Partners in film as well as in life, Indian producer Ismail Merchant and American writer/director James Ivory made 44 films together under the banner of their brainchild: Merchant Ivory Productions. Their impressive catalogue, made up mostly of literary adaptations, boasts some of cinema’s most acclaimed independent period dramas: A Room with a View, Maurice, Howard’s End and The Remains of the Day.

Stephen Soucy’s affectionate yet scattershot documentary on this 40-year partnership explores the overlap between the two as lovers and as collaborators, offering a broad overview of their life’s work, and fondly detailing the lengths to which the duo would go to turn shoestring budgets into meticulously crafted, tasteful films.

Right off the bat, we hear from about a dozen talking heads from the Merchant Ivory family, including Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, all affectionately sharing anecdotes about the duo’s creative synergy; the juxtaposition of Merchant’s relentless, chaotic hustling and Ivory’s calm artistic vision. Ivory is also interviewed rather extensively, recounting his tumultuous relationship with Merchant. The duo’s Indian collaborators are largely absent though, and it all comes together in a rather shallow, often frustrating attempt to bottle up a significant piece of late 20th century film history, devoid of that touch of Merchant Ivory movie magic.

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Whether through isolation, financial uncertainty, grief or trepidation over whether life would ever feel the same, the pandemic did a number on all of us. For many artists, there was the added challenge of losing access to the resources needed to make new work, but for some, seeing through their sudden and random bouts of creativity became somewhat a necessity. This was the case for Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors who, during the UK’s third lockdown, decided to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet entirely within the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto Online.

We follow Crane and Oosterveen’s avatars who are joined by Crane’s wife, filmmaker Pinny Grylls, her avatar documenting their pursuit with an in-game phone camera. There is much to enjoy in the anarchy of this film, the unsuspecting players that show up to audition while dodging the bullets coming at them from all directions, and the moments of earnest connection and serendipity borne out of banding together to pull this crazy thing off.

The film’s spontaneous spirit is muddied by a sense that some ideas are retroactively staged (like when Crane and Grylls, who live together, have an in-game domestic over how this project is taking over life commitments), but what ultimately stays with you is the actor duo’s commendable ability to find inspiration and poetic gravitas in silliness, horseplay and tomfoolery, even (and especially) in the darkest of times.

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Layla (Bilal Hasna) has been living a double life. As a non-binary drag queen, they’re surrounded by a queer artistic community and regularly perform at the fictional London nightclub Feathers. Yet in the presence of their Muslim family, they abide by tradition and still go by their deadname, Latif. When invited to perform at a corporate pride event for a ready meals company called Fork Me, Layla meets strait-laced marketing exec Max (Louis Greatorex), who ends up joining them and their friends at a Feathers queer party, kicking off their romantic fling.

Amrou Al-Kadhi’s debut trades in any unique qualities that a queer film can exhibit in terms of form and content, with the tried and tested formula of the palatable, cheesy odd couple romance. Here, it’s between the “eccentric” Arab non-binary drag queen and the “conventional” white corporate gay man. It’s this glaringly harsh contrast – between the vibrant and diverse queer scene in which Layla finds their community, and the drab, corporate, middle-class life of the straight-passing Max – that ends up driving the film forward; a somewhat ironic binary to rely on as a primary site of friction.

There is phenomenal cinematography and costume design on display, which come together to create a sumptuous atmosphere, but one that is sadly let down by a script largely shorn of the complex nuance behind all the ideas Al-Khadi is trying to explore. In an attempt to consolidate conflicting identities and communities, Layla’s journey of identity with their relationship to their family – as well as the added elements of racial dynamics in queer relationships and subtle transmisogyny microaggressions – few of these ideas are afforded with the adequate space to be fleshed out, or to be emotionally explored with nuance. This feels true especially in the case of Layla’s family portrayal and their Palestinian background, a thread established only in passing and quickly dismissed in favour of focusing on Layla’s struggle to navigate a new relationship with a white man.

