In some cases, there are "pink films" in which the woman is represented as a heroine, as in this movie. The director, Mamoru Watanabe, is another of the fundamental names of this subgenre, which he cultivated for more than forty years, and in this film he presents a story starring Okayo, a woman who is chased by a corrupt policeman, who catches her and sells her to a gangster sadistic. She has a tattoo of Benten, the goddess of fortune, on her back, which is an offense to men.
In this film, shot in black and white but with colored inserts for the sex scenes, there is a representation of violence and torture that works as a reflection of patriarchal oppression. The director uses inserts from erotic Japanese prints, and places sexual violence in an environment of natural landscapes that seems idyllic, as a kind of contrast that further reinforces the dramatic character of the scenes. The fact of turning the protagonist into a heroine, creating a kind of mixture between "pinku eiga" and "jidaigeki" (period drama films), causes the scenes of rape and sadism to acquire a different meaning, more as a critical representation than as a vision of violence from an aesthetic point of view. Because, contrary to what happens in "Blue Film Woman" (1969), for example, the punishment ends up being for the rapists, not for the victim. In fact, this film is a sequel to "Otoko-goroshi: Gokuaku benten" (Mamoru Watanabe, 1969), which also starred Tamaki Katori, one of the muses from the "pink films", who played the classic "Flesh market" (Satoru Kobayashi, 1962) with which this subgenre began film.
[Visions du Réel '24] The question: What is Europe? It remains constantly throughout this journey that tries to find the links between the mythological reality of the princess who was kidnapped by Zeus and the current reality of a territory that, despite its efforts, does not find the necessary balance to maintain peace. The title refers to a phrase from a musician who is part of the Pontanima Choir of Sarajevo, an interreligious group in which Muslims, Christians, Serbs and Croats sing together: "After the war it was impossible for some to sing each other's songs". But this hope for peaceful coexistence seems easier to find in the representations of the past and nature itself, such as the remains of the Minoan civilization in Greece, among which no weapons or border traces have been found, a peaceful culture such as the one reflected in paintings discovered in a cave in Lofoten (Norway). Archaeologist Ingrid Sommerseth explains that these are drawings that do not show men hunting, but only figures dancing. This memory frozen in representations of the past shows that man has managed to coexist peacefully, and that only through knowledge of history can answers be found to the questions of current civilization. The film thus manifests itself as an exciting journey that sustains a constant search for that home that persists in being separated by borders.
[Visions du Réel '24] A look at the astonishing nature of the French High Alps through the lonely journey made by Felix, a young shepherd who leads a flock through rugged landscapes on foot for 200 kilometers through the Ubaye valley, pressed for time to be able to reach their destination within the deadline but also due to the continuous attacks of wolves that can kill more than twenty sheep some nights. It is a silent and contemplative film that increases the presence of humans in the second half in which the protagonist takes care of the family flock in the French Prealps. The disturbing presence of the wolves is shown in night shots in which we see their shadows lurking, a presence that not only threatens the flock but also the very survival of a traditional work that has already been transformed by urban traces. Edited with special delicacy by Agathe Hervieu and Tania Goldenberg, who let the images breathe in long takes filmed by the director himself, the film introduces us to a life that has a timeless character, a solitary choice that is nevertheless surrounded by a poetry that It is not only drawn from the books of poems by Fernando Pessoa that Felix reads but also from the living and changing nature itself that surrounds the shepherds.
[Visions du Réel '24] An exciting documentary about the underground environment of the so-called baloeiros, groups of young people who dedicate themselves to making large balloons and releasing them into the sky in cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. But it is an activity prohibited by the Brazilian authorities, arguing that they can cause forest fires and are polluting, so it has become a clandestine work, surrounded by secrecy. Although it is never made clear what kind of relationship they may have with crime or how they get the money to manufacture hot air balloons, the film reflects with outstanding force the way in which this artistic passion becomes the only way to isolate oneself from the environment. social of the favelas in Brazil. The meetings to "hunt balloons", when one has been detected launched days before or from another city that is about to fall, are tense, and the sense of community that these groups share is transmitted with closeness. While the drawings of Rocky Balboa or Luciano Pavarotti rise towards the sky, the clandestine work becomes a spectacle that reflects a singular art form, ephemeral but charged with a social and community feeling that is shared by all.
