Film Festival Coverage Hub - Reviews & Recaps

Only The Animals – International Competition – SBIFF

Only The Animals features a bunch of interconnecting narratives spanning across France and Cameroon. Each narrative is connected to the murder of a French woman during a snow storm in rural France. It’s weird, entertaining, and satisfying as every piece of the puzzle falls into place. Even the initially out of place opening of a man riding his bike through Abidjan with a goat on his back is eventually linked in and understood.

It’s a fun ride but I haven’t figured out what’s the point or message beyond ‘things happen by chance’. Not saying that it has to have a message – this film was enjoyable to watch – but it would turn a showy multiple narrative film into something better. Maybe I’m asking for too much after seeing the Trump era unravelling of a white upper class family in 2019s stand out murder mystery, Knives Out.

If anything it could be that everything the people aren’t grateful for gets reversed on them. E.g. Joseph is an inanimate loner who can’t love that ends up loving an inanimate loner who can’t love.

Only The Animals covers a lot but doesn’t feel slumped. While every character could have been given more of a backstory, it does fit the movie to not dwell so much. The fun is in watching the transcontinental story slowly unravel as each characters viewpoint layers onto the next.

Side note: slightly stereotypical story of witch doctors and scammers in Africa, even if it is hilarious watching them do their work to a horny middle aged white guy.

Verde – Pan African Film Festival (PAFF) 2020

If you’re looking for transcendental film from Dominican Republic, the ritualized pacing of Verde carries the fire lit by Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias’ Cocote.

Verde is the first feature film set in Dajabon, a small region in the Northwest of Dominican Republic that borders Haiti. Like Cocote, the setting contains the streams, forests, and grassland that color the interior of the country instead of the pristine beaches and resorts you’d find in tourist brochures. It’s an open environment, a long way from sweltering urban Santo Domingo situated on the opposite side of the country. Here, the outside blends with the inside as the heat and sounds permeate through the walls and open doors of everyone’s houses. Because of Dajabon’s distance from the cities, there aren’t any signs of government of authority. Spiritual leaders and gangsters have taken their place as indigenous customs hold a similar power to the church and the gangs’ tit-for-tat retribution rules.

This has consequences for the three protagonists who’s attempted heist of a gold mine goes wrong. They don’t go to the police to hand themselves in, as there are no signs of the police here. Instead, they have to answer for their actions with the locals. They also don’t go to the church to ask for forgiveness, instead choosing to visit a shaman for a ritual to cleanse their sins. However, as their silence reveals, they already know the fate waiting for them.

Their march towards their inevitable deaths, payment for the man they killed during their attempted robbery, is reflected in the slow tempo of the film and their silence. Every shot, as common in transcendental cinema, lingers for longer than it needs to, forcing you to observe the characters for longer. With more time, Carmelo’s silence becomes more obvious and his actions appear more deliberate. He has the most screen time but does the least with it. His silence appears to honor the dead and repent for the crime he committed. His actions also appear willed by a feeling of guilt. However, he doesn’t appear to be in control, as if he has already given up his body to someone else. It gives the sense that he has already embraced his ultimate fate and is mourning for himself as well as the others.

In this way, Verde fits closest to Schrader’s meditative segment of transcendental film. It’s not simply observing the characters like a surveillance camera, and it’s not focusing solely on the look of the film. Instead Verde employs its slow tempo to hold viewers in a trance like state through the chapters of the film. We follow Carmelo’s repentant march through Dajabon and in it we are given time to reflect on our own lives as we move with him closer to our fate.

Verde is an impressive debut feature that you should look out for at a festival near you.

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

Nevia – International Competition – SBIFF

With her mother dead and her father in prison, Nevia and her little sister live with her grandmother in a container park on the outskirts of Naples. It’s not the best place for her to grow up. Her grandmother rents out her rooms to prostitutes and runs odd chores for the local crime boss to try and repay the debts Nevia’s father owes. Nevia despises her grandmother for bringing men into their home.

Nevia’s other problem is that Salvatore, the 30 year old son of the crime boss, is infatuated with her. Even though she’s only 17 (and looks younger), he’s already asking her grandmother for her hand in marriage. The prostitution to many men or prostitution to Salvatore is what Nevia fears is her fate.

To escape, she finds work with the local circus. They provide her independence and a more complete family then the one she has at home. It allows her to wean herself away from her grandmother and Salvatore. But when she finds the circus leader has his own problems, she’s redirected to the fate she tried to escape.

