Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews

A list of films fully reviewed* (with links) at Sheffield Doc/Fest

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 June

In alphabetical order, a list of films reviewed in full* at Sheffield Doc/Fest (with links) :


A Sinner in Mecca (2015)
Doublethink in Mecca : Being devotional despite inflicted modernity


A Young Patriot (2015)
Full circle in Shanxi province


Containment (2015)
Containment – the vessel and the djinn


Iris (2014)
Big glasses to Big Eyes


Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014)
Sheffield – God's own City ~ Michael Palin at The Crucible


The Nine Muses (2010)
The best of Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 : in the John Akomfrah retrospective


End-notes

* The same reviews can also be found linked in A round-up of events at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 (@sheffdocfest).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Doublethink in Mecca : being devotional despite inflicted modernity ?

This is a Festival review of A Sinner in Mecca (2015)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 June (29 June, Post-script added)

This is a Festival review of A Sinner in Mecca (2015), which screened at Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 on Tuesday 9 June at 6.15 p.m.

This remains the most perplexing film from Sheffield Documentary Festival, with its themes – almost at poles away from each other (please see below) – having tumbled around in one’s head, in search of supremacy, throughout the screening. Although, in fact, none ultimately found any, and one’s hopes for a considered response were then jostled by a good deal of immoderately detailed criticism, and even hostility, in the Q&A* (so what one first wrote – please see below – was not an ideal appreciation) : it was painful that there was the palpable affront to, and taken by, director Parvez Sharma (@parvezsharma) at being asked why he had made A Sinner in Mecca, and what it was about (as he pointed out, to these people who had just watched his film, there was insult in so doing).

These themes in the film [its official web-site is http://asinnerinmecca.com], which refuse to stay together and be quiet, are fairly simply stated (though it is not intended to be reductively done) :

(1) The desire to complete a Hajj to Mecca and show that one is a good Muslim

(2) How the traditional elements of a Hajj (specifically the environment and manner in which they are carried out) have been influenced or even changed by the Islamic tradition to which the ruling Saudi royal family adheres (the Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam)

(3) A prohibition on filming at Mecca and the other religious sites (whereas we have footage, and much contemporary audio, of everything that Sharma does to complete his Hajj)

(4) Recent executions, by beheading, of men just for being gay


It is partly in the interaction of themes (1) and (2) that tension arises within the viewer : Sharma is clearly sincere in wanting to carry out the traditional steps of a Hajj, and seek acceptance from God for his pilgrimage, but he in no way refrains from doing so and at the same time pointing out how a shopping-mall, for example, complete with a branch of Starbucks, is a matter of a few hundred metres from the most sacred Islamic site, The Kaaba (or Ka’aba), in the mosque Al-Masjid al-Haram [the link is to the Wikipedia® web-page]. It feels like a remarkable doublethink on Sharma’s part, trying to engage with the significance of all these ritual acts (and their meaning to him), but at the same time as criticizing what the ruling family has done to holy sites (or, later in the film, seems to have allowed to happen to them).

One is reminded that, in the Christian tradition, all four Gospels have accounts of Jesus driving the money-lenders out of the Temple (e.g. Matthew 21 : 12–17, 23–27), and Islam has equivalent passages of zeal for God’s house :

At the culmination of his mission, in 629 CE, Muhammad conquered Makkah with a Muslim army. His first action was to cleanse the Kaaba of idols and images.

Narrated Abdullah: When the Prophet entered Mecca on the day of the Conquest, there were 360 idols around the Ka'bah. The Prophet started striking them with a stick he had in his hand and was saying, "Truth has come and Falsehood has Vanished.. (Qur'an 17:81)"

—Sahih Al-Bukhari, Book 59, Hadith 583


Since, from what Sharma says in the film, we do not know whether theme (3) is a religious prohibition (or an administrative one), and in the light of a harsh state religious penalty from theme (4), one might imagine – and hence be anxious – that he risked execution to take his footage (please see below). Here lies what appears to be a further conflict : even if a person decides for himself, irrespective of such a penalty, that a good Muslim can be gay (or lesbian), why would he (or she) flout a prohibition not to film in sacred places ? As with the pull between themes (1) and (2), so, in that between (1) and (3), one spends time not quite fathoming why Sharma has chosen to film his Hajj – and that gnaws at one, as one watches the film :

Is he – if a real distinction is being made here – filming it as proof for himself that he did it, or to show us ? (Although, if he is showing it to us, we may not (easily) understand what this series of acts means to him spiritually, especially the final one, which is alarming.) If he had not filmed, of course, there would not be a documentary (not in this way, at any rate), but does the film, as we watch, leave us with the uncertainty how he can be both sincerely pious and simultaneously documenting his experience, if (and we do not know) filming is against a religious ordinance ? Or do we maybe need to throw ourselves into a world such as that of Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales (or of Gide’s Les caves du Vatican), and not try to separate religious experience from humanity from human nature ? (With the example of Jesus and Muhammad, after all, we see how they concentrate on what is holy about the Temple / the Ka'bah, and dismiss the unworthy human additions : does the pilgrim, too, undertake certain steps to reduce his or her unworthiness ?)


