East End Review

Tag: film

  • Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest: this year’s programme announced

    Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest: this year’s programme announced

    Check It, a documentary about the a queer gang in Washington D.C screens at Fringe!
    Check It, a documentary about a queer street gang in Washington D.C. screens at Fringe! in November

    The travails of the world’s only documented gay street gang, the daily life of a ‘third gender’ family in India and some sexy and shocking short films are set to hit East London’s screens at the Fringe! Film and Arts Fest next month.

    The annual queer arts festival was launched in 2011 and has become a mainstay of East London’s cultural calendar.

    Cinemas, art galleries, pop-up venues and basement clubs are to host a raft of film screenings during November alongside a programme of experimental art, workshops, interactive walks and parties.

    The grand opening of this year’s programme is on 15 November at the Rio with Viva, the story of a hairdresser in Havana who works at a drag cabaret club to make ends meet but has dreams of stardom.

    Check It, at the Institute of Light, is a documentary about the Washington D.C street gang of the same name (apparently the only documented queer gang in the world) and their struggles to claw their way out of gang life through the unlikely avenue of fashion.

    Shorts supply: Natural Instincts is a series of short films designed to shock and arouse in equal measure
    Shorts supply: Natural Instincts is a series of short films designed to shock and arouse in equal measure

    Other film highlights include Guru: A Hijra Family, a moving portrait of the daily life of a family of transgender women in India known as hijras, commonly referred to as ‘the third gender’.

    A series of shorts tackling the theme of being young and in love and will, according to the programme “resonate like the first time”. Whilst another, Natural Instincts, veers towards the explicit, featuring depictions of spanking and light bondage.

    Away from the films, spoken word night Queer’Say will see broadcaster and comedian Rose Wilby host performances by three acclaimed LGBT poets and the drag performer and dominatrix Holestar will be hosting a BDSM workshop and fetish party.

    Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest
    15–29 November
    various East London venues

    For more information and the full programme, see here.

    Still from Viva, which opens the festival at the Rio Cinema
    Still from Viva, which opens the festival at the Rio Cinema next month
  • The Hard Stop, an interview with filmmaker George Amponsah: Language of the unheard

    The Hard Stop, an interview with filmmaker George Amponsah: Language of the unheard

    Protesters in Tottenham voicing their anger at the police shooting of Mark Duggan.
    Protesters in Tottenham voicing their anger at the police shooting of Mark Duggan.

    Five years after the death of Mark Duggan and the subsequent riots, many Londoners from black and minority ethnic communities still struggle to trust the police. The 2013 inquest into Duggan’s death at the hands of police found the shooting to be a ‘lawful killing’, despite many witnesses testifying Duggan had not been armed. A gun was found at the scene, but it bore none of Duggan’s prints, blood or DNA. An expert witness went as far as to testify it was “very difficult” to imagine the deceased throwing the gun to the spot where it was found, some 20 feet away, after he had been shot twice. Marcus Knox-Hooke and Kurtis Henville, two childhood friends of Duggan, were determined to find justice for him and the resulting documentary, The Hard Stop, explodes historical tensions between law enforcement and London’s black community. The film’s director George Amponsah reveals what East London said about the film, what divides Londoners, and how to protest.

    How have Londoners responded to the film?

    We screened it at the East End Film Festival in June and afterwards had a panel with two police officers. Emotions were high: feelings of sadness, feelings of anger and a sense of injustice. There were a lot of questions asking those officers how they felt the police might change some of the patterns of behaviour reflected in the film – the main pattern being a history of not being accountable when things go wrong.

    Is there a clear dividing line between people open to Duggan’s story and the people who are not?

    I don’t know. To be honest, I’m not trying to be evasive in saying this but I’m a filmmaker. What I know is films and trying to tell a story. Part of the motivation for making The Hard Stop was that I wanted to make a film that was about an important subject and about my home. I was born in London. I’m British. In many senses I’d be satisfied with the film as long as it is something that provokes debate and discussion. Because what’s important to me in some ways is that Martin Luther King quote that appears at the beginning of The Hard Stop: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s just important for a debate and discussion to be had rather than for a significant amount of people to think their voice and opinion is not being heard, and is being discounted – so much so that they find themselves taking to the streets and getting involved in the kind of disturbance that we saw in Britain in 2011.

    What advice would you give to young Londoners who want to carry on the conversation started with this film?

    Try and get involved in things that are constructive and creative. Try to find a way of protesting where you’re getting your voice heard, where it can’t be discounted, and certainly in a way where you know you’re not going to be imprisoned or find yourself on the wrong side of the law.

    thehardstopfilm.com

  • Stutterer: film review – universal themes in modern East London

    Stutterer (2) 620
    Reclusive: Matthew Needham is Greenwood in Stutterer

    East London may with some justification be able to call itself a world leader when it comes to making short films these days.

    That is because East London films have triumphed for two years running at the Oscars in the category of Best Live Action Short Film, arguably the most prestigious award a short film can receive.

    This year 12-minute short Stutterer emerged victorious in the category, emulating the success of James Lucas’s The Phone Call the previous year.

    Directed by Benjamin Cleary, the film is about a reclusive typographer with a severe speech impediment whose inability to communicate effectively in everyday situations severely hampers his self-esteem.

    Stutterer 620

    Greenwood, played by Ben Whishaw-lookalike Matthew Needham, is a young twenty-something East Londoner who can’t even phone his broadband provider without them assuming it’s a nuisance call and hanging up.

    When someone asks him for directions, he feigns deafness by responding in sign language to avoid a potentially embarrassing situation.

    Yet the voice inside his head is clear, articulate and witty. He makes up poetry, his bedroom is full of books.

    The place where Greenwood can most be himself is on the internet, where he has been chatting with a girl for six months over Facebook. But when she decides to visit London and wants to meet up IRL, Greenwood is crippled by fear.

    Stutterer (3) 620

    With funky patterned shirts buttoned all the way to the top, Greenwood looks every inch the modern East Londoner as he scouts Broadway Market, rehearsing what he’s going to say, leading to the final scene outside the Star By Hackney Downs pub, and a clever and unexpected plot twist.

    Only the viewer is privy to Greenwood’s inner thoughts and wry observations, which we hear in a voiceover, often while Needham’s face, the picture of self-pity, gazes back at us.

    But our sympathy is derived less from Greenwood’s condition than what it comes to represent: the struggle to bridge the gap between the ‘real’ person inside and the one the world sees – a universal theme no less, in this subtle and tender film.

  • Slave’s Lament – an art film with “raw immediacy” from Mile End auteur

    Slave’s Lament – an art film with “raw immediacy” from Mile End auteur

    Slave's Lament runs until 26 June.
    Slave’s Lament runs until 26 June

    There’s something ghostly about the intimacy of the art film Slave’s Lament and the accompanying series of Indian Inks by Graham Fagen, a Glaswegian artist represented by Mile End’s Matt’s Gallery.

    Notions of cultural redemption, closeness and personal detail take centre stage as Fagen looks at Scotland’s links to the slave trade and colonialism, particularly Jamaica.

    The four channel film is a performance of the song ‘Slave’s Lament’, written in 1792 by Robert Burns.

    The film matches the words of the poet to reggae music and is a collaboration with singer Ghetto Priest, accompanied by classical musicians.

    The song of tear-making poignancy and other worldly sorrow is written in the voice of a Senegalese person transported to a Virginian plantation.

    Robert Burns, though known for his abolitionist tendencies, was close to becoming a slave overseer on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 1780s.

    His finances in a mess and his writing going nowhere, the desperate poet saw a chance to get rich quick and put down a nine guineas deposit to secure his passage.

    But the success of publishing a book of his poetry to raise money for the trip caused his life to veer forever in a different direction.

    Fagen’s filmed version of the song is haunting, as different tones of the past and modes of action resonate to create the sense of a still lingering presence of a recently lived past.

    The video focuses on the singer’s teeth, a striking motif in Fagen’s recent work. There’s a vulnerability to teeth, as the only exposed bones in the human body and our principal source of social exchange.

    Fagen’s interest in the depiction of teeth was sparked by casts of George Washington’s mouth, and the discovery that his dentist had taken a philosophy course on the phenomenology of dentistry.

    One of Fagen's Indian Inks
    One of Fagen’s Indian Inks

    Possessing a raw immediacy, the Indian Inks look like the Mexican Day of the Dead masks, or Venetian Carnival Masques. Each painting is punctuated by an identical starting point of the artist own teeth. These sensory portraits are created by Fagen closing his eyes, feeling his teeth and blindly rendering them.

