On Saturday 7 October, Birmingham’s Paradise Circus played to a packed room at the O2 Institute3 – with support from Pentire and Sunbalm.
Formed in 2019, Paradise Circus have been carving out their top spot in the city’s indie rock scene for four years now.
Amassing a rafter reaching army of fans, the Birmingham born five piece managed to maintain their nascent momentum during ‘the lockdown years’ – storming back into the live circuit as doors reopened, and releasing a series of singles since their debut ‘Fight It’ in 2019.
Paradise Circus released their latest double a-side single in June this year, featuring ‘Fly’ and ‘Sanguinem’ – and have a high-profile supporting gig coming up before Christmas, playing alongside Sundra Karma at XOYO in Birmingham on 24 November.
And having previously sold out shows at The Sunflower Lounge and the O2 Institute2, Paradise Circus rammed their recent home city show in October – back at the O2 Institute, and following a gig at the Marrs Bar in Worcester the previous month.
Nevaeh Anning was at the O2 Institute3 on 7 October to shoot a special PHOTO GALLERY for Birmingham Review – see below.
Paradise Circus will be supporting Sundra Karma at XOYO in Birmingham on 24 November, for more gig info and links to tickets visit: www.xoyobirmingham.co.uk/#whats-on
On Monday 16 October, LA based garage rockers Flat Worms come to the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath – alongside support from Birmingham’s Total Luck and Manchester’s Wax Head.
Doors open at the Hare from 7:30pm, with tickets priced at £15 + booking fee – as promoted by This Is Tmrw. Minimum age for entry is 14 with anyone aged 16 and under needing adult supervision.
Coming to Birmingham for the last date of their UK tour, before jumping across the Channel for a series of gigs throughout France, Flat Worms are globetrotting with their latest studio album – the Ty Segall produced, Witness Marks.
An 11 track noise fest, as one would expect from the Californian trio who self described their release as ‘a buzzing combo of blunt force and surreal lyrics to hammer the absurdity of the status quo’, the latest LP has been brewing up a variety of storms since it’s September release on the Chicago based independent Drag City.
But whilst Flat Worm’s new album has all the haze and hallmarks you’d expect, there’s a smidge of production polish in comparison to their self-titled 2017 debut or 2020 sophomore LP, Antarctica.
Still as ferocious and amp confounding, with Will Ivy’s facts-in-your-face vocals swamped by relentless waves of guitar and percussion, the third edition into the Flat Worms Hall of Fame is well worth a stop, look, and listen.
All three of which you can do at the Hare and Hounds on Monday 16 October. Lucky you.
Support comes from the well loved Birmingham punksters Total Luck, and Manchester’s psych/garage four piece Wax Head. So, expect turned up tuneage, tinnitus, and a good start to the week.
And if you need a bit more convincing, check out ‘Time Warp in Exile’ below – a tiny taste from the new album.
Now get your hands down the back of that sofa and pawn the cat, you’ve got a gig ticket to buy.
Perhaps it was because a few minutes in we were evacuated by a fire alarm, and then upon restarting found the film had to be further rewound because the sound had fallen out of synch… but I never found myself warming to Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners.
After an intriguing opening, it reveals itself to be a blandly tedious film, so focused on depicting the full breadth of LGBTQ+ experiences that it forgets to do anything remotely interesting with its cast or subject matter. All we have is a sequence of increasingly tiresome sublots which remain largely abandoned by the time the credits roll with a whimper.
These subplots concern a ragtag bunch of weirdos and punks who are outcasts owing to their sexualities, a thorny issue in Macedonia, and all living under the same roof.
Dita (Anamaria Marinca) is de facto matriarch of this safehouse and lives with her Roma girlfriend Suada (Alina Serban), her teenage daughter Vanesa (Mia Mustafa), and wrecking-ball six-year-old Mia (Dzada Selim). Swirling around them are other characters, all too uninteresting and thinly sketched to make any kind of impression.
Something exacerbating this is Suada’s swift death from terminal cancer – leaving Dita to raise the children. This is a shame for the audience as well, as Suada is by far the most compelling character Stolevski deigns to give us and her fiery ferocity scorch indelible marks on the rest of the film – one that never manages to recapture her livewire presence.
