Director: Beatrice Minger | Co-directed by Christoph Schaub | Written by Beatrice Minger in collaboration with Christoph Schaub | With: Natalie Radmall-Quirke, Alex Moustache, Charles Morillon | Switzerland 2024 | French& English w/ EN subtl., 89′.

Eileen Gray was a creative genius and the first woman to conquer the territory of architecture at a time when men controlled it all. This new film reflects on Gray’s impressive career and her avant garde house on the Cote d’Azur and will appeal to cineastes and lovers of art and design alike.

Unfolding as a stylish hybrid documentary E.1027 is a filmic journey into the emotional world of Eileen Gray, who was born into a large family in County Wexford, Ireland before before moving to London where her career languished in the shadow of her male colleagues in the world of architecture at a time when the profession was dominated by men.

In the 1920s women architects found themselves confined to designing interiors but Gray broke the mould by moving to France where she courted the art scene before moving south where she found a plot of land on the water’s edge in Roquebrune – Cap Martin and fulfilled her dream of having a modernist house on the Riviera.  A self-confessed bi-sexual she lived with her younger lover, the editor-in-chief of the journal ‘Architecture Vivante’ Jean Badovici. The two crossed paths with fellow architect Le Corbusier and his wife Yvonne but Corbusier comes off the worse for wear in Swiss filmmaker Beatrice Minger’s take of events. He is seen an arrogant rather self-regarding character who muscles into Gray’s world by decorating her house with his own murals.

Eileen Grey – the house at Roquebrune – Cap St Martin

Minger’s film takes us into Gray’s inner circle, a tightly knit coterie of designers that included Fernand Lager, Corbusier and his wife Yvonne. Early on Gray counteracts Corbusier’s theory that a house is ‘a machine for living’  considering it more spiritual than that: ‘A place you surrender to, that swallows you. A place you belong to”.

Gray and Jean Badovici discovered the Roquebrune-Cap-Martin location that sits on the Côte d’Azur between Monaco and Menton. Due to its rocky, cliff-hanging location, wheelbarrows has to be used to transport materials on site. Gray named the house: E for Eileen 10 for John Badovici but left the place two years later: “I like doing things but I don’t like possessing them”. Eileen had already bought another plot of land inland and even more remote location and she left her house to ‘Bado’.

The film then broadens its focus onto Badovici and Corbusier’s relationship, with the French architect claiming Gray’s scheme for the house was copied from his own pen design. He built his own wooden Cabanon alongside a little bistro near to E.1027. But the Second World War put an end to the rivalry when Nazis occupied the Roquebrune house riddling the walls with bullets.

In the title role Natalie Radmall-Quirke smokes her way  throughout this intimate portrait of the artist who appears both victim of her emotions and driving  force behind her lover Bado – in one scene a graceful dance is testament to their feelings for each other. After leaving the house Gray was forced to contend with Corbusier’s arrogance, although he valiantly tried to find a buyer for the Roquebrune house which eventually to a Swiss art Marie Louise Shelbert who misguidedly thought he had designed it. No one came to Bado’s funeral.

Family money and her strong work ethic clearly allowed Gray to remain financially independent all through her life although there is never any mention of commissions outside her own designs although – many of her schemes never left the drawing board until later recognition saw her furniture sell for astronomical prices although  her famous house had a less illustrious ending. In a final interview Gray emerges as an appealingly decent woman without a shred of ego.

E.1027 also brings to life conflicting undercurrents in the Parisian art scene of the 1930s. A fascinating finale allows us to meet Eileen Gray in a brief interview. She comes across as modest and appealingly lacking in any ego. @MeredithTaylor .

E1027 – Murals by Corbusier

EILEEN GRAY AND THE HOUSE BY THE SEA which will celebrate its world premiere at CPH:DOX 2024 (March 13-24, 2024) in Copenhagen as part of the INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION programme.

Dir: Tonislav Hristov | Finland, Doc with Ivan | 79′

Writer director Tonislav Hristov offers more insight into his native Bulgaria with this melancholic look at last chances and dwindling communities seen through the eyes of an ageing ‘Seagull’, a man who makes a living from escorting female tourists.

