Spank's LFF Diary, Tuesday 10/10/2023

Reviewed today: Banel & Adama, Short Film Competition A-G.

11.45am: Short Film Competition A-G [see the films here]

Remember Covid? What a fun old time that was, especially for film festivals that couldn’t pack loads of people next to each other in cinemas for a year or so. I’m still impressed to this day by the approach the LFF took in 2020: socially distanced screenings for the biggest films they had, and off to the BFI Player with everything else. After that huge pivot, gradually the balance has swung back over the last three years. This year, only a few bits of the programme are watchable online: the Screen Talks (gradually appearing on the BFI YouTube account), two items from the Expanded VR collection, and the films competing for the LFF Short Film award.

So, here’s one you can play at home: all ten of the competition shorts are available for free to UK viewers on the BFI Player until October 15th, and you can vote for your favourite in the Audience Awards (although the LFF site has literally no information about how you do that). As in previous years, I’m viewing them over two days, taking the first five titles (in alphabetical order) today and the rest later in the week. Comparing these ten shorts against each other is idiotic, obviously: there’s such a wide range of subject matter, genre and budget that it’s hardly a level playing field.

Having said that, in this selection I’m viewing today there are two complementary shorts about the Black British coming of age experience. Iggy London’s Area Boy [trailer] follows a young lad who’s moved with his mother to a new town, and is finding it impossible to fit in: his church upbringing doesn’t impress the other boys, and he’s far too awkward with girls. It’s interesting to note that race isn’t considered a factor worth mentioning in Area Boy, which is quite different from the approach of Yero Timi-Biu’s Essex Girls [official site]. Busayo’s identity crisis is built around her constantly wanting the approval of the white girls at school, so she’s thrown for a loop when a Black classmate invites her to a party. Both films have effective use of wide-screen photography which makes you forget their low-budget origins, but for me Essex Girls has the edge for its sense of humour and its williness to let its lead character make a choice at the end.

The other three shorts are experimental, to varying degrees. Thao Lam and Kjell Boersma’s Boat People [official site] uses the metaphor of the resilience of ants to tell the story of her family’s escape from Vietnam. It's only really experimental in that it uses animation as its medium: as The BBG says, the main thing it does is remind you that grown-up animated shorts like this one used to have their own programme slot at the LFF, and maybe it's time that happened again. There's more hardcore experimentation in Mahdy Abo Bahat and Abdo Zin Eldin’s The Goose’s Excuse [official site] , even though its title leads you to expect a cartoon adaptation of a beloved children's book. We get some nicely shot scenes of an Egyptian village, and two men in the distance discussing their dreams, but no context to put any of this into. You have to go to the British Council's website to find a synopsis that makes some degree of sense - 'a heavenly inquiry lands in a village to inspect the sleep of a peasant and his renegade goose' - but it's not quite enough.

Of the five shorts we're looking at here, Simisolaoluwa Akande’s The Archive: Queer Nigerians [trailer] is probably the best. It's a documentary in which four Nigerians on various shades of the queer spectrum tell their stories, all of which follow a predictable pattern: they discovered their sexuality growing up in Nigeria, suffered rejection by family and friends, and moved to London because it seemed a much safer place to live in. The quartet tell their stories in voiceover, with Akande adding inventive visualisations of their words – sometimes showing tantalisingly brief glimpses of the speakers and their partners, sometimes going down a more abstract route. It’s a film that's got a thing to say, and it says it both imaginatively and well, so currently it's my frontrunner for the award. But we'll see if that changes when I watch the other five shorts later this week.

3.35pm: Banel & Adama [trailer]

No pressure on first time director Ramata-Toulaye Sy, but she’s kind of subbing for Martin Scorsese today. Several of Spank's Pals were keen to see this morning's matinee of Killers Of The Flower Moon, but inevitably it sold out in minutes, and I'm past the age where I'm prepared to join an early morning returns queue on the off chance that a ticket might become available. Actually, I should also be past the age where I’d be going out to see a Black Country, New Road gig this evening, but that one I am doing. All this means that if we want to see a film in an actual cinema today, we're severely limited in terms of both timeslots and films that have availability. So we end up settling for a little Malian movie we've never heard of that's playing in grotty old NFT2, and hoping that it'll at least be watchable.

Funny how things work out sometimes, isn’t it?

The chief of a small village has just died, leaving his widow Banel (Khady Mane) free to marry her childhood sweetheart Adama (Mamadou Diallo). As first couples go, they’re fairly unconventional: he doesn’t want the role of chief despite having it handed to him on a plate, while she has no desire whatsoever to produce an heir. Banel is also keen to get the two of them out of the village, and has her eye on a house that the locals consider haunted. Put all of these transgressions together, and it means that when a series of disasters strikes the village, fingers are going to be pointed.

This is an extraordinary film for someone's debut: slow paced, very quiet, but with total control over its story. It uses the landscape brilliantly - the state of Banel and Adama's relationship is mirrored in the terrain, and the visual transition from fertile village to blasted desert is incredibly well done. It's all beautifully acted by a cast of non-professionals, with Khady Mane's Banel the utter standout. Ramata-Toulaye Sy is now on my list of director names to look out for in the future: watch your back, Marty.

(As for BC,NR - in the first live show I’ve seen of theirs since the departure of Isaac Wood - they still seem to be coasting on the Bush Hall live set they released as an album earlier this year, with hardly any new material. And they still sound like three separate bands that haven’t settled on a unified direction yet. But I haven’t worked out which of the three is my favourite yet, so maybe that’s something. It appears that the prime audience demographic for this incarnation of the band is 'six foot plus genetic freaks who like standing in front of shorter people', so the only time we get to see the band properly is when we're standing right at the back for their final number. Hence the picture.)