London Film Festival

Charlie's Country - David Gulpilil

London Film Festival is a fantastic research tool.  Yes, it has Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley on the red carpet.  It also has hundreds of films from all across the world, almost all of them in UK premieres, many of them never to be seen here again.  When it comes to keeping your pulse on the cultural currents flowing around the world - it's a good place to be.

A film I'd been eager to see for some time was Charlie's Country - the third in a series of films made by Rolf de Heer with the great indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil.  The first two, The Tracker and Ten Canoes, were quite extraordinary, breaking new ground in terms of indigenous film-making, with a full and genuine engagement between the film-maker and the indigenous culture, following the protocols and letting the culture speak in its own terms and its own rhythms.  In Charlie's Country, the process is brought powerfully into the present day, with Gulpilil providing not only a mesmerising central performance, but also the truthful underpinning of the story, much of which is painfully close to autobiographical.  In the first Origins Festival, back in 2009, we screened a British-made film about Aboriginal Australians, called This is Our Country Too.  Gulpilil appeared in the film, not as an actor but as a subject of documentary - clearly adrift from stability, poverty-stricken, awash with alcohol.  I have to confess that I didn't believe it - I did not want to believe it.  Seeing Charlie's Country, and hearing some of Rolf de Heer's very moving talk after the screening, confirms what was in Ishmahil Blagrove, Jr's film: but it also moves beyond it, as Charlie's Country gives this great actor a way back to himself, understanding himself and his cultural context through the process of performance, making sense of the conflicts in which he lives through the media of cultural expression.  It is a fantastic achievement, fully worthy of his Best Actor award at Cannes.  

At the end of the film, there is a sense of the way in which culture can offer the route to self-reclamation for indigenous communities, as the young of Charlie's tribe learn the traditional dances and songs.  I have long believed this to be the salvation of the dispossessed - an idea first clearly articulated for me by Yves Sioui Durand in that same landmark first festival, when he explained his ideas around the Theatre of Healing - a process that reconnects young indigenous people to their ancestors and their inherited cultural practice.  I also believe that these healing processes underway in indigenous communities are an example to the rest of the world - spaces where identity and community are reclaimed, and a sense of spiritual worth restored.  

There's a terrific blog by my friend Ian Henderson, which explores in more detail the "art activism" of indigenous Australia as seen in this film.  

The Dead Lands

The complexity and power of Charlie's Country was all the more marked by the contrast with the other indigenous film I saw - a film called The Dead Lands, which is actually in the Maori language.  Given that the only other feature ever to be made in Te Reo Maori is a rather conventional version of The Merchant of Venice, this was both a terrific opportunity and a great responsibility for the film-makers.  It turned out, listening to their Q&A, that the script had in fact been written in English, and was translated into Maori for performance.  So the subtitle "translation" was in fact the original script - a fact which is important given the very different epistemologies of Maori and western cultures.  What masqueraded as "authentic" was in fact a western construction of the Maori world - and the use of conventional Hollywood structures and tropes underlined this.  The film, ostensibly set in pre-contact Aotearoa, pandered to all the worst assumptions of the imperialist mind about the noble savagery of indigenous people.  There were conversations with a dead grandmother surrounded by green fairy lights, and long sequences of Jackie Chan-style violence, without the compensating humour.  I wouldn't be worried about this, were it not that the film's status in terms of language means that it will give off signals to the world, and they are not the signals that indigenous cultures want to be relaying.  It's not the first example of this exoticisation and regression to colonial structures that I've seen recently - the Canadian film about Inuit and Innu, Maina, was possibly even worse.  So I'm thinking that we need to have some active discussion of this in the next festival...  watch this space.  

Dearest

The other film I much admired was by Chinese director Peter Ho-sun Chan, and was called Dearest.  Closely based on a true story of child abduction (I never cease to be amazed what the Chinese authorities will and will not allow drama to talk about...), the film has a surprising and rather wonderful two-part structure.  The first half of the film focuses on the parents of an abducted boy, and in some ways is quite a conventional quest narrative. The second half is about the woman whose husband was the abductor.  He had died since his crime, leaving her with her "son" (whom he said he'd had with another woman because his wife was barren) and her "daughter" (whom he said he found on a building site).  As Peter Ho-sun Chan said after the film, it is no accident that the abducted child was a boy (greatly valued in Chinese culture), while the abandoned child was a girl.  In other words, it may well be that the dead husband's second story was true.   What's fascinating about this is that the abductor's wife and "daughter" themselves become victims of the crime, as they are separated from one another and from the little boy, whose natural father himself comes to say that the "second abduction" (from the family he had grown up in) did more psychological harm to his son than the first.  The mother deprived of her children is also played by the biggest star in the film, Zhao Wei - so Chinese audiences who came to see their equivalent of Julia Roberts spent the first hour of the film wondering if they were in the wrong cinema....  It's a great lesson in what we need our political and social dramas to do.  

Switch the viewpoint.  Start to see things from the point of view of somebody you thought was the enemy.  Open up that conversation.

Stepping towards the Indigenous

I'm writing this in a hotel room in Perth, WA. Another hotel room! This time I'm in Australia as the guest of the Australia Council, with a view to programming indigenous work into the Origins Festival. Great to know these ideas are being taken so seriously.

This sort of work has been an emerging theme over the last few weeks. First we has Sam Cook's workshop at the Laboratory, and then last Thursday I drove up to Cambridge to see Miria George's play and what remains.... as part of the Pasifika Styles Festival. Miria is a Maori, who runs a Wellington-based company called Tawata Productions with a writer and director called Hone Kouka. It's an incredibly provocative piece of work - based on the idea of the last Maori leaving New Zealand a few years into a dystopian future. If it sounds far-fetched, Miria points out that she wrote it in response to legislation in 2005 which forbade Maori ownership of seashore land. Which sounds very like ongoing colonialism in the 21st century.

What was really striking about the play was the way in which Hone had given "voice" to the almost silent Maori character of Mary through her use of traditional gestural language. There's a great moment when she opens her suitcase, and we see it's full of earth. She gets in, and dances in the earth: a dance of eloquent despair. Hone and Miria came to the Laboratory on Saturday, and did a workshop for us around this way of working. As often in the past, I'm struck by the pervasive nature of performative activity in First Nations cultures. We find ourselves strutting like birds, singing laments, performing hakkas, and all with a theatrical meaning and intention behind them. It's very much helped by the fact that half the people attending are themselves Maori - there's a clear and deep loyalty to the home culture among Maori people living in England.

On the plane coming here - it's a very long flight - I saw a new film called Ten Canoes, with an entirely Aboriginal cast. Again, there's an amazing sense of culture and performance as being the heart of everything. There's a wonderful sequence of a Makarrata ritual, with two members of a tribe that has given offence facing the spears of the offended, dancing magically as they dodge them. And, when one, Ridjimiraril, has been hit and mortally wounded, he performs a long and agonizing dance of death; like the one David Gulpilil (who narrates this film) does in Walkabout. It's a very beautiful film - and has filled me with excitement about the next few days.