London Film Festival

Ixcanul (Volcano)

I was in rehearsals though October (more of which in another blog post), so I saw rather less at this year's London Film Festival than usual - but there was still a lot of excitement!  Our old friend Adil Hussain, who was in the first version of Orientations, and was central to its devising workshop, appeared in several films this year, particularly Sunrise and the rather strange Kothanodi.  It was also great to meet up with Atom Egoyan again, at the screening of his new film with Christopher Plummer, Remember.

Of the mainstream films, the one that most excited me was The Daughter - the film version of Simon Stone's Wild Duck for Belvoir, which was one of my theatre highlights of last year. Simon had already made Ibsen more filmic, and this seemed like a logical development of the piece.  It wasn't perhaps quite so emotionally intense as the play - and I think this was partly because the social realism, the physical landscape necessary for film dissipated some of the concentration of energy given by the enclosed glass box set of the theatre production.  It also, perhaps, pointed up the lack of social concern in Stone's treatment of the characters - his approach is more psychological than Ibsen's, and so actually not the sort of drama I usually warm to.  Certainly the film version made the character of Christian (played by Paul Schneider) seem more directly to blame for the tragedy, and his malevolence seemed rooted in his own psychological problems, his jealousy.  I always worry about the sort of psychologically-driven naturalism that makes it seem as if people with problems are somehow to blame for them - as if there were no underlying social, economic, political issues that lead to our psychological malfunctions.  Perhaps it's good that the film made this more apparent - but I missed the play's extraordinary intensity.

I was also, as always, on the lookout for films from indigenous cultures, with an eye to the next Origins.  There were two that particularly excited me this year.  Ixcanul (Volcano) is a film set among the Maya of Guatemala, and reminded me of the wonderful Grupo Sotz'il, whom we hosted in this year's festival.  The film delves under the surface of the culture with great integrity - and in its closing minutes becomes genuinely shocking and incredibly powerful in relation to how that culture is being maltreated by the West.

Tanna

The real revelation, however, was Tanna, a film from the island of the same name, in Vanuatu.  Like Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes, which the filmmaker Bentley Dean showed the people of Tanna as the project began, this is a piece of and about an indigenous culture, made in deep partnership with the people of the land and based on their own histories and customs.  It is based on real events in the 1980s, when a young woman was offered in marriage to another tribe, in order to bring peace between them.  She and her boyfriend ran away, and finally took their own lives, rather than be lost to one another.  The island community's acceptance of love as a reason for marriage dates to these events - although the film itself is actually the first public statement of this fact, and so, quite literally, makes history.  What is quite wonderful about the film is its total authenticity and integrity, made manifest in both how immediate and real the performances of the community members feel, and in the strangeness of their world to Western eyes.

Of course, this is something that cuts both ways.  Bentley was at the screening, together with the film's cultural consultant, the only man on the island who speaks English.  During the Q&A, he was asked what he thought of London.  His reply was largely complimentary and polite - but then he said how very surprised he had been to see so many homeless people on the city's streets.  This is a rich country, he said - but there are people who have nothing.  Tanna is not a rich country, but there are no poor people, because there is no money and everything is held in common.  In Tanna, nobody would be left out in the cold in this way.  It was one of those extraordinary wake-up calls that indigenous cultures sound from time to time.  The cinema applauded him, with a deep sense of "What have we done?"

Pathway 2: Politics and Protest

Oxlajuj B'aqtun

Origins has always been a political festival, and this year's programme particularly reflects the worldwide indigenous protest against continuing imperialism, economic colonisation, and the destruction of the environment.  Grupo Sotz'il, for example, are performing their great production Oxlajuj B'aqtun, which has been acclaimed across Latin America for its moving response to the genocide committed against the Mayan people of Guatemala, and especially the assassination in 2010 of the group's inspirational founder Lisandro Guarcax.  His words form the epigraph to their work: “We wish that all our efforts will be translated into the knowledge of the others”.

Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke, who gives this year's Origins Lecture, is probably the most important Native political leader in the United States.  Founder of the project Honour the Earth, Winona lives on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where she practises an environmentally balanced lifestyle, at the same time as leading the protest against the destruction of indigenous lands, which is a threat not only to indigenous people, but to the whole of humanity.  She has twice stood as the Green candidate for the Vice-Presidency of the United States.  On 15th June, she will speak at Rich Mix about the indigenous approach to ecology, politics and protest in the 21st century.  And, if you want to know more about her, there's a film about her life too, called Thunderbird Woman.  

There are plenty of other talks with a political edge - but the one we'd particularly mention is the Menzies Centre talk with Indigenous Australian writer and campaigner David Milroy.  David has been involved with Origins from its inception, and is always fascinating and entertaining at once when he deal with his passion for Aboriginal land rights and cultural survival.

Standstill

Our film programme is equally uncompromising in its approach to political questions.  Standstill, which opens the film festival on June 10th, find links between the long resistance of the Mohawk people to colonisation, and the current situation of the Palestinian people.  To view the Palestinians as the indigenous subjects of a colonial power throws a whole new light on the conflict there.

Benny Wenda and the Lani Singers

West Papua is another land where the indigenous people are fighting against aggressive colonialism today, and the Festival welcomes their exiled leader Benny Wenda - twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize - to the screening of The Road to Home, a documentary about his remarkable life, and to sing the songs of his native land at The Origins Concert.  Meeting Benny is an experience you will not forget.

Just Another Sámi

Closer to home, the Sámi people of the European Arctic are also engaged in a struggle for land, ecology and culture.   Norwegian company Ferske Scener's Just Another Sámi is a dramatic and musical howl of protest against oppression in lands surprisingly close to home.

Beautiful One Day

The Politics and Protest Pathway reaches through to the closing event of the Festival, brought to London from Australia's Torres Strait Islands by Ilbijerri Theatre Company.  Beautiful One Day is a protest against ongoing racism and the scandal of Aboriginal deaths in custody, starting from one particular death on Palm Island in 2004.  It is also a love letter to an environment and a way of living that somehow endure, in spite of everything.

After the Festival is over, the echoes of protest will remain.  Palpably so, in the form of Elliot Tupac's street art.  Elliott has re-defined mural painting in Latin America with his fusion of indigenous Andean art and the roar of the contemporary city.  Origins brings his work to London, leaving a lasting reminder of the Politics and Protest pathway.

Eve Sussman

The other fascinating experience in Montréal was a visit to the Modern Art Museum, to see Eve Sussman's piece, made with the Rufus Corporation, White on White. 

This piece looks like a film.  You go into a room, you sit down, and you watch it.  You are in an audience.  There are images, characters and dialogue.  The actors are clearly located in a recognisable world - it's Eastern Europe.  At times the settings are very specific - as in the image above, which is a careful reproduction of Yuri Gagarin's office.  But actually this is not a film in a conventional way, because the scenes are not ordered.  Rather, the editing is generated by a computer using algorithms, so that there is some sort of association between the scenes (the result of hash-tags), but it isn't any sort of narrative sequence planned by the artist.  The apparent logic by which the plot unfolds is in fact totally random.

And yet, the strange thing is that you can't help treating it as if it were a normal film - because all the signals are telling you that's what it is.  And so you start to create narrative out of the juxtapositions of scenes, and to generate plot-lines which may be unfurling.  The fact that none of them lead anywhere, and that the film refuses to end or to loop makes this deeply dis-orienting.  It is also very close to lived experience - nothing ties up neatly.

In many ways this is a response to the collapse of the grand narrative - both in terms of the end of Communist ideology in the East and the failure of late capitalism in the West.  It also suggests a kind of post-traumatic numbness - I was reminded of it as I watched the Guatemalan film Polvo that evening.  This is a "real" film, but again the narrative is fragmented and difficult for the viewer to re-construct.  As if the experience of genocide no longer allows the characters to live in a way that "makes sense" - either to them or to their implicated spectators.