    From there he continues to paint blindly about how he feels, whether it is first thing on a glum Monday morning or the fizzing energy of going out on a Friday night.

    The Mighty Scheme: Graham Fagen
    Until 26 June
    CGP London and Matt’s Gallery
    The Gallery by the Pool
    SE16 2UA

  • Feline romantic – Homerton filmmaker releases debut feature Dead Cat

    Feline romantic – Homerton filmmaker releases debut feature Dead Cat

    Michael (Sebastian Armesto) and Kristen (Sophia Dawnay) share a moment in Dead Cat
    Michael (Sebastian Armesto) and Kristen (Sophia Dawnay) share a moment in Dead Cat

    There was a time when brash romantic comedies ruled the cinema screens. But now, with the likes of Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary more than a decade old, it is a genre in decline.

    But Sam Bern is trying to restore the rom-com to its former heights.

    The Homerton-based filmmaker has just released his debut feature Dead Cat, about two childhood sweethearts who chance upon each other at the start of their thirties.

    “Romcoms are important films and I think are really underrated,” says 34-year-old Bern, who lives in Homerton.

    “At their heart they’re about two people who at the moment aren’t happy or aren’t functioning and it’s finding a way for them to be complete or happy again.”

    Dead Cat is the story of Michael and Kristen, who have taken very different paths in life since they last knew each other.

    “She’s sort of gone off and done everything and he’s sort of gone off and done nothing,” explains Bern.

    “She’s got married, had a career and a kid and is going through a divorce, and he’s tried to become a photographer but it hasn’t quite been working.

    “They run into each other at speed dating night so it’s like he sits down at a table and realises the person opposite him is someone he was very close to when he was a teenager, and they sort of come back into each others lives.”

    With only a bunch of dysfunctional friends as allies, Michael and Kristen seek to discover whether this second bite of the romantic cherry is anything more than mere nostalgia.

    The dead cat of the title is originally Michael’s hapless excuse for following Kristen around.

    Much of the film is shot around Shoreditch, where Bern and the production team used to work making corporate films and music videos until the financial crisis hit.

    “We were losing a lot of work so, as a group of filmmakers who had collaborated a lot before, we decided to make a feature film with people that we knew.”

    Since starting work on the film in 2009, some of the cast have already made names for themselves: Sebastian Armesto was the lead in Star Wars 7 and Tom Mison has made a name for himself in the Fox series Sleepy Hollow.

    “We all trained together at drama school and that’s how we knew each other,” Bern says.

    Romantic comedies at their best are life-affirming, and at their worst can feel formulaic and cliché-ridden. The idea of there being a person out there who is ‘the one’ is a tired trope, Bern insists.

    “It’s not that they have to be together it’s that they would be good together,” he says, explaining that each of the main characters provides the spark missing in the life of the other.

    “He needs more real world and she needs more escapism and they sort of begin to find it in each other.”

    “It’s like a mini resurrection you get to see these people get a second chance and find something in themselves that maybe they didn’t realise was there before.”

    deadcatfilm.com

  • Kinoteka Film Festival set to showcase best of Polish film history

    Kinoteka Film Festival set to showcase best of Polish film history

    Letting the side down: Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose films feature at this month's Kinoteka Polish Film Festival
    Letting the side down: Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, whose films feature at this month’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival

    The Kinoteka Film Festival gets underway this month, with East London venues set to screen work by some of Poland’s most renowned filmmakers.

    A retrospective of the films of Jerzy Skolimowski will be held at the Barbican.

    Skolimowski is a maverick filmmaker who has worked as a director, writer and actor for over 50 years, and is regarded as one of Polish cinema’s most iconic figures.

    For the opening gala on 7 April, Skolimowski will be there in person to introduce his new film 11 Minutes, which focuses on 11 minutes in the lives of a variety of characters whose paths cross as they race towards an unexpected finale.

    The film, described as an “inventive metaphor for our modern hectic lives driven by blind chance”, will be followed by an onstage question and answer session with the director.

    Over the month the Barbican will be showing more films from Skolimowski’s extensive back catalogue, including rarely screened titles such as 1960s psychological drama Barrier (with an introduction by Skolimowski), Deep End, a comedy-drama about obsession, and the 1982 film Moonlighting starring Jeremy Irons, which was awarded Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.