The film takes as its structure a relationship of addresses and events, narrated in a monotone tone by the actress Melanie Hyams, but contrasting the story of the past with the images of the present in the streets of Amsterdam, provoking a questioning look that questions the need not to forget. Most of the images were recorded during the coronavirus pandemic, which gives it a unique perspective. One of the announcements from local authorities heard on the radio establishes a curfew, remembering that the last time an exceptional measure like that was ordered was during World War II. The decision not to artificially provoke emotions establishes a cadence and structure that may feel monotonous at first, but that absorbs the viewer as it develops, capturing everyday images shot over three years in 35mm. with a 4:3 format that refers to the British documentary films of the sixties. It is remembered that 75% of the Jewish population of Amsterdam did not survive the occupation, losing about 60,000 Jews of the 80,000 who lived there, cold numerical data that nevertheless reminds us of the magnitude of the horror. By choosing a cinematographic format and an immovable narrative structure, there is a clear invitation to get caught up in the images and the voice-over, within their uniform tone, which reveal two different Amsterdams: one that remembers and another that seems to forget.
[CPH:DOX '24] The director's style extracts the reality of the lives of the inhabitants of Mandø, but more than an observation documentary it is a planning documentary. There is a preparation of the scenes that arise from small everyday details: the elderly Mie turns 99 and 100 years old, which marks the temporal space of the film, some neighbors gather around a radio frequency system that they use to play bingo with Neighbors from other islands, tractor buses transport tourists who visit the area, telling the story of the flood of 1634 and therefore reminding its inhabitants of the inevitable future that awaits them. Ingeborg goes to Ellen's shop and they talk about how the full moon nights affect them, while Søren seems to enjoy bringing up the topics of conversation that bother Gregers the most over coffee, such as the lack of resources that the Danish government provides to help area. This humanist look is fed by an observation of the environment, through wide shots that reflect the exuberance of the landscape and its contrasts, such as an area of the island where there are tanks and military cars abandoned for a long time. Peter Albrechtsen's sound design establishes a certain musicality in the rise of the tides and the sound of the birds that populate the island. The film thus adopts a temporal atmosphere awaiting the arrival of a decisive event, a kind of calm before the storm that provides a feeling of doom.
[CPH:DOX '24] After having managed to escape the gang dynamics in Gottsunda, moving to live in Stockholm with the intention of becoming a filmmaker, the director has embarked on a three-year personal project in which, using Super 8 cameras and some recordings with his cell phone offer an incursion into the environment of this suburb to adopt a perspective that is already external, but he has the understanding of the closeness and direct contact with many of his friends who remain within the circle of drugs and crime, involved in the dynamics of masculinity and loyalties towards their community. What stands out about the documentary is its more humanistic nature, the conversations he has with some of his friends, in which they talk about the low expectations for the future within the gangs and the growth of violence in the neighborhood, with some notes of nostalgia. towards the generation born in the 70s and 80s, the one that proclaimed that it was "them against the system, not each other." But there is also a questioning as a filmmaker, about the danger of romanticization, and the need to finish a film that he seems to cling to as his last link to his old life.
[CPH:DOX '24] The directing pair's latest film was presented last year in a short version of one minute as part of the exhibition at the Royal Academy in London dedicated to the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, who designed the building of the REHAB Rehabilitation Center in Basel, built to provide the architectural design itself with a therapeutic function. The center specializes in the treatment of neurological diseases and paraplegia, and possibly one of the most surprising aspects is the youth of many of its patients, who are under thirty. But it is also a more personal proposal in which Louise Lemoine, through texts on the screen, tells of her own experience in different rehabilitation centers where her disabled father was, which she remembers as "the worst rooms of my life." While the human stories are left a space for observation and proximity, interacting with them, the look towards the surroundings of the building becomes more playful. The directors manage to create a film that is at the same time moving, funny and poetic, confronted with the real experience of the director, with a point of view of hope about the capacity of human beings to face the challenges that their own body imposes on them.
[CPH:DOX, '24] The director addresses her own family history in this documentary that confronts the permanence of grief after the death of her mother six years ago. Now she is trying to organize a kind of tribute event with her father and her sister, who don't seem to have the need to share the mourning and are reluctant to celebrate a farewell that they have already experienced alone. It gives the impression that the celebration of this act of homage serves more to the dramaturgy of the film than to the real need of the characters. There is an evident lack of communication within the family that the director highlights by exposing the cinematographic artifice, when she shows the cameras with which she is recording, or when the characters tell each other that they should not look at the lens. The title refers to the story of Jonah and the whale, a prophet shared by the three main religions, appearing in both the Bible and the Tanakh and the Koran. Although the film doesn't always find a balanced way to present its main topics, it addresses some interesting questions about family relationships, guilt and the need to heal emotional wounds.
