A Film a Week - Remember My Song / Sjeti se moje pjesme

 previously published on Cineuropa

The collapse of Yugoslavia remains a subject of interest across generations in the states that succeeded it after the wars of the early 1990s. The central question is how the proclaimed ideals of “brotherhood and unity” in the former socialist regime morphed into nationalist hatred and quasi-tribal wars. Artists across different disciplines have sought to capture this transformation through metaphors drawn from a range of settings, such as ethnically mixed villages and towns, workplaces that employed large numbers of people, and communal spaces – bars, clubs, inns and taverns once widely frequented.

One such tavern that operated in the 1980s stands at the centre of the documentary Remember My Song, directed by Jelena Bosanac and Tanja Brzaković. The film has just premiered in the regional competition at ZagrebDox. The opening scene shows an ageing man reciting a poem about his village of Jugovo Polje beside its road sign. The rhymes are somewhat laboured and the worldview expressed in the poem is slightly naive, evoking the idyll before the war and portraying the war itself as a kind of demon that appeared from nowhere. The scene is followed by material from a personal archive, showing the immediate consequences of the events of the early 1990s: a bare structure too large to be a single residential unit, yet not large enough to function as an industrial building. In the ruins, completely ransacked years earlier, a woman finds an old LP record, and the time capsule opens.

It takes us to a tavern called Jablan, meaning “poplar”, which operated in a village near a busy road. Its owner, Nikola, was a capable businessman, and his wife Milena had a gift for managing staff. During the day, endless meals were prepared for passing truckers, and countless coffees from the first espresso machine in the area were served. On weekend nights, the tavern turned into a folk music disco, with live performances by aspiring singers and even established stars brought in from Belgrade. The owners and staff lived in harmony and unity, while the guests kept spending their money and “producing” countless anecdotes. Questions of nationality were never raised – until nationalism reached Jablan through its guests in the early 1990s, when politicians were stirring people up for war.

However authentic it may be, the story is quite typical, touching on all of the familiar cornerstones of idyll and nostalgia. What makes Remember My Song stand out, however, is the filmmakers’ approach. Much of the film is built entirely from found VHS footage and photographic material re-shot by Željko Felbar and edited by Hrvoslava Brkušić, using experimental forward and rewind techniques to create a psychedelic effect. This effect is further enhanced by the use of (Serbian) folk music, which taps into deeply rooted emotions and is further distorted by being sourced directly from ageing VHS recordings. Over this material, Milena, the waiters, the cooks, the musicians and the regular singer Haska narrate the stories they have collected.

The filmmakers’ decision to shift their approach once the tavern’s golden years are over, turning to a series of shots of empty spaces filmed by Boško Đorđević, proves to be another effective choice, as the stylistic contrast works very well and highlights the consequences of war and destruction. In the end, with Remember My Song, Bosanac and Brzaković may be telling a well-known, oft-told story, but they do so in a captivating manner.

A Film a Week - The Moon Is a Father of Mine

 previously published on Cineuropa

George Ovashvili’s fifth feature film, The Moon Is a Father of Mine, which is premiering in competition in Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival, might serve as a prime example of the use and slight subversiveness of the “Chekhov’s gun” principle in dramaturgy. The principle dictates that, if the firearm is displayed in the first act, it must go off and set up a plot twist in the third. In the present film, the rifle is presented more elaborately at the very end of the introduction before enjoying two additional moments in the limelight in the hunting sequence which takes up most of the second act, and with the firing of the rifle opening the film’s final act.

Grade school student Toma (newcomer Giorgi Gigauri) is living with his grandma Sidonia (Kira Andronikashvili) in a town apartment in the autumn of 1991, while his mother is living and working away in Moscow. Toma has a knack of getting into trouble, especially when he decides to stand up to a group of bullies who are targeting him for having revealed his feelings to his classmate Anana. Tired of scolding him for his behaviour, the grandmother accepts the boy’s father Nemo (seasoned actor Givi Chugaushvili) taking care of Toma in his ancestral village in the mountains.

