Hal Kitchen
The “Journey” section of the London Film Festival brings us films from across the globe, offering glimpses into communities and cultures rarely seen onscreen. This year, the section gives us Bolivian family drama Utama, as well as American and Dutch documentaries After Sherman, Crows Are White, and Shabu.
Utama (dir. Alejandro Loayza Grisi, Bolivia)
Unfortunately, it’s with a heavy heart I’m forced to admit that Utama (Our Home), a film I was greatly looking forward to, has provided the festival with its first real snoozer. Director Alejandro Laoyza Grisi’s tale of a stubborn Bolivian llama farmer looks very pretty, but it’s a story we’ve heard already, told in a way we’ve seen before.
Virginio (Jose Calcina) and Sisa (Luisa Quispe) have farmed the Bolivian altiplano their entire lives, living much as people there must have for centuries. Each day, Virginio takes the llamas to graze while Sisa goes to the village to collect water. However, after more than a year without rain, both the grazing and the water have dwindled. When their city-dwelling grandson Clever (Santos Choque) comes to visit, he quickly reads the writing on the wall for his grandparents’ way of life, setting the stage for a potentially explosive and tragic intergenerational conflict.
There are aspects to Utama that are interesting and lend it some appeal beyond the initial novelty value of seeing a community rarely granted the respect of artistic curiosity. The landscapes are the film’s most consistent draw, with the altiplano a plausibly mythic theatre of destiny. Its sunburnt rocks a close cousin to Monument Valley. Laoyza Grisi often films it as such too, framing Virginio silhouetted in doorways or standing in awe before the timeless expanse of sand and stone. The faces of the characters are equally textured terrain, with Calcina and Quispe’s age-worn faces containing decades of routine and heartache. The performances of all three leads are pretty unconvincing, but their looks do the storytelling for them.
Sadly, there’s not much more to commend Utama. We’ve seen the stubborn and bitter old farmer determined to die the way he lived, the well-meaning youngster he’ll never be able to see eye to eye with, and the long-suffering wife wiser than both, but resigned to her station. Little is brought to these archetypes to reinvest the viewer in them. It’s obvious who these characters are and what sort of dynamic they’re going to have and, with an aesthetic sensibility as dry as the desert itself, the story of such one-note characters has little hope of leaving an impact.
I’m sure Utama will speak to some people. The family drama it unfurls is the kind of thing we tell ourselves is timeless as is worth retelling and it might well strike a chord under the right circumstances, but there’s little fresh wisdom to be found here. The bittersweet tale doesn’t provide much in the way of insight, nor even unique perspective from the culture it depicts. The debates to be had here remain unspoken and the inarticulate characters are just left to frustrate the viewer as much as each other. The film’s slow pace just exacerbates the sense of malnutrition in its story, and we’re given few reasons to truly care about the fate of a community and way of life we’re given such little positive contact with and the conflict feels stake-less. A film like Honeyland shows us an equally modest and alien existence, but still finds moments of joy and contentment in it and makes us rage at its destruction and mourn for its passage. Utama casts no such spell.
Shabu (dir. Shamira Raphaela, Netherlands)
Troubles of a very different kind meet Shabu, Shamira Raphaela’s coming of age docu-drama following fourteen year old Sharonio as he attempts to acknowledge and make amends for his mistakes. The film wastes no time establishing his quest, opening with a family meeting where “Shabu’s” misdeeds are aired. While his grandmother was away in Suriname, he stole her car and wrote it off. The family decides he needs to pay for the damages himself if he’s to learn a lesson, but Shabu is more concerned with pursuing his ambitions as a musician and decides to kill two birds with one stone by staging a concert and selling tickets.
As Shabu goes round his home—the “Peperklip” estate in Rotterdam—we meet its various inhabitants and their priorities, but the focus remains principally on Shabu. Like many fourteen-year-olds, he’s irresponsible, immature, reckless, naïve, egocentric and emotionally vulnerable. The film might conceptualize itself as his coming of age, as a late sequence implies it is. After being a kid too long, he’s messed up in a major way and needs to learn to take responsibility for his actions, acknowledge his selfish behavior, and make recompense.
