film?

I think we need to be educated about how we watch widely-broadcast audiovisual productions that are now part of our daily life and that we easily take in without sufficient distance, and that is problematic. Despite my own relatively detached way of consuming them, I can clearly see that these videos grew on me, and I was surprised to find myself under the influence of the influencers. What sort of role model do the images of women on YouTube channel for teenage girls? You only have to take a look at the comments under the videos to realize how big the problem is. At the same time though, there's hope on social networks and I don't think we should belittle their documentary benefit, which is something I wanted to show through my film. On YouTube and Instagram, women can express themselves without an intermediary, and on a large scale, two conditions that up to now have been inaccessible to women. What's at stake is genuine freedom of speech, especially with regard to topics that are typically feminine. My film addresses isolation and psychological suffering, but there are also many new voices to be heard about giving birth and about sexual violence.

What advantages has the short film format offered you?

Shorts make it possible to give a hint of something, to experiment. I'm not sure this type of narration could sustain a longer format… I'll think about it though. I think the fact that it was a short helped me to not try to be exhaustive and stuff everything I wanted to say into the film, and to privilege saying things clearly and making the development efficient. Shorts are less definitive than feature films and allow you to tell yourself that you'll get to everything else later.

Knife + Heart (Un couteau dans le coeur) by Yann Gonzalez - Fragments 2019

Abla Kandalaft — 2019-06-11T07:07:28Z

You And The Night, celebrated at Cannes's Critics' Week in 2014, cemented Yann Gonzalez's reputation as a truly original director, with his own brand of stylish, colourful and erotic filmmaking. With Knife+Heart, Gonzalez offers up a stylised slasher flick in the vein of Italian gialli, set in the heart of the gay porn industry in the seedier parts of 1970s Paris.

The film opens with a particularly gruesome murder in which a masked killer stabs his victim repeatedly with a dildo-shaped knife. The victim is a young actor, starring in one of producer Anne Parèze (Vanessa Paradis)'s kitschy pornos. Parèze then sets out on a mission to uncover the mystery behind the leather-clad killer, whilst trying to win back the affections of her ex-lover and editor Lois.

Knife+Heart is beautifully crafted, shot on 35-millimeter film, it is saturated with dazzling flashes of colour, which pulsate to the beats of a synth score, which make its dreamlike sequences completely hypnotic. Like his previous work, Gonzalez's latest effort is rich with obvious cinematic references, from William Friedkin's Cruising to Brian de Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, with some sequences perhaps unintentionally reminiscent of scenes from Nicolas Winding Refn or Gaspard Noé's films.

Vanessa Paradis is beautifully understated and commanding as the enigmatic, alcoholic Anne Parèze and there's a pleasingly great turn from Nicholas Maury (Call My Agent's flamboyant Hervé) playing Archibald with the same joyful abandon and dedication as he did the highly strung agent.

At times, the meticulous attention paid to the visuals overshadows the film's storyline and character development. The characters themselves tend to display little emotional depth, which means it's sometimes hard to fully engage with their trials and tribulations. After a bit of a lull in rhythm midway through the film, Knife+Heart ends on a thrilling high note, as the story unfolds and the killer's identity is revealed.

Knife+Heart will be screened as part of the Fragments Festival at Genesis Cinema on 12 June at 9 pm.

Interview with Jian Luo, director of What Do You Know About the Water and the Moon

Abla Kandalaft, Brasserie du Court team — 2019-05-18T10:01:42Z

Interview with the Chinese filmmaker Jian Luo about her short film What do you Know About the Water and the Moon? selected as part of the 2019 International Competition at Clermont-Ferrand. A video directed by the students of the ARFIS École in collaboration with the Brasserie du Court and Mydylarama.

During an attempted abortion, a girl gives birth to a live jellyfish.

A magic realist film that's both hypnotic and troubling from a very promising and original young director.

Interview with Nick Jordan, director of Stratum

ARFIS, Elise Loiseau — 2019-04-20T10:20:30Z

Interview with the British filmmaker and Clermont favourite Nick Jordan about his short film Stratum.

Stratum is a film that navigates through post-industrial landscapes on the European Route of Industrial Heritage, from Britain's abandoned South Yorkshire coal seams to the culturally re-purposed collieries of the Ruhr Valley, Germany, via the former coal-mining region of Wallonia, Belgium. Contrasting the past and present, contemporary scenes are combined with archival film material, alongside audio narration from Miserie au Borinage (directed by Henri Storck and Joris Ivens, 1934), made in the depths of the Great Depression.
Official Selection Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2019 - Lab Competition

Café court / Expresso Video - Nick Jordan from ClermontFd Short Film Festival on Vimeo.

More about Nick's work on his website.

ClermontFF2019 Swatted by Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis

ARFIS, Brasserie du Court team, Clotilde Couturier — 2019-02-13T17:02:54Z

Interview with the French filmmaker Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis about his short film Swatted selected as part of the 2019 Lab Competition (L1 programme). A video directed by the students of the ARFIS École, in collaboration with the Brasserie du Court and Mydylarama. Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis is back at Clermont with a second award-winning short. Café court / Expresso Video - Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis from ClermontFd Short Film Festival on Vimeo. - Shorts / Festival, Short, Clermont-Ferrand 2019, experimental

ClermontFF2019 Last Year When The Train Passed by Pang-Chuang Huang

Abla Kandalaft, ARFIS, Brasserie du Court team — 2019-02-10T10:32:16Z

Interview with Taiwanese filmmaker Pang-Chuan Huang around his short film "Last Year When the Train Passed by" selected as part of the 2019 Lab Competition (L5 programme). A video directed by the students of the ARFIS École in collaboration with the Brasserie du Court and the Mydylarama team.
Pang directed the Grand Prix-winning Retour in 2018.

What were you doing last year when I took this photo from a train passing by in front of your house?

Café court / Expresso Video - Pang-Chuan Huang from ClermontFd Short Film Festival on Vimeo.

Pang on Retour

Labo 2018 - "Retour" from ClermontFd Short Film Festival on Vimeo.