Quite often (maybe through not being a Muslim ?), one wonders whether Sharma must be ‘going through the motions’ in his Hajj (or, in part, feel that he is ?), since he is commentating so pointedly on what has become of its elements in modern Saudi Arabia – that, though, does not quite identify our question, but is an attempt at understanding what it must be like to be in locations that have now been ‘reinterpreted’ so radically (not his word, but a euphemistic analogy). For example, Sharma tells us of the history that gives symbolic significance to the activity of running between two mountains (and we are shown a moment of animation) : they are mountains, now that the space has been enclosed, that we cannot see, but only what resemble (again, not his word) ‘soulless’ modern corridors.

Using the word ‘soulless’ is not, of course, at all meant to denigrate the inherently sacred nature of this spot (for Sharma himself indicates that he does not relish what has been done here). It is an attempt to say what it looks like, as a space that one would think lacked significance, and even much humanity – as when we castigate planners for giving us an unwelcoming underpass, or a corridor that we have to tramp down to get to platforms on an Underground line. Sharma, however, must somehow keep everything holy in his soul and heart, despite the fact that this and other settings for elements of the Hajj have been changed so much that we wonder how the religious acts themselves can remain. (Likewise, he shows us what disgusts him in traffic-jams on a coach that last for hours, and in having to make devotions in a city full of discarded rubbish that no one deals with.)

Somehow (or mentally somewhere : as if in a minimal area of overlap between themes (1), (2) and (4), in a Venn diagram ?), despite being critical that Saudi cemeteries / monuments have been destroyed (because the Wahhabi faith of the royal family discredits praying to idols), Sharma sees himself as capable of making a Hajj that is acceptable to his God – yet, in so doing, rejecting / critiquing what has now been done to the religious centres, including the fact that his sexual orientation stands condemned and that filming is banned (theme (3)). This seeming confusion of attitudes is why, early on and for the round-up portal-page for Doc/Fest coverage, this comment was made :

Despite director / cinematographer Parvez Sharma’s hope that his film was not self indulgent, and the insights that he wished to share – through going on a Hajj – about Mecca and other holy sites, and the ruling Saudi dynasty and its attitude to the past, how he pursued, and attained, the object of his quest seemed to stay very personal to him and his experience


The more reflective step, before starting to analyse the film’s themes (as attempted above), was to consider the case of Arthur Koestler, who (in the summative Bricks to Babel, which probably excerpts an earlier work for this material) reported his experience of being so far ‘inside’ the ideologies of both first Communism and then Christianity that objections to them could be heard, but never penetrate to or undermine belief : the internal logic of each belief-system had a self-sustaining answer for everything that challenged it. Here, one needs to come to a realization that none of the negative associations involved in what we see of Saudi – such as the Wahhabi accretions / rulings / modernizations – affect Sharma’s core relationship to his faith, and, more importantly, what he ends up telling us that he has nevertheless taken from the Hajj : He feels accepted by his God, and he is vindicated as a Muslim who is also gay.

However, for us as viewers, that part of what happens in the film is utterly internal to him, with (especially, again, if we are non-Muslims) only his words as mediation between his experience and us – not least if we do not relate to the notion of, or what is needful in, a blood sacrifice [in the tradition of Ibrahim / Abraham]. Moreover, the path that Sharma is shown having chosen, to travel to Saudi (despite being gay), and intending to film, is a very narrow one : on account of a sequence at the opening of A Sinner in Mecca, which, quite from choice, seemed to front-end what followed, but never to be returned to**, one was left, as one watched (despite the fact that, flesh and blood, the film-maker had introduced his film), more and more anxious at the risk that he had run to make it (and whether there was still a possibility of reprisal, against him or those who screened his film ? – on which, please see the Post-script).


