Film & TV — 58 Design — 61 Food & Drink — 62 Books

Film of the Month — Hit the Road

Director: Panah Panahi Starring: Hassan Madjooni, Pantea Panahiha, Rayan Sarlak, Amin Simiar

RRRRR

Released 29 July by Picturehouse Entertainment Certificate 12A

theskinny.co.uk/film Iranian filmmaker Panah Panahi’s debut feature is kind of a miracle. Not just because it was shot under a regime so strict that Panahi’s own father, acclaimed director Jafar Panahi, has been legally forbidden from practising his craft while his sister, Solmaz Panahi, was forced to flee the country after starring in one of their father’s films. But because it somehow manages to translate this anxiety into a film that moves with the lightness of a road trip flick. Hit the Road is about a family of four who are making their way to the border where they have made arrangements to have their eldest son smuggled across. Naturally, their journey is marked by moments of intense fear, all four hearts skipping a beat any time another car lingers behind them too long. But for the most part, their rented vehicle acts as a safe haven, sealed off from the state’s suffocating influence. Inside it, they blare pre-revolution pop hits from the radio and sing along at the top of their lungs. They draw on the windows with marker pens and snack on pistachios. They tease each other, dance together, argue and laugh. Rolling along the road in this bubble of privacy, they get to be funny, grumpy, petty and joyful. They get to be themselves, fully and fearlessly. And it’s impossible not to get swept up into that effervescent family atmosphere because each of the four figures is so perfectly drawn. Dad (Hassan Madjooni) sits in the back with a busted leg, delivering punchlines in an earthy monotone. Mum (Pantea Panahiha) seems like she might be relegated to the role of worried caretaker only to bust out a devilish grin and a wicked one-liner. The younger son (Rayan Sarlak) is a total livewire – playing, pranking and arguing with the boundless confidence and absolute self-seriousness of a well-loved child. And then there’s the older son (Amin Simiar), keeping his own counsel in the driver’s seat while life as he knows it recedes slowly into the rear-view mirror. They create a whole world within the confines of that Mazda station wagon. You can feel their full history together in each exasperated sigh and pointed comment. These are people who have known each other or been known to each other for their entire lives, and it shows. And that lends the film its tragic undercurrent too. Because, for all of the cavorting and karaokeing, the knowledge of how this journey ends and why it was necessary always hangs in the air. But though the destination is inevitable, Panahi keeps finding avenues of escape – from the familial freedom found inside the car to an enchanting sequence in which father and son lay on the ground together and look up at the stars as they are slowly absorbed into the cosmos.

Hit the Road is elegant, elegiac and defiantly open-hearted. It’s never saccharine, just shot through with a love for its characters that refuses to be entirely quelled by the hardships imposed upon them. [Ross McIndoe]

Scotland on Screen:

Kristy Matheson

After 13 years of taking place in June, Edinburgh International Film Festival is moving back to join the August festivities. Ahead of EIFF’s programme launch, we chat to Kristy Matheson, the Creative Director overseeing the festival’s new era

Interview: Jamie Dunn

edfilmfest.org.uk Is there a tougher job in UK cinema exhibition than being head of the Edinburgh International Film Festival? From the outside, it appears not. This venerable institution – until COVID struck, the longest continuously running film festival in the world – has burned through four festival heads in the last decade. Two were emergency caretakers (James Mulligan, Nick Vardy), another didn’t hang around long enough to make much impact (Chris Fujiwara), and one brought few innovations during their stint in charge (Mark Adams). No one could accuse EIFF’s new Creative Director, Kristy Matheson, of lacking innovation. In less than a year in charge, she’s overseen several major shake-ups, the chief one being the festival’s permanent move back to August since its controversial rescheduling to June in 2009. “The whole point of moving back to August is really about ensuring that film is central to that broader cultural conversation that happens in Edinburgh every summer,” she tells us. “Obviously the August festivals are important to local audiences, but it’s also a global gathering of people and talent, and I think it’s really important that film, as an art form, is in that mix.” During our chat, which takes place a whole month before EIFF officially launches its programme, Matheson often brings the conversation back to her future audience. Keeping the paying punters in mind was a philosophy drilled into her during her first gig in programming back at her hometown film festival in Brisbane, Australia two decades ago. “The biggest thing I learned during that experience was the idea that, as a programmer, it’s not about you; you’re kind of irrelevant,” she says. “What’s important is the films and the audience, and your job is just really putting those two things together.” The annual Michael Powell Award is also changing. The original brief of the award was to honour imagination and creativity in British cinema. But with the festival returning to its original August slot, Matheson started thinking about the award in its new context. “When all these festivals were started in 1947, it was out of a spirit of internationalism, and this idea of collaboration,” she says. “It was using culture to mend bridges, bring people together rather than always constantly seeing the differences.” She also started thinking about the internationalism of the filmmaker the award is named after, and his long and fruitful partnership with Hungarian screenwriter and producer Emeric Pressburger. With this in mind, the prize is now dubbed the Powell & Pressburger Award, and will see five British films competing for it alongside five international titles “We’ve got ten films that we’re super, super happy with,” says Matheson of the competition lineup. “There are some first-time filmmakers in there, there are some very experienced filmmakers in there, there are people from all over the world

