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Short Films from the PAFF 2020 – Part 2

Here’s another round of quick fire reviews from the short films featured in the Films in Paradise segment of PAFF 2020. Unfortunately one of the films in the segment, After Mas, had an issue with the audio so it won’t be reviewed here.

The deliverer (Trinidad & Tobago)

Joseph is a fisherman on a hunger strike. He’s leading a protest against the construction of an oil refinery which threatens to displace his community and livelihood. However, things change when Joseph rescues a wounded drug runner that offers him an opportunity to make enough money to save his home and town. All he has to do is traffic some drugs across from Venezuela.

The Deliverer feels more like a long trailer than a short film. Everything in it sets the film up for the dangerous journey trafficking drugs to and from Venezuela. However, as soon as the set up finishes with Joseph getting on his boat, the film ends. It’s simply a proof of concept short film that the filmmakers have made to try and raise enough funds for a feature film. I guess filmmakers have to do what they got to do to make a feature. Fortunately, this approach is working as The Deliverer is currently being developed into a feature length film. I hope I get a chance to see it.

She Paradise (Trinidad & Tobago)

A teenage girl struggles to fit into a crew of Soca backup dancers in She Paradise. Her shy, quiet personality doesn’t seem to fit the confident aura of the dance team, but, despite this, she keeps trying to break free of her insecurities. With the help of one of the older members of the dance team that she warms to, she ends up with her first chance on stage. Can she make the most of the limelight?

She Paradise was a refreshing change from the mostly male fronted short films I saw in the two short film segments I saw at PAFF. At its center is a heartwarming coming-of-age relationship between a young shy teenage girl and a confident and charismatic dancer that takes her under her wing. The older dancer becomes like a sister to the younger girl, showing her how to embrace her sexuality and act confidentially. These are two characteristics she needs to be a successful soca dancer, but their relationship feels deeper than that. It feels like the older dancer is helping guide the younger girl into adulthood, becoming the role model that the young girl doesn’t appear to have. Helping her to add color to her life (lipstick and make up), feel the music and express herself through dance gives her a foundation to be happy now and in the future. It’s a beautiful win for positivity.

Currently streaming on Vimeo

Flight (Jamaica)

Kemar dreams of flying to the moon. He sneaks up onto the roof at night to look at the starry night sky and builds a rocket ship with his best friend. However, when his best friend ‘grows up’ to work for a local gang, Kemar loses the only person that believed with him.

Flight is one of those films that is impossible to hate. The enthusiasm of the young kid and his dreams of becoming an astronaut are contagious. We can see what he imagines with the help of his friend and a few props. However, Flight melts your heart when you find out the reason why he wants to go to the moon; to get closer to his mother. It’s enough to get his dad to join him in building a spaceship to help his imagination get there. A beautifully heartwarming story about a father and son finally connecting and transcending their loneliness through their mutual love for their lost wife/mother.

The blue cape (Puerto Rico)

Two months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the power remains out and buildings continue to collapse. Junior, a ten year old boy, is summoned by his mother to search for medicine for his dying grandfather. He puts on a blue cape and sets off on his quest to save his grandfather.

The Blue Cape is just 6 minutes long but it packs a punch. Every shot is immaculate, and the acting is all on point. My personal highlights were the shots of Junior roaming down to the local town. He hops around loose bricks and walks along planks of wood strewn across the road. From his point of view, it looks like a normal run down town, but then the camera zooms out to reveal the bricks and planks are from half collapsed buildings that are teetering over deep valleys. It’s function is to uncover the colossal damage from the Hurricane that the U.S. media has overlooked. There’s an obvious lack of U.S. support months after the disaster (there’s no sign of repair and still damage everywhere). It directly implicates the U.S. as the ultimate decider of Junior’s grandad’s fate. Powerful and beautiful. Hope to see more from this director.

