In the City of Sylvia

A film by José Luis Guerín

A deceptively simple tale of a man's return to a city, in search of the woman that he loved six years earlier. The young man, an artist whose name we do not know, has come alone and on a whim to Strasbourg in order to find a beautiful woman called Sylvia whom he remembers from six years ago. It is not clear whether a relationship between them ever existed or if their meeting was just a chance encounter. He has no way of contacting her and nothing but a map she drew for him on a napkin, but he knows she was then a student at the Conservatoire. It is here that he is now seated in an outdoor café as he begins his task of waiting, watching and hoping. As he sips his beer he makes pencil sketches in his notebook of the young women who surround him, whilst patiently waiting for his lost love to appear. A glance, a gesture, a smile — precious moments captured which might somehow lead him to Sylvia or perhaps draw her to him. Sylvia's presence lingers, but is it possible to return to the past?

Suddenly a delicate and lovely young woman who may be Sylvia catches his eye, and after some deliberation, he abruptly leaves his table at the café to chase after the girl. Obsessively following her almost like a stalker, he calls out to her, "Sylvie?". Losing her momentarily in a labyrinth of alleys and streets, he then gets very close but we cannot be certain at this point whether she is aware of his presence. The girl boards a tram and he follows her. Again he asks her name, "Sylvie?" and then she speaks to him.

An outstanding, superbly shot and hauntingly enigmatic interior drama, perfectly capturing the sense of longing, unfulfilled desire and simple voyeuristic pleasure. The almost total absence of dialogue and the skilful use of shifting perspective allows us to follow the thoughts and musings of this young man and to join him as an observer of people amidst life in a French city. In being a part of the flânerie sustained by the gentlest thread of a story we become immersed and entranced by its moods, impressions, sensations and their repetitions. We find that we are observing a piece of art in motion, one in which we are free to provide the characterisation ourselves, by inference or reconstruction — exploring the power of the imagination over reality, bringing the magic of the dream into the everyday world.

www.axiomfilms.co.uk

Still Life

A film by Jia Zhang-ke

Set against the spectacular landscape of the Three Gorges region, this humane and moving film tells two contemplative and compassionate stories of a man and a woman searching for lost partners in Fengjie, an ancient town on the Yangtze River which is being demolished and will soon vanish for ever in the flooding caused by the controversial Three Gorges hydroelectric dam project.

In the separate yet marginally connected stories, the events in the lives of these two very different people mirror each other but with a contrasting emphasis and outcome. At the same time as offering a revelatory, thought-provoking portrait of people adrift in a world they no longer recognise, Sanxia Haoren also reveals their energy, resilience and ability to reach new understandings.

Sanming Han is a coal-miner from Fengyang in Shanxi province who is looking for his ex-wife, Missy Ma, who left him taking with her their daughter whom he has not seen for 16 years. Sanming has only an address given to him many years ago, and until his arrival in the town, had been completely unaware of the demolition and flooding taking place in the area. With the help of her brother he eventually traces Missy who works on a boat which is down-river in Yichang. Their daughter, who is the reason for Sanming's journey, is now working in Dongguan, much farther south, but in their meeting both Sanming and Missy discover they have renewed feelings for each other.

Shen Hong, a nurse from Taiyuan in Shanxi, has come to look for Guo Bin, her estranged property entrepreneur husband whom she has not heard from in two years. She enlists the help of one of his old friends, archaeologist Wang Dongming, in order to find him. Discovering he is now very successful in the business of asset stripping former state-owned properties, she suspects he is also having an affair with Ding-Ya Ling, his female associate. But when they finally meet she walks away, and when he follows her she reveals that she is in love with someone else and wants a divorce.

The natural beauty of the Three Gorges and the Yangtze River is contrasted with the manual demolition of the buildings in a town that will soon be lost for ever, and the human stories set against this background are fleeting, fragile and ethereal. The slow, balanced and contemplative motion of events suggests the movement of water, bringing fluidity, transformation and renewal. The film's focus is on the destruction of time and place and our collective loneliness in the modern world, and yet it is also a testament to the depth and capacity of the human spirit to overcome and adapt to loss and change in our lives.

Samson & Delilah

A film by Warwick Thornton

Samson and Delilah's world is small, an isolated community in the Central Australian Desert. When tragedy strikes they turn their backs on home and embark on a journey of survival. Lost, unwanted and alone they discover that life isn't always fair, but love never judges.

Samson & Delilah is a love story, but perhaps not in the traditional sense. It deals with life on a remote Aboriginal community and the ways in which one young couple manage to escape from this mundane existence, exploring a love that develops out of survival — necessary love. It is a story about the many different ways in which love grows. Samson and Delilah have a very unusual relationship and their love is strong but understated and it develops as their trust develops. It's a film about people who are classed not even as people — let alone people who are allowed to love or have emotions. The story of these two young lovers is an important and unique story to tell, an untold story. In the end, even though life is going to be hard, there are real possibilities of success for them, a new life, hope.

