I'm just back from the African Film Festival of Milan, which was on all week. We were due to go up for a day to get the films we need for our own African film festival, which starts tomorrow, but I ended staying for 3 days because the catalogue was so intriguing.The word most frequently used by the Italians to indicate films they'd appreciated is "bello" - which of course generally translates as beautiful, or nice.
After having watched some of the films recommended under this epithet for myself, I couldn't help feeling that such a qualification was terribly inappropriate. These films aren't nice and and with a few exceptions, they aren't beautiful either. They depict some of the ugliest, most miserable, desperate places & situations on earth. Prisons, shantytowns, warzones, slums, ghettos, refugee camps... The kind of environments that could strip any human being of their spirit, but yet in the midst of which glimpses of humanity occasionally appear, which makes it all the more poignant & unbearable.
I learnt pretty rapidly that the films I watched at the festival would not be noted on my next christmas list. You wouldn't want to watch films with scenes of murder, torture, rape & incest over & over, first because its too upetting, but also because seeing it again would make it less shocking, less traumatising, the initial effect is the most important, after which a second view would make you somewhat immune, & desensitised.
The two which stood out for me, in terms of provoking just this kind of trauma, delivering the kind of punch in the stomach that leaves you twitching for days, were these:
To See if I'm Smiling (Israel) - A documentary made up of interviews with young female Israeli soldi
ers. In Israel, apparently, military draft is obligatory for all youths as of the age of 18. I think this goes a long way to explaining the collective mentality of the country, as I see it. Why Israelis never seem to be capable of measured, rational debate, but never fail to hop on the defensive, to react as if under attack when criticised. To see themselves first & foremost as Israelis whatever the context. When every single member of a population has experienced being in that defensive position, of insecurity and fear, where there is no empathy whatsoever with the people regarded as the "ennemy", it's quite logical that they should become reactionary as a result, and lose all perspective. When an entire population has suffered the trauma of war & combat, this is the result.
Leonera (Argentina) - I won't try to review it but all I can say is I left with a feeling in my chest of actual physical tightness that I can't quite describe properly. A film about how "ordinary" people can be drawn to the depths of desolation, how normality can become hell overnight, and humanity can vanish in a second.
The films I saw at the festival, especially these two, weren't films that make you cry, like Titanic, Cold Mountain, or Love Actually.
Rather, they just leave you feeling limp (in the sense Chinua Achebe describes in "Things Fall Apart"), drained in the face of the unfathomable horror of it all - the unbearable lightness of death, as one of the Israeli girls puts it.
Films like these are not a pleasant experience so much as an ordeal. Within them play out scenes that leave you at a complete loss, about everything, because they are just so difficult, and so ambivalent. Scenes of the awful things people do to one another, and others of the incredible sacrifices they can make. Stories that portray human fragility and human resilience, but don't answer the question of which ultimately wins out most of the time. All this paints a disturbingly complex picture where good & bad are impossible to distinguish, a million miles from the easy Manichaeism of Hollywood & its reassuring conclusions about the state of universe.
Watching the films and hearing the directors speak about them got me to thinking about the relationship between film-making and activism. I suppose shedding light on injustice is a laudable endeavour, but spending millions on film-making somehow seems excessive. I suppose it can depend on the concrete results, Blood Diamond for example, has lead to massive raise in awareness of the ties between the diamond mining industry and civil conflict in Africa. The result has been a much greater interest in obtaining ethically sourced diamonds. There is an argument to be made for art for the sake of art, of course, but that particular can of worms I'll save for another post.
