Don't Look at Me that Way (film review)

Hedi (Uisenma Borchu) is the Mongolian neighbour of Iva, a German single mother living with her daughter Sophia. Hedi meets Sophia first and the two become friends but Iva is a little suspicious until she meets Hedi herself and the two women become friends and then lovers. Both women have male lovers as well and unusually for film (where normally bisexuality is portrayed as a phase until a character realises they're really gay / lesbian) the relationships are all just an acknowledged and accepted part of the two women's bisexual identity (though it would be nice if cinema could one day also acknowledge that bisexual characters can commit to a monogamous relationship and still be bisexual).

The relationship between the two women is very believable, as are both their relationships with Sophia, who is a lovely character, a really cheeky, amusing six year old.  Hedi is also a great character, treated to some degree as a scapegoat because she is different in so many ways to those around her, but also envied because of some of the freedoms her cultural difference gives her.

The scenes in Germany are interspersed with vivid scenes of Hedi taking Sophia to meet her grandmother in Mongolia, which are probably dream sequences though this isn't obvious.

I really enjoyed the film up until the point where Hedi starts a relationship with Iva's father. The cinematic trope of the much older man and the much younger woman has been done to death in my opinion and from that point onwards the film significantly deteriorates.

The film is directed by Uisenma Borchu and in this interview she talks about the film.

Don't Look at Me That Way screened at Edinburgh Filmhouse for BiVisibility Day and is showing as part of the Scottish Queer International Film Festival which takes place 27 September - 1 October in Glasgow

Brand New U

Brand New U, showing at the Edinburgh International Film Festival is a tense, futuristic thriller about parallel identities that at heart is a love story. Slater visits the Brand New U corporation after his girlfriend Nadia disappears. He is given a new identity and a new lifespace with the warning that he musn't take anything from his old life with him. He is however, obsessed with Nadia and is convinced he has found her in his new lifespace, with complicating and dangerous consequences.

This stylish and moody film brings up interesting issues around identity and the existence of a soul-mate and plays with ideas around parallel realities.

It can be confusing. As I left the cinema, I heard someone say she thought it was much more confusing than she had expected, but I found it less confusing than I had expected. 

The soundtrack severely begs for Placebo's track Every You and Every Me. Luckily I know that song pretty well and could add it myself at the appropriate moments. Silently of course so as not to disturb the rest of the audience.

Brand New U is showing as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival at 1550, 27 June at the Odeon.

You can read my other reviews from the film festival over on Crafty Green Poet by following these links

Under Milk Wood - the film (2015) - the new cinematic interpretation of Dylan Thomas' classic prose poem 

Of Chickens and Camels - a review of Chicken (a wonderful coming of age film about a teenager with learning difficultie) and Nearby Sky (a documentary about the camel beauty contests in the Emirates). 

Infini - disaster on an off-planet mine

La Tirisia - love and life in the cacti covered mountains of Mexico

When Elephants Fight - conflict minerals in Congo

 Iron Ministry - a cinematic journey through China by rail

 Index Zero - dystopian SF set in a future Fortress Europe

30 Days Wild goes to the cinema - how the landscape backdrops two films set in very different countries (Sand Dollars and The Gulls)

Disclaimer: I have a press pass for the film festival and attended free press screenings for these films. 

As ever, coloured text contains hyperlinks that take you to other webpages where you can find out more.

haiku

all night horror films -
the woman next to me knits
baby clothes


(this is a haiku / senryu from Crafty Green Boyfriend's perspective from a recent horror film festival he went to. I don't do horror films (nor do I knit!))

Films at Edinburgh International Film Festival

As most readers of this blog will know, I have a press pass for Edinburgh International Film Festival and am positively overdosing on great films for the next two weeks. I'll be reviewing most of the films over on Crafty Green Poet, but some will be on this blog. I thought it might be useful to have an overview post with links to all the reviews, so here goes (click on the links to read the reviews):