Filmhouse Cinema

in there. I don’t understand anyone who says ‘this has been a bad year for films’ because it’s like, you just haven’t dug hard enough.” While we agree with Matheson that there is no shortage of great films in any given year, the challenge for EIFF has always been convincing filmmakers and distributors to show these films in Edinburgh rather than at another festival. The particular difficulty of EIFF’s positioning in the crowded festival calendar is something Mathison is well aware of. “Being in August puts us right in front of the busiest part of the film calendar in many respects,” she says. Falling close on EIFF’s heels are major festivals like Venice, Toronto, Telluride and New York, which all mark the start of awards season. “All of what we think of as the really big films of the year, they really sit in that last quarter,” says Matheson. Anyone hoping that EIFF’s move back to August will mean more famous faces attending the festival might be disappointed. “That’s not the corridor that we sit in,” says Matheson, “and it’s not the programme we’ve set out to build. So spoiler alert: if you want seven days of red carpets, that’s not gonna happen.” Matheson is almost ready to share what the programme will look like, but rather than feeling stressed, she’s in the middle of her favourite part of the process. “Watching the films is fun, but what I like the most is having discussions with my colleagues about the programme. It’s like I’ve gone on holiday to a cabin with four other people. And we’ve just been doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. There have been moments where I’ve been like, ‘I can’t find that piece, it’s really frustrating.’ But it’s been fun. “And now the jigsaw puzzle is almost finished, so it’s great to be at this point and be able to go, ‘OK, wow, I can see that picture now.” You can get the full picture of the puzzle yourself when EIFF launches its programme on 20 July.

All Light, Everywhere

Director: Theo Anthony rrrrr

Can the act of seeing ever be removed from human biases? Did the invention and the subsequent ubiquity of the recorded image achieve this, or confirm it as impossible? Big questions fill Theo Anthony’s film, more essay than documentary, but thankfully they’re backed up by robust arguments and surgical filmmaking, and focused into an urgent modern topic: the intersection of state power and technology in police body cameras. A wealth of philosophical statements are banded around the film, in cool, unfeeling voiceover as well as disconnected subtitles, but they never feel like platitudes. Rather, it feels like what we assume or take for granted about the act of seeing is being interrogated, presented in a detached, sterile way that contributes to a feeling of slight dread, either by lingering on unnerving perspectives and firing an onslaught of images and data at the audience. Filmed at various points over the past decade, the private companies worming their way into law enforcement throw up as many red flags as the institutions that welcome them. In his exposé of the fallacy of objective recording, Anthony is keen to highlight his own inescapable, biased presence behind the camera, but the film would benefit from tackling the topic more effectively than the few evocative moments that go undiscussed. But these flaws feel like human errors in a complex film about that very topic. BE OBSESSED, a sign in a body-cam manufacturer threatens its workers. With regards to Anthony’s film, such an imperative is unnecessary. [Rory Doherty]

