2021

(Ο Άνθρωπος του Θεού)

dir: Yelena Popovic

2021

It’s…strange. My path to tracking down and watching this flick is an odd one. A few weeks ago I watched a Greek film called Apples about a world where people get amnesia spontaneously but still have to get on with their lives, which wasn’t that world-shaking, but had a guy in the central role who was a bit interesting.

And then I saw that he had another film that came out in 2021, and thought that I would give that a go.

It’s actually (mostly, 99 per cent) in English, despite the setting and the nationality of most of the actors. It’s about a Greek Orthodox saint, which I can’t imagine a lot of people who don’t already speak Greek could possibly care about. And it’s set in the 1890s which, I dunno, is it a decade that has a lot of diehard fans? I mean, I know the kids of today are strangely and offputtingly fixated on the 1990s, which I find very disconcerting, especially because I was there, and remember what we did back then, but I struggle to imagine the audience that could exist for something about a religious weirdo from over a century ago.

So, well. Films don’t have to have built-in audiences for my purposes, because I’m not an investor, or a hedge fund manager, or in fact anyone with enough money to invest in icy poles. I care if I enjoy a film or not, and then I think about why afterwards.

There is something compelling about the character study provided here (rather than the biopic aspects). Arvis Servetalis, as Nectarios of Aegina, gives a very committed performance as the saint, played as a man who so completely believes what he preaches that the other members of the Greek Orthodox Church (literally referred to as the Patriarchy, I’m not making that up) fear and resent him. Because he’s not into his faith solely for the accumulation of wealth, and actually wants to help people, however high he rises, he inspires hatred in the other priests because they fear he’ll give the Church’s wealth away to those who really need it.

The film starts off in Alexandria, Egypt, with there being a guy, a priest, well, actually more like the equivalent of a bishop (a metropolite, as he is referred to in the movie), who is beloved by everyone who he comes into contact with, absolutely everyone except, you guessed it, the other priests and metropolites, especially. These men with flowing beards and awesome headgear sit around plotting against him. The main reason is that they fear that, because Nectarios is so awesome, and because so many people adore him, that he’d be a shoo-in to be the next Patriarch of Alexandria.

What is a Patriarch? He’s not just an old guy, or someone’s daddy, or a paid up member of a misogynistic system striving every day to make the world a worse place for girls and women everywhere. He’s like a pope to those who follow the Orthodox faith. The conniving priests dread the idea of Nectarios becoming Patriarch and potentially giving away all their wealth. All their clothing with gold thread in it, which surely was Jesus’s plan all along.

(Zgjoi)

dir: Blerta Blasholli

2021

Hive is based on a true story about a woman just trying to get by in this world. The problem is: this fucking world in which we live.

Some parts of this world seem to be easier to live in that others. For Fahrije (Yilka Gashi), the reality is she lives in a part of the world where seemingly the entirety of society is stacked against her, for no good fucking reasons.

I guess it helps to set the scene as to where and when. The where is Kosovo, the when is after the Kosovo War in the late nineties, and the reality is that Fahrije, like a lot of other women, hasn’t seen her husband since the massacres began.

There are a lot of mass graves waiting to be excavated, still. I had hoped there would a time in European history when new mass graves would stop being dug, and yet when you see what the Russians are doing AGAIN in Ukraine…

I despair. I am not as strong as Fahrije. She doesn’t despair, she just keeps moving forward.

She is a Kosovar Albanian. She has two kids to look after, and her wheelchair bound father-in-law. I don’t know why, but she is not allowed to get a job. The society, the community doesn’t tolerate women working or even really spending too much time out of their homes.

This community doesn’t even like the idea of women getting their licences and driving cars.

So, she has no husband to work and provide the family money, but it is also frowned upon for her to work and support her family. Clearly the best thing to do would be for them all to die.

Fahrije is not alone in this predicament. A group of women whose husbands similarly haven’t returned or whose remains haven’t yet been identified, also have no means of support and stop themselves from doing anything that would draw the ire of the menfolk.

It’s paralysing to watch this kind of thing. Someone offers them driving lessons or work, and the women tell themselves and each other “I cannot do these things, they will all call me a whore”. And true to their word, random men call Fahirje and any other woman whores for daring to support themselves and earn a subsistence living.

