Tag Archives: art house

Campbell X and THE WATERMELON WOMAN

THE WATERMELON WOMAN is a self-coined – Dunyementary – a fusion of fiction and documentary style filmmaking. In THE WATERMELON WOMAN, Cheryl Dunye uses investigative documentary shooting on video intercut with a formal fiction comedy drama structure shot on film. Inserted within the narrative is archive footage constructed by Dunye.

THE WATERMELON WOMAN is edutainment. We laugh while being educated about the erasure of Black women in cinematic history in general, and also the invisibility of Black lesbian actresses in Hollywood history. As we watch the film we begin to question what is real and what is fiction? THE WATERMELON WOMAN is the Black actress Fae Richards who had disappeared, undocumented in the mist of time.

The title “THE WATERMELON WOMAN” is a play on the association between racist depictions of Black people eating watermelons, equivalent to the often racist caricatured images of Black women as the Mammy/Maid characters in Hollywood. The title is also an homage to Melvin Van Peebles’ 1970 film WATERMELON MAN. Melvin Van Peebles is credited with starting the Blaxploitation era of cinema which heralded a new vision of modern African American cinema.

As THE WATERMELON WOMAN begins we see video footage of a white Jewish wedding with Black guests. As Cheryl, who is a wedding videographer sets up the frame, a white male photographer comes and tells the contributors to move around to suit his frame while she is shooting. She is of course outraged and tells him to wait his turn. This first scene sets the tone for the ways in which Black women’s stories are denied, overwritten or erased in Hollywood.

Cheryl in the film decides to search for the real Fae Richards. As she does so she interviews various gatekeepers of culture, who are unapologetic in their ignorance about Fae Richards. Lee Edwards, the Black gay man, played by Brian Freeman (Pomo Afro Homos – 1990–1995) is uninterested in anything to do with history of women in cinema, the CLIT archivist played by Sarah Schulman hoards Black womens’ archival assets and denies Cheryl access to the material, the cultural critic Camille Paglia played by herself, who while explaining the impact of the Mammy role, denies there is a racist element to them, and even posits the roles as empowering because she insists on viewing them through her own Italian American experience.

The complicity of white women in power structures is further reinforced when we learn that Fae Richards was in a lesbian relationship with a white film director Martha Paige who cast her in the Mammy roles. Martha Paige did nothing to write and direct roles for Fae that were outside of the Mammy/Maid roles. She instead built her reputation as a film director off plantation type dramas. In fact it is often Martha Paige who is referenced in the history books and not Fae Richards. Martha Paige is played by Alex Juhasz, one of the producers of THE WATERMELON WOMAN. Cheryl’s relationship with Diana played by Guinevere Turner (Go Fish, L Word, American Psycho, Notorious Bettie Page, Charlie Says) falls apart when Cheryl has the dawning realisation about her liberal white racist values and her attempted appropriation of Cheryl’s project.

At the same time Cheryl interviews older Black lesbians who let her know how much they revered Fae Richards, even as Hollywood rejected her, and dumped her when she got older. She uncovers Fae Richards rich and joyous life as a Black lesbian who was survived by June, her lover of 20 years. June is played by the iconic poet and essayist – Cheryl Clarke.

THE WATERMELON WOMAN is a genius film which subverts dominant cinema with a Black lesbian feminist aesthetic through centring dark-skinned Black women as characters and actors. And by placing Black masculine of centre women of various ages as objects of desire and love interests. Cheryl Dunye casts herself, a black lesbian woman, as the central character, a Black lesbian filmmaker called Cheryl in order to obtain authenticity in the role, as well as intrinsically preventing any erasure of Black lesbian desire or bodies.

THE WATERMELON WOMAN is a love letter to cinema – African American cinema in Philadelphia in particular, we learn about those film companies that existed in the 1930s and see the cinemas where African Americans watched the silver screen. THE WATERMELON WOMAN while exploring the invisibility of Black lesbian women in cinema, also creates its own queer archive. There are references to other queer works of art, the documentary elements allow for the use of actual LGBT people, Dunye uses music of Black lesbians like Toshi Reagon and if you check the credits you will see interns like Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, The L Word, Carrie ).

THE WATERMELON WOMAN tells us to speak to our queer elders and hear their stories in order to document histories/herstories/theirstories so we so we know they were there.

Campbell X

REINVENTING MARVIN – The Origins

Though “Marvin” was inspired by “The End of Eddy” by Edouard Louis, your Marvin is not an adaptation of that book. Tell us how the film was born.

I felt a very strong connection to the hero of the book by Edouard Louis, and I almost immediately felt like I wanted to make his story my own. I wanted to invent a new destiny for him. Explore the way he had to reconstruct himself after such a difficult separation from that family, and that subculture of France, socially and culturally disinherited. Dream up the crucial influences of his teenage years. In short, adapt it so liberally that “Marvin” could no longer be considered an adaptation, though the book was powerful.

How do you explain the connection that you feel with this character?

I like the idea that powerful people can escape what they are born into, that nothing is ever predestined or doomed, and that it’s possible to transform obstacles into strengths. That is what has always guided me. How do we manage to do that? How do we succeed in transcending difficulties? Those are questions that I, as a completely self-made person, can identify with. Marvin’s journey fascinated me as much as Coco Chanel’s. She, too, was able to invent herself, though she came from an extremely disadvantaged background.