Writer/director Warwick Thornton on the making of the film:
"Storytelling has been a way of life for my people over thousands of generations, from singing stories under the stars to celluloid on the screen. The medium has changed but the reasons for telling our stories have not. I believe that this is a story I needed to tell. You have to believe in your stories and trust that an audience will take the journey with you and your characters. The audience's journey through the darkness makes the light brighter at the end. Samson and Delilah's unconventional love is that light. Their challenges and struggles are inspired by what I see every day as I journey through my own life in Central Australia. It is real."

Samson & Delilah yesterday won the Caméra d'Or prize for best first feature at Festival de Cannes 2009.

samsonanddelilah.com.au

Elle s'appelle Sabine

A film by Sandrine Bonnaire

A sensitive and very personal portrait of Sabine Bonnaire, the autistic younger sister of French actress Sandrine Bonnaire.

Sabine is a 38-year-old whose autism went undiagnosed for decades and whose vivacious character was almost destroyed through years of inadequate care. Using footage filmed at Sabine's current care home as well as 25 years of home movies, Sandrine paints a picture of her sister as a once independent young woman with special needs to an adult now in need of constant supervision. The contrast between the young girl and the dispirited woman five years later is a terrible and moving indictment of state institutions and the effects of misdiagnosis. Now in a care home in the Charente region, Sabine has found a new lease of life thanks to proper care and the unwavering support of her family and friends.

As a girl, despite her unusual behaviour, Sabine would play with her siblings and take part in their games. She first attended a school for "abnormal" children but in fact had a great many abilities, including being able to read and write. At the age of 12 she was enrolled in the same school as Sandrine, but stood out as being different and suffered taunting by the other kids. She became self-destructive, biting and scratching herself and removing her clothes in the playground. With no specialised schools available, she then remained at home until the age of 27, during which years she was highly creative both in crafts and studies. Also developing a love for music, she took lessons for piano and very soon was playing Schubert and Bach. Sabine was always very close to her siblings but as they left home one by one she was left alone with her mother in the Parisian suburbs. Her sisters would visit her regularly and organise special outings for her. She became independent, able to go places on her own; she was cheerful, full of laughter and life. Sandrine then made Sabine's dream of America come true by taking her on a visit to New York.

When Sabine's mother moved from Paris to the country the sisters were able to visit less frequently. Sabine became isolated, and feeling abandoned, gradually began to decline, becoming destructive and violent towards her mother. Her sisters took her for a while in order to give their mother a break but Sabine continued to be violent and disruptive in each of the sisters' family homes. As a result, Sabine was sent to a psychiatric hospital for diagnosis, while the family searched in vain for a specialised home in which she could receive professional care. Sandrine eventually rented a flat close by where she installed Sabine with two home nurses. This arrangement, however, did not last and Sabine returned to the hospital where she stayed for five years. As her anxiety grew worse and she began self-mutilating, she was restrained and given high doses of neuroleptics. With her memory almost gone and her weight increasing by 30kg, Sabine's physical condition and mental faculties deteriorated further until she was unable to look after herself.

In 2001, Sandrine heard about a centre in Charente. While there were no places available, she met with the director who was seeking desperately to open a new home. Sandrine's fame as an actress was instrumental in gaining the necessary funding to eventually create the new home where Sabine still lives today. Now diagnosed as psychoinfantile with autistic behaviour, the treatment she receives is vastly improving her quality of life and it is hoped that the damage resulting from years of being institutionalised can eventually be repaired.

Mockingbird Don't Sing

A film by Harry Bromley-Davenport

On 4 November 1970 on the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite reported on the horrific story of a 13-year-old girl discovered in the small Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia who was still in diapers, barely able to walk and unable to speak. She had been kept in severe isolation by her parents with virtually no human contact for more than ten years. Confined to her bedroom, tied to her potty-chair by day, and at night restrained in an over-sized crib with a cover of metal screening, she was often forgotten and left alone to fend for herself. As Cronkite noted, it was one of the worst cases of child abuse ever to surface.

The tragic story of Genie (named Katie in the film) is the subject of this drama made in 2001. The director worked closely with Dr Susan Curtiss (Sandra Tannen in the film) now a linguistics professor at UCLA, who as a graduate student interested in language acquisition had been present from the early stages of Genie's rescue, starting a few months after she arrived at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles. Genie immediately won the hearts of all the doctors and scientists involved in her case.