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

The Pencil – International Competition SBIFF

The Pencil is bleak. It features an artist that travels to a remote Russian town over 1,000 miles from Moscow to be closer to her partner who’s been wrongly imprisoned there. She becomes a teacher who believes she can make a difference, but has to confront a violent bully.

The teacher is a naive ‘Im going to make a difference’ teacher. She’s the Russian version of Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver and Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. However, unlike the two American films, her class bully is from the criminal family that runs the town. A family that has the police department, prison, school, and any other public services in their pocket. The bully is free to extort and bully both his fellow students and teachers.

Unfortunately for her, her naive beliefs that the bad kid would take to her first art lesson are misguided (she’s obviously never taught before). She doesn’t exactly try to help him either when she says he has no talent in front of the class in their first lesson. From there, her relationship with the bully spirals downhill until the naive hope she had disappears.

The Pencil is shot well. You get a real sense of setting – the isolation from everywhere else (you never see a way out), the juxtaposition of the freedom of nature with the oppressive factories spewing smoke non stop and big run down apartment blocks, and the grey colour palette which is brought to life briefly by the teacher on their art walks.

Secondly, pay attention to the pencils in the film as the film exploits them well. There’s the local factories that create them manned by the working class locals whose kids are being taught to use them to create. Using them instead of creating them gives the kids a way out of the town. It’s also a symbol of the naive teacher’s wish to offer her students a way out, which is easily snapped by the bully in the very first lesson. It’s also no coincidence that the ending features the wood logs that are used to make pencils.

The Pencil is a clever bleak film. However, the bleakness doesn’t present the best picture of Russia. It presents a society without hope that is scared of standing up to the corrupt powers in control. If you can handle hopelessness, it is worth a watch.

P.S. To all the audience members generalising Russian (and Eastern European) film as bleak, please watch more movies before making assumptions. There’s plenty of comedies out there, and plenty of bleak American films that present a bleak picture of the U.S. too.

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret – PAFF 2020

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret takes us back to Jaki’s childhood living in a coastal African town with his Granma, family, and friends. There’s no sign of school or any other schedule filling activities for young Jaki, so he creates his own entertainment with his friends Pi and Charlita. They start investigating the construction site of a huge mausoleum guarded by Russian soviets. Their innocent adventures uncover the Russian’s plot to demolish their neighborhood, so they plan to foil it by setting off their secret explosives.

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret revolves around Jaki’s childhood in the 1980s. The characters give the film (and award winning African novel by Ondjaki) its flavor. There’s Jaki and his two friends, a trio of innocent adventurers that Americans will recognize from many 1980s U.S. films such as The Goonies or E.T. There’s a loving Granma that never loses her spirit even when her toe is covered in gangrene. You’ll also meet two foreigners fighting for her company in a Portuguese speaking Russian and a Spanish speaking Cuban doctor. None of the characters are threatening or unfriendly, even ‘Sea Foam’, the only homeless man in the film is friendly and happy. It creates the kind of neighborhood you wished you grew in.

The film is also told in flash back, of an older Jaki reminiscing on his childhood. This flash back narrative adds to films saudade, a classic feeling in Portuguese language novels and films which describes feelings of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia for an object that you’ll probably never have again. In this case, it’s Jaki’s saudade for his happy and innocent childhood. The director emphasizes his good memories by coloring the memories of his childhood town in warm pastel colors and filling the story with only happy memories. Eradicating the greys and downplaying the threat of the Soviet construction work and the absence of Jaki’s parents keeps the story positive in a way that only a person looking back on their life with saudade could.

Whilst I haven’t read Ondjaki’s novel, João Ribeiro’s adaptation is a heart warming coming of age story told through the rose tinted lenses of Jaki looking back on his childhood.

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

Desrances – Pan African Film Festival 2020

In the opening of Desrances, Francis is out fishing when he hears gun shots from the shore. He races back to his family home to find his mother and relatives shot dead by insurgents in the 2004 Haitian coup d’état. It’s a traumatic totem he still carries approximately 15 years later in his new life in Cote d’Ivoire.

