1.15pm: Darwin's Nightmare
Another day, another documentary. Hubert Sauper's film carefully studies the fishing industry in Lake Victoria in Tanzania. It's the home of the hugely popular Nile Perch, a fish which is exported all over the world. But the thing is, that wasn't always the case. Lake Victoria used to be full of countless other species of fish, but they've all died off since the Nile Perch was introduced into the lake as an experiment in the sixties. The local inhabitants can't afford to buy it, and have to survive on the fish heads and carcasses that are dumped after the filleting process, so starvation is a major problem. The only work open to women is prostitution, so HIV and AIDS are rife. And the children are mostly living on the streets and getting high from fumes off burning fish packaging.
It's an appalling state of affairs, and Sauper documents it all in a calm, unsensational fashion. To be honest, this makes the first part of the film a little bit dull, but this is because he's trying to structure the film to match his own discoveries. A constant feature of the movie is the repeated sound of the export planes roaring overhead as they take off and land. When they leave, the planes are carrying fish to the EU: but Sauper has to ask over and over again what's in the planes when they arrive. For almost the entire running time he receives the standard answer of "they're empty, I think... I'm not sure," until a Russian pilot finally lets the truth slip.
By the end, the initial slowness of Darwin's Nightmare is forgotten as you realise the full scale of what Sauper calls a hidden genocide. He's helped by a carefully chosen selection of interviewees, who he's obviously built relationships with over a period of time. British viewers should be able to see the film when it appears in BBC2's Storyville slot some time in 2005: more importantly, the EU Parliament should be seeing it at a special screening in the next couple of weeks. Sauper isn't hopeful of the outcome - prior experience has shown him that politicians will congratulate him for telling it like it is, and then do nothing. I hope he's wrong.
3.30pm: The Plague
Last week we had Bullet Boy: now here's another low budget British film about the problems of inner city youth. But where Bullet Boy felt like lecturing from grownups, this has a more authentic ring to it, partly down to its lack of easy moralising. It follows a group of four lads - lovestruck Tom (David Bonnick Jr), dopehead Alex (Samuel Anoyke), Muslim Ravi (Nur Alam Rahman) and token whiteboy Matt (Brett Harris). We watch them over two days as they get into all manner of dodgy dope deals by day and parties by night, with the ever present sound of Destruction FM in the background, featuring Skinnyman on the mike.
You can't help but admire The Plague's ambition. Made by Greg Hall for an astonishingly low budget of £3500, with a crew of eight people and a cast of sixty, it shows no real signs of the lack of experience or resources involved. It opens boldly - daring you to keep up as it rapidly cross-cuts between all the main characters - and keeps up the pace almost to the end. Unfortunately, though the first three quarters of the film works well as a series of loosely-linked vignettes, Hall feels he has to pull some sort of dramatic climax out of the hat at the end. The nightclub scene that results slows the film to a crawl, and its melodrama feels somewhat forced after the slice-of-life nature of what's come before. Still, there's an awful lot to like here, including some extraordinary use of slang throughout. (Some of it's lost in a surprisingly underpowered sound mix, so hooray for the hard-of-hearing subtitles at today's screening. Do young people really refer to money as 'wong' nowadays?)
Greg Hall's engaging Q&A reveals that he's not managed to get a distribution deal yet - apparently the UK Film Council refused to fund The Plague, as it thinks the people depicted in it aren't the sort that go to the movies. But he lets slip that if he still doesn't have a deal by early 2005, he'll press up some DVDs himself and sell it via his website. See? I told you it was the future.
6.30pm: Soldiers Pay
It's impossible to review this documentary without going into some detail regarding the story behind it. Earlier this year, director David O Russell was approached by Warners regarding a theatrical and DVD re-release of his 1999 Gulf War classic, Three Kings. He was asked if he could provide some new bonus material for the DVD. So he got together with documentary filmmakers Tricia Regan and Juan Carlos Zaldivar, and within six weeks they'd bashed out a 35 minute short film, Soldiers Pay, looking at the experiences of soldiers in the more recent Iraq adventure.
