Spike Lee in London

BFI Southbank has a current season of films which places Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing in context. Lee has come over to speak during the season and he popped up in the crowd at Arsenal’s home game against Wigan on Saturday. I know he is a big sports fan. He’s been to Arsenal before and I’m sure he enjoyed the game.

We’ve also had interviews in the Independent and on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row in which he was interviewed by the urbane, liberal and generally calm and organised Mark Lawson. But Spike lived up to his billing and Lawson seemed quite nervous. It was a joy to hear someone who wasn’t interested in giving us platitudes and just spoke his mind and laughed a lot. I enjoyed the interview but was very disappointed by one of his comments. Asked about the films that were being shown alongside Do The Right Thing, Lee told us quite clearly that he hadn’t chosen the films – and he didn’t agree with showing all of them. Lawson suggested that the Paul Haggis film Crash might have been influenced by DTRT. Lee said that he didn’t want to be associated with Crash. I can understand that but I confess that I was dismayed when Lee came out with a tirade against Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine. Kassovitz should have acknowledged  his debt to DTRT he said. And then it transpired that Lee hadn’t seen the film. His friends had told him all about it and so he didn’t want to see it.

I guess this is vintage Spike Lee and we have to take the rough with the smooth. You should watch the film, Spike. It’s one of the best films of the 1990s and Kassovitz has spoken about his influences, including your own role model and fellow NYU graduate Jim Jarmusch as well as Martin Scorsese. He has spoken about the independent US features, including the ‘hood’ films that he admired – I think that Juice is perhaps closest to La haine. In many ways the young Kassovitz worked in similar ways to the young Spike Lee and although his subsequent career has been a disappointment, I think La haine still stands up. So, go on Spike, give it a go.

Those Spike Lee Joints

The home of 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. Photo © Sparkdance as shown on Flickr

It’s twenty years since the release of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (it feels a lot longer, not sure why). The BFI is celebrating the occasion with a season on the Southbank in London and we are also going to get some screenings up here in Bradford. I’m also planning a course, so it seems a good idea to revisit the work of Spike Lee, one of the most controversial directors working today. I’ve seen most, but not all, of Lee’s features so I’ve got some catching up to do and some re-viewings. I’m not qualified to judge how well he represents African-American culture, though I feel like I’ve learned a lot from his films. Although race is a major topic for him, his films are also about gender, social class, the family and a host of other issues. Most of all though he is a stylist and I think that his films are distinctive because of their visual qualities, the use of music and great casting. Lee is a genuine auteur. There are few filmmakers whose work is instantly  recognisable from their company’s name. But when you see the announcement that a film is from ‘40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks‘, you know that it is a Spike Lee Joint, sho’ nuff.

I’d have to say that I haven’t yet seen a bad Spike Lee film or perhaps more accurately, I haven’t yet seen a Spike Lee film that wasn’t interesting in terms of style, content and commitment. I know that there are commentators that I respect, such as Armond White, who are very down on Spike and accuse him of blocking out other more worthwhile filmmakers because of his vigorous self-promotion and propensity to ’say it like it is’ as loudly as possible – but even when I don’t necessarily agree with him, I think it is better that he is out there saying things than keeping schtumm.

Spike Lee was born in 1957 in Atlanta but grew up in Brooklyn, New York City. He went back to college in Atlanta at the famous Black school, Morehouse, before developing his filmmaking skills back in New York at the Tisch School a couple of years behind Jim Jarmusch. Lee’s father is a noted jazz musician and composer and his mother was a teacher. His father has worked on the music for several of Lee’s films and his family life has clearly influenced his filmmaking.

In 1986, Lee’s first ‘commercial’ feature She’s Gotta Have It, a low budget independent film, was one of the earliest successes of what became known as American Independent Cinema. Since then, Lee has been continuously working on fiction features, documentaries, TV dramas, music videos and commercials, all produced by his own company. As of August 2009, Lee had released 20 features (fiction and documentary) and another 20 TV/video/commercials etc. This is a staggering achievement given the conservative nature of the mainstream American film business and the forthright arguments put forward by producer/writer/director/actor Spike Lee. This hasn’t prevented major features like the last Spike Lee Joint, the Miracle at Santa Anna (2008) from failing to get a proper release outside North America. Personally, I find it difficult to imagine what the winning documentaries must have been like that prevented Lee’s 4 Little Girls (1997) and When the Levées Broke (2006) from claiming Oscar success. But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised given the commercial failure of Bamboozled (2000), the biting satire on the racism in American television. In the same year, Lee had a big commercial success with a documentary/concert film featuring four African-American comedians, The Original Kings of Comedy. Lee is tough and sharp when it comes to surviving in the American film industry. It would be good to discuss what we think his films have contributed to global film culture over twenty years and more.