Ever since 1979 Ivan has been charming the birds on Sunny Beach on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. Now, at 58, his days as a low level lothario are numbered and he is looking in the last chance saloon for a way out.

Sunny Beach is not exactly the Côte d’Azur but it’s cheerful and family-orientated with a fabulous stretch of silky white sand. For a long time the resort has offered rich pickings for Ivan in the shape of wealthy female tourists from nearby Russia or Ukraine. But the tousled-haired simian-featured chain smoker is now growing tired of the sun and endlessly parading up and down plying his trade. 

Love is simply a business deal for Ivan, a way to finance the rest of his life. And since his divorce he claims ‘to feel nothing for women’, despite his need to please them. Back in the good old days, hanging out with a ‘wealthy’ Russian or Ukrainian earned him €50 a day including board and lodging. His last relationship, with a Ukrainian, lasted three years. Now Ivan is forced to make his way working in a car wash and doing odd jobs around the local farms. The future certainly looks grim as he cuddles a kitten and a puppy back in his ramshackle house in the small rural backwater of Dervent – a place he now claims to hate.

But this social malaise is not just about Ivan. Everyone in the community is suffering the effects of transmigration. And with the young moving to the cities, the local population has dwindled in recent years. The pandemic also signalled a sea change in fortunes for the elderly ‘Don Juan’, now a grandfather, he yearns to reconnect with family and his estranged son who lives with his wife and toddler in Ukraine. 

Hard times have also made wealthy women selective: more than just ‘looks and a lay’, they want a responsible man who can hold down a ‘proper’ job. One trump card up Ivan’s sleeve is his EU status as a Bulgarian: despite being poor, he can offer Ukrainian or Russian women a passport to Europe. And a small flat of 50 square metres can be bought in the region for a mere 20,000 euros. Marriage to Ivan will give her Carte Blanche to move around Europe and ‘to much nicer countries such as Germany’. And that’s worth its weight in gold with the recent war in Ukraine, and the increasingly fraught situation in Russia.

Filmed during the pandemic and making the best of its coastal and rural settings captured in all their glory by Hristov’s regular DoP Orlin Ruevski, who filmed The Good Postman and January, this is a good-looking documentary and all the better for its tight edit and concise running time. The Last Seagull also connects with the narratives of Ulrich Seidl’s 2012 outing: Paradise: Love and Laurent Cantet’s Vers Le Sud (2005) that reflect on marriages of convenience, increasingly popular in this day and age. 

SCREENED DURING CPH:DOX 2023

Dir.: Hanna Badziaka, Alexander Mihalkovich; Documentary with Swetlana Korzhych; Swe/Nor/Ukraine 2023, 94 min

Belarus has been taking the rap in the media recently for the harsh regime of its dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko, judging by this documentary from Hanna Badziaka and Alexander Mihalkovich, this is not fake news.

The directors followed relatives and victims of “Dedovschina”, a brutal, often deadly initiation ritual imposed by the forces, a regime that was first practised in the army of the old Soviet Union, and is still prevalent in former republics of the former Russian empire.

Two young Belarussian men, Aleksandr (“Sasha”) and Nikita had reservations about joining up. Nikita, who spends his time with his Rave circle mates, had second thoughts about serving, and even mulled over the idea of emigration or opting out on medical grounds, by pretending to be a ‘nutcase’. But his father talks him into serving, believing it will make a man out of his son. Sasha, on the other hand, blindly joins up. To his detriment, we later find out, when his mother Svetlana puts flowers on his grave. Svetlana now spends her time up and down the country trying to find justice for Sasha, and connect with other people whose sons have suffered the same fate. She never accepted the official version of “suicide”, after workers in the morgue, where her son is resting, told her about his physical wounds: bruises on his back and neck.

Sasha was the victim of said “Dedovschina” – which is literally translated as ‘Grandfathers”: old men who pull rank in the army, holding sway over new recruits. But their status will change when today’s victims become tomorrow’s perpetrators, getting their own back for all pain they have suffered in their first year in the barracks. 

A voice-over reads imagined letters from a soldier (actually written by co-director Mihalkovich, edited by Hanna Badziaka), talking about his torture at the hands of the older men, whom he had to pay on a regular basis, into the bargain. The anonymous voice describes a life of hell. 

Meanwhile Nikita has been released from service and is heavily traumatised. A shadow of his former self he regrets not having fled the country. It is August 2020, and election time in Belarus, and Lukashenko is standing again, having seized power in 1994. Had he stayed in the army, Nikita would have been forced to open fire at his friends who have joined the popular resistance movement, in a bid to keep the dictator from being re-elected. But the police and the military (as well as Vladimir Putin) have a vested interest in making sure Lukashenko stays in power, and many demonstrators are killed in the protests. In one of the letters, the author states “that after being transferred to new barracks, out of the reach of the “Grandfathers”, I enjoy the pleasure of my new powers. It has gone under my skin”.

Nikita’s friends emigrated to the Ukraine after the election, but they went ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ when Russia invaded the nation. Svetlana continues to rage against the authorities but fights a losing battle. DoP Sirhiej Kanaplianik stays close to the action with a hand held camera, capturing brutal confrontations, particularly the bloody scenes when police and plain-clothes agents join the mass slaughter. AS

NOW AT CPH:DOX 2023 | DOX AWARD WINNER | ONE WORLD INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS competition.

Main image: A riot policeman is standing next to the House of Government in Minsk amid mass protests in 2020. Credit: Siarhiej Kanaplianik

Dir: Juha Suonpaa | Doc, Finland 80′

Until fairly recently the wild lynx was in danger of extinction. This astonishing cinematic documentary follows Hannu (Hannibal) Rantala whose interest in the elusive animal came about as an accident, quite literally. A time of convalescence forced him to stay indoors and now on his farm in the West of Finland he discovers the healing properties of nature in an environment home to all kinds of wildlife – including the Eurasian lynx.

Finding a dead lynx by the side of the road, Hannu bonded with the graceful creature and came to the realisation that the lynx, who lived in the area during his childhood, had made a comeback.

Hanno cuts an eccentric figure, to say the least with his long beard and shoulder-length hair. In some ways he’s just an ordinary Finn: taking saunas, playing his accordion and looking at FaceBook. But when we see him walking around naked and crouching in the snow with just a hat on, we start to wonder if he is half-man half-beast. Roaming around with a lynx mask Hannu is actually lying in wait to capture the enigmatic lynx in an undercover operation to record footage on a specially concealed camera covered in feathers. Soon twenty three such devices are in place for the project: “it’s not about resembling the bird, but about movement and such” says Hannu, who also makes use of a mirror to assist the process – with some startling results. Pheasants and a moose are spooked out by their reflections as their peer unwittingly into to mirror. Eventually Hannu identifies two females, calling them ‘Spot’ and ‘Grumpy Girl’ and a male ‘Joseph’. 

Grumpy Girl eventually turns up, supple and lithe, the large feline has pointy ears, long powerful legs and hindquarters, a short tail dipped in black, spotted caramel-coloured fur with a white underbelly and eyes as big as headlights. Two cubs follow her, purring like cats. There are five cubs in total, protected from predators (foxes and wolves) by the father Joseph’s scent which he sprays liberally round their territory. But a skin disease, robbing the lynx of their fur, can also be life-threatening, sadly Joseph catches it, leaving him bare against the cold. Man is a predator too as we will discover in the final act of this enlightening eco-documentary that premiers at this year’s CPH:DOX, following on from Suonpaa’s 2013 outing Wolf Man.

Mixing black and white footage with colour Juha Suonpaa captures the enchanting early Spring landscapes of this remote part of the world, showing foxes, deer, moose and wild geese, among others, and finally the lynx whose enormous eyes are specially adapted to hunt at night.

In 2021 Hannibal and his friends launched a complaint with the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland. The precedent states that lynx population management in Finland does not meet the directive requirements and is therefore illegal.

SPECIAL MENTION – NORDIC:DOX AWARD  AT CPH:DOX | COPENHAGEN 2023

Lea Najjar / Germany, Lebanon, Qatar / 2022 / 90 min / World Premiere

Against the backcloth of their chaotic capital Beirut’s pigeon fanciers play the cruel sport of Kash Hamam. The object is to lure other players’ flocks into your own pigeon loft high above the capital. Catching a pigeon entitles you to butcher its wings with scissors, or feed it to the cats: “Because at the end of the day, it’s just animals, just birds”.

