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THE CINESKINNY AUGUST 2022
THESKINNY.CO.UK / CINESKINNY
EIFF Special
Please Baby Please
Aiming for Iconic W
hen we sit down with American musician and filmmaker Amanda Kramer, she’s preparing for an LA screening of Please Baby Please – one of two films of hers (alongside Give Me Pity!) showing at the 2022 Edinburgh International Film Festival. The former sees a respectable bohemian couple’s identities upended (or liberated?) by flamboyant gangsters. In the latter, a star’s TV special is threatened by sinister forces. The spectre of Americana looms over the stylings of Please Baby Please and the jaw-dropping rendition of You're a Grand Old Flag near the beginning of Give Me Pity! “It’s a bit mean-spirited,” Kramer admits of this montage. “I have a strange anti-nationalist flair. I am a pastiche filmmaker. I want what I make to be
a love letter between the films and filmmakers that inspire me and in the current conversation of contemporary cinema.” Give Me Pity! further draws on music videos and diva-dom. “Almost all female pop stars have moments of incorporating America into their act. You’ll see an American flag bikini music video or fireworks shooting out of a bra. I cannot tell you how turned off I am. But I have to go through it because I have to understand it.” Please Baby Please is rooted in the dark heart of 1950s cinema. “I find [1950s American films] incredibly claustrophobic and bizarre,” she says. “There was this idea that we had come home from the war, we were happy, our men were back, we were creating babies – we were in the best time, right? But those films are depressing, bizarre — 53 —
Interview: Carmen Paddock and perverse – very unhappy and ill at ease. They have secret histories inside of them. Many people see the 1950s as this idyllic time, and 1950s men and women as models of white heteronormative values. I want to have a conversation with that and destroy that.” This goes much further than worrying about elements of 1950s cinema that haven’t aged well. “It’s obvious to say, ‘that’s sexist, that’s racist,’ but that’s a very easy relationship,” Kramer elaborates. “I’m talking about a deeper and more entrenched depression, sadness, and loneliness from seeing that war, even when you come out triumphant. There was something lost in the American spirit. Men are drinking and sad and smoking and yearning and lonely and cannot ever find satisfaction.” This
August 2022 – Feature
We kick off this CineSkinny supplement dedicated to the Edinburgh International Film Festival by speaking to kickass American filmmaker Amanda Kramer, who brings two wild works to the festival: Please Baby Please and Give Me Pity! She talks to us about embracing theatricality, bringing an art school cool back to cinema and the iconic awesomeness of Terminator 2
EIFF Special
THE SKINNY
August 2022 – Feature
Give Me Pity!
melancholy of man still echoes today. “Normally as a feminist I would say ‘who cares?’,” she says with a laugh. “But I like watching those movies and thinking about how that codified a way of thinking throughout the century, a reason why [men] feel they deserve ownership over the world.” Kramer considers herself a writer first, but Please Baby Please and Give Me Pity! are kaleidoscopic, vibrant experiences – surreal nightmares you don’t want to leave. She credits those around her with the realisation of her vision. “You have to have good taste,” she says of filmmaking. “With great taste, you can create amazing things when nothing exists before you. I want to be in someone’s memory.” She cites two of her favourite figures – Freddie Krueger and the Terminator – as examples of icons. “They will never leave the imagination. Why is that? Those films don’t mean anything. They have themes we could talk about, but that’s not it. T2 is flawless. That’s a commercial Hollywood movie, so that makes me feel like everyone’s not doing a good job now! I don’t think coolness is in filmmaking anymore. A lot of the cool people have left and are doing something else.” Kramer’s films don’t exist in the realms of realism. Theatricality on screen is very much a positive, she reckons. “There’s no such thing as over the top,” says Kramer. “People don’t pay for under the top! When I have the opportunity to guide an actor, I don’t think there’s too much theatricality. Style is substance. It’s as hard to have style as it is to have substance. I hire people with incredible fine arts tastes to help my vision.” In Give Me Pity!, Sophie von Haselberg plays Sissy St. Claire, the young performer whose TV special goes awry. Before the film’s shoot, Haselberg would rehearse relentlessly, with Kramer running out of notes to give. “Every day I would feel so exhausted on her behalf. She’d be in hair and makeup for hours and then she’s singing, doing monologues, dancing. She’s a consummate performer. It reminds me of the specials where Cher is in eight wigs and running across the stage with costume changes and balloons coming out everywhere.”