Everything is slow and agonising in coming, but Fahrije is persistent. Where the other women fear what the community will say, Fahrije sees that lack of choice they are being offered (this charity set up for the women barely has any money for their day to day lives, and there’s no widow’s pension or government help, apparently) as giving her all the more motivation to succeed in her endeavours.

Because she’s got no other fucking choice.

dir: Christopher Makoto Yogi

2021

I was a simple man. I still am, in a lot of ways. No-one really wants to think of themselves as being overly complicated. But being too simple seems like intellectual laziness.

But enough about me. I Was a Simple Man is pretty much, if you ever decided to sit down and watch it, a flick like no other that you might have seen in your life. The themes, of mortality, of regret, of past and present merging, all that crap, aren’t unique, but there really isn’t another film to compare this to.

I read such impassioned reviews of this flick back in the day, and I was determined to eventually watch it. The one thing about watching this, that meant I started and stopped it many times, was that the main character has a dog, who is often on screen with him.

You might think: so fucking what, old man? How is a dog an impediment to watching a movie, you lazy fuck?

Well, the thing is, if my dog is in the room and awake, the appearance of a dog, or any four legged creature on screen really, means that my dog goes absolutely fucking berserk. And If I’m watching a movie late at night, which I usually am, having the dog go completely fucking berserk is not conducive to sleep for the other members of my household. Or for enjoyable movie watching.

Only recently did I come up with the innovation of piling up couch pillows between her and the telly so that she can’t see the doggoes, even if she can hear doggoes barking.

So, finally, I got to watch the flick the whole way through. Yes, I am stalling for time, how did you figure it out?

dir: Jean Luc Herbulot

2021

There is a lot of insanity going on here.

For much of this flick’s length, I felt like I was watching something so cool, so different from anything I’d seen before, something steeped in cleverness and difference, but within a startling cinematic form, from places where films like this rarely arise (not that I would know – I mean that rise to prominence outside of where it was made).

And eventually I came back down to Earth. It’s just a film. As great as the melding of form, function, place, history, cool looking dudes is, and as refreshing as it is for a revenge tale, the way everything is resolved felt unfulfilling.

And yet everything I will say from now on isn’t going to really capture the magnitude of why I found this flick so impressive. I think it will remain hard to explain.

I know nothing about the director, but I know he’s seen some films. He has definitely seen the films (or at least enough scenes from them) of Sergio Leone. And though he’s from the Republic of Congo, and studied and worked in France, he is drawn to telling a very strangely specific story about a trio of guys who find themselves trapped in the Saloum region of Senegal.

The stuff I’m going to write is going to sound quite specific and quite strange, but I assure you most of it is reasonably accurate. The film starts in 2003, during a coup d’etat in Guinea-Bissau. A trio of mercs runs around what looks like piles and piles of corpses in the streets, wearing slick grey-silver slickers, wielding weapons. When we see one soldier stir amidst the dead, one of the mercs, with white dreads, blows a powder into his face, knocking him the fuck out.

They proceed to a room where there’s a Mexican drug dealer who has a suitcase full of gold bars, and it seems their job all along has been to extract the racist jerk from this place and take him north to Dakar in Senegal, so he can get back to, I dunno, macramé and drug dealing in his spare time.

I don’t think the mercs were responsible for the coup (in the film, I mean, not in ‘real life’) – though that’s maybe why they’re there to extract Felix (Renaud Farah). As they fly to their destination, the plane loses fuel, and they have to come down in a region of Senegal they think is cursed.

The three chaps, the three amigos, these three Bangui’s Hyenas, are thick as thieves. They never really argue with each other that much, but they do disagree occasionally. Chaka (Yann Gael) seems like the youngest of the three, but seems maybe to be their leader. They defer to him at least. Rafa (Roger Sallah) acts like he thinks he’s the coolest of the trio, but that’s only because his sunglasses, mohawk and machete combination look really, really on point.

Last is Minuit (Ba Mentor), who is some kind of mystic with his massive dreadlocks, but he seems, whatever his propensity and comfort with violence might , is here called a marabout, or someone with the skills to both pay the bills and the power to repel evil spirits and such.