The Wolves is a spiritual sister to Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. Instead of a boisterous white mum and daughter living in a motel by Disney World, The Wolves features a single mum with two young boys that have just crossed the border into the United States. The kids are happy to follow their mum and spend more and more days passing time in a shabby apartment on the understanding that they’re going to Disneyland.
The two boys are stuck at home everyday making their own entertainment whilst their mum works double shifts to try and create a better future. There’s no school for them to go to and they’re forbidden from leaving the apartment. Any chances of being caught and deported must be avoided.
Despite being stuck in the apartment all day, The Wolves is presented with a lot of warm nostalgia. There’s a slow and lazy guitar soundtrack that generates the same warm melancholic tones of films imbued in Americana like Mud, Bombay Beach, or even parts of Thelma and Louise. There’s also warmth in the games that the two boys play to keep themselves occupied and the drawings that come to life in their imagination. Even though the melancholic soundtrack and bleak surroundings hint that the American dream is out of reach, their playfulness shows it won’t stop them dreaming.
The Wolves is an ode to the faceless people of America. Not just the immigrants that cross the southern border seeking a better life, but the homeless, and anybody scraping together a life living below the poverty line. A few times in the film, Samuel Kishi Leopo (the director) inserts montages of portraits of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds living within the new family’s community. All the portraits feature people staring straight into the camera like you might see in a National Geographic magazine, showing them without anything to hide. It shows them purely, in front of their humble homes. What these people have in common is an absence of the white picket fenced house promised by the American dream. It’s a sign that being American, or simply being in America for those that migrate north, doesn’t automatically grant you a well spring to health and prosperity. The Wolves honestly highlights the people that the country has left behind.
For more films from the Berlin film festival, head to our Berlinale home page.
We don’t believe in a cinema that yells “¡Viva la revolución!” but in one that instead formally critiques the structures that originally created the profound injustice that exists today.
Pedro Escoto, Director of Ruinas Tu Reino
If you’re not familiar with slow film or meditative cinema, the lack of story line and raw experimental shots of Ruinas Tu Reino might prove to be too much of a challenge. The long shots of the sea and fishermen sitting around makes the film feel more like a film exhibit you’d see in a modern art museum. However, if you have the patience to observe, you’ll find a film imbued with poetry; literally in words that appear on screen, and visually in the meditative shots of the fisherman’s existence. It’s a film that seeks to deconstruct Latin American cinema by transcending historical narratives, reverting to DIY production, and focusing on the power of very raw images.
Angelika Levi’s Absent Present is one well made documentary. If you’ve ever listened to an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s equally well constructed Revisionist History you’ll find similarities with Angelika Levi’s documentary method. Like Revisionist History, Levi starts with an event – in this case the disappearance of her friend Benji – and unravels the threads linked to it to uncover a whole chain of associations from colonialism to migration. Having explored more of the threads linked to Benji’s life, we see his disappearance in a new light.
Uncovering the Mystery by Looking at the Big Picture
Benji’s disappearance is a mystery that Levi tries to unravel by following his path. Born in Namibia, he was one of many young Namibian children that were brought to the GDR (German Democratic Republic otherwise known as East Germany) having survived the Cassinga Massacre (a South African bombing raid on Namibian independence fighters). He spent 11 years in East Germany from ages 3-14 at an orphanage and German school, and became a naturalized East German citizen. However, in 1989 the GDR collapsed, East and West Germany reunified, and Namibia gained its independence. As a result, Benji was sent back to Namibia despite having grown up in Germany. Back in his birth country, Benji was kidnapped by Angolan soldiers and forced to join their liberation struggle. He managed to escape and returned to Europe disguised as a tourist. He eventually made it back to Germany, but disappeared a few years later. Levi travels from Germany to Namibia and back to Germany in Benji’s footsteps to try and investigate his disappearance. But ultimately, as she retraces his steps she finds the foot prints of more African refugees in Senegal and Spain and starts to uncover the hypocrisy of anti-immigration policies. By following the footsteps of migrants like Benji, Levi gives us a look at the big picture, which gives us a context to help explain Benji’s disappearance.
The Hypocrisy of Anti-Immigration Policy
Levi starts her broader investigation with the Columbus monument in Barcelona, a grand 19th century column that celebrates the discovery of the New World. At the top, Columbus points towards his ‘discovery’, a world where Columbus received gifts of welcome and from which Spain gained incredible wealth and prosperity. The hypocrisy of the monument is that it celebrates a migrant that crossed oceans in search of wealth, whilst today the same country that benefited from the wealth of other continents turns away migrants with similar intentions.
Levi also highlights the underlying racism behind Spain’s treatment of African migrants in the Canary Islands, juxtaposing images of white tourists relaxing on beaches and running through woods with images of Africans detained in camps just meters from tourist hot spots. The fact that these camps, that almost specifically hold African migrants, are built on the foundations of former slave camps makes it all the worse. Seen in this context, it’s not surprising that Benji tries to return to Europe disguised as a tourist with bleached hair. For Benji, and the African migrants that are detained in Spain, Europe is the only option left in their attempt to survive. It’s “Barcelona or Barsaak” (the Wolof for land of the dead). Viewed in its historical context, the anti-immigration policies of Europe look like an evolution of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. The Africans were forcibly brought to Europe and the Americas as slaves, forcibly exploited in colonialism, and now they are forcibly shut out of the riches their work and land created, detained as migrants.
