‘Close Relations’ explores divisions in Ukraine society
‘In the Shadow’ takes an impressionistic look at Rio’s favela
In “Close Relations,” subtitled “The Ukraine crisis, my family and I,” prominent documentary director Vitaly Mansky uses the prism of his own extended family to explore contemporary divisions in Ukrainian society over the Ukraine Russia conflict and to question what constitutes national identity. For Mansky, whose North Korean-shot doc “Under The Sun” is currently in U.S. cinemas, this film is equally full of absurdities, albeit more personal and less strikingly visual than his previous work. Featuring his mother, a sibling, aunts, cousins, and other family connections, it is more humorously home-movie-like, and also more of a gab-fest. Festivals and broadcasters will want to join the family, although additional didactics and graphics could help Westerners unfamiliar with the area’s complicated history.
Mansky serves as both voiceover narrator and provocative on-screen presence, interpolating between branches of the family who live in Lviv, Odessa, and Sevastopol in Crimea. He even visits the separatist Donetsk region and films with what looks like a secret camera.
Relates
Mansky was born and raised during Soviet times in Lviv, a large city in western Ukraine near the Polish border. He went to study in Moscow, and was just starting his career as a director when the Soviet Union broke apart. As he relates, “I became a Russian rather than Ukrainian citizen simply because I happened to live in Moscow. At the time, it seemed the obvious choice and I didn’t lose much sleep over it. As children of the Soviet Union, we couldn’t imagine a reality in which proper borders would strictly separate the former Soviet republics.”
While visiting his aged mother in Lviv (and trying to persuade her to wait in a long queue to vote), he traces their family background. One grandmother was a Pole from Lithuania. When, he wonders, did Lithuanian Poles become Ukrainians? What comprises nationality? Geography? Blood? Language?
And what about the inhabitants of the Crimea who essentially went to bed Ukrainian and woