docufiction

1

Man Bites Dog (Belgium) – Help Out an ‘Affectionate and Sweet’ Murderer

Man Bites Dog Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

This may well be the darkest comedy there is. You may not agree at first, but you probably will by the end of the film. And you’ll probably feel like a murderer for watching it! This is one of the ultimate mockumentarys!

Why Watch Man Bites Dog?
  • If you like dark comedies – and when I say dark, I mean it!
  • If you like docu-fiction films (see Battle of Algiers or Che)
  • To learn how much ballast you need to sink a corpse
  • For a murderer’s ode to pigeons – actor Benoit Poelvoorde is crazy
The Breakdown

You’ll get an idea of what kind of a film this is from the opening. It starts with what looks like a normal scene. A man on a train is standing by the window as a woman walks past him along the corridor. However, as the man moves out of the way to let her pass, he rings a rope around her neck, forces her into a cabin and strangles her.

As you’ll quickly realise, this is not a serious film. However, you also won’t be surprised that it was highly controversial when it was released in 1992 (two years before Natural Born Killers).

Straight after the brutal opening scene, we meet Benoit (the murderer) again. This time, he is talking to the camera and telling us how to properly ballast a corpse so it sinks. Remember, ‘you need to ballast a dead body with 3 times it’s body-weight, and 5 times for old people as their bones are even more porous’ (Benoit’s quote, not mine).

The mockumentary style (mock documentary) makes the film even more real. Benoit looks straight at the camera a lot, and therefore straight at us. As a result, we are forced to get close to him and pushed towards identifying with him. The intimacy is stretched even further as we are introduced to his family and friends, who all say what an ‘affectionate and sweet’ person he is. But every time we start to get comfortable with him the director reminds us of his violence. For example, in one scene he starts playing with a few kids in a park making him appear normal, but the director quickly cuts to a montage of him murdering innocent people to remind us that he is a murderer.

Image result for man bites dog

Conclusion

Man Bites Dog is provocative. But it’s also clever. It plays with us throughout the film, encouraging us to get close to a murderer before brutally showing us images that are undeniably wrong and shocking. There’s also a pretty meta commentary on both the moral obligation of the film-makers and the audience. Are the film-makers and us morally wrong for making/watching this film?

Either way, for more, I’d recommend checking out Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (with a young Woody Harrelson leading). Also check out Behind the Mask for a horror movie equivalent.

 

2

Honeyland – Traditional Lifestyle on the Brink

Honeyland

Honeyland Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

If you love documentaries that stray into the fictional or very real docu-dramas, you’re in for a treat. Honeyland is one step up: it’s a docu-epic. It follows a middle-aged bee keeper in rural North Macedonia living on her own with her frail grandmother. Their survival is delicately in the balance when a large family join them looking for a better life. It’s a tale of modernity vs. tradition, and greed vs. modernity: a real showdown for the ages. Plus it’s shot beautifully.

From: North Macedonia, Europe
Watch: Now Showing in the U.S, Screening Times Elsewhere 
Next: Makala, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Nobody Knows
Read The Full Review
3

In Vanda’s Room

In Vanda’s Room Film Difficulty Ranking: 5

“Our country is the poorest, most pathetic of all”

The Lisbon that you will find here In Vanda’s Room is a Portugal you haven’t seen. It is a Portugal which resembles a third-world country. It will expose you to the city’s poorest residents that are all hidden away in the darkness, away from the eyes of tourists. Watch on for Lisbon’s realist version of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting. Or, for something a little more upbeat, watch Aniki Bobo for your Portuguese film fix.

Why Watch In Vanda’s Room?
  • For an introduction to Pedro Costa and his critically acclaimed depictions of the marginalised people of Portugal
  • Meet some of the poorest people in Lisbon
  • It is currently available here on YouTube
  • Who needs a front door when you have a window?
The Breakdown

The film begins in Vanda’s room, where Vanda and her friend are sitting on a bed smoking heroin. The room is very dark, but you can make out the dirty green walls behind them and the layers of dark blankets covering the bed they sit on. Vanda inhales some smoke and coughs violently until her throat is cleared. She then viciously wipes her mouth on her sleeve. The lack of light, coughing fits, and drug addicts aren’t what you think of when you think of Lisbon. But Costa has a knack for revealing the hidden people of Portugal.

The next scene shows someone washing themself with a bucket of water in a dark derelict house. Bits of furniture and mess are cluttered around the place and there is still no sign of sunlight. Our first shot outside matches the mess inside the buildings as puddles mark the unpaved streets. A BBQ with a few pieces of wood burns to provide some light for the street which daylight does not seem to reach.

In this neighbourhood there is nothing to do. Vanda sells cabbages and another character tends parked cars, but otherwise there is no sign of business. So the character’s we see are usually hidden away in the dark and out of sight. Is this the life they’ve chosen or the life that they have been forced to live? That is a question that Costa looks to us to decide. However, they cannot prevent the bulldozers that are tearing down their neighbourhood. These bulldozers shed light on Lisbon’s poverty stricken residents, just as his film reveals their existence.

Conclusion

In Vanda’s Room is a solemn portrayal of Lisbon’s poorest residents. As a docufiction, this film does not show any bias towards or against the drug addicts who await eviction. Costa’s role is to reveal their existence for us to make our own judgement.

