ALSO SHOWING
A collection of letters sent by victims of the soviet Gulag system to their families shows that love really can transcend anything, writes Vin Arthey
Moxie (15) ✪✪✪✪
Parks and Recreation star, Saturday Night Live alumni and Russian Doll co-creator Amy Poehler takes on the teen movie with typical smart-withheart brio in Moxie, an adaptation of Jennifer Mathieu’s best-selling YA novel from 2015 about a quiet teen who takes inspiration from her mother’s 1990s Riot Grrrl past to challenge the toxic masculinity that’s been allowed to run rampant in her high school. Hadley Robinson takes the lead as Vivian, the sort of kid who – along with her best friend Claudia (Lauren Tsai) – has a tendency to keep her head down so as to remain off the radar of the school’s ruling cliques. But when new girl Lucy (Alycia Pascual-pena) challenges her shrugit-off passivity after Vivian witnesses her being harassed by the school’s entitled football star Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger, perfectly cast), she takes it upon herself to counter the everyday misogyny of school life by publishing an anonymous cut-and-paste zine modelled after the underground feminist punk movement of the early 1990s that was spearheaded by the band Bikini Kill and their Riot Grrrl manifesto. An analogue novelty in a digital world, it takes off and soon Vivian finds herself as part of loose coalition of similar girls and allies ready to use their own newly discovered voices to overturn the status quo. Poehler (who also plays Vivian’s mother) has a great knack of being incredibly sincere and incredibly funny and both qualities apply here. But while she slyly presents the film initially as a kind of less guy-centric spin on late 1990s teen favourite 10 Things I Hate About You, there’s also a touch of early 1980s cult outlier Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains in Vivian and co’s notgoing-to-take-it-anymore attitude. Netflix
Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché (15)
✪✪✪
Moxie inspiration Kathleen Hanna pops up again in new documentary Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, this time waxing lyrical about the late X-ray Spex frontwoman whose enduring Oh Bondage, Up Yours! punk anthem laid the groundwork for a lot of what Riot Grrrl later became. The film examines some of that influence and offers great archival footage of her incendiary performances, which stand in marked contrast to her shy, sometimes bewildered reaction to the condescension she frequently faced from the media, the record industry and the male-dominated scene as she took an often-ironic stance on the issues that mattered to her as a young, mixed-race, working-class woman who pushed against the strictures of punk as much as she helped define it.
However, the documentary, which has been co-directed by Edinburghbased filmmaker Paul Sng and Poly Styrene’s daughter Celeste Bell, is really an investigation by the latter into who her mother was as she attempts to reconcile her own memories of her difficult upbringing with her status today as the custodian of a pioneering feminist punk icon’s legacy. modernfilms.com
Wander Darkly (15)
✪✪✪
As a new mother dealing with a difficult pregnancy and the aftereffects of a serious car crash, Sienna Miller does a good job of holding together the sometimes intriguing, sometimes hokey Wander Darkly as it tries to pull off a tricky narrative balancing act. Upending expectations at almost every turn, writer/director Tara Miele’s early decision to shift from a rootedin-reality film about an unhappy couple unravelling amid the stress of parenthood to a Carnival of Souls/ Jacob’s Ladder-style psychological drama is certainly a bold one, especially as it plunges us into Miller’s unreliable headspace while her character, Adrienne, tries to figure out why her fractured, post-crash reality keeps altering in strange ways. On digital demand
As the USSR and the Soviet Union Communist Party began to disintegrate in the late 1980s, Memorial was formed – a group of anti-totalitarian Russians and Ukrainians determined to promote the truth about the Soviet past and to perpetuate the memory of the Gulag victims. Now, Memorial gives legal and financial help to many of these victims along with researching and publishing information about those sent to the camps or shot.
The archivists who prepared this collection of letters and memories of 16 victims chose fathers rather than mothers because although there are many letters from women in the archives, the women were more likely to survive and the focus here is on what in several cases turned out to be the final communications between fathers and their children. Astoundingly, these stories are not miserable. Yes, they mention inadequate shelter, clothing and food, but the overwhelming impression is of these men’s love for their families.
They illustrated their letters with drawings, cartoons or beautiful pieces of art sometimes created only from scraps. Some had office jobs and could obtain paper to make small books for their children. In their letters all of them stressed to their children the importance of education and the need to pursue learning. One man sewed a letter to his wife, daughter and son, with a fishbone needle into a fragment of bed linen and had it smuggled out of prison by a released cellmate who hid it inside his shirt collar.
My Father’s Letters is beautifully produced, with photographs of the men and their families, colour reproductions of the original correspondence and appendices giving details of individual prison camps, Soviet judicial bodies and secret police agencies. There is also a section outlining Memorial’s mission. Georgia Thomson’s superb translation is supported by useful footnotes, with information about writers, places, politicians, Russian language and culture.
Apart from one father, a vocal Trotskyist from the peasantry, the men are doctors, teachers or managers and if not committed to the regime at least they are good citizens, despite resenting the injustices dealt them and appealing against their arrests and punishment. They often assure their families that their arrests are the result of mistakes, but Memorial’s research shows how these innocent men had been targeted: cases include a chance remark to a friend, drafting a complaint against being passed over for a promotion at work and another, president of the All-russian Society of Stamp Collectors, whose lists of stamp catalogue numbers were assumed to be encrypted messages for foreign spies.
Alongside the analyses of these appalling injustices are examples of the power of family love that the Soviets were trying to extinguish. One son says, ‘‘I walked up to the
train carriage to give Father a teapot and some food for the journey. He deliberately let the teapot fall so that I would pick it up and he could squeeze my hand.’’ One of the letter writers to survive arrived at his daughter’s workplace in 1946, grey haired, ill and stooping. It was only when he spoke that she recognised him. He had journeyed for many days and despite his hunger had carried with him a half-litre jar of red caviar “for Mama. She always so loved red caviar and it is difficult to get hold of these days.”
Another said, "Do you know what saved me? Letters. The connection with home.”
The importance of the work Memorial does is clear in what what one returnee said to his teenage daughter in 1946: “there will be a time when it will no longer be those in prison or in exile who are shamed, but those who allowed this to happen. We will be considered heroes…this will happen in your lifetime.”
Bear Grylls continues his occasional series of taking a famous person out into the wilderness and subjecting them to all kinds of hell. In this episode, it’s former rugby union player and World Cup winner Jonny Wilkinson who heads out to Dartmoor to be pushed to his physical and mental limits.
In addition to the physical challenge, Bear talks to Wilkinson about his life, achievements, key life moments, as well as his hopes for the future. And of course, Bear will be sourcing some wilderness survival food to sustain them.
Tuesday, STV, 8pm