revolution - Page 3 of 3

Finding Sally (Ethiopia) – Pan African Film Festival 2021

Finding Sally is the story of a 23-year-old woman from an upper-class family who became a communist rebel with the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party. Idealistic and in love, Sally got caught up in her country’s revolutionary fervor and landed on the military government’s most wanted list. She went underground and her family never saw her again. Four decades after Sally’s disappearance, Tamara Dawit pieces together her mysterious life in Finding Sally. She revisits the Ethiopian revolution and the terrible massacre that followed, which resulted in nearly every Ethiopian family losing a loved one. Her quest leads her to question notions of belonging, personal convictions and political ideals at a time when Ethiopia is going through important political changes once again.

Tamara’s family story in Finding Sally is a good one, but doesn’t always come across like it. It could have taken a few more artistic liberties to bring out the story a bit more. One example that dampens the mystery is in a scene where Tamara is interviewing her Aunt in Ethiopia. She asks her why she never knew about the existence of her missing Aunt Sally, and her Aunt answers: “I don’t know, she was in all of the family albums.” Her answer immediately shuts down the mystery the director was creating about her missing Aunt.

It’s also clear that they’re not the typical Ethiopian family. The director’s grandfather was a foreign diplomat that took them round the world with them, so they had certain levels of privilege other Ethiopians wouldn’t. But his importance is never hyped up that much, making their family appear pretty normal versus how they probably were. Their uniqueness could have been emphasized more.

Aunt Sally’s role in the communist movement also feels a little unclear. It doesn’t come across that she was an integral part of the movement as her links to the party appear fairly tenuous in Finding Sally. Perhaps there was just not enough information to tell her story in so much detail. It also feels as if the director is caught between telling multiple stories. She uses the narrative of her missing Aunt as a gateway into contemporary Ethiopian history, but also depicts the story of her family history as she reconnects with her family in Ethiopia. In moments, the stories tie together, but the lack of detail in Sally’s story, never fully brings her to life, leaving her role in the revolution and beyond a bit flat.

If you’re looking for a personal story of a family of a diplomat working in a changing country told through personal one on one interviews and photographs, Finding Sally is worth a watch. However, this might not be what you’re after if you’re looking for a more involved documentary on Ethiopian history or a globe spanning mystery.

Check our Pan African Film Festival 2021 page for more reviews coming out of the 29th edition of the festival.

RRR – The Indian Blockbuster to Watch on the Big Screen in 2022

For the first time in my life, I watched an Indian Blockbuster in a cinema. Whilst it wasn’t the full experience I had imagined, the cinema is the only place you should see RRR‘s bombastic stunts and melodramatic bromance.

The Experience

In hindsight, choosing to watch RRR as a Sunday matinee wasn’t the best choice. The Cinemark 18 + XD in Los Angeles was almost as empty as the mall it sits within, which is itself a forgotten mall, across the 405 from the much more popular Fox Hills Westfield Mall. There’s no real need for this mall or the Cinemark itself, as the theater chain has since built a more modern location in Playa Vista just 2 miles away. However, the distinguishing factor of this Cinemark location is that it has become the only theater on the West Side of Los Angeles (Cinemark or otherwise) that consistently screens new Indian releases each week. So if you want to watch Indian films in the city on the big screen and don’t reside in the Valleys or the O.C., this is your best option.

The theater was screening RRR in each of the languages it had dialogue specially written for (Telugu, Hindi, and Tamil), but as Telugu was the original production, we went for that screening. I’m not sure how widely each of the languages are spoken in Los Angeles, so not sure if the Tamil or Hindi screenings might have been more busy, but the Telugu Sunday matinee screening was almost empty. There were just a few families with toddlers and infants for company. As a result, we never heard an audience response to the movie, apart from applause at the end. The only sounds coming from the audience that we could hear were from the kids’ tablets that their parents had given them after they announced they wanted to go home around 30 minutes before the intermission (this film is not for everyone). However, this was never much of a problem for us, because, to the probable detriment to our ears, this film was blasted through the speakers at a noticeably higher decibel level than your typical Hollywood screening. The loud but empty cinema made it feel like we’d arrived early to a music concert. With a crowd, this would have been special.

