Reviews
Last Hijack Reviewed by David D’Arcy Somali pirates are the screen villains of the year, and they get another 15 minutes in the documentary, Last Hijack. Seen from a pirate’s point of view and shot in Somalia, it is an effort to have you share the pain of at least one pirate. Getting to an actual pirate — even a former one — is a huge coup, and filming in Somalia to tell that story involves genuine courage, yet Last Hijack is one part of the picture, rather than the definitive documentary on these contemporary buccaneers. The film is likely to find a berth on European television after a round of festivals — and perhaps somewhere small in the North American market, which is fatigued with conflict cinema. But the film could also be overtaken quickly if a documentary with better access to the gunmen emerges. Mohamed is the name of the former pirate spoken to by film-makers Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta. From certain sides, the pudgy, affable gent can look a bit like Forest Whitaker (now we will know who to cast in the remake), and he explains on-camera that trawlers plying the east African routes started the hijack business by destroying fishermen’s nets and firing on fishing boats. We see the armed men in action in animated sequences, opening with an attack on a container ship by an angry eagle that looks straight out of a recruitment advert. The animation chronicles the storming of ships, the seizing of hostages and the receiving of ransoms, yet it would not be needed if
Concerning Violence Reviewed by Mark Adams A powerful, illuminating and visually arresting documentary that offers a fresh perspective on the African liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Goran Hugo Olsson’s striking Concerning Violence makes for compulsive and at times disturbing viewing as it tackles colonial rule head on, benefiting from singer Lauryn Hill’s striking narration — also repeated on the screen — taken from psychologistphilosopher Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial text, The Wretched Of The Earth. This intelligent and provocative film cleverly weaves archival footage into an at-times searing treatise on the terrible impact of colonialism, at the core of which is Fanon’s theory that the violence must be met with greater violence to be defeated. Director Olsson returns to Sundance after The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, which played in the World Cinema Documentary Competition in 2011, with an impressively produced and structured film that will tick plenty of the right boxes for intelligent audiences and arthouse distributors, with television sales also likely to be strong. As the film’s full title, Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes From The Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense, suggests, the film is structured in nine chapters, covering a series of different colonial struggles in
n 18 Screen International at Berlin February 9, 2014
Panorama documentary Neth-Ire-Ger-Belg. 2014. 83mins Directors Femke Wolting, Tommy Pallotta Production companies Submarine, The Media Programme of the European Union, Netherlands Film Fund, COBO, Film und Medienstiftung NRW, Dutch Media Fund, Flanders Audiovisual Fund, Irish Film Board, Planete, RTS Radio Télévision Suisse, Still Films, Razor Film, Savage Film, Jamal Media, Ikon, ZDF International sales The Match Factory, www. the-match-factory.com Producers Bruno Felix, Femke Wolting Co-producers Nicky Gogan, Gerhard Meixner, Roman Paul Associate producers Lucia Haslauer, Isa Ostertag, Lucas Schmidt, Charlotte Uzu Editor Edgar Burcksen Music Kreidler Animation supervisor Gavin Kelly
the film-makers had obtained mobile phone or other footage the hijackers themselves had taken. Under the vivid Somali sky, always extraordinary to see, we listen to Mohamed tell of breaking with the pirates, as foreign governments fight back and local anti-piracy pressure also builds. His betrothal to wife Muna is based on a pledge to her family — and to his father — to give up piracy. We get a rare look at a Somali wedding, but we are not sure at the end if Mohamed’s promise has been kept. Yet the focus of Last Hijack is micro rather than
global. After epic sagas such as A Hijacking and Captain Phillips, much of the doc has the look of a home movie, despite the piercing light of the region. Last Hijack is limited because it is the account of one man, albeit a fascinating ethnographic portrait at times — complete with scenes in Mohamed’s SUV that look like visits with rappers on reality TV. Despite the window that it opens, the doc points to how much we do not know. After yet another Somali pirate film, we still need one to tell us more.
Africa, some more brutal and bloody than others, but all linked by Fanon’s intelligent prose and a call to embrace a more creative and humane society. The segments — often footage from television companies in Scandinavia who are backers of the film — include extensive material from a Swedish mine in Liberia, where a strike leads to miners being thrown out of their homes by the army; a shocking image of a young woman with her arm hacked off feeding her baby, which itself has a leg cut off; a Swedish couple doing missionary work in Tanzania, intent on building a church before a school; a night-time attack on a Portuguese base in Angola; bombastic farmers in former Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) talking about their lives; and an
interview with a rather young president Mugabe of Zimbabwe. The quotes from Fanon — who fought in the Second World War and later in Algeria against the colonial power — run up on screen as read by Hill (or Ms Lauryn Hill, as she is credited in the film), which helps reinforce the power of his words. His language is lucid, angry and potent, and is the glue that binds the film together. Beautifully assembled, the film also benefits from a strikingly jazzy score that helps the images move along with dark ease. The film premiered at Sundance, but the Berlin screening features a new preface about Fanon by professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak from Columbia University.
panorama documentary Swe-US-Den-Fin. 2014. 85mins Director Goran Hugo Olsson Production companies Story, Louverture Films, Final Cut for Real, Helsinki Filmi, Sveriges Television International sales Films Boutique, www. filmsboutique.com US sales Cinetic Media, www.cineticmedia.com Producers Annika Rogell, Tobias Janson Co-producers Joslyn Barnes, Danny Glover, Monica Hellstrom, Miia Haavisto Associate producer Corey Smyth Editors Michael Aaglund, Dino Jonsater, Goran Hugo Olsson, Sophie Vukovic Music Neo Muyanga Main cast (narrator) Lauryn Hill