Born like this

FLARE LGBT Film Festival, London Southbank

There are more arrests for homosexuality in Cameroon than any other country in the world. With intimate access to the lives of four young gay Cameroonians, Born This Way steps outside the genre of activist filmmaking and offers a vivid and poetic portrait of day-to-day life in modern Africa. Lyrical imagery, devastating homophobia, the influence of western culture and a hidden-camera courtroom drama mysteriously coalesce into a story of what is possible in the global fight for equality.

FILMMAKER’S COMMENTS
We met Steave Nemande, the founder of Alternatives Cameroun (the first LGBT center in Cameroon) at a Human Rights Watch event in Los Angeles. As we talked, he told us about a very brave group of LGBT people who congregate at Alternatives. He described how they work and play there: doing HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, providing psychological counseling and supporting people who are rejected by their families, but also throwing amateur runway fashion shows, dance parties and soccer matches. And during all of this, exploring together what it means to be gay, lesbian, African, human—in a place where none of these things are simple. He said that he believed many people in that community were ready, for the first time, to tell their stories.
So the two of us traveled alone to Cameroon on tourist visas. We spoke
almost no French, the official language, and though we have both traveled widely, neither of us had ever been to Central Africa. We had no idea what kind of film we would end up with. We only knew that we would determine the structure and content by listening to the people who agreed to share their stories and their lives.

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ABOUT THE FILM

Relatively simple questions guided our shooting: who​ are you? What are your lives? What does it mean to be gay right now in this part of Africa?
We followed two main subjects as they went out into the world to confront their own challenges and then returned to Alternatives to regroup with their friends, to figure things out, to treat each other’s wounds and to build up their courage to go out once again.
One challenge to all of this was Cameroon’s laws. It is illegal to shoot documentary footage without government permission. We filed for a permit under the cover of doing a film on HIV/AIDS prevention, but when they said that we needed to have a government observer with us at all times, we realized that we would have to stay undercover.

We alternated operating camera and sound. We shot on a Canon HDSLR and a Panasonic HVX200. We moved around the city and country with our subjects on the crowded buses and motorcycle taxis that they use, with our cameras in backpacks, being careful not to shoot when police or official-looking people were around. We hid in plain sight, much like LGBT Cameroonians do. Living with a constant sense of danger and often fear helped us connect with our subjects on an empathetic level—though the fear and risk that they live with every day of their lives is much more serious. When we went into Alternatives Cameroun with them, almost all of the fear evaporated. It is one of the only sanctuaries where LGBT people can be who they are openly with one another. So we built Born This Way around our subjects’ movement between safety and danger. It is not an essay film. There isn’t a lot of exposition. It is a view from the inside of a secret community on the verge of transforming into a social movement. It observes the very specific details of several lives.

CHOOSING TO BE ON CAMERA

When we first went to Cameroon, we expected that very few LGBT people would be willing to show their faces on camera. We were surprised when most of those who appear in the film told us that they were willing to reveal their identities. Yves Yomb, executive director of Alternatives Cameroun, said, “We are tired of pretending that gay people do not exist in Cameroon.”
We talked at length with everyone about the possible dangers. Several people, such as Yves Yomb, are out publicly in Cameroon. He has even appeared on television there speaking about LGBT issues and has not been harassed. Others were concerned about their families seeing the film and finding about their sexuality. We decided together not to show the
film in Cameroon or France, where many people have family, or to show the faces of the participants online. They understand how likely it is that images or clips from the film will end up online without our permission. Even so, they all said that it is a risk they are willing to take.

A CHANGING CAMEROON

Although the situation for LGBT people in Cameroon is grim, when asked at a press conference in January 2013 about his country’s high prosecution rate for homosexuality, President Biya said, “There is no reason to despair. Minds are changing.” One month later, American Ambassador to Cameroon Robert P. Jackson invited President Biya to the premiere of Born This Way on behalf of the U.S. State Department. President Biya did not attend, but his ambassador to Germany met with the filmmakers and the American Ambassador to Germany and had a very open discussion about sexuality in Cameroon.

Nearly absolute power rests with Cameroon’s president, and we believe that he is opening up to the idea of dropping his country’s anti-homosexuality law. If it does change, the LGBT community will be able to work openly toward dispelling common homophobic stereotypes (that homosexuality is imported from the West, that it is a form of demon possession, that it is contagious). In fact, our friends in Cameroon say that public attitudes have already started to shift over the last few years. Some of them are comfortable enough to be out publicly now. They believe the public is ready for this message, and Born This Way is poised to be a tool for awareness-building and sensitization about this crucial human rights issue.