Surely not all TV specials are as haunted as Sissy St. Claire’s? “No, they all are. I promise. It’s a deranged format,” insists Kramer, citing the “subterranean rumble” to Lady Gaga’s Thanksgiving special and the “incredibly eerie” Carpenters specials. “I watched hundreds of hours of specials before we made Give Me Pity! Everything I would see I would think, ‘this is so strange, am I the only one seeing this?’ Sometimes it feels like you’re picking up on a current or station but only for you.” The performances in Please Baby Please are similarly heightened and inspired. It’s electrified by Andrea Riseborough’s Suze and Harry Melling’s Arthur. “I exist, I think, in a large part, to write great parts for women of all ages,” Kramer says. “Actresses deserve to have as complex, bizarre, and difficult parts as their male co-stars. When you write for Andrea, you know her capacity and understand the lengths she will go to and the level she can reach. You should be unafraid because she will be unafraid. When you have those experiences with actresses, you’re inspired to turn the volume up on those characters. There’s a myth that there’s a lot of vanity in Hollywood and acting. There are women who truly want to eschew that and be a disgusting version of a character. I’m the filmmaker to bring that out. I’m lucky they exist and I hope they feel lucky that I exist too.” And of Riseborough’s co-star? “Harry is one of the best,” she says. “He’s a very tender and thoughtful actor. The character of Arthur is more irritating on the page because he’s frustrated, closeted, but also uncommunicative. Harry wanted it to be a love story. He wanted him and Andrea to be sweethearts, as well as him and Karl [Glusman, who plays Teddy, the pretty boy gangster who both halves of the coupe fall for], so he had to have chemistry with both. I’m very lucky that he gave the performance he did. He is the tender heart of the film. “When I cast someone, I’m upfront with them,” Kramer adds. “I am not interested in ‘good acting’. I need someone to build a character that feels iconic and singular.” — 54 —
“I don’t think coolness is in filmmaking anymore. A lot of the cool people have left and are doing something else” Amanda Kramer Kramer’s ethos seems at odds with current blockbusters, but she doesn’t feel alone. “Everyone sees a Marvel movie and thinks ‘what are we doing?’,” she says. “We’re making money. The people who are working really hard to infuse art back into [film] are the heroes of the industry.” To her, trying something new is paramount. “I used to think it was trite to say I’m amusing myself, but I don’t feel that way anymore. I take filmmaking seriously but I don’t make serious work. I allow myself the opportunity to be surreal and experimental. Imagine wasting brain space hoping to get an Oscar.” While it’s been a big festival year for Kramer, she remains focused on what she calls her “true love”: writing. Hot on the heels of Please Baby Please and Give Me Pity!, she has two films in the pipeline. Both sound unmissable: “a 70s thriller and a really fucked-up feminist action film. I hope I can do T2 justice! My god! I don’t want to let T2 down!” Please Baby Please: Everyman, 18 Aug, 8pm; Filmhouse, 19 Aug, 4.45pm Give Me Pity!: Filmhouse, 15 Aug, 9.30pm; 19 Aug, 2.30pm Tickets at edfilmfest.org.uk
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Remake/Reframe Kim Knowles introduces EIFF’s Reframing the Gaze retrospective which responds to the 50th anniversary of the festival’s legendary 1972 Women’s Event EIFF Special
Interview: Xuanlin Tham
F
ifty years ago, in 1972, Edinburgh International Film Festival held its highly influential Women’s Event. Organised by revolutionary film theorists Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston alongside EIFF programmer and future Artistic Director Lynda Myles, it was the first major celebration of work by women filmmakers by a European film festival. EIFF is marking this anniversary by theming this year’s edition around that Women’s Event, and that includes the retrospective Reframing the Gaze: Experiments in Women’s Filmmaking, 1972 to Now. Curated by Kim Knowles, this retrospective gazes backwards – and forwards – at the intertwined evolution of feminist filmmaking, experimental filmmaking, and the festival itself. Groundbreaking films by Chantal Akerman, Barbara Hammer and Mulvey herself are among those included, while the most recent work is the 2019 feature So Pretty from American trans filmmaker Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli. We speak to Knowles about her approach to curating this programme, and the transformative power of experimental film.
