Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures
It’s a bleak, desperate and unforgiving world for the mainly Portuguese “provisional figures” — immigrants with undetermined status — eking out meagre lives in Great Yarmouth, the once popular English tourist destination and now one of the country’s poorest towns, in Portuguese director Marco Martins’ unflinching social realist drama.
With an unsentimental outsider’s gaze, Martins offers a devastating critique of the realities of migrant life in 2019 Britain, shortly before the nation made its ill-advised final exit from the EU in the wake of the Brexit vote. The migrant workers here live in Victorian-era levels of squalor and exploitation.
The story’s conflicted anti-heroine is Tania (impressively played by Beatriz Batarda), a Portuguese woman in charge of running a morally dubious operation in partnership with her wastrel husband in which they provide barely minimal accommodations to migrant workers in rundown hotels and then use them as cheap labour to fulfil the demands of the local turkey processing plants.
With the Christmas season fast approaching, the film follows the day-to-day lives and struggles of Tania and her workers in three chapters that begin in the cold and grey of October and proceed over three more months of ever more despairing bleakness. Based on stories drawn from interviews with real migrant workers, it’s a hard-hitting slab of discomforting social realism that’s solidly directed and poetically realised to deliver the kind of dramatic impact that makes you fume long after you’ve left the cinema.
Miroirs No. 3
Acclaimed German director Christian Petzold continues his decades-long fascination with the porous borders between life and death. Young, existentially anxious Berlin piano student Laura (Paula Beer) is dragged by her aspirant filmmaker boyfriend on a day trip with a potential producer. Once they’ve arrived at their destination, an unhappy and troubled Laura insists that her boyfriend drive her home, and moments later — heard only by a local woman painting her fence — their car crashes, killing her boyfriend but leaving Laura miraculously unscathed.
She is rescued by the fence-painter, Betty (Barbara Auer), who offers her a place to stay while she recovers. So begins an increasingly strange interaction between the two women as Laura becomes part of Betty’s broken family and offers them hope at recovery from a recent tragedy of their own. When Laura realises the truth of her new situation, she’s faced with the fateful choice of whether to embrace it and leave the ghosts of her old life behind or return to the world she was struggling to navigate before her accident.
Fuori
Though the credits to Italian director Mario Martone’s loosely biographical drama describe its subject, Goliarda Sapienza, as a writer recognised as one of the greatest in 20th-century literature, you’d be forgiven for never having heard of her.
Sapienza, who was born in 1924, began her creative life as an actress in post-World War 2 Italy, where she became a central figure in the neorealist film and Communist Party circles in Rome when Italy was struggling to reform its identity after fascism. She later turned to writing, and though she published two memoirs in quick succession to minor critical acclaim in the 1960s, she spent most of the rest of her life living in poverty. She also spent a few days in prison after stealing a friend’s jewellery and worked on a fiercely feminist, anti-establishment novel called The Art of Joy, which remained unpublished when she died in 1996.
Her reputation is based predominantly on that novel, eventually published in France to great critical acclaim and popularity in the early 2000s, before finally being published in her native Italy in 2008.
Martone’s film stars veteran Italian actress Valeria Golina as Sapienza, living in Rome in 1980, recently released from prison, struggling to get a job and having just finished her novel. While reconnecting with some of the women she met in prison and flashing back to her memories of their time inside, the film traces a small but hugely influential moment in Sapienza’s life and the bittersweet bond she formed with the woman she shared it with.
It’s a quiet but effective testament to female resilience, nonconformity and independence forged in the shared experiences of the safe space they create for each other that offers hope and escape from a crushingly patriarchal society.
Unicorns
Directors Sally Al Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd extract engaging and tender performances from leads Ben Hardy and Jason Patel in this queer, drag love story. Luke (Hardy) is a working-class, single-father car mechanic who is intrigued and unnerved by his attraction for Aysha (Patel), a South Asian drag performer living her own complicated code-switching double life between the freedoms of her nighttime identity and the constraints of her daily existence within a conservative Muslim family.
As the connection intensifies, the empathetic and honestly realised social drama asks not whether they will or won’t but rather whether they can take the leap to realising who they both really are no matter the consequences.
Real Faces
Belgian director Leni Huyghe’s relationship drama is perhaps the slightest but most probing film in this year’s selection. Twenty-nine-year-old Julia (Leonie Buysse) is an assistant casting director, newly relocated to Brussels after a stint in London and a failed relationship. Ambitious and, in her own sullen way, eager to please whomever she needs to to succeed, Julia finds herself standing on street corners, buttonholing interesting-looking strangers for possible casting in a pretentiously overconceived perfume advert dreamt up by a temperamental has-been director (Yoann Blanc), who wants to create a modern-day, 30-second retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Julia finds some semblance of normal human relation in her interactions with Eliott (Gorges Ocloo), a reserved microbiologist and lichen obsessive, who rents her a room in his apartment. As pressures mount at work for both Julia and Elliot, they’re slowly drawn into an awkward relationship that forces them to realise they need to stop compartmentalising their lives if they’re to fulfil their ambitions.
It’s a film that resonates with its sometimes sad but also sharply funny examination of the truth of the alienation that can paralyse so many ordinary people in an increasingly disconnected and divided world.
• The EU Film Festival takes place at The Labia in Cape Town and The Bioscope and Nu Metro Hyde Park in Joburg from October 9 to 19. A selection of films will also be available for streaming. To find out more, visit eurofilmfest.co.za
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