Critic's Chair: Guy Somerset reviews highlights of the Doc Edge Festival, including some hyperbole on the death of Sir Peter Blake, and finds some respite from reality in the French Film Festival
If one were in any doubt about the significance of the work New Zealand yachting legend Sir Peter Blake was doing when he was murdered by pirates in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest in 2001, a cursory glance at headlines in The Guardian over the past couple of months would quickly settle the matter.
“‘Negotiating with your worst enemy: Biden in risky talks to pay Brazil to save Amazon”; “Brazilian Amazon released more carbon than it absorbed over the past 10 years”; “Animals farmed: Food giants accused of link to illegal Amazon deforestation”; “Brazilian police raid environment ministry over ‘illegal’ timber sales”; “Brazil aerial photos show miners’ devastation of indigenous people’s land”; “Brazilian wildcat miners attack police and burn indigenous homes in Amazon”.
That’s not all of them by far. Even on the day I watched The Garden of Evil, Larry Keating’s film about Blake and the Amazon, which is screening as part of this year’s Doc Edge Festival, there was photojournalist Tommaso Protti’s picture essay “Amazȏnia: life and death in the Brazilian rainforest”.
The question that writer, producer and director Keating seeks to answer is whether the pirates who raided Blake’s boat Seamaster, leading to his fatal shooting, were robbers as claimed or in fact had been hired to, in the hard-boiled tabloidese of narrator and guiding interviewee Donal MacIntyre, ‘take him out’.
MacIntyre is a renowned Irish investigative reporter who had been about to join Blake to cover the work he was doing on behalf of the United Nations Environment Programme when he was killed.
The Garden of Evil highlights his BBC connections and role as a visiting professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, but MacIntyre also has more downmarket parts to his CV, and brings to the documentary a lurid touch it could have avoided with a steadier, more restrained voice at the helm.
Instead we get hyperbole (Blake’s murder was “one of those JFK, Marilyn Monroe, kind-of Diana moments where you just froze and you think he’s such a larger than life figure, how can he just simply not be there any more?”), excitable intonation and a man who, in a clip from the 2002 television investigation he went on to make without Blake, can say with a straight face of an illegal-logging boss: “Eventually a rare sighting of the King of Mahogany, the man who is like a fox.”
MacIntyre’s intrusive sensibility is especially jarring given the high-end look of the documentary as it captures the beauty of the Amazon, the activities of those destroying it, and the people trying to stop them. It is a look that has just won the man responsible, Jacob Bryant, the Best New Zealand Cinematography prize in the Doc Edge Festival’s awards.
Filming on location, in often highly dangerous locations, with access to journalists, environmentalists, tribe members, police and criminals, including even Riccardo Tavares, the then-22-year-old who shot Blake, Keating conveys the scale of the problem and the extent to which the natural eco-system of the Amazon is matched by the no-less-complex social and economic eco-system exploiting it.
One of strongest elements of the documentary is New Zealand conservationist and environmental investigator Peter Bethune.
Bethune is shaven-headed, dressed in camo trousers and – who knew? – camo-framed sunglasses, but beneath his macho exterior is trembling of voice as he revisits the spot where he nearly met the same fate as Blake and as he later says of the rainforest: “Ever since I was a kid, I had this burning ambition to come here. In many ways, I came here and it’s getting destroyed. The thought of trying to contribute in a positive way to saving the Amazon, I’m just one guy, and maybe a small team around me as well, but there’s a limit to what we can do.”
Over-population, poverty, corrupt police, politicians and public servants, all-round lawlessness (with drugs as well as the illegal logging and fishing), and so-called ‘legitimate’ businesses in the rest of the country and the world beyond benefiting – the problem is seemingly intractable, but no less urgent because of that.
On location, The Garden of Evil picks off low-hanging fruit among the criminals, which is risky enough. But these are for the most part the powerless poor with limited options in life. The documentary does talk about how the more powerful and significant figures in this disaster remain removed from the scene of the crime, back in Brazil’s big cities and overseas. But it doesn’t, understandably given the dangers of even starting to ask questions on the matter, seek to identify them or put their faces on camera. That is probably too much to ask of any filmmaker, but that is where a crucial part of what is happening to the Amazon begins, and ends.
Sir Peter Blake would have been proud of the subjects of High Tide Don’t Hide, which is also screening in the Doc Edge Festival. Directed by Niva Kay, Emily McDowell, Nia Phipps and Phil Stebbing, the film follows the genesis and early protests of New Zealand’s School Strike 4 Climate movement.
Focusing especially on Lillian Balfour and Helena Mayer from Thames in the Coromandel, Sophie Handford from Paekākāriki on the Kāpiti Coast and Aucklanders Luke Wijohn and Aigagalefili Fepulea’i Tapua’i, the documentary is an inspiring depiction of youth refusing to sit back and do nothing while deferring to the disproven ‘higher wisdom’ of their elders.
By getting in early, High Tide Don’t Hide is able to show the teenagers’ growing organisational skills and media nous, their self-determination and resilience in the face of head-in-the-sand-as-the-water-rises politicians such as Thames–Coromandel District Mayor Sandra Goudie and the condescending dismissiveness of Mike Hosking, and the emerging tensions within the movement itself as members’ understanding of the issues evolves.
Tapua’i is particularly powerful as she and fellow members of the South Auckland 4 Tha Kulture (4TK) wing of the movement defend using the word ‘genocide’ for the threat to Pacific islands, against Pākeha School Strike 4 Climate members’ criticism of doing so, and as she seeks to ensure the Pasifika voice within the movement isn’t subsumed by that of ‘privileged’ white members.
She shamed me, at least. Coming over all Mike Hosking, I had made a note about the scene of her in a bargain store and saying how in South Auckland “no one’s going to judge you for shopping from a $2 shop because everyone shops from a $2 shop”. Sure, the cheap products in a $2 shop, and how they are manufactured, are a big part of the climate change and broader sustainability problem. But the contradiction of Tapua’i shopping in one is as nothing compared with the contradictions in my own life, and in all likelihood yours too. As seen in The Garden of Evil, the origins of the ecological disaster we face are systemic and other parts of the system need to be fixed ahead of going after $2 shops.
Tapua’i exemplifies the need for 4TK’s distinctive presence in the School Strike 4 Climate movement and articulates the extra significance of climate change and sea rise for Pasifika peoples, most movingly expressed when she says: “One of the boys in 4TK, Sebastian, was talking about how all our parents who are from the islands, they want to be buried on the islands, and I think he said something like, ‘I don’t want to have to bury my mum in water.’ I feel the exact same way.”
If, by its very nature, the Doc Edge Festival captures the reality of the world around us, you can count on the French Film Festival to provide some respite from it.
You know you are in peak French Film Festival territory when a pivotal part of one of the films you are watching turns on whether or not an incriminating email a character has sent is in fact part of an epistolary novel she is writing.
The film in question, Appearances, written and directed by Marc Fitoussi, is as hermetically sealed a bourgeois tale of adultery and murder as you could hope for. Set among the well-to-do French expats of Vienna, it stars Karin Viard as the wife of a famous composer, who discovers he is having an affair and sets about undoing it, at great cost to all involved. As the title suggests, appearances are everything, and so is maintaining them. A particularly French touch is the suggestion nothing reignites a man or woman’s sexual interest in their spouse than discovering they are sleeping with someone else.
This is one piece of marital advice Van der Beck’s School of Housekeeping and Good Manners spares its girl pupils in writer and director Martin Provost’s comedy How to Be a Good Wife. With a wonderfully prim Juliette Binoche as its headmistress, the school confronts the social and political tumult of 1968 by ignoring it entirely and continuing to teach its students the traditional virtues expected of a wife. The girls themselves are getting other ideas and it is increasingly difficult for Binoche and her off-siders, nun Noémie Levovsky and sister-in-law Yolande Moreau, to keep a lid on things – and indeed on themselves.
The film is a delight from start to finish, even as it loses whatever grip on plausibility it had to start with, and especially when it takes leave of its senses entirely with a musical number where Provost channels Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
The pupils of Van der Beck’s School of Housekeeping and Good Manners would also find writer and director Dominik Moll’s gripping Only the Animals a bit of an eye opener, with its bad marriages succumbing to sexual infidelity, in person and online, and its moments of near-necrophilia. A Russian doll of a thriller, it has a supernatural strand to explain its outlandish coincidences, and connects the windswept and freezing landscapes of a French farming community with the hot and impoverished former French colony of Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa.
Fans of the eight-season but now-finished French television policier Spiral will enjoy director and co-writer Anne Fontaine’s Night Shift, essentially a four-hander, with Omar Sy from Netflix’s Lupin, Virginie Efira and Grégory Gadebois as Parisian cops driving asylum seeker Paymān Maādi to an airport to be deported to almost certain death in his home country.
This film is fully grounded in reality and everything in it rings true, even a hallucinatory sequence featuring a horse wandering through the surrounds of a burning migrant detention centre.
There is not a false note, from the cop ensuring his underwear is always presentable should he end up on a slab, to the one who changes in the corridor outside his apartment so he doesn’t take the taint of his job home with him, to the line uttered during a woodland stop-off: “If I ever had to shoot myself, I’d come here.” One of the cops, an alcoholic, is forever opening a bottle of liquor just to smell it.
The cast, writing and direction are uniformly spot-on. None shirk their responsibility to verisimilitude, so the best the viewer can expect are small acts of grace and redemption. But when they come they are to be cherished.
Doc Edge Festival (various times and locations in Auckland and Wellington and streaming online until 11 July); French Film Festival (various times and locations nationwide, 9 June–14 July).