What guided your curatorial approach to the retrospective? Although my programme looks back to 1972, it hops across numerous events I’ve been interested in: the 1972 Women’s Event, the 1976 International Forum on Avant-Garde Film where many female experimental filmmakers were present, and the Psychoanalysis and Cinema Symposium that same year. It’s quite a tricky retrospective because it takes a fairly unconventional approach. During the 1970s, Lynda Myles had quite a close relationship with the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, a centre of experimental filmmaking, so I was asking myself: what films might appear in the programme if Lynda Myles was directing the festival in the 1990s, for example? I’m hopping through the decades, but those decisions aren’t arbitrary – I’m asking myself different questions. Did you discover any patterns of experimentation connecting the 1970s to now? While in the 70s, there was a certain withdrawing of the self, one can see in the 80s-90s that subjectivity is much more directly interrogated. Moving into the 2010s to a film like So Pretty, we have a more playful, self-reflexive questioning of the body, of representation, of identity politics. What I love about the programme is it takes us from this question of “what is women’s film?” to “what is film?” to “what is woman?” So Pretty picks up the language of Riddles of the Sphinx with this panning movement of the camera – a non-objectifying gaze – to represent a domestic space that’s more fluid in terms of identity. Those films mirror each other, and use essentially the same language: one that doesn’t fix, control, or objectify, allowing experience to be constantly in process.
Riddles of the Sphinx
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So Pretty
What makes experimental film form such a powerful terrain for resistance? Some feminist film critics quite militantly argued that one can be radical within mainstream film form. However, I’ve always felt that it’s by showing us things differently that we come to think differently: it’s only when we don’t necessarily know what we’re looking at that we have our preconceptions challenged. [Academic] Scott MacDonald says in relation to experimental film that it “retrains perception”, and that can apply to the representation of women, of race, sexuality, and ecology – it all comes back to the same mechanisms. What I want is for these films to draw attention to what it is to “look”, to be aware of the cinematic gaze. What are the responsibilities curators have in charting towards a more feminist film exhibition space? Curators have a massive responsibility in that respect. I’m constantly asking myself if I’m doing enough. We need a more just, more ethical society – we need it desperately, and that means curators seeking out filmmakers and themes that question damaging patterns of behaviour. Film is a wonderful form of self-expression, of community, but I think increasingly, we’re going to have to question what role it plays in creating the world we want to live in.
Reframing the Gaze: Experiments in Women’s Filmmaking, 1972 to Now runs 14-18 Aug at Edinburgh International Film Festival Full programme and tickets at edfilmfest.org.uk
August 2022 – Feature
What has been the legacy of the 1972 Women’s Event? The women that came together in the 1972 Women’s Event were crucial in shifting the debates about what form feminist filmmaking should take. You had Laura Mulvey, who put forward that feminist filmmaking should counter the patriarchal film form, and you had Claire Johnston, who argued that mainstream filmmaking created the potential for female filmmakers to come at a method of resistance from the inside. There were multiple positions on the history of feminist filmmaking, how to think about the present, and how to stimulate the future.
