AUTUMN FILM SPECIAL
TAKE ONE ACTION FILM FESTIVAL
Returning to Glasgow and Edinburgh for the i fth year in a row, the Take One Action Film Festival’s aim is as much to celebrate great work that is being done around the world to i ght injustice, as it is to provoke audiences to get up and do something about the situations they see. It’s also an excellent opportunity – and in some cases the only one – for Scottish audiences to see the best i lms from the past year on the international documentary festival circuit.
Festival Artistic Director Simon Bateson says: ‘Take One Action celebrates the people and movies that are changing the world. It’s two weeks of the most moving and acclaimed cinema about some of the biggest issues facing Scotland and the world today. It has discussions with directors and campaigners from Palestine, India, the US, Tunisia, Bulgaria and South Africa. It has pedal-powered cinema at Edinburgh’s Botanics and for the i rst time in Glasgow’s Hidden Gardens alongside our Filmhouse and GFT screenings.’ And for anyone who fears that socially-conscious cinema sounds too much like work? ‘Well, it has premieres of more award-winning Sundance and other international festival hits than we’ve ever shown before – and there’s simply nowhere else to see them.’
Although the festival has outspoken i lmmakers Ken Loach and Paul Laverty as patrons, Take One Action is not about pushing a particular political agenda, but rather showing that i lm is a global language that can be used to communicate so much more than disposable stories. This year highlights include the Martin Scorsese-produced opening i lm Surviving Progress, acclaimed Arab Spring documentary Half Revolution and a special interactive family screening of Mary Poppins. With many screenings featuring director Q&As, workshops and post-i lm discussions, this is a rare instance where watching a i lm really could lead to changing the world. (Paul Gallagher) ■ Take One Action Film Festival, various venues, Edinburgh and Glasgow, Thurs 20 Sep – Sat 6 Oct.
18 THE LIST 23 Aug–20 Sep 2012
TABU
Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’ startling new fi lm has had critics claiming the fi lmmaker as a major new voice in international cinema. Gail Tolley speaks to him to fi nd out more
A senile woman in contemporary Lisbon who runs away to the casino whenever she gets the chance; a secret, destructive love affair that unravels in 60s colonial Africa; and a pet crocodile that keeps on escaping from its enclosure: these are the unusual ingredients for Miguel Gomes’ distinctive i lm Tabu, one of the most talked about i lms of this year’s Berlin Film Festival where it premiered last February.
The second feature by the Portuguese director has been described as idiosyncratic, highly inventive and quite frankly eccentric, perhaps the result of Gomes’ ability to accumulate material which later manifests itself in his work. ‘I think I am like a collector,’ the director explains. ‘There are some things that stay with me, they can be stories that someone told me or songs or people I know who I have the desire to i lm . . . but at the beginning I’m just collecting all these things and I don’t know that altogether it will make a i lm.’
In the case of Tabu inspiration came from two unexpected sources. The i rst was a story told to Gomes by a family member about a neighbour who believed her African maid was a witch. The second was hearing
the memories of a Portuguese band (who featured in his debut, Our Beloved Month of August) who used to play in Mozambique in the 60s. The two stories would go on to inl uence the unique format of Tabu that in some ways can be described as two i lms in one. The i rst set in modern day Portugal is about a retired woman, Pilar, and her paranoid neighbour, Aurora, who believes her Cape Verdian maid is practicing voodoo on her. When Aurora is taken to hospital she requests that Pilar track down a man from Aurora’s past named Ventura. When they i nd him he has a remarkable story to tell about the time that he and Aurora lived in Africa at the foot of Mount Tabu. The second part of the i lm is Ventura’s story as he remembers it, a bewitching, dialogue-free melodrama drawing on the style of silent i lm.
The together
two parts come in a glorious juxtaposition, offering intellectual nourishment on ideas of memory and loss, as well as Portugal’s colonial past, or in Gomes’ words ‘things that disappear and that only exist in memory’.
Tabu is on selected release from Fri 7 Sep. See i lm review, page 55.