you dreamed of empires (alvaro enrigue, tr natasha wimmer)

Enrigue’s pandemic text is a playful dissertation on the arrival of Cortes at the court of Moctezuma. This is the ur story for the founding of modern Mexico - Iñaritu also incorporated it in his ‘Mexican’ film, Bardo. That first clash of kingdoms, civilisations, ways of thinking, that would shape the geographical territory now known as Mexico, from whence cometh Enrigue himself. The author chooses to engage with the narrative in a playful, self-acknowledged Borgesian form. Using well-known accounts from the time, and great big ice cream cones of his own imagination, he takes the reader back to those days which can only be described as fateful, letting them unravel like the skin of a dead warrior left too long in the sun.

For those who are not familiar with the more Latino account of the tale, the Mexica and their glorious city of Tenochtitlan, were not brought down by the Spaniard’s superior military skill or technology, but by the conflicts endemic to the territory, which Cortes skilfully turned against the Aztecs, and the decadence of their own empire. Enrigue’s Moctezuma is a mushroom junkie. He has the mental confusion and lucidity of a Burroughs, which is exciting but hardly suitable for maintaining an empire against multiple threats. His court is riven with paranoia, given its ruthless martial politic. A warrior culture ensures rigid discipline and clean streets but when the leader goes rogue, more Kurtz than Genghis, the whole edifice topples and it only takes one jumped up conquistador to bring it down.

Enrigue details all of this with playful charm. He takes us through the long-lost streets of the Aztec capital, one of the lost wonders of the world. His cast of characters are all possessed of a glorious, doleful humanity which goes above and beyond cultural origins. If you want a cracking read about the end of the world, and one can imagine why the author chose to address this subject during the pandemic, this is it. 

clean (alia trabucco zerán, tr. sophie hughes)

Clean is marketed as a literary thriller. Marketing it as a deep dive meditation on the inequalities of Chilean society probably wouldn’t be seen to be as effective. It tells the story of a cleaner, a 40 year old woman from the south of the country, by implication Mapuche, who has come to the capital and worked for the same affluent family for seven years. It’s a job that dehumanises her and destroys her psyche. She narrates the book, charting the family’s descent towards tragedy. Although this tragedy feels like something of a macguffin: the author’s real interest would appear to be the narrator’s gradual disintegration, as she yearns for the south she realises she has foolishly left behind. 

perfection (vincenzo latronico, tr. sophie hughes)

Perfection had me thinking of Huysmans. A novel which is self-consciously smart, driven by a notion of aesthetics as much as narrative. A sardonic take on modern urban living, lancing the boil of pretentious but vacuous hipness. Which is all very well, and a remit Vincenzo Latronico pulls off effectively, however, this is a dry text, and his targets, southern European designers playing at being sophisticates in Berlin, feel like easy targets. Of course the twee middle class mores of liberalism can do with bing taken down a peg or two, but the novel, (hotly tipped to win the International Booker), never seeks to address what underpins the aspirations of its feckless protagonists, and never looks to scratch the superficial surface it describes with such precision. 

maria, maria (marytza k rubio)

Rubio’s collection of short stories dabbles with the dark side. One particularly engrossing tale, Tijuca, deals with a woman taking her decapitated lover’s head and burying it in the jungle, according to his instructions. There’s a gothic beauty to this and other tales, many of which seem to emerge from the twisted soil of Calexico. Because these are tales from a lost land, the Mexican North America, a Chicano vision which folds the Yankee psyche into the stranger pulse from across the border, stretching down from the isthmus to the jungles of the Amazon. There was a time when the southern states of the USA belonged to a different consciousness, and in Rubio’s stories we get a glimpse of what that might have been. 

pacification (w&d albert serra, w. baptiste pinteaux)