Lea Najjar’s lyrical impressionistic feature debut soars above Beirut’s skies to tell the story of a melancholic city and its beleaguered inhabitants still suffering shortages in public services and economic collapse for the past eighty years. But one thing Beirutis can control and master is the pigeon population, and they do so with the same cruelty they complain of receiving from the country’s ‘ruling classes’.

Radwan, a local barbar, has been raising pigeons since he was nine. Despite the rising price of grain he will still go on feeding and tending his birds from chicks, and throwing clementines at them to make stronger flyers, or even cracking whips and slings to scare them into flight from his loft. Kash Haman is a competitive sport but the camaraderie between the men is strong and supportive. In Syria (where the sport is banned because it is considered a form of gambling) the men claim the ‘Kashash’ are  prepared to kill over their feathered friends.

But behind the camaraderie lies a city in disarray. And the problem is the politicians “who pull the blanket to cover only themselves”, according to one fisherman as he navigates the city’s majestic shoreline under a skyscape of stratospheric apartment buildings and cavernous rocks. “If you go to other countries, everyone holds one flag. Here, every sect and party has their own flag”. His sons should be studying at their university but instead they are helping out with the catch. “Our Government does not take care of them” he claims.

Meanwhile Radwan’s little niece begs him to teach her the masculine art of Kash Hamam, but Radwan refuses: “you should be reading, or something”. Meanwhile his Armenian client at the barbar shop is pessimistic about the future of Lebanon. “No matter how much rouge and perfume an old woman wears, she’ll never be young again. Your country is old”. So Najjar doesn’t reach any enlightening conclusions in her film despite its beguiling beauty: the eternal conflict between rich and poor, politician and worker rages on as it ever did in another sad but stunning snapshot of the Middle East. MT

WINNER NEXT:WAVE AWARD 2022 | CPH:DOX COPENHAGEN

Dir.: Payal Kapadia; Documentary with the voice of Bhumisuta Das; India 2021, 99 min.

Indian director/co-writer Payal Kapadia, whose short films have been awarded numerous awards, returned to Cannes in 2021 with her first feature documentary A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING, winning the “Oeil d’Or, Prix Documentaire” for best documentary film of the festival. Poetic as well as politically engaged, A NIGHT is a collage made from home videos, archival footage, CCTV recordings and scenes shot from mobiles.

The feature unfolds in an around the campus of the ‘Film and Television Institute of India’ in Pune where letters and a box of clippings and letters written by a female student, simply called L, who was writing to her boyfriend K. The love letters, soon became more and more politically engaged. K. had left the campus, and was literally imprisoned by his parents, for dating the lower cast L. Arriving back. he did not even speak to L, obeying his parents. Now L.s letters were written not to K. but “the man he could have been, or the one I loved once”.

The story dates back to June 2015 when the Modi government, after a landslide victory at the polls, took over all aspects of public life in India introducing their Hindi nationalism to the whole country including the Film and Television Institute. Gajendra Chauhan, who rose to fame in the 1980s as an actor in soap operas, was named the new director of the Film School, his only qualification was his rabid espousal of Modi’s politics. These involved raising tuition fee by 300%, which particularly hit Dalits (formerly Untouchables) and lower cast students the hardest.

The students called a strike which went on for several months. The Police were called in by the government, female students were threatened with rape by the police officers. Violence spilled over to other universities. L, voiced by Bhumisuta Das, edits the films of friends, before engaging more and more in the strike actions. The students’ main slogan was “Eisenstein, Pudowkin – we shall fight, we will win”.

Students graduated with a much different perspective than before the strike. They now had to find a way to make films for Dalits and lower class members, who were repressed by the Modi government. L writes: “We must make sure the ones who make the shoes for the rich, or harvest their food, have a voice”. It is obvious her own experience with her ex-boyfriend played a large part in her politicisation.

DoP and editor Ranabri Das create a dramatic arc showing the escalation of police violence, and the students’ reactions. Like L, many students had started out as proponents of art-house films, but the experience of state violence changed their outlook dramatically. Apart from K that is, L asking in one of her letters, “how could you be so strong when the police attacked, and so vibrant and in the meetings when you give in so easily to your parents”.