The tourism board of North Macedonia must have their head in their hands; Stolevski’s rendering of the country’s capital, Skopje, isn’t far above Borat in terms of nuanced cultural sensitivity. Stolevski was born in North Macedonia but emigrated with his family to Australia when he was a child, and clearly carries a deep anger with his native home to depict it as the backwards hovel it appears as in his film.
But at least it sounds nice. I’ve never seen a film from Macedonia before, and the language has a sharp and relentless cadence which at least lends the many, countless, scenes set around dinner tables a nice sense of pacing. It’s something which works well with Naum Doksevski’s handheld cinematography, which has a tendency to place intense close-ups of tired faces against blurred domestic backdrops; these people exist in a state of dissonance with the culture surrounding them. Occasionally, miraculously, the two align and the effect is subtly powerful. And sprinkled in with great frequency, like needles, are the vile slurs which transcend language.
When the film finally settles on one of these ragtag outsiders, it gains a certain degree of narrative drive; Dita first asks gay Toni (Vladimir Tintor) to enlist as Vanesa and Mia’s father, and then to marry her so that she can share custody. The film, briefly, manages to be very funny and the deadpan delivery draws genuine laughs. It’s an arrangement which upends the established norm in the house, and Stolevski’s ensemble rise to the challenge of depicting the shifting dynamics at play. Stolevski, acting as editor here, lets scenes run longer than most and it gives proceedings a deft, improvisational quality.
But these elements are too slight to make any real difference; Stolevski’s film runs on and on trying to tie up all these dangling subplots and fails to end any on a note of satisfaction.
The performances from the gung-ho cast are uniformly committed even if their characters fail to make any real impact, but the film is so bloated and unfocused that my fingers were crossed for another fire alarm. A real shame.
LFF screenings begin at MAC on 4 October and run until 15 October, with tickets for all films and events on the programme now on sale. For full listings and links to online ticket sales visit: www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023
Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of National Geographic Documentary Films
Where is the line between faith and madness? Martyrdom and delusion? Friend or invader? They’re questions at the heart of Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ The Mission, a compelling documentary produced by National Geographic Documentary Films and screening in the BFI London Film Festival’s documentary slate.
Not to be mistaken for Roland Joffé’s 1986 film of the same name, McBaine and Moss’ The Mission is in an interesting concept for a documentary, but it’s one that eventually suffers from being too even-handed with regard to some of the groups it depicts.
The Mission explores the circumstances surrounding the death of John Allen Chau, an American evangelical Christian and would-be missionary. Chau was attempting to make contact with the still uncontacted people of North Sentinel Island which lies in between the East Coast of Southern India and the West Coast of Thailand. Previous attempts to broach contact have been met with hostility and violence, yet Chau, miraculously, thought he would be the one to bring God to them.
It’s a knotty subject for a documentary, made even more tragic by the fact that Chau’s diary is read in voiceover: “Is this Satan’s last stronghold?” we hear him ask. Or is he pleading? Chau’s voice sounds increasingly desperate, but it’s a device which is inherently manipulative. Chau is dead, we are hearing an actor; the inflections and pauses aren’t his, and the device ultimately adds an uneasy layer of artifice to a film which elsewhere takes a principled commitment in presenting the various attitudes towards missionary work with an even hand.
Missionary work, the film makes painstakingly clear, isn’t just hopping on a coach to Mexico to paint houses and build wells. Chau prescribed to a heavily romanticised, colonial view of missionary work. Juxtaposed with Chau’s diary is a letter written by Chau’s father and given to the filmmakers, again read by an actor.
Chau’s father recalls, with retrospective aching, how smitten Chau was with stories like Robinson Crusoe and Through Gates of Splendour. Chau’s father describes him as suffering a ‘predestined suicide’ and the film has the dreadful air of depicting an easily preventable tragedy.
Something the film takes real sensitivity in is depicting the colonial violence inflicted on the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands. It renders this trauma with a coolly anthropological voice, positing history itself as being itself an unreliable document.
Provocatively, it even questions the role of National Geographic in upholding these narratives of primitive savagery and prehistory simplicity, but this idea is promptly forgotten. So long as the Sentinelese people choose to remain isolated, the film argues, the historical narrative remains incomplete.
