Latest news with #BerthaDocHouse
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
All the Mountains Give review – gripping portrait of smugglers on the Iran-Iraq border
In an immersive and sweeping debut feature, Kurdish film-maker Arash Rakhsha portrays the plight of his people with sheer cinematic poetry. Shot over six years, the film closely follows Hamid and Yasser, two Kurdish friends who work side by side as kolbars, smugglers of untaxed household goods across the Iran-Iraq border. Coloured in icy shades of blue, their lives are filled with terrifying dangers, yet there's also space for warmth and camaraderie amid the fog of precariousness. Getting paid per kilogram, the pair haul heavy loads on their backs through treacherous terrain. One moment they are wading upstream, the next they are hiking through the steep, snowbound ranges of the Zagros mountains. The kolbars also rely on mules for transport, though this means they are easier to detect by the border patrols. Landmines – active souvenirs from the Iran-Iraq war – are also hazards on the winding paths; every year, about 200 kolbars die en route. Taut and evocative, Aso Kohzadi and Mikail Asian's piano and strings-driven score further underlines the psychological tightrope of these treks. In wide shot, Hamid and Yasser are dwarfed by the majestic but melancholic landscape, fraught with unknowable pitfalls. The gripping, thriller-like atmosphere of the men's journeys is punctuated by touching moments of domestic calm. Gentle scenes of family bonds – Hamid tending to his ailing father, Yasser teaching Kurdish to his wife – glow with a painterly beauty. For this stateless ethnic group, their homes acquire an even more powerful meaning. The film's use of a wide aspect ratio is especially effective, turning seemingly ordinary acts of care into larger-than-life tableaux. These quiet moments are what nourish the kolbars with courage and strength, as they brave death on a daily basis. All the Mountains Give is at Bertha DocHouse, London from 11 April.
The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project review – electric film about radical thinker and poet
Nikki Giovanni, bestselling American poet and civil rights activist, blazed on to the scene in the 1960s. In this documentary, completed before she died in December, we watch Giovanni in her late 70s, reigning over sold-out public appearances. On stage she recites poems about love, race and gender and in between, with the timing of a standup comedian, she has the auditorium erupting in whoops and laughter. Posing for selfies, a woman tells Giovanni she named her daughter after her; another says she wrote to her on the verge of dropping out of college. 'You wrote back. I'm a teacher now!' In archive footage, Giovanni as a young woman, reads her 1968 poem Nikki-Rosa, which has a line about how white people fail to understand the lives of black people: 'they'll probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy'. Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, during segregation and, after witnessing domestic violence at home, she went to live with her grandparents. Speaking in a radio interview she is blunt: 'Either I was going to kill him' – she's talking about her father – 'or I was going to move.' Filmed at home with her long-term partner Virginia, Giovanni comes across with tenderness. For fans she has all the time in the world, endlessly smiling for selfies. But clearly she was not a woman to suffer fools; as a documentary subject she is firm with her boundaries, refusing to budge on areas that she deems off-limits – that includes challenges in her childhood and the death of Martin Luther King. Her poems, read by Giovanni herself and the actor Taraji P Henson, made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. There are snippets too from a conversation – televised in 1971 – between Giovanni, still in her 20s, and the writer James Baldwin. Two utterly original and brilliant thinkers, a flicker of recognition sparks between them that here is someone on their level, a match for their fierce intellect. It's electric. Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project is at Bertha DocHouse from 21 March
The Guardian
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Johatsu review – poignant account of Japan's ‘voluntarily disappeared'
'Johatsu' means evaporation in Japanese, and is used to refer to those people who choose to disappear, severing all ties with their past lives and their families. It became a phenomenon in Japan in the 1960s, and intensified during the 1990s as the country struggled with a debt crisis. While some plot their departures on their own, others call on the services of 'night movers': companies that help people vanish without trace. Following the owner of one such business named Saita, Andreas Hartmann's and Arata Mori's poignant documentary surveys the circumstances that drive people to desperate measures. Unfolding like a suspense thriller, the opening sees a man hurriedly get inside Saita's van, his voice trembling with fear. Unable to cope with a possessive partner, he finally manages to flee. Interviews with Saita's other clients reveal that, besides financial catastrophes, domestic abuse is often a catalyst for escape. At the same time, the reasons for a disappearance are not always clear-cut, and the film not only lends an ear to the 'evaporated' but is also sympathetic to the abandoned, who are left with gnawing questions and no answers. The juxtaposition of intimate interviews and static shots of nondescript Japanese towns adds another element of melancholy. These compositions show how johatsu is not just an individual decision but a manifestation of larger societal issues. Interestingly, since the subjects only agree to participate on the condition that the film will never be screened in Japan, their new homes and identities are carefully obscured. But in an age when a film can travel far and wide virtually, it remains to be seen whether such measures are enough to protect their anonymity. Johatsu is at Bertha DocHouse, London, from 28 February.
The Guardian
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Intercepted review – phone taps are a chilling glimpse into Russian soldiers' minds in Ukraine
Vietnam saw the advent of the visible war, documented by TV cameras; but the Russia-Ukraine war perhaps represents the moment we also get a fully audible one. With two relatively affluent belligerents involved, mobile phone coverage is ubiquitous on both the civilian and soldier sides. Juxtaposing intercepted calls back home from frontline Russian troops with shots of the devastation they have wreaked in Ukraine, this film is a bleak and searing wiretap into Putin's warping effect on his people and the psychology of power. 'A Russian is not a Russian if they don't steal something,' jokes one woman when she hears her brave boy has looted some makeup for her. Set against the shots of ransacked living rooms, wrecked petrol stations and dimly lit bomb shelters, such casual banter hammers home a chilling normalisation of imperialism and aggression – which comes with varying justifications. There is the standard dehumanisation: that the 'khokhols' (a derogatory Russian term for Ukrainians) deserve it. Many parrot Putin's line that the special military operation is fighting fascists. Or, in some troops' amazement at Ukrainian ice-cream and abundant livestock, we glimpse an economic envy that lets such lies slip down more easily. There are dissenters, too. 'Putin cares about the land, not the people,' points out one grunt. What is truly chilling is how the largely female listeners on the other end of the line are often more gung-ho than the soldiers. In one horrific segment, another combatant tells his mother about Federal Security Service officers torturing individuals. He confesses to participating in and enjoying this sadism. 'If I got there too, I would enjoy it like you,' says Mum. 'You and I, we are the same.' With Russian civilians here regularly condoning the murder of their Ukrainian counterparts, it shows how deeply Putin has cankered the body politic. Amid the thriving micro-industry of documentaries about this conflict, there are, as always, questions to be asked about the purpose and perspective of individual films. Since this one presumably could only have been made with the cooperation of the Ukrainian intelligence services, it's hard not to wonder about what material was made available to director Oksana Karpovych and what has been made prominent in the edit. Even so, this eavesdropping is totally compelling, often overpowering the visuals the conversations are matched with; a dissonant stratagem that both outlines and pierces the post-truth fog of war. Intercepted is at Bertha DocHouse, London, from 21 February.