Marvin also has to deal with being different. Having nothing in common with his family or classmates, he is totally alone.

Yes. You’d think he came from another planet. He has the face of an angel, and it’s as if his beauty stimulates the cruelty of others. He is an object of sadistic treatment to his classmates and an object of shame to his family. But that grace, that expression of femininity he carries within him – which is the cause of all that violence – is precisely what will feed his creativity and allow him to find his own path.

Your characterization of the family is never insulting; it even lends them certain humanity.

I felt it was important not to disparage those characters and pin them down like butterfly specimens. It’s their subculture that gave them those often terrifying phrases they say. They do it almost despite themselves; they think from where they stand, with their close-minded languaging. My co-author Pierre Trividic and I didn’t want to judge them.

Despite his ideas, the father is almost touching.

He says “faggots are awful… it’s a disease.” He is obsessed with the norm, but you can tell he is not mean. He has never hit his children, which is already progress by comparison to the previous generation. He is never outright violent. He even makes an effort when he takes Marvin to the train station and gives him money to buy Coca-Cola. He tries to be interested, and that makes him moving because we know full well that he doesn’t care about theater. That’s somewhere else, in another world.

You make him, as well as the character of Marvin’s mother, truly poetic.

There is something theatrical about the father. He makes a show of who he is. He’s not a hick, as his daughter points out. Strangely enough, there is love in that family. It’s lively and complex. Marvin can feed off of that material.

Which feeds them in return?

Yes. In the end, the father manages to say the word “gay” and talk about homosexual marriage. He has opened a door.

The older brother ends up being the only one in the family who is unreachable.

That is also a possible truth of that subculture: the incredible violence that suddenly breaks out from nothing, from the fact that their little brother was hiding in the church to eat candy. Combined with alcohol and his vision of Marvin (a representation of homosexuality), it triggers in Gerald an irrepressible urge to bash. It’s a horrible scene. Dramatically, it was important for the parents to step in. But I wouldn’t say that Gerald is “unreachable.” None of their destinies are set in stone.

You have never delved into that community.

Not being from it myself, I did question my own legitimacy. But I brushed that away pretty quickly. You don’t have to be in it to talk about it. What is essential is to feel things. And I knew them, in a certain way, through one of my grandmothers, who ran a small business under very tough living conditions and who was culturally very close to the Bijou family –

anti-homo, anti-black, anti-everything. As a kid, that intellectual poverty struck me deeply. But she was also a generous woman with amazing humanity. I loved that grandma and got inspiration from her, of course. Just as I got inspiration from the families I met in the area around Epinal – people who are forgotten, living on the edge in incredible poverty and often very close to the Front National. I really settled into the region and stay put. That was the best way to understand it from the inside. Though I’m not obsessed by the documentary aspect, what I showed had to ring true.

Being DISCREET with director Travis Mathews

We caught up with director Travis Mathews to talk about the origins of DISCREET his chilling new thriller that is being distributed by Peccadillo.

What was the genesis of this project?

Late in the summer of 2015, I had just stepped away from a much-delayed project and needed to do something that felt urgent and unafraid.

I dropped into my surroundings and listened to what was going on around me. At the time, I was driving around central Texas in a borrowed van that was a radio/cassette situation, so I indulged in
talk radio. Having grown up in rural Ohio, I was familiar with the A.M. dial, but what I heard sounded noticeably different, like the drumbeat to war. There was an unhinged desperation in these
voices and the rumbling sounds of the “alt-right”.

If these conservative voices were to be believed, some justifiable violence against “outsiders” seemed imminent. White, rural America was prepared to make their country great again!

The zeitgeist was so thick with unease, I wanted to write something that embodied this kind of “nation on the edge” anxiety. I set out to write a story that explored the ways in which populist insecurities about losing power intersected with, and informed, individual views on masculinity and sexuality. Alex, the hero in the film, is a distillation of this caustic soup. He’s unwell, to put it mildly.

As Alex’s mental state came into focus, every creative and editorial choice was made to service his cinematic representation. For me, this is one of the most exciting parts of the process. As a character comes into view, especially one as complicated as Alex, there’s a real joy in discovering what visual or sound expressions would most represent him. It’s also a process that brings real cohesion to the filmmaking team because we start to share ownership of this vision.

How does this film comment on contemporary gay male sexuality?

In Texas towns, both big and small, I turned on gay hookup apps like Grindr and Hornet to see how 2015 was translating among locals. I expected to find closeted guys, but I wasn’t prepared for the degree of racism, internalized homophobia, and the general fear of being seen, that was rampant. What fascinated me most were the profiles labeled discreet, and the men hiding behind black boxes in lieu of faces or even anonymous torsos. Shame was feeding the darkness, amplifying mythologized ideas of what a real man should be. It was the same wholesome mythology being propagated by rural -assumed straight- white conservatives.

Many of these guys on the apps are no different than the men on conservative radio. They’re both terrified of being outed as a lesser version of this kind of a Marlboro man ideal. It’s fear of being emasculated. And as demographics shift, turning America more brown, more tolerant, more fluid and more urban, their entire way of life is felt as under attack. This is how I understand the right’s
perverse and draconian actions and also the black boxes men hide behind.