A NIGHT is a vibrant kaleidoscope of film styles and personal experiences which suddenly become entwined in the vicious circle of police brutality. L’s identity is changed by outside forces and she emerges no heroine, but no victim either. AS

Dir: Liang Zhao | Doc,

Liang Zhao’s gracefully cinematic and quietly persuasive documentary depicts not just the devastation caused by nuclear accidents but also the emotional fallout of those affected by events such as Chernobyl and Fukushima.

In these days of dwindling power supplies the nuclear option is ongoing. According to the World Nuclear Association’s 2020 report there were still 442 reactors in existence, most are in the US, China and France and around 40 under construction. But Zhou departs from a dry scientific study to focus on the human and environmental cost and the eerie wastelands left by defunct nuclear sites. He also makes use of a Japanese figure that floats silently through abandoned power plants – if ever there was a scary device in an straightforward eco-documentary it is this one.

From the outset camera pans over the devastation caused by the nuclear power plants of Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the silent ruins left behind by the population who fled the directly contaminated areas. Some, mostly elderly people with nowhere else to go, stayed on, enduring the devastation and emptiness both accidents have generated in an existence that stretches before them, alone in the universe. One old woman has spent the past thirty years completely alone in the Chernobyl decontamination zone, surviving off the land in a smallholding. Her approach is calm and philosophical: “Death takes everyone eventually, but they told us a load of nonsense, and sealed all the water wells. How can the water be contaminated, when it looks so clean”.

A menacing soundscape accompanies a slow-paced collection of stunning shots of  remote landscapes and ruined interiors recording a poignant memory of lives destroyed. Melted dolls with singed hair, and tiny ballet shoes lined up against a row of painted cots are all that remains of a nursery school. The deafening silence is the most powerful element.

Driving home his anti-nuclear message in a gentle way is so much more persuasive than the threatening approach of so many eco-docs. Zhao also invites us to question the absurdity of a situation where the nuclear power plant accidents led the affected areas. “Is it the past or the future?”.

Many disused nuclear facilities are now being painstakingly taken apart, and we see the gruelling efforts by a team in Germany forced to spend their days hosing down every inch and angle of the former steel monstrosity; “What one generation builds, the next with dismantle” comes the inevitable voiceover comment.

The film culminates in a sorrowful scene in Belarus, near the Chernobyl Exclusion Site, of a mother tending to her seriously disabled daughter “we weren’t told not to love when we moved here” she explains.  Sadly, I’m So Sorry has no positive message to offer her after showing us a Hell we have been part of creating. There is no bright future on the horizon or any hope in the near future.  Zhao Liang crafts a powerful anti- nuclear plea to the world, if only the world leaders would listen. MT

NOW SCREENING DURING CPH:DOX 2022

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Dir: Łukasz Kowalski | Doc, Poland

Poland’s largest pawnshop has moved from the centre of the city to the outskirts, but still cannot make a profit, largely down to a lack of business expertise by its eccentric owners Jola and Wisek.

Clearly their bizarre relationship captured the imagination of first time writer/director Lukasz Kowalski in his rather dubious and structureless undertaking. The pawnshop is clearly a labour of love for Wisek and Jola who puts fake Zloty notes cut from a magazine in the till in the pretence of hard cash. Often customers are asked to pay “what they want”. There are only 86 Zloty in the cash register at the time of filming.

In a shop boasting over 70,000 items there seems to be a preponderance of deer antlers and non-functioning electrical items, including a kettle that nearly exploded on a trial run. Crystal glass is also a great runner, so we are told; but the 19th century phone, many have an eye on, is not for sale at any price, it belongs to Wisek and he is keeping it. A look at the book section shows an abundance of self-help titles: ‘Medicine and Sex’, ‘Women and Sex’ ‘A new way of Sex’. Either the previous readers want to pass on the knowledge or gave up trying to improve their lives.

Customers ringing to complain about faulty goods purchased are given short shrift by Jola who tells them, in no uncertain terms, to repair the items themselves. When Wisek shows her a ‘mammoth tooth’, he has bought and hopes will bring in a healthy profit, the two nearly have a bust up. Next, there is some complaint about some welding equipment and Loya nearly burns the place down with a blow torch.

