Opening Up in “Let the Sunshine In”

The 2018 European Film Festival at Cinema Nouveau is about to end, but those who can run may still catch the last screening of one of the great pleasures on offer, Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In, from France, which is showing tonight at 20:00 at Rosebank Nouveau. It stars Juliette Binoche as a bourgeois painter in Paris named Isabelle, a moderately successful artist who has entered and now traverses along the French modern art scene, but seems to exist outside of its cliques, ideologies, and prejudices, and perhaps not entirely by choice. The story moves along the plane of her romantic life, and intersections with her personal and professional lives (though it would seem that, in Paris, very little effort is made by artists to ever separate them). The movie opens with Isabelle naked in bed while her married lover, a banker named Vincent (Xavier Beauvois), pneumatically heaves on top of her. The scene’s severe physicality is both heightened and punctured by the short snaps of dialogue: “Not cumming?” “You finish, I feel good.” (I quote subtitles from memory.)

And so it is with the rest of the movie. As Isabelle shifts from one lover to another, as her emotional state improves and declines, the talk throughout the movie seems to both expand and undercut the developing moods and emotions. It doesn’t bounce between melodrama and comedy, but ascends to a plane that covers both, that allows for the depiction of a life streaked with tears as well as bouncing on laughter. Isabelle herself wobbles between anguish, tenderness, doubtfulness, apprehension, and a warm glow of bliss (one that’s depicted quite literally in the final scene and especially the final shot, and that points back to the movie’s title). And she varies just as much with one lover as between any two or more of them. Following her abrupt break-up with the disdainful Vincent, she hooks up with an actor in emotional and professional turmoil (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a man of the working class, whose profession is not revealed, but with whom she undergoes acute social tension (Paul Blain), an artistic associate who is reluctant to start up an affair (Alex Descas), and with her ex-husband and the father of her ten-year-old daughter, whom she keeps inviting back into her bed (Laurent Grévill).

Africa’s Upcoming Premier Documentary Festival

Encounters Documentary Festival 2017

The Encounters Documentary Festival has been an annual film event in South Africa since 1999, taking place in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. This year, the 19^th Encounters South African International Documentary Festival will run from 1 June to 11 June, with screenings at the V&A Nouveau, the Labia, and the Bertha Movie House in Cape Town, and at the Rosebank Nouveau and the Bioscope in Johannesburg. Darryl Els, the festival director, reports that over 70 local and international features and shorts will be screened, no fewer than 32 of which are South African and 19 are world premieres.

Click here to see the entire 19^th Encounters South African International Documentary Festival programme, including booking and ticket price information, the entire selection of films, the festival schedule, and other features.

The festival receives support from a whole host of sponsors, including the National Film and Video Foundation (an agency of the South African Department of Arts and Culture), the Bertha Foundation, Al Jazeera, various commercial funders, as well as other branches of government cultural agencies. The Wikipedia article on the festival also reports that many overseas festivals and distributors programme from the Encounters Documentary Festival when looking for African content in documentary categories. The festival includes a number of workshops where attendees may engage with these sponsors and other strategic partners, with opportunities to meet funders, see presentations on publicity campaigns for documentary producers, see presentations on producing a debut feature, participate in discussions on the state of documentary filmmaking in South Africa, hear panels on breaking into the South African film industry, hear individual filmmakers talk about their own experiences and issues important to them, and listen to discussions on the forms and possibilities of documentary filmmaking. There are also sessions hosted by Al Jazeera that filmmakers, industry members, and observers may take part in that involve pitching and commenting on new ideas for documentaries, and a lab for filmmakers to get a chance to work on their films in post-production with an editing mentor. The information and schedules for all these events are in the programme.

South Africa’s Upcoming European Film Festival

European Film Festival 2017

“It was the fate of Europe to be always a battleground. Differences in race, in religion, in political genius and social ideals, seemed always … to be invitations to contest by battle.” Those were Calvin Coolidge’s words, uttered in an address in 1924. It’d be trivial to point out how correct he was then in his view of history, as well as how aptly his description of Europe has played out since. We shall overlook for now the present state of Coolidge’s own fair continent, which itself appears convulsed in fiery conflicts on very much the same grounds as he set out, and which provides our cinemas with an enormous bulk of their general fare; this month, from the 5^th to the 14^th, the focus at the movies in four major centres in South Africa (Brooklyn in Pretoria, Rosebank in Johannesburg, the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, and Gateway in Durban) is on the specifically European tensions of our times – social, political, ethnic, religious, and, of most interest to this blog, aesthetic.

The European Film Festival has become an annual feature at the Ster Kinekor Cinemas Nouveau, coordinated by the Goethe-Institut South Africa, and organised in partnership with various European cultural and diplomatic organisations. It began in 2014 and this is its fourth iteration. There isn’t much of an opportunity to see European features in theatrical release in South Africa, so this one should be grabbed by all curious and enthusiastic local moviegoers. I attended last year, only to see a single film, but shall definitely be making concerted efforts to see far more this year. The festival director (and, I presume, sole curator) is Katarina Hedrén, who has brought over a selection of recent European works, evidently in an effort to span as wide a range of topics, moods, and nationalities as she could. I haven’t seen any of the films playing at the festival, nor even heard of some of them before checking the lineup, but it looks to me like a good sampling for us to gauge the current condition of mainstream European cinema.

Sunlit Gardens

“Irrational Man” and “Flowers”

Image: blogs.indiewire.com

The European Film Festival, which is a collection of European films currently playing at Ster Kinekor’s Cinema Nouveau theatres, is a useful enough opportunity for South African moviegoers to be exposed to the contemporary cinema of Europe, and an equally useful opportunity to find that the fact that something is foreign, subtitled, subdued in tone, or literary in temperament does not denote its artistic pedigree or intellectual superiority to our usual bright and brash, American English-language stock comedies and thrillers. What matters in cinema is less how composed and refined a film can be, and more how much life and with what depth and breadth of experience and ideas a filmmaker can imbue it.

On Friday, in a programme of our own devising, a friend and I went to see Woody Allen’s new film, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone, named Irrational Man and taking on the breeziest and most enchantingly sun-lit tone, followed by Earl Grey tea and a screening of Flowers, a Spanish entry in the European Film Festival, in Basque and with English subtitles, and considerably more naturalistic and solemn. The sun lit the small Spanish town just as much as it did the small New England haven, but with far more organic, prosaic, and inert a glare.