Category: ARTS (2022)

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd @jimmydougan) / Production pics courtesy of the Japan Foundation

The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme (JFTFP) returns to the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), running until 28 March, and presents a week of carefully curated Japanese cinema to audiences outside of London.

The theme of this year’s JFTFP is ‘Unforgettable: Memories, Times and Reflections in Japanese Cinema’, and each of the films on offer explores the ways in which memories of the past influence the present, and how memories feature in the cinematic toolkits of leading Japanese filmmakers.

The festival promises memorably rich films and provocative ideas, and many of the films have never previously been exhibited in the UK.

Read on to find out our film critic’s three top picks from the JFTFP ’24 programme at MAC.

Ripples – Tuesday 26 March, 7pm

Naoko Ogigami’s Hamome Shokudo is one of the great fish out of water comedies, a low-key tale of a lonely Japanese woman attempting to establish a Japanese café in Helsinki. It was an unhurried, softly spoken comedy which established Ogigami as one of Japan’s most vital auteurs.

Her new film, Ripples, follows Yoriko (Mariko Tsutsui), a woman struggling to keep things together following the abrupt disappearance of her husband, who was terrified of radiation poisoning after the 2011 earthquake and the ensuing Fukushima disaster, and the departure of her son for university.

Ogigami’s forte, the film blends aching sadness with wryly surreal humour (feeling adrift, Yoriko joins a cult and regains a sense of belonging absent from her life) but the film also promises to highlight contemporary social issues unique to Japan. Ogigami points her camera at nuclear anxiety, urban isolation, and the suffering of women.

Ripples – official trailer

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Egoist – Wednesday 27 March, 8.15pm

Daishi Matsunaga returns to the Japan Foundation Touring Programme with this delicate tale of repressed longing and gay intimacy. Kosuke (Ryohei Suzuki) was 14 years old when his mother died, and he spent his teens in the countryside hiding his feelings as a gay man. Now an editor for a fashion magazine, he meets Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa) and the two find themselves drawn towards each other.

Adapting Makato Takayama’s novel of the same name, Egoist sees Matsunaga employing a documentary approach to gesture towards the novel’s semi-biographical origins. Matsunaga estimates that almost a third of the film is improvised by a largely non-professional cast – though Suzuki is one of Japan’s most beloved actors – and shot it largely on handheld cameras.

Egoist – official trailer

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A Man – Thursday 28 March, 7.30pm

A hit on the 2022 festival circuit and a big winner at the 2023 Japan Academy Awards, this brooding psychological thriller directed by Kei Ishikawa follows a divorcee Rie (Sakura Ando) who meets and remarries Daisuke (Masataka Kubota).

They lead a modest but content life, until Daisuke dies in an accident. After his death, Rie discovers that the man she knew and loved as Daisuke was in fact a wholly different person and hires a lawyer (Satoshi Tsumabuki) to discover the real identity of the man she shared four years of her life with.

From Keiichiro Hirano’s best-selling novel, Ishikawa spins a melancholic and slow-burn thriller that deftly interrogates potent themes of identity and national belonging, with two astonishing central performances. The film deservedly won eight prizes at the Japan Academy Awards, including for Best Film, and deserves to be seen in a cinema.

A Man – official trailer

What films are you excited to see at this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme at MAC? If you see catch our critic Jimmy at any of them, make sure to tell him.

Japan Foundation Touring Programme screenings run at MAC until 28 March. For full listings and links to online ticket sales visit:  www.macbirmingham.co.uk/japan-foundation-touring-programme

To read more about the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme visit: www.jpf-film.org.uk
To read more about the Japan Foundation go to: www.jpf.org.uk

For more from Midlands Arts Centre visit: www.macbirmingham.co.uk

To follow Birmingham Review’s film critic Jimmy Dougan on Letterboxed click here, or search @jimmydougan 

Words by Ed King

Across March, a series of free to access photo walks and workshops will be held in Erdington – with Birmingham born photographer Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora inviting local residents to explore how green spaces and urban settings can impact their mental health.

Starting on Monday 4 March, the first photo walk will take place between 10:30am and 12noon – with subsequent workshops held at the same time on Monday 11 March and Monday 24 March.

The events will run for about 45mins each, with regular stops, and no previous experience of photography required to take part. Organisers have asked those attending to ‘wear suitable warm clothing and footwear for urban walking.’

Locations outlined for the photo walks include Rookery Park and Erdington High Street.

As well as the photography workshops, participants will have the option to display their work at Ikon Gallery in June as part of a special exhibition called Green Spaces – alongside portraits of those who attended the events in green spaces that are important to them, taken by Dhaliwal-Boora.

Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora is an award winning Birmingham photographer and multi disciplinarian artist, who uses her work to ‘empower and give voice’ to marginalised communities and explore how to visually capture and represent ethnicity, gender, and place.

