LIDF

While my erstwhile counterpart was watching Filmmaking For Social Change at the next-door Stevenson Theatre, deep in the throbbing heart of the British Museum’s Great Court, I was stationed in the BP theatre watching some European films centring around ideas of community.

The BP theatre is a smooth ride for an filmgoer. The films segued seamlessly into eachother with no need for introduction – a screen announced the next showing – and despite the screen surround being as disturbingly deep and shiny as an Anish Kapoor sculpture, this was a relaxed viewing. The audience seemed to be predominantly here for ‘The Last Tavern’, the longest of the three pieces being shown in this segment, and spoke with excited Italian voices (as previously reported, there does seem to be a strong Italian presence at this year’s Festival) as the first piece was shown.

‘A Film From My Parish’ by Terry Donoghue, a seven minute short from Ireland, began the community-theme. It’s interesting use of ‘stop-motion’ techniques to capture movement lent an ethereal quality to the content, as the viewer travelled surreally into an Irish farming community along a road overhung with trees and then into tin-rooved houses. The disembodied voices of the interviewees were accompanied by charming visualisations of their memories, which were then turned into framed pictures sitting on a dresser – the hub of the rural home – and the linked stories that brought the community together turned into a Russian-doll of dressers within dressers, that added to both the themes of rural life and the idea that we were lucky observers of this birdsong-filled green-haven of protected tranquillity.

The next film, the slightly longer 10-minute ‘Arcadia’, set in Scotland and directed in 2009 by David Graham Scott, centred again around a family, this time one of landed falconers, represented by mother and daughter Catherine and Ismay Macleod, protesting against a wind farm being built in the surrounding lowlands, a place that “stores more carbon than the rainforest”. It would be ruined by the advent of these concrete monoliths planned for the area, as would their Falconry business. The predominant imagery of burnished, glowing healthy fields, echoed by the younger Ismay’s fiery hair, contrasted with the swooping white, succinctly out of place towers of the turbines…and ultimately was compounded in the image of an almost pagan ceremonial burning of a wind-turbine effigy. The outcome of their protest is left uncertain, but the film certainly leaves you questioning decisions such as these, that are made without perhaps the broadest possible perspective.

The last of the three films, the longest at 60minutes, was Alfredo De Giuseppe’s ‘The Last Tavern.’ Traditional Italian Osteria serve wine, with food to accompany it, and the nore modern predilection for beer is somewhat wiping out the ancient game of ‘Passadella’, the passing-game, where wine is bought for the whole company playing cards with the exception of an ‘Idiot’ who is denied the privilege. The film looks at the last few Osteria in the area of Triase, and the men who visit them, all, as comes out through a series of increasingly personal interviews, feel they have lost their place in society. The presence of mysterious man with a bleached goatee is unexplained until we realise he is the owner of ‘The Last Osteria’, where the film ends with the now understood words, “here still live those who become ‘Idiot’” – those left behind by an increasingly modern society that undervalued age and experience.

It’s great to have these projects dealing with minute and often undervalued components of society dealt with, and be viewed on such a stage.