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N0 4 / 27 FEB – 1 MAR
28 Feb, GFT, 8.40pm | 1 Mar,GFT, 11am
Lost in Music Mia Hansen-Løve discusses her brilliant new film Eden, an intimate epic telling the history of the French Touch music scene through one DJ’s bloodshot eyes
M
ia Hansen-Løve is sitting legs folded, Buddhalike, on a straight back chair in a London hotel conference room. In her hand she’s unconsciously fiddling with a card of stickers covered in Disney princesses. She sees them catch my eye. “My daughter was playing in here before,” she explains. “I should put them away, really. People will think I’m weird.” She carries on
INTERVIEW: playing. One gets the impression the 34-year-old filmmaker doesn’t worry too much about what other people think of her. You can see this strength of character in her small but exquisite body of work. Her first three features (All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children and Goodbye First Love) reveal a filmmaker with a distinct voice all her own; one that is concerned with organic rhythm and gentle ironies rather than grand dramatics or convoluted scenarios. “I think it’s probably both my strength and my weakness,” she suggests of her low-key style. “It always brings me problems when I try to finance the script because people tell me there’s not enough drama, there’s not enough plot, not enough violence.
Jamie Dunn
The thing is, my own emotion works this way – I can’t help but trust it.” Take her latest film, Eden, which charts the rise of French house music from the early 90s to the present day. A more conventional filmmaker might want to tell the story from the point-of-view of one of the scene’s superstars, say Daft Punk. That electronic duo do make an appearance as baby-faced house party wax-spinners, but Hansen-Løve’s focus instead is Paul, a contemporary of Daft Punk’s (he’s at the party where they premiere Da Funk), who didn’t quite make it. Hansen-Løve based the character on her own brother, Sven Hansen-Løve, who was a DJ on the French Touch scene and ended up left behind by the wave. continues…
27 FEB H I G H LI G H T S
Wake in fright
Wake In Fright Mackintosh Queen’s Cross, 9pm This dizzying outback psychodrama might be one of the most terrifying examinations of warped masculinity put to film. The Samurai GFT, 11pm The werewolf myth gets a queer makeover in this nightmarish thriller, as a young cop tries to stop a sword-wielding maniac’s rampage. Love Is All Mackintosh Queen’s Cross, 5.30pm Kim Loginotto celebrates love with this intricate archive film set to Richard Hawley’s swooning score.
“I’m much more inspired by people I know intimately than by fantasy stories,” she tells me when I ask about her choice to base the film on her brother’s experiences, “but also I thought it could be much more universal because, for every two Daft Punks, how many Pauls are there? A lot of people can connect with that music deeply but as far as it has to do with their lives and their path, I think Paul’s path is a very common one. The film is an intimate epic. It’s set over two decades, has dozens of characters, and scenes on either sides of the Atlantic, but it never strays far from its lead protagonist’s emotional imbroglios. “You’d think in twenty years you’d have lots of big events and dramatic moments, but – partly unconsciously – I avoid them and instead look at the aftermath or the moments that people don’t care about – but they are crucial to me.” Hansen-Løve is well aware this approach won’t be to every filmgoer’s taste. “Maybe I’m losing part of the public that need the more frontal storytelling,” she concedes, “but then I think about the other part of the public who can still connect with the film even more deeply from the fact that it is not conventional.” As the years roll on, Paul’s DJ regime leaves him in a kind of limbo, a world of euphoric, coke-fuelled nights that prevent him joining his friends in a more adult and family orientated lifestyle. It’s a pattern she’s observed in her brother and her other DJ friends and acquaintances. “It’s strange, actually, to see people who spend their lives in nightclubs, who don’t sleep at night, take drugs and alcohol, some of them die, but some of them seem to stay as if they were 25 forever.” Like in all tales of eternal youth, this blessing eventually becomes a curse. “Girls come and go and leave again, people die, the music changes – everything changes except [Paul]. He’s just like a vampire who stays young forever. At first you think it’s a power, but then it gets quite sad at some point.” Like in Hansen-Løve’s most recent film, Goodbye First Love, which takes place over eight years, there are no facile efforts to make Paul look older over the film’s timespan, which serves to enhance his arrested development. “In all the films where you have these special effects to make the actors look older, for me they make the films look like cinema,” she says.
“I was always more excited to make the films give a feeling of life. I’m not saying it’s the perfect solution, because the perfect solution would have been to wait 20 years, like in Boyhood, but I am not patient enough.”