Colonialism. The Honorary Consul. Graham Greene territory, Malcolm Lowry territory. Shady dealings in the tropics. Opaque conversations which hint at the greater existential battles being waged on the planet, the unnamed battles, the undisclosed wars. It’s exciting material which Albert Serra seeks to constantly mystify and de-excite. Takes are long, conversations are cryptic, the stakes are never clear. The end result is a woozy, vaguely hypnotic movie which feels as though it’s struggling to resist the weight of its own pretension, which in turn is not such a bad trope in a film, albeit one which is always likely to register higher with the arthouse crowd than the general public, whatever that amorphous body might be. I might have missed things, but I was never quite clear what the post-colonial message was saying, beyond beware men in white suits. As a spectator I felt awash in this lush world, drifting through a booze-sodden lost weekend, absolutely certain that the events unfolding before my eyes held more meaning, more complexity, more gravity, than anything I could ever hope to understand in my inebriated state of mind.  

el castigo (d. matías bize, w. coral cruz)

Bize’s chamber piece is what they might call whipsmart in the pages of TimeOut, if TimeOut still exists. A single shot sustained over 90 minutes, marked by the setting of the sun in a forest beside a main road, with the nagging tension of a lost child and a disintegrating marriage. The single shot film is perhaps the acme of low budget filmmaking, (cf La Casa Muda, Victoria etc), a skill which when well-executed demonstrates the Aristotelian power of cinema as a rival to the stage. El Castigo (The Punishment), takes place in a space which is perhaps no more than 500 square metres, where the action is occurring offstage. Ana has punished their 7 year old child by leaving him at the side of the road for two minutes, after he nearly caused a crash. When they come back the child is missing. With this simple premise, the film dissects her and Mateo’s marriage, and the possible collapse of their comfortable lives. It’s beautifully acted by Antonia Zegers and Néstor Cantillana, and, as is necessary, brilliantly filmed by Gabriel Diaz. In a medium which so often rewards those who do the flashy things well, doing the simple things well becomes the mark of a bold sensibility, prepared to swim against the tide. 

strandings: confessions of a whale scavenger (peter riley)

What do you do when you’ve been obsessed with whales all your life, to such an extent that you’ve become an expert on Moby Dick? Of course, you write a book about it, non-fiction, trying to make sense of your psychological deviance and looking for a way to incorporate this into the history of a country which has engaged on a course of deviant psychological damage. A country which has become a beached whale, just as you are a beached whale, just as a beached whale is a beached whale. It’s a somewhat tenuous theory, but Riley milks it for all it’s worth and the book includes revelatory moments. Above all in the way it traces the evolution of a beached whale society, the scavengers and fetishists who feel the pull of the whales, just as the whales themselves feel the pull of the tides which erroneously cause them to commit an auto-de-fe by choosing land over water. These characters represent an alternative Britain, none more so than the mythical ‘Big Blue’ to whom a truly wondrous chapter is dedicated, a character so Dickensian he feels he really ought to be fictional. These oddballs, some using the whale as a metaphor for the possibilities of Brexit, as opposed to the author’s use of the metaphor as the catastrophe of Brexit, construct a fascinating map of the island’s coastal regions, the point of elision between the values of the nation state and the values of the deep. At times it feels as though Riley slightly overplays his hand as he seeks to impose his map of the whale territory on the map of the country, but this is nevertheless a book that conjures out of its unlikely thesis an engaging, off-centre read. 

el caso padilla (w&d pavel giroud)

El Caso Padilla recounts the tale of the night the Cuban poet, Heberto Padilla was released from prison and proceeded to give a speech lasting several hours to his fellow writers in the hall of the Cuban Writers Union. The speech is a self-flagellation and a warning, and Padilla is clearly speaking under duress. He confesses to having written poetry which in its tone and its negativity is counter-revolutionary. He then goes on to name various writers who share his views, some of whom come forward to perform a public mea culpa after Padilla has finished speaking. The documentary is constructed around the filmed footage of the night, which the film claims at the start has never previously been seen, even though fragments were used in a play by the Cuban Abel Mello on the same subject around five years ago.

