There was a strand at this year's Glasgow Film Festival called The Edge of the World, which consisted of highlights from the ImagineNATIVE Festival in Canada with a sprinkling of Gaelic short films thrown in. This particular film was accompanied by a short called Glen Tolsta (about an isolated and now abandoned community on Lewis). It was particularly nice because both the directors were in the audience so they spoke a bit about their respective films at the start. As is the way of these things Ishbel Murray spoke in Gaelic first before continuing in English, so when it came to Yves Sioui Desard's turn he spoke, briefly in Innu before continuing in English, which is the first time I've heard that in real life.

( trigger warnings for drug/alcohol abuse, incest, and suicide )

The latest film for this challenge is somewhat familiar terrain for me. However, it was purchased on recommendation from several people I know (who rightly said 'oh you'll love this') and its a film I own (whole other challenge I've been working on) that qualifies for this challenge. Also while I am normally a big fan of cinema that challenges me and makes me think, sometimes I just want action/adventure and explosions. It's a big Chinese historical epic, which has long been a favoured genre of mine. Though most of the other films of this type that I've seen have been more centred on martial arts and the exploits of a couple of particular characters and their skills against a historical backdrop. Red Cliff however, is more about big sweeping battles, with a bit of intrigue, alliances and political manoeuvring on the side.

( spoilers ahoy )

I was trying to get away from using Asian cinema as a safety net but I couldn’t resist a little more Wong Kar Wai. Happy Together (1997) is at least set and filmed in Argentina so it does have a different flavour.

Happy Together is a beautiful and dreamlike piece of filmmaking; coloured with the mixture of darkness and grace that I’ve come to associate with this director’s films. Much like Kowloon in Chungking Express (1994) the city of Buenos Aires is as much a character in the film as the humans. Although if the earlier film is a loving portrayal of home with all its flaws and comforts, then Happy Together is a more raw experience. A remembrance of somewhere that you were both very happy and utterly heartbroken – a city you fell in love with and stayed in, long after the romance has faded away. This is a portrayal neither of the city the tourists see nor the one the natives know. Both the beauty and the grubby ugly side are portrayed as transient. Nothing can be truly transcendental or truly sordid, because this reality is ultimately temporary, both viewers and characters will eventually go home sooner or later. Fitting given that at its heart it’s a film about starting over and the different things that can mean.

There are continued references to the waterfall depicted on the lamp the couple own, a place they visit only to kick start the end of their relationship. Yet, despite the beautiful romanticised shots of both the falls and the lamp that the film portrays, it doesn’t make me want to visit. Instead it is the Lighthouse ‘at the end of the world’ that Chang is so determined to visit before he goes home to Taiwan that calls out to me, with it’s threat of suicide and present of peace.

According to the back of the box of the copy I watched, it was quite controversial when it was released because the director had convinced two of Hong Kong cinema’s biggest male stars to play a gay couple. And we’re not talking a few chaste kisses, but a passionate, messy love affair with an utterly unashamed (though admittedly tastefully shot) sex scene. Yet ultimately this isn’t a ‘gay’ film, it’s a film about two lovers and their messy broken love affair as it falls apart. The rawness and heartbreak are familiar and the fact that both lovers are male is largely of secondary importance. As Yiu-fai says, turns out that lonely people are all the same.

This is a film for anyone who’s ever fallen in love with someone they shouldn’t have or wished they could throw a friend’s sadness off the end of the world.

Film number six is Bamako (2006) by respected Malian/Mauritanian film-maker Abderrahmane Sissako. I bought this film during my first go round at this ‘challenge’. After I saw and enjoyed Finye at the Africa in Motion film festival a couple of years ago I was pleased to discover that there were a fair number of Malian films easily commercially available in the UK and also a decent amount of academic literature in English which is always a good combination when it comes to my own obsessions with particular national cinemas.

( more rambling than actual spoilers )

No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009) is an unexpected mix of fiction, documentary and music video.