“ I'm much more inspired by people I know intimately than by fantasy stories” Mia Hansen-Løve
While naturalism is clearly important to Hansen-Løve, there is a structural convention to all her films that do mark them out stylistically: they’re all presented in two halves with an ellipsis between acts, like an interval in a theatre production. In Eden’s case, the first part is titled ‘Paradise Garage’, the second ‘Lost in the Music’. Why does she favour this atypical two act form? “I don’t know why. I guess everybody who writes has some obsession, some way of thinking or a way of constructing stories that you feel comfortable with. I never intend to do films like that, it just happens.” This unconscious structural quirk does provide a pleasing mirror to the emotional dichotomy at the heart of all her films: a tension between the euphoria and melancholy of life. “I guess maybe it does have to do with the mixture of energies [in her films]: joy, a trust of life, something that’s a bit more upbeat, and there’s always a contradictory movement in them that’s more downbeat. I guess the emotion that makes me write always comes from these mixed feelings; it’s never black or white.” Whatever the reason, these conflicting emotions, she insists, have to be brought into the here and the now. “My films are connected with past and memories, but none of my films are locked in the past – I would not be interested in that at all.” The notion, for her, is far too morbid. “It’s totally necessary for me personally that my films connect with life, and the only way to do that is to bring them back to the present.”
R E VIE WS A Girl at My Door
27 Feb, GFT, 12.45pm 28 Feb, GFT, 8.20pm
Starring: Bae Doona, Kim Sae-ron, Song Sae-byeok
“ Thrumming with love, desire and violence paced”
This could so easily have been fluffed in less careful hands. Fortunately, writerdirector July Jung has a delicate touch, melding a weighty, challenging story with wonderful performances. The resulting picture, thrumming with love, desire and violence, is excellent. Young-nam (Bae Doona), the newly instated police chief in a small South Korean coastal town, has been transferred from Seoul on an obscure count of misconduct. She quickly finds herself
allied with young Do-hee (Kim Sae-ron) against the girl’s drunk and violent stepfather, Yong-ha (Song Sae-byeok). But Young-nam is a drinker too, downing rice wine she’s decanted into water bottles. And Do-hee shows increasing guile as she vies to escape her oppressive domestic circumstances. So though Yong-ha is certainly the villain, his stepdaugther and her protector show dark little flickers as they try to end his reign. There’s a definite seam of melodrama running right through A Girl at My Door. But Jung works with such clarity, and Bae and Kim are so strong, that the end product feels so very sharp. [Angus Sutherland]
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Illustration: Sophie Freeman
Director: July Jung
28 FEB
“ A pitch-black comedy that’s simultaneously full of raw emotion”
H I G H LI G H T S
Electric Boogaloo
Force Majeure
1 Mar, GFT, 7.30pm
Director: Ruben Östlund Starring: Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Kristofer Hivju, Vincent Wettergren, Clara Wettergren, Fanni Metelius, Karin Myrenberg, Brady Corbet
A Swedish family are on a ski holiday in the French Alps. Everything seems to be going great for Tomas (Kuhnke), Ebba (Kongsli) and their two kids. That is, until one fateful day when an avalanche strikes during lunch. The mountainside restaurant seems to be right in its path, and everyone around them is screaming at the terror about to unfold. Except, as his previous film (tricksy race relations drama Play) proved, things in writer-
director Ruben Östlund’s films never go down the route you might presume. The exact nature of how the avalanche aftermath unfolds will remain unspoiled here, but let’s just say that Mansplaining on Ice could work as a plausible alternative title for the film. In a formally playful fashion and manner largely free of didacticism, Östlund skewers the hollowness of many notions of gender roles and offers a pitch-black comedy that’s simultaneously full of raw emotion (Kongsli is absolutely fantastic) and as tense as many a great horror movie. A blizzard of discomfort and ambiguities. [Josh Slater-Williams]
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night Director: Ana Lily Amirpour Starring: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Dominic Rains
Junkies, dealers, swindlers, pimps and chancers, all shimmering in the dark night. As Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez did with their decidedly masculine Sin City, so writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour has captured Los Angeles on gorgeous black-and-white video to create the fictional Persian town of Bad City, for what she describes as “the first Iranian vampire western.” And as a gunslinger would rain justice down in those Wild West narratives
ONLINE REVIEWS Head to theskinny.co.uk/cineskinny for more reviews, including...
Wake In Fright The Boy in the World Eden
Dreamcatcher Burroughs: The Movie The Ninth Cloud
Electric Boogaloo CCA, 3.45pm As with Ozploitation doc Not Quite Hollywood, Mark Hartley shows an infectious enthusiasm for scurrilous filmmaking. In this case the focus is on Israeli film cowboys Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, whose Cannon Group never saw a good movie they couldn’t rip-off. Sea Without Shore GFT, 6.15 One of the picks of the Crossing the Line strand, this world premiere mixes theatre, dance and sound to create a journey into the subconscious. The Boy and the World CineWorld Parkhead, 3pm We’re head over heels for this charmer. In our five star review, we called it “a vibrant celebration of hand-drawn animation.”
