Film Festival Coverage Hub - Reviews & Recaps

The Mercy of the Jungle – Pan African Film Festival 2020

The Mercy of the Jungle starts with the same scene it ends with. In it, an armed Sergeant Xavier chases a fleeing rebel across an open field. He appears weary of the endless war but mechanically carries out his duty. Book-ending the film with this same chase scene of Sergeant Xavier in a weary pursuit traps him within the conflict. Every scene he appears in as a Sergeant ready for war. He rarely discloses anything about his dreams or personal life. The war in the heart of the jungle covering Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has consumed him, just as the soldiers in Francis Ford Copolla’s Apocalypse Now are gradually consumed by their war. Whilst he can switch uniforms and play both sides of the war, the cyclical nature of the film indicates he can never escape the conflict or the jungle it takes place in.

The suffocating jungle provides the first test for a lost Sergeant Xavier and Private Faustin, as they try to find their troop. It’s overgrown, making it hard for them to see beyond a few meters. Even in the clearings the mist prevents them from seeing much further. Plus there’s the hot humidity that slowly saps the precious moisture from Xavier and Faustin as they try to find the way; a death curse as there are no signs of fresh water. The jungle is their inescapable prison.

The sounds of the fauna at night tell Xavier and Faustin that they’re not welcome in the jungle. We never see what makes the noises, which helps to make us more paranoid of what could be out there. It’s not clear if it’s an animal stalking them, or just animals passing by. Whatever it is, the fear of the unknown only further demonstrates their complete loss of control in the jungle and slow descent into madness. The diegetic sounds are supported by a loud, deep, ominous soundtrack that builds the feeling of hopelessness. The jungle is consuming them.

The inescapable, consuming jungle goes hand in hand with the inescapable, consuming war. Just as Sergeant Xavier is stuck in the jungle surrounded by unknown, unwelcoming sounds, he’s stuck in the war surrounded by unknown, unwelcoming armed groups. The war is faceless. The only thing that separates Sergeant Xavier from the different armies and rebel groups he encounters is his uniform. Otherwise, they speak the same language and look the same. So, to avoid death, Xavier and Faustin carry multiple uniforms so they can change clothes to blend into the areas they trespass. They even make friends with soldiers and communities they originally fought against. However, although they can fluidly switch sides, Sergeant Xavier can never escape the war. The one time he tries to disguise himself as a civilian, he’s attacked because it’s obvious from his ‘Muhammad Ali’ physique that he’s a soldier. Whilst he can switch military uniforms, he can never return to being a regular civilian. He’s condemned to a life of war.

The Mercy of the Jungle depicts the inescapable cycle of war around the Virunga National Park in the heart of Africa. The suffocating, disorientating jungle is reminiscent of the jungles depicted in Apocalypse Now and Aguirre, whilst the inescapable war is reminiscent of those depicted in War Witch and Beasts of No Nation. The Mercy of the Jungle stands up to all four of these films as one of the best jungle war films there is.

Head to our Pan African Film Festival Hub for more reviews and short films from the Pan African Film Festival 2020.

Towards The Battle – Spain/Latin American Competition – SBIFF

In Towards the Battle, Louis, a French photographer, gets lost in French occupied Mexico in the 1860’s. He wants to photograph the French-Mexican War, but gets lost in the Mexican wilderness trying to find it. However, his encounter with Pinto, a Mexican peasant, gives him the companion and support he needs to carry out his quest.

Louis is in Mexico as commissioned by the French army. He holds a permission slip from the French general which acts as his pass to freely travel the region without reprimand from the roaming French army. It’s the only thing that separates Louis from the rabble of the French army. If he loses it, he’d be conscripted into the army, or, if he’s lucky, sent back to France.

Whilst he can escape from the marauding French army, he can’t escape from the Mexican wilderness. As the scenery changes from mountainous scrub-land to deep rain-forest, Louis is (literally) one step away from a premature death. It’s obvious he can’t survive by himself with two horses carrying his huge amount of photography gear. Luckily for him, a Mexican peasant named Pinto finds him when he’s starving and gives him the food he needs to survive.

From that moment on, they become Don Quixote and Sancho Panza-esque partners. Louis is Don Quixote: a leader of a well off background that loses himself in the quest of one of his hobbies. Instead of chivalry, Louis drags a mountain of photographic equipment across the Mexican wilderness in search of a war that doesn’t appear to exist. When Pinto finds him, he’s already gone a bit mad in his quest to capture a photo of the elusive war. Pinto is Louis’ Sancho Panza: a Mexican peasant that knows Louis is mad, and doesn’t understand him (he doesn’t speak French), but happily goes along with Louis’ delusional quest because he’s got nothing better to do. Along the way, he saves Louis a couple of times, and subordinates himself to him to allow Louis to live out his fantasy. The Don Quixote allegory gives Towards the Battle a timeless feel, and gives an extra layer to Louis’ madness and his slow progression to his own awareness which he reaches in the final scenes.