The shop assistants moan about their pay, or the lack of it. Jola expects gratitude for keeping them on in the current climate, but the workers are not impressed. Jola and Wisek have been together for eight years, but there is not much love left, Wisek claiming: “You only care about money, not feelings”. Jolanta, one of shop assistants, is so bored she starts trying on fur hats. They suit her, but on her salary, she could never afford them. Finally, Jola and Wisek come up with a marvellous new idea.

DoP Stanislaw Cuske does his best to make the dowdy subject cinematically appealing but with a long line of banalities and hardly any dramatic arc, he runs out of ideas. Kowalski was clearly intending to make a mockumentary about this sorry state of affairs but sails a bit too near to the wind in the current state of living crisis. AS

SCREENING AT CPH:DOX 2022 | SELECTED FOR THE DOC ALLIANCE AWARDS

Dir.: Marie Lidén; Documentary with William Hendeberg; UK 2021, 85 min.

Radiation from mobile phones, electrical devices and pylons now affects around 3% of the World’s population, according to WHO.

In her first feature documentary Marie Lidén explores the condition through William Hendeberg, 40, who suffers from ‘Electro Sensibility’ and is forced to live in a special hut constructed by his father Jan, in the remote hamlet of Ekeby Björn, Närke, south central Sweden.

Only a decade ago William had a perfect life: he was writing his master thesis, having spent three years at university in Boras and Gothenburg. A gifted musician, he played in no less than four bands. Now he exists in a hut, like a Faraday cage, covering himself in blankets made out of cotton and copper threads to block the microwave radiation. And that’s not all. A special mosquito net also helps to dissipate out any other radiation. “I don’t want the camera so close”, he tells the film crew, “it makes it difficult for me to focus”.

William lives like a recluse. In the early days of his illness he used to venture out but now it makes him feel so unwell, he has stopped doing it. He listens to music, Sinead O’Connor is a favourite “I need music, it shakes the soul. I usually start with nice, happy music, then something more funky, ending up with punk. ‘Lindisfarne’, makes me feel good too. I put a cake tin over the CD player, so I don’t get too bad.” He points to a collection of tea caddies. “Me and my ex, Maria, we loved tea caddies”.

We watch a video shot by William himself in 2007, and another of him playing in a band. “I was so bewildered at first, but it was almost exciting for a while”. At that point he only went out into the radiation-free forest nearby, even though he loved the freedom of the city. But it made him too ill with burning and cramping pains in his forehead. He needed days to recover from his city trips. “Like having your head caught in a vice.”

When is all started, William worked in a library, standing in for his partner Maria who showed milder symptoms of the disease, particularly as a reaction to fluorescent light and the computer screen. “The counter in the library was fitted with a loop for the hard of hearing – this was the beginning. Three other people working there had the same symptoms”. He has had no contact with Maria for 18 months now, after she left the caravan they were living in she got married and had children. We watch a video, Maria cutting William’s hair. They seemed happy.

William has got used to darkness, even though he is addicted to colours, particularly green and red. As his father tells us, William has always loved Christmas. So his parents ‘visit’ their son with presents. They celebrate as if he was still a child. William knows his parents have cried a lot, they want the old ‘William’ back. And are hoping they can all go and visit his sister Alexandra in Karlskoga. One of his chief concerns is that people think he is exaggerating. Everyone just hopes he will recover one day.

Electro Sensitivity has not been acknowledged by the medical profession so William tries to soldier on, not wanting to upset his family. A herbalist has given him some relief: William can now stay up longer, and is more able to focus in his reading and writing. his autobiography is already underway, but he cannot write creatively. “I am still curious about life”. And has started to go out and about, even though it makes his symptoms get worse. He had a phone installed via fibre optic cable: “After 15 years I have a speaker phone. I can talk to somebody who is not here. It feels amazing. But I am still waiting for a miracle, to make me better slowly. I long to be out, in freedom”.