The film begins with the early years of Katie's life of isolation, fear and abuse at the hands of her unstable and domineering father. Her mother, Louise, sensing that her husband is now potentially homicidal, leaves the house taking her daughter with her. Almost blind from cataracts, Louise is seeking medical aid treatment, but unwittingly enters a social services agency where Katie's physical condition immediately alerts the authorities' attention and she is taken into care at Children's Hospital. There she becomes the focus of observation and research by scientists and doctors who are eager to discover if Katie has a normal learning capacity and whether it is possible for her to recover completely from years of deprivation. For them, Katie is the perfect opportunity to test the Criticial Period Hypothesis which contends that the ability to acquire language is limited to the years before puberty, after which, as a result of neurological changes in the brain, the ability is lost.

In her new environment Katie makes rapid progress, but whilst her vocabulary grows she is still unable to string words together into meaningful, grammatical sentences. Scans indicate she may in fact be mentally retarded, either from birth or as a result of injury, chronic malnutrition or lack of mental stimulation. But over the following years Katie demonstrates a remarkable ability to develop non-verbal communication skills — illustrating complex ideas and even feelings in quick sketches, and by learning to use sign language. Her mental development however eventually levels out to a point from which she does not progress further.

Throughout the years of research, Katie's life is far from stable and we see how she becomes the victim in a tug-of-war between those who want to help her, study her, and provide her with a normal home environment. Funding for the research project is eventually withdrawn and Katie is passed around between her mother, the hospital, and several inappropriate fostering placements where she suffers further abuse. The only person who truly cares for her wellbeing and who can offer Katie a stable and loving home is Sandra Tannen but Katie's mother forbids it, threatening legal action against all those involved in her daughter's case. Katie begins to regress, deteriorating both physically and mentally and her mother places her in a home for retarded adults where it is believed she has remained for the rest of her life.

Genie's story is a very poignant one. Perhaps if therapy had been the priority over research then things may have turned out differently. She was a victim not only of abuse at the hands of her father but subsequently of the limitations of society's mechanisms for dealing with abused children. The film sensitively and accurately documents the system's initial success yet ultimate failure to address the needs of a very special child.

FeralChildren.com
a comprehensive documentation on Genie's case history

PBS/NOVA transcripts "Secret of the Wild Child" (1994)
also released on DVD (Region 1) in 2007

BBC Horizon documentary (1994) on YouTube, looking at the moral and ethical issues raised by the case of Genie:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer (HarperCollins, 1993)
the definitive investigative account of Genie's story

Twin Sisters

A film by Ben Sombogaart, based on the novel by Tessa de Loo.

Following the deaths of their parents in the 1920s, twins Anna and Lotte Bamberg are cruelly separated at the age of six. Contact between the two is immediately broken and the sisters grow up in separate worlds. Anna is sent to work on her uncle's farm in rural Germany, growing up in harsh circumstances, denied an education, and living amongst ignorant and brutal people. Lotte, who suffers from tuberculosis, is welcomed into a loving home by her upper middle class Dutch relatives where her health is restored and she receives a good education. For many years the girls try to contact each other but both families intercept their letters, making each believe that the other sister is dead.

Both attempt to renew their bond several times but fail each time for different reasons. The story follows their lives as they eventually meet and try to reconcile their differences while World War II impacts each of their lives in different ways. Anna marries a young Austrian SS officer, while Lotte becomes engaged to a Jewish musician — following different and opposing paths, both sisters' lives are irrevocably changed. More than half a century later, Anna seeks out her unwilling sister, only to find that their different experiences during the war years has damaged their relationship possibly forever.

A deeply moving story focusing on the loyalties, fates and passions of two women torn apart by war.

Suzhou River

A film by Lou Ye

A visually arresting tale of mystery and obsession set in the neon lit nightclubs and grimy industrial wastelands of Shanghai. The story is told by and shot directly from the point of view of the unseen narrator. He guides us through the streets, along the banks of the heavily polluted and industrialised Suzhou river, and we watch his girlfriend MeiMei, whom he is obsessively filming, as she dresses and prepares to leave her riverside home. He tells us that MeiMei has unexpected periods of sadness and silence, often disappearing for days at a time without explanation. His own moments of sadness then turn to joy when he sees her return, walking over the bridge with her arms folded across her chest. He then begins to recount the story of Moudan and Mardar.

Mardar is a motorcycle courier working in the city. One of his clients, a shady businessman, regularly hires Mardar to drive his sixteen-year-old daughter, Moudan, to her aunt's house while he entertains his latest girlfriend at home. Moudan and Mardar grow fond of each other and a relationship develops. He gives her a mermaid doll as a birthday present. But then Mardar becomes entangled with a crime gang who force him to kidnap Moudan and demand ransom money from her rich father. She escapes from him outside the empty warehouse where she has been held, disappointed at his betrayal of her love and enraged by the small amount of ransom money he is due to receive in return. Moudan runs from him, and clutching the mermaid doll, throws herself off a bridge into the poisonous river, promising that one day she'll return as a mermaid.