I would put Spike Lee into my Top 10 American filmmakers of the last twenty years without hesitation.

Danny Boyle – life after Slumdog

Screen International this week reported that Danny Boyle has signed a three year deal with Fox Searchlight and Pathé, the two companies behind the successful distribution of Slumdog Millionaire. Slumdog is still making money around the world with theatrical currently showing $358 million and DVD already at $30 million in the US.

Boyle is said to be keen to link up with Indian filmmakers Shekhar Kapur and Anurag Kashyap and has acquired the rights to the book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta, a collection of essays about the city by a returning former resident. Shekhar Kapur is best known for Elizabeth in the UK, but more importantly he made Bandit Queen (India/UK 1994) with part-funding by Channel 4. This was one of the first films to attempt to marry aspects of British and Indian popular cinema. Anurag Kashyap is a younger (37) filmmaker with wide experience as an actor, writer and director. He has worked with Mani Ratnam and with Deepa Mehta, but it was his own film, Black Friday (India 2004), about the 1993 Mumbai bombings, that Boyle watched in his preparation for Slumdog.

The success of Slumdog means that Danny Boyle will have great freedom to choose his next projects. But it doesn’t mean that he has become a critical success. Anyone who wants to gauge the challenge that Slumdog’s success has presented to the critical community should look at the last two issues of Cineaste magazine. Robert Koehler wrote one of the silliest reviews of Slumdog I have seen and what was worse he wrote about the film claiming deep knowledge of India and Indian Cinema. Taken to task in the latest issue by Rahul Hamid, Koehler then compounds his folly. I don’t want to rehash all the debates again, but Koehler seems unable to accept that Slumdog is an Indian story about aspects of contemporary globalised Indian life adapted and mounted by Brits and Indians working together and drawing on recent Indian film styles.

Nouvelle Vague Directors: Jacques Demy

Jacques Demy and Jeanne Moreau on location on the Riviera for Baie des anges © Raymond CAUCHETIER / 1993 CINE TAMARIS

Jacques Demy (1931-1990) is the New Wave director who, like Louis Malle, is difficult to categorise. Some link him to the ‘Left Bank Group’, but this is primarily because he married Agnès Varda in 1962. Otherwise he had little in common with the politics of Alain Resnais or Chris Marker. In some ways he was closer to Truffaut and he certainly knew all the Cahiers gang, presumably via Varda or from his film school contacts. There were several distinctive aspects of Demy’s cinema which made it ‘personal’ and ‘different’.

Demy was fascinated by American Cinema – but by musicals rather than B films noirs. Nearly all of his films present a romance drawing in some way on the musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. He was also a fan of various aspects of classical French Cinema and French popular music culture. Demy was a native of the West Coast of France in the region around Nantes and this coastline provided the backdrop for his best known films, Lola (1961), Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Les demoiselles de Rochefort in 1967. These films draw on various Hollywood sources – On the Town (1949), the Stanley Donen film about sailors on leave in New York is an obvious influence on Lola. The stars of Demy’s New Wave films are the women (and the music of Michel Legrand). In his first four films these are Anouk Aimée, Jean Moreau, Catherine Deneuve and Deneuve again with her sister Françoise Dorléac. By 1967 he had a full star cast – Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, George Chakiris and Gene Kelly. Demy moved to the US to make Model Shop in 1969 and after this his career foundered. The early quartet of films have survived however and are well worth watching, both for their own specific qualities and because they represent a different side to the New Wave.

Demy’s second film was La baie des anges (Bay of Angels 1963). Jeanne Moreau as a platinum blonde is a bourgeois wife with a gambling habit. The film starts with a typical New Wave tracking shot by Jean Rabier (who had been an assistant to Henri Decaë on Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’énchafaud (1958) before shooting several films for Chabrol and then for Varda and Demy). The camera appears to be mounted on a car or truck which is driven at speed along the deserted promenades of the Riviera. It reminded me of Jean Vigo’s ‘city symphony’ film A propos de Nice (1929) photographed by Boris Kaufman. The action then switches to Paris where a young man in a boring accountancy job is persuaded to visit a casino by a colleague. When he wins a considerable amount on the roulette table, Jean (Claude Mann) decides to change his holiday plans and instead of visiting relatives in the country he finds a hotel in Cannes and starts to visit the casino. Here he meets Jackie (Moreau) who he had briefly seen earlier being thrown out of a Parisian casino.