Once in the mountains, the father and son begin to get to know each other better. Toma learns that his father was imprisoned for killing a poacher while working as a ranger, and Nemo tries to pass on some wisdom to his son. But as soon as they start to trust each other implicitly, destiny separates them again.

The trouble is that, in Ovashvili’s movie, the third act seems a little anti-climactic and therefore not particularly purposeful, but that’s only one of the film’s issues. The magic realism introduced by the filmmaker at a given point never gets a firm foothold since it clashes with the social realist air established in the opening sequence. Slightly wooden acting and declamatory deliveries of stilted or falsely poetic dialogue, over-use of the shallow focus trick in Christos Karamanis’ cinematography, which only occasionally opens up onto the unique, breath-taking and eerie mountainous landscape, and Josef Bardanashvili and Jakub Kudlác’s unnerving, strings-heavy score which becomes omnipresent, regardless of what’s going on onscreen, also hamper the film. Eventually, the sluggish pace established in the editing phase by Kim Sun-min serves as a painful reminder that this could have made for a good short film rather than a pretentious, uneventful feature-length movie.

In fact, all these afore-mentioned “mandatory art house elements” seem to have been frivolously added to the mix in order to draw attention from selection committees and juries, rather than representing any kind of auteur vision. We also get the impression that, with The Moon Is a Father of Mine, Ovashvili is trying hard to regain the status he enjoyed after his first two feature films, The Other Bank (2009) and Corn Island (2014). It’s possible that there’s more to it, but ultimately the movie is written in a coded language only accessible to certain viewers. In this sense, the opening card informing us that we’re about to watch a true story, and the closing explanation that these events were followed by the Georgian Civil War, feel more like an attempt to wrap things up than a loose metaphor on freedom and self-sufficiency, the necessity of patriotism, or the importance of family roots.

A Film a Week - Whites Wash at Ninety / Belo se pere na devetdeset

 previously published on Cineuropa

In 2018, Slovenian writer Bronja Žakelj debuted with her autobiographical novel Whites Wash at Ninety, in which she, as a character, has to deal with a troubled childhood and youth during the 1980s and early 1990s, as she has to contend with tragedies and the passing of her loved ones. It became a bestseller in her home country and was later translated into eight more languages. Seven years later, the film adaptation of Whites Wash at Ninety by Marko Naberšnik, who also co-wrote the script with the author, has premiered at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival, in the Open Air section.

Young Bronja (Mei Rabič) is growing up in a vibrant household with her brother Rok (Jaka Mehle), mother Mita (Tjaša Železnik), father Janez (Jurij Zrnec) and grandmother Dada (Anica Dobra). Just as she is about to finish primary school, the first tragedy strikes, as she loses her mother to cancer. The second happens just as she finishes secondary school and starts her further studies, as she (with Lea Cok taking over the role) gets diagnosed with lymphoma. Shortly after she gets better, Rok (Žiga Šorli plays the part in adulthood) gets killed in a fatal climbing accident, and Dada gets ill and eventually dies. Bronja cannot count on much support from her father, who seems only to be passionate about politics and the end of communism, nor from her friends or boyfriends, who can scarcely cope with the intensity of her life. However, luckily, she always has something to live for.

As he demonstrated in his previous works, Marko Naberšnik is capable of handling multiple characters and directing actors as an ensemble (Rooster’s Breakfast), pulling off an epic story unfolding over an extended period of time (Shanghai Gypsy), and paying a lot of attention to period details, even when working on a tight budget (The Woods are Still Green). The latter is definitely the strongest point of Whites Wash at Ninety, since there are no flaws to be found in Maja Moravec’s production design, Nadja Bedjanić’s costumes or the authentic props deftly captured in Max Sušnik’s cinematography. On the level of each individual scene, Naberšnik showcases his precise execution.

The trouble, however, stems from the script, as the director and the novelist do not manage to “translate” the story or the emotions it carries from one medium to another. With the help of editor Milica Jelača, they have tried to introduce flashbacks to break up the chronological order and make the film appear more cinematic, but some more serious errors can be observed in the almost non-existent character development, as most individuals come off as borderline caricatures relegated to a single trait or emotion for a certain portion of the film, or even for the duration.

Lea Cok does her best to convince us of Bronja’s resilience and determination to go on with her life, and Tjaša Železnik channels Mita’s ethereal energy in the flashbacks, but Jurij Zrnec repeatedly hits the same notes as Janez, and Serbian star Anica Dobra seems miscast for the role of Dada. Dobra does her best, as she usually does, but the role of a caring granny does not suit the naturally glamorous thesp.

In the end, Whites Wash at Ninety might be viewed as way less than the sum of its parts, some of which are outstanding. It’s an example of something getting lost in translation between the media of literature and cinema. However, the status of its source material might make it at least a minor hit on home turf, despite the movie being so clunky.

A Film a Week - When the Phone Rang / Kad je zazvonio telefon

 originally published on Cineuropa

"It happened in a country that no longer exists, except in books, films and memories of those born before 1995", we are informed by the off-screen narrator (Slavica Bajčeta) at the very beginning of Iva Radivojević’s third feature When the Phone Rang, premiering in Locarno's Cineasti del presente competition. The phone rang one Friday, at 10:36 in the morning, the year was 1992, and it completely changed the world our protagonist and the filmmaker’s alter-ego Lana (Natalija Ilinčić) had existed in so far. In the first repetition (of ten in total), she is informed by the voice from the other side that her maternal grandfather died of a heart-attack. For her, that call announced the war, so soon enough, she and her family left the country.

The narrator explains that the urgency of the call lasted for days for Lana, and we soon get the meaning of that phrase. In the next repetitions, Lana receives different phone calls from different people, always on Friday and always at 10:36AM. We learn a thing or two about her fascination with her older sister's classmate Vlada (Vasilije Zečević), a punk-rocker and an anarchist who doesn't care about death, a glue-sniffer and her protector on the street; but also about the routine spying games she plays with her younger neighbour Jova (Anton Augustin), following and imagining the lives of strangers; having to say goodbye to her friends Mirjana and Olja; the words of love she shares with Andrijana; the troubles her father might have gotten into by dealing with a mobster nicknamed “The Barking One”; and the army background of her paternal grandfather…

It seems enough for several lives, or at least several periods of a life, and all of it rings true individually, but combined, these events only make sense as a mix of fading memories. But Radivojević’s film is not about the “facts” of the lives of the characters around Lana – instead, it is interested in the memories that tend to be produced at an inflationary pace at formative periods, and which often melt together with others into a confusion where only vague sentiments and emotions can be remembered. In this case, it is the memory of the collapse of Yugoslavia in a bloody war, and of the lives of ordinary people slipping into uncertainty, riddled with crime and poverty during the 1990s, as seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl.

Filming in the city of Novi Sad and finding locations that have not changed much since the 1990s, Radivojević makes a powerful and intelligent film that hits on both the cerebral and the visceral level. As was the case with her earlier works, she maintains full control over the material, working as her own editor, production designer and casting director. Regarding the latter, she really picked interesting, talented newcomers she could work with easily, especially Natalija Ilinčić, whose interpretation of Lana going through different emotions is simply stellar, further highlighted by Radivojević’s close-ups. 

The use of 16mm stock in Martin Dicicco’s cinematography might seem as risky, counter-intuitive move since the format is usually associated with more pleasant memories, but it brings another layer of dreaminess where colours get enhanced in a seemingly natural way, and the graininess of the material creates a foggy, blurry look corresponding with fading childhood memories. In the end, When the Phone Rang is an extremely well-made film, a concentrated and stimulating viewing experience that stays with the viewer.

A Film a Week - The Wrath of God / Božji gnjev

 previously published on Cineuropa

Kristijan Milić returns to the Pula Film Festival with one more genre piece, based on a novel by Josip Mlakić centred around the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. The filmmaker once again blends different genres into a smooth and consistent amalgam with The Wrath of God, which has just premiered in the Croatian competition of the national festival. As a genre piece with universal appeal, one could expect specialised festivals to book the film in the future, but it could also fare reasonably well in the regional theatrical distribution landscape.