    The Shoreditch-based Close-Up Cinema will be hosting festival films too, as part of their Masters of Polish Cinema season. These include a screening of Skolimowski’s loose trilogy featuring his on-screen alter ego Andrzej Leszczyc: the films Identification Marks: None, Walkover and Hands Up!

    The boutique cinema is also planning to show three early psychological thrillers by Roman Polanski: his Skolimowski-scripted debut Knife in the Water; the controversial, mind-bending exploration of psychosis, Repulsion; and the paranoiac ménage-à-trois Cul-de-sac.

    Then later in the month the cinema will show Pawel Pawlikowski’s debut feature, Ida, the Oscar-winning film that delves through 20th century Polish history, scripted by East London resident Rebecca Lenkiewicz.

    closeupfilmcentre.com
    barbican.org.uk

  • Oscar win for Hackney director Asif Kapadia

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    Winner: director Asif Kapadia
    Oscar winner: director Asif Kapadia

    Hackney director Asif Kapadia triumphed last night at the Oscars, winning Best Documentary Feature for his film about the late singer Amy Winehouse.

    Amy, which is the highest grossing British documentary of all time, beat off competition from Cartel Land, The Look of Silence, What Happened Miss Simone and Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom.

    The film looks at the life of the troubled jazz singer, who died in 2011 aged 27, using interviews with friends and family as well as archival footage.

    In his acceptance speech at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, Kapadia, 44, who grew up in Hackney, said: “This film’s all about Amy showing who she really was – funny, intelligent, witty. We just wanted to make a film to show what she really was.”

    The Oscar win makes it a clean sweep of major award ceremonies for the film, which was named Best Documentary Award at the BAFTAs and Best Music Film at the Grammys.

    The director responded on Twitter to this latest victory with one word – “Wow.”

    Speaking to the East End Review in January, Kapadia said that his aim for the film was to show people “the real girl, the real Amy”.

    “At least now people have more compassion and love for her now than maybe before. I think she became a bit of a tabloid persona, tabloid character, when actually she’s high art, she’s a real natural phenomenon and someone for London to be really proud of,” he said.

    Kapadia has become the UK’s most successful documentary maker of recent times, with Amy surpassing Kapadia’s 2010 docuemntary Senna as the highest grossing British documentary of all time.

    Talking about his upbringing in Hackney, Kapadia said it had given him “strength to survive”.

    “I’m a Hackney boy born and bred,” he said. “I was born in Mother’s Hopsital which is no longer there, I went to Tyssen Primary school and I went to Homerton House secondary school.

    “We lived in Stokey and we lived in Stamford Hill and although I don’t live in Hackney right now you can’t take Hackney out of the man. It definitely gave me the strength to survive.”

    Last month Kapadia revealed that he is working on a new documentary about the Argentine football legend Maradona.

  • London Short Film Festival: what’s on out East

    Double Anamaria
    Seeing double: Anamaria Marinca in Bootstrapped, a short film by Tony Grisoni playing at the ICA on 10 January as part of the London Short Film Festival

    Films about peer pressure, relationships gone wrong and cats are to feature at the London Short Film Festival, returning this month for its 13th edition.

    Hackney Picturehouse, the Ace Hotel Shoreditch and the Round Chapel in Lower Clapton are host venues for the festival, which aims to offer a snapshot of contemporary Britain in the most confrontational of terms.

    Fucked Up Love (Hackney Picturehouse, 9 January) is a selection of shorts focusing on extra-marital affairs, sex games, prostitution and misread moments, from a story of a couple trying to take a picture they both agree on, told through the lens of a photo booth, to a short in which an act of animal cruelty creates a schism in a couple’s relationship.

    There’s a focus on groups of people, with programmes about motherhood, lonely men and peer pressure amongst urban youth. And with the refugee crisis still very much in the spotlight, a programme of shorts entitled Movement: Refugee and Migrant examines perceptions of immigration and the grim realities many immigrants face.

    One programme likely to pull in crowds has a feline focus. Cats&Cats&Cats is a celebration of the best in classic and contemporary cat cinema, to be held at the Round Chapel on 14 January. A live score by psychedelic three-piece Stealing Sheep will accompany some classic mog-centred shorts such as Private Life of a Cat (US, 1949), Cat’s Cradle (US, 1959), Jayne Parker’s The Cat and the Woman: a Cautionary Tale (UK, 1982), as well as three new cat films specially commissioned for the festival.