This film delves deeply into one man’s brutal psyche – what was your cinematic process to create and visualise his internal world?

I think in all my work I’ve put a premium on men who express vulnerabilities very candidly. I’ve
explored this with sex and intimacy, but also in terms of loneliness and isolation. In Discreet, these same themes are explored with Alex, while I’ve also tried to make him an amplified reflection of the zeitgeist. As we all know, it’s pretty damn dark out there. But to be honest, Alex initially entered my head much more innocently. I was at Barton Springs in Austin with one of my producers, just riffing off of each other in the water. It was a little like a Richard Linklater moment, which I think is hilarious, thinking back. Anyway, my producer tells me about this Texas guy who films construction sites, dump truck videos more specifically, and has millions of views. It’s just one camera set up, one shot, for hours. He has all sorts of videos that take distinct sounds and/or images and puts them on a multi-hour loop. An early favorite of mine is a looping 8-hour video of bacon frying. Something really clicked with that one, so I started imagining the kind of person who would think to film this. That’s where my exploration of Alex started, before I knew anything else about him. He could have had a quirky romantic comedy in front of him, but it didn’t turn out that way.

His videos were my first entry point, and where I let my mind wander. When it clicked that his videos were actually a strange attempt to find calm, control, and some sort of psychic peace, it started to make sense with the zeitgeist and his character started to emerge. All around us, there’s the sense that something bad is coming, it feels like dread, like the setup to a dystopian thriller or a horror movie. And it’s only gotten worse since I wrote the early drafts of Discreet. This kind of madness in the air had a real impact on the evolution and the final outcome of the film. Initially, the story was more overtly political, more linear and more violent. But as months passed between the summer of 2015 up to the weeks following the US presidential election, the story of Alex started to take on a more surreal and restrained kind of internal horror. He – like most of us – was trying to survive this onslaught of crazy the best he knew how.

Jonny Mars’ central performance as Alex anchors the film – what was your collaborative process like?

Jonny and I were introduced by the filmmaker, and mutual friend, Kat Kandler. She and Jonny had worked together on Kat’s great Hellion short, where Jonny plays an aging heavy-metal God trying to do right in the world. That was my introduction to Jonny Mars. And when I started to share the bigger ideas of who I thought Alex was, and could be, almost everyone suggested that I connect with him. We were in different cities at the time, so before meeting, we spent a lot of long phone calls just deep diving into politics. Jonny’s really smart, and fully committed to his strong moral compass. He’s also up to do virtually anything on film, if it’s a smart choice that’s right for the character. This was reassuring because I knew from the start that “Alex” would be in some fucked up situations and head spaces.

Jonny jumped into the pool and we became fast friends. We also shared the same sense of urgency about making a film that would speak to this moment. It quickly made sense to bring Jonny even closer, and to have his involvement as a producer. Jonny, myself, and Don Swaynos – our tireless lead producer – were at the center of constructing Alex all the way through, and despite the heavy nature of the film, we tempered it with a lot of playfulness. Both Don and Jonny wore a lot of hats. Jonny, in particular, was somehow able to deliver these gutting performances then switch on a dime with production notes for something unrelated, and happening on another day. I also think that because we were independent, we had the creative freedom to go bold, which is what was required for this story to work. It’s that kind of creative freedom that allows a cohesive team to purr.

What does your film say about technology as something that is alienating society?

There’s a lot of isolation and long-distance attempts at intimacy via strange uses of technology in the Discreet world. It’s almost like traditional coping methods and ideas of intimacy have been proven to be ineffective and Alex is trying out new ones with imperfect results. The connections in Discreet seem transactional, based on primal needs for survival. It’s as if simple desire has become
so scarce that it’s maybe not to be trusted. And you see how that tug of war over desire plays out in Alex’s head. He’s tortured by it and distrustful of it.

As a country, I see us increasingly moving in this protectionist direction, which drives personal isolation and nativist tendencies. There’s the sense that things aren’t good out there, so close the borders, close your doors and just sit with your phones. What’s real, who can you trust? A lot of rational minds feel like we’ve entered a new epoch, and it has the smell of 1984 or Brave New World. There’s so much free-floating anxiety in America right now, that many people’s impulse is to cave inward and to isolate. Alex is a manifestation of all this.

What are your cinematic / aesthetic influences for this film?

Early on we were quite attuned to the Travis Bickle Taxi Driver nature of Alex. I also took deep dives into psychological thrillers like Polanski’s apartment trilogy, and horror, e.g., The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While I was writing, I binge-watched How to Make a Murderer. Many of my initial dream locations came from freeze frames in that series. The rural community it depicts has a perverse loyalty to maintaining power at any cost, even at the risk of destroying lives. It’s a theme echoed in Discreet.

Unrelated to movies, I was obsessed with the freeways in Texas. Beyond being synonymous with America, the Texas freeways (the interchanges especially) always seemed unnecessarily jumbo-sized. As someone who lives in San Francisco and hasn’t owned a car in almost 20 years, I’m sure it was amplified for me, but it all seemed a little ridiculous. Because Alex is a drifter who lives out of his van, always on the road, it made sense to pay more attention to the freeways in the film’s world. Here are these man-made monsters, an expression of Texas muscularity, that Alex can’t get away from. In almost every location in the film, the freeways are always looming or threatening to strangle.

DISCREET can be seen as both a timely and timeless statement not only one man’s violent internal struggle, but an allegory on social strife in America and even the world. What are your thoughts on this viewing of your film?

By now, we all know that there are populist movements happening around the world, especially in Europe. Right wing nationalists are securing power with the rabid support of voters who feel pushed out by globalization. And this is so often done by appealing to people’s base desire for scapegoats, simple, answers, and fairytales about reverting back to a “more pure” time. From Texas to France, these are mythologies about national muscularity, brute masculinity that doesn’t
answer to anyone.

So, despite the film’s focused critique of America, with few changes Alex could be a Frenchman or an Englishman struggling with the same issues. These “patriarchy on the run” mythologies are not the exclusive domain of America.

Travis Mathews

MARIO a revealing look at homosexuality in The Beautiful Game.

No matter who I talk to, hardly anyone understands why it should be a problem to be an openly gay professional football player in 2018. As early as 2013, many German politicians as well as high-ranking club functionaries and representatives of professional associations took a stand and signed the “Berlin Declaration” – a position paper against homophobia in sport. We know that there are gay football players, and club-internally they receive professional guidance and management. But towards the outside, the silence is maintained.

Coming out in professional football is still a taboo. The blame for this is passed back and forth. Some say reactionary fan groups are the problem. Others point to the sponsors, who could bail out. Or individual players from chauvinistic cultures who would not be able to deal with the situation. Corny Littmann, former President of the St. Pauli football club in Hamburg, Germany, and gay himself, gave an interview on the topic in 2012. Asked why not a single player had come out as gay yet, he answered that this would be stupid. “Only a fool would do that.” Littmann regards the world of football as a professional field lacking the social competencies to deal with a coming-out.

Homophobic clichés and small-mindedness are still widespread, according to him. On average, a football player can pursue his career for 16 years and changes clubs every two to three years. He is a commodity, bought and sold again as lucratively as possible. An openly gay player would, however, encounter problems when trying to find a new club. He would be seen as “difficult”, even if his athletic performance were high. Coming out would therefore destroy his market value – and with it his entire career. So is everything, as so often in our society, a question of money?

In 2018 the FIFA World Cup will be carried out in Russia, a country that discriminates against and ostracises homosexuals. 2022 will see the World Cup in Qatar, a country that punishes homosexuality with five years’ imprisonment or 90 whiplashes. As we know, football is big business, and FIFA will make sure that nothing comes in the way of that – least of all the gay question. And we will follow both cups with excitement, and we will pay to see the games. In the end, the current status quo regarding homosexuality in professional football is a contract we have all entered into. But the weight of self-denial is a weight that the gay players carry alone.

When screenwriter Thomas Hess approached me in 2010 with his idea to make a feature film on the topic of gay love in professional football, my first question was: Hasn’t that film already been made? The topic was already present in the media, but our research showed that, apart from numerous news features, there was only a comedy dating from 2004.

The great football love story, however, had not yet been made for cinema. This is why I committed to the project. Apart from the topical relevancy, I felt very much like making another love story twenty years after “F.est un salaud”. Since classical literature, love stories that are framed by any kind of forbidden love have moved us the most. I saw the opportunity to tell a truly moving story in the given social context of a modern forbidden love. It was important to me to illustrate this context as realisticallyand contemporarily as possible. The football club BSC YB from Berne, Switzerland, generously supported me during the research and script development phases. During shooting BSC YB and the St. Pauli football club provided us with infrastructure, materials, and their names, for which I am very grateful.

Marcel Gisler

Director and co-writer of MARIO – Marcel Gisler

Meet the Amatos – with THE CIAMBRA Director Jonas Carpignano

In the first part of a two part interview, writer / director Jonas Carpignano talks with us about about casting the Amato family in his film THE CIAMBRA.

Writer-Director Jonas Carpignano

How did you first encounter the Amato family?

The first time I met the Amato family was in 2011 after the Fiat Panda filled with my crew’s film equipment was stolen. We were in Gioia Tauro (Calabria) shooting A Chjana (the short film which would later become Mediterranea). In Gioia Tauro, when a car disappears, the first thing you do is “go to the gypsies.”

That’s when I saw the Ciambra for the first time. I immediately fell in love with the energy of the place. Whenever I tell this story, Pio says that he remembers seeing me, but at the time I didn’t notice him – there was too much to take in. We had to wait three days to get the car back because Pio’s grandfather (the Nonno Emilian character is based on him) had just died and they wouldn’t negotiate the ransom for the car until after the funeral. Clearly that funeral procession made a big impression on me because five years later I wrote it into the film. Needless to say the entire situation had an enormous impact on me and soon after I wrote the first draft of the short version of A Ciambra.