Where the film falters is in its oddly blameless treatment of the kind of evangelical thinking that led to Chau’s delusion. His father describes Chau as being effectively radicalised by his faith, yet the members of his church escape any genuine scrutiny. Religion is the closest to a modern mythology many in contemporary America still believe.
Compared to the incendiary power of recent documentaries like Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed or Ezra Edelman’s definitive 2016 work O.J.: Made in America, The Mission feels frustratingly toothless, clearly afraid to reckon too intensely with a history of American evangelical extremism. You can’t help but feel that those who encouraged Chau are getting off scot-free, those behind the camera remain almost silent.
As it is the film is often reminiscent of reading an article in a magazine: it’s a fascinating story and one which is told with an admirable journalistic rigour and refreshing historical clarity, but unlikely to linger in the memory like the great works the documentary format has given us.
LFF screenings begin at MAC on 4 October and run until 15 October, with tickets for all films and events on the programme now on sale. For full listings and links to online ticket sales visit: www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023
Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of Elle Driver
A cause of celebration for lovers of the animated cinema, there is a lovely, bittersweet new thing for us all to savour. Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams is miraculously his first foray into animation, yet it retains his trademark playfulness and builds to an uplifting – if overly protracted – crescendo of warm hopefulness.
Robot Dreams is about the helpfully named Dog, who lives in Manhattan’s East Village in the 1980s. Berger subtly and gently draws us an image of isolation and depression: Dog has no friends but watches longingly from his apartment window at the people passing below. He spends his nights playing pong and flicking through the television, numbly whittling away the hours.
Berger portrays Dog’s loneliness as a sad absence of feeling, of numbness. It’s not that Dog is depressed, rather we see that he has nothing worth living for because he has nobody in his life. He feels nothing because he has nobody; his gorgeously animated eyes containing fathoms of longing. For a film which will undoubtedly draw younger viewers, this feels important.
Dog finally finds a like-minded companion in Robot, who is ordered over the phone and delivered to his apartment. Robot tentatively leads Dog out into the busy streets of Berger’s rendering of the greatest city on the planet. It looks like the one we know but is populated exclusively by animals, and blossoms before us like a flower.
Robot Dreams is beautiful to behold, hand-drawn in a way which is reminiscent of Hergè’s The Adventures of Tintin or Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix. In an era in which animation artists find themselves beholden to computers and the whims of artificial intelligence, this film is a refreshing change of palette which lessens the impact of some sluggish pacing.
Berger’s vision of New York is exuberant: an octopus bangs drums on the subway, a duck flies kites in Central Park. His version of the East Village is full of wonderful real-life touches which add to the surreal sweetness like The Strand Bookstore and Vesuvius Pizza. Are we to believe that animals built these? That’s the logic of adulthood… Berger asks us to just enjoy the view. He also references the iconic shot of the Queensboro Bridge from Woody Allen’s Manhattan – bonus points from me.
The film begins to lose steam after Robot is stranded on the beach when his batteries die. How will he make it home? The beach is shut until the summer season begins again, although Dog, strangely, doesn’t really make much of an attempt to rescue him.
It’s on the beach that Robot is subjected to the full gamut of adult experience and emotion. Sleazy pigs hack off his leg for parts. A gentle little bird uses his armpit as a nest, and Robot watches with awe as her eggs hatch and candy-pink chicks stare up at him. It’s emotional stuff.
It makes it frustrating that Robot Dreams is an increasingly uneven film with a tone that manages to evoke genuine sadness through the sheer sweetness of its lovable central duo, but some scenes are genuinely upsetting – at least one child in the screening I attended was in tears. This looks like a film for younger viewers but wants to be a film for adults, striking an uneasy balance between both.
Not to say Robot Dreams isn’t worth a watch. For older children grappling with the emotional and social turbulences of puberty this especially this feels like it could have genuine worth, and the fact that not a single word of dialogue is said over the course of its 100-minute runtime gives it a universal appeal which transcends language and geography. Just make sure there’s tissues handy.
LFF screenings begin at MAC on 4 October and run until 15 October, with tickets for all films and events on the programme now on sale. For full listings and links to online ticket sales visit: www.macbirmingham.co.uk/london-film-festival-2023