And as you know, Laura Mulvey has been the most incredible force in feminist film – for that reason, my programme starts with Riddles of the Sphinx, the film she made with Peter Wollen, as a springboard. It’s an incredibly exciting viewing experience, and I hope putting it on at the festival will break through the difficulty the film’s been associated with.
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EIFF Heads Up
We recommend you seek out all the films featured in this special EIFF supplement as well as the closing gala After Yang, although tickets for the latter are currently like gold dust. Here are 12 other must-see titles from EIFF’s programme Compiled by Jamie Dunn
Aftersun Dir. Charlotte Wells
Nude Tuesday Dir. Armağan Ballantyne
EIFF Special
Vue Omni, 12 Aug, 6.50pm and 7pm; Filmhouse, 15 Aug, 1.30pm
Everyman, 16 Aug, 8.40pm
This achingly sad feature debut from Scottish director Charlotte Wells sees a young woman looking back at a life-altering holiday she took with her father to a low-rent Turkish resort when she was 11 and he was 30. What makes Aftersun such a revelatory work is the way in which the characters’ swirling inner emotions are never spelt out in dialogue, and instead are wholly expressed visually or through the nuanced and deeply emotional performances by Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal.
Jemaine Clement plays a sexual healing guru in this ‘gibberish comedy’ about a middle-aged couple trying to rekindle their moribund marriage – much self-discovery and full frontal nudity ensues. If the nudity hasn’t already piqued your interest, then the fact that dark comic genius Julia Davis (Nighty Night, Sally4Ever) provides the subtitles to the gibberish should.
Juniper Dir. Matthew J. Saville Everyman, 17 Aug, 6pm; Filmhouse, 20 Aug, 11am Aftersun
Leonor Will Never Die Dir. Martika Ramirez Escobar Filmhouse, 16 Aug, 8.35pm; Vue Omni, 18 Aug, 3.30pm
Fiction and reality blur in this surreal comedy from the Philippines. The Leonor of the title is an ageing director famed for her action movies. Her retirement is interrupted, however, after a neighbour accidentally drops a TV on her noggin, hurtling her into one of her own films where she interacts with some of the macho characters she wrote. A love letter to the wild invention and exuberance of Filipino cinema.
Charlotte Rampling is said to be at her majestic best in New Zealand drama Juniper. In it, she plays a heavy-drinking grandmother who terrorises then eventually bonds with her estranged 17-year-old grandson, who’s charged with her care as punishment after being expelled from boarding school. Pass the G&T as well as the hankies!
Nude Tuesday
August 2022 — Chat
Juniper
Phantom Project Dir. Roberto Doveris Vue Omni, 14 Aug, 2.15pm; Cameo, 15 Aug, 9.20pm
Special Delivery
Leonor Will Never Die
This delightfully leftfield comedy from Chile follows a queer aspiring actor hipster who’s being haunted – and perhaps seduced – by his ex-flatmate’s vintage cardigan. On the surface, this is a whimsical meta ghost story but Phantom Project also has plenty to say about the precarious lives of poor young creatives trying to hold their shit together in modern-day Santiago.
Special Delivery Dir. Park Dae-min Vue Omni, 18 Aug, 9.35pm; 19 Aug, 4.20pm
Love vehicular thrillers like Drive and The Driver but sick of them being boys’ clubs where the female leads are stuck playing passengers? Special Delivery breaks the mould with a female petrol-head – Parasite’s Park So-dam – behind the wheel. By day, she works in a scrapyard; by night, she’s a slick getaway driver taking Seoul gangsters wherever they want to go in a hurry. We’re told to expect high-octane car chases and a pulsing electronic score. — 56 —
Phantom Project
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LOLA Dir. Andrew Legge Everyman, 15 Aug, 9pm; Vue Omni, 19 Aug, 4pm
How neat is the premise for Andrew Legge’s WWII-set debut feature, LOLA? It concerns two sisters who build a machine that can intercept TV and radio broadcasts from the future. They initially use their time-travelling tech to discover pop bangers that won’t be penned for decades and gamble on upcoming sporting events, Back to the Future-style, before putting it to more heroic uses.
