Spank's LFF Diary, Thursday 17/10/2024

Reviewed today: The Shadow Scholars, The Weekend, When The Light Breaks.

3.40pm: When The Light Breaks [trailer]

For reasons too fiddly to get into here, this is actually our third choice for our first film of the day. It was on our radar because it's Icelandic, and we're still a bit buzzy from our trip there earlier this year: and, quite frankly, it was the only one we could get standby tickets for. It's not until we're in our seats and listening to the introduction that we realise we've come across the film's director before: Rúnar Rúnarsson was here in 2011 with his debut, Volcano. At the time, I said "I'll definitely be keen to see his next one": well, it turns out that I've missed two features that he's made since then. Still, once again, third time lucky.

In my memory, Volcano was a funny movie, albeit darkly so. This isn’t: it follows a group of young art students over one of those long, long Reykjavik days as they come to terms with the death of one of their friends, Diddi (Baldur Einarsson). Five of them set up a mutual support network to get through the day, including his girlfriend Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir) and his performance art collaborator Una (Elín Hall). But one of the group is carrying a secret, and today would probably be the worst possible time for it to come out.

It could almost be a classier Icelandic Hollyoaks, but the main thing When The Light Breaks gives you is a detailed study of how five kids, who’ve never lost anyone before apart from grandparents, have to learn to grieve properly for the first time. There's a careful balance between the emotions the five are trying to navigate, and the tension derived from what we know and what other people don’t. And it's not as gloomy as I may have made it sound in the previous paragraph: Rúnarsson throws in the odd surreal detail, like the streets of Reykjavik being dotted with fellow performance artists in silly costumes.

Because The BBG and I have been to Reykjavik a couple of times now, we're delighted to see the use of recognisable locations throughout: the Harpa concert hall as a trauma centre, and Hallgrímskirkja as the location for a memorial service. And for a film that's mostly driven by the interactions of its cast (all of whom are excellent), Rúnarsson pulls off some staggeringly lovely visual coups: Una's demonstration of one of her performance art pieces is a simple but glorious highlight. Hopefully I won't miss another two of his films before seeing my next one.

6.20pm: The Shadow Scholars [director interview]

We're accidentally seeing an African double bill of movies this evening. The first half of our programme is mainly set in Kenya, but uses that as a starting point to investigate something that's happening all around the world. Eloise King's documentary is based on the work of Professor Patricia Kingori, an Oxford don studying the rise of 'contract cheating': students going online and having their college essays written to order by someone else, for a price. But what she’s interested in is that a huge proportion of these essay writers are based in Kenya: highly educated, under-employed students who’ve developed the skills to write quickly and well on a variety of topics.

When this gets reported in the Global North as we call it now, it’s seen as a problem with our lazy students. (Thankfully, we only get to hear from a very small number of American teenagers whining about how they’re entitled to a degree given the tuition fees they're paying.) Kingori, though, is viewing it from the other angle: that of the essay writers who see what they're doing as legitimate academic writing, even though they have to submit it under fake Western-sounding names, and are getting paid for it (although inevitably there's a middleman who takes a hefty cut). She asks, if these Kenyan kids are so smart and productive, why can’t they get jobs where they can use their real names and advertise the country they come from? In fact, why can’t they get official tutoring jobs in the Global North's universities? Although we probably know the answer to that last one.

Kingori claims she never wanted to be on camera for this film, but she does a great job as its frontwoman, navigating us through all the moral dilemmas raised by the existence of the shadow scholars. In fact, the deeper we go, the more worrying questions are brought up. If essay sales have been going on for years, and thousands of people have already got jobs based on degrees they didn’t really earn, there are two possibilities. Either they’re running around the world being shit at their jobs: or they’re pretty good, and all this proves is that academic essays are a shit method for measuring competence.

Either way, the system is badly broken, and the prospect of AI is there to muddy the waters even further. The solution proposed by academia is to block access to the essay-selling websites, but then what happens to the Kenyans who are suddenly out of work? There are lots of questions, and plenty of answers to go with them, all making for a decently chewy documentary that could have a reasonable chance of picking up an award at the end of this festival.

9.00pm: The Weekend [trailer]

For our second African film of the day, we go to Nigeria, where Luc (Bucci Franklin) has recently got engaged to Nikiya (Uzoamaka Aniunoh). Her argument is that as she's about to become part of his family, isn't it about time she met his mum and dad (Gloria Anozie and Keppy Ekpenyong-Bassey)? It's pretty obvious that there's a lot of bad blood between Luc and his parents for some reason, but eventually he relents and takes her to the family home on the weekend of the couple's 50th wedding anniversary. Also on the guest list are Luc's sister Kama (Meg Otanwa), and her sexist arsehole of a boyfriend Zeido (James Gardiner). Well, you can just imagine the high jinks that will ensue over the weekend!

Actually, no. You can’t.

I have in my head what's almost certainly a stereotypical idea of what Nollywood cinema is like: very low budget, often largely shot in people's living rooms with boomy sound. But in the same way that not all Indian cinema is Bollywood, I guess not all Nigerian cinema is Nollywood. And Daniel Oriahi's film certainly doesn't fit the stereotype at all: there's a definite slickness in the production, albeit still obviously working on a small amount of money.

It's being marketed as a psychological thriller, but a short intense flashforward right at the start indicates that things will get viscerally dark by the end. The pacing from that point onwards is expertly managed: we're given tiny hints of the murky undercurrents within the family, and they all build slowly on top of each other. And then things escalate, and how. Each plot revelation is only a small rise in intensity from what came before, so you never really notice the frog boiling until you look down at the end and realise you’ve got a kettle full of frog tea. Which may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but it suits me just fine.