The FIlm

Despite the small crowd, the film itself was completely at home on the big screen. It’s an action film that the Superhero addicted Hollywood studios have become afraid to make: a completely original story with a big budget. But to be fair to Hollywood, this film wasn’t made by just anyone. It was made by S.S. Rajamouli, one of the biggest name directors in India. He’s the guy that made the #2 and #8 highest grossing Indian films in Baahubali 1 and 2.

Costing $72M, RRR is the second most expensive Indian film ever made (behind S. Shankar’s 2.0). The high budget is evident in the incredible action scenes and CGI – which, whilst still slightly behind the quality of the Hollywood CGI, already looks much better than the Baahubali films. If this is what $72M makes, imagine what the budget of the $356M Avengers Endgame could produce. That is if you can imagine anything being more action-packed and epic than RRR.

There’s so many big moments in this film. It starts with three hard-hitting chapters which introduce ‘The Story,’ ‘The Fire,’ and ‘The Water.’ The Story is the premise – a child from rural India gets ‘bought’ by the English colonial governor to the heart-break of their mother and village. The Fire is the introduction to our villain – a loyal and determined member of the colonial police that single handedly takes on an entire mob of around 1,000 people in one of the film’s best action scenes. The Water introduces us to the kidnapped girls hope at rescue – a man from the forest that protects those that inhabit it. He demonstrates his action chops by taking down a tiger. Even though each of these scenes hits hard and gives you an adrenaline shot to kick start this 3 hour action bromance, neither are the film’s best action scenes. There are just too many action scenes to highlight, which we’ll leave for you to experience.

The only moments that took me out of the zone were the intermission and the ‘Naatu Naatu’ dance scene which both doesn’t fit the period or the serious action/cheesy tone that the film had already established. Plus the nod to Black culture by tokenizing a Black drummer (the only Black character in the film) just feels awkward. But luckily the film quickly resumes the melodrama and action pretty soon after both scenes to build the adrenaline and emotional connection back up. This is the ultimate ‘Theme Park‘ movie that needs to be seen on the big screen.

The Future

Before the pandemic, there was a John Woo double feature at The Aero in Santa Monica. It featured The Killer and Hardboiled, two stylish (and often cheesy) classics of the action-film genre. They’re both incredibly fun films to watch, and it was even more fun to watch them with a full audience that responded to the film’s iconic moment with cheers and shouts of appreciation. I believe S.S. Rajamouli deserves the same love that The Aero afforded John Woo. It may sound strange saying this as S.S. Rajamouli is a hugely popular director around the world that has drawn a relatively massive box-office total. But, whilst his films are massive in India, they haven’t found much of a cross-over audience amongst film fans in the U.S. Like John Woo, his films are iconic, melodramatic, action films that are best experienced with friends or a crowd. They should be seen by all action and superhero film fans, but I’ll be happy if they manage to form a cult corner like John Woo managed to do, and screen to sell-out shows in Art-House cinemas in the not too distant future.

Tug of War (Tanzania) – Pan African Film Festival 2022

In colonial Zanzibar, a young revolutionary and runaway wife from different parts of the city meet. As their romance grows, so does their revolutionary fervor in this adaptation of Shafi Adam Shafi’s novel.

It’s rare that you see Tanzanian films on the international film festival circuit, especially those that are directed by Tanzanians. The industry in the East African country is dominated by Swahiliwood’s low budget, rapidly made ‘Bongo films,’ which, like the majority of African cinema industries are largely ignored by Western film festivals. So it’s nice to see a Tanzanian representative on the international film festival circuit in Tug of War, even if it isn’t your typical Tanzanian film. Unlike ‘Bongo films,’ Tug of War‘s production quality matches the criteria for Western film festivals, with beautiful cinematography inspired by Wong Kar Wai, good production design, and great acting. It perfectly fits the Western expectations of ‘good’ international cinema.

