FRAGMENTS OF PARADISE - BFI London Film Festival 2022

K D Davison's documentary of film-critic and avant-garde director Jonas Mekas is deferential to the point of banality.  This is frustrating given the level of access she had, and the sheer volume of self-diarised film footage.

The man is, however, fascinating. Mekas was an immigrant from a World War Two Nazi labour camp in Lithuania, and came to New York with his brother. He set himself up as a film critic for Village Voice, archivist and distributor, influencing and encouraging generations of American auteurs and artist from Ginsberg to Jarmusch to Scorsese. But behind the gregarious one-man social movement was the trauma of loss, migration and never quite knowing oneself, captured most movingly in the film where he returned home to Lithuania 25 years after leaving it, and in footage of Mekas in old age disturbed as to who he is.

I wasn't familiar with Mekas' work before I watched the film and I can't say I'm tempted to go back and revisit it. I was far more fascinating by Mekas as a complex man with a conflicted past as emblematic of the late twentieth century European experience. It's true that Davison doesn't shy away from the controversies but I wish she'd interrogated them more: the teenage pro Nazi sympathies under the guise of being anti-Soviet - retreating to German territory at the end of the war - the homophobic tone of his early criticism.  

The result is a documentary that washed over me rather than truly engaging me - something workmanlike rather than compelling.

FRAGMENTS OF PARADISE has a running time of 98 minutes. It played Venice and Telluride 2022 and will play next month's BFI London Film Festival and tickets are available here. 

FAREWELL AMOR - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 3

FAREWELL AMOR is a quiet but brutal emotional drama about an immigrant family reunited after decades of separation. It resonated powerfully with me because it mirrors the story of my own grandparents and asked questions I have longed to ask.  As the film opens we meet Walter, an Angolan refugee who has established a life for himself in Brooklyn over the last 17 years, including a relationship with a woman.  He has to end that relationship when his wife Esther, and now fully grown daughter Sylvia, finally get their immigration status approved and arrive in New York to live with him.  What follows is a painful observation of an estranged couple.  Walter is utterly alienated from a newly religious Esther who seems to want to cling more to her old life and its values than embrace the new.  Sylvia is struggling with the weight of her mother's expectations and resentment that her father left her behind.  Dance is used as a motif.  Walter remembers when his wife was young and carefree and danced.  In one of the most finely observed exchanges in the movie he tells his daughter that as a black man he spends his life holding himself in and presenting himself in a way that won't scare white people. He encourages Sylvia to dance freely and true to her own style because dance is one of the very places that one can be oneself. I'm not sure if I bought into the final act of the film - and its resolution - but I very much enjoyed the journey and getting to know these three characters.

FAREWELL AMOR has a running time of 95 minutes. The film played Sundance and London 2020. It does not yet have a commercial release date.