    Films from around the world make up an unprecedented number of submissions – nearly 2,000 in total – with Bootstrapped, the latest short by award-winning screenwriter Tony Grisoni, the pick among the many offerings by local filmmakers.

    London Short Film Festival
    8–17 January 2016
    http://shortfilms.org.uk

  • This is East London: short film Jacked has true grit

    Charley Palmer Rothwell and Thomas Turgoose in Jacked
    Charley Palmer Rothwell and Thomas Turgoose in Jacked

    Jacked is a short by Dutch director Rene Pannevis which fits nicely into what one might call the grit-porn pantheon (his oeuvre also contains a film called Junkie XL and a documentary short of DJ Tiesto of all things).

    It follows young car thieves Russell and Waylen, played by Charley Palmer Rothwell (Legend) and Thomas Turgoose (This is England) respectively, who find a stack of tapes made by a dying man addressed to his unborn daughter. Hilarity ensues.

    It’s an interesting, thoughtful piece – if a little contrived – giving one enough to feel something of a stake in the lives of the two young protagonists, whilst capitalising on the brevity of the short form to retain a level of ambiguity. This is creditable considering the artistic treatment of such topics can all too easily err towards the proselytising, critical or, worst of all, glamourising.

    The narrow, winding grey streets (it’s in colour, but barely) form a claustrophobic labyrinth in which our two protagonists work, with a short focus camera serving to isolate them from their background. It’s a well-worn technique, but in a story dealing with isolated yoof, the obvious reference is La Haine.

    On speaking to Rothwell, he confirms Kassovitz’s 1995 work was in their minds whilst filming. He is more uncertain, however, about whether we can fairly call Jacked a film about East London, despite there being several clear signs that this is where the ‘action’ takes place.

    “I think the director wanted to be ambiguous. I’m not too sure that the location needs to be relevant, it could be anywhere and it would still be as gritty,” he explains. It is indeed based, we are told, on the director’s own experiences in the Netherlands.

    Why is it that we are so fascinated in an almost voyeuristic way by underclass life in film of late? “Because it’s real,” Rothwell says. “I’d not use the word underclass. Things like this aren’t as uncommon as people think. Very few people could relate to something like Riot Club. If it’s about things that are real, more people will watch. If you go north of London, it is very gritty, people are poor.”

    Certainly, the question of the role and success of cinema (and of the arts in general) in addressing or mirroring an uneven society is an interesting one. It is unfair, perhaps, to narrow our discussion of this short to this question though, as it also touches on loss, friendship and loneliness, and can boast a minor triumph in the natural rapport between its two leads.

    facebook.com/jackedthefilm

  • London Sex Worker Film Festival seeks to challenge ‘whorephobic’ society

    Soy Negra
    Scene from Columbian documentary Soy Negra, Soy Marica, Soy Puta

    An on-the-job video of a peep show girl and a documentary about a transgender sex worker who takes in an abandoned young girl are among the films to be screened at the London Sex Worker Film Festival this Sunday.

    The festival, to be held at the Rio Cinema, seeks to challenge an “intensely whorephobic society” with a programme of films made mainly by current or erstwhile sex workers.

    Shorts and longer features address topics such as migration, border control, race, gender and violence.

    Highlights include the feature Red Umbrella Diaries, a 90-minute documentary telling the individual stories of seven New Yorkers who work in different sectors of of the sex trade and the Columbian documentary Soy Negra, Soy Marica, Soy Puta (I’m black, I’m gay, I’m a sex worker) that follows a sex worker and lawyer who campaigns for and represents trans people and sex workers in Colombia.

    Shorter works include the self-shot Diary of a Peep Show Girl, the award-winning Roxanne, in which a transgender sex worker’s life is thrown into question after she starts looking after an abandoned girl, and Becky’s Journey, about a Nigerian woman who attempts to go to Europe to sell sex in the hope of changing her life for the better.

    Now in its third year, the festival will be looking to mark the 30-year anniversary of the sex worker occupation in Lyon, when sex workers occupied a church for eight days to draw attention to their lack of rights in French society.

    London Sex Worker Film Festival is at Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, E8 2PB on Sunday 8 November.

    https://londonsexworkerfilmfest.wordpress.com/