The main part of the film is a melodrama about sex and money. Jean and Jeanne have a tempestuous and whirlwind affair driven by the thrill of gambling with its intense highs and lows and moments of exhilaration and despair. There is passion and indeed violence in the relationship and the narrative has an ‘open’ ending that is quite abrupt. What this points to is the curious mixture of ‘fantasy romance’ and cold realism that seems to infuse the films I’ve watched.

I enjoyed Baie des anges. At times I thought to myself, “there isn’t much plot”, but at the same time I realised that I was engrossed by the rich texture of the images and the way in which the narrative unfolded. Moreau is a star actor, but I wasn’t completely convinced by Claude Mann. Sometimes he appeared perfect for the role and sometimes out of his depth. Jeanne Moreau’s hair was my main concern. I presume that it was meant to signify ‘artifice’/'brittleness’. I certainly didn’t like it, but it worked in the sense that it somehow enhanced Moreau’s extraordinary ability to look soft and alluring one moment and hard and frankly terrifying at others.

I’m hoping to watch more from Demy soon. In the meantime, there is a clip from Baie des Anges on an earlier posting here. 

Senses of Cinema article and links.

Genova (UK 2008)

Will Holland as the older daughter, Kelly, in Genova

Having thought that I’d missed Genova, I managed to catch it in France where it is titled Un été Italian. I seem to have spent a long time extolling the virtues of Michael Winterbottom and defending him in the face of indifference or hostility. As a result, I was a little worried about seeing this feature which has hung around since last Summer before getting a release. It hasn’t helped that the only Winterbottom films that have been deemed commercially successful tend to be those that for me are his least interesting, such as A Cock and Bull Story (UK 2005). It’s a relief then that Genova is a big return to form for Winterbottom fans – and of course another commercial disaster.

For most reviewers, Winterbottom’s main distinguishing feature as a director is that he constantly moves from one genre to another and can’t be pinned down. The implication is that this is a problem, rather than an indication that Winterbottom is an auteur filmmaker who makes films for his own reasons. If he does draw on genre repertoires, it isn’t usually in order to frame a story in genre terms. For mainstream audiences this presents a real problem in that the films do not offer conventional structures – or rather they do not fulfil the expectations that generic story structures set up. This is certainly true of Genova, which perhaps has less ‘plot’ than any other Winterbottom film and instead offers the most intense and emotional representation of a brief period in the lives of the central characters. 

If Genova draws on any generic repertoire, it is the current cycle of psychological horror/ghost stories, but its clearest referent is not a modern Japanese or Spanish film but Nic Roeg’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story Don’t Look Now (UK 1973). In that classic film Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland are a couple who are deeply in love, but grief-stricken over the death of one of their children. When they visit Venice they are disturbed by a sense of foreboding in fleeting sightings of a mysterious figure. In Genova, a university lecturer (Colin Firth) loses his wife in a car crash which his two daughters survive. He decides to take the girls to the Northern Italian city of Genoa for the Summer to help with the grieving process. The comparison between the two films is valid but not helpful towards an understanding of what Genova is actually about. Don’t Look Now is a genuine melodrama/thriller with conscious attempts to draw in an audience through the strength of the bond between the parents and the sheer terror that threatens them in the potentially supernatural mise en scène of the dark canals. Genova is much more circumspect about what constitutes a ‘ghost’ and is in many ways a supremely realist film. In fact, it made me think about another film concerning grief on a trip through Italy – Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Italy 1953).

I’ve called Winterbottom an auteur, but I’m sure he would also credit the authorial contributions of his collaborators. The other ways to approach Genova are via its writer Laurence Coriat and its familiar crew members, especially Marcel Zyskind as cinematographer. Laurence Coriat wrote my favourite Michael Winterbottom film, Wonderland (UK 1999). She is also working with Winterbottom on a long-term project featuring Wonderland’s John Simm and Shirley Henderson and on a film with Marc Evans, a long-time friend of Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton and the Revolution Films set-up. Coriat is almost an ‘in-house’ writer and with the usual suspects on set, it would seem that Genova must have had a sense of coherence as a project. Having said that, Winterbottom’s shooting strategy and Eaton’s approach to squeezing evey drop out of the tightest of budgets must always make shooting a film like this extremely demanding.

