Another World Reviewed by David D’Arcy The New York City police ousted Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters from a park in lower Manhattan in November 2011, after an improvised settlement there lasted almost two months. Another World follows 10 occupiers for whom the experience didn’t end with the police action. In this earnest documentary, it is too soon to tell whether US politics were transformed by the protests that spawned similar encampments around the world. Yet in tracking individuals drawn to the park, film-makers Rebecca Chaiklin and Fisher Stevens find stories that go beyond the boilerplate anti-corporate anger and cloying group hugs of political chronicles. Another World — a term taken from what protesters said they wanted to create — faces a challenge in finding an audience. Every major city in the US and Europe had its own occupation experience. Still, the centrality of OWS and its window on US politics should put the doc into festivals internationally. Distilling the sprawling demonstrations and economic demands of OWS into the voices of 10 characters puts the protests into a manageable narrative for the film-makers and potential audiences. With prodigious editing and surprising production values, Chaiklin and Stevens (the actor-turnedproducer) make a wieldy chunk of raw experience watchable in their well-crafted doc about committed and troubled activists that OWS drew from improbable backgrounds.
That Demon Within Reviewed by Fionnuala Halligan Dante Lam conjures up an inferno in That Demon Within (Mo Jing) a dark, twisted trip through one Hong Kong cop’s explosive meltdown. Possessed by the afterlife, Lam’s story plays out in funeral parlours and graveyards, where the director’s action and special-effects co-ordinators go about setting the city on fire. Although it opts for a tricksy narrative with fussy flashbacks and hallucinations delivered in the widest-possible variety of styles, That Demon Within is bleak at its core, a dark, hopeless tale of death, corruption and mental illness shadowed by spectres. Lam is a towering box-office presence in SouthEast Asia and, with Daniel Wu in the lead opposite regular player Nick Cheung, the Hong Kong director will test his audience’s appetite for an introspective thriller that blends kinetic action with Taoist superstition when it opens on April 18. Despite a slightly opaque and somewhat overblown narrative, That Demon Within is a professionally executed production, laden with impressive special-effects shots and bone-crunching violence. Like Infernal Affairs, two male characters on opposing sides of the good/evil tightwalk lead the charge: Wu as troubled policeman Dave Wong and Nick Cheung as his nemesis, Hon Kong, leader of “the gang from Hell”. When Hon is injured in a chase during which he murders two policemen, he winds up at the hospital
n 12 Screen International at Berlin February 10, 2014
Panorama documentary US. 2014. 87mins Directors Rebecca Chaiklin, Fisher Stevens Production companies Article 19 Films, Diamond Docs, Insurgent Media, Harbor Picture Company International sales Insurgent Media, info@ insurgentmediany.com Producers Rebecca Chaiklin, Fisher Stevens, Scott Cramer, Lauren Saffa, Mark Monroe Executive producers Lekha Singh, Zak Tucker Co-producers Zara Duffy, Bruce Ehrmann, Stephen Walker Screenplay Mark Monroe Cinematography Scott Cramer Editor Lauren Saffa Music Fall On Your Sword
Besides giving a tactile perspective on the protests in Manhattan, thanks to embedded cinematographer Scott Cramer, the film puts human faces on activists whom the mainstream media stigmatised as noisy grumblers with bankers in their crosshairs. The OWS demonstrators are neither zealots nor vagrants in Another World, although plenty of both were in Zuccotti Park. They include a New Hampshire farmer’s son whose family risks losing their homestead (who falls in love with a would-be model on site), a Palestinian-American corporate lawyer frustrated in his profession, an aspiring rapper whose family in North Carolina lost their home, and a veteran woman warrior of long-forgotten activist battles. Consensus among anarchists is difficult enough.
Discussion was not helped by manic group drumming day and night. And it is hard not to laugh at the crowd’s call-and-response practice of shouting back whatever its orators say — echoing one of the best gags in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian (1979). Chaiklin and Stevens choose to focus on the ardour of their 10 appealing protagonists, while underplaying the hostility and harassment by New York police. Law enforcement sent homeless youths and ex-prisoners to the park in a shrewd cynical gambit to erode morale from within. Intrepid cinematographer Cramer was arrested and jailed for trespassing. And the visual collage of Another World is enhanced by extensive police video, hacked from a NYPD site by the anarchist group, Anonymous.
policed by Wong. Not realising who Hon is, the cop donates blood to save his life, an event that begins to tear apart Wong’s carefully constructed world and shatter his all-important beliefs in right and wrong. It turns out the upright Wong is a copper with a fiery past, and as the dreams, hallucinations and flashbacks mount up, so does the body count — gangsters, family members, policemen, scores of civilians; at times it looks as if nobody in Hong Kong is going to get out of this fast-and-furious film alive. Much of the film takes place in the dark including several key action sequences and meetings in the Kowloon Funeral Parlour with the gang from Hell, Hon’s group of robber-killers who use masks
of the Demon King as a disguise. Such an extensive use of graveyards, funeral paraphernalia and effigies is unusual for a Hong Kong action film, and may test the superstitious in home markets. The tortured Wong, meanwhile, is helped by his superintendent and her psychiatrist sister, while his efforts to look after his ‘granny’ are prompted by a level of guilt that threatens to crack his fragile psyche, and the film, apart. That Demon Within boasts an inexhaustible visual energy; Lam never lets up and the effects within a single hypnosis montage with its floating scenarios and twisting perspectives, for example, are beyond the scope of many of his Western counterparts across an entire film.
panorama special HK-Chi. 2014. 112mins Director Dante Lam Production companies Emperor Film Production Company, Sil-Metropole Organisation International sales Emperor Motion Pictures, enquiry.emp@ emperorgroup.com Producers Candy Leung, Albert Lee, Ren Yue Executive producers Albert Yeung, Song Dai Co-producers Cheung Hong-tat, Stephen Lam Screenplay Jack Ng, Dante Lam Cinematography Kenny Tse Editor Patrick Tam Production designer Lee Kin-wai Music Leon Ko Main cast Daniel Wu, Nick Cheung, Christie Chen, Andy On, Liu Kai-chi, Lam Kar-wah, Lee Kwok-lun, Stephen Au, Chi Kuan-chun