Oh, I was disappointed in this. I’d expected it to be a dive into what apologies mean, how they differ across countries and languages, some sort of anthropology.
Instead, we get an awful lot of Belgian handwringing. It’s all very well-meaning, but to my mind it fell down on two pretty major points.
First, it seems massively reluctant to draw a line between a personal apology and a representative one. It’s just silly. It treats the idea of apologising for something you have done as the same as apologising for something your people or ancestors have done. And they’re not remotely similar. But the film seems disinclined to distinguish between them.
Secondly, it doesn’t want to criticise the absolute emptiness of the political apology. We watch the progress of some Belgian subcommittee for apologising for their horrendous deeds: it runs for nearly three years and interviews hundreds of people before writing a report that’s buried forever. It’s an absolutely abhorrent waste of time and money. The film seems keen for us to see the eventual acrimonious end as being the real problem. But it’s not. The whole exercise was doomed from the start! We never find out how much was spent on this charade.
As ever, I’m massively glad this was made, I’m glad of the chance to see it, and I’m grateful the director came to the screening. It didn’t hit the mark for me, but I’d take it over a hundred Netflix-produced documentaries in a box any day.
I’ve lumped these two together because they’re both showing in competition this year, but they are very different. Although perhaps they have as many similarities as they do differences.
Both take us to an island. They show us a generational gap being bridged. Both are deeply concerned with the old school—the analogue, the community, the heritage—crashing up against the modern—the impulsive, the independent.
Zejtune follows Mar, whose mother has recently died. Her remaining family are combative and cold, and it was clear she had some serious issues with her mother, but she’s been left three plots of land, with maps scrawled with illegible Italian text that state her right to it. She enlists a wedding singer she meets, who turns out to be a legend of għana (a sort of Maltese folk music, where flamenco meets rap-battle), and sets off around the island looking for her land.
The film isn’t really about that, though. It’s about family and tradition, about historical wrongs and whether they can be righted (or at least forgiven), about land and place and people. There are links back to the fabulous In a Whisper, in the determination of the older characters that the youth should not flee the land.
Memorizu cuts a much slighter figure. It’s a film in which almost nothing happens. Just life, moving along slowly. Yuta sets off from his wife and young daughter to keep his father-in-law company. He joins him in his old-school photographic studio, driving him about for school portraits and wedding snaps.
It’s a much more understated film, but the new runs up against the old—iPhone footage contrasted against the warm film grain—the modern and cosmopolitan crashing up against the fusty and old but deeply community-rooted ways of life.
I loved both.
I think both gave a beautiful slice of life in their respective cultures and took us with them on a journey that was small, personal but deeply satisfying.
A decent documentary about the life of one of the original phone phreakers, proto-hackers of the telephone age.
I’ll be honest—I found the hacking side a lot more interesting than the rest of it. The background to his life and all the parts up to his arrest for fraudulent long-distance calls was pretty fascinating. The later chunk about his answerphone message call line was a bit thin.
The curse of a film with a cracking title and a ridiculous concept (“a sewage system taken over by evil spirits”) is that it becomes very hard to live up to the expectations. For me, Bowels of Hell didn’t quite make it past this curse. It was a fun film. It was very silly. But the idea was probably still better than the execution.
There was a lot to enjoy: excruciating influencers, cashing in on their stepchild’s disability, a scat psychic (!), a cat eaten by a toilet, and waves and waves of shit. It leaned in hard to the gross and did a good job with it, proving once again how much more fun physical effects are.
I overheard someone explaining their film festival choices. They’d picked Bowels of Hell, they said, because however good or bad it might be, it was unlikely to be boring. A sound argument. This might not have been great, but it was quite good fun.
This year has a handful of fictionalised tellings of real events. They sit somewhere between documentaries and fiction: the people and the events are real, the dialogue and the details are imagined. The Red Hangar takes place on a Chilean air force base in the hours around the 1973 coup. Heysel 85 zooms in on the stadium disaster of a Liverpool–Juventus match in Belgium. It’s fair to say neither is a cheerful watch.
It’s not a (sub)genre I’ve much considered. There’s a faint aura of something distasteful – making entertainment from real-world tragedies – but it’s countered by a sense of warmth and humanity – putting humans and emotions back into stories that are told in timelines, statistics, diagrams.
This carries over into the visual language of the two. The Red Hangar is shot in glorious crisp black and white. Heysel 85 is fuzzy 16mm, designed to echo the homemade and news footage that gets spliced in, both in texture and in warm 80s colours. Both presentations give the films texture, and make clear that this is neither a dry documentary nor a modern Hollywood-style retelling.
I loved both. Despite being obviously, unavoidably, grim, they both managed to keep a sense of taut, breathless action, and flesh out the characters into real people.