It constantly blurs the lines of fiction and reality from the self-referential asides to the use of character names that are the same as those who portray them.

( not really very spoilery thoughts )
And, always important in any film about music, the soundtrack is excellent.

(Mods: not a review, but a resource link.)

NAPT: Native American Public Telecommunications looks to be a good resource for finding Native-produced (Native American or Alaskan Native) documentaries.

From their "About Us" page:

NAPT exists to serve Native producers and Indian country in partnership with public television and radio. NAPT works with Native producers to develop, produce and distribute educational telecommunications programs for all media including public television and public radio. NAPT supports training to increase the number of American Indians and Alaska Natives producing quality public broadcasting programs, which includes advocacy efforts promoting increased control and use of information technologies and the policies to support this control by American Indians and Alaska Natives.

Browsing around the website: upcoming productions, release/broadcast schedules, DVDs, podcasts, film festivals, sorting functions for subject and target age-group...

Ee!

1. Princess Angeline, Upstream Productions, 2008. Producer: Sandra Osawa (Makah).

Kikisoblu, the eldest daughter of Si'ahl (aka Chief Seatle), was known to Seattlites as "Princess Angeline". She continued to live in Seattle after the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855, selling dolls and baskets, and by the time of her death in 1896, had become something of a city mascot and tourist attraction. The way I usually hear it told (by non-Native people), because she loved the city so much, she "chose to stay" in Seattle instead of going to the reservation, and that made her different from other Duwamish, all of whom "left" the city.

...which explains a great deal about why this movie is not so much about Kikisoblu herself, but very much focused on the Duwamish, the Treaty of Point Elliott, and its aftermath. After all, "chose to stay" is what many of the Duwamish did -- which was something of a Hobson's Choice, because no Duwamish reservation was ever established -- and everyone but Kikisoblu "leaving" was less about individual choice, and more about the city focusing its effort on driving them out: starvation, arson, and sundown laws. Which, of course, means that quite a few Duwamish died, quite a few others went underground, and others took refuge among other tribes.

The documentary never stated why Kikisoblu received relatively little of the violence and harassment -- she lived openly in Seattle until her death -- but it's not terribly difficult to fill in the blanks: Seattlites did call her 'Princess', after all.

The documentary rattles through 200 years of history in under an hour, so there's a lot that is merely sketched, but Osawa makes good use of the time. Treatment of WWI or so through the 1990s is light [1], presumably in order to spend more time on the Duwamish fight for federal recognition, and the new longhouse.

In short: important, valuable history, and absolutely recommended to anyone with connections to Seattle or the greater Sound area. Contrary to the title, not so very much about Princess Angeline herself, but now that I've seen the documentary, I rather agree with that choice: you can't talk meaningfully about Princess Angeline without first being able to talk meaningfully about the Duwamish people as a whole, and their ongoing history with Seattle.


[1] I was surprised to see not even a passing mention of Seattle's Urban Indian movement. OTOH, the documentary makes occasional veiled references to tension between the Duwamish and tribes with federal recognition. That might make a discussion of Duwamish perspectives on that movement complicated enough that there's no way you could address it in an hour-long documentary that was already stuffed to the gills.

The GF has finished reading Ahn Do's book The Happiest Refugee, and was thereby reminded of the movie Footy Legends, which she'd seen on an airline flight somewhere. So we went out and bought it today (for less than $15) and watched it this afternoon.

I really enjoyed it. Sure, the plotting is a little weak (just why DOCS wants to take Anne away from Luc was never really convincing), but it's a very fun sports movie (in this case Rugby League). The more I know about the movie the more I'm impressed: Khoa did a project with disadvantaged young people, some of whom worked with him again on Footy Legends. I don't know how this film would work for people who don't know at least a bit about Sydney (it's SUCH a Sydney film). I love that the Yaroonga team is one Vietnamese boy, two Murri, one Lebanese, and three Anglo-esque white boys. I love how Aussie it all is: just so much fun.