Millie Lies Low Dir. Michelle Savill Vue Omni, 15 Aug, 4.05pm; Filmhouse, 18 Aug, 1.45pm
EIFF Special
Be prepared to cringe hard with Kiwi comedy Millie Lies Low. When anxious architecture graduate Millie has a panic attack before a flight to New York, forcing her to stay in her hometown of Wellington instead, she does the obvious thing. Go home and have a cup of tea? See a therapist? No, Millie instead fakes her trip to the ‘Big Apple’ using creative licence on her Instagram.
Millie Lies Low
Goodbye, DonGlees! Dir. Atsuko Ishizuka Vue Omni, 16 Aug, 2pm; 19 Aug, 9.15pm
We love the sound of coming-of-age Japanese animation Goodbye, DonGlees! It follows three teen pals – Roma, Toto and Drop – who spend their summer cooking up backyard adventures, but when they’re blamed for starting a nearby forest fire, they set off into the wilderness to try and clear their names. Basically, it’s giving us Stand By Me vibes, but, you know… anime.
LOLA
Goodbye, DonGlees! Photo: Kelly Green
The Plains
The Plains Dir. David Easteal Filmhouse, 13 Aug, 6.30pm
Full Time
Full Time Dir. Eric Gravel Vue Omni, 17 Aug, 6.15pm; Filmhouse, 18 Aug, 4pm
Anyone who’s ever had to deal with a hellish commute will appreciate Full Time. After getting an interview for a job that will enable her to be financially stable and spend more time with her kids, Julie’s dreams hang by a thread thanks to a Paris transit strike. A nail-biting thriller dressed as a social realist drama, we’ve seen Full Time described, quite delightfully, as Uncut Gems for single mums.
We’ve heard great things about David Easteal’s docu/fiction hybrid The Plains, which takes us along for the ride with Melbourne lawyer Andrew on his humdrum daily commute. Through conversations on the phone and with his occasional car-share passenger, we get a compelling picture of Andrew’s rich, complex and often hilarious life. File alongside other great car movies like Jafar Panahi’s Taxi and the ultimate midlife crisis on wheels movie, Locke.
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Social Studies: Six Films by Kinuyo Tanaka Filmhouse, various dates and times
With roles in over 250 films, Kinuyo Tanaka was one of the most popular actors in Japan in her day. Less well known are the six features she directed between 1953 and 1962. Shot through with a vivid sense of freedom, these films put women’s stories at the forefront. EIFF shines a welcome light on these works that are just beginning to be discovered and taken seriously in the West.
August 2022 — Chat
The Wandering Princess part of Kinuyo Tanaka
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Cooking with Gas EIFF Special
Avant-garde sonic caterers? Nipple-twisting kinks? The melancholy of flatulence? You’ll find all and more in Flux Gourmet from Peter Strickland, one of the most visionary voices in British cinema Interview: Jamie Dunn
August 2022 – Feature
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hile watching Flux Gourmet, the latest film from Peter Strickland, British cinema’s premier chronicler of kink, fetish and general weirdness, I’ve a feeling of déjà vu. The film features an avant-garde musical trio who create freaky soundscapes and performanceart pieces using foodstuff. The chopping of vegetables, the whirl of food processors or the sizzle from a frying pan are their notes and chords. I think to myself, “I’ve seen an outfit like this before.” It’s only as the credits roll that it hits me. It was Peter Strickland’s own band! Aptly called The Sonic Catering Band, I saw them perform in 2015 as part of Manchester International Festival. “Oh, that was one of our worst gigs,” Strickland says with a grimace when I bring up that MIF performance. “It was terrible, terrible, terrible. After that, we just said ‘never again’, we just kind of stopped.” The Sonic Catering Band may be no more, but their legacy lives on in Flux Gourmet. Initially, Strickland’s concept of making a film inspired by their obscure project was an inside joke. “I liked the idea because it’s perverse to make a film about a band that nobody’s heard of. Usually, that status is reserved for, you know, Queen or someone on that kind of level. We did a gig once and only one person turned up.” The film may have begun as a gimmick but that quickly wore off as interesting threads crept