Mardar serves a three-year jail sentence for his part in the crime, and still wracked with grief over Moudan's supposed death, eventually returns to Shanghai and to his work as a courier, whilst endlessly searching all over the city for Moudan. But no one has seen her or knows what happened to her because a body was never recovered. One night as he walks into a bar, Mardar encounters a girl who bears a striking resemblance to Moudan. He follows her to the nightclub where she works, performing an underwater mermaid act in a tank, and Mardar is convinced that the girl, MeiMei, is his lost love.

The jerky handheld visuals, harsh lighting and stunning colours all bring a heightened sense of reality to the film, and we are drawn into the tragedy of Moudan and Mardar, the narrator's own part in the story, and the feelings that develop between Mardar and MeiMei. An intriguing and captivatingly beautiful love story, with an unexpected narrative twist bringing the plot full circle, and to a heartbreaking conclusion.

Smiley's People

A TV mini-series dramatised by John Hopkins from the novel by John le Carré, and directed by Simon Langton.

George Smiley is once more called from retirement to come to the aid of 'the Circus', the code-name for the British Secret Intelligence Service. He is asked to settle the affairs of an old friend, an émigré Estonian general and British agent, who has been assassinated on his way to a meeting in a safe house in London. Smiley's old organisation, the Circus, has become so overwhelmed by political considerations that it wants no involvement. As Smiley begins to retrace the events of his friend's last days, the clues lead to his seemingly invulnerable nemesis in Soviet counter-intelligence, Karla, who may have finally exposed an Achilles heel.

Years before, Karla had nearly destroyed British counter-intelligence, wrecking Smiley's marriage in the process. Following an initial hunch and a fragment of evidence, Smiley methodically begins to put the pieces together, despite the fact that almost everyone he knows advises him to go home and enjoy his retirement. At the same time, Karla, realising that he has probably jeopardised himself by bending his own rigidly enforced rules, is ruthlessly trying to cover his own tracks.

Resolutely overcoming all obstacles he encounters, and with the help of some of his ex-colleagues, including the elegant but dubious former master of spy tradecraft, Toby Esterhase, Smiley collects the evidence needed to secure the support of Saul Enderby, the vain and cynical current chief of the revamped Circus. Smiley's investigations send him digging into the past on a twisted trail across Europe that moves, inexoribly, towards a final confrontation with his old adversary, Karla of Moscow Centre.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

A TV mini-series dramatised by Arthur Hopcraft from the novel by John le Carré, and directed by John Irvin.

George Smiley is a retired principal counter-intelligence officer who is secretly brought back into 'the Circus', the code-name for the British Secret Intelligence Service, to root out a top-level mole. Smiley did not actually retire, but was removed from his post, the head of personnel, as a result of a remarkably orchestrated long-term plan by his old adversary, code-name Karla, the head of Moscow Centre.

Smiley's chief, known only as Control, had been detecting markers of Karla's intricate scheme for months and had narrowed the mole's identity to five senior officers. To stop him, Karla fashioned a set-up in the form of an offer that Control could simply not refuse. The necessarily unsanctioned operation to exploit the offer failed catastrophically, and Control, disgraced, was forced out, taking with him Smiley who, as Control's most trusted ally, was found guilty by association and also banished.

When Ricki Tarr, a resourceful, low-level field agent, thought to have defected, turns up in Britain with solid evidence pointing to the existence of the mole, thereby validating Control's long-term suspicions, Smiley, the sole remnant of the old order who can be trusted, is called in to spy on the spies. Without official access to any of the files in the Circus and without revealing that anyone is under suspicion, Smiley gradually pieces together the story, trawling through the murky waters of Cold War espionage and the painful memories from his own past.

A Perfect Spy

A TV mini-series dramatised by Arthur Hopcraft from the novel by John le Carré, and directed by Peter Smith.

Magnus Pym has disappeared, setting off a massive man-hunt. One of Britain's top intelligence agents, Pym is also searching for his true identity, hidden beneath a lifetime of deception. His quest takes him from his relationship with his con-man father to his betrayal of everything close to him — his wife, his country, even the high-ranking Czech agent whom he befriended. Pursued by his agency and his enemies, Pym must find himself before his hunters find him.

As a young man, Magnus Pym's father Rick was the most influential character in his life. Rick was a raconteur, con-man, thief and black marketeer. From a young age Magnus was included in Rick's schemes, learning how to survive by deceit and lies, but also learning about responsibilities towards those you love. When a university student in Switzerland, Magnus meets the other person who will have the greatest influence in his life, Axel, a Czech refugee. As Magnus enters his career in the British Secret Service, his relationship with Axel and the values he developed in childhood will lead him down his own tragic path of betrayal and loyalty.

Part spy thriller, part mystery, part psychological suspense story, but foremost a love story. A stunning and exquisitely transformed adapation of le Carré's most intriguing and absorbing masterpiece.