Hello all you lovely Cherwell readers and welcome to the first of our blogs from the London International Documentary Festival. Today, most of the scheduled events are on at the Barbican, which for my money is the best arts centre in London. For those of you that haven’t visited before, it’s like one big cultural living room. Literally, there’s a glut of sofas scattered across every floor and absolutely no one to tell you to leave or buy something before you sit down. Think Starbucks but without the overpriced coffee.
Walking down the stairs towards the Barbican’s cinema block, I notice a small exhibition of photos by Toby Smith entitled “Madagascar: Bois de Rose.” This is a part of the LIDF’s attempts to broaden the nature of the events held as part of the festival with the use of things like radio and particularly photography. This exhibition is completely free and documents illegal deforestation in Madagascar and it’s full of shots of beautiful landscapes alongside images of poverty. I was expecting an exhibition criticizing the illegal trade but instead the main emphasis was on the community and people involved.
Now onto the main events. First up is a screening of This Way of Life which follows Peter and Colleen Karena, their six children and their fifty horses. The Karena family live in a thoroughly “unmodern” way, unconcerned by the comforts of materialism they instead value nature and family. I know this may sound like a typical film about laid-back flower-power but it isn’t at all; I was struck by the elegance of the family’s life in their attitudes, lifestyle and particularly their relationships with their horses (and before you ask, no, not in an Equus way.) For all of the hours of expensive blockbuster footage of horses, I have never seen the animals look as majestic as they do in this film. Add to that probably some of the cutest kids in the world and you’ve got yourself a winner.
After a three hour lull in screenings which I spent pretending to do work, the next film was due to start. This year, the LIDF is hosting a retrospective of Don Boyd’s work and this was launched at the Barbican with a screening of Lucia, which was introduced by the director himself. Boyd explained his influences and inspiration behind the film and made it clear that Lucia isn’t really a documentary. In fact I don’t know how to describe Lucia at all. It’s a film about a company performing Lucia di Lammermoor and the lives of the singers become entangled with the plot of the opera; well at least that’s what I think happens. It’s easy to get confused in the midst of all the blood, arias and nudity. At its best, the film is truly disorientating and surreal. There’s a wonderful colour-saturated scene of a woman underwater; it’s like nothing else in the rest of film.
Closing the day’s events is Erik Gandini’s Videocracy. For anyone – like me – who didn’t know, the Italian president, Silvio Berlusconi has a huge stake in the Italian media and the film focuses on the growth of television culture in Italy, Berlusconi’s power over this and the effects on the aspirations of those who grew up around the fairly vacuous barrage of television on offer. This is a really strong documentary, full of shock, humanity and humour. It includes footage of an advert in which crowds of women impassionedly singing “Thank God Silvio exists.” Seriously. After the film, there’s a panel discussion hosted by Index on Censorship. By the time the panel came around it had been a long day and I was fairly tired but it certainly woke me up. One of the key topics extended by the talk is the attitude of women towards Italian television, particularly the swathes of women who dream of becoming “Veline” (barely dressed, completely silent dancers that populate Italian television).
Having learnt about the state of Italian TV, the illegal rosewood trade and the life of a New Zealand family, I called it a day. I’ll be back blogging from the LIDF soon so goodbye until then.