Whilst the big picture Levi uncovers in Absent Present doesn’t answer why Benji disappeared, it does connect Benji’s forcible removal from his home country, and forcible repatriation to a brutal history of exploitation. It uncovers a hypocritical and racist history that takes African bodies when they’re needed and discards them when they’re not. Seen in this context Benji’s disappearance is not a mystery, but a symptom of the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and illegal immigration.
What to Watch Next
If you’re looking for another documentary that attempts to find a missing person, check out Luis Ospina’s A Paper Tiger. It tries to track down a Colombian artist named Manrique Figueroa by interviewing all the friends he left behind.
Or if you’re looking for more films in which migration and colonialism are a major topic I’d recommend exploring the following:
Atlantics – a feature film from Senegal that conveys the impact of a lost generation venturing north on their friends and family back at home.
Tenere – a documentary that tracks migrants crossing the Sahara desert on the back of Mad Max style converted trucks in Niger in quests to reach Europe.
A Storm Was Coming – a documentary that artistically represents how the Spanish Empire erased the indigenous cultures of Equatorial Guinea.
Or if you’re just looking for more documentaries narrated in English by great German film makers, check out Werner Herzog. His film, Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a great place to start. It’s a film about the life of a German war survivor that becomes a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
You might know Gurinder Chadha from Bend It Like Beckham and Blinded by the Light but you probably haven’t seen her short documentary portrait of British Asians in the 1980s. It’s well worth watching to hear about what it means to be British and Asian from a selection of young people based in different corners of the country. It’s good to watch to be reminded of the cultural influences from South Asia that British people often take for granted. You’ll also get to actually hear the opinion of British Asians themselves – unfortunately still a rare sight in British film and TV.
London Me Bharat
London Me Bharat (India in London) is the first Hindi-language film made in Britain (1972). It’s a short documentary that feels a bit like a made-for-TV special as the narrator describes everything we see. It takes us from London’s main sights, full of tourists to Southall, a district where tourists probably haven’t heard of, which hosts one of the largest Indian communities in Britain. It’s a perfect short documentary for anyone not familiar with the origins of the Indian community in the U.K. and for anyone interested in seeing the multiculturalism of London.
Indian Sweets & Indian Sweets & Savories
These two short TV documentaries feature white British men raiding South Asian sweet shops in London. The first, Indian Sweets, features an incredibly bad mannered white presenter walking around behind the counter grabbing everything he fancies like he owns the place. After taking a bite of each he asks “what’s this then?” before adding it to the pile of sweets that starts to bulge in his hand. The low-light: when introduced to Jalebi’s, he shouts “Jelly Babies?” after taking a huge bite.
The white presenter in Indian Sweets & Savories is a little better. He at least asks the sweet shop owner before he grabs sweets. Unfortunately he relegates Indian food to unhealthy food you’d eat after a night out, fake burps after eating his Thali, and doesn’t do much to ingratiate himself to the restaurant owners that have invited him in. The behavior of both white TV presenters is a window into the Britain of the 1970s and 1980s.
New Ways
Created by Ealing and Hammersmith as an introduction for South Asian people moving to the UK, this 13 minute documentary sets out the basics for adapting to life in Britain. It makes you wonder how many people watched this before or right after arriving in the UK to start a new life. It hardly develops any kind of excitement for life in Britain as it monotonically emphasizes the cold dull weather. It’s patronizing tone must have drawn a lot of raised eyebrows too.
You can watch all of the short films about Indian Food and the British Asian Experience featured above for free on the BFI Player.
Dakan is the first Sub-Saharan African film to deal with homosexuality. The focus of the film is the plight of two high school lovers in a society rejects them. They don’t fit into traditional or modern Guinean society, shown through Manga’s ‘traditional’ mother and Sori’s ‘modern’ father. As a result, they’re condemned to a life without love.
Dakan experienced a lot of protests in Guinea during its production, and once you see the first scene, you’ll understand why. For many countries around the world, homosexuality is taboo or illegal, so to have an opening scene of two men making out in an orange convertible like a scene from an American hetero high school romance is a bit of a shock for the world’s conservative viewers.
The two lovers are both high school students hoping to get into university. They openly show affection for each other at school, where they are largely accepted and left alone, but at home their relationship provides a source of friction for their parents. For Manga’s single mother, she sees Manga’s relationship with Sori as a curse that will deprive her of grandchildren. In contrast, Sori’s father sees Sori’s relationship with Manga as a distraction from his studies and his prosperous future in business.
They also differ in their way of stopping their son’s relationship. Manga’s mum relies on traditional methods, sending Manga away to a traditional witch doctor to be cured. In contrast, Sori’s father, a ‘modern’ businessman, sends Sori to work for him in his company. However, neither route changes how they feel about each other. Their solemn faces throughout the film only emphasizes that there is no place for them in a traditional society founded on the family, or a ‘modern’ society founded on economic growth. There’s no place for their love in Guinea.
Overall Dakan is a good African film that uses homophobia to talk about the common African and third cinema tropes of modernity and tradition. There was a moment in Dakan where I feared the film would turn into an HIV disaster film like Kijiji Changu but fortunately Mohamed Camara doesn’t diminish the relatively progressive portrayal of homosexuality in Africa.
What to Watch Next
If you’re looking for more films from the global south that portray homosexual relationships in countries that don’t have a place for it, check out Jose from Guatemala and Rafiki from Kenya.
Or for more witch doctors trying to cure people in Africa, Zambia’s unique I Am Not A Witch is a must watch.
Finally for more films that feature Romeo + Juliet relationships that are forbidden by society, check out Tanna, featuring an controversial relationship that crosses tribes in Vanuata.
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