Sixty years after its first edition, the London Film Festival, whose entire programme once barely amounted to 20 films, now screens 240 titles. Previously a single venue festival, it is now spread over 14 screening locations. One of LFF’s past directors, the aviophobic Richard Roud, used to oversee the New York Film Festival at the same time, having to cross the Atlantic by ship. That dependency on the energy and organisation of one man is a thing of the past; the festival now a colossal event, run by an army of staff and volunteers.
This shift is not just a sign of the times and what London has gone through since the end of the Second World War, but in a broader sense, an indication of the ever-changing function of film festivals; from modest cinephiliac affairs to corporate sponsored business ventures. In these circumstances, a festival-goer’s task is to once again prioritise film as art and discover fresh ideas and innovative approaches to the medium amid the busy and perhaps distracting traffic of a festival.
It should come as no surprise that some of the true gems of LFF are to be found among those films with less publicity and whose catalogue blurbs are not merely uncritical raves, heavy on adverbs but light on insight; films that typically do not receive West End red carpet galas, and are not guaranteed theatrical distribution.
Cristian Mungiu’s arresting feature Graduation, which delves into corruption and nepotism, was complemented by an even more striking portrait of the country: Cristi Puiu’s three-hour masterpiece Sieranevada, which is set entirely in a tiny Bucharest flat. Today’s Romania comes alive in conversations that cover everything from the “merits of the Nicolae Ceaușescu era” – as brought up by one Communist aunt – to the failure of modern democracies in the face of post-9/11 fear and paranoia. The film is loaded with nuanced observations, witty conversations, hilarious conspiracy theories and family melodrama, the combined effect of which is to project beyond the confined space of the action, giving a broader sense of where we are standing at this troubled moment in the 21st century.
I must admit that one of the masters of Italian cinema, Marco Bellocchio, hasn’t impressed all that much with recent films, all of which were presented at different editions of LFF. However, Bellocchio’s latest, Fai bei sogni, is a remarkable study of childhood trauma and its repercussions in adult life. It might be Bellocchio’s best since Buongiorno, notte.
No film at LFF was, in its response to present concerns, culturally and cinematically as urgent as the Franco-German co-production Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello). The Internet, terrorism, identity crises, and consumerism are at the core of this cold and formally sophisticated film. The story follows a group of young rebels with a cause, who venture out on a destructive mission, planting bombs at some of Paris’ key monuments before going into hiding in a luxury store where they are eventually consumed and destroyed by the objects and goods they have rebelled against.
Before discussing the Iranian films showing at the festival, I’d like to point out another film which shares the same zeal as Nocturama, even though it is set in a totally different context: Neruda, directed by the talented and prolific Pablo Larraín, is the story of Chile’s popular poet and politician Pablo Neruda, on the run after the Communist Party was outlawed by the Chilean government. By inventing fictional characters chasing the presumably real ones, Larraín artfully subverts the familiar clichés associated with the historical biopic. Far from an escape story or simple biography of a much-loved poet, Neruda is a film about the relation between fantasy and reality, made especially fascinating where the life of a man of words and imagination is involved. But it is also a film about that irresolvable conflict between a poet’s absolute dedication to freedom and the selflessness of a collective effort demanded by political life.
Tales from Iran at LFF
This edition featured only two films from Iran, a rather low figure considering the total number of films at the festival. However, traces of Iran could be heard or seen in some non-Iranian films at LFF. If there was a link between all these films, it was their shared interest in severe social problems and their victims; with a specific focus on migration and criminality.
Among the non-Iranian films, Murderous Injustice (Gavin Scott Whitfield) was based on the real case of an Iranian man in Bristol who was beaten to death before being set on fire by his racist neighbour. Inspired by the cinema of Alan Clarke, to whom it is dedicated, the film follows the action in a single take, moving between a park and two houses while a radio broadcast of Nigel Farage is heard.
Xenophobia and the migration crisis are also at the centre of the controversial documentary Chasing Asylum (Eva Orner), which protests against the inhuman conditions on the islands used by the Australian government for the indefinite accommodation of asylum seekers arriving by boat. Featuring interviews with former security officers and volunteers who worked on the islands, as well as incorporating footage filmed secretly by the inhabitants, the film’s emotional climax is a trip to Iran to visit the families of the two young men who died in the camps.
Moving from Iranians as victims to Iranians as idealised and exotic, the archival footage documentary Letters from Baghdad (Sabine Krayenbühl, Zeva Oelbaum), about Gertrude Bell – a British traveller, spy and the founder of modern Iraq – relies heavily on letters she wrote to her father (read by Tilda Swinton) among which there are some letters from Iran, reflecting a love for its language and poetry.
Two of the festival films were fresh from Tehran:
The Salesman – the latest film by Asghar Farhadi, the most internationally famous and nationally popular Iranian director today – is about a couple, an apartment and a simple incident with tragic consequences, elements familiar to Farhadi’s last few films, which established him as a great auteur. However, playing too much on these elements, close to a mere mechanical reproduction here, the film’s posing of conflicting moral questions lacks conviction and depth. Even Farhadi’s treatment of the sensitive subject of rape, present in Iranian films since the 1960s, remains problematic and limited to a male point of view, whereby the trauma of the victim is pushed to the background in favour of the male protagonist’s vengeful search for the perpetrator.
Another story about Iranian women narrated from a male point of view is Starless Dreams, the new documentary by Mehrdad Oskouei, who after years of seeking permission takes his camera inside a rehab centre for young female offenders in Tehran, which looks more like a temporary prison.
Oskouei films the faces of these women as if he is depicting saints in a renaissance painting, wilfully contrasting the baby-girl attitudes of the inmates with the crimes they have been charged for, which range from drug dealing, to prostitution, to patricide. Oskouei, in his sympathetic investigation, goes much deeper into the origins of social illnesses than most of the films at LFF 60.
The film won the Grierson Award for best documentary at the festival, a reminder of the new, unsung talents and internationally unknown yet established filmmakers out there whose work can equal or even surpass that of any of the star directors and their festival circuit follies.
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