[CPH:DOX '24] Two months after having her son Roja Pakari was diagnosed with incurable bone marrow cancer, which turned her motherhood into a kind of fight against time to take advantage of the moments she could share with Oskar among her continuous hospital admissions. Over the past six years, she has crafted a beautiful and inevitably painful love letter that she presents through a second-person narrative that sometimes has the tone of a farewell. The film is full of deep sensitivity, always attentive to Oskar's gaze, but without placing him in the center of the camera. Roja Pakari has taken as a reference the extraordinary book "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2005), in which the writer Joan Didion (1934-2021, United States), narrated her experience after the sudden death of her husband, the also writer John Gregory Dunne. And it actually flies over throughout the film that idea of "magical thinking", which attributes causes to effects that have no concrete relationship, as if the inevitable could be avoided by carrying out different actions. But placing it closer to the power of resistance and the need not to give up, driven mainly by her condition as her mother. It is a powerful idea that has especially moving moments in this powerful reflection of love for a child.
[CPH:DOX '24] The construction of the film based on constant questions develops in a meandering way, making clear the limited knowledge about how thoughts are developed in the animals that surround us. Since the euthanasia carried out on the giraffe Marius at the Copenhagen Zoo in 2014, questions arise about the meaning of life, about death, free will or the place that the human being occupies in the evolutionary chain. Marius's story takes up too much screen time to connect questions that seem to want to motivate reflection rather than find answers. There is an intention of the director to frame the interviews within a context of everyday life, which is reinforced when he maintains the shots in which a zoo employee passes in front of the camera while interviewing Bengt Holst or when a man interrupts an interview in the forest greeting the interviewee. But it is a somewhat scattered reflection in which the most interesting thing is to find the scientists themselves questioning the meaning of life, such as the Danish evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev: "If it's all about survival of the fittest and reproduction, if this is really how it all works, what a horrible Earth we're living on, what a terrible place."
At the end of the film reference is made to the expulsion of 75,000 Muslims from the North of Sri Lanka in 1990 by the separatist militants, the Tigers, during the civil war. But the tensions between the Catholic, Muslim and Buddhist religions, which are the majority, continue to this day, and recently the government proposed a ban on the burqa, after an attack claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) that claimed 270 victims during the Easter celebration in 2019. The story takes place during the post-war period, when Tamil separatists were defeated, but an internal division still persists in a society that has not yet healed its wounds. Laitha (Sharmini Masilamani) returns to her country after several years emigrated to Canada, but finds a family in which the trauma of the disappearance of her brother Jude still persists, especially in the personality of her mother, who clings to ideas of betrayal by a neighbor, whom he accuses of being the cause of the complaint against his son.
The film is shot with almost theatrical simplicity, still shots in unique settings in which the camera in hand is sometimes close to the characters, in a semi-documentary style. There is a certain amateur air both in the performings and in the planning itself, but the intention has been achieved to reflect an inner look, a kind of identity crisis, in which the concepts of religion, community and family are exposed from the perspective of the woman. displaced person, who already has a different point of view, like that of the director herself, whose life experience is reflected in the character of Laitha. Sumathy Sivamohan is a professor of English at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and in her directorial debut she offers a reflection on a country that is failing to shake off the division that caused the bloody civil war. The protagonist family, which in a certain way functions as a reflection of the nation itself, hides secrets and hides information that is relevant to knowing the fate of the missing brother. The film works better in its poetic representation than in its narrative conception and in the elaboration of the dialogues, but it discovers relevant aspects about the sense of identity in a country that does not seem to find its own. Particularly noteworthy is the hypnotic soundtrack created by the young Anglo-Sri Lankan pianist Kausikan Rajeshkumar, who won first prize at the prestigious María Herrero International Piano Competition in 2013.
[MUBI] The particularity of the film is in its reference to the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu, to the point that it could be considered as a kind of erotic version of "Tokyo Story" (1953). In fact, many critics find in some films by the Japanese director an implicit sexuality that is not directly represented, but is shown through symbolic objects, such as a vase. And we could say that what Masayuki Suo does is make explicit the sexuality of the Japanese master's films. He uses some very characteristic Ozu resources, such as his famous "tatami shots", a camera position at ground level, flush with the tatami, which shows us a very careful but static composition of the scene, in which the relevance is in the internal rhythm of the dialogues.
Tatami shots predominate in "Abnormal family", which Masayuki Suo uses as a contrast to sexual scenes. At the beginning of the film, one of these frontal shots alternates, showing the father and his two sons as they listen to their brother and sister-in-law having sex upstairs in the bedroom, where the camera is also positioned flush with the bed. In fact, almost all erotic scenes are seen from the ground or in a medium shot, but in most cases as a contrast to that of the family representation. In some way, it can be said that Masayuki Suo carries out a deconstruction of the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu, with some of its characteristic elements: a vase, a teapot, a poster or with the representation of the outer life in front of that inner universe that develops inside. family, and that also functioned in Ozu as a kind of kaleidoscope of society. This position of the family in which everything remains is taken to the incestuous extreme in the film, in which the sister-in-law ends up sexually initiating the youngest son.