Central Bosnia, the winter of 1993. Ilija (Ivo Krešić, glimpsed in Milić’s previous feature, Dead Fish), formerly a maths teacher, is now a miner in the Croatian forces fighting against the Bosnian ones. His war routine is broken when he hears the news that his brother Goran was killed in action in a village several kilometres behind enemy lines, without his death having any strategic significance for the struggle. Furthermore, there is no official record of the action, and Goran and his comrades received a cash payment in US dollars for their involvement.

With the help of his contact in the intelligence department Zoran (Marko Cindrić, in his third collaboration with Milić), Ilija sets off on a mission to uncover who sent his brother and his comrades to death and what for. The conspiracy he discovers leads all the way to Zagreb and the shady deals between both sides of the conflict, with military and political officials involved. Ilija's investigation threatens to turn into revenge…

The war, or at least its echoes, serve as a primary topic in Milić's films, but the filmmaker's approach is always different in terms of genre. His debut The Living and the Dead (2007) blended WWII and the 1990s war in a mix of war movie, mystery, fantasy and supernatural horror. The subsequent Number 55 (2014) told the true story of the Croatian War for Independence as a pure high-octane war-action movie, while Dead Fish (2017) was an Altman-esque account of post-war human destinies in a divided city. This time, the foundation of the war movie is converted into a thriller with its sub-genres, such as the crime procedural, the film noir and the 1970s-style paranoid conspiracy thriller.

As a director, Milić makes all the calculated, smart moves to keep the plot going and intriguing for the viewers throughout the 110 minutes of its runtime. The pacing is usually moderate, which gives the sense that the plot breathes, while the shifts in genres are underlined by shifts of styles. For instance, the colour palette of Mirko Pivčević’s cinematography moves from the greys and browns of the war landscape to more bluish tones more suitable for an urban noir, and the music by Andrija Milić turns from old school orchestration with some acoustic guitar highlights, to something more jazzy and progressive as the plot moves to a different genre.

The same level of meticulousness can be observed in Milić’s choice of actors from the ranks of those he knows and has previously directed. Ivo Krešić as a leading man in a genre piece might have seemed a risky idea before, but the actor seizes the opportunity to prove himself capable of such an endeavour. He gets a lot of help from Marko Cindrić who plays Zoran in a very grounded fashion, Slaven Knezović (also the producer of the film) who plays Ilija's benevolent commander, while for Domagoj Mrkonjić in the role of Ilija's closest buddy could be a career-starting performance.

In the end, The Wrath of God is a slightly retro but never outdated, fulfilling genre movie experience. This kind of rock-solid but never flashy genre piece has become more and more of an oddity today.

A Film a Week - The Land Within

 previously published on Cineuropa

Kosovar-born, Swiss-based filmmaker Fisnik Maxville (also known as Fisnik Maxhuni) has forged a career in shorts and in documentaries of various lengths and styles. His two feature-length works Zvicra (2018) and Fin de Partie (2020) explored the relations between his two countries through the lenses of Kosovar-Albanian immigrants living in Switzerland and the Swiss coach taking the lead of the Kosovar national football team, respectively. After taking a break from such topics and exploring an intriguing reversed-colonialism scenario in Nostromo (2021), Maxville comes back to his homeland with his feature-length fiction debut, The Land Within, which has just premiered in Tallinn Black Nights’ First Feature Competition.

After fleeing Kosovo during the 1998/99 war and spending the ten subsequent years in Geneva, Remo (Florist Bajgora, very active in different cinematic contexts of late) gets a call from his cousin Una (Kosovar-French actress Luàna Bajrami, of Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Final Cut fame) to ask him to go back to his native village, which is now in ruins. The family patriarch, Skender, is dying, and as the only male offspring of the clan, Remo has to be there at the time of Skender’s death. Most of the inhabitants of the village were killed during the war, so the team of international scientists is excavating the mass graves, trying to identify the victims, for which they need the help of Una, Remo and the rest of the surviving villagers. Other than that, the roads to the village have been closed owing to signs of wolves being present in a nearby forest, and the frequent power cuts put Skender’s life in danger.