Awarded the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain prize for three years running, from 2022-24, her previous work has been exhibited at the UN Headquarters in New York, Wembley Stadium, The People’s History Museum in Manchester, and at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games 2022.

To see previous portraits taken by Dhaliwal-Boora, click here to visit her online portfolio or on the link below.

A collaboration between Ikon Gallery and Living Well Consortium – a group of 30 charities, volunteer groups, and not-for-profit mental health organisations – the Green Spaces project and exhibition are intended to ‘raise awareness of, and engagement with, topics centred on mental health and wellbeing’, according to organisers.

According to UK based mental health charity Mind, a quarter of the British population will experience mental health problems – with the Office of National Statistics finding the one in six people across the UK will experience depression at any one time.

Men’s suicide rates, often linked to mental health concerns or depression, are three time higher than women’s in the UK – as found in a report published by The Samaritans.

Green Spaces is scheduled to be on display at Ikon Gallery from 12–23 June, later this year.

For more information and to book a place on the Erdington photo walks, please email Green Spaces producer Amelia Hawk at a.hawk@ikon-gallery.org

To find out more about the Green Spaces photo walks and workshops in Erdington visit: www.ikon-gallery.org/news/view/photo-walks-and-workshops

For more on the Green Spaces exhibition at Ikon Gallery visit www.ikon-gallery.org/exhibition/green-spaces

For more on Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora visit www.jaskirtdhaliwalboora.com

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of MUBI

The idea that depicting monotony needn’t be monotonous is hardly a new idea.

Take Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman which with exacting slowness depicts three days in the life of a repressed housewife. Or more recently Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, which spans a week in the life of the poet. These are unvarnished works which, through acute psychological detail nonetheless build to crescendos of genuine dramatic heft.

Just because something is boring, they suggest, doesn’t mean that the experience of watching of it should be. There are, however, some films which are boring to watch, which slide towards tedium and frustrate with their emotional dullness.

Wim Wenders’ new film, Perfect Days, is one of the latter; a series of trite encounters which say dull things about a dull subject, exacerbated by the smug contentment with which it presents itself. Happy to be slight, it’s a work of maddening incuriosity, full of broad gestures made by characters who only occasionally register psychologically or emotionally.

Perfect Days follows Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), who works as a cleaner for the Tokyo Toilet, a series of seventeen public toilets of artistic distinction in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighbourhood. He lives in a small apartment, and like the protagonists of Akerman or Jarmusch follows an intense daily routine.

He is woken by the sound of an old lady sweeping outside; he reads, shaves, waters his plants, dons a set of overalls, gets a coffee from a vending machine, and starts his van. He soundtracks his drives with cassettes of 70’s American rock.

Hirayama goes from toilet to toilet and treats his work with a seriousness which baffles his younger colleague, Takashi (Tokio Emoto). His routine is repetitive but not without pleasure: after work he washes in a bathhouse and eats in a restaurant before returning home to sleep.

Wenders and co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki try to portray Hirayama as an enigma, they make various allusions to his past without ever explicitly revealing just how he came to be cleaning toilets.

The film lusts after Hirayama via incessant close-ups which try, and fail, to imbue him with a sort of spiritual purity. If only everyone who cleaned up faeces and urine for a living could find such joy in the morning sky… It is wishful and, ultimately, deeply belittling.

Realising this, Toni Froschhammer’s editing rears its head and any scenes involving cleaning are zipped through snappily. Perfect Days focuses then on a series of mildly excruciating encounters between the cleaner and various other zany outsider-figures.

He gets dragged along to a music store by Takashi and listens to Patti Smith with Takashi’s girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada). These moments are sweet, but shallow – though Takashi and Aya suggest themselves, in their brief appearances, to be vastly more interesting characters than Hirayama. Sensing our awareness of this the film has Aya disappear, and Takashi leave his job.

If the first hour of Perfect Days is a slog, the second is more compelling owing to the abrupt appearance of Hirayama’s teenage niece Niko (Arisa Nakano), who has run away from home. The film slows down and takes a breath.

Wenders and Takasaki finally begin to do more than merely gesture towards psychology; Niko cannot fathom why her uncle would take a job such as his so seriously, Hirayama can’t fathom why someone wouldn’t. She watches her uncle work with a mixture of fascination and revulsion.

Yakusho and Nakano imbue these scenes with two senses of weariness, middle-aged and adolescent, and the effect is moving if derivative. Hirayama is the surname of the family in Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 Tokyo Story, a film which so painfully depicts the inevitable rifts that fissure between young and old, tradition and modernity.

So, if the second hour of Perfect Days is a rehashing of old ideas, at least the film finally expresses an opinion on something.