Bilal Hasna shines as Layla, delivering a magnetic performance, but unfortunately the same can’t be said for the rest of the cast, who fall victim to the contrivances of a script that was maybe taken out of the oven before it was fully cooked. Yet, despite the cheesiness and familiar story beats, there is plenty of energy and heart behind this project, and its themes of transformation, freedom and authenticity are sure to resonate.

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Mark Cousins documentaries always originate from a deeply subjective position. Poetic voiceovers and associative form shape his films as visual essays, articulating an inherent tension in documentary filmmaking: that of questioning the nature of getting to an “objective truth” and its proximity to a subjective projection.

Cousins places this tension front and centre in his latest film, A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, an artist portrait of Scottish modernist painter Wilhelmina (Willie) Barns-Graham. The film opens with a photograph of the artist in the later stages of her life, asking us to ponder how much we learn from this image, as opposed to how much we project onto it. Naturally, the follow-up question this prompts is, how close can the documentary filmmaker get to their subject, especially posthumously?

Barns-Graham was born in St Andrews to a family of landed gentry and she relocated to Cornwall in the ’40s where she was to become a significant part of the St Ives group. Cousins addresses that she was majorly sidelined as a woman artist; she also had synesthesia, a neurological condition where sensory information is interpreted in the brain as colour. Colours become associated with letters, numbers, people, places, visual sensations, which we see by being immersed in scans of her notebooks. Page upon page of letters mapped onto shades on intricate, colour-coded grids, shapes, flourishes and mathematically conceived arrangements showcasing a very unique fascination with the natural world. Cousins embraces this vast body of work through lengthy slideshows, accompanied by Linda Buckley’s contemplative string score. Elsewhere, Tilda Swinton reads passages from the artist’s diaries and letters, and art historian Lynne Green, who authored a book on the artist, shares her reflections.

It’s clear that Cousins sees his subject as a kindred spirit, adopting a formal structure akin to Barns-Graham’s freewheeling way of seeing. We even follow the filmmaker as he goes to get one of her drawings tattooed, but in these instances, him being an author who insists so much on the “I” can limit the scope of his work. A sequence in which he suspects that a painting he acquired at an auction might be fake appears as a loose thread.

A visit to the Grindelwald glacier (a big inspiration for Barns-Graham) becomes an opportunity to reflect on the effects of climate change that’s all too brief, as in place of the frozen landscape’s sheer physical presence, Cousins’ camera finds a glacier that has retreated by a mile and is almost gone. But these never feel awkward or shoehorned in. As much as this is an ode to an artist neglected by the annals of mainstream art history, it’s also about another artist’s personal fixation, affinity, and desire to get as close as possible to their subject.

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Milisuthando Bongela’s sprawling, self-titled documentary is divided into five distinct parts, each with a unique sense of direction. Formally, the film as a whole circumvents the need for a structure to contain its constituent parts. Poetry, archive material, collective memory, spirituality, personal histories and memoir are combined to make up a striking cine-essay foregrounded by Bongela’s lived experience as a black South African woman, and a desire to interrogate the dialectic tension between “nation” and “self”.

“The street I grew up in had no name, and is in a country that no longer exists”, Bongela explains in her poetic narration, switching between English and Xhosa. Her background as a writer truly shines, lending a lyrical tone to the film’s exploration of vulnerability and radical honesty. She was born in 1985 in the Transkei, a Bantustan established in 1976 by the South African apartheid regime as the first nominally independent “black homeland” for the Xhosa people. The state would remain internationally unrecognised and diplomatically isolated for its 18-year existence as a colonial testing ground for the illusion that racial segregation was the right path to equality.