But as the bodies are exhumed, family secrets also surface, starting with the fact that Remo was not just the adopted son of the family, and that Skender ruled the clan with an iron fist, fuelling the ethnic tensions and mixing personal conflicts with ethnic ones in a highly combustible cocktail. How can the surviving extended family members live with one another and with themselves now that these buried secrets are coming to light?

Maxville takes his time in plotting and revealing the mystery, relying on several flashbacks all set in the 1980s, with each bearing its own title. However, the plot seems a little too convoluted, even by the standards of the topics dealt with here: family secrets, the 1990s Balkan wars, ethnic tensions and coping with guilt. The dialogue, written by Maxville in collaboration with Mathilde Henzelin, is at times a tad too cryptic and at others very poetic, while sometimes it sounds like political slogans, so it serves more as a distraction than as a way to prove a point.

However, Maxville is better at being a visual storyteller than a verbal one, and he is more than capable of channelling the atmosphere of hopelessness and being stuck in a state of limbo between a traumatising past and an uncertain future. He utilises the cinematography by Yann Maritaud, with its muddy-grey colours and different lighting and granulation for different timelines, to paint a picture of his characters’ emotions, while the cues in Nicolas Rabales’ score elicit emotions within the viewer, sometimes too directly, but never in an obviously manipulative way. Maxville should also be praised for his work with the actors, especially with the leading duo tasked with channelling complex emotions. Both Bajgora and Bajrami have arguably offered up their best acting performances to date in The Land Within.

A Film a Week - Riders / Jezdeca

 previously published on Cineuropa

Dennis Hopper’s classic Easy Rider (1968) is never mentioned by its name, but is referred to several times as “The Movie” and certainly serves as a source of inspiration for Dominik Mencej’s debut feature Riders. This smooth sub-genre blend of a road- and coming-of-age movie may never get as brutal in its exposure of the hostile environment and petty human emotions as Hopper’s film, but it definitely has something to say about growing up and being repressed by life events and a small environment.

Riders premiered in the Features Competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival, which might serve as a fitting springboard for a film with such tone. Further festival bookings and regional distribution in arthouse theatres could be expected in the foreseeable future.

Tomaž (EFP shooting star Timon Šturbej) and Anton (Petja Labović) are best friends and “entry-level” bikers, driving around on their mopeds through their village in the northeastern part of Slovenia. While Tomaž has the reputation of the good boy and hard worker who repairs machinery in his small shop in the village, Anton is more of a bad boy, constantly getting in trouble with authority figures in his home and at work. Both of them grew up fatherless: Tomaž’s father died, which left the young lad under the constant look of his mother’s (Nataša Matjašec Rošker) vigilant eye, and Anton never had one.

It is the spring of 1999, and the guys decide to modify their bikes into choppers and to take a weekend trip to Ljubljana to visit Anton’s girlfriend Tina. The surprise visit does not turn out to be a good idea, but along the way they pick up runaway nun Ana (Anja Novak) and meet with the old, wise biker Peter (Serbian star actor Nikola Kojo in yet another bravura performance, this time in a really subdued mode). So the duo grows into a quartet (alas, on three bikes only), and the weekend trip to Ljubljana gets prolonged first to an extended weekend towards the coast, and then to a longer trip all the way to Split in Croatia and maybe even to Međugorje, which in Yugoslav countries has the status of a Marian sanctuary and a miraculous place.

For Tomaž, the trip represents an opportunity for first love and also a stage of life in which he won’t be dominated by his mother or his best friend, while for Anton it serves as a chance to understand his anger and deal with it accordingly. For all three young ones, it is an attempt at freedom.