Film website

 

 

 

The Irrepressibles

Village Underground, London

(I would have loved to this show, oh man)

Erich Kästner: Emil and the Detectives

National Theatre

 

The National has set the bar high when it comes to family entertainment, with shows ranging from His Dark Materials to the Katie Mitchell-Lucy Kirkwood revision of standard fairytales. And it’s fair to say that this version of Erich Kastner’s 1929 children’s classic, adapted by Carl Miller and directed by Bijan Sheibani, doesn’t disappoint.

But, while my eight-year-old grandson sat raptly attentive, I occasionally felt the hurtling moment of the original was overlaid by a supersophistication.

Kastner’s story deserves all the praise fellow authors have heaped upon it. In tracing the story of young Emil, as he attempts to retrieve the 140 marks of which he has been robbed on a train journey to Berlin to meet his grandmother, it does several things. Most famously, it empowers children by showing how an army of Berlin kids pit their wits against the adult world by aiding Emil’s quest to find the bowler-hatted thief.

Like much 20th-century fiction, it also makes the city a vital character in the story. Kastner pays tribute not just to his child-sleuths, but to a 1920s Berlin that swarms with people, cars, trams, buses, which is dominated by buildings stretching into the sky, and where the cries of news vendors (the city had an astonishing 61 daily papers) rend the air.

Bunny Christie’s designs, the real star of the show, do everything to convey this fever. Through skilful projections, Christie gives us geometric urban grids that remind us that this was the period of Fritz Lang’s futuristic Metropolis. We also get vorticist tunnels that remind me of the dream sequences in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. But the real visual inspiration is German expressionism and its influence on the silent movies that came out of the UFA studios. It is all fantastically ingenious. But, when Miller’s script adds a not especially convincing sequence in which Emil pursues the thief through the Berlin sewers in a nod to The Third Man, I felt that adult knowingness was going a step too far.

I liked the show best when it returned to the essential human values of Kastner’s story. There’s a lovely scene at the start when the young Emil watches his widowed mum at work in her hairdressing salon. Miller picks up on the mother-son relationshiop to give the anxious Mrs Tischbein (a furrowed-browed Naomi Frederick) a moment, not in the book, when she turns up in Berlin to abort Emil’s adventures. And, even if not all the children are easily audible, the relationships between them are well handled. Each role has alternative casting, but on opening night the audience warmed to the uncompromising solemnity of Ethan Hammer’s Emil, the streetwise cockiness of Georgie Farmer’s Toots and the quiet persistence of Keeyan Hameed’s Tuesday, assigned to man the phones.

I especially enjoyed those moments of rough theatre when the audience became directly involved. At one point, Stuart McQuarrie’s monocled, dumpling-devouring robber dives into the stalls only to be hotly pursued by scores of rampant children. And, just when it looks as if he might escape justice, we are asked to get out of our seats and “stand up for Emil”. At points like these, Sheibani’s production becomes more than a meticulous, well-drilled display of physical precision and scenic invention. It acquires a human warmth and reminds us that Kastner’s story touches us precisely because it is a hymn to pre-teen goodness and solidarity with none of the bleak pessmism that pervades a work like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Michael Billingon in The Guardian

 

John Lanchester: Capital

In the prologue of Capital, a hooded figure is seen moving “softly and slowly along an ordinary-looking street in south London”, filming the houses in which the large cast of main characters live or work: Roger Yount, an investment banker; Zbiegniew, a Polish builder; Matya, a Hungarian nanny; Freddy Kano, a young Senegalese professional footballer; the Kamals, a British Pakistani family who run the corner shop; Quentina, a Zimbabwean traffic warden; and Petunia, an elderly working-class woman – the last of the aborigines. The story begins just before Roger’s bonus is revealed to him in December 2007; it ends in November 2008, with the world economy grinding to a halt.

The opening of Capital is strikingly original. It seems that the real protagonists are not the people but the Victorian houses on Pepys Road. An omniscient narrator traces their history – built by a Cornish developer and Irish labourers in the late 19th century; first inhabited by clerks and other members of the “aspiring not-too-well-off”. Next the Caribbean immigrants arrive, then the upper-middle classes with their open-plan kitchens and loft conversions and, finally, the bankers. The effect is a little like a Larkin poem (“Many, many people had fallen in and out of love; a young girl had had her first kiss, an old man had exhaled his last breath, a solicitor on the way back from the Underground station after work had looked up at the sky, swept blue by the wind, and had a sudden sense of religious consolation …”) – but “fluent in money”, as the book has it: “For the first time in history, the people who lived on the street were … rich. The thing which made them rich was the very fact that they lived in Pepys Road.”

…

Guardian