Released 22 Jul by ICA Cinema; certificate TBC

Director: Jonas Carpignano Starring: Swamy Rotolo rrrrr

A Chiara filters morality through the moody gaze of the eponymous 15-yearold (Swamy Rotolo), whose world is about to crumble. When her father goes on the lam, Chiara’s eyes burn with questions about her family’s ties with the local organised crime outfit, the ‘ndrangheta. Dismissed by the adults around her, she takes it upon herself to find answers to her questions. Director Jonas Carpignano opens a window on to a community where rituals and hierarchical structures are central. The film presents Chiara’s sister’s 18th birthday party and a drug deal in equally great, mundane details, not making a spectacle out of either. The usual, sensationalistic spiel on mob stories is stripped to the bone, with violence existing outside Chiara’s point of view and never being exploited for its shock value or turned into a moral parable. As in his previous films about the town of Gioia Tauro, Calabria, Carpignano works with non-professional actors. In interviews, the filmmaker has revealed he would only let his main cast in on what would happen in a scene directly on the day. This choice limits the interactions between the characters, but it allows their unspoken conflict to build up in hyperrealistic, semiimprovised conversations, brimming with such tenderness and urgency you’ll almost feel like you’re standing next to them. Swamy Rotolo steals the show as Chiara. The young actor delivers a fierce performance, encompassing a wave of raw emotions the protagonist may have only just discovered, finding her rage and voice in an uneven trajectory. [Stefania Sarrubba]

Released 15 Jul by MUBI; certificate TBC

All Light, Everywhere Nitram A Chiara Futura

Director: Justin Kurzel Starring: Caleb Landry Jones rrrrr

The depressing slew of recent headlines telling of atrocities perpetrated by angry young men with automatic weapons may prove to be detrimental to the release of Justin Kurzel’s excellent new true-crime drama. A film not so much centered on the crime itself, but on the events leading up to one of the worst mass murders in Australia’s history. The reliably intense Caleb Landry Jones plays the titular character (whose name is deliberately obscured), a brooding man-child who we first encounter antagonising his neighbours with firecrackers and handing out fireworks to the school kids at the local playground. His father, terrifically played by Anthony LaPaglia, is a tightly coiled bag of stress perpetually in dread of what antics his antisocial son will get up to next, while his mother (Judy Davis) has quietly resigned herself to the fact that all the toughlove parenting hasn’t exactly worked. Through a malaise of angst and early-20s boredom, Nitram drifts in the Tazmanian suburbs until, in a strangerthan-fiction twist, he meets eccentric older heiress Helen, living a Grey Gardens-esque existence in a crumbling mansion, bizarrely becoming her live-in lover despite the 30-odd year age gap. As with their deeply disturbing crime drama Snowtown (2009), director Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant don’t scowl at their protagonists through a sanctimonious lens. Instead they let the drama unfurl slowly, perhaps hinting that male nihilism and small-town boredom create a vacuum in which terrible events are allowed to manifest. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, especially hands that can easily access automatic killing machines. [Adam Stafford] Futura

Director: Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, Alice Rohrwacher rrrrr

Influenced by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Love Meetings, in which the Italian director took to the streets to ask people about their attitudes toward sex, Futura sees Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi and Alice Rohrwacher collaborate on their own state-of-the-nation travelogue. From culinary students in Milan and trainee beauticians in Napoli to aspiring boxers from Calabria, the trio travelled across the country, asking a cross-section of young people about their hopes and fears for the future. Where Pasolini was met with prejudice and bigotry, the trio encountered a generation worried about inequality, climate change and the rise of nationalism. The project began at the start of 2020, and at the midpoint of the film the faces of these youngsters suddenly become half obscured by masks due to the outbreak of COVID-19. During the pandemic many teenagers expressed their anxieties about the future and here it’s no different, but throughout the film the trio are keen to point out that the pandemic did not create these problems; it simply made them impossible to ignore. These interviews are interspersed with archive footage of similar investigations undertaken in the 1960s by Mario Soldati and Gianfranco Mingozzi, as well as footage from the 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, where police violently attacked thousands of peaceful anti-globalisation protesters. This historical context helps draw out the film’s message about the importance of collectivism as well as suggesting how these interviews might be viewed in years to come, with Futura ultimately an important time capsule for a generation born into an era of global uncertainty. [Patrick Gamble]