1. Shut Up Little Man! (noisy neighbours, invasion of privacy & copyright issues. Documentary)
2. Calvet. (how art transformed one man's life. Documentary).
.......and an interview with Jean Marc Calvet and the film director Dominic Allan
3. Project Nim (can we teach chimpanzees to communicate using language? Is it ethical to even try? Documentary).
4. Borrower Arrietty (gorgeous anime based on Mary Norton's classic children's book The Borrowers)
5. Cityscapes (experimental short films about cities across the world)
6. Mysterious Object at Noon (surreal storytelling on a road trip through Thailand)
7. some thoughts on nature therapy after watching King of Devil's Island
8. Convento (kinetic art in rural Portugal. Documentary)
9. Off the Beaten Track (rural life in Rumania, Documentary)
10. Burning Ice (art and science respond to climate change. Documentary.)
11. Almanya - Welcome to Germany (entertaining drama about a Turkish family in Germany)
12. Albatross - (coming of age drama focussing on an aspiring writer)
13. A Better Life (depressing story about an undocumented Mexican family in California)
14. Perfect Sense (romance against the backdrop of an unknown epidemic)

Calvet

I'm in the middle of reviewing the Edinburgh International Film Festival! I've seen ten excellent films so far, but one that made a particular impression on me is Calvet (you can read my review here). This is the amazing story of how Jean Marc Calvet's life was transformed when he discovered art.

I was delighted yesterday to be able to chat with Jean Marc and with Dominic Allan, the director of the film.

Jean Marc Calvet had a hard childhood and an early career as a bodyguard, a French Legionnaire and a vice cop. He abandoned his partner and young son to take a shady job in the USA, which led to him absconding to Central America with huge amounts of cash he had stolen from his employer.

Dominic Allan has worked in TV, directing such films as The Pipeline; Mandela: The Living Legend and Israel Undercover. He was travelling in Nicaragua in 2004, when he met Jean Marc in a restaurant, which was decorated with huge paintings. These paintings of Jean Marc's made a big impression on Dominic but it was only two years later that he had the idea to make a film about how art had transformed Jean Marc's life. Jean Marc admitted in our interview that at that stage he hadn't entirely seen Dominic's vision, but that he saw the film project as an extension of the therapy that art already was for him.

The most memorable part of the film for me is where Jean Marc discovers painting as therapy. There is an extended sequence of impressionistic visuals and soundscapes that recreate the drug-fuelled hallucinations that Jean Marc experienced for several months while he had imprisoned himself in his house in Costa Rica. At some point, he discovers several pots of paints and literally starts throwing the paint around the rooms. At this stage, Jean Marc says, he would deny he was an artist, when people asked him. It was only five years later, when someone contacted him wanting to put on an exhibition of his work in New York that he realised that he was a real artist.

Jean Marc has used lots of different styles in his art. In his early days as a painter, people would compare his work to Jackson Pollock or Jean-Michel Basquait but he'd never heard of these artists. So he set out to learn as much as he could about art and became an avid reader of art magazines. He is entirely self-taught and uses different styles depending on what best fits what he wants to say. Art, he said, is like a 'big walk inside' himself.

Jean Marc is now a respected artist and is inspiring the next generation of artists, not least his own daughter, who is deaf. She is allowed a lot of freedom in his studio where she enjoyed expressing herself through art and she appears briefly in the film.

Dominic had wanted to use film techniques that would best capture the immediacy of Jean Marc's art and the intensity of his life story. He wanted to mostly avoid reconstructions of the past (though one scene in Jean Marc's old house on Costa Rica is a very effective reconstruction with slides of his first paintings projected onto the now white-washed walls). Dominic chose to intercut the narrative with segments of impressionistic film to suit the mood of the story. This approach works brilliantly and really does give the film a sense of immediacy and emotional impact.

Dominic said he wants to make films that are inspiring and Calvet certainly is! The film should be touring various film festivals in the next few months and hopefully should get released into cinemas after that. If you get the chance, see it! Meanwhile you can see some of Jean Marc's paintings and read more about his life on his website here.

The website for the film Calvet is here and there's also a Facebook page here!

Thanks to Edinburgh International Film Festival for making this interview possible and to Jean Marc and Dominic for making the time to chat to me!

As ever, coloured text contains hyperlinks which take you to other webpages where you can find out more. This article also appears on Crafty Green Poet.

Edinburgh International Film Festival

This lunchtime I went along to collect my press pack for the Edinburgh International Film Festival! As I've said before, I'm very impressed with this year's programme, based purely on the fact that there are more films I want to see than there have been for years. So I'm looking forward very much to seeing lots of films over the next week or so. I'll review most of the films I see over on Crafty Green Poet, but one or two might find themselves reviewed on this blog. And of course I'm delighted to find myself mentioned in this article on bloggers to watch out for at the festival.

As ever, text in green contains hyperlinks to other webpages where you can find out more.