DoP Michael Sherrington uses the camera in a very sensitive way – the quality of the shot is always secondary to William’s condition. Maria Lidén has certainly raised awareness and understanding of this little known condition. Rather like lung cancer, as a result of smoking, and endometriosis, it took the medical profession many years to acknowledge their existence. Lidén approaches her topic without any frills or sentimentality in a direct and informative, but always empathetic approach. An eye opener, produced on a shoe-string budget. AS

ON CINEMAS FROM 3rd March | Premiered at CPH:DOX 2022

Dir: Gorki Glaser-Muller | Sweden, Denmark, Qatar | Doc With Patricio Galves, Clive Stafford Smith, Isabel Coles 95′

Like most stories coming out of Syria since the recent reign of terror this is a familiar one chronicling days of anguish amid political turmoil. Children of the Enemy centres on one man’s Kafkaesque journey to rescue his family and take them back to their homeland of Sweden. Meanwhile the Swedish authorities and even the media keep a low profile for fear of repercussions.

Chilean Swede Patricio Galvez cuts a tragic figure as shares his pain with filmmaker Gorki Glaser-Muller. Told simply, its tone of ongoing desperation being the focus, it tells how another unsuspecting victim – his nubile daughter – became radicalised and married one of Sweden’s most notorious ISIS terrorists.

After both were killed in the fight for a caliphate their children were left high and dry, lost somewhere in the Al-Hol prison camp in Northeast Syria. A moving phone montage on Patricio’s mobile phone is all he has left to identify the kids during his nightmarish 45 day recovery mission through Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile every minute could be their last. Days of desperation and disbelief add to the ongoing narrative of this ‘missing persons diary’ in a world that grows more and more hostile, less compassionate as allies and enemies become increasingly indistinguishable. MT

CPH:DOX | WORLD PREMIERE|  INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION  | COPENHAGEN DOC FESTIVAL 2021

Dir.: Joonas Neuvonen, Sadri Cetinkaya; Documentary with Joonas Neuvonen, Jani Raappana, Antti , Lee Lee, Thi, narrated by Pekka Strang; Finland 2020, 99 min.

It all started with Reindeerspotting-Escape from Santaland back in 2010. Its Finnish director Joonas Neuvonen turned out to be a drug dealer from a middle class background, and this fuelled the storyline for Lost Boys, a drug-powered tour of Thailand and Cambodia to celebrate the film’s success. Joining him were petty thief and addict Jani Raappana, and his mate Annti. Reindeerspotting co-writer Sadri Cetinkaya co-wrote the script.

Three months later Jani would be found dead in Phnom Penh. How he met his fate is still uncertain. Indications are he was murdered. Pekka Strang narrates, as the voice of Neuvonen, commenting from his cell. The trio were heavy users of ‘ya ba’, formerly known as yama, a potent mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine, also used as a horse drug, and favoured by soldiers, taxi drivers and sex workers.

Lost Boys chronicles their down-spiralling nightmare into Hell, a modern day, sordid version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The drug culture inevitably leads to debt, organised crime holds sway with death squads enforcing control. Sex workers are all part of the picture, the exploited leading their clients into the hands of the drug lords. Cambodia’s turbulent past has contributed to the country’s post traumatic stress disorder that started with colonisation and culminated with the Khmer Rouge. Sex tourism involving adults and children is now rampant throughout Cambodia. The country’s horrific history – past and present – plays out in a gruesome montage to the strains of La Marseillaise, as colonialism meets today’s sex tourism.

Neuvonen maintains his sole interest is in saving Annti and finding Jani’s murderer, but at the same he seems ambivalent about his mate, coming clean about the anti-hero of his first film: “I wanted him to vanish. I wanted him to die”. But will he be the only survivor of this trip to Hell?

Meanwhile Jani’s girlfriend Lee Lee and her friend Thi are compliant vessels for the sins of others and Annti is the victim of paranoid psychosis believing the nearby radio masts are there to stalk his thoughts and send the messages to a company called “Sky”.

What makes this quasi detective story so compelling is the way we’re led by its unreliable narrator in a non-linear narrative full of elliptical deceits imbued with hallucinatory visuals from dizzying handheld cameras. More than just a story, Lost Boys captures a state of mind – lies coalesce to cause the downfall of all three men whose paradise of sex and drugs leads them into a maze of death. Colour grading and editing sustain the scratchy edges of the documentary that floats in a woozy soundscape, leading us on a fractious journey as the men drift into a harrowing cul-de-sac. Lost Boys is a visual poem of the cruellest most nihilistic kind.

CPH:DOX | APRIL 2021