Souvenir Design

Daytrippers! is a special summer collaboration between Local Heroes and V&A Dundee celebrating Scotland’s contemporary design scene, which supports designers by commissioning limited edition, collectable design products

Words: Stacey Hunter

Local Heroes are back this summer with more joyful design commissions. Created in collaboration with V&A Dundee, each commission is designed to be the perfect souvenir to remember a great day out. The project builds on the success of last year’s collection which featured a sold-out series of beach towels and a range of wildflower seeds exclusive to V&A Dundee’s shop and website. The beach towels have now been restocked and the wildflower illustrations transformed into prints. So let us introduce you to what’s new for 2022. This year our focus is on sustainability and consideration for the environment. When we visit Scotland’s beauty spots we are encouraged to ‘leave no trace’ and this new collection helps to make that possible with a range that celebrates ‘design to take with you’. Scotland’s first design museum was designed by a leading Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, so this summer we were inspired to produce our own collection of furoshiki [pronounced fu-rosh-ki]. Our large and small soft silk-cotton furoshiki have multiple uses and are perfectly portable. Furoshiki are very popular in Japan where they are used to wrap gifts and shopping, hung as artworks to brighten interiors and worn as scarves and bags. Perfect for carrying and wrapping, furoshiki are a great choice for your next shopping trip or a zero-waste trip to the beach. We’ve commissioned one Japanese designer based in Tokyo and one Scottish designer based in Edinburgh to create designs that honour friendship, conviviality and being outdoors. Manami Sakurai creates textiles that connect to people’s feelings and nostalgic memories. Her hand-drawn images illustrate experiences from her everyday life and are rooted in the concept of “sending a message of peace”. Manami has designed Daytripper – a large furoshiki inspired by her childhood memories of day trips with her family. “We would go into forests or hills with our sketchbooks and sketch what we saw. For me, the idea of a day trip is good memories and fun discoveries, and I wanted to convey these feelings through this design.” In addition, Manami’s smaller furoshiki The Ordinary Day depicts a playful scene featuring a cat among some summer strawberries and ribbons. “In my everyday life, I gather my thoughts by seeing different kinds of art, reading books, watching movies and chatting with my friends. Then I start to draw to create designs that have a gentle message. I love hand drawing lines and I believe that free floating lines hold the warm personal touch. I use a variety of drawing and painting tools depending on my mood. I hope my colourful textiles can fill your day with joy and a nostalgic feeling.” She studied fashion and textiles at Central Saint Martins and gained her experience as a textile designer in the UK, India and Japan. In 2019 she started MANAMI SAKURAI within the Taito Designers Village atelier. Ellen Martin is based in Edinburgh and specialises in printed and dyed textiles. She spent four months studying in Kyoto learning traditional Japanese textile techniques which continue to inform and inspire her approach to design today. She has created two new designs for our furoshiki range. The large design is called Maple which are known as kaede (frog’s hands), as well as momiji, which means both ‘become crimson leaves’ and ‘baby’s hands’. “I lived in Japan during the spring and summer so didn’t get to see the spectacle of the maple trees changing colour, however there are some that are red all year round.” Ellen’s smaller sized furoshiki is titled Omikuji. This design depicts the paper fortunes found at temples and shrines in Japan. Omikuji are often folded and tied to trees or on rows of wires in the temple or shrine grounds. “Having only launched my design business two years ago, I feel privileged to have the support of Local Heroes and V&A Dundee. Creating bespoke designs for V&A Dundee has been a joy and I can’t wait to see the finished pieces for sale in Scotland’s design museum!” With a focus on hand-drawing, collage and repeat pattern, her work captures the details found in her surroundings, often when visiting new places. After graduating from GSA in 2020, she launched her first collection of printed silk scarves. The designs will be available to buy in V&A Dundee. Their new retail manager Erin Thompson is enthusiastic about the project. “I am so excited to be a part of this project having read all about it last year before joining V&A Dundee. Working together, our focus has been on how to make these wonderful items as locally, as sustainably and as cleverly as we possibly can, with zero wastage and ever mindful of our footprint. Daytrippers! genuinely is a ‘glocal’ project and a lovely way to welcome summer.”