From the scenery to the setting to the characters, Towards the Battle was one of the films that flew under the SBIFF radar. It’s a well made update of Cervantes’ Don Quixote applied to the French occupation of Mexico. It’s used to show the madness of the French in Mexico and the absurdity of the French occupation of Mexico. The French (Louis) and Don Quixote both live a world away from the reality.

Tenere – Pan African Film Festival 2020

Tenere documents the incredible real life Mad Max journey of Nigerien people crossing the Sahara on customized trucks in search of an escape from their poverty. It’s an almost unbelievable journey, and although more people try to cross the desert than the Atlantic to get to Europe, it surprisingly rarely makes the news.

Tenere itself is an observational documentary that follows Bachir on his journey from Agadez to Dirkou in search of work. Bachir is one of the most experienced members of the group, having already made the journey across the Sahara a few times in order to provide for his family. This time, instead of going to Libya, which is no longer a land of opportunity because of the raging civil war, Bachir plans to stop and find work in Dirkou, 584km away from Agadez in the northeastern corner of Niger. However, what might be a days journey by car on normal roads is a perilous 5 day trek across the sands of the Sahara in blistering 45 degree heat (that’s over 110 degrees Fahrenheit). In this part of the world, roads don’t exist, just a lot of sand.

Tenere takes off cinematically when the journey leaves Agadez. There’s a point, roughly 10-15 minutes into their journey that the craziness of it hit me. Agadez is the 5th largest city in Niger, albeit a small one when compared to cities around the world with just over 100,000 inhabitants. It doesn’t look like a city teeming with opportunity when we see it on camera. The dust roads, mud houses, and lack of greenery indicate that human life here isn’t sustainable. However, compared to the desert the migrants travel through, Agadez is an oasis of life. After 10-15 minutes of traveling through the desert, the director starts using drone shots to shoot the truck loaded with goats, people, wares, and water, allowing us to see just how perilous the journey is. We can see that their truck is the only sign of life for miles, an island in a landscape that is purely sand and hot air. They’re truck is the desert equivalent of the Senegalese pirogues aimed towards Europe, completely isolated and just a few punctures away from certain death.

You might be wondering: “well, these people were never going to die because the filmmaker and his crew were there just in case something went wrong”. However, you might not know that this film was all shot by one Turkish man, Hasan Söylemez, with just a few cameras and a convoy of hired soldiers to protect them from desert bandits. There’s not much a camera and soldiers can do to help if your car breaks down when you’re two days drive from civilization and surrounded by sand and a 45 degree heat. It’s exactly at the halfway point of their journey that one man emerges inexplicably from the desert. He has just walked 17km to find help because his truck has broken down whilst carrying 20-25 migrants on its back. They’re all stuck by the car with their water supplies running out. If he didn’t find anyone willing to help, this truck load of people would succumb to the desert, like the many other people buried under car tire tombstones. It’s an unforgiving journey, and death always feels precariously close because of a lack of visible support. There are no signs of backup help, because there isn’t any.

Tenere is almost unbelievable. These guys and their custom stacked truck would fit perfectly into an apocalyptic Mad Max film. But the handheld camera and drone shots make it almost feel like we’re there with them, minus the heat and glaring sun. It’s a brilliant observational documentary that exposes another migration route that rarely makes the news. I watched this film whilst I was halfway through reading ‘The Devil’s Highway’, an account of the Yuma 14 who died crossing the Arizona desert, which made this film even more pertinent. If you’re sitting comfortably in your home in Europe or the U.S. thinking that you deserved the luck to be born there, watch this film and see exactly how people are risking their lives to try and reverse their own fortunes.

Head to our Pan African Film Festival Hub for more reviews from PAFF 2020.

This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection – Sundance 2020

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is not your typical film. It’s pretty slow paced and full of carefully crafted shots, reminiscent of director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s debut, Mother I Am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You. However, unlike his debut documentary feature, This Is Not a Burial, Its a Resurrection is Mosese’s first fictional feature film. But don’t expect an easy to follow narrative, as like a Lav Diaz film (see From What is Before), it requires a lot of interpretation. If you put in the effort, you’ll be rewarded with a beautiful constructed film touching on a wide range of themes covering death, community, progress, and the environment.

This Is Not a Burial, Its a Resurrection starts chaotically with a slow motion shot of a group of horses being attacked by tribesmen. This opening shot doesn’t appear to serve any contextual purpose, as the horses or tribesmen never reappear later in the film, but it does create a sense of uneasiness which prevents us from settling into the film. This feeling continues into the next scene in which a camera slowly pans around a dark empty bar with the eerie sounds of a lesiba instrument playing in the background. The cameras stops on a uniquely dressed man who starts giving us clues about what we are about to see. He doesn’t reveal much, as he uses a lot of legends and proverbs which don’t mean much to us at this point, but his speech indicates that we’ll have to be an active viewer and search for deeper meaning in the rest of the film.