The film is frustrating in many ways. In order to understand the context of his confession, it would have been helpful to have been given more of an insight into Padilla’s personality and history. At the end we learn that he emigrated to the USA, and sought to define himself as someone who was neither of the left or the right, although the trauma of these events must have scarred him. It’s one thing to confess to being a traitor, it’s another to implicate your friends and colleagues. It’s also frustrating that the film doesn’t offer any clue as to the fate of his fellow writers, characters who feel as though they emerge from an anti-Bolaño novel.

Which also leads on to the other thought the film provoked. Which is that writers might be free to say what they like under capitalism, but that’s because capitalism doesn’t give a shit about what they have to say. There’s also another kind of censorship under capitalism, which is the censorship of the market. The very fact that Castro, like Plato, may have felt threatened by the poets who were once his champions feels like a testament to a power that poetry still possesses within that society.

All of which is not to defend censorship or the Cuban regime. Anyone who has visited Cuba will be aware of that it’s a society which is far from Utopian. Nevertheless, in a historical moment where, once again, the political and social values of “the West” are being stripped bare to reveal the brutality that underpins them, the case of Padilla feels as though it is probably more nuanced than the film suggests. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Mello, the playwright who wrote about a play about Padilla, was employed by a university in Havana to teach theatre when we met him there, in spite of his criticisms of the state and the fact he spends half his time in Spain. Cuba is complicated and the film, whilst doing a service in exploring the case of Padilla, doesn’t really do justice to these complexities. 

unrueh/ unrest (w&d cyril schäublin)

Schäublin’s curious film left both myself and sñr Flamia somewhat bemused. It’s a very elliptical telling of the way in which events at a Swiss watch factory on the 1870s influenced Kropotkin, who happened to be drifting around the valley where the factory is located at the time. The socialist principles of the watchmakers are emphasised as they offer to donate some of their wages to striking workers in Baltimore, part of a worldwide union movement that doesn’t prevent four of the female factory workers from being unjustly sacked. Kropotkin moseys around, looking out wistfully, perhaps nursing a crush on one of the factory workers. Whilst obviously based on facts, the film seems less concerned with exploring and developing its narrative and more interested in becoming a mood piece. Much is made of the element of time, with the valley having several different time zones. Whilst this helps to restrict the homogeneity of life, it also makes it hard to plan. It felt as though there was a lot bubbling under the surface of a likeable premise, but the lid is never lifted to release the full radical force of Kropotkin’s ideology on the audience. Which is a pity, as one suspects that the Cinemateca audience would have been well up for it. 

walk up (w&d hong sang-soo)

Hong Sang-soo is a big lacuna in my film viewing, but I suspect that Walk Up isn’t the ideal place to start to get a handle on his work. Clearly a stocking filler, the film takes place in the same house which doubles as a restaurant. A film director visits an old friend with his daughter, and she offers to let him stay. Some time later, having not taken up the offer, he returns to the restaurant part of the house, where he hangs out with the friend and her friend, the restauranteur. At this point the director reveals that a big project has fallen through. He starts a relationship with the restauranteur, moving in to the house. He starts smoking heavily and drinking heavily. He gets depressed. He falls out with his friend who has now become his landlady, and doesn’t mend the leak in the roof. His daughter comes to visit. The film ends. The film is split into several long narrative sequences, which revolve around the use of the house and the steady deterioration of the gnomic film director. It’s languidly paced, with long talky scenes. In many ways it feels more like a stage play than a work of cinema, split into its various acts. Whilst there’s an undeniable charm, the film seems in danger of drowning in (self-referential?) whimsy. It provokes a hunger to see what happens beyond the walls of this hidden-away building, out there on the streets of Seoul. Whilst this is clearly intentional, Walk Up remains a charming but frustrating watch. Hopefully I will get a chance to see more of the director’s work, the films that didn’t get the rug pulled from them by the financiers. 

da-eum so-hee/ next sohee - (w&d july jung)