Join us for three weekends of special events at V&A Dundee during July and August. Check the Local Heroes instagram feed for dates and times

@localheroesdesign @manami_sakurai @ellenmartintextiles

Photo: Paul Marr

SCAMP, GLASGOW

Scamp’s inventive small plates are packed with subtle touches, impressively crunchy flourishes, and some very well-cooked fish Words: Peter Simpson

Photo: Peter Simpson

Food

26A Renfield St, Glasgow, G2 1LU

Wed-Sun, midday-late

scampglasgow.co.uk Scamp is the new place from the team behind a pair of well-known and exciting Glasgow venues – the small plates restaurant Eighty Eight and wine bar Hooligan. It’s right in the city centre, and when we pop in on a Sunday lunchtime a few weeks after their opening, it is completely empty. Maybe it’s the on-off rain outside, or it could be the fact that everyone in town seems to be gearing up for the Liam Gallagher gig at Hampden later, but it’s an inauspicious start. Once we’re inside, things pick up. The decor is all muted greys, lovely plates and nice wooden touches. The staff are great, and the food – from a fish-focused menu of small plates – kicks off with a banger. Sourdough from the excellent Freedom Bakery is paired with zingy pickled mussels and a brilliant mussel

Photo: Peter Simpson broth butter (£5). The butter manages to be extremely nautical yet actually quite subtle, all salty hints rather than loud shouts about Fish In The Butter. Next up are a pair of barbecued scallops (£13), topped with charred leeks that look a little bit like hay if you were to squint enough or really want to make the comparison. The scallops are perfectly cooked; juicy, tender, with a hint of char from the grill. Pickled leeks keep your taste buds on their toes, and a bright green purée underneath ties everything together. At the same time, it’s £13 for two scallops, which is a lot no matter how many leeks you throw in. A better deal comes courtesy of the panko-coated fried mushrooms (£8). Juicy mushrooms in a crunchy coating, layered with more delicious pickles, and dotted with another impressive sauce. The words ‘black garlic aioli’ might summon memories of over-enthusiastic burger chefs from the early-2010s, but this stuff is creamy, subtle, yet very definitely packed with garlic. The monkfish scampi (£9) is also fantastic. Once again, the fish is brilliantly juicy, and the fried chicken-style coating is a bit like a herby, spicy exoskeleton. It comes paired with a chicken and tarragon gravy, which turns away from the ‘all pickles, all the time’ vibe of the earlier dishes in favour of being extremely unctuous and savoury. Eat it quickly, as our coating tended to fall off the fish towards the end, but it’s delicious so of course you’ll eat it quickly. The asparagus (£6), with kalamata olives and some crackly, diamond-sharp croutons, is nice, but it’s no monkfish scampi. Then there’s the prawn hotdog (£9). A prawn sausage, laden with pickled fennel, dressed with strings of sauce and topped with dollops of smoked caviar, all served in a brioche bun. It looks… impressive. It feels like nothing else we’ve tried all afternoon. It’s not particularly nice. The sausage itself is tasty – good bite, nice texture, very shrimpy – but there’s just too much going on. Our bun is a bit stale, the sheer volume of stuff packed into one space is overwhelming, and in the context of a small plates sharing menu, what are you actually supposed to do with this? Cut it into little bits? Take a bite and pass it on? The prawn hotdog feels like it was designed for Instagram, as a dish that people can share and point to saying ‘that’s a bit different’, but it also obscures what Scamp does well. The chill-industrial aesthetic, the subtle flavours and precise plating, the fact that these guys can really cook a fish – that’s what will bring people through the doors and keep them coming back. Well, that and a quick change in the weather.