It’s hard to generalize the position of the Romani in Italian society, and I don’t have the space here to really get into the complexities of their situation in Italy or in Europe in general. The fact is that they are not a monolithic group. There are those who have risen to the top of the organized crime pyramid like the Casamonica in Rome; or the hard working blue collar Romani who have everyday jobs and are indistinguishable from other Italians; or the nomads who live in squalid trailer camps created by local governments on the periphery of many major Italian towns; and countless other examples. What is relevant for the film is the role the Romani of the Ciambra play in Gioia Tauro and their relationship with the newly arrived African immigrants in Southern Italy. While I think that looking at this example can, hopefully, speak to a more universal condition, the goal with this film was never to shine a light on these broader sociological factors. I am interested in Pio and Ayiva and I think the film clearly articulates their relationship – specifically, its potential and its limits.

Pio Amato stole the show in Mediterranea and your short film A Ciambra (2014). Was it always your intention to go back and write a film around him and his family?

I met people who had all kinds of opinions while I was on the road with Mediterranea, but one thing that was consistent was the complete, utter love and appreciation for Pio. He has, as my friends in New Orleans say, it. Whatever it is, Pio has enough to burn, and I realized that the second I met him.

That said, I had intended to make a feature in the Ciambra before I ever met Pio, even before we started shooting Mediterranea. Casting the short version of A Ciambra was exactly like casting the short version of A Chjana. I went into the Ciambra with a rough idea of a story. Once I met Pio, I revised the story to take into account him and his family. Biographical elements of the Amato family ended up reshaping and altering the story in the same way that Koudous Seihon’s story shaped Mediterranea.

In both cases, after meeting the protagonist, I tried to make the films as true to their protagonists’ experiences as possible, while keeping some semblance of dramatic structure. In the case of A Ciambra (the short), I was interested in telling the tale of two brothers. In the winter of 2013 I started going to the Ciambra regularly to cast the film and the first person I was drawn to was Pio’s older brother.

At first he was completely against the idea of being in a film. He was so reluctant that one of the producers encouraged me to find someone else. However, I couldn’t see anyone else playing the role, so I kept after him for months.

A week or so later, Pio and I began becoming closer. He had shed his initial distrust for an outsider and it became clear that he and I had a special bond. It’s hard to describe what and how it happened but both of us knew, pretty quickly, that we would be important to each other. In a lot of ways his relationship with Ayiva in the film is a combination of his relationship with Koudous and with me. The first testament to that was when Pio helped me convince his brother to be in the short. It was our first success, kind of.

Kind of?

I say “kind of” because in reality Cosimo is played by two twins, Cosimo and Damiano Amato. I was always after Damiano, but for the short film I had to use Cosimo because Damiano wasn’t having it. Finally, by the time it was time to make the feature, Damiano came around to the idea and the film is all the better for it.

You have managed to get remarkable leading performances out of non-professional actors Pio Amato (and his family). What’s your approach in working with cast?

It’s different for each cast member. My approach to working with Pio was very different from my approach with Koudous, Iolanda, Pasquale or even my father, who played the guy at the train station. If there were one consistent element in working with all of them I’d say it was the atmosphere I tried to create. I am very militant on how many people are allowed on set, who is watching, and so on. Since we are always shooting in real locations, often in people’s houses, I never want to feel like we are altering the natural rhythm of the place. I always said to the crew that we need to adapt our approach to them, instead of trying to impose a traditional filmmaking infrastructure upon them. That would have never worked. So I think that by going with the flow, we were able to create a very safe atmosphere where people didn’t feel exposed. I’m not sure I could have gotten the same performances if I brought the A Ciambra cast to shoot those scenes on a soundstage in Rome, for example.

I also spent a lot of time breaking down barriers between the cast and myself. It was not a “professional” relationship. There was a deep familiarity between us which I think is why they were willing to go places when I asked them to. I can’t remember who said it recently, but I recall hearing: “There are two styles of directing. One where you stand still and demand that the actors come to you. And one where you go where they are and try to steer them in the direction you think is best.” I clearly fall into the second category.

Read part two of this interview here.

Tamara Shogaolu talks about HALF A LIFE from Boys on Film 18: Heroes

Tamara Shogaolu, the director of the stunning short film Half a Life – part of Boys on Film 18: Heroes – chats about her inspiration for the film and the experience she had making it:

How did you meet the narrator, and what led you to want to tell his story?

Over the course of two years before, during and after the revolution, I traveled around Egypt collecting oral histories of a variety of people—mostly women, activists and members of marginalized communities. It was a time of openness where people felt like they could talk and be honest and for that I feel incredibly fortunate.

The plan was always to make an animated documentary film based on these oral histories. We felt an urgency to share this story first because of the active persecution of LGBT individuals in Egypt at the moment. We are also currently developing an interactive augmented reality animated
documentary based on some of the other interviews.

Where does the title “Half a Life” come from?

The title of HALF A LIFE is inspired by Khalil Gibran’s poem of the same name. It speaks to the value of individual action, commitment, and resistance, like the film’s interviewee and main character. The film ends with a selection from the poem:

The half is a mere moment of inability
but you are able for you are not half a being
You are a whole that exists
to live a life not half a life

How and why did you decide the documentary should be animated?

Animation has allowed us to protect the identity of the people involved in the story, but it also affords us the artistic freedom to convey its emotion visually and viscerally. It also emphasizes Adam’s voice as he tells his story, offering us a firsthand look into the gay experience in Egypt today.

