The Making of Soy Cuba

Anyone fascinated by the very excellent Soy Cuba, or indeed by cinema as a whole, would find Vicente Perrez 2004 documentary about the making of 'Soy Cuba’, the oddly named I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth, well worth seeking out. It can be hard to find, but, fortunately for afficionados, it is available to watch online at the IDFA (Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival) website. That site is a little idiosyncratic, but a search under ‘I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth | IDF’ should put you in the right place (more hit and miss:  even more hit and miss: ). It’’s well worth persisting - Perrez documentary covers far more than just the making of ‘Soy Cuba’, though it does that in satisfying detail - it sketches a history of Cuban cinema (and beyond), the technical aspects of making the film, discusses the terrible reception Soy Cuba got when screened in ’64, its rediscovery and critical re-appraisal, and all usually through the eyes of those who spent fourteen months or more making Soy Cuba back in 1962. Terrific.

Stephen Hopkins

Audience Member

Remaining films in our Cuban strand: Return to Ithaca and A Wedding in Havana.

Coming Soon to a Peripatetic Projector Near You: Part 2

After Almodóvar, and on the subject of singular directors: Café Society (Dir. Woody Allen, US, 2016). Every year I go to the latest Woody Allen movie. (I do know I didn’t back when they were better.) Everyone says it looks delightful – but even terrible movies can manage that these days. He deserves more respect. The movie starts very strongly, moves along nicely then fizzles out, perhaps because Steve Carell’s character just accepts his lot. There are many good gags and Ken Stott (Marty Dorfman) gets most of them. [Ken Stott’s agent: “Ken, I’ve got a Woody Allen film. Your character’s name is Marty Dorfman.” – “I can do that.”] Last year’s Allen, Irrational Man, was more satisfying in terms of plot, character development and a tidy ending. It reminded me of those American radio dramas from the 1940s that BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast occasionally, where Hollywood movie stars of the era give their reading of a James M. Cain script.

Some critics wonder why movie stars want an Allen movie on their CV. When his body of work is complete, and the reassessment comes, they will want to be part of it. There’s a story with acting required. Nice wardrobe, nothing dangerous. The shoot’s a wrap within a month. It’s an opportunity to make a studio-system-style movie few directors still know how to do. You know when you mooch about Freeview and you stumble across a 1950s B&W movie starring Humphrey Bogart so you give it a go. Then the opening credits reveal that it’s directed by John Huston, you wonder why the Information button never mentions the important details, and ninety minutes of enjoyable fluff ensue. That’s what I mean. Woody Allen is 81. Who else is going to make them?

The Borderlines 2017 programme features several ‘state of the nation’ movies from around the world: Aquarius (Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil, 2016); Graduation (Dir. Cristian Mungia, Romania, 2016); Moonlight (Dir. Barry Jenkins, US, 2016); and, I, Daniel Blake (Dir. Ken Loach, UK, 2016) is ours. During December my home cinema, Number 8 Pershore, sequenced three trailers together: Allied (2016) – the UK news features graffiti; A Street Cat Named Bob (2016) – Luke Treadaway walks past graffiti; and, I, Daniel Blake (2016) – Dave Johns creates graffiti. The writing is on the wall. It recalls Loach’s My Name is Joe (1998) when Peter Mullan (Joe) daubs paint on the car of someone taking photographs of him. I, Daniel Blake also echoes Loach’s Poor Cow (1967), not to mention a thousand other examples of British social realist cinema, when a desperate young woman goes on the game. Ken Loach – his work has as many call backs as a Bond movie.

British films that comment upon recent UK social history have improved a great deal in the past 30 years. During the 1980s Channel 4 screened issue movies every month. There would be soap-box speeches and heavy-handed, broad-brush moralising – particularly during the comedies. Were The Comic Strip Presents that driven by a good word from the New Musical Express? A Keith Waterhouse script would include a rant about the friends he lost when he passed his eleven-plus. In Hanif Kureishi’s London Kills Me (1991) a young British-Asian man steals a police car, removes its roof, drives around – and nothing happens. Is it a dream sequence – or did I dream it? In Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Last Resort (2000), two policemen in a patrol car have nothing better to do than spend their shift spying on the common-or-garden asylum seeker housed in a Margate tower block. No they wouldn’t. It’s a good film otherwise. And as for that one with Pete Postlethwaite, rock climbing and electricity pylons, Among Giants (1998): it’s worse than water-boarding – but still preferable to Shopping (1994). When you’ve seen enough UK cinema you know what it is to suffer.

I, Daniel Blake merits its awards: Palme d’Or at Cannes, BAFTA Best British Film. Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) has no luck but his plight is entirely plausible and credible. Listen out for the opening bars of “Spring”, from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”, on the soundtrack – and by the knowing groans of laughter from members of the audience you will know their line of work. You yearn for Daniel to drop into Citizens Advice but, after a lifetime of paying his stamp, it’s understandable that he might expect a bit more help from the public sector than he gets. And the moral is: Deference Always.