Why Wenders doesn’t devote the entirety of his film’s runtime to the dynamic between Hirayama and Niko is a question with a straightforward answer: to do so would require a genuine interest in depicting psychology and not merely capturing superficial quirks.

Lurking behind a veneer of arthouse pretension, Perfect Days is little more than a tedious and arrogant film full of hollow motifs and dull images. No doubt the cultural bourgeoisie Wenders has spent fifty years pandering to will relish it – it must be lovely living in the clouds.

Perfect Days – official trailer

Perfect Days releases in cinemas on 23 February, for Birmingham screenings follow the below links:

The Electric Cinema: www.electricbirmingham.com
MAC: www.macbirmingham.co.uk/cinema/perfect-days
Mockingbird Cinema: www.mockingbirdcinema.com/production/perfect-days

For more on Perfect Days visit: https://www.perfectdays-movie.jp/en

Words by Ed King / Production pics by Ellie Kurtt

Written for the stage by Simon Beaufoy, the UK screenwriter who penned the Oscar nominated 1997 film (that made over £160m from a production budget of only £3m), The Full Monty opened at The Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham on Tuesday 30 January – directed by Michael Gyngell.

Running at The Alex until Saturday 3 February, the show will go on to eight more cities across the UK, before heading back to Canterbury its final run in April at The Marlow.

A immensely popular film, the title of this well established narrative describes the ultimate show all our six struggling protagonists have ultimately committed to – after realising without six packs and washboard stomachs they’ll need to bring a bit more to the table if they want to cash in Chippendales style.

But like the expression itself, The Full Monty is not a story about taking your clothes off. It’s about the desperation so many in Sheffield and other cities felt in the nineties as the legacy of successive Thatcher governments ravaged the widespread provider that was Sheffield’s steel industry – leaving broken unions and communities scrabbling in the shadows.

The play opens as Gaz (Danny Hatchard) and Dave (Neil Hurst) are breaking into their once workplace to “liberate” some steel girders for £40 a pop. With them is Gaz’s son, Nathan, played brilliantly on the Birmingham opening night by Rowan Poulton – a young actor from South Yorkshire who outshone several of the adults around him.

Gaz is behind on his child maintenance payments, to the point he is about to lose access to Nathan, and not wanting to take a job “stacking shelves in Morrisons” or working night shifts as a security guard they embark on their own ‘steel industry’ – plundering the abandoned warehouses that used to be the bread and butter for many families, including their own.

But crime doesn’t pay, apparently, and after seeing male strippers pack out their local working men’s club they decide that sex is probably a better pitch.

So, led by Gaz, played well by Hatchard but who Beaufoy’s script leaves a little difficult to feel overly sorry for, they start recruiting other men to perform a one night only strip that could earn them some much needed quick cash.

Enter Lumper (Nicholas Prasad) a security guard literally at the end of his rope, the ironically named Horse (Ben Onwukwe), and the beauty next to the beasts, Guy (Jake Quickenden).

And along the way, with each character shinning their own individual light into the increasingly dark corners, the play addresses issues around sexual inequality and inadequacy, male suicide, body dysmorphia, and homophobia – although often with a light touch and language that is certainly ‘of its time’.

Jumping from warehouses to working men’s clubs, from side streets to jobcentres, Jasmine Swan’s mailable stage gets twisted, turned, separated, and stuck back together to represent all locations – looking superb throughout, and a little reminiscent of the Les Misérables barricades that came before it.

The cast all bring their characters to life, working well together, and allow each other enough room to show their true skin – figuratively and literally. And at the other end of the chronological rainbow to the young Nathan/Poulton, Gerald (Bill Ward) represents the challenges facing older men who lost their livelihoods with a superb balance.

The second half brings the narrative firmly together, including a wonderful recreation of ‘the job centre queue scene’ where the subconscious steps being practiced by the central cast come out as ‘Hot Stuff’ is played whilst they wait to sign on.

And, despite the very early calls to “GET YOU KIT OFF, ALL OFF” from some tensely sexually aggressive audience members, the grand finale is genuinely fun and heartfelt.

Laugh out loud funny from start to finish, with poignant moments and a fantastic soundtrack throughout, The Full Monty is a great night out. One that will make some laugh, some wince, a few dance, and with a message still pertinent nearly three decades later.

The Full Monty 2023/24 UK tour – official trailer

The Full Monty runs at The Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham until Saturday 3 February, with tickets available from £26.00. Click here for more information and links to online ticket sales: www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-full-monty-the-play-by-simon-beaufoy/the-alexandra-theatre-birmingham

For more on The Full Monty 2024 UK tour, visit: www.fullmontytheplay.com

For more from The Alexandra Theatre, visit: www.atgtickets.com/venues/the-alexandra-theatre-birmingham

Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of A24

The relationship between aesthetics and ethics is a slippery one at best. But there are no ethics without emotions, and the most striking thing about The Zone of Interest, the new work from visionary Jonathan Glazer, is that it depicts a complete void; of empathy, of colour – figuratively and to a certain extent literally – and of basic humanity.