It was fitting really, for the festival to be happening in Milan, which I'd describe as a difficult city itself. There's something incredibly alienating about the place, I don't know if it's the emphasis on the commercial which makes it feel somewhat soulless and superficial, or perhaps the contrasts of the slick city centre a few minutes away from the frighteningly ugly grey tower blocks on the outskirts. I suppose both lack some kind of human quality, in different ways, and it makes the city quite a sad place. Seeing a roma camp on my train ride from the suburbs into the city, with all the squalid little shacks made out of iron and cardboard jostling for space in the darkness of the tunnel under the motorway also came as a bit of a shock. This is northern Italy for goodness sake, not Kosovo. It seems that everywhere has its ugly, shadowy places but in Milan I felt I encountered more than usual.
And everywhere I went I heard foreign languages, which I would try to place... Russian on the metro, amharic in the ethiopian call shop, arabic on the train, polish in the restaurant, something balkan spoken by the musicians on the tram... I couldn't help wondering each time if maybe they had similar stories to those I'd just been watching. In Milan, it seems everyone is an immigrant. Even the italians we encountered seemed to have all migrated from the South. And the result isn't exactly a picture of multicultural harmony. Back in september a black youth was beaten to death by an Italian shopkeeper and his son. But unfortunately, I don't think these are the kinds of people who go to this festival (not to say turnout was lacking - the showings were invariably packed out) which makes me wonder whether such a festival really helps in a city like Milan. With the much loathed Roma stuck hiding in the shadows of the underpass, and poor italian & foreign migrants alike stacked up in isolated high-rise flats, is it any wonder the situation seems on the verge of exploding.
Films like these are not a pleasant experience so much as an ordeal. Within them play out scenes that leave you at a complete loss, about everything, because they are just so difficult, and so ambivalent. Scenes of the awful things people do to one another, and others of the incredible sacrifices they can make. Stories that portray human fragility and human resilience, but don't answer the question of which ultimately wins out most of the time. All this paints a disturbingly complex picture where good & bad are impossible to distinguish, a million miles from the easy Manichaeism of Hollywood & its reassuring conclusions about the state of universe.
Watching the films and hearing the directors speak about them got me to thinking about the relationship between film-making and activism. I suppose shedding light on injustice is a laudable endeavour, but spending millions on film-making somehow seems excessive. I suppose it can depend on the concrete results, Blood Diamond for example, has lead to massive raise in awareness of the ties between the diamond mining industry and civil conflict in Africa. The result has been a much greater interest in obtaining ethically sourced diamonds. There is an argument to be made for art for the sake of art, of course, but that particular can of worms I'll save for another post.
It was fitting really, for the festival to be happening in Milan, which I'd describe as a difficult city itself. There's something incredibly alienating about the place, I don't know if it's the emphasis on the commercial which makes it feel somewhat soulless and superficial, or perhaps the contrasts of the slick city centre a few minutes away from the frighteningly ugly grey tower blocks on the outskirts. I suppose both lack some kind of human quality, in different ways, and it makes the city quite a sad place. Seeing a roma camp on my train ride from the suburbs into the city, with all the squalid little shacks made out of iron and cardboard jostling for space in the darkness of the tunnel under the motorway also came as a bit of a shock. This is northern Italy for goodness sake, not Kosovo. It seems that everywhere has its ugly, shadowy places but in Milan I felt I encountered more than usual.
And everywhere I went I heard foreign languages, which I would try to place... Russian on the metro, amharic in the ethiopian call shop, arabic on the train, polish in the restaurant, something balkan spoken by the musicians on the tram... I couldn't help wondering each time if maybe they had similar stories to those I'd just been watching. In Milan, it seems everyone is an immigrant. Even the italians we encountered seemed to have all migrated from the South. And the result isn't exactly a picture of multicultural harmony. Back in september a black youth was beaten to death by an Italian shopkeeper and his son. But unfortunately, I don't think these are the kinds of people who go to this festival (not to say turnout was lacking - the showings were invariably packed out) which makes me wonder whether such a festival really helps in a city like Milan. With the much loathed Roma stuck hiding in the shadows of the underpass, and poor italian & foreign migrants alike stacked up in isolated high-rise flats, is it any wonder the situation seems on the verge of exploding.
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