And the Grandfather was awesome!

7 Sins Forgiven was one of those strange serendipitous film festival screenings where you head for a screening, realise you’re going to get there too late and that the film you wanted to see isn’t even on at the place you’re headed to, so you have to pick something else at random.

This film won out, as I flicked through the guide on the U-bahn (the guide to Berlinale is helpfully organised by section, cinema then time but is singularly unhelpful if you want to know all the films on around 1pm on Saturday across all cinemas – useful for the organised, less so for the last minute reschedule) by being on at a cinema I was already heading towards and having English subtitles. My main criteria when faced with a dilemma between screenings is ‘am I likely to see this anywhere else, any time soon?’ Films in Hindi don’t turn up at either my local art house cinema (never-mind the multiplex) so I went in completely blind and really close to the front of a promisingly packed screening.

( this film needs so many trigger warnings I don't know where to begin )

Halaw: Ways of the Sea, is a film I know qualifies for this challenge because the bloke behind me in the queue to get in made a sarcastic comment about queue jumpers to a another bloke who apologetically explained he was the director…

It’s hard to describe a film about human trafficking as ‘enjoyable’, but it was well made, intriguing and had compelling characters. The performance of Arnalyn Ismael as young Daying is particularly notable, balancing the useful skill being easily able to steal any scene she is in while being able to fade into the background when the scene requires it. The film is very stylistically shot without seeming to be. By that I mean that the film neither shies away from the harsh realities of the poverty its characters live in nor glamorises it. Rather it finds the beauty in mess, in a way that can arguably only be achieved by viewing somewhere through the eyes of someone who loves a place despite being painfully aware of its problems. This is a film that reminds us that one cannot live on the view, no matter how beautiful that view might be.

( And again, though at least with a film about human trafficking you know what you're getting into. )

Bed of Flowers (2001) is a TV-length documentary about Lancashire theatre company Horse and Bamboo as they put on a show called The Girl Who Cut Flowers. The documentary follows the company as they put together the show, from early concepts and prop making, through various stages of rehearsal to the actual performance.

Like much of what I’ve seen of director Erik Knudsen’s work (not to be confused with the Canadian actor of the same name, this Erik Knudsen is Ghanaian/Danish and lectures at Manchester University), it’s not an entirely conventional documentary, having no voice over, long sections without dialogue and no one ever speaking directly to camera. On a couple of occasions discussion between senior production staff takes place with the participants angled towards the camera as though it were a participant, albeit a silent one, in the creative discussion. Clearly the director had built up a great deal of trust with his subject by this point. There are fascinating sections as the puppeteers work to build their ‘girl’.

Early in the film there is a somewhat odd sequence in one of the workshops with the puppet girl, which is clearly a constructed sequence and the only scene to feature non-digetic music. It feels almost like a fragment of another film, a blurring of fiction and reality, which the viewer then expects to continue throughout the film but it doesn’t. It’s almost as though the filmmakers began making one type of film and then ended up making another one entirely, but kept that scene because they liked it. It feels out of place looking back on it, like it should have been discarded; yet it also feels as though it was left in purposefully, to undermine the viewer’s perception of reality and to feed back into the play itself.

Watching the film is a bit of an odd experience and I can’t help but feel that it’s incomplete without seeing the final theatre production. I suspect in that way the viewers of the play have missed something in not seeing this documentary alongside it. In that way it feels more like a companion to the theatre production rather than an entirely separate entity. Rather than being solely about the production it has become a part of the production. Given that the director has gone on to collaborate more directly with the production company, producing the audiovisual elements of another production it is possible to infer that this was, if not the intended outcome, certainly one they were aware of at the time.

This is fly on the wall filmmaking but not as we know it. Whether this is the genre at its purest and most distilled or a glimpse at the next level of its evolution is up to the viewer to decide.

The film is available to watch for free (with adverts, or without for £1.99) at Jaman