Riders is a very detailed and polished piece of cinematic work in almost every aspect. Samo Jurca’s measured sound design respectfully adds the engine rumbles and natural noises throughout. The visuals captured by cinematographer Janez “Zu” Stucin, edited in a rhythmic succession by Andrej Nagode and Matic Drakulić, are stunning, bathing in the casually brought out details of a certain time and place thanks to the production design of Iva Rodić and the costume design of Katarina Zaninović.

The fine details can also be spotted in Mencej’s and Boris Grgurović’s script (the impending solar eclipse, the end of the century, the fear of the “Millennium Bug” in one paranoid miniature executed by late actor Peter Musevski playing a truck driver in his last screen role), and also in the different dialects all the actors are coached to speak. Strictly on the level of acting craft, Riders also shines, thanks to the natural, spontaneous chemistry between the young members of the cast and the acting authority Kojo provides playing a wise man on a motorcycle. This is a ride to be taken and felt with both heart and mind.

A Film a Week - Even Pigs Go to Heaven / Nosila je rubac črleni

 previously published on Cineuropa

We already know that all dogs go to heaven, but what about pigs? They are among the most intelligent animals, somewhat trainable, but they also have strong personalities and can certainly be adorable in movies. So, 27 years after George Miller’s Babe, let us meet another very special pig, this time from the Zagorje region in Croatia, in the third feature film directed by the Croatian-American filmmaker Goran Dukić, best known for his debut, the American indie film Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006). Even Pigs Go to Heaven premiered in the national competition of the Pula Film Festival, and its next festival booking is just around the corner, at Motovun.

Narrated by the all-knowing Jesus Christ on the cross, and set in the hilly area of Zagorje (north of Zagreb) in the year 1991 when the war broke out in Croatia, Even Pigs Go to Heaven plays out like a light-weight comedy-drama about pigs and their human companions dealing with the hardships of life, love and the well-meaning but sometimes overbearing environment. Our human protagonist is Anka (Nataša Dorčić of You Carry Me fame), a smart and energetic village woman that has to handle various situations on the verge of scandal. Firstly, her goddaughter Ančica (Tesa Litvan) is about to get married to a hopelessly naive and seemingly mentally challenged man she does not love, while she carries the baby of the village priest in an environment where everybody knows everything and everybody judges everyone, but where discretion is an imperative of sorts. And secondly, her beloved sow Beba (voiced also by Litvan) really has the itch to mate for the first time. Anka has Rocky, a dark-haired, big and strong boar in her mind as a perfect match for Beba, but the trouble is that Rocky is Serbian and what would the village think of her while the young lads get mobilised into the army to fight against the Serbian aggression?

Silly as it seems, Even Pigs Go to Heaven is actually a love letter to the unique landscape and the unique mindset of Zagorje that combines religiousness, alcohol, hard work and humour with some of the nasty habits of gossiping, being judgmental and getting in conflicts with neighbours, friends and family members for various petty reasons, masked by a blend of sex, romance and the comedy of human nature that sometimes turns into a proper drama. Spiced up with emotions, decorated with cutesy animation and dressed as a period piece, detailed in terms of music and sound design, this film is certainly a demanding production that manages to keep the local taste while telling a universally understandable story.

The script written by Sandra Antolić (Branko Schmidt’s Agape and Once We Were Good for You) is quite detailed, rich in local flavours regarding customs and the dialect, while the basic story of human and animal love as overseen by a benevolent figure works in pretty much any language, both as a folktale and as an observation of human behaviour. Nataša Dorčić carries the film with zest and grace. On the technical level, everything is a top notch effort, like Branko Linta’s postcard-worthy cinematography, Iva Rodić-Novak’s production design, Morana Starčević’s costume design, animation and visual effects done by the co-production company Vertigo Visual and especially Ivana Fumić’s smooth editing, while the soundtrack consisting of jazzed- or rocked-up traditional songs (and those newly written that sound traditional) by the band Cinkuši is absolutely fitting. It seems that Even Pigs Go to Heaven was a meaningful project for all involved and that Dukić, who can certainly make a cute, feel-good yet extravagant film, also had a good time directing it.