For a young Bongela, growing up surrounded only by a black community in a place devoid of “whites only” benches and dogs that were trained only to bark at black people, that illusion felt real and would only rear its ugly head upon the dissolution of borders and her family’s relocation to the mixed city of East London. From that point on, Bongela must reckon with the apartheid regime in its direct aftermath, coming with the realisation that her generation’s lived experience throughout the existence of Transkei was at the core of the regime’s “sordid experiment”, with communities being forced to build a livelihood inside its bowels.

Combining a treasure trove of archive footage, home movies and personal photographs to tell the history of the Transkei, Milisuthando is also a clear love letter to the filmmaker’s own family. We hear from her grandmother as she reflects on lingering wounds, speaks effusively about the Transkei, and even blames Nelson Mandela for its dissolution. There’s a lot here about the ramifications of living outside the structural violence of apartheid, the complicated nature of a misplaced nostalgia, and the impossibility to reach towards a collective black history and memory that hasn’t been defined in relation to whiteness. Bongela really leans into these complexities with great nuance.

The film’s fourth chapter is made up almost entirely of a voiceover accompanied by a blank screen, where a heated exchange about white privilege between Bongela and her close white friend, Marion Isaacs, who is the film’s producer, takes place. It’s a bold choice that doesn’t entirely pay off, stunting the momentum built over the film’s first half. So much of the film is grounded by such a strong subjective position, and shifting the focus in this way to point towards the reverberations of white violence feels abrupt. Still, it does work in exemplifying the political undercurrents of relational power dynamics, and stressing that the personal is always political.

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Taking place during the last weekend of August (August 30th until September 1st) at East London’s Genesis Cinema, the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend announces itself not only as a celebration of everything documentary can and should be, but an expansion of our understanding about what nonfiction can entail.

Although “creative nonfiction” is more commonly associated with works of literature, festival director and co-editor of Subjective Realities: The Art of Creative Nonfiction Film Orla Smith saw in the term a potential to convey a type of documentary that aims to tell a story and express a point of view, rather than to simply educate – films that are “working with the material of real life, but with creative rather than journalistic aims” as she explains. The CNFW was born out of a need to champion creative nonfiction films that challenge how we think about cinema, while also showing audiences the breadth of the genre as something that can be “fun, funny, entertaining, moving, character-focused, DIY [or] political.”

In its inaugural edition, the CNFW brings a menagerie of films to Genesis Cinema, with a strong aim to forge a community of filmmakers and cinephiles on a path towards a cinema that “embraces and investigates the subjectivity of reality” says Smith. Half of the titles on their slate are UK premieres, which provides a rare chance to see them in this country and on the big screen.

The three-day festival has been thoughtfully curated with intersecting threads, one being the importance of embracing lo-fi, DIY filmmaking, as well as that of self-portraiture and the imaginative ways that filmmakers such as Zia Anger (My First Film) have been turning the camera on themselves. Reid Davenport’s I Didn’t See You There, Saeed Taji Farouky’s I See the Stars at Noon, Joanna Arnow’s i hate myself and Charlie Shackleton’s As Mine Exactly display a DIY flair and a cinematic fluency that circumvents the need for money and manpower in order to be expressed.

Noting the significance of including a piece of live cinema within the programme, the festival asks: “If we’re doing away with the rulebook in terms of what constitutes fiction and nonfiction, why not also throw out the rulebook on what constitutes cinema?” In this vein, 24 performances of As Mine Exactly, an intimate piece about Charlie Shackleton and his mother, will run across all three days of the festival, experienced sitting across from the artist and wearing a VR headset. “What’s so cool about it is it makes you realise that there are so many different ways to tell a story that you might not even considered before” Smith explains.

The other half of the programme, concerned with character portraits, provides a rare opportunity to catch Miryam Charles’ exquisite film Cette Maison, which we named one of the best films of 2022, on the big screen. It’s an exceptional and unique film with luscious imagery and atmospheric sound that should really be experienced in a proper theatrical setting, so make sure not to miss it.

Elsewhere, Pacho Velez’s Searchers, Eliane Raheb’s Miguel’s War and Luke Lorentzen’s A Still Small Voice tackle their subjects’ inner worlds through a breadth of means: animation, reenactment, observational footage etc, while the films screening on the festival’s last day tackle political structures through the lens of border crossing, repressive regimes and crumbling healthcare systems. Smith notes that “these films prove that a filmmaker’s expressive tools are also powerful political tools.”

Audiences are encouraged to either experience all the films playing on a particular day or to attend the whole thing, as the festival was curated to be experienced as a whole. For those keen to discover as many creative nonfiction films as possible, the festival provides the opportunity to see everything, with each film only screening once and with no overlaps.

Guest filmmakers Saeed Taji Farouky, Pacho Velez, editor Joe Bini, and producer Kellen Quinn will be discussing their works, and the festival aims for this to take a form that feels different to the standard Q&A format concerned with the circumstances around each film. Instead, Smith is keen for the guests to “delve into their philosophies on nonfiction filmmaking as it relates to the broader themes of the festival”.

“It’s my belief that when coming together to watch and appreciate documentary cinema, we should also extend the care and compassion those films ask of us into real life”, says Smith, who has also organised a fundraising raffle to take place in the cinema’s yard space. This will take place before the last film screens, providing three hours to relax and discuss films with unlimited free tea and coffee, with the raffle raising money for a young trans asylum-seeker to help them afford basic survival costs and save for a more secure living situation. It’s a worthy cause nestled within a programme that has community at its core, and the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend is an exciting new addition to London’s independent film festival calendar.

The inaugural Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend takes place at Genesis Cinema from August 30th to September 1st. You can explore the programme and get tickets at cnfw.co.uk and follow the festival on Twitter/X and Instagram.

As a young girl growing up in the ‘90s, Carla J Easton aspired to be in an all-girl band, but not knowing where to look for a girlband to idolise in her native Scotland, her idols came to her in animated form instead, through the protagonists of American cartoon Jem and the Holograms. The question that arises early on in her voiceover is a pertinent one: Who do we choose to remember?

Taking us on a linear voyage through the Scottish music scene and the bands whose legacies were doomed to the niche category largely due to their gender, Easton and Blair Young’s documentary traces the histories of Scottish women pioneers, asking why they’re not celebrated, let alone remembered, while highlighting their unique relationship to Scotland as well as the politics dictating their futures within a male-dominated, London-centric music industry.

Rather than painting the nostalgic, idyllic picture that we’ve grown to expect from music docs of this ilk, Easton and Young interview the women behind the bands, whose testimonies prove that it’s the industry’s inherent misogyny that stood between them and their careers. We hear from the likes of Jeanette McKinley (who performed with her sister Sheila as The McKinleys in the ’60s, opening for the likes of the Beatles but never getting paid for performing), Sophisticated Boom Boom (later known as His Latest Flame), The Ettes, Lung Leg, Sunset Gun, the Hedrons – their interviews mixed with archival footage from gigs, television performances, studio recording sessions and tours.

Unsurprisingly, the iconic Glaswegian duo Strawberry Switchblade form a big part of the documentary, as we discover that the dark, introspective themes in their songwriting were relegated to the backseat, with the media much more infatuated with their vibrant polka-dotted image and sugary pop sound. Their brilliant hit single after which the film is named, Since Yesterday, led them to become the only Scottish group to break into the UK top ten, peaking at #5, while Switchblade’s Rose McDowall explains that although the song is commonly interpreted as being about heartbreak, the duo actually intended it to be about nuclear war, the Cold War era’s existential dread, loss of innocence and disillusionment.

Reflecting on the commodification of women in music by record labels themselves, the doc also highlights the effects of becoming a mother on women’s careers in music, how labels don’t really know what to do with a girl band especially when it comes to the risk of them becoming pregnant and “messing up” a record deal.

The broad scope, starting from the ’60s and taking us to the early noughties while also showing the DIY grassroots movements being made in the present, means that there’s quite a lot of history to pack into a 90 minute runtime, so unfortunately we don’t get to spend much time with each group and their individual sound. While this is the ultimate price to pay for giving each band equal opportunity to shine, the effect of quickly jumping from one band to the other while a young girl fills her bedroom wall with posters can be a bit jarring. The film works well regardless – it’s energetic, lively and an impactful testament to these women’s boldness and perseverance.

The practice of conversion and aversion therapies marks a very dark chapter in the history of Western medicine. Surgical, chemical and electrical experiments being carried out on gay men held in psychiatric institutions with the intention to alter their sexual orientation were commonplace in Britain all the way up to the mid-1970s. Basing his feature debut on the cumulative impact that these traumatic practices had on queer people, Will Seefried adopts a painterly lens in his poignant dramatisation of this historical wound.

Set in 1920s England, the story follows Owen (Fionn O’Shea), a gay novelist who forms an unlikely friendship with Dorothy (Erin Kellyman) a psychiatric nurse who feels closer to a modern-day therapist, providing emotional solace to Owen as he opens up about his relationship with Philip (Robert Aramayo), a medical student who, convinced he has a “cure” for his “forbidden” feelings, talks Owen into a performing a risky, barbaric procedure on his genitals. The arrival of a third man, Charles (Louis Hofmann) complicates things between the two men even further.

The film effectively jumps back and forth between these two timelines, sharply contrasting shadow and light; the hopelessness within the grey and dismal psychiatric facility and the tender intimacy and passion contained within the warmly lit cottage, Owen’s prior residence (James Baldwin’s evocative Giovanni’s Room being a definite source of inspiration here in how the space is conceptualised), providing a tactful balance between pain and joy.

The camera always moves with intention, whether it’s to capture idyllic compositions of the English countryside or tactile close-ups that linger to accompany the often lyrical dialogue – in one scene, Charles is seen devouring an orange which he describes being “like eating the sun”. This trifecta of queer characters also serves to remind audiences that queerness is far from a monolith or a stereotype: Owen believes in his right to live free of shame, Philip adopts a much more cynical approach opting for suppression, and Charles seems content with living his truth in secret.

Another discovery that the filmmaker made while delving into these traumatic histories was in Tommy Dickinson’s book ‘Curing Queers: Mental Patients & Their Nurses’, which details the friendships that blossomed between gay men and their nurses, many of whom recognised the barbarity of these so-called “treatments” and began to fight the system from within. With the stories of Black nurses working in healthcare at the time being largely unknown, these parallel histories become Seefried’s springboard, intersecting in the form of an unlikely bond.

The picture is beautifully acted overall, yet Dorothy feels more like a vehicle for exposition, and Erin Kellyman isn’t afforded as much room as her male co-stars to display her acting chops. Regardless, this is a confident debut, clearly extensively researched, put together with great care and makes for a welcome addition to the canon of queer period dramas.

One unfortunate reality about the hellscape we find ourselves in today is that there’s barely a shortage of TLC-type documentaries about boys and their toys. There is a whole world of docs out there preoccupied with a dangerous breed of lonely, romantically inept men whose fantasies of female subservience lead them to seek out uncanny facsimiles of women in the form of sex dolls and sexbots.

But there’s also a plethora of films that show this reality for what it is: whether it’s Ryan Gosling dating a life-size silicon doll in Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl, a female cyborg transcending her docile programming to become autonomous in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, or a ScarJo-voiced operating system reminding us of the blurry lines between artificial and authentic empathy and emotional connection in Spike Jonze’s Her, these films show a complex, often ugly honesty about the male psyche and the dangers of replacing women’s autonomy with female images constructed by and for a strictly hetero-male fantasy.

It’s good news then, that Bryan Carberry’s documentary (which even features a montage of the aforementioned films, the subject himself being a big movie buff) seems to appear closer to this milieu of nuanced portrayals. Carberry set out to make a film about the rising levels of loneliness coinciding with the amount of men seeking companionship with sex dolls when his online searches on social media led him to discover Chris, the 36-year-old that would become his film’s main subject.

