Tag Archives: BFI

London Film Festival 2020 Interview: African Apocalypse Director Rob Lemkin

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Rob Lemkin always does a lot of reading in preparation for his films. As an Oxford-based filmmaker, perhaps it’s par for the course. In the years he spent making the award winning Enemies of the People, as well as his earlier 1990s BBC films about colonialism in Southeast Asia, he came to realise that there were very few films that really query colonialism. “So I kind of gravitated towards thinking about readings that I had done and thinking about how Heart of Darkness has been a universal text that still stands, notwithstanding all of the criticisms that are made of Conrad’s racism, language and so on and so forth.”

In the course of further research into Heart of Darkness, Lemkin discovered the story of a rogue French army commander, Paul Voulet, who was slaughtering his way through Niger in 1898 at the same time that Conrad was writing his book. Lemkin persuaded the BFI to fund him to go to Niger to see what he could find out about Voulet.

During his recce trip he found that the Voulet story was still incredibly present, not least because Voulet’s terrible path of murderous destruction led to the highway that runs through the country. “The idea that that his journey still existed now as a road just felt to me like wow this was a way of really connecting Colonialism to a universal present,” Lemkin says.

After his recce trip, Lemkin was wondering how to approach the film when his partner came across Femi Nylander performing in a pub down the road from their home. “He was performing songs including one about the Congo, which obviously is where Conrad’s book is set. She came back and she said ‘maybe you should look at him’”. Nylander is a British-Nigerian poet-activist who had recently been active in the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. Soon Lemkin and Nylander decided to make the film together.

In African Apocalypse, which had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, Nylander follows the path of Voulet’s destruction, with the help of two local guides. On top of scenes of their journey, and various encounters with the locals, we hear Nylander’s thoughts as he reads the diaries of Voulet. In the verité footage, however, when interacting with descendants of his victims – who are clearly still traumatised – Nylander often seems impassive. 

Femi Nylander

Extraordinarily, in the middle of the film, the two guides confront him about his lack of emotion. “I think it’s a testament to him and to his courage that he was happy to have that scene included, because it was a bit of a forceful personality critique,” says Lemkin. “He is a young guy for whom colonialism is an enormous issue amongst the student population. In the environment of the student hothouse, world colonialism is an issue, a subject, a topic for discussion, a thing. You don’t actually breathe it, touch it and feel it; you  read it, you watch about it, you talk about it.”

Lemkin says that whilst Nylander is very effective at being forceful in television discussions, he found it much more difficult on the road with limited language and various pressures. “I realised that Femi would need a lot of orientation because suddenly were not in the Oxford Union or in some student hub. And it’s raw but it’s also random and there’s a lot of different kinds of things that are going on– present tense issues and awareness of historical issues.”

Lemkin says Femi found it quite hard to be constantly under the scrutiny of the camera. “It’s a difficult pressure to be on for anyone,” he says.  “When he was going into the real community he still had the feeling that he was a consumer of testimonies. One of the things that we were able to deploy as a mechanism is trying to ask: How does a young black person coming from a formerly colonised country deal with this kind of history?”  

Guide and Filmmaker Amina Weira

This question works as a motif that threads through the narrative, Lemkin says. “Although at the time when we shot that scene, I wasn’t really thinking about it in such a motif and narrative kind of way. I was just thinking more about the fact that in reality both of the guides and myself were feeling a sense of frustration about the fact that he did not seem to be able to or want to connect in a totally full throttle human way with the groups of people that we were meeting.”

Lemkin says that although Nylander had learned rudimentary Hausa and French for the trip, the rushes reveal that the people really couldn’t understand him. “It’s kind of google translate hausa and they’re not getting it. And the people that we are speaking to are not necessarily literate people, so there’s quite a gap. But I think they also feel a sense of feeling like they can educate Femi with what they say to him in a way that responding to me as a white person there is a different power dynamic.”

By interweaving Nylander’s voiceover with the verité footage, and existing archive, the final film is an engrossing narrative with many layers which succeeds, as Lemkin intended in querying colonialism and bringing its often terrible legacy into the here and now.

Lemkin’s aesthetic approach to filming was to treat the shoot like a road movie. “We wanted to really capture the sense that we were going from encounter to encounter, and it was actually going into places where Femi was meeting people for the first time. This was really critical for me. Even Claude (Garnier, the DoP) was saying ‘do we really have to film them going in?’ and I said ‘yes we really have to film them going in’. And we use that a lot of the time just because I think it gives you a feeling of the freshness and unpredictability of the encounter”. 

Rob Lemkin

The meetings that we see Nylander have are the result of Lemkin’s two previous trips to Niger, where he spent a lot of time scouting the right people to talk to. “What appears to be a spontaneous journey isn’t,” he admits.  “It was very important to have actual community meetings very well established so we could put in archive and make it feel it was something that you are mentally flipping to and from across time all the way through.”

Such personal connections are necessary for the viewer to then be able to connect with the archive, Lemkin says. “Otherwise you could just end up feeling that the whole thing was theoretical and abstract and academic. Not like I don’t like academic, but I think it’s important that it’s rooted in human experience.”

African Apocalypse is available now on the BFI player. 

London Film Festival 2020 One Man and His Shoes Interview: Yemi Bamiro

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One Man and His Shoes, a new feature length doc from South London filmmaker Yemi Bamiro, tells the often astonishing story of the rise of the Air Jordan brand, the first mega superstar endorsement that remains a cultural phenomenon. Thanks in large part to a series of iconic ads made with director Spike Lee, the shoes became a highly coveted status symbol which has endured for decades, and taken some dark turns, not least the murder of teenagers for the trainers.

Made independently over seven years, Bamiro interweaves a number of themes, from America’s love affair with consumerism to the mass-market 1980s breakthrough of African Americans such as Jordan, Eddie Murphy and Prince. In the wake of its screening at the BFI London Film Festival, I spoke with Bamiro via Zoom about the making of it. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Carol Nahra (CN): I enjoyed the film and as an American of a certain age this is my era. But how did you, a much younger Brit, come to be telling the story?

Yemi Bamiro (YB): I guess I started thinking about the story in 2012-2013 when I was thinking up ideas for longer form films. I had always been interested in trainers. The first iteration of this film was going to be about Air Jordan collectors because I felt that I had never seen anything like that before – I was interested in the culture and their enthusiasm and their obsessiveness over this one brand. So I started to make that film, and some of the collectors that I profiled are actually made the cut for the feature film. But I realised maybe after a year that I needed more to sustain a feature length narrative arc. So then I started thinking about the origin story of the Air Jordan. I started to seriously think about Michael Jordan in terms of marketing and how much that has given the world, given that that was the first foray into superstar endorsement deals. And that’s pretty much how the story came about. I knew that it was an idea that I wouldn’t get bored of  after a couple of years, that it would be something that I would be able to stick with. And I thought that was important given the fact that I realised it was going to be take a long time to make this film independently.

CN: How easy was it to get access to your interviewees? What was that like as an outsider?

YB: The access was pretty straightforward but I only say that because we had the luxury of time. Everyone that you asked to put in your documentary is not necessarily going to say yes straight away. They want to know who else is in your films. I think if someone had given us a pot of money in 2013 and said deliver this film in 2015 I think you know we might not necessarily have had the contributors that we ended up having in the film. Because when you ask somebody to be in your documentary they might say no and you have to persevere and keep knocking and gently knocking until they say yes. I am not really a person who goes away easily given I was so invested in this project. 

An Air Jordan collector in a still from the film

CN: Did you try to get Michael Jordan or Spike Lee? 

YB: I never entertained the idea of getting Michael Jordan because it would’ve completely changed what the film is. The film is about Michael Jordan in part, but it’s essentially about his sneakers; it’s about marketing; it’s about all of those interesting facets centred around this phenomenon. You couldn’t have Michael Jordan in your film as a talking head: he would have to be beginning middle and end. We did definitely try to get to Spike Lee but he is an Oscar winning director and he’s got lots of things on. So we didn’t get him.

CN: You made this independently. Where did you get money from?

YB: We self-funded it for many years. After about two years I met this guy, James Ramkoleea, who is now really good friend of mine in my NCT classes. And he lives locally and is an Arsenal supporter and we just started speaking about our lives and I told him about this film. He said ‘I’ve always wanted to invest in film’. I kind of laughed at him and then over the next six months he kept prodding me about getting involved in this film. Then he gave us a chunk of money and invested in the film! And his contribution and him coming on board as an exec producer was the thing that allowed us to get the film across the line. We got in to SXSW and that pretty much changed everything for us. 

CN: When did Christo (Hird, Dartmouth Films) get involved?