Nevia looks a lot like the recent Neapolitan films of Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah, Dogman). It contains the same grimy urban landscape of rubbish strewn across roads, battered apartment blocks, and lots of concrete and tarmac. It’s a hopeless forgotten Italy in which opportunity doesn’t exist. The only people who succeed are involved in crime, and those that don’t are inevitably linked to them whether they want to or not.

Like Dogman’s main character, Nevia is linked to the criminal underworld by means outside her control. She comes into contact with the criminal bosses because of her father and grandmother. She’s doomed to Salvatore just for living where she grew up. It’s not a problem with her but a condition of the hopeless environment she grows up in.

The welcome difference of Nevia is that it’s led by Nevia, a young female protagonist growing up with her female relatives. It therefore provides a female perspective of life in the hopeless outskirts of urban Italy. The environment for them is much more restrictive than the criminal freedom it afford the men.

Song Sparrow – Short Film Competition – SBIFF

In Song Sparrow the freezing temperature of a smuggler’s truck turns a group of refugees’ hopes for a better future into a struggle for survival.

Song Sparrow starts in an eerie forest, where a group of people are peering into the back of a meat truck with meat carcasses hanging from the roof. This is their ominous escape route. You can feel their nervousness in their blinking eyes and the cutting between the meat truck and their faces, alone in the forest. Their anxiety turns into excitement whilst they’re in the back of the truck as the refugees share blinking looks and dance to music. However, this changes when the truck’s refrigeration system kicks in.

It’s a short animated film that contains everything you want to see from a short animated film. Firstly, it gains true story points for basing the story on two tragic events (NBC News: 71 Refugees Found Dead in Truck in Austrian Highway, BBC News: Essex Lorry Deaths) that didn’t get the coverage they should have. Secondly, for its short film creds, it tells it’s story concisely and precisely whilst taking enough time to evoke sympathy for the characters involved. Lastly, for it’s animation creds, it’s uniquely animated with puppets with blinking eyes. They don’t say anything, but you can feel their anxiety, their relief, their excitement, and their despair in their blinking eyes. It’s proof that something so simple can be so effective.

However, creating the sets were not simple. To give you a better perspective on how they were made, and to prove how impressive it is visually, here’s a quick comment from the Director Farzaneh Omidvarnia and some images from the set:

“Firstly, the size of the puppets and sets are larger than they look (see the attached pictures); the Puppets are each around 70 cm tall. Secondly, it is a live action animation and I tried to animate and record the movements lively. The filming process took 80 days. I applied animatronics to develop the blinking eyes and eyeballs, and the eyes are controlled remotely. The movements are not conducted by stop motion. Nevertheless, I consider this a developing method that I am actually trying to exploit and advance it. In fact, it might be more challenging than for example stop-motion for some scenes, but I believe regarding the contents, it might convey the message and senses more clearly. So all my hope is that this technique gets established more strongly through my next movies.”
Farzaneh Omidvarnia

The Flying Circus – International Competition – SBIFF

In The Flying Circus, four lads from Kosovo receive an invitation from the Albanian National Theatre to put on their latest play for their festival. Problem is, to get there, they need to cross two borders illegally. They have to escape Serbian occupied Kosovo, sneak through Monetenegro, before crossing illegally into Albania.

It’s a funny ‘based on a true story’ escape/road trip film set in a divided Balkans. It manages to convey the seriousness of their journey, but lightened with humour. The only unnecessary addition to the film is the cliched holiday relationship between one of the actors and a woman from Tirana. It just feels too quick, underdeveloped, and unnecessary.

The humour comes from the strange situations and people the four actors stumble into and how they deal with them. For example, there’s the threatening episode when the Kosovars traveling from Kosovo are all threatened by a trio of skinheads in a restaurant. One of the skinheads brings out a gun to which one of the four actors smashes his hands on two glasses (as he saw in a movie earlier). It turns a threatening situation into something absurd to laugh at. In these comedic moments you almost forget that they’re on the run and their lives are under threat.

The Flying Circus also offers a glimpse of life as a Kosovar in the Balkans. At home there are routine ID checks of ethnic Albanians and officials speaking Serbian instead of the local Albanian. This sets up what they’re due to face later on. On the road, they face further checks – made by grumpy officials speaking Serbian, and they’re threatened by a local in Montenegro. All the signs show that the Kosovars are looked down upon both at home and abroad. This doesn’t change when they make it to Albania either, where the officials are corrupt and inept.

Overall, The Flying Journey is a fun journey, on a similar level to Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. It’s got funny characters, humor in unlikely situations, and a happy-ish ending.