Unfortunately, though, I just didn’t buy his redemption arc. The film is extremely enamored with his charmingly immature behavior and might indulge him a bit too much. He’s unquestionably a big, charismatic personality, but his expressions of vulnerability were unconvincing and the whole enterprise felt insincere and contrived. It feels more like constructed reality TV than documentary. Perhaps this was all 100% spontaneous and genuine, but it didn’t feel it and I struggled to invest in what felt like a contrived scenario to a nebulous end. It feels almost as if we’re missing a first act establishing the dynamic between Shabu and his grandmother, who doesn’t have the presence in the film that an offscreen character should. Her judgement is as meaningless to us as it often appears to be to Shabu because we don’t have time to invest in their relationship before it fractures.
The most promising material focuses on the moments of introspection and insecurity Shabu indulges in, as when he suddenly becomes uncomfortable when discussing heartbreak around the pool or when he gets jealous of his girlfriend’s new male friend and asks how light his skin is and if his hair is flat. Moments like these feel like they might be starting to reveal something fundamental about Shabu and why he behaves as irresponsibly as he does. Sadly though, these scenes are too few and the film commits to such a fly-on-the-wall style that it sacrifices the means to create opportunities whereby its protagonist might be challenged to open up.
There’s a handful of cute scenes of life on the estate, some others that impart a sense of offscreen danger, and the scenes wherein Shabu’s mentor gives him some advice on performance, but the whole picture doesn’t really end up that entertaining or meaningful. Shabu is sometimes charming company, but he’s frustrating just as often. The film hinges a lot of its interest on the audience being as fascinated with him as it apparently is and can start to feel like a pushy parent forcing you to listen to stories about how unique and special their kid is. Of course, the experiences of a young teenager living on a Rotterdam estate who dreams of stardom are valid, but Shabu’s attempts to craft them into a narrative are unconvincing and rarely enlightening.
Crows Are White (dir. Ahsen Nadeem, USA)
Faith-based films are a hard thing to get right. There’s no rationality to any form of spiritualism, so it’s hard to strike the right balance of curiosity and skepticism. What any audience considers an appropriate level of either concept is going to vary enormously from viewer to viewer. Thinking critically about ideology and practice of religions is something that I, an atheist, would consider a necessity of any religious documentary worthy of the name. However, I am also skeptical of any inquiry made in bad faith, and the core beliefs of individuals and cultures should not be questioned without good reason. Like any faith-based film, Crows Are White is forced to reckon with these ideas and does so in a fashion I’d consider to be extremely admirable.
The film begins with its director Ahsen Nadeem, who is curious about the monks of Mount Hiei in Kyoto, and their extreme, endurance-based practices for achieving enlightenment. He’s fascinated by the lengths they claim to be willing and able to go to and the sacrifices they make in order to achieve enlightenment. The monks indulge him for a while, but after Ahsen reaches an impasse, he’s forced to re-examine his reasons for coming to the monastery in the first place, and makes an acquaintance who offers an unexpected perspective.
The acquaintance is Ryushin, a low-ranking monk with very earthbound tastes who removes the halo adorning his order. Ryushin invites Ahsen to consider a new form of harmony in which one accepts the contradictions and hypocrisies of one’s culture. Ahsen’s reasons for coming are a lot more fraught. Having been raised a Muslim, Ahsen has long wrestled with the strictures of his faith as enforced by his parents, until now in adulthood, he has reached a point where he can no longer hide from them. He must break one of Islam’s sacred tenets and confront not only his guilt, but his parents in the process.
Crows Are White explores the self-deception and mythologizing that religious orders are built on. Not in a way that seeks to expose their corruption and hypocrisy, but their humanity. The monks of Hiei are humans seeking to become gods, escape their mortal bodies and human weaknesses, and pursue a form of perfection they are well aware is unattainable. All religions have a little of this in them, you won’t find a religious text anywhere that expresses reasonable parameters for a healthy and just life. Even if you did, most normal people would still be incapable of embodying it wholly for their entire lives. Yet we continue to enshrine these ideals, holding ourselves and others to them, and deceiving ourselves and others into thinking that we are following them. Except for Ryushin. In his guileless, charming, and good-natured way, he has learned to accept his limitations and his desires, forgive them, in himself and others.