How was the experience for you as the director?

It has been an incredible experience. I have been working on this project for years and was finally able to get a really great team together. Everyone was really involved in all aspects of telling this story. This is the first animated film I direct and was also the first narrative film for the animation team. We were also incredibly lucky to have wonderful mentors who gave us key feedback to make the film and story more powerful.

What do you hope the impact of this film will be?

Like Adam, many Egyptians love Egypt, while they are struggling against the very backlash that many involved with the 2011 revolution feared. Our team is devoted to sharing Adam’s story, and it is our hope that this film can embolden and contribute to the movement for gay rights taking place in Egypt right now.

Boys on Film 18: Heroes is released on 30/04/2018 and you can order your copy here.

BEACH RATS – The Origin

Writer / Director Eliza Hittman talks about the original ideas behind her award winning film BEACH RATS.

BEACH RATS

When Eliza Hittman’s debut feature, IT FELT LIKE LOVE, premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, it was hailed as a refreshingly unsentimental, original and visually poetic portrait of a teenage girl’s sexual coming-of-age. Hittman was lauded as a filmmaker to watch, and the accolades continued as IT FELT LIKE LOVE played additional festivals and went into theatrical release in 2014. Richard Brody of The New Yorker named it one of the 20 best films of 2014 and wrote “Even as the movie delves deep into the characters’ complex emotional lives, it subtly and gradually—yet ineluctably—conjures a world that I was sorry to leave. I didn’t want the movie to end.”

Hittman knew she would be expected to tell another female-centered story with her second feature, but she wanted to challenge industry assumptions and herself as a filmmaker. She wanted to continue to plumb the outer and inner lives of young people, but chose a different focus. “I grew up in a family where all conversations around sexuality were taboo. I watched someone be brutalized because of their sexuality, but I’ve been barred from writing about my family specifically. My firsthand experiences with homophobia haunt my youth and inspired me to tell a story about a character wrestling with sexuality. I wanted to take on something that was very masculine, and explore the intense pressures on young men to live traditionally masculine lives in an environment with no clear alternative, role model or way out.” BEACH RATS began production on July 25, 2016, and shot for 25 days in different parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

In considering a setting for the story, she was drawn back to the South Brooklyn working-class neighborhoods of IT FELT LIKE LOVE. A native of Flatbush, Brooklyn, Hittman came to know the borough’s coastal communities through high school friends who lived in places like Manhattan Beach. “I’ve always been a little bit fascinated with those neighborhoods and I’d spend a lot of the summer just flopping around those beaches,” she says. “It’s a part of Brooklyn that feels caught between past and present. Those areas have a history of violence of all kinds–crimes against people of color and gay men, and organized crime–and, unlike other parts of the City, change has come very slowly.

Harris Dickinson plays Frankie in BEACH RATS

Her image of the main character in BEACH RATS came from a Facebook image she’d found while researching wardrobe and set design for IT FELT LIKE LOVE. “It was a guy standing at a mirror holding his phone, with a big flash from the camera,” she says. “He had his shirt off and this hat on, and the visor was sort of masking his eyes. It looked like he was about to pull down his gym shorts and take a picture of his dick. There was this tension between hyper-masculine and homoerotic that the picture so clearly illustrated.”

At the same time, Hittman also became interested in Internet-related violence in the LGBTQ community, violence that has had a significant presence in these outer reaches of the City as a microcosm of events that happen throughout the world. The horrifying nature and similarities within stories where dating sites are used to lure people into sexual encounters that end with robbery, beatings, and even death. Hittman says “it’s a very dark subject, one that I know will have a divergent response as it’s a difficult topic that continually recurs.”

From there, Hittman started building out the world of Frankie, a 19-year-old facing an aimless summer at an uncertain moment in his life. His father is in the last stages of cancer, dying in hospice care in the family living room. Frankie spends his days killing time, getting high and hanging out with three delinquent fellow beach rats. At home, he squirrels himself away in the basement, where he can flirt with older men online without anyone knowing. But when a self-assured, sexy local girl named Simone makes a play for him on a Friday night at Luna Park, he awkwardly goes along with it.

Eliza Hittman writer / director of BEACH RATS

Maysaloun Hamoud director of IN BETWEEN

Born to communist parents in Budapest where her father was studying medicine, Maysaloun grew up in Dir Hanna, a village in the North of Israel.

After a Masters in History of the Middle East at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Maysaloun’s interest shifted towards cinema. In 2012, she graduated from the Minshar School of Art in Tel Aviv. She has been living and working in Jaffa for the past nine years.

From 2010 to 2013, Maysaloun was in charge of communications at the Tel Aviv based NGO SADAKA, which promotes political and social change.

Since 2009, she is a member of the group PALESTINEMA, a group of young filmmakers whose objective is to promote Arab culture by organising screenings of films in Israel and Palestine

Maysaloun Hamoud, July 2017 Tel Aviv Yaffo.

Maysaloun Hamoud -photo by Anne Maniglier

Maysaloun Hamoud in conversation with Haggai Matar – +972 Magazine

Is Tel Aviv the condition for freedom? Could this happen elsewhere, or is the Jewish hegemony in which the story is set needed for the girls’ feminist liberation?