I don’t know where to fit Sweet Bean (Dir. Naomi Kawase, Japan, 2015) into this preview – and that’s quite right. We adore Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies but his 1950s films set in post-war Tokyo are much less known in the West. They’re a bit long. I’ve only seen Stray Dog (1949), the baseball stadium sequence is much-stolen, and Ikiru (1952), a very moving political drama. To my delight the cheap, made in China, Kurosawa box-set I own also includes Late Chrysanthemums (1954) – even though it was directed by Mikio Naruse. Neorealism wasn’t confined to Italian film-makers. The undercover detective in Stray Dog and the dying bureaucrat in Ikiru are your guides to post-war Tokyo: the American night clubs, the huge difference a few more Yen each week can make to living standards, the corruption. Like the superb Nobody Knows (2004) you are there with them: the sun in your lungs, street dust up your nose. Sweet Bean fits into this tradition: its tone, pacing and humanity. William Blake could “see a world in a grain of sand” and Kawase finds it in a quick snack.

A 76-year-old woman, Tokue (Kirin Kiki), short of money, wishes to work for a dorayaki pancake franchise owner, Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase). She has a superior sweet bean paste recipe she would like to live on after her death. Inter-generational understanding, a trade-off between business and teaching, develops gradually into friendship. I heard this film, and Ethel & Ernest (2016), described as “gentle”. Only if you’ve forgotten what bereavement feels like. They mean that it’s a thoughtful film with few characters. It’s also a food film: like Tampopo (1985 - noodles), Babette’s Feast (1987 – seven course banquet), Big Night (1996 - omelette), even Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014 – I don’t know but they looked delicious). The most humble of food films: a pancake paste.

Robin Clarke

Volunteer

North La La Land

Howdy from California! So here I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, overlooking the famous
bay and San Francisco itself, while wearing my Borderlines Film Festival t-shirt kindly sent from Hereford, 5242 miles away! This is my third year of writing for the festival, but I haven't always been a "foreign correspondent". Back when I proudly lived in Hereford, I remember the old Ritz cinema  only seemed to show films at weekends, and mostly blockbuster fare, and then The Courtyard Arts Centre opened in 1998, bestowing a new source of independent cinema upon the local cinephiles. Unfortunately, I left Hereford just before Borderlines Film Festival began, or else I'm sure I would have been keenly involved from the get-go. A few relocations later and now I am settled in the sunshine state, where cinema was born.

Where multiscreen cinemas are now the norm in the UK (indeed, my home town had Europe's first multiplex), many neighbourhoods here within the various Bay Area cities have their own independent "movie theater". My local cinema is an opulent art deco building that somehow survived the 1989 earthquake and a modern renovation. The next closest cinema has a Wurlitzer organ ascend from its main auditorium’s stage, as if to play-in the evening's films. Across the Bay Area, and California itself, these old local cinemas are often downtown focal points, somewhat mirroring the local demographic in their film programming.

I think this local investment in, at times, quite esoteric independent and international films is a positive knock-on effect of being in relative proximity to Hollywood. It may be sunny all year round down in Los Angeles, but here in Northern California there is less sheen, perhaps a holdover from the gold rush pioneers who braved the Sierra Nevada mountains to settle amongst the redwoods of the Pacific northwest. I like to imagine them imbuing the Bay Area with a progressive attitude that lives on in the creative industries, as we have so many film production luminaries based locally, including Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, and Lucasfilm. Living close to such a breadth of cinematic expertise is certainly a privilege, and Hereford and its surrounding countryside is lucky to have the equally pioneering Borderlines.

In recent months I've been fortunate to see films as diverse as Check It, Jackie, and Moonlight all in local independent cinemas that proudly screened them as part of film festivals (such as Frameline, or tangentially to the typically more mainstream Hollywood movies. It feels almost meta to have grown up with the first multiplex blockbusters in the middle of the UK, to living where scores of those movies were produced and filmed. There's certainly something uncanny about attending to one's daily business, only to recognise a hilly vista from Vertigo, or noticing that the latest Godzilla wasn't actually shot by the Golden Gate Bridge after all. 

So, leading up to the 89th Academy Awards ceremony this Sunday, celebrating what I would humbly say is a year of especially outstanding cinema, it dawns on me that I will do as I often have since falling in love with film in Hereford and look forward to the glitz of it all - except now from within the same time zone as Hollywood! Surreal. Hopefully there'll be some colourful wins this year. Now all I need to decide is whether to watch the Oscars on television from the comfort of home, or screening live down the block at the independent art deco flicks, here in North La La Land...

Duncan Wardlaw