Jung’s film, whilst never radical, is a great example of how cinema acts as a portal to other parts of this small world. South Korea’s education system is frequently lauded in the West as a progressive example of the quest for excellence and the advantages of conformity. Next Sohee is a heartfelt corrective to this vision. Sohee, a bright but assertive student, is sent as part of her education to work in a call centre, where the female agents are expected to operate in as mechanical a fashion possible, convincing people who want to cancel their internet subscription to renew. Sonhee, whose secret dream is to be a dancer, rebels against the malfeasance of the company. She complains that it exploits the trainees, as well as protesting against the inhumanity of its commercial practices. But her protest comes at a terrible cost and leads to suicide. The second half of the film switches focus, with the female detective, Oh Yoo-jin, investigating the circumstances of Sonhee’s death. Her investigation takes her to the heart of a system that is both corrupt and inhumane. When her superior criticises her, saying that if they investigated every suicide they would be swamped, Oh Yoo-jin says that this is exactly what the police are for: to find out why and how society is flawed, and how that leads to tragedy. Whilst there is something discursive about all of this, the film is held together by the striking performances of its two female leads, Kim Si-Eun and Bae Doona who put raw flesh on the conceptual bones. Whilst never being a radical piece of filmmaking, Next Sohee succeeds in offering a telling portrayal of a society on the other side of the world, revealing the cracks in the South Korean economic miracle, reminding us that every society has its demons.

It is also, for anyone who has ever had the misfortune to work in a call centre, a telling reminder of the stultifying nature of that particular means of employment.

trenque lauquen (w&d citarella, w. laura paredes)

There’s a monster in Trenque, which the protagonist, Laura wants to see. She’s told she can’t see it, but she can listen to it. She strains at the door to hear, and what she hears, along with us, is the sound of the monster breathing. Which seems wholly appropriate for a film which relishes its capacity to breathe. Rather than being measured in minutes or story beats, it might be measure in breaths, the breaths the characters take as they try to work out what’s happening, and we take alongside them.

Trenque Lauquen has garnered critical plaudits and global recognition for Citarella. Its genesis as part of the Pampero stable is evident, with Llinas credited as a collaborator. At nearly five hours long, it is in the vein of Historias Minimas and La Flor, films where the director worked as a producer. All of which goes some way to explain the surefooted way her magnum opus handles the challenge of filling so much screen time so artfully. It’s almost as though a parallel version of cinema has been quietly evolving in the province of Buenos Aires, one which has no fear of taxing the audience’s attention span, something which is such a concern in other parts of the world. Because Trenque isn’t just long, it also revels in its longeurs, even down to the modes of dialogue, where the Pinteresque pause is employed to full and touching effect.

The film is divided into twelve parts, each of which has its own distinctive flavour, sometimes, as in Spregelburd’s part, defined by the acting, and sometimes defined by the mood. In her talk following the screening of Ostende, a film she said was shaped as a mash-up between Rohmer and Hitchcock, the director said that Trenque is a conversation with at least eight directors. Hitchcock might be there again, along with Antonioni, using the trope of the lady who vanishes, and the end felt as though it might be a nod to Varda’s Vagabonde. The multiplicity of influences and tones, another thing that more conventional filmmaking tends to be wary of, actually helps to define the aesthetic of Trenque Lauquen: it is many things at once, always predicated on a mystery. The mystery of the poetess, the mystery of the creature, the mystery of the missing protagonist. These hooks are enough to constantly engage the audience, and maintain the film’s rhythm: we’re not that bothered how long it takes, in fact, the drawn out nature of the quest if anything adds to our enjoyment. This is cinema operating like a sprawling novel, where the detours and distractions are part of the pleasure. 

saturdays disorders (w&d lucia seles)

Seles’ films have been feted in Cinemateca this week, a retrospective for a filmmaker who makes films on their own terms, patchwork assemblages of video and narrative. Part bricolage, part home movies, Saturdays Disorders has the feeling of an intense comedy psychodrama as found footage, an offering from a state at the edge of the accepted cinema rules. In its wilful idiosyncrasy and elaborate architectural vision (this film belongs to a tetralogy) it feels like the work of a vaulting Borgesian ambition to reinvent film with nothing more than a manic will and a digital camera.

