Dan Slevin previews three more titles from this year’s Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival.
Photo: NZIFF
Reality (Tina Satter, 2023)
Verbatim theatre is an artform we do quite well at here in Aotearoa. Transcripts of interviews, conversations and recollections can provide more illumination to a situation than any invention from a scriptwriter. That’s not to say that there is never an intervention from a writer – that material still has to be shaped. There’s still a writer’s hand at work.
When the original material is inherently dramatic and the shaping is brilliantly deft you get Reality, based on Tina Satter’s own stage play Is This a Room.
With the only dialogue in the piece taken verbatim from the original transcribed recordings, Reality recreates the day in June 2017 when national security translator – and former Air Force senior airman – Reality Winner is raided by the FBI and interrogated at her home about the ‘mishandling’ of some documents.
What starts out as a ‘whatwasdoneit’ (if that’s a word) over time becomes a ‘whodunnit’ and then eventually a ‘whydunnit’ as the agents slowly reveal how much they already know and Winner crumbles under the pressure.
An insight into interrogation techniques – in this case quietly methodical, on the surface respectful, constantly asking if she needs water or wants to sit down, the welfare of her pets, etc – viewers will wonder why Winner never stops to ask for a lawyer. It’s clear that she still sees herself as a patriot and wants to help, at least that is until the net closes too tight.
Gripping from whoah to go, largely as a result of lead actor Sydney Sweeney, by the end you ought to be as outraged as Winner was about what she was seeing from her government – and about how she was treated by it as a result.
Photo: NZIFF
Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022)
Another film that relies heavily on interrogation (although not verbatim it is based on a real trial) is Alice Diop’s powerful Saint Omer.
A Senegalese migrant mother is accused of murdering her 15-month-old daughter by leaving her to drown in the sea at Berck-sur-Mer. While not contesting the facts of the case, the mother – here played hypnotically by Guslagie Malanda – pleads not guilty and the question of her mental health becomes the key issue.
A novelist and academic – played by Kayije Kagame as a surrogate for filmmaker Diop who followed the original trial – thinks the story might be the inspiration for her next book but does not reckon with the uncomfortable parallels with her own life.
I found this one hard going not because of the filmmaking, which is first rate if a little slow, but because the French justice system is so very different to the structured adversarialism of our own and that I also didn’t know enough about Marguerite Duras or the story of Medea and they both – I think – turn out to be important references.
Photo: NZIFF
Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams (Luca Guadignino, 2020)
Shoemaker of Dreams might almost have been another victim of my own ignorance, if it wasn’t so good at telling the origin story of the Italian couture cobbler who was determined to prove that high fashion shoes could also be comfortable to wear.
Making his first pair at the age on nine (!), Ferragamo took off for the new world in 1915 at the age of 17 and quickly built a made-to-measure business, eventually heading to Hollywood and a successful period shoeing the great stars of the period.
Inexplicably – even for the filmmakers – he left show business behind and returned to Italy in 1927 and entered the world of fashion, his innovations based on an actual understanding of the human anatomy that he got studying at the University of Southern Califormia.
He died young – only 62-years-old – which makes the final third of the picture a bit more of a corporate celebration of his legacy and his family but the picture is still a tidy one about a genuine one-of-a-kind character.
Whānau Marama New Zealand International Film Festival opens in Auckland on Wednesday 19 July and then travels around the country until September. You can read the first part of Dan’s previews here.
