What were you doing on your sixteenth birthday? Hopefully something better than Liam. Sweet Sixteen came out three years before MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen and shows a semi-orphaned teenager waiting for his mum to get released from prison. It’s another brilliantly bleak depiction of working class youth in the U.K. from Ken Loach and a perfect reality check to the super rich spoiled kids which took over MTV screens a few years later.
If you’ve been watching a lot of films recently, you’ll notice that Sampha: Process is different. Firstly it’s got a lot of music, which you’d probably expect as it’s an extended music video. Secondly, you’ll notice the quick and choreographed cuts (the editing works with the music). Music videos are where Spike Jonze and David Fincher started out, will Khalil Joseph transition to feature films as well?
Why Watch Sampha: Process?
Because there’s art in music videos – Director Khalil Joseph made a name for himself with this art/music video to accompany Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and also directed Beyonce’s Lemonade visual album
If you like Sampha (you’ll at the very least appreciate his voice if you’re a music fan)
It will make you want to go to Freetown, Sierra Leone
For some fast cuts and symbolism – exactly what you’d expect from an extended music video
The Breakdown
First off, if you haven’t heard of Sampha, you should check out his latest Mercury Prize winning album Process before you watch this film – give it a listen here. Then you’ll need to know that this album was created after he lost his mum to cancer. He deals with loss in the music, but it is also the focus of this film.
Throughout the film, Khalil Joseph cuts to the image of Sampha’s mum trapped in a chrysalis. Her image appears between the beautiful beaches of Sierra Leone and urban London, connecting the two different cities. As a result, she is the link that connects Sampha to Sierra Leone. Her death, along with her mother’s old age (she’s the last of 14 siblings), threatens the link.
Conclusion
Sampha: Process is a film you should watch if you want to see how to adapt a music album into a film. Khalil Joseph takes a brilliant, complete album and manages to add more depth to it.
For more, check out this art/music video Khalil Joseph made for Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City album.
Are you feeling very silly? Are you up for a silly laugh? Well you have come to the right place. This is Monty Python. These are the people that inspired all the candid camera pranks and comedy sketch shows of today! One of the sketches in this film is bound to crack a smile across your face. Also, the short sketch format means you can dip in and out in your lunch break, before bed, or in the morning while you’re eating breakfast!
Why Watch this Now For Something Completely Different?
You haven’t seen anything by the famous Monty Python comedy troupe
To see how ‘silly’ British humour really is!
So you don’t miss the classic ‘Twit of the Year’ race
Hear the funniest joke in the world!
The Breakdown
Now for Something Completely Different starts with a short sketch set in a field. The narrator is showing us how not to be seen. Instead of trying to explain the first sketch, here it is…
As you can see, Monty Python’s humour is pretty different to anything you’d find in America or elsewhere, which may make it pretty hard to translate. Please let me know if you are a massive Monty Python fan from outside the U.K and how it translates!
What else makes a Monty Python film? It’s silliness! The sketches get even more silly as the film progresses until one of the narrators interrupts dressed in an army suit: “Stop it now, this has just got silly! It started out as a nice story about grannies attacking young men, but now it’s just got silly.” Ah the scene is Monty Python in a nutshell.
Conclusion
Anyway enough blabbering on. If you’re up for a laugh and you haven’t got much time, check out some Monty Python sketches on YouTube. If you’re up for a feature length Monthy Python film I’d recommend checking out The Life of Brian or Monty Python and the Holy Grail! Go indulge yourself in the silliness!
Looking for more classic comedy with moments of silliness? Check out the Oscar nominated German film Toni Erdmann!
Here’s some quick fire reviews from the short films featured in the Pan African Shorts Program of the 2020 Pan African Film Festival.
My Father Belize (Belize)
It’s great to see films being made in Belize, and My Father Belize definitely does the Belizean tourist board proud with shots of idyllic peninsulas where the jungle meets pristine beaches. The film focuses on Sean, a born and bred in Belizean that left the country in his teens for a life in the United States. He’s back in town for the first time in three years to scatter his fathers ashes; a father that was never there for him growing up. Sean has moved on from the death of his estranged father and is now engaged to someone from the U.S. However, during his visit he discovers he conceived a son last time he was in the country and must face his own future as a father and husband.