Monkfish scampi

Honey & Spice

By Bolu Babalola rrrrr

Kikiola ‘Kiki’ Banjo, host of student radio show Brown Sugar, is determined to keep the Black women in her college from falling for men who will waste their time, take their energy, and ruin their friendships. Apart from her best friend Aminah – the kind of best friend everyone should have – she prefers to stay separate from the college’s cliques and social hierarchies and eschews romantic entanglements to keep herself safe from potential rejection and hurt. Her careful plans are thrown into disarray with the arrival of Malakai, a new student who Kiki labels “the Wasteman of Whitewell”, who turns out to be more considerate, charming, and handsome than she cares to admit. Babalola’s debut novel is lyrical, witty, and maintains all the genre trappings that we love in romcoms, while doing something completely new. Kiki is a memorable protagonist – seemingly aloof but soft hearted, confident and funny, and a self-proclaimed nerd, with a heart that she is afraid to risk – and her bond with Aminah is beautiful, with its unwavering support and affection. The romance between Kiki and Malakai is full of moments that feel on par with every iconic scene in your favourite romcoms, from public arguments to big romantic gestures, humour paired with sizzling attraction, and two characters who truly see into the core of each other. Essential reading for any romance enthusiast. [Sim Bajwa] Nudes

By Elle Nash rrrrr

Elle Nash’s debut novella Animals Eat Each Other announced the arrival of an exciting new talent, one who was not afraid to examine the darker corners of human existence, and the way we treat each other. It also showed a writer who didn’t waste a word, so her new short story collection Nudes is a welcome publication as it seems the perfect form for Nash’s fiction. That proves to be the case as the stories in Nudes are not only short, but sharp and often shocking. Nash’s characters are beautifully imagined, jumping off the page, and are people who rarely appear in print – working class women striving to survive in a harsh and unforgiving world. The collection works as a whole as the stories seem to bleed into each other, strongly suggesting a shared world. This is in no small part down to Nash’s references, which are spot on. The drinks drunk, the cigarettes smoked, as well as the music listened to and the clothes worn, place events either in the 90s or 00s, or they at least make you reflect on them. It’s not a trip into nostalgia, just a fully imagined world in terms of people and place. You should make yourself familiar with Elle Nash, and Nudes is the perfect introduction. This is a writer who is only getting started, and promises even greater things to come. [Alistair Braidwood] Paper Cuts: How I Destroyed The British Music Press and Other Misadventures

By Ted Kessler rrrrr

Music magazines help to define their times, and books by music journalists often offer so much more than simply stories about your favourite bands and artists. You may buy them for the insider’s experiences with, and anecdotes about, the ‘talent’, but the best ones stay with you due to what they say about the precarious, and often extreme, world of music publishing. Ted Kessler’s Paper Cuts will be of interest not only to music lovers, but also magazine aficionados, as it shows the challenges that music magazines faced as the publishing world in which they exist changed, shrank, and all but disappeared. The book begins with Kessler’s early life, charting a challenging journey to a career in journalism, but the book only really gets going when he starts writing about that career. And that book title is telling. Kessler worked in the glory days of the NME in the 1990s, but was also editor of Q magazine when it folded in 2020, so there are few better placed to set out the decline of music journalism, at least in print. In terms of entertainment there are other memoirs written by music journalists that deliver more anecdotes and tales of extravagance, but they were mostly written in or about times when sales, and budgets, were huge. Ted Kessler bears witness to the end times, or near it, which makes Paper Cuts a fascinating document for readers today and in the future. [Alistair Braidwood] Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors

By Aravind Jayan rrrrr

In Aravind Jayan’s debut Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors, a family is faced with scandalous humiliation as a result of a viral sex tape leaked online. The saga is narrated by the unnamed youngest son who guides the reader through his older brother’s indiscretion and its inevitable fallout. The narrator is humorous, neurotic, and desperate to try and broker peace between his older brother Sreenath and their parents, Appa and Amma. Although the narrator has spent his entire life in the shadows of his older brother, he ends up playing an integral role in the fight to restore family unity, much to the annoyance of Sreenath and his girlfriend Anita. What unfolds is a bittersweet comedy of errors-cumreckoning of the Indian middle class, and a deep dive into generational divisions of modern Indian society. While the premise is entertaining, the plot moves far too slowly, filled with too many passive scenes of the narrator sitting awkwardly and idly in his brother’s safehouse while two families are being ripped at the seams back home. Although it is Sreenath and Anita at the centre of the scandal, they feel too much like tertiary characters, moody and insufferable, which makes it difficult to empathise with the liberal freedom they’re meant to represent. Still, the narrator makes this a compelling read for all his tender albeit misguided love and advice giving. [Andrés Ordorica]