We finally meet our main protagonist Mantoa in the next scene. She’s an eighty-something woman living alone in remote valley in Lesotho, which is a days trip from the nearest town. Her last son has passed away, so she’s now the last one left in her family. As a result, all she craves now is her own death, so she sets about planning her own funeral. Until her time comes, she carries on with the futility of her life, attending local community meetings and covering cracks in her mud floor. However, her patience is disrupted by news that the local government are planning to flood the area with the construction of a big dam. Not only does the dam disrupt the plans for her own burial, but it will also force the relocation of her buried family. As the main figure leading the resistance against the dam, she becomes more and more distanced from her community and religion. Her death isn’t a physical one, but a death from her community and cultural roots as the country ruthlessly pushes forward in the name of progress.

The narrative is sparse, but the look and feel of the film is incredibly rich. One way Mosese adds a unique richness is through his use of a taller 1:33:1 aspect ratio which gives the picture slightly more height. The extra vertical space allows the sky to dominate every image by taking up almost half of the screen for each landscape shot. In contrast, the people in the community are largely confined to the bottom third of each landscape shot. This framing adds power to the sky and nature, and diminishes the significance of the people below. Their lives and the things they do, such as building dams, are impermanent compared to the eternal nature of the sky (and heaven?). The taller aspect ratio therefore enforces the futility of not just Mantoa, but the futility of humanity as a whole.

The futility of humanity is enforced by the feeling generated by the films’ soundtrack. Firstly, listen to the trailer for this film without watching it. It sounds like a horror film. There’s the unique muffled bursts of the lesiba combined with a horror 101 mix of piano notes, scratchy strings, and ascending voices. This soundscape plays throughout the film to viscerally convey the confusion, anger, and sadness that Mantoa feels on her quest to join her dead family. But the sounds used in horror films also signifies the presence of the spiritual realm. Just as the taller aspect ratio gives more power to the sky and nature at the expense of the significance of humanity, the soundtrack bolsters the dominance of the spiritual over the physical human bodies. It reminds us that we’re not in control of our own fate.

The unsettling opening, sparse narrative, and rich look and feel of the film make This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection feel enigmatic. By the end, it feels like you’ve just watched a piece of art. You might have understood a bit of the film and felt its power and beauty, but you will finish it feeling that it’s full meaning is unattainable. It’s mystery is the mystery of life.

Right Near the Beach – Pan African Film Festival 2020

In Right Near the Beach, Jeffrey Jacobs, Jamaica’s world record breaking sprinter is beaten to death near his home. His murder sparks a frenzy of media coverage that digs into his friendship with a gay man. Jeffrey’s single father becomes a social pariah because of the reaction to his son’s death, living alone in the hills. It’s only when his youngest son returns that he is given a chance to transcend his isolation and grief.

Right Near the Beach tells its story effectively through the images and sounds it presents. Firstly, the film develops Terrence Malick’s visual style to create a more visceral feeling. Right Near the Beach still has the trademark wandering camera and meditative shots familiar to Malick’s films, but adds a varying shot length to better convey the varying emotions Jeffrey’s dad feels.

For most of the film, the average spot length feels longer than your typical Hollywood film. This gives the audience more time to watch the characters as they wander in rural Jamaica alone, allowing us to feel their search for inner peace. However, for a few key scenes, the emotional toll of the media and neighborhood gossip is too much for them and they release their frustration in sin scenes with frantically fast cutting. The quick shots that rapidly cut around Jeffrey’s dad when he starts axing a tree root creates an urgent feeling of blind rage that contrasts with the otherwise relaxed feelings generated by the longer shots. It’s one example of how the filmmakers brilliantly use shot lengths to change the feelings of each scene.

Secondly, the sound of Right Near the Beach provides the foundation for the visual experimentation. In the first half of the film, the soundtrack is dominated by a constant stream of radio show interviews with people discussing Jeffrey Jacobs’ homosexuality. The real homophobia you hear on air (these interviews were conducted with real Jamaicans) penetrates the silence of the rural area Jeffrey’s father lives. What he hears forces him deeper into isolation just to try and silence the country’s prejudice. This changes in the second half of the film, when the prejudiced voices that plague him start to ease after his youngest son’s arrival. They’re replaced by more natural sounds from the rural environment they live in, marking his successful coming to terms with his eldest son’s death. It’s as if he’s managed to meditate away the hateful media and replace it with a calm peace of mind. Just as the visceral visual style builds emotions, the sounds we hear guide us through Jeffrey’s dad’s grief.

To take the film full circle, the filmmakers end the film with the reunion of the dad and his youngest son. It’s a touching end to an emotional film that shows they have both transcended the deaths of their brother/son and mother/wife.

Right Near the Beach manages to accomplish a lot. Firstly, the editing and cinematography work incredibly well with the soundscape to depict the character’s raw emotion and path to overcoming their grief. Secondly, the full circle script gives the film a spiritual completeness that many films fail to achieve. But, that’s not all. Right Near the Beach also touches on the prejudice in Jamaica and how the country is largely overlooked internationally except for beaches and running (hence the ironic title). I’m excited to see more from these filmmakers.

Head to our Pan African Film Festival Hub for more reviews from PAFF 2020.