Chris is a personable, expressive and charismatic character with an interest in anime and sci-fi, living and working in a “depressed” North Carolina town with his roommate Jonah. Though he’s been in multiple relationships and situationships in the past, Chris has failed to find lasting emotional fulfilment with any woman, and so he ends up forging a relationship with what he refers to as an “entity” named Mimi, a silicon doll who he seeks to enhance by proxy of Replika, a generative AI chatbot app that allows them to “communicate”.

Though he is aware of his rather unconventional set-up and the social stigma surrounding it, what lies at the darker core of this story is that Chris has named his “love doll” (he refuses to call it a sex doll and insists that physical desire is a mere footnote in their relationship) after a young woman he was in love with, who was violently killed before he got to express his feelings for her. The subject matter then, starts to become a lot more clear: this is a film about a man grappling with trauma, grief, and a very morally grey pursuit for closure as much as a search for a source of comfort, and the filmmaker excels in putting these concerns front and centre.

However, as *smiles and kisses you* adopts some odd pacing issues alongside the familiar trappings of cut-and-paste talking heads accompanied by fast-paced montages of newsreels and film snippets, it begins to lose momentum towards the end. We lose sight of what the film sets out to say beyond providing an intimate, sympathetic window into Chris’ life. The darker impulses that guide the pursuit of this connection, as well as the misuse of AI in violating women (both real and imagined, both material and symbolic) will hopefully manifest in a future piece of more explicitly feminist filmmaking. But it’s fine! We’ll all be having sex with robots in about 5 months’ time anyway, right?

One of the first feature length narrative dramas written, directed and produced by a Black American woman in the 20th century is Ayoka Chenzira’s debut, Alma’s Rainbow. It’s a vibrant ’90s time capsule centred on a teenage girl who is discovering herself while Strict Mom and Cool Aunt seem to be butting heads in the background. There’s a lot of depth here too, beyond what the premise suggests. The film didn’t receive a wide enough release at the time, as distributors in the ’90s only seemed interested in telling certain types of Black stories. Despite independent cinema having a moment too, plenty of gems (including this one) ended up falling through the cracks.

Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt) is the teenage girl at the heart of the film, who can’t understand why she has to either commit to the tomboyish garb she’s in when performing in a hip-hop dance crew, or conform to a more feminine look. Her mother Alma (Kim Weston-Moran) runs a beauty parlour out of their stunning Brooklyn townhouse, a natural space of community for other women of colour in the neighbourhood. Alarmed by her daughter’s budding sexuality, Alma keeps reminding her to “stay away from boys”. But when Alma’s flamboyant sister Ruby (Mizan Kirby) turns up after a 10 year long absence trying to make it in Paris as an actress, the two end up clashing over what direction they think Rainbow’s life should take.

Fascinated with her aunt’s larger-than-life spirit, Rainbow begins dreaming about life as a performer, even as her dance crew is falling apart due to her male partners becoming more interested in chasing after girls than in rehearsing. Chenzira focuses her energy on putting this matriarchal trifecta of conflicting personalities front and centre. Rainbow, Alma and Ruby are intimately fleshed out and make a compelling core to this extremely stylish picture. By the end of the film, all three women’s journeys are influenced by their relationships with one another, attesting to Chenzira’s ability to explore the complexities Black womanhood in a way that’s charming, subtle but bold all the same.

Sure, the film is rough around the edges – some of the writing feels uneven, some performances feel much better suited to the stage and there are some distracting ADR issues. But if we look past the obvious limitations of a shoestring budget, we find a gift: a lovely, tactile film with such a nuanced depiction of the ever-shifting tides of mother/daughter dynamics, overflowing with love and care as much as it is with a vibrant colour palette and gorgeous textures.

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