“The movie takes place in Tel Aviv, because I wanted the imagery to be within a hegemonic space, but the scene in which they live is in Jaffa. The essence of the scene is Jaffa-Tel Aviv, and the plot-lines draw a lot of inspiration from what happens around me and from real characters in my own life…

Tel Aviv is a city, and that’s what a city does. It challenges. The same things would likely happen in Beirut or Amman…Tel Aviv is not the Berlin of the Middle East. It’s just the city that’s here. The scene here is unique because it’s Jewish-Arab, with a lot of mutual influence. Most young Palestinians in the city believe in a shared life, while the Jews [in this particular community] are left-wing and anti-Zionist, which is like a glue that creates mixed couples.”

The difference between religion and the religious

… “The atmosphere of the Arab Spring didn’t skip Palestine/Israel, we were all with them in spirit — in the opposition to oppression, patriarchy, chauvinism and the perpetuation of the old system. This generation can no longer continue playing around with obsolete codes. We have to put everything on the table, because as long as we keep sweeping our fears under the carpet, the carpet will rise and we will stumble. Fundamentalism is a serious disease, and if we don’t shake out the carpet it’s likely going to be too late.”

Now that the film has been commercially released, what response are you expecting to these sentiments, which are also at the heart of the movie?

“Some people will want to hang us in the town square, for sure. The conservatives. The film does something very clever: I don’t say a single bad thing about religion. Everyone has his own faith. That’s not what the religious say, but even among them there are no ‘bad guys.’ There are characters you fall in love with in conservative society as well. Nour wears a hijab; she isn’t leaving the faith. Yes, she’s searching for a place of liberation in her own world — the religious, believing world — and that’s the place I’m searching for. So I’m very curious as to what the religious will pick up from the film.

The film doesn’t let liberals off the hook. It holds up a mirror to them too. We all know those families, Christian or Muslim, that are terribly open, but in moments of truth everyone falls in line behind the same traditions. It’s not just Nour’s family from Umm al-Fahm — it’s also that of Salma, the Christian. And the film doesn’t go easy on Jews, either. Maybe they’ll say, ‘Hey, it happens among us too, how great,’ but they need to address the fact that they always leave Arabs out. It’s a case of not here, not there. But the essence [of the film] is the intra-Palestinian conversation.”

InBetween5_ImagebyYaniv_Berman small web

Drugs and alcohol are a significant part of the film — marijuana, MDMA and more. What does that mean to you?

“First of all, during the first party in the film they’re taking Ritalin, and that’s intentional, because the parents watching the movie are themselves giving their kids Ritalin. Coke generates more antagonism, so I didn’t put an emphasis on it.

But there’s more to say beyond that. We want to say that the current period is like the Sixties of the Arab world, and in an underground which you don’t want in the Middle East, everyone is taking every drug. It’s integral to the scene, and it influences identity, politics and culture. If we’re already doing it, why not show it?”

Balls in the face of BDS [The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.]

Success aside, In Between also sheds light on the complications of politics and identity faced by many Palestinian citizens of Israel who are filmmakers. For example, Hamoud put together a soundtrack featuring original music by artists from different countries in the region, whose names she could not publish and who couldn’t be credited in the movie. The movie also features music by DAM, a Palestinian hip-hop group from Lod, who wrote a dance song especially for the film. “They were amazing collaborators and I love them so much,” Hamoud says.

Other artists who saw earlier versions of the movie wanted to collaborate, but ultimately felt that their reputation would be in danger if they worked on a film funded by Israeli government institutions.

One day, Hamoud met a musician in Ramallah who was especially enthusiastic when he heard the movie’s plot and watched some of the rushes. “So I told him, yalla, we’ve put ourselves on the line for this movie, put yourselves on the line and say, ‘We’ll be the first people to look at the complexity, at the Palestinians who are inside [Israel – h.m.].’ But in the end they refused, despite knowing that they were contradicting themselves. There’s no link between the synchronization among us and the separation that reality has created.

“Yes, the state is giving me money, because I deserve to make films from the money I pay [in taxes]. I’m not ashamed, and I deserve even more. And still, I would have taken money from elsewhere in order to lift the cloud of a boycott, but there’s nowhere else. So I took from the state, and the film will be screened as an Israeli-French movie, despite it being mostly Arab-Palestinian.”

InBetween11_Yaniv_Berman small web

Bitter candy

“People in the Israeli cinema world have never worked with the Arab community. They don’t know what it is. Arabs don’t go to the movies much, because there aren’t cinemas in their communities, they watch Hollywood films at home and there are no local movies they want to see. Now all of a sudden they have a reason to go out, and we need to make use of this swell in order to bring other people into the industry.”

But the most important thing of all for Hamoud is her dream that her movie will open up a “new era of representation of women in Palestinian cinema, in which the woman is at the center and not behind the male character,” she says.