in. “Some people might consider the approach unusual, but to me, it’s no different from, say, Joanna Hogg looking back on her life with The Souvenir films,” says Strickland. “OK, the result is different. With our film, you don’t quite know what’s fiction and what’s real, whereas I gather Hogg’s films are much more straightforwardly autobiographical. But we’re also looking back at a mass of creativity; we’re looking back at egos and the creative process.” Another key thread is the struggle between financiers and artists. The trio – who can’t even decide on a name – take up a “culinary and alimentary performance” residency at an art institution based in a country manor. The institute’s director (played by a wild-eyed Gwendoline Christie) insists on providing notes on each performance, much to the annoyance of the band’s frontwoman, Elle (Strickland regular Fatma Mohamed). It’s a dynamic that Strickland knows well. “Oh, it’s very relevant to filmmaking. Much more relevant to filmmaking than it is to music. I mean, [The Sonic Catering Band] never had anyone telling us what to do.” Can we assume Elle is Strickland’s surrogate in the film, then? “Oh, I see myself in all the characters,” says Strickland. What? Even Dr Glock, the institute’s gleefully sadistic medic? “Oh definitely,” he says without missing a beat. “A filmmaker’s job is to be a devious bastard, and that’s Dr Glock.”
Flux Gourmet
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“A filmmaker’s job is to be a devious bastard” Peter Strickland The centre of the film is not the band, the financier or the malevolent MD, however. Our gateway into this strange world is Stones, played by the perennially downcast Greek actor Makis Papadimitriou. Stones is a self-confessed “hack writer” whose job at the institute is to interview the band and keep a record of their process. Strickland clearly has a soft spot for his sadsack protagonist. “Stones is a hack but I’m a hack too,” he says. “Most of my work in between films is for other people. Which I’m fine with. Hack is a dirty word in the creative industries and I wanted to have a more sympathetic view of being a hack. Only rich people use hack as a pejorative.” Stones’ job is to blend into the background and simply document; he’s not the most obvious of focal points. “I always find people who tried to be invisible really fascinating, and I like the idea of this unassuming character unwittingly getting pushed to the forefront of the whole film.” Another reason why Stones is struggling to blend in is that he’s suffering from a severe case of flatulence, the pain, discomfort and embarrassment of which he tells us about in great detail in voiceover. When Elle gets wind (sorry!) of Stones’ incredibly private issues, she hijacks it for the performance and incorporates Stones into her art. While Flux Gourmet is often laugh-out-loud hilarious, Stones’ flatus is never the butt (sorry! again) of the joke. Instead, the melancholic sincerity with which Strickland approaches his condition recalls Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, two other great films about protagonists with tummy troubles. “What was interesting for me was to take something you traditionally find funny, both in real life and in films, flatulence, and to see if it’s possible to give it a different tone – give it a solemn tone, even,” says Strickland. “It’s one hell of a risk. What if the audience just laughs at this character? But it was something I wanted to try and I just felt it probably hadn’t been done before.” Flux Gourmet screens at Filmhouse, 14 Aug, 8.20pm; Vue Omni, 15 Aug, 1.30pm; tickets at edfilmfest.org.uk
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The Weird and Eerie We delve into the dark psychological thriller It Is in Us All with Irish filmmaker Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who directed, wrote, and acted in the film EIFF Special
Interview: Rory Doherty
It Is In Us All