My Father Belize works because the gossipy reveals are backed up by just enough well timed humor to keep it tongue in cheek. Every time the film introduces a cheesy twist, Sean’s cousin is on hand to say exactly what is on the audience’s mind, thereby acknowledging the exaggerated turns of the script. This balancing act cleverly draws the audience into the script, opening up a space for My Father Belize to talk to us about the ordinary topic it really wants to: fatherhood.
A Handful of dates (Sudan)
It’s also great to see more films coming out of Sudan. A Handful of Dates is shot from the perspective of a young boy that is ashamed to learn the truth behind his grandfather’s date palm fortune. He has grown up idolizing his grandfather, but when he sees the poverty his grandfather has nonchalantly plunged his neighbor into to achieve his wealth, he’s repulsed.
A Handful of Dates is a risk-free adaptation of a short story by Tayeb Saleh that fits perfectly into 15 minutes. It efficiently builds the arcs of the two characters the young boy interacts with (his grandfather and the neighbor) with just enough visual cues to support the limited dialogue. No second is wasted in depicting the grandfather’s transformation from idol to demon and the neighbors transformation from social pariah into a humble exploited man we can sympathize with.
Dolly (U.K.)
In Dolly, a white babysitter works on her laptop whilst the young black girl in her care asks for help with her maths homework. The babysitter ignores her until she finds out she’s got the job she wanted. To celebrate, she lets the young black girl put make up on her face, not knowing that the young girl is going to paint her face black.
There are a lot of issues that Dolly touches on but doesn’t explore, such as white privilege, racial privilege, black girls in STEM, discrimination in education, blackness, lack of black representation, being black in a white world and more. However, instead of exploring any of these issues that the film half references, it chooses to ultimately go for a punch-line ending of a white girl being found with blackface on. As a result, Dolly is left without much substance to add to a pretty bland performance from the white babysitter.
Songs for my right side (U.S.A.)
Rodger Smith is in pain. Every night he writhes alone in his bed because of a searing pain that has taken over the right side of his body. It might be the after effects of a bad break up, or the fate of two young black people recently murdered in cold blood. The only thing that soothes the pain is music.
Songs For My Right Side deserves a lot of credit for trying to do something different. Whilst the three short films above stick to familiar storytelling styles, Songs for My Right Side blends music, mystery, and Rodger’s thoughts together to create an almost psychedelic viewing experience. It’s as if you’ve been plunged into another person’s mind and forced to follow their roving stream-of-consciousness. There’s no room to step away from it and get a complete picture of what is happening, but that is kind of the point. You’re stuck with an untrustworthy, apparently crazy narrator, and you have to try and decipher what is true or not. Whilst the film does meander a lot, rendering it pretty confusing to follow, the experience is worth the ride.
Hanna starts Luxor looking like the typical ‘gone abroad to find yourself’ young white adult. She’s dressed in loose clothing, feels an other worldly connection to the foreign place, and sleeps around. However, whilst her character never completely loses this image in the film, our interpretation of her changes.
Instead of opening up, she becomes more closed emotionally as the film progresses. It doesn’t feel like we learn more about her. Scene by scene, her face becomes a canvas of lonely stoicism, even after she meets her former lover, Sultan. The only moment she breaks this facade in the first part of the film is when she automatically switches into ‘work-mode’ to help a tourist that faints. Otherwise she’s made a shell around her personality to defend herself against hardships.
Luxor could have slipped into the trap of exoticizing a foreign location from the perspective of an outsider. Whilst it does turn Ancient Egypt into a place for a white person to contemplate (side note: shout out to the British Museum), it feels self aware of what it’s doing. Hanna finds connections on her own organically, and other connections to the land through the eyes of a local Sultan. It also recognizes that tourists do visit Luxor to exoticize ‘the other’ by representing them in the spiritual group of westerners that followed the Grateful Dead, and the obnoxious American tourist from the opening. Again it just about avoids the trap of falling into the problematic ‘white girl finds herself in exotic location’.
Instead it uses the environment, and Hanna’s connection to it, to evoke nostalgia for Hanna’s past life with Sultan. We learn that this isn’t the first time she’s been to Luxor (having been here with Sultan earlier in life). Now she’s older, she has experienced trauma (that is only hinted at in the film), and her mind is in a different place. She’s seeing the same locations, but in a different light. Everything feels familiar, shown in her confident exploration of the place on her own, but it also feels different, as shown in her inquisitive interaction with the ruins. Her new connection to the place suggests that her return may be fated, and that she may have found her home and future.
Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.
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