We met Christo in like 2016 when we got into MeetMarket at Sheffield Docfest. And I think we basically felt a little bit fatigued because we had met everybody, but we only met a few people who were really champions of the film, that really got it. And Christo was one of them. We made the decision in 2017 to go back to all the people who have just championed this film. Christo was one of the people that believed in the idea and bought into it so I think we formalised everything in terms of him coming on board with Dartmouth in 2018.

Yemi Bamiro

CN: At what point did you become aware of The Last Dance series? You must’ve both been moving ahead at the same time.

YB: I knew that ESPN and Netflix were making this mammoth 10 hour special on Michael Jordan. I think I became aware of it maybe two years ago. I didn’t think anything of it because I always hoped that our film would be out in the world and we would be quite clear down the road before that mammoth came along, you know? But then the global pandemic happened and SXSW got cancelled and ESPN obviously pushed it forward because they had huge programming slots in their schedule because of no live sport.

It was like the number one trending topic on Twitter every week that they dropped an episode. It was too close to home for me – I couldn’t engage with it because I was thinking what’s the point of us even putting this film out when this thing has stolen all of our thunder? But thankfully the Last Dance team had a different objective. Their objective was about Michael Jordan and his last season with the Bulls and our film was completely different. So we are able to co-exist. 

We then very much existed in the slipstream of The Last Dance because I think it showed that there was an appetite for all things Michael Jordan,  nostalgia,  1990s NBA basketball. And we just happened to have a film that dealt with all of those things at a time when everybody was at home and wanting content so I think we got really lucky. That’s how we sold our US TV  rights to Vice – they saw the reception that The Last Dance got.

One Man and His Shoes is playing in UK cinemas from 23 October, and on demand from 26 October.

Coming of Age Docs Shine at BFI LFF

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During the 60th BFI London Film Festival, which wrapped on Sunday, one of the most acclaimed dramatic features was British director Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, a coming-of-age story acclaimed by critics for its “visually fascinating aesthetic.” But far away from the buzz surrounding such Oscar hopefuls, in the relative quiet of the Documentary Competition, I found a clutch of coming-of-age films that equally shone. Together, they employ a battery of storytelling techniques to bring their young protagonists’ lives to the big screen.

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Ginger, from All This Panic

All This Panic, a feature debut by husband-and-wife filmmaking team Jenny Gage (director) and Tom Betterton (DP), follows a handful of private school-educated teenage girls in Brooklyn over three years of their late teens. Ginger is “terrified of getting old,” clashes with everyone in her family, and finds herself adrift as her friends begin university without her. Her father tells her she can stay in the house, musing that they used to be best friends but have spent the last six years fighting (a haunting line that brings chills to those of us with young daughters with whom we are still on good terms). The other main subject, Lena, is self-possessed and articulate, and at the film’s outset, preoccupied with having her first stab at love. But Lena also has bigger issues on her mind: Her brother has significant behavioral problems, and both her parents—now separated—are living turbulent lives. Indeed, despite their privileged education, most of the girls here are dealing with significant issues, from broken families to self-harm and emerging sexuality. Photographers-turned-filmmakers Gage and Betterton manage, without formal interview or narration, to capture the complexity of teenage lives with the film’s striking visual style.All This Panic is beautifully shot, very close up, and in a dreamy-yet-pacey style that mirrors the girls’ inner lives, consumed with whom they are and whom they might become. The film is very effective at evoking the storminess of the high school years, as well as the fleetingness of this period.

Covering similar territory, in at times a strikingly similar visual style, is Alma Har’el’s Lovetrue. She interweaves the stories of three young subjects spread out across the US: a young erotic dancer in Alaska, a surfer-turned-single dad in Hawaii, and a teenage girl in a New York City family of singers whose parents have dramatically split. Each is navigating difficult relationships and trying to make sense of a world that often seems cruel. Har’el’s 2011 debut feature, Bombay Beach, was an innovative hybrid, with her rural Californian characters often breaking out in dance. She continues to break new ground inLovetrue, which features enacted scenes (filmed in a home-movie style reminiscent of Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell) that include both flashbacks and flashforwards, often with the subjects interacting with their dramatic counterparts (see featured photo above). While I admired the beauty and innovation of the film, the stories of the three protagonists were strong enough that in the end I felt the dramatic elements were sometimes more of a distraction than a service.