In the event, perhaps it could have helped one focus on other aspects of the film, if one had known beforehand what one came to learn in the Q&A : one device that Sharma had been using to film had actually been confiscated, and what he had filmed was deleted (so he had had to replicate it later on), but nothing worse had happened***. Even so, it may be that the nature of the themes that Sharma is handling here (as teased out above) just inevitably mean that it feels in conflict with itself, and that we are likely to stay external to his understanding of himself in relation to Islam and his God ?


Post-script

Synergistically with working on the above review, and en route to and from The Stables for a folk gig last week, Richard Thompson’s album The Old Kit Bag was being replayed.

One had forgotten that, in part two (The Pilgrims Fancy, titling tracks 7 to 12), was a song called ‘Outside of the Inside’. It begins provocatively with God never listened to Charlie Parker / Charlie Parker lived in vain, and calls his jazz ‘monkey music’, and him ‘Blasphemer, womaniser’ – the first of several take-downs of Western figures such Albert Einstein, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Van Gogh and Botticelli.

Towards the end, we have these rather chilling lines :

I’m familiar with the cover
I don’t need to read the book
I police the word of action
Inside’s where I never look


The review of the film that appeared in The Guardian (by Safa Samiezade’-Yazd), now read, tells us : Parvez, who is gay and Muslim, has had death threats for making the film, leading to increased security at the festival screenings. (In retrospect, then, the search of our bags in the way into the screening at Doc/Fest had been nothing to do with trying to restrict pirating…)

As the review also has a short interview, at the end, with the reviewer as a sympathetic questioner, it is well worth a read to give the film’s director a chance to talk about A Sinner in Mecca, without (as we had twice in the Doc/Fest Q&A) a point-by-point insistence on the ways in which he had misrepresented Islam and its tenets, for example :

This is a film about the change that needs to happen within Islam. It’s a direct challenge that has never been mounted to the Saudi monarchy. It’s a call to action to all Muslims to take back singular authority over their faith.

Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* Except that one did not wish to get caught up in the emotion behind these harsh comments, and see a film-maker who has brought a film be attacked, was it possible that the fact that, in themselves, they were being made almost provided sufficient justification for having made A Sinner in Mecca ?

** A little stagily, though, in fact, the staginess proved to help convey the sense of fear and desperation of the director’s correspondent, and thereby to leave one, later, in trepidation for his safety.

*** Even so, the fact that he had made A Jihad for Love (2007) connected him, as a film-maker, with being gay, so he had clearly heightened the risk of being identified, when in Saudi Arabia, by filming. (And, as was put to him in the Q&A, his film had been open about his marriage to his gay partner in New York City at the start of film, but, in some parts of the States, legislation against same-sex marriage was being passed, so the negative attitudes were close to home.)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

A round-up of events* at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 (@sheffdocfest)

This is a summary account of events / screenings at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 June

This is a summary account, in a sentence each (well, almost), of events / screenings at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 (5 to 10 June)

Congratulations to all nominees & winners at the #sheffdocfest 2015 Awards. Full listings can be viewed here http://t.co/AtWCZzVvOG

— Sheffield Doc/Fest (@sheffdocfest) June 12, 2015

Saturday 6 June

* 12.30 – A Young Patriot (2015) (Showroom Screen 2, Vimeo) – inadvertently raises questions both about one’s reasons for choosing a subject and what one has meaningful consent to film (reviewed here) – probably 10+ minutes too long

* 3.45 – Match Me ! How to Find Love in Modern Times (2014) (Odeon Screen 8) – the Q&A essentially confirmed what one had really already suspected, that it was not really about match-making, but had been made to be to complement the story of a couple who had met through a type of arranged yogic marriage – also probably 10+ minutes too long

* 7.00 – (screening at around 9.45) Mavis ! (2015) (The Botanical Gardens) – Mavis Staples is a figure whose musical significance is worth bringing to greater prominence, with the sort of voice that is normally called lived in and an impressive career, but fairly conventional / unremarkable in documentary terms themselves



Sunday 7 June

* 12.15 – Containment (2015) (Showroom Screen 2, Vimeo) – a title that IMDb (@IMDb) will have to disambiguate, as there are also two features of this name, but they will not skilfully look at a range of issues such as where nuclear waste comes from, serious mistakes in our understanding that prove to have been made in attempts to store and process it, and how (perhaps not a wholly integrated theme ?) we warn those in AD 12,000 of its existence / presence (reviewed here)

Isotopes, becquerels, control-rods, fission, reprocessing, contamination - not all used in @ContainmentDoc at @sheffdocfest , but reminders.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 7, 2015

If one had not tarried, to talk to directors Robb Moss and Peter Galison after the Q&A, there might have been a chance to get to Imperialism or Inquiry : How Fair is Our Foreign Filming ? at 2.30 (ITV Town Hall Council Chamber) (or, at 3.30, How Interactive Content is Shaping the Future of Cinemas and Film Festivals (Memorial Hall, City Hall))...