27 Feb, GFT, 8.30pm 28 Feb, Grosvenor, 8.30pm
we’ve seen countless times before, so the moral arbiter here is the female bloodsucker. As disparate as its influences are the emotions Amirpour’s languid, moody, topsy-turvy piece inspire: it’s righteous, shocking, terrifying, iconic, funny, twistedly romantic and refreshingly unpredictable. The film also contains the year’s most erotically charged scene, which is all the more astonishing for being chaste: all it contains are two lonely young people listening to a record and longing to touch. [Ian Mantgani]
“ Twistedly romantic and refreshingly unpredictable”
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Love is All screens 27 Feb, Mackintosh Queen’s Cross, 5.30pm | Dreamcatcher screens 28 Feb, GFT, 3.45pm
1 MAR
H I G H LI G H T S
“ Often I end up making a film in a really horrible place… but it's because the story is so good”
Coming Home
Coming Home GFT, 4.45pm Zhang Yimou, one of the leading lights of China’s ‘fifth generation’, is back with what GFF are calling “his best film in a decade.”
Kim Longinotto
Taking Us on Journeys Kim Loginotto brings two typically great films to GFF – archive film Love is All and Sundance winner Dreamcatcher. The British documentarian reveals how these two very different works came to fruition
“O
ften I end up making a film in a really horrible place, you know, where I don’t really want to go, but it’s because the story is so good,” says Kim Longinotto, who has shot documentaries about female circumcision in Kenya, the Iranian divorce system, and prejudice against lower caste women in Uttar Pradesh, to mention just a few. But I’m speaking to her the week of Valentine’s Day, just before the release of Love is All, a sometimes euphoric, sometimes tragic chronicle of relationships made entirely from clips of British cinema history, scored by Richard Hawley. “It was a one-off,” she reports. “I absolutely loved doing it – I loved not going anywhere, I loved being in London, and looking at loads of archives.” Love is All was hardly heard amid the din of Fifty Shades of Grey, which was released on the same day and gained the all-time opening box-office gross for a female-directed film. Longinotto is too prolific for her work to be subsumed by the mass-market though: her new film, Dreamcatcher, which won the award for best documentary at Sundance, opens in the UK next month and both screen at Glasgow Film Festival. From a lush archive film to a handheld camera on the streets of Chicago, what both these films share and have in common with all Longinotto’s work are windows into extraordinarily unique times and places, and a fascinated concern for people making do when they’ve been marginalised by society. “I fell in love with Brenda,” she says about the subject of Dreamcatcher. A former prostitute and now an inspiring tower
INTERVIEW:
Ian Mantgani
of warmth, Brenda Myers-Powell runs a foundation that helps streetwalkers stay safe or change their lives, and counsels schoolchildren to avoid getting on that path. Brenda is frank about the lows of her own life, which culminated in being knifed and having facial reconstructive surgery. Experiences of growing up around prostitution and being sexually abused are heard from all the sex workers in the film, and in one extraordinary scene, several girls from Robeson High School open up on camera about having been sexually molested themselves or having to protect family members from the same crime. “Brenda’s lost for words and a bit shocked,” remembers Longinotto. “Because she’d been with them for two years at that point and none of them had come out.” Longinotto is an effusive, inquisitive filmmaker who gets people to reveal astonishing personal information. What’s her secret? “I don’t really like the idea of your persuading someone – that feels a bit weird to me,” she says. Nor does she slink into the background: “I’m very against this idea of ‘fly-on-the-wall,’ which is a horrible phrase anyway. Or being purely ‘observational,’ this silly idea that, you know, you say to people, ‘Don’t look at the camera.’” Rather, she wants her subjects to know that her camera is there to share their stories with the world. An anecdote from Dreamcatcher’s production illustrates this point. Longinotto tells me that one of the schoolgirls in the film said to her, “‘It’s like a journey we’re going on together we’re going to enjoy it. I did it for you.’ And what she meant was the audience who are going to watch it and there’s a point in saying it. And it was really exciting when they said that, and then after that I thought, Oh my God, I love making films – it’s so wonderful when that happens.”
Small Faces GFT, 2.10pm Gillies MacKinnon’s Small Faces is a vivid coming of age movie following three brothers as they skirt the fringes of gang culture in 60s Glasgow. An unsung gem of British cinema, GFF’s screening also acts as a mini cast and crew reunion. From What Is Before GFT, 1.30pm Hardcore movie fans/masochists [delete as appropriate] have one final treat in store as visionary Filipino director Laz Diaz delivers another arthouse epic. At 5h38m, you might want to bring a cushion.
Produced by The Skinny magazine in association with the Glasgow Film Festival: Editor
Jamie Dunn
Subeditor Will Fitzpatrick Picture Editor Eve Somerville Designer
Sigrid Schmeisser
Illustration
Louise Lockhart
Digital Editor Peter Simpson GFF Box Office Order tickets from the box office at www.glasgowfilm.org/festival or call: 0141 332 6535 or visit: Glasgow Film Theatre 12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 6RB info@glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk
The Skinny Short Film Showcase Thursday 12 March | 7.15pm, CCA, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow FREE ENTRY: tickets available on the day from CCA box office
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