She tries again to define it: “There’s a writer called Mark Fisher, he wrote a book called The Weird and the Eerie. I actually only picked it up after the film. I feel like he was writing what I was communicating but just more fluently. We don’t have a section for it in the video store (sorry to be 1990s about it), but ‘the weird and eerie’ is a genre that’s not quite science fiction and not quite drama; it’s like a tonality that we understand – like if we don’t sleep for four days, everything takes on a different tone. I think it’s an exceptional space to be in.” Body horror also comes to mind, as Hamish’s “cracked open” self pushes him out of his own body and into a new, uncomfortable state of being. Hamish mends his post-accident injuries (including a nasty open fracture) in a constrictive, amateurish fashion, repressing his woundedness out of sight. “Body horror sounds so negative,” CampbellHughes says, again struggling with the inaptitude of genre descriptors. “It’s sort of like body horror… poetry? I find that when we see the injury, when we see the illness, when we see the destruction, it’s an analogy for a deep, profound vulnerability.” Vulnerability isn’t something CampbellHughes shies away from, and not just in terms of putting her own experiences on screen. “I was — 59 —
It Is in Us All screens at Everyman, 15 Aug, 6.30pm; Filmhouse, 16 Aug, 12pm Tickets at edfilmfest.org.uk
August 2022 – Feature
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ntonia Campbell-Hughes, writer-director of the Irish psychological drama It Is in Us All, has no difficulty talking about her film, but she’s less keen on defining it. Her feature debut details the unravelling of Hamish (Cosmo Jarvis), a tightly-wound Londoner, who suffers a car crash in rural Donegal while visiting a home left to him by his late aunt. Physical wounds soon trigger emotional ones. “I saw it like he is cracked open, and that crack suddenly buys him time outside of himself,” says Campbell-Hughes. ”So his time then is bought time where he can actually tiptoe outside of his own locked shell.” Soon Hamish is questioning his heritage, his masculinity, and his relationship with life and death, in a film that is not just hard to define but one that questions the necessity of definition itself. In terms of reference points – aside from the multitude of painters and photographers that influenced the film’s austere, heavy mood – Campbell-Hughes initially pitched It Is in Us All as science fiction in a pastoral setting, but found her vision being misunderstood. “I think I was trying to push an understanding of what I was trying to do. Of course, people go, ‘So are there aliens?’ And it’s like, well no, because science fiction is not the word.”
born in Donegal, and we left when I was two; I grew up in Switzerland and Germany, and so I had this removed idea of where I came from,” she explains. “I’ve always been really interested in people who feel dislocated from their heritage or roots.” But beyond that, Hamish pushing against the boundaries of his myopic, gendered self-perception isn’t a foreign emotional state for Campbell-Hughes. “At the end it says ‘For Peter’, and that is my father, but it’s not this very emotional thing,” she explains. “It was more that he was a very complex man, and he died many years ago, but I spent that time after his passing trying to understand him. When you’re a child or a teenager and your parent passes, you’ve only got a very simple relationship. But after that, you try to really understand who the person was and how they operated, and he was quite like how Hamish is. Hamish was a construct of many things, but the story was about trying to excavate and understand those nuances where there is a complexity with the male.” It’s not a discovery that can happen in isolation. Hamish’s journey is defined by a burgeoning connection with Evan (Rhys Mannion), the 17-yearold driver who collided with him, as well as the grieving mother (played by Campbell-Hughes) of the boy who lost his life in the crash. The three performances define the film in nuanced ways, always independently disoriented, but making unexpected connections that feel fittingly nebulous and confused. Early reactions to the script affected the execution of Campbell-Hughes’s vision. “Initially, Evan’s character was 14, so that didn’t go down very well. People really baulked at that. They were instantly like, ‘No, he has to be older.’” But Campbell-Hughes wouldn’t alter the intimate nature of Hamish and Evan’s relationship. “Yeah it is sensual, I’m not going to back down on that,” she says. “It is really sensual. I want this to have a very common appeal. It is about the common ground of experience. That is a sensuality that can happen that is ageless, and genderless, and placeless. And it is about just the connectivity of being seen and sharing, and something that happens when you’re compromised.”
