The Manhattan Brothers wrote and sang 'Township Jazz' music during 1940s and 50s in South Africa. With over 150 hits, they sold millions of records, but their record company, Gallo Records, paid them using petty cash vouchers and hardly anything in royalties. Exiled from South Africa for almost thirty years, Joe Mogotsi now returns to find out if, in the 'new' South Africa, past injustices will be redressed.
The Governess is a moving love story set in the 1830's. When Rosina Da Silva's father is killed, she is forced to disguise her Jewish identity and seek employment in the world outside the sheltered East London community in which she was born and brought up. The only job that she can find is on a remote island in Scotland as governess to a spoilt young girl, Clementina. Her employer, Charles Cavendish, is a mysterious man, who is conducting secret experiments in a wing of the old house. When Rosina, overcome by curiosity, breaks into his workroom at night, she discovers that he is experimenting with photography, working towards a solution which will fix the fleeting images he has taken.
Cavendish, lonely and unrecognised in his work, invites Rosina to join him in his workroom. They begin an intense and passionate affair. When Cavendish's son Henry returns home from university, this affair takes a turn that threatens to tear the whole family apart.
Nineteen year old Iris thinks she can handle her mother's untimely death. She doesn't understand why her older sister Rose is so upset. Surely life goes on, and in order to prove this Iris leaves her boyfriend Gary and moves into a bedsit.
In her new home, she begins to transform herself by dressing up in her mother's wig, fur coat and sunglasses. A new sexually confident Iris emerges and she begins to haunt the streets and clubs of Liverpool, picking up men. Iris thinks that she is in control, that she is having fun. However, her increasingly manic behaviour is exacerbated by her combative relationship with her older sister Rose. The two sisters have always competed for their mother's attentions and her sudden death brings to the surface their feelings of jealousy and rivalry. Iris becomes increasingly estranged from her sister, her friends and her ex-boyfriend, who is trying to win her back.
The state of society now is caricatured in a well-to-do but dysfunctional family contrasting sharply with the smoothly operating society of wasps in a nest over their heads. Wasps is a film about insects, infestations, nervous energy, control, chaos and untimely extinction.
Yoman's Dance, a contemporary London story, investigates how a young Senegalese man with a lack of English, copes in the cosmopolitan metropolis. The central theme of the story is Yoman's battle to overcome his inability to express and articulate. Not naive to the difficulties of moving to a new and foreign city, and armed with a complex history and optimistic attitude, Yoman is well able to meet the many challenges that face him. However, the constant wear of misunderstanding climaxes with the failure of his first short lived encounter, which leads to a final sense of isolation.
Mona Hatoum left Beirut in 1975 for a short visit to London. When war broke out in the Lebanon she found it impossible to return. In this video, letters from her mother in Beirut, written in Arabic, move across the screen. They are read aloud, in English, by the artist. Hatoum's mother is also heard, speaking openly about her feelings and sexuality, accompanied by images of her in the shower.
Hatoum's video suggests exile and displacement. She has said it also challenges 'the stereotype of Arab women as passive, mother as non-sexual being'.
In their seminal, intersectional first feature, directors Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien incisively interrogate Black British experience, fusing dramatic scenes of family life with documentary and mystical elements, to give richly imaginative witness to a ‘post-colonial’ identity that encompasses generational, class, sexual and gender differences. Vividly manipulated footage of urban unrest, police brutality, gay rights marches and the miners’ strike, alongside chopped-up sequences showing a buzzing London night life, are intertwined, creating a penetrating example of Sankofa’s disruptive critique of 1980s Britain. And it looks fantastic. The film screens in a simultaneous transatlantic premiere with the New York Film Festival.
(London Film Festival)
New York. Desperate for work, Christine takes a job selling tickets at the Variety, a sex cinema. This somewhat alienates her boyfriend Mark, who is investigating a story about union links with the Mob at the wholesale fish market. Christine finds herself drawn towards events on-screen, and also follows one of the customers, Louie, when he enters a sex shop, apparently on business. Louie, who is clearly both wealthy and powerful as a result of his shady activities, takes her to a ball game at Yankee Stadium. When he is suddenly called away, she again follows him and observes him at work.
Variety inverts the traditional narrative structure of cinema – whereby a man watches and a woman is watched – without showing, and thus flaunting, the object of female desire. Creating a counter-narrative to Hollywood, Bette Gordon asks the same question formulated by Teresa de Lauretis in “Oedipus Interruptus”: “How did Medusa feel upon seeing herself in Perseus' mirror just before being slain?”
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Forum Archival Constellations