“In most Palestinian movies the political story dominates the plot, and so [women] are generally represented as victims. Even in my early movies [filmed when she was a student – h.m.] I told women’s stories via men’s heroics. The women I want to show are all around us but are invisible in the movies. Gender, activism and liberation from the patriarchy can be feminist, even if that word doesn’t necessarily define the women themselves. One way of telling this complex story of women, and the weighty issues that accompany it, was to wrap the whole tale in simple cinematic language, almost American. It’s also the women’s internal language in the film. They are burdened by the outside world, but they see themselves in the same image we are accustomed to seeing in the cinematic output of a liberated and vibrant society. The film’s producer, Shlomi Elkabetz, calls this “bitter candy” — something wrapped in flamboyance and beauty. You get into the film, and then get kicked in the stomach.”

Translated from Hebrew by Natasha Roth.

What are little boys made of..?

If you’re blind to what is different, this story is not for you. But if your eyes are open, you should listen carefully

Every so often a film comes along where it is incredibly difficult to find the right tone. With GIRLS LOST we have been through countless design concepts and have really discussed, argued and fought over how it should look, how the synopsis should read, how to present this to the audience and even who that audience should be.

We’ve never had it like this on a single title before. But I have to say that after months of changing minds, designs and words we’ve finally cracked it, literally the day of release!

It’s an amazing film, in fact one for all the family! Read more below…

Kim (as a girl) and Momo (as a girl) from GIRLS LOST

Kim (as a boy) and love interest Tony from GIRLS LOST

“Girls Lost is maturely executed, offering a discussion that presents us with ideas that cannot be considered in haste, the post-contemplation of the film necessary.” HeyUGuys

Here’s the synopsis follow link

You can find out where and how to watch GIRLS LOST : http://www.girlslostfilm.com/

Interview with Asaf Korman – Director of Next To Her

How did you come across the idea for this film?

The idea for the film and the characters came from my wife, screenwriter and actress Liron Ben Shlush. Back in 2009 — she was still my girlfriend then – she told me she wanted to write a script based on her own experiences growing up with a mentally disabled sister. Talking about it for a while, we understood that this film will not be about looking after; it will be about a woman neglecting her own life for the sake of another person, and the dangers this neglect enfolds.

How was it working as a couple on the film?

Our combination, as a couple and as a screenwriter\actress and her director, defined the essence of this film. During the writing we got married and had our first child together, realizing that the film is not only about a situation of co-dependency, but also about parent-hood, about the boundaries we are forced to deal with when taking care of another person. There was a lot of anxiety before filming started. Liron had to perform nudity and love scenes with another man, and she had to deal with Dana Ivgy re-enacting her own real life sister. Eventually, these were the easiest parts of filming. The nudity and sex were technical, and the resemblance of Dana to Liron’s real sister allowed her to relate to her and made her feel comfortable.

The challenge in working with Liron on the character of Chelli was the fact that she wrote it. We had to find a way making every situation in the film new to Liron, making her forget everything she wrote so she can experience the scenes as if they are the present reality, and not something meticulously tailored in writing. The fact that the lead actress of the film was always the only person on set knowing better then everyone the meaning of the scenes and actions was both helpful and dangerous, but the strength of the emotional connection to the story, and the semi-autobiographical elements of it, allowed her to create an amazingly complex and ambiguous character that is both her and the troubled women she could have become. This film is an act of love, in the most complex and challenging sense. It is an act of cooperation that encloses passion and pleasure, side by side with struggle and distress. It is an act of observation, of looking deep into each other’s eyes, which required true exposure, without compromise. In that sense, the film is also a continuation of my short film DEATH OF SHULA, that also touched the edge of exposure, revolving around the family’s deepest of fears, and crossing borderline between fiction and real life.

Film making demands collaboration with hundreds of people. How did you manage to work on such a personal film with others?

It was very liberating to be able to share our intimate and personal cinematic dream with a whole bunch of creative people. Our producers Haim Mecklberg and Estee Yam Mecklberg (2-team Productions) played an integral part in all the artistic aspects of the film, from start to finish, sharing their passion, vast experience and uncompromising love for filmmaking. We also had a very enthusiastic production designer, Ron Zikno, who managed to build the main location of the film as if the characters lived there forever, and filled the set with objects from Liron’s childhood memories which he carefully researched. Amit Yasour, the director of photography, apart from bringing his innovative cinematic approach and subtle style, created an artistic and non-technical environment on set which allowed us to focus on telling this story, with all the emotional challenges, the best way we could.

Watching the film, one could think that Gabby is portrayed by a real mentally challenged actress. How did the actress manage to do that?

The actress portraying the disabled sister is a famous Israeli actress, Dana Ivgy. I met Dana in high school, she is a very close friend of mine for many years and she was lead actress in the first short film I made in high school when we were 18 years old. We have been waiting to work together again ever since, and me and Liron knew we would cast her from the early stages of writing. Our close friendship was what allowed us to trust each other going into the wild journey this character demanded. In order to play the role of Gabby, Dana worked very long hours at the hostel in Haifa where the real sister of Liron is living. She researched a lot and met doctors and specialists, trying to deeply understand the physical and mental state of the character. We also rehearsed quite a bit, trying to master the gestures of the two sisters and reach the intimacy of siblings that was so crucial to the credibility of the film.

Next To Her will be released in cinemas and on-demand – March 11 at Curzon Bloomsbury, ICA, Art House Crouch End and Home Manchester.

If you’re blind to what is different, this story is not for you. But if your eyes are open, you should listen carefully

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