The production set-up recalls Code 46 (2003) which also featured a North American star (Tim Robbins) plunged into the world of low-budget ‘guerilla filmmaking’ on the streets of Shanghai. Robbins was not too impressed by the rigours of the shooting method but Catherine Keener in Genova seems more receptive in interviews. Code 46 is a lot more plot driven, but both films tend to have narrative ‘gaps’ that audiences are expected to fill and endings which are very open. I like this and it doesn’t cause me problems.

Colin Firth now lives in Italy so presumably he found himself on solid ground. Catherine Keener plays a friend, an old classmate from Harvard, who works in Genoa. She helps widower Joe and his two girls travel to the city and arranges a temporary post for him at the university. Keener is a well-known in American Independent Cinema. The two girls are played by Willa Holland and Perla Haney-Jardine (who I later discovered I’d seen in the US remake of Dark Water). I that Firth is meant to be a Brit, though I didn’t really think about this as globe-trotting academics are pretty common these days. The low budget production includes a winter driving scene in Sweden and some UK work as well as a Chicago street scene and the main shoot in Italy. The only production issues for me were the casting of Kerry Shale (nice man, but aren’t there any other American actors in the UK – his presence makes me think of plays on Radio 4) and the use of Ryanair as the airline flying into Genoa (from the US?). The real benefit of course is the freedom to shoot in the Zyskind style.

What this means in terms of the emotional feel of the film is the disorientation brought on by hand-held ‘Scope camerawork with sometimes jarring cutting. Everything is filmed in available light, so we linger in darkened rooms or move between dark and light with all the problems of re-adjusting. This makes the film quite uncomfortable to watch, but matches the numbness and lack of focus felt by the characters. The architecture of Genoa also plays a part as characters (i.e. the girls) have to follow a route through narrow alleyways. Zyskind tilts the camera up to show us the bright sky struggling to reach down into the narrow alleys as the girls wonder where they are. This effect matches that of Christie in Sutherland in the similarly dark alleys and canals of Venice. The efect also carries over into a sequence in the woods close to the beach where another search takes place.

In a sense, Genova is an ‘anti-melodrama’. The characters get angry, but mostly their emotions are pushed down. So much in fact that I’ve seen complaints that the Firth character is a ‘bad father’ who seems indifferent to his wife’s death and unconcerned about what is happening to his children. I think he’s shown as behaving in the way many English men would. He suppresses emotion. In a melodrama, this would then ‘return’ to be expressed as an emotional release in some way, but here Winterbottom constructs a narrative with cold realism and the result for me was devastating. I’ve never really rated Firth before (I’m afraid I’ve generally ignored him) but here I thought he was excellent. Two crucial scenes with Catherine Keener struck me as the most psychologically ‘real’ I’ve seen for a long time. Here’s a movie I’d recommend to anyone prepared to question their own emotional responses to film narratives.

Critics and film – the same old story

Most Friday nights I subject myself to a form of torture known as the Newsnight Review on BBC2 TV, a programme that rarely fails to leave me fuming. My main gripe is that the programme parades an array of cultural critics who collectively have around seven or eight minutes on four or five of the week’s new productions. Each of the critics tends to have a specific area of expertise, but they are required to speak on all of the items. Very occasionally there is someone with expertise in cinema, but films are regularly reviewed – usually the major Hollywood offering, but sometimes a European film (never anything from India, China, Africa etc.)

The idea of an educated liberal elite who are able to speak about all art forms is a British cultural tradition. There are some things to be said in favour of this approach, but mostly it creates problems. The critics on shows like these rarely have the space to say anything vaguely theoretical or ‘intellectual’ so discourse is at the level of genteel discussion. (The programme has in the last few years ditched the older and more curmudgeonly critics like Tom Paulin who could often be entertaining in his ignorance of popular culture as well as sharply analytical.) The real problem is that the British tradition is still mired in a worldview that recognises writers, fine artists and other high art practitioners, but pretty clueless about cinema and by extension filmed drama on television.

On last night’s show the four topics were an opera, Dr Atomic, the Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery, Red Riding (a trilogy of Channel 4 films) and the ‘Eurothriller’,  The International. The quartet of critics, Paul Morley (popular music and popular culture generally), Jeanette Winterson (novelist), Tom Service (classical music) and Tim Marlow (chair and art critic) referred to both Picasso and the opera’s composer John Adams, but when it came to the film and TV material, the references were only to the writer of the source novels for the television film and to the actors involved. 

I haven’t seen either The International or Red Riding (which airs during the coming month), but I have got some sense of what they are about and what disappoints me is the refusal to see the medium of ‘filmed entertainment’ as worthy of proper coverage. It has long been the case that UK television has been discussed in terms of its writers and producers and virtually never in terms of its directors, cinematographers, designers, editors or any other creative personnel other than the actors. Red Riding is a major production based on a quartet of novels by Yorkshire-born (currently Tokyo domiciled) David Peace. Peace has received plenty of recent attention having developed as a cult crime writer over several years. His recent ‘novelisation’ of the legendary football manager Brian Clough’s disastrous 44 day reign at Leeds United has also been adapted as a feature film and The Damned United is released in a few weeks. So, I have no problem with a discussion of Red Riding in terms of an adaptation of Peace’s work. Yet the trilogy was written for television (melding four stories into three two-hour films) by Tony Grisoni, himself a relatively high profile figure in the British film industry after work with Michael Winterbottom and Terry Gilliam. The films were a co-production between Channel 4 and Revolution Films (the company owned by Michael Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton) and together they represent a significant investment in UK filmmaking. Each of the films is directed by a significant UK director (Julian Jarrold, Anand Tucker and James Marsh) – surely this deserves some kind of comment? As it was, the critics mostly discussed whether the film (the first of the trilogy) was a faithful adaptation and whether this was proof that British television could match recent US TV drama (something of an obsession with UK television critics).

The same issue arises with The International. This was discussed in terms of a mainstream feature in which Clive Owen and Naomi Watts were underused in a film that clearly failed to be a Bond thriller or a Bourne adventure. Other than this, the main discussion was about the theme of corrupt bankers. In the current circumstances focus on corrupt bankers is understandable, but the big question is why nobody was interested in this as a Tom Tykwer film. Tykwer has been a controversial figure with plenty of gainsayers, but in Run, Lola Run (1998) he gave a much-needed boost to European filmmaking in the international market-place and he recently had a major European hit with Perfume (2006).  His 2002 film, Heaven, from a script by Krzysztof Kieslowski and starring Cate Blanchett, was poorly received (unjustly in my opinion). Both Lola and Heaven sound like they were important references for The International yet the film was discussed as just another Hollywood thriller. Officially the film is a German/US co-production with some UK involvement. There are four US independents and three German companies involved. The film has been sold to Sony and Disney in terms of international distribution. Although it has some fans, the general US feeling is that it doesn’t work. OK, but wouldn’t it be more useful to discuss the difficulties of ‘international’ filmmaking in English for European directors – or perhaps, the difficulties that American audiences (and Europeans in love with Hollywood) have with these kinds of films. Whatever Tykwer’s successes or failures, he at least needs recognition as the director of this film.

Update: BBC reviewers on Radio 4’s Saturday Review programme recovered the corporation’s reputation a little by discussing Red Riding and mentioning both the screenwriter and director of the first film – perhaps they should take over Late Review?

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (US 1931)

I was pleased to get the rare chance to see a 1931 classic in a new print on a BFI re-release. I don’t remember seeing the film before, although the image of Fredric March as Mr Hyde is very well-known. The whole experience was a real treat and I wasn’t prepared for either the brilliance of Mamoulian’s approach via camerawork, editing and production design or the sheer eroticism of the film pre Hays Code. The film begins with an audacious subjective camera shot, seemingly hand-held, but presumably on some primitive form of dolly.(This follows a sequence of passionate organ-playing that must have been an inspiration for Monty Python.)

There is already quite a lot of material out there on the film and there is no need for me to repeat it. Here are two blogs that offer (1) a short interview with Mamoulian and (2) a formal analysis with loads of screen grabs showing the compositions and glorious wipes:

http://blog.allanellenberger.com/book-flm-news/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde/

http://www.aycyas.com/jekyllandhyde1931.htm

I suspect that the fans of the film who have only seen it on TV or DVD have missed some of the erotic charge of the film, partly because US TV versions were cut for a long time (as was the initial UK release), but also because the big screen has the kind of mesmeric effect in Mamoulian’s hands that you just can’t get on a small screen. In the final sequence there is a shot in which Mr Hyde approaches Jekyll’s fiancée from behind (as depicted in the poster above) and the subjective shot makes the woman’s dress seem almost touchable – and what dresses they are in the film, close fitting and low-cut. In his ‘Cinema One’ book on Mamoulian (1969) Tom Milne sets up a spirited defence of Mamoulian in the face of later critical apathy. 

Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) was a Georgian from Tbilisi who trained as a theatre director in Moscow and then travelled to first London and then New York, directing both straight theatre and opera. In cinema by the late 1920s he was seen as a real innovator in the use of sound, the roving subjective camera of Jekyll and Hyde and later the first Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp in 1936. He was seduced away from Paramount by the moneybags at MGM (where Garbo’s Queen Christina was a highlight) but after Becky Sharp, his career faltered and he became known for films which he left for various reasons, the last of which was the ill-fated Cleopatra in (1963). The last film he completed was Silk Stockings in 1957, the Cold War musical version of Ninotchka, with the sublime Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire. Milne argues that Mamoulian’s sense of rhythm and timing in shooting and cutting was such that all his films could be seen as musicals.

I can see that my viewing is Mamoulian-light. I have Golden Boy (1939) to watch but now I must also seek out Applause (1929), City Streets (1931) and Love Me Tonight (1932).

Here is the famous scene between March and Miriam Hopkins, demonstrating what Hollywood lost when the Production Code came in:

‘The Invisible Woman’ – Kim Longinotto

With the release of a new DVD of Divorce Iranian Style and Runaway, and a new film appearing at Sundance this month, it’s an opportunity to highlight Kim Longinotto’s work. A British documentarian, who doesn’t quite seem to attract the recognition of some other documentary makers, her work is phenomenal in its range and its capturing of the emotional worlds of its subjects. Hold me Tight, Let me Go (2007), (pictured left) which has aired recently on UK television, is a powerful piece of work about the work of the Mulberry Bush School, for children who are severely emotionally and behaviourally disturbed. Longinotto’s triumph here is to weave all the different strands, of all of these different stories together, firstly without judgement and, structurally, without a sense of those narratives become eclectic and disjointed.

Longinotto, in contrast to the ‘celebrity’ documentarians that have accompanied documentary’s renaissance in recent years, does aim to efface herself from the storytelling and to allow the ‘protagonists’ to speak for themselves. There are problems with attempting to do this, since the documentary maker inevitably shapes the material they produce through editing and decisions about accessed voices. However, her work is always affecting in its intense humanity in relation to its subjects. In Sisters in Law (2005) she, her collaborator Florence Ayisi and sound recordist Mary Milton, follow the work of a campaigning prosecutor, Vera Ngassa, and judge, Beatrice Ntuba, in Cameroon. Both women seek to redress the balance of endemic injustice by pursuing groundbreaking prosecutions of husbands for rape and violence and adults for abuse of children.

Despite the grim nature of this material, which the documentary gives unflinching coverage to, what emerges is the triumph of people’s humanity and a female drive for justice. Longinotto’s stated intention is to stand beside those in the culture and to film their stories as truthfully to the emotions as possible. “The women we’re following know that we’re there to tell their stories. We’re part of their fight, we’re on their side. And the amazing thing is how they make use of our presence. Suddenly, there’s a witness and that gives them confidence.” (www.redpepper.org). Longinotto is appealing to the universality of these emotions, of the connectedness of all experience.

In Divorce Iranian Style (1998) which is included on this new DVD, her stated role is to give back an identity, a named identity to the faceless and the powerless: “I just thought I’m so glad that I’m making films because I’m giving those little girls names… Really, I’m just balancing it a tiny bit.” (www.dfgdocs.com). Therefore, she intends a celebration of her subjects and their bravery, using film to give them an identity rather than herself. Working as a Western director on this material does raise issues of perspective and ideology, but Longinotto’s commitment to her subjects is not in doubt.

Quietly and sure-footedly, she has been building a reputation in the industry. Amongst others, Hold me Tight, Let me Go, won the Best British Documentary award at the Britdoc Festival 2007 and Sisters in Law won the Prix Art Et Essai award at Cannes Film Festival.

Longinotto’s work seems to spring from her own deep wellspring of emotions about her early experiences, and I feel she draws powerfully on these in her documentaries. They simply never fail to move and engage you.

Her latest work, Rough Aunties (2008), concerns women who care for abused and neglected children in Durban, South Africa. It is in competition at Sundance Film Festival this month.

There is much material for Longinotto on the web, but here’s an interesting interview on BAFTA’s website: http://www.bafta.org/learning/20-questions-kim-longinotto,547,BA.html#overlay=hidden.

The new DVD is released by Second Run. Sisters in Law is also available on DVD.