The film itself melds two narratives. One is the arrangement of a tennis match, the only match of a tennis tournament, organised by a group of friends for no apparent reason. The other is the tale of one of those friends, called Lujan, who is coming to meet these friends, in a city called Lujan, but for reasons that are never quite clear, she is in a state of heightened anxiety and ends up patrolling the streets of the city, desperately searching for a church which might or might not be a point of rendezvous, leaving increasingly unhinged voice messages as she goes. The two stories are jemmied together, and the film as a whole feels as though it has been edited on speed, with a frenetic, semi-associative style, held together by Lujan’s odyssey and the anti-climax of the tennis match.

Whether Seles is Seles or Graf is hard to discern. The freedom the filmmaker has in setting their own aesthetic and narrative agenda gives the film energy, (even a “propulsive” energy, to use the word supplied to me in notes on a UK project), but the film also relies to an extent on accepting that the audience are in on the joke, with no attempt to give us any emotional hooks to cling to. Lujan is desperate, we don’t know why, it’s kind of funny, it’s all done on a shoestring, but where’s the beef? One of the curious things about Saturdays Disorders are the glimpses it offers at the edge of the frame of ordinary people going about their business in an Argentina on the point of implosion - a market outside a cathedral, a collection of people offering directions on a street corner. The ordinariness is in contrast to the slightly chummy activities of the group setting up the tennis match, obsessed by their own cruel particularity. 

cold enough for snow (jessica au)

Au’s brief tome, a novella, is another text which would appear to flirt with the genre of auto-fiction (although who is to know?) as the Australian narrator goes on a trip to Japan with her mother, who was raised in Hong Kong. In the course of the trip, the narrator indulges in a few recollections, (of kayaking on a lake, of a childhood visit to Hong Kong), and some meditations on the nature of family. With her mother, she visits museums and takes trains across the country, before their paths separate and the narrator goes on a solo walk in a more rural zone. If all of this sounds somewhat mundane, that’s because it is, unashamedly so. Au’s text doesn’t have quite the same laconic tone as the like of Chejfec or Toussaint, whose work explores a similar aesthetic of the quotidian, rather it trades on a shaggy-dog suspense, as the reader suspects that something more dramatic is bound to happen sooner or later, even though it never does. There is a moment of potential tension in the closing pages which is soon punctured, leaving the reader with the not unpleasant sensation of a leisurely stroll through a partial Japan, via Hong Kong and a volcanic lake. 

mato seco em chamas (w&d adirley queirós, joana pimenta)

Mato Seco em Chamas, translated in English into Dry Ground Burning, is a curious blend of Ghetto Mad Max, muscular feminist filmmaking and documentary footage. Three women succeed in stealing petrol from an underground pipe, which they sell at a discount to the motoboys in their marginal barrio, situated in the hinterland on the edge of Brasilia. Two of the women, Chatara and Lea, are sisters, with Lea recently released from prison. A third, Andreia, is setting up her own political party, PPP, which could be understood as the Prisoner’s Party for the People. The trio defend their territory as the police move in, before Lea is rearrested. The filmmakers smartly employ some barnstorming biker imagery, as the motoboys procession through the barrio, and at another point when Andreia leads them, as though at the head of a great cavalry movement. These moments, and the shots of the oil well, have a romantic cinematic power, summoning up the ghosts of Brando in The Wild Ones or Dean in Giant. The images feel as though they are being skilfully welded onto the unwieldy mechanism that is the film overall.

Because, Mato Seco em Chamas is clearly far more than just a dystopian drama. It’s also clearly rooted in the everyday turmoil of Brazilian society. There is footage from a Bolsonaro rally, as well as several sequences in the favela where the women are based which have a vivid fly-on-the-wall feel. A female singer performs to a favela crowd; Andreia sings in a Pentecostal church. The line between fiction and fact is blurred, even more when the film suggests that its protagonists aren’t actually actors, but real people who have been drafted into this fiction, and the apparent reveal that Lea has gone to prison a second time actually means that the actress who is playing Lea has gone back to prison.