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Feline Friends Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson, whether as a duo or going solo, have long been two of the most exciting filmmakers working in Scotland. They make their feature debut with A Cat Called Dom, a thrilling blend of animation, doc and meta-fiction
EIFF Special
Interview: Jamie Dunn
A Cat Called Dom still
August 2022 – Feature
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n the year that Edinburgh International Film Festival’s annual Michael Powell Award is retooled to become the Powell and Pressburger Award, there’s something fitting about Scotland’s most innovative filmmaking partnership earning a place in the competition with their debut feature. Animators Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson have been working together since they were students at Edinburgh College of Art in the early 2010s. They both have fruitful solo careers but there is an undeniable alchemy when the pair put their heads together, like on award-winning projects The Making of Longbird (2011) and Monkey Love Experiments (2014). Their latest collab, A Cat Called Dom, has been eight years in the making. The cute title suggests something lighthearted but the incident that incited its inception is as serious as it gets: Anderson’s mother had just been diagnosed with mouth cancer. Will Anderson: “We had both just made our first professional film [Monkey Love Experiments] and we had done some student work that had done all right [they won a bloody BAFTA!], so we were feeling gung-ho about making films and this thing happened. It shook me pretty hard and it felt like the only thing I could really do to deal with it was to make a film about it.” The pair are no strangers to mining their own lives for inspiration. Anderson’s recent short Betty was a heart-on-sleeve analogy for a messy breakup and the debut film from Henderson, I Am Tom Moody, about a musician going through an existential crisis, was partly inspired by his short career as a pop star. Was there any trepidation, though, in exploring this taboo subject? WA: “It was a little awkward. But this is the way Ainslie and I communicate with the world. I quite genuinely didn’t know how else to react to the fear of losing my mum. So in my head, we were just kinda doing our job, and I was trying to express how I felt as best I could. But that got muddy.” It’s not just emotions that got muddy. The form of the film is also dizzyingly complex, blending fiction, documentary and animation. Ainslie Henderson: “I think it started out as more of a fiction film. I remember at the beginning, Will and I had a lot of conversations about how to span that gap between how
contrived and written it is, and how much we follow a kind of an improvisational style, where you react to what you’re exposed to, like you would in documentary.” Watching The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary documentary about the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, was a major inspiration. AH: “It’s an amazing film and ended up being quite a reference because that too is a documentary about making films about something that was very, very real. I think we tried to script Dom a lot more at the beginning. We talked about it being scripted scenes that we were going to do with Will and his family, and then we were going to also just capture what came out of those scripted scenes not working. But then, as time went on, I think it became more of a doc.” The animated element of A Cat Called Dom, meanwhile, is the title character: a small black cat who grows from a single malfunctioning pixel in the bottom corner of Anderson’s laptop. Is he an analogy for the cancerous cells growing in Anderson’s mum? Or simply Anderson’s alter-ego? WA: “I started to think of him as a bit like the elephant in the room. He’s asking me the obvious questions. ‘Well, why aren’t you just there? Why don’t you go and spend time with your mum? Why don’t you tell her how much you love her?’ AH: “He’s a few things, wasn’t he? He was that, and he was – and I hesitate to say this because it’s a contentious and possible offensive idea – the embodiment of what’s good about cancer. But if there is something good that comes out of cancer, that’s what we wanted Dom to symbolise.” The ‘good thing’ Henderson is alluding to is how this devastating illness can be a wake-up call to appreciate your loved ones while you can. And we’re pleased to hear Anderson’s mum, who’s in remission, will be with him for a good time longer. WA: “I certainly thought she was leaving us and then she fought through it. She’s tough. I’m just very thankful to be in this situation where I can still communicate with my mother and have maybe grown even closer through a little scare like this. I feel very lucky.” A Cat Called Dom screens at Cameo, 13 Aug, 5.30pm; Filmhouse, 19 Aug, 7pm; tickets at edfilmfest.org.uk
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