* 5.45 – Iris (2014) (Odeon Screen 8) – unlike with Mavis !, a film that was not exactly awash with humility, although Iris Apfel is a great encourager and collector with definite tastes and flair, and where doing a deal – having justified the concept of haggling in its appropriate place – seemed part of the thrill of the chase in remorseless acquisitiveness (although tempered by giving archive material, both temporarily and permanently)

We admire Iris Apfel's obvious flair, but her acquisitiveness - though hardly unique - makes her hard to like much... pic.twitter.com/yZV32HrFx1

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 27, 2015

Monday 8 June

* 12.00 – The Nine Muses (2010) (Showroom Screen 1, AP Archive) – excellent melding of readings (Naxos Audiobooks) from sourced such as Dante, Homer, Beckettt’s trilogy (Molloy and The Unnameable) with music, images and displayed quotations – directive, but largely through meditative juxtaposition of powerful source and new material (reviewed here – and as prophetically Tweeted ?) :

So far, two main approaches from @sheffdocfest films : a broadly chronological unfolding (sometimes in real time) and complementary strands.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 7, 2015

Best film that @THEAGENTAPSLEY has seen at @sheffdocfest so far, The Nine Muses (2010) - great for Beckettt lovers ! https://t.co/v2sBv03Lj6

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 8, 2015

Little White Lies (@LWLies) had this to say : Even more of a revelation was the screening of Akomfrah's The Nine Muses (2010), which effectively demands the cinema experience. Abstract, demanding but never less than compelling, we can't pretend to have grasped its every free-associating allusion, but its intoxicating riffs on diasporic identity and memory are assembled with the eye of an obvious master.

Here are our five top picks from the 2015 @sheffdocfest: http://t.co/o6s6vh6oG4 pic.twitter.com/rdwDIpBIY1

— Little White Lies (@LWLies) June 17, 2015

* 2.15 – Jungle Sisters (2015) (Showroom Screen 2, Vimeo) – the combination of an incipient headache and motion-sequences that felt overly jerky did not make for a screening that could be sustained

* 4.00 – Influence Film Club : Almost There (2014) (The Adelphi Room, The Crucible Theatre) – a pleasant chance to meet, off Twitter, the directors and producers and share and chat with them, as well as seeing a trailer and a clip, and hear them interviewed

A @sheffdocfest discussion with Almost There directors Aaron Wickenden/ Dan Rybicky, Tim Horsburghof @Kartemquin : http://t.co/yYpBiy0o62

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 8, 2015

Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden (directors) and Tim Horsburgh (Kartemquin Films)

* 6.00 – The Making of Long Lost Family (The Crucible Theatre) – apologies if it is wrongly recalled as in Rotherham, but, anyway, the story of Yorkshire twins, only one of whom knew of the other’s existence, and what the programme did to help her track down her sister, who turned out to have been living just three miles away the whole time, and even to have been registered with the same medical practice – as Nicky Campbell tellingly described it, they became young girls again as they ran towards each other, and Davina McCall could scarcely contain herself that they were there to join the panel on the stage of The Crucible, which was just one unexpectedly moving moment in this session about Long Lost Family, and its commitment to quality and care for its subjects

* 8.15 – Meet the Makers : The Revolution will be Televised (The Crucible Theatre) – despite the fact that the chat was ably chaired by Owen Jones (@OwenJones84), nothing altered the fact that comedy’s effects can be wildly subjective (in a Freud-like way, one can see that something is amusing, but not laugh), and this seemed less hard hitting than much other British satirical work, and more like Dom Joly’s stunts (with a political slant)

Owen Jones

 
Tuesday 9 June

* 10.30 – The BBC Interview : Charlotte Moore (Controller, BBC1) interviewed by Alex Graham (Festival Chair) – proof (one has done it in Q&As, and in interviewing Ken Loach) that one can be so keen that those listening are aware of the store of one’s knowledge that one swamps the interviewee with propositions (mixed up with a question somewhere), and then, lively to engage, irritatingly (?)** cuts short the answer…

* 12.45 – Newsnight and documentary : Ian Katz (Editor, Newsnight) interviewed by Nick Fraser (Executive Producer, Storyville) – Nick Fraser, by contrast, used fewer words, but to better effect, and integrated clips highly appropriately into talking to Ian Katz (@iankatz1000), who spoke with such a fluency and command of language that he well conveyed what helped us understand his editorial approach and decisions at, and hopes for the use of documentary for, Newsnight and in relation to other BBC factual output