The resultant film is percussive, punctuated with music from the barrio, treading a fine line between the real and the imagined; showing us a favela world which is lived like a Mad Max movie, and who are we to know how true or not this is. A sequence towards the end seems to suggest that the petrol which the women trade is actually a cipher for narcotics, but even this remains unclear. At two and a half hours long, this is a challenging, radical film which feels as though it has emerged from some kind of parallel cinematic sphere, one which knows and uses the tropes of cinema, but isn’t all that interested in them: instead it seeks to capture something of the reality of the Wild West of Brazil’s edge-lands. 

diego garcia (natasha soobramanien & luke williams)

As the title suggests, the novel’s focus is on the eponymous archipelago that was ceded by the British to the USA as a military base, meaning the Chagos islanders who lived there were forcibly deported, destined to roam the world as they sought to make the case for being permitted to return to their islands. One of the co-authors, Natasha Soobramanien, is of Mauritian descent, which helps to explain her interest in the islanders’ fate, as their first port of call after being deported was Mauritius, where a strong community of Chagos islanders remains. Others have moved to the UK, specifically Crawley,  a consequence of the stateless islanders arriving at Gatwick when they first came to Britain. A select cohort of the islanders have been granted UK citizenship, but others haven’t and their fate, as is the fate of so many stateless individuals, is to roam the world in limbo. One of these, called Diego, is a character in the novel, albeit a peripheral figure, as the novel on the whole revolves around the relationship between Damaris and Oliver, which appear to be nommes des plumes for the writers themselves. This auto-fiction is the dominant strand of the book, as it traces the relationship between the two writers, who are also writing this novel we are reading together. The novel thus becomes a somewhat solipsistic project, albeit very Fitzcarraldo. It comes as no great surprise to discover that Soobramanien is an alumni of the UEA Creative Writing MA, which in turn has been so influenced by the work of Sebald. Whilst the novel incorporates segments which are memoirs of other characters, figures in the story of Diego Garcia, there is perhaps a sense that it is slightly less radical than it purports to be and the interweaving of the novelists’ stories with that of the Chagos islanders has moments which feel somewhat tenuous. 

aguas del pastaza / juunt pastaza entsari. (d. inês t. alves)

Aguas del Pastaza (The Waters of the Pastaza) is a beguiling little film. Running at a shade over an hour, it documents the lives of a small tribe of children who live, learn and play on the banks of the river Pastaza, deep in the Amazon rainforest, somewhere on the border of Peru and Ecuador. Throughout almost the whole film, there are no adults present, just the kids. Alves shows them with an affectionate, observational eye. There is no intent to interview them or speak to anyone who might be shaping the way their minds work, in part, one suspects, because it is clear their minds and bodies are shaped more than anything by the world around them, in which they live in a state of seemingly Wordsworthian joy. They climb tees, forage for fruit, hunt for shrimps by night, play football in the teeming rain, paddle down the river in their pirogues, go fishing, cook etcetera. As such this is no more and no less than a vivid fly-on-the-wall portrayal of what life is like for these children, a life that they clearly relish.

As it happens I watched the film with Sñr Amato and his friend, Juanma, who explained that this way of life was one his mother had lived in the Paraguayan selva, not so very long ago. Juanma is a very urbane figure so I had no idea of his rural background. He said that Alves’ film transported him back both to stories his mother told him and his own experiences when he went to stay with family in the jungle, and the sense of wondrous liberty of existing in this environment, an element of the continent’s consciousness that is constantly under threat, (a threat that is latent but never declared in the film). Rather, what we get to see is everything we have already lost and everything that clings on regardless in the face of supposed ‘progress’. 

avec amour et acharnement (w&d claire denis, w. christine angot)