Nadeem doesn’t pedestalize Ryushin in turn. What’s so endearingly unexpected about him is that he’s so normal. While his brothers deprive themselves of sleep, food, rest or speech, he goes about his day, answering phones, doing calligraphy, caring for his grandparents, sneaking out at night to eat ice cream, attending Slayer gigs, dreaming of moving to New Zealand to become a shepherd, and generally living about as wholesome an existence as one could aspire to. The friendship that forms between Ahsen and Ryushin is extremely sweet and a welcome antidote to the surprisingly difficult and even tearjerking material in the film’s third act.
As the film starts, Ahsen states in voiceover that he’s a very good liar, but that he’ll try and be honest with his audience. Though at the face of it this seems like the setup for an elaborate piece of documentarian deception, in the context of the film that follows, this reads more simply as a self-deprecating acknowledgement of the film’s themes of deception and self-deception and how they interact with religious practices throughout our daily lives. There are moments in Crows Are White that have you questioning its transparency, but I don’t believe they’re there with much in the way of intentionality. I think Nadeem hopes the viewer will absorb the story as told and engage emotionally with his own struggles to reconcile the life he is leading with the expectations of his parents and their faith, and I, for one, did. More than any other film yet this festival, I was absorbed by Crows Are White, a film that is equal parts amusing, touching, thoughtful and provocative, and all these in a manner that’s deeply humane, loving and accepting.
After Sherman (dir. Jon Sesrie Goff, USA)
Faith also plays a pivotal role in Jon Sesrie Goff’s documentary on his South Carolina homeland and the Gullah people who live there. After General Sherman retook the area in the Civil War, the land there was nominally gifted to the freed black residents, where they could reside in perpetuity, free from persecution. No such utopian ideal materialized. The residents were forced to purchase the land and, in the Century and a half that followed, many tracts of land were reclaimed and sold by the government. After Sherman examines the Gullah community through the eyes and testaments of its members, wrestling with the broken promises America made to its Black citizens, and the tests of faith they have suffered since.
At last year’s festival, one of the highlights was the documentary The Neutral Ground. The film explored black southerners’ experiences living side by side with white southerners who neither understand nor, in some cases, believe the extent and nature of slavery. The Neutral Ground also looks at the way white southerners’ blindness to the effects of it on black people’s sense of self/identity perpetuates and incubates harm to this day. After Sherman touches on very similar topics in a manner that’s less comic, personality driven or journalistic, but more impressionistic and social. Combining archive footage and occasional animation, Sesrie Goff brings together his community via interviews and presence at public gatherings, but the individual most at the center of After Sherman is his father, a pastor and spiritual leader to many in the community, and his sermons provide the strongest statements of intent the film delivers. Through his voice, the film speaks not with anger, militancy or grief, but tender thoughtfulness and reflection, as it pieces together fragments of history and wrestles with the personal task of drawing conclusions.
The film is broken up into chapters, each chapter title read in a hushed voice as if whispered by candlelight. The grainy archive footage is often assembled into montages of impressionist images, evoking a sense of the intangible meaning and value of the land itself, which is central to the issues of rights, identity, inheritance and culture the film explores. The land is not just their birthright, it’s their due as free people of America as their ancestors were assured by Sherman. Episodes within the film deal with specific events like struggles for equal pay or the impact of a recent mass shooting that bereaved nine churchgoing families, but specific events play little part in the film’s narrative, which moves from person to person, weaving in and out of the community and back and forwards in time. The efficacy of this strategy is perhaps debatable as the most conventionally told moments of After Sherman are generally the most memorable and the lack of momentum or connective tissue does sort of weigh on the film as it goes on.
There are some beautiful moments of intimacy and righteous personality that act like milestones refocusing the film on its end goal though. It isn’t a fully impressionistic exercise and doesn’t sacrifice accessibility for expression. A more intimate look at the individual stories might’ve helped to appreciate the weight of the story the film is telling, but the more reflective and accented voice it speaks with is credible, personable, and authoritative.