It is a vanitas for our age of bleak cruelty, in which horror is normalised to the extent that images of unfathomable suffering perforate our screens and collective consciousness so that it’s all too easy to feel nothing at all.

It’s an artwork that drags us back to the evils of the Holocaust to force us, frankly and subjectively, to examine the ways in which we are complicit with the very systems of cruelty which recur throughout history like tumours; and, crucially, those who perpetuate them.

Speaking of, when we first see Rudolf and Hedwig Höss (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller) it’s in a scene of bucolic bliss. The birds sing and children toddle in a clear stream. Later, for his birthday, Rudolf is presented with a canoe and the paint stains their baby’s bottom green. You’d be forgiven for failing to notice the guard tower and barracks peering over the walls of their garden.

Höss was the real-life commandant of Auschwitz: each morning he kisses the children goodbye and strolls next door to oversee the unthinkable. Hedwig tends to the roses in her immaculate garden. Is a flower still beautiful if it’s on the same soil as Auschwitz? Glazer, in one sequence of close-ups, forces us to contemplate an answer.

Höss ran Auschwitz as a factory for torture and murder in which the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimate 1.1 million men, women and children were killed. Yet most striking about the film is in Glazer’s staunch refusal to literally depict the horrors of the camp.

Save for one horrific low-angle shot of Höss with plumes of black smoke billowing from behind his head, Glazer is far more interested in showing the luxurious comforts that Höss and Hedwig were afforded by their proximity to atrocity.

Hüller plays Hedwig like a curled python: in one scene she tries on a fur coat pillaged from a new arrival to the camp and excitedly finds a lipstick in the pocket, in another she threatens to have a servant’s ashes scattered in the fields of Babice for mislaying the table.

The extremes of Hedwig’s personality contrast with Höss’, who appears happy to do the job and be content in his belief that he’s doing the right thing. We see him stop to pet a dog and you’d be forgiven for forgetting that this was the man who, on multiple occasions, condemned random prisoners to death by starvation over the escape of one inmate. A man of contrasts, then, in a film bursting with them.

Lee, who runs Mockingbird Cinema, is keen to stress before the screening that the projector isn’t broken; after a brief credits over foggy whiteness, we sit in blackness for at least a minute while Mica Levi’s expressionistic score belches and whines like some infernal machine. Evil has no banal middle-ground, Glazer stresses. It’s black and white. You’re complicit or you aren’t.

There is a pall of rot seeped into the very images we see. Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal shoot entirely in natural light, which renders the image as sickeningly muted and pale.

Some of the characters, like Hedwig’s mother Linna (Imogen Kogge), retch and splutter incessantly. Perhaps it’s a side-effect of living downwind from a furnace. Or maybe it’s just an alignment of body and soul.

The dissonance between ignorance and complicity is evoked too by Johnny Burn’s superlative sound design which through-scores the entire film with the sounds of the unthinkable. The constant screaming, the barking of dogs, the chugging of furnaces. Set against constant depictions of domestic comfort it’s legitimately nauseating.

A glimmer of hope is found in a young Polish girl inhabiting the titular Zone – an area surrounding Auschwitz that was still closely monitored by the Nazis – who sneaks into the camp under the cover of night to hide apples for the prisoners.

Glazer and Żal shoot these scenes in monochrome infrared and perhaps lay it on a bit thick, ostensibly suggesting that the act of hiding food in Auschwitz is so kind that it breaks the colour spectrum.

But when placed alongside Glazer’s climactic coup de cinema, which quietly pulls us into the present, it suggests that the good of humanity will only prevail if its evils are preserved for all to reckon with. How will we know ourselves otherwise?

This is punishingly forceful filmmaking from one of our most vital cinematic artists. The dissonance between what we see and hear in The Zone of Interest plunges us into an abyss of torture and picnics, of lilacs and drownings.

It slices through the noise of contemporary debate like a scalpel along flesh; the evil of Glazer’s vision of Auschwitz is not banal or ignorant, it is willing and glad. I can think of no artwork so horrendously necessary for our species to witness.

The Zone of Interest – official trailer

The Zone of Interest releases in cinemas on 2 February with preview screenings at Mockingbird Cinema on 27 and 28 January. For Birmingham screenings follow the below links:

The Electric Cinema: www.electricbirmingham.com
MAC: www.macbirmingham.co.uk/cinema/the-zone-of-interest
Mockingbird Cinema: www.mockingbirdcinema.com/production/the-zone-of-interest/

For more on The Zone of Interest visit: www.a24films.com/films/the-zone-of-interest