London Film Festival - Mischief Night, Dark Blue Almost Black and Buenos Aires 1977
As the 50th London Film Festival gets underway, a new update from Suchandrika Chakrabarti, with previews of Penny Woolcock's Mischief Night, the Spanish Dark Blue Almost Black and a real-life Argentine horror story, Buenos Aires 1977.
Mischief Night (Penny Woolcock, UK
, 2006)
The third part of Woolcock's Beeston, Leeds-set trilogy stands perfectly happily on its own. Made in conjunction with the team behind TV's inimitable Shameless, this irreverent look at life in the town from which three of the 7/7 London bombers came is both funny and thought-provoking. Life in Tina's household with her three kids and their "three different dads. All tossers," is never dull, and neither is it in the Khan household on the other side of the park, where the sheer number of siblings mean that poor Asif has to sleep under the kitchen table. Nevertheless, Woolocock's film does not shy away from the increasingly problematic issues of integration in this community; many characters comment on the fact that classrooms were much more mixed a generation ago, and that present trends do not bode well. A rollicking watch, with some hilarious lines - few of which are fit to quote in front of a family readership - but rooted in very real, and worrying, concerns.
Dark Blue Almost Black (Daniel Sanchez Arevalo, Spain, 2006)
TV scriptwiter Arevalo has made the leap from shorts with this feature. Centering on the difficult and indefinable relationship between son and increasingly ill father, Jorge (the son) who is also faced with (in no particular order): the boredom of staying in his father's old janitor job; his ex hitting town; his jailed brother making requests far beyond the duty of a brother; and his friend Israel, aka 'Sean Penn', whose life is a contracted and comical version of Jorge's. The various strands are ably shouldered by the gifted ensemble cast, and flashes of great comic timing enliven some of the more sordid or potentially depressing scenes. An enjoyable debut feature from Arevalo.
Buenos Aires 1977 (Israel Adrian Caetano, Argentina, 2006)
Fresh from the Official Selection at Cannes 2006, the most worrying aspect of this film is that it's all true.
In late 70s Argentina, a goalie for a second-division footie team is earmarked as a leftie sympathiser and abducted by a government task force. He joins other young men in a secret villa just outside Buenos Aires. Here, the young men undergo interrogations, beatings and torture. The film almost becomes a stock thriller, with the will-they-won't-they-escape question becoming ever more important.
As some reviewers have noted, the film goes for the personal over the stark political facts: 30 000 people - including pregnant women and teenagers - were killed under military rule. Instead, Buneos Aires 1977 goes down the route of depicting how it would feel to be there. The escape attempt is inevitable. The result... well, you have to watch it and see. Perhaps those behind the film are sometimes guilty of style over substance/historical fact. However, a movie dealing with the realities of a man who was mistakenly seen as a terrorist, and hauled off to a secret prison, cannot but resonate with us today.
Watch this space for more previews. In the meantime, see The Times BFI website for further details.
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