Less innovative in style, but no less compelling, were two additional coming-of-age films in the documentary competition. Mehrdad Oskouei’s Starless Dreams takes us inside a detention center for 18-year-old Iranian girls. Their crimes sound shocking—they range from larceny to murder—but their back stories, revealed matter-of-factly to a sympathetic Oskouei, are even more disturbing. Together they paint a portrait of the most dysfunctional rung of Iranian society, where drug addiction rules and families violently turn on each other. But inside the center, the girls act much as any other high-spirited teenage girls living together, and the film says more about what we have in common than our differences. The press notes say that Oskouei worked for seven years to gain access to the institution, an effort that more than pays off for a film that has already garnered both an Amnesty International Award and a True Vision Award and went on to take the LFF’s Grierson Documentary Competition Award.

 

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Starless Dreams

 

At the other end of the socio-economic spectrum are the French students who are the focus of Claire Simon’s observational documentary The Graduation. They have come from all over France to take an astonishing entrance exam to the country’s most prestigious film school, La Femis. Over three months the wanna-be auteurs undergo a host of tasks, mulled over by the film’s real stars – the industry figures who serve as the selection committee, offering up withering critiques once the candidates have left the room. I emerged in awe of the articulacy of the candidates, and in wonder at the complete Frenchness of the whole scene, which comes with more than its share of chain-smoking and Gallic shrugs.

Not surprisingly, many of the festival’s fare across the genres reflected the turbulent times in which we live, with a host of films focused on stories of migration and war. Among these was the winner of the short film category, the documentary 9 Days – From My Window in Aleppo. Finding his apartment smack-dab on the frontline when war breaks out in Syria’s largest city in August 2012, photographer Issa Touma begins filming from his window; this compelling short is an intriguing insight into the opening days of the ongoing destruction of Aleppo.

While nonfiction media is never going to dominate at the BFI London Film Festival, where the focus remains firmly on the dramas and the red carpet, it can be said that there has never been a better time for cinema documentaries in London. There has been a boom in arthouse cinemas opening up in the last few years (my North London neighborhood, Crouch End, which formerly had none now has three within a mile). And in order to differentiate from the temptation to remain at home in front of the television, cinemas are featuring many documentaries with Q&As or panel discussions afterwards. During the LFF I took a side trip half a mile away to the Bertha Dochouse, which has been exclusively showing documentaries for more than a year. There I hosted a panel following the screening of yet another coming-of-age documentary, Driving with Selvi. Directed by Canadian Elisa Paloschi, it’s an inspiring tale of how a child bride in India escaped her life to become a taxi driver. Having spent ten years filming Selvi, Paloschi eschews dwelling on the abuse that she suffered as a child bride, focusing instead on the confidence she gained as a taxi driver and through a second marriage, this time for love. This week I’ll be returning to moderate another panel, following Rokhsareh Ghaem Magham’s multi award-winning Sonita, yet another tale of an inspiring young woman whose story continues to put “bums on seats,” as they say here.

This article also ran on www.documentary.org

Sean McAllister on his Syrian Labour of Love

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British documentary Sean McAllister is known for launching himself into foreign lands, often in the midst of war, and finding unforgettable personal stories. Whether it’s via a piano player in Baghdad, a postal worker in Japan, Sean’s own “minders” in Iraq, these are stories of ordinary people – though always strong characters – struggling to survive in an often unkind world. Sean’s latest film, A Syrian Love Story, is perhaps his best yet. It begins as a very local story about Amer and Raghda, a couple who met as political prisoners in Syria and went on to have four sons together. When Sean is arrested with footage of them in his camara, the family has to abruptly flee to Lebanon, and the film  turns into a larger story about lives in exile.  Sean continues to follow them as they struggle to find solid footing, not least in their marriage,  whilst watching a deteriorating Syria from afar.

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Sean and Bob
I spoke to Sean a few days before the film’s world premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest, and he explained a bit about the circuitous way the film was made:

It’s been a long time in the making. Is this your longest project?

Yes, it’s a labour of love, isn’t it? It didn’t get commissioned. That’s why it went on and on and on. I suppose the interesting side of it is that I’d given up on it actually. Then Matt Scholes, who graduated from Sheffield University film school, read an interview with me about it, and contacted me and said rather than working in the industry I’d like to edit this material of yours. I said I’ve given up on it – it’s not happening. And he said, well let me just have a look at it. And he went off for three months and started cutting it together and got me excited again. So I went off filming again because of him.

That’s amazing. At what point had you given up on it?