Ian Katz

* 3.00 – The Channel 4 Interview : Dan Reed (maker of documentaries (and feature films)) interviewed by Ralph Lee (Deputy Chief Creative Officer, Channel 4) – flagging too much for little other than sustenance by caffeine and chocolate brownie (courtesy of those welcoming people upstairs in The Influence Film Club) and an energy drink (donated by delegate Ravinder Surah), but with little glimpses through Dan Reed’s lens into worlds of depravity, violence and threat

Ralph Lee (L) interviews Dan Reed (R)

* 6.15 – A Sinner in Mecca (2015) (Odeon Screen 8) – despite director / cinematographer Parvez Sharma’s hope that his film was not self indulgent, and the insights that he wished to share – through going on a Hajj – about Mecca and other holy sites, and the ruling Saudi dynasty and its attitude to the past, how he pursued, and attained, the object of his quest seemed to stay very personal to him and his experience (unsure now : see after-thought – and, which is more considered, the review now here)

On @parvezsharma's A Sinner in Mecca at @sheffdocfest, reflecting on Arthur Koestler's thoughts, v. in / v. out of communism / Christianity.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 10, 2015

Watching @parvezsharma's A Sinner in Mecca (2015) at @sheffdocfest had me in knots about what risk he ran, @kingqueen3065 @BeresfordPeter !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 11, 2015

* 8.45 – DS30 (2014) (Odeon Screen 8) – three films (the first two, being contemporary to the NUM strike, between them totalling around 14 mins, and the third around 33 mins) that, respectively, documented or revisited (a commission for AV Festival in 2014) the mood and music of the time, the latter as made by Test Dept and The South Wales Striking Miners' Choir :

Popular @camfilmfest 2014 film @EnemyWithin1984 tells the story of the miners strike from the miners themselves. #Orgreave #CamFF

— Cambridge Film Fest (@camfilmfest) June 12, 2015

Good, @MusicMattersR3, to hear @tomservice talking to @Test_Dept after seeing them after the @sheffdocfest screening of DS30 (2014) ->

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 13, 2015

-> Less obviously than @BurundiDrummers, when @THEAGENTAPSLEY asked about influences, @Test_Dept named Penderecki, Gorecki, Shostakovich.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 13, 2015

Burundi and Kodo too of course! https://t.co/7aK9EN2J1c

— Test Dept (@Test_Dept) June 17, 2015

[...]



Wednesday 10 June


* 11.00 The Awards Ceremony (The Crucible Theatre) – a pleasure to be 'inside' this event, hearing the wit and versatility of Jeremy Hardy as host first hand, both before and during :

The ever-entertaining and sharp Jeremy Hardy hosted for @sheffdocfest at @crucibletheatre - here, looking balletic ? pic.twitter.com/quC6ChLotX

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 10, 2015

Day 6 at @sheffdocfest, and back at the @crucibletheatre for the awards ceremony, setting up photos for the hopefuls pic.twitter.com/E09oZ7gr7e

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 10, 2015

* 2.00 – Volunteers' Secret Screening : The Confessions of Thomas Quick (2015) (The Void, Sheffield Hallam) :

Apart from ducking out of Jungle S. for image-quality, the volunteers' free surprise screening felt gratuitous for re-enacting violent acts.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 10, 2015

* 6.30 Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014) (The Crucible Theatre) – to Holly Gilliam’s (Terry Gilliam’s daughter’s) impulse to get a camera to document what happened at the script-reading for Monty Python (Almost) Live, and afterwards, much is owed, in this skilful snapshot of the surviving Pythons by Roger Graef and James Rogan (reviewed here)

The Pythons at @TheO2 in Roger Graefand @J_Rogan1's masterly Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014) very suitably closed @sheffdocfest.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 11, 2015

It was @THEAGENTAPSLEY's pleasure, as @sheffdocfest volunteer, Doc/Lovers-wristband-holder and writer, to be there ! https://t.co/w9XjVPD7He

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 11, 2015

To be expanded / continued...

A new sign-off, following @sheffdocfest... A:\emptydisk\recharge

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 13, 2015

End-notes

* These Tweets refer :

Not of all the sheep that have been much around @sheffdocfest, but a round-up of events / screenings so far : http://t.co/233OsbI9ns

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 9, 2015

** Assured by Charlotte Moore that the style of the interview had not felt antagonistic, one still felt uncomfortable watching more than short sections of it, and others did not disagree with having been disquietened.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)