You have to hand it to Denis. She doesn’t let up. Her latest feels like a vehicle for Binoche & Lindon, as the twin superstars of French cinema strut their tortured stuff. There are two ways of looking at Love and Fury: as self-indulgent Gallic melodrama; or, stripped to the bone, raw emotional heroin. Several scenes feel like they’ve been captured ‘in the moment’, as the two leads go head to head. The mood of the film is one of being constantly on the edge of something terrible about to happen, reflecting the reality of sharing a failing relationship, one which Jean (Lindon) and Sara (Binoche), for all the love their characters have for each other, are trapped in. It all starts to go tits up when François, Binoche’s ex-husband, reappears. His role is perhaps the weakest in the film, as he comes across as the equivalent of a male bunny boiler, evidently narcissistic bad news. That Sara, Binoche’s character, should be so readily infatuated with him seems, to this Anglo-Saxon temperament, implausible. If one were watching this in the guise of a psychologist, one might infer that Sara is using François to get out of her relationship to Jean, even if she would never admit it. In the end, both Sara and Jean seem to be more in love with the notion of romantic drama, relishing the big scenes, than getting on with their lives. The postscript , which perhaps has echoes of that alt-melodramatist, Reygadas, shows Jean happily reunited with his estranged son, one of the various under-developed strands in the film. (Why was Jean in prison; how does Sara’s instability affect her job as a radio presenter.) However, these details aren’t really the point. The structure of Avec Amour et Acharnement is gerrybuilt as a platform to allow the leads to do their thing, and if that’s your thing, you’ll roll with the film. And if it’s not, you won’t. 

la nuit du 12 (w&d dominik moll, w. pauline guéna, gilles marchand)

Moll’s film, the second of his I have seen this year at Cinemateca, opens with an act of psychopathic brutality. For a while it feels as though the film is staggering in the wake of this action. Where can it go from here? Particularly as it is clear Moll doesn’t want to do anything gratuitous. He wants to pay homage to the victim, re-vindicating the murder mystery as a means to explore the psychic damage that is inflicted by a violent action. As such, the figure of the police chief, Yohan Ives, emerges as the protagonist. Yohan is part of a male-dominated world that has no option but to treat violent crimes as part and parcel of their daily lives, something which contributes to an inevitably sardonic, macho culture. Yohan, played with a delicate subtlety by Bastien Bouillon, has natural leadership qualities, but he is also a gentle soul. HIs failure to resolve the crime nags away at him, representing not only everything that is flawed about the job, but also a world ridden with gender wars and violence. Moll handles the material with restraint and tact. It feels, to an extent, as though this perhaps restricts his filmmaker’s flair, but it permits him to succeed in converting a story which perhaps shouldn’t work, shifting the focus of the crime from the victim to the policeman, but in the end sort of does. The film traces Yohan’s journey towards a reconciliation with the flawed world he inhabits, even if it is a world without mercy or justice. 

the damned don’t cry (w&d fyzal boulifa)

Despite the portentous title, Boulifa’s film is ultimately an affectionate portrait of a mother-son relationship and a clear-eyed take on the vicissitudes of Moroccan society. Selim and Fatima are down on their luck. Thrown out of their grandfather’s home, they return to Tangiers and try to fashion a viable future in an inviable society. Fatima is a flakey flirt and her handsome son soon realises that following in her footsteps is the way to get ahead, as he enters into an uneasy relationship with Sebastian, the French owner of a downtown riad. The narrative keeps moving as the characters lurch from salvation towards damnation and back again. The precarious nature of life in Morocco, as in any third world country, is acutely described. What marks Boulifa’s film out, beyond all of the above, is his refusal to convert his twin protagonists into heroic figures.  Both Fatima and Selim are flawed survivors, getting by against the odds as they try to steer an independent path through a stratified society. Aicha Tebbae’s portrayal of Fatima, in particular, a middle aged ugly duckling convinced she’s actually a swan, is beautifully realised. In spite of her foolishness, Fatima is possessed of a survivor’s sly wisdom which keeps her both alive and sane, against the odds. If the film sometimes seems to skate over some elements of the harshness of the lives its characters endure (what is it really like to be a young man in a Moroccan prison?), it still succeeds in avoiding the trap of constructing a heroic or redemptive narrative of life in the third world, thereby offering a more convincing, less palliative depiction.