In Cote d’Ivoire, his life is normal. He has helped make a happy family with his wife and 12 year old daughter, and runs a shop with his father in law which provides him with enough to afford his nice sized apartment. His life gets even better when he finds out his wife is expecting the son he’s wished for. He’s so excited for his future son that he even names him well in advance and starts building his crib. However, in his excitement he fails to spot the familiar signs of a civil war brewing in the country and that his daughter is becoming more distant.

The turning point of Desrances arrives with the news that all of the most dangerous prisoners of the country have escaped (an event that actually happened in 2017). It’s at this point that the film turns into a post-apocalyptic style thriller with a group of stereotypical prisoners, that wouldn’t be out of place in a DC movie, providing the antagonists to Francis and his family. Out of the blue, the group turns up at Francis’ house with guns and machetes in an attempted robbery. Francis and his family manage to escape, and rush to the hospital with Francis’ wife in labor. However, as Francis’ PTSD kicks in, he loses track of time and reawakens at home alone with his daughter, with his wife and new-born missing.

The second half of Desrances follows Francis as he runs around Abidjan looking for the group of prisoners who have kidnapped his missing wife and son. The city has quickly become a desolate urban wasteland with supermarkets full of empty shelves, deserted streets, and bands of people assembling to stake their claims to sectors of Abidjan. These are all signs of your typical post-apocalyptic movie; signs which point to the futility of Francis’ search. However, if anyone could interpret the signs, it should be Francis. He has lived through the revolution in Haiti and experienced the trauma of war. However, out of blind desperation to meet his son he keeps looking no matter how hard his daughter tries to stop him.

Desrances draws on the 2017 escape of over 100 inmates from prisons in Cote D’Ivoire and the Ivorian Civil War to create a post-apocalyptic environment in Abidjan. Behind the chaos is a story about a father and daughter that have to reconnect after losing touch with each other, held together by great performances from Jimmy Jean-Louis and his daughter. It’s a well put together thriller that should have popular appeal.

Bigman Wahala – Pan African Film Festival 2020

Bigman Wahala is an enjoyable road-trip comedy with commercial appeal that focuses on the unlikely relationship between a poor taxi driver and a wanted former government official on the run. It never takes itself too seriously and even gets away with poking a bit of fun at both the ‘Bigman’ and military governments as well as the gullibility of the public.

Bigman Wahala starts with Honest, our friendly taxi driver, stuck in a traffic jam in Accra. The frantic John Woo style cutting rapidly builds pressure until Honest spots a gap in the traffic and races on home. It’s a sign that this road-trip comedy will be filled a few bursts of tense energy to propel it forward.

The next comes when an armed jeep full of soldiers carrying assault rifles descends on the Government building to stage a successful coup d’état. Like the opening traffic scene, the attack is full of fast cuts that cross the usual 180 boundaries of Hollywood cutting which makes it appear very chaotic. However, the insurgents win a quick victory that seems a bit too easy – perhaps a satirical jab at how many coups there have been in Western Africa over the last years. It’s presented as something a bit too familiar. Nevertheless, the insurgents quickly assume control of the airwaves and order all former government officials to report to their nearest police station. This is when we start following ‘Bigman’ Joseph, the former minister of the health department and follow his attempt to escape the country.

Our Bigman is comically selfish. As soon as he hears the news, he leaves his wife to collect his huge stash of money from the safe in his office. Whilst he’s there, some insurgents arrive to look for him, so he escapes through the back entrance and jumps into the nearest taxi, which just so happens to be driven by Honest. This kicks off a light buddy road trip movie between Bigman Joseph and Honest, as Honest helps Bigman to escape the country on lockdown.

Whilst the ending undermines the class boundaries which define the rest of the film in its’ we’re all human message, Bigman Wahala for the most part is a fun road trip comedy built on the classic Fish Out of Water and How the Mighty Have Fallen tropes.

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