Once Warners worked out the implications of this being released just before a Presidential election, they panicked and cancelled all their plans for Three Kings. Thankfully, Russell, Regan and Zaldivar were allowed to retain the rights to their film: since then, they've organised a short US theatrical run, as well as a television screening two days ago, on the eve of the election. With bitter irony, Russell and Regan are in London to introduce the film's British premiere on the day when anyone with the slightest bit of leftwing feeling across the world is staring westwards and mouthing 'WHAT THE FUCK?' to anyone who'll listen.
In the current American climate, pretty much any level of questioning of the war in Iraq is treated as treason, and time and again people are forced to resort to the cliche of being "against the war, but for the troops". And this is precisely the line that Soldiers Pay takes: it interviews a group of Iraq war veterans about why they joined up and what happened to them. We also get additional comments from a journalist, a psychologist, two Iraqi actors from Three Kings, a Republican senator and a retired general who's opposed the war from the start. (As Tricia Regan pointed out after the film, the sincerity of all the interviewees is apparent, with the notable exception of the senator, who's obviously just spouting a party line without thinking about what it means.)
The film is careful to include both pro- and anti-war voices, but it's always firmly on the side of the soldiers. The main story at its centre concerns the widespread looting that went on, in which soldiers were told by higher ranking officers to take what they could get away with - as one person points out, these aren't the actions of a liberating army, but a conquering one. In an amusing parallel with the plot of Three Kings, we hear about two soldiers who discovered several hundred million dollars in an Iraqi safehouse, and how one of them was set up as the fall guy to cover for the misdemeanours of his seniors. Other concerns about what happened over there are discussed, including the widespread use of civilian contractors who were better equipped that their military equivalents, and the recently-leaked plan to cut the veteran health budget by a billion dollars in 2006. The line is consistent throughout: whether you believe they should be there or not, the soldiers are being appallingly treated. It's fitting that the last word should go to the retired general, who very subtly loses it as he talks about his struggle to remember the names of all the men he's sent to their death in battle. It's a touching reminder that real people are involved here, something that's occasionally forgotten on both sides.
9.00pm: Times Screen Talks: David O Russell
David O Russell, co-director of Soldiers Pay, first burst onto the scene in 1994 with his incest comedy Spanking The Monkey. And I've never seen it. Really. Just so you know. I've only been trading under this name since 1998, and besides, it was just one of those films that I never got around to. I tried to get hold of a copy for research purposes prior to this onstage interview, but it doesn't seem to be available in the UK right now. Sorry.
Anyway, Sandra Hebron's interview starts with Russell's early days as a political activist, during which he made a couple of short documentaries. Having taken the sideways step into fictional shorts, he spent some time developing a feature based around a man who bugged the tables at a Chinese restaurant so that diners could be given really specific fortune cookies. This fell through, but his backup project Spanking The Monkey seemed to be coming along more satisfactorily, so he made that instead. The film won a Sundance award, and allowed him to get stars like Mary Tyler Moore and Alan Alda on board for his followup, Flirting With Disaster. ("It's a standard career path - independent directors on their way up intersect with has-been actors on their way down...") Since then he's made Three Kings, as discussed above, and I Heart Huckabees, an existential detective story which is somehow related to that fortune cookie plot from way back.
It has to be said that Russell is an entertaining interview, rather than an informative one. He's reasonably open for most of the first half of the evening, but clams up a bit after a mid-show trip to the bathroom, a detail I mention here for informational purposes only. However, the second part of the interview is most notable for the on-stage arrival of Jon Brion, who wrote the music for Huckabees. Brion talks a bit about getting the balance between songs and orchestral score right on the soundtrack, and how the score of Huckabees is drawn primarily from a series of songs, not all of which are performed vocally in the movie. He charmingly performs a couple of them on stage for us, though, and even gets Russell to provide occasional backing vocals on the second one.
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