A Film a Week - Unsilenced

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Falun Gong is a new religion movement that originated in the early 90s China during the boom of “qigong” spiritual practices. It declares itself as a non-violent movement with an emphasis on compassion. Its practice consists of meditative exercise sessions and it combines the teachings from Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism with some minor influences of Christianity and Islam. Not all the messages the movement transmits are beyond any doubt (its disapproval of homosexuality and racial or ethnic mixing are especially questionable), and it recently allied itself with various far right organizations and media outlets in the US, which does not shed a nice light on it. Nevertheless, the movement is the best known as a victim of the violent crackdown conducted by the Chinese communist government in 1999 (for being too massive for Party to handle it, therefore threatening the state-imposed Marxist ideology) in which those who practiced Falun Gong were imprisoned, tortured and even executed.

The second feature film of the Chinese-American filmmaker Leon Lee (otherwise more active in the realm of documentaries) called “Unsilenced” is a political thriller based on true events that tries to chronicle the crackdown and the suffering of Falun Gong devotees. It was shown on some minor festivals in the US last year, while this year it saw some limited distribution. 

As film opens at Tsinghua University in Beijing (albeit the movie was mostly filmed in Taiwan), we meet the quartet of university friends who get involved with Falun Gong and get in the trouble when they try to complain against it being outlawed, risking their career prospects and chances for social advancement in process. They are arranged in two couples, with Wang (Wu Ting) and Li (Tao He) taking the role of the main one, while Jin (Shi Chenghao) and Xia (Chen Yingyu) serve as the supporting one. All of them (well, almost) would get in trouble with the law by the end of the film and they collectively serve as one of the three points of view for the audience.

The second point of view belongs to the journalist from Chicago and the veteran of Tienanmen coverage Daniel Davis (Sam Trammell of “True Blood” fame) who stumbles upon the story of the crackdown and tries to push it to his outlet back home, while his bosses are more interested in the efforts made by the official China to enter the World Trade Organization. There is also a hint of romantic relationship going on between him and his assistant / protege Min (Chinese-Canadian actress and activist Anastasia Lin with whom Lee collaborated on his previous illegal organ trade-themed feature “The Bleeding Edge” from 2016), who might be the government’s infiltrated agent. Finally, the third perspective is given to the government represented by the ruthless secretary Yang (Taiwanese actor Wang Tzuchien) who is tasked with the whole crackdown operation.

There is no shortage of the films that problematize the attacks on the human rights performed by the Chinese government and communist party, both in documentary and fiction forms. “Unsilenced” starts as a decently told story that is not that known to the world-wide audience, and it is admirable that it is not completely Western-centric, although it features the well-known cliché of the noble American journalist willing to expose the violation of human rights in an authoritarian country. For a good part of it, it is a highly functional and clearly structured political thriller, highlighted with solid production values, decent cinematography and competently “invisible” directing which, along with the choice to hint at brutality rather than showing it, makes it almost an ideal buy for the TV networks.

The cracks start to show around the half-point and it originate from the screenplay written by Lee, Ty Chan and Jocelyn Tennant. It looks like the trio has run out of the ideas how to picture the crackdown and the struggle by the quartet on one side and Daniel on the other without repetitions, so they decided to raise the stakes. One particular sequence, in which Lee’s water breaks while she tries to escape from the police as she was denounced by the shop owner, seems like an overkill, while all the dramaturgical solutions towards the end are forced. Problems with the dialogue that goes more and more to direction of characters shouting political slogans put the cast under considerable pressure and even some sloppiness regarding the props (cell phones and cars tend not to look like they came from 1999) becomes apparent.

In the end, it is clear that the mission of “Unsilenced” was more political than artistic, with the focus on communicating the message and condemning the authoritarian Chinese government and communist party, which is more than legitimate. But paired with the modest scriptwriting and filmmaking skills of the film’s creative team, it pretty much backfires, seeming transparently fake even when it is not.