For more Portuguese film, check out Tabu for an alternative depiction of Lisbon (and the old Portuguese colonies in Africa).

4

Perfumed Nightmare (Philippines) – A Revolutionary Comedy

Perfumed Nightmare

Perfumed Nightmare Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

Honestly, I was a bit confused at the start of Perfumed Nightmare as the tone seemed a bit off. The film was made in 1977, but the black and white footage looks even older, so I was surprised to have the fourth wall broken a few times by the main character, Kidlat, after he pulls an increasingly larger toy truck over a bridge. The genre is also deliberately hard to pin down. It gives off the appearance of a stylish, amusing ethnographical film set in rural Philippines to disguise its strong revolutionary undertones. Don’t let anything put you off from watching this movie though as it’s a brilliantly unique and clever contribution to the Third Cinema movement.

From: Philippines, Asia
Watch: JustWatch, IMDb
Next: Black Girl, Breathless, Born in Flames

Perfumed Nightmare – The Breakdown

There are a lot of familiar elements in Perfumed Nightmare as it deliberately borrows from a mixture of well-known revolutionary film-making. The frenetic pace of the movie, with cuts across time and a fuzzy narrative voice that seems to be a half-second behind the images, feels a lot like Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic film, Breathless. The fast paced montages of Filipino and Parisian society, which meshes together a range of stock and new images showing the evolution of society towards modernization, borrows from Dziga Vertov’s influential Man with a Movie Camera. Both of these influences (each monumental to the development of European film) are referenced by the Director, Kidlat Tahimik, to stake a claim for Filipino film within the context of cinema and to also set Filipino film apart by reclaiming the medium’s portrayal of the Philippines.

One of the best things Kidlat Tahimik adds to the revolutionary film movement is humor. It both makes the film more enjoyable whilst also targeting the ‘Third World’s’ portrayal by ‘the West’ to reclaim it for the Third Cinema movement. One example of this is in the inventive use of dubbing, in which all of the film’s white characters, whether in the Philippines or Europe, are dubbed and made into comedic caricatures. One white person in the Philippines is turned into a bumbling, arrogant, imperialist, through the dubbing, whilst Kidlat’s French beneficiary is turned into a money obsessed businessman. Whilst it is fun to laugh at the dubbed characters, which makes the film an easier watch, the dubbing is also used to subvert the portrayal of Filipinos and other ‘Third World’ characters in Western film who are typically voiced and spoken for by white European/American directors. Instead, it’s the white characters that are spoken for in Perfumed Nightmare.

The film’s visual gags also serve a similar function. The shots of Kidlat filling up chewing gum dispensers in some ridiculous locations for his French beneficiary, whilst funny, also serves to make fun of capitalism. If chewing gum dispensers in cemeteries is the peak of Western progress, then capitalism and Western imperialism seems pointless. The humor is a welcome addition to an otherwise serious revolutionary genre. It makes the film easier to watch, but also backs up the central theme of Kidlat’s Charlie-Chaplin-esque journey chasing the American Dream; that life is better in the Philippines. Perfumed Nightmare mocks and rejects the progress of globalization, imperialism, capitalism, and everything the West stands for in favor of a celebration of Filipino life.

What to Watch Next

There’s a few places you can turn to next after watching Perfumed Nightmare. The most obvious place to go would be to watch more revolutionary films from the Third Cinema movement such as Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl or Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga. You could also brush up on your European film history, which Kidlat Tahimik subverts in this film, by watching Breathless or Man with a Movie Camera. Obviously both of these film movements have plenty more examples than the four listed above, so please don’t limit your exploration to these four movies!

5

The Fabulous Ones – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

The Fabulous Ones is a warm home-made story featuring real friends reuniting to relive their memories from 30 years ago. The drama comes from a fictionalized will of one of their old friends, but the personal, real stories provide the substance for this docufiction.

From the tone of the film, it feels like most of this film is a documentary. The characters all get along too closely for it to feel fictionalized. However, the director uses different film types to blur the past and present, and also reality and fiction. Sepia-tinted film makes some shots feel old – as if shot 30 years ago in the character’s past – and these are edited alongside clearer shots to indicate the present. Some scenes also alternate between these two types of film to make it unclear what is fictionalized and true to reality, such as the seance and re-enactment of their ‘dead’ friend. The blurring of reality and fiction and past and present through the type of film also fictionalizes their pre-transition lives. Home footage and photos of the characters pre-transition, look like the scenes of the seance, making their pasts feel less real than the present.

Whilst their pre-transition lives are made to feel like the fictionalized parts of this documentary, The Fabulous Ones doesn’t shy away from sharing the characters’ real experiences as Trans-women. Throughout their reunion, the camera focuses on each character to hear their queer coming of age experience and how their individual families and the society around them reacted. These scenes draws you closer to the characters by sharing their more intimate experiences, and in doing so, holds the film back from going full happy-dream with the fictionalized elements of the film. These moments ground the film in the unfortunate reality that not everyone is able to be who they are without prejudice.

If you’re looking for a quirky docufiction that lightly explores some heavy personal experiences through a fictionalized will left by a ‘dead’ friend, this film is for you.