The sex here is more explicit, but less violent than in other pink movies. Or at least it proposes a "calm" violence, because the wife, Yuriko, takes such a static position in sexual relations with her husband Koichi (and later with his brother, Kazuo), that it seems almost a rape. This statism contrasts with a kind of later sexual liberation, in a masturbation scene. At the same time, her sister, Akiko, made the decision to work in a soapland, a kind of Turkish bath that was drifting towards what are now massage parlors, a euphemism for prostitution. But this apparent social transgression is shown as a way to become an independent woman.
[MUBI] The budget for pink films was limited to 3.5 million yen (about 25,000 €), so directors could not afford to use color, although certain scenes were highlighted using color in some titles. Therefore, "Blue Film Woman" (Kan Mukai, 1969) is a rarity in this context, since it is one of the few films shot entirely in color, and one of the few that have survived in its 35mm original copy. The director Kan Mukai is one of the main representatives of the Pink Cinema, to which he dedicated himself for almost his entire life, directing some 200 films and producing more than 500. And in this case, it is a story that can be framed directly in the subgenre, with all its consequences.
With less tendency to experiment than in other titles, "Blue Film Woman" has an almost dreamlike beginning, in which the color is highlighted in a sequence that seems to evoke the credit titles of the films of James Bond, but then the story unfolds in a linear fashion, focusing mainly on the erotic aspect. When a father of a family loses all his money in a bad investment, a lender demands the payment of the interest, but proposes to offer him another loan in exchange for having sex with his wife. The woman becomes an object of exchange between men, but it will also cause the family breakdown. Her daughter, a young student, promises that she will avenge her family by getting a large sum of money... by becoming a whore.
"Blue Film Woman" is presented as a more conventional story than others, but introduces an interesting approach to psychedelia in the visual conception, both in the beginning sequence and in those that take place inside the disco, or those that show the apparent sexual submission of the protagonist. In this sense, Kan Mukai offers a different treatment of the image, taking advantage of color, but also proposes a certain social criticism of capitalism. Prostitution functions here as a representation of the strengths and weaknesses of a capitalist society. "She's so stupid. She thinks it's wrong to have sex for money." So there is a background that largely fuels the interest of the film. There is a hint of female empowerment, but victory is not possible in a story that is intended for an eminently male audience, and therefore the rebelling sexual object (the woman) ends up being punished.
[MUBI] "Inflatable sex dolls of the Wasteland" (Atsushi Yamatoya, 1967) is a film noir that marked the directorial debut of Atsushi Yamatoya, the same year he had participated in the script of "Branded to Kill" (Seijun Suzuki, 1967 ), considered one of the best yakuza movies ever. The story begins with a businessman commissioning a hit man to kill those responsible for the rape and murder of his lover, who have also recorded in his presence.
The film unfolds towards almost hallucinatory terrain, in a way of telling the story that dives into the protagonist's past and that proposes a plot that bends in on itself. It could be defined as a kind of psychological "film noir", in which the director rehearses with experimental shots, underlined by an excellent free jazz soundtrack by the pianist Yôsuke Yamashita. But the story and the lines are quite disastrous and the lack of budget causes ridiculous moments. The woman is represented as a nympho and as an inanimate object (literally), but the film does not contain too many erotic scenes. It is also an example of the production way of "pink films", since at the same time that they participated in these film, the actors Noriko Tatsumi and Yūichi Minato starred in "Love's milky drops" (Ario Takeda, 1967), which it was shot on the same sets.
[MUBI] Masao Adichi was a collaborator of Nagisa Oshima and Kôjî Wakamatsu, but above all he was a left-wing political activist. In fact, "Gushin prayer: A 15-year-old prostitute" (1971) is one of his last films before joining the Red Army and living for twenty-eight years in Lebanon. He had previously made other "pink films" such as "Sei chitai: Sex zone" (1968), and had presented two films as a screenwriter at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival: "Violated angels" (1967) and "Sex Jack" (1970), both directed by Kôjî Wakamatsu.
In "Gushin prayer" the director introduces four teenagers who become aware of their sexuality, but at the same time wonder if they can "beat sex." The protagonist, Yasuko, tries to discover through her sexual intercourse if she is capable of feeling her own body. One of these relationships with a teacher causes her pregnancy, and therefore she is considered a prostitute by her friends. In a way, it is a contradictory reading with that sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, in which the body is the object of vindication. But Masao Adachi turns it into a political element, an instrument of acceptance of an identity and a reflection of "the way society is blocked", in his own words.
In reality, more than as a representative film of the "pink films", "Gushin prayer" is revealed as a description of youth in a time of social upheaval. What, apart from the representation of the feminine as an object of sexual abuse (Yasuko is abused by the teacher, but there is also verbal abuse in the way her friends treat her), is also reflected in the verbalization across the story of real letters left by teenagers before committing suicide.