The warmly patient pace of Tug of War defines the films tone, characters, and relationships. It’s created through the slow motion shots and orange tinted film that the director, Amil Shivji, uses throughout the film, just as Wong Kar Wai did in In the Mood for Love. The slow motion highlights some of the defining moments in the character’s relationships. This is clearest in the shot of Denge and Yasmin’s first glance of each other. Stretching out this fleeting glance captures the longing in that brief look, symbolically starting the embers that starts their romance. These slow motion moments also signify their enlightenment. One shot shows Yasmin pushing against the flow of a moving crowd. At regular speed, the shot might be forgettable, but in slow motion it becomes symbolic of her going against the grain of her family’s expectations and grabbing her own independence. Lastly the slow motion also emphasizes the link between their budding romance and new-found independence with the anti-colonial revolution that stands against both. This is captured in the slow motion scene of red pamphlets falling between them like wedding confetti (as in the image above).

For a beautifully shot, anti-colonial Tanzanian film inspired by Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, watch Tug of War. It features sumptuously warm cinematography, a slow burning romance, and a fight for independence. This interracial, extra-marital love is anti-colonial. Viva la revolución.

Check back to our Pan African Film Festival 2022 page for more reviews coming out of the 30th edition of the festival.

Perfumed Nightmare (Philippines) – A Revolutionary Comedy

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!

The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (Oman) – Feminist Revolution

The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

The Hour of Liberation has Arrived is the only first-hand account of the democratic, feminist Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf. Enabled by recent advances in film technology, the film gave voices to the voiceless to create one of the most direct revolutionary documentaries from the Arab world and beyond.

From: Oman, Asia
Watch: YouTube
Next: Battle of Algiers, Flame, Mortu Nega

Why Watch The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived?

For one of the best examples of a revolutionary documentary film, helped by recent technological advances to film equipment
It broke boundaries – it was the first film directed by an Arab woman that was screened at Cannes (in 1974)
It’s the only first-hand account of the democratic, feminist guerrilla movement against the British backed Sultanate of Oman

The Breakdown

The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived offers the only glimpse of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, a secular, democratic, feminist revolutionary movement that managed to liberate one third of the Sultanate of Oman. In the region they liberated, the Front launched an extensive program of social reforms, captured in this revolutionary documentary, the most radical being affirmative action for women.

Filmed in 1971, The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived was made possible due to advances in film technology. It brought voices to the voiceless through synch sound (sound recorded at the time of filming). Whilst synch sound had been around since the birth of sound movies, it had only recently become more portable with new hand-held filming equipment that could record sound and video by itself, without a separate sound recorder. Without this advance in technology, this film wouldn’t have been made, as the 800 kilometers that Heiny Srour and her Team had to walk to reach the Front (under the bombing of the British Royal Air Force) would have been dauntingly arduous. The advance in synch sound technology allowed filmmakers, particularly documentary filmmakers, to capture otherwise inaccessible locations. The less intrusive equipment also allowed filmmakers to capture more authentic representations of reality – a truckload of equipment, lighting, and larger crews make people act different to one person filming with a small camera.

The film pieces together stock and live footage, photography, maps, and voice-over narration to create both a first-hand account of the movement, as well as a revolutionary manifesto. The photography and live footage provide the first-hand account of the revolutionaries and their day to day activities, whilst the stock footage, maps, and voice-over narration provide the anti-imperialist impetus that drives them. Its use of a range of media to tell its message looks raw, like a modern, student-made essay film, but this gives the documentary an authenticity that studio-made movies couldn’t replicate. Free from the ties to corporations/companies, governments and heavy, expensive film equipment, Srour could make whatever film she wanted. This is revolutionary cinema at its most direct.

What to Watch Next

You don’t have to turn far to watch more revolutionary cinema. For the big budget films, turn to the brilliant Cuban films sponsored by the USSR such as I Am Cuba and Lucia or Pontecorvo’s docu-drama of the Algerian fight for independence in Battle of Algiers. You can also find gold in lower budget third cinema films such as Flame, Mortu Nega, and Sambizanga.

To see how further technological advances have enabled filmmakers to get even closer to the revolution, check out some films enabled by the digital revolution, such as The Square, Winter on Fire, and The Edge of Democracy.