I gave up on it so many times. But the most significant point probably was two years ago, when I finished my Yemen film. I took off from Syria and went to Yemen and made The Reluctant Revolutionary.  Nick (Fraser, of BBC Storyville) had sort of wanted a film from Syria. I gave him the Yemen film. I think he felt after the Yemen film and post Arab spring that it wasn’t so interesting to have an Arab spring film again…So he then sent me off to Greece to make a film. So I used the development money in Greece to fly off to Lebanon to film them, with the development money from Greece.

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Amer and Bob speak to imprisoned Raghda
There’s no Greece film, huh?

There’s no Greece film. But like at the beginning, when I wanted to go to Syria and couldn’t get Syria commissioned, they sent me to Dubai. So I used the Dubai development to go to Damascus. So where there’s a will there’s a way. At the end of the day Nick saw there was nothing happening in Greece, and I was very passionate about this. And by then it wasn’t Arab spring; it was a different story. The arc of it had changed over the course of five years; it became a story of exile. It became something a bit more unusual because of the time frame. And this was all possible because Matt had got on board to construct the material, so we had stuff to show. And then when the BBC came on board, we pitched to the BFI. It’s perfect for a BFI pitch because they need to see what they’re getting into. And we had certain scenes cut, and they were excited.

The family’s story arc changed thanks to you, probably in a more direct way than has previously happened in your films.

I just came back from the border, screening the film with Raghda, and one of my questions (in preparation for post screening Q&As) was did she blame me for life today? Because I got arrested and they were all thrown into exile….And she laughed and said “I cried when you were arrested, I cried for you. The only people I blame in any of this are the regime.”

A Syrian Love Story has its world premiere screenings 7 and 9 June at Sheffield Doc/Fest. It will then be playing at festivals internationally and following a cinema release will be broadcast on BBC Storyville in early 2016.

NFTS Documentary 2015: The Ones to Watch

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Last week, after years of wanting to attend, I finally made it to the NFTS Show, the National Film and Television School’s showcase of films made by their Directing Documentary MA graduates.  I took my documentary students to see the eight films at the BFI Southbank – an impressive venue which also played host to some outstanding fiction and games student projects.

There’s every reason to keep an eye out for NFTS documentary students: graduates include many of the UK’s top doc makers, including Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen, Kim Longinotto and Sean McAllister. Kim Longinotto’s own NFTS graduation film, Pride of Place, about the boarding school she loathed as a student, was so successful at showing up the school’s shortcomings that it closed shortly afterwards.

Long after my own students filtered out, I sat mesmerized. Despite tiny budgets of £4,000, not one of the films was based in the UK – shooting locations included Cambodia, Thailand, California, and Brazil.  A couple films followed a strong observational narrative, including a senior citizen on an overseas mission, and a drug addict on a Buddist detox. But as the NFTS’s head of documentaries Dick Fontaine noted whilst compering the afternoon, those students without a strong narrative worked intensively to develop a cinematic language of their own in these films. It showed. In an age of formatted television, where action is heavily narrated, and follows a predictable storyline, as a whole these stories were beautifully told without titles, narration, presenters or archive. Although made on a shoestring, the directors had the support of the abundant resources at the NFTS, and a sizeable crew of fellow students, introduced by the directors after each screening.

Here are my favourite films from the day:

The Archipelago

This portrait of the Faroe Islands, as it struggles to hang on to its traditions in the modern world, is not for the squeamish. Following an unnamed character known in the credits as “the young man”, director Benjamin Huguet sketches the community through his daily life as a butcher, capturing him scratching the cows behind the ears, and in the next scene carving them up into steaks. Huguet was also along for the ride when the community turned out for a practice bringing them international condemnation: pilot whale hunting. By filming the blood drenched slaughtering of the whales, and the allocation of their parts to local families within minutes, Huguet’s immersive camerawork shows how close to nature the Faroese continue to live.

Esta Vida (This Life)

Director Lyttanya Shannon’s at times heartbreaking film shows child advocate Rita as she works to encourage a group of vulnerable young girls in rural Brazil to fight against a cycle which sees them all too often the victims of drugs and sexual abuse. Shannon’s cinematography places her in the center of these girls’ worlds, as they perch on the edge of a frightening adulthood.

Pioneers

Grace Harper takes us onto the streets of the eccentric Pioneertown – a former Hollywood film set now inhabited by a number of characters carrying abundant personal baggage. It’s a beautifully shot ensemble piece, which paints a portrait of a town as unique in its populace as its history.