Berlinale: Three queer docs and one all too brief feature
Wednesday, February 21, 2018 at 5:11PM Seán McGovern's continued reporting from the Berlin International Film Festival. Click back to part one if you missed it the opening film "Isle of Dogs". Here are notes on four more films playing at Berlinale 2018.
Shakedown (dir. Leilah Weinraub, 2018)
This slightly chaotic documentary charting the history of a Los Angeles lesbian dance club in the early Aughts is dope-tempered and energetic. Leilah Weinraub's confident and assured filmmaking features several years of footage of Shakedown's nights – the women who performed and the women who watched. There are plenty of anthropological documentaries about queer subcultures, but Weinraub's doc is anything but...
She appears sporadically in the doc, interviewing the performers, organisers and club staff: an eclectic mix of queer women of colour, a range of female identification from studs to femmes. Weinraub's centrality in the proceedings makes it both personal and political: we see shocking moments of power-exertion by the police, but also genuine heart from the families that were created thanks to Shakedown. Expect to see this in plenty of film festivals in the next year.
High Fantasy (dir. Jenna Bass, South Africa, 2017)
Halfway through a film-festival, a 73 minute feature is a blessing. In this rare case, I wish the film was longer! Filmed as a pseudo doc, interspersed with staged interviews, High Fantasy follows four South African teens: one white, one mixed and two black, who head out on a camping trip to the vast, arid farm land owned by white Lexi's family. They wake up one morning to discover they have all swapped bodies, and thus not only swapped gender identities but ways of seeing (and being seen by) the world. High Fantasy is a film with gallons of potential it seems unaware of, and in its short running time decides also to be a teen relationship drama and a very heavy handed critique of South Africa's complicated racial politics. The kids themselves are great: funny, loose and mostly natural but High Fantasy is an ambitious missed-opportunity.
Game Girls (dir. Alina Skrzeszewska, France/Germany, 2018)
This film generated a lot of anticipation in the ticket lines for other movies. Game Girls is a perfect comparison to Shakedown and raises a lot of important and interesting questions about the frame of reference of the director in relation to their subjects. Game Girls, set on Skid Row, is about the relationship between stud, Teri and her femme girlfriend Tihana, as they navigate the justice system, street violence and the persuit of life away from the hood. Where Shakedown is endearingly chaotic, Game Girls is a much more traditionally structured and observational documentary.
Teri and Tihana are extremely comfortable around the camera, letting life play out naturally and this is a testament to director Alina Skrzeszewska. But there are several moments in this documentary where anthropology veers into poverty porn, including a divisive scene of domestic confrontation generating different reactions amongst the audience. When watching Shakedown I knew that life was difficult for every woman in that club, but that it was a film about joy, entertainment and freedom. Game Girls felt determined to generate a pity response from the viewer.
Director and Subject of "The Silk and the Flame"
The Silk and the Flame (dir. Jordan Schiele, USA, 2018)
By the time it came to viewing this meditative doc by American documentarian Jordan Schiele it occurred to me that queer stories seem to inspire a lot of non-fiction filmmaking, because all too often fact is stranger than fiction. In Silk and the Flame, Schiele accompanies Yao to his home village for Chinese New Year. Yao is an unmarried son, and the degree of sadness and disappointment this causes his parents is so heavy, that to know that there son was gay would be beyond devastation. Yao's parents are such cinematic creations that at times it is easy to forget that this isn't a moving-image installation. Yao's mother has been deaf since childhood, and speaks in a type of sign-language only understood by her family. His father we are told, has given up on life, mute and immobile, only remaining alive to see his son finally get married. The film raises questions of what it means to pursue our own individual freedoms, when your troubles may be comparatively small compared to the struggles your parents endured. In stark black and white, the filmmaker slowly becomes a peripheral but important part of the film, the family welcoming, but suspicious of this foreigner's role in their son's life.
More to come!
Reader Comments (1)
High Fantasy and The Silk and the Flame both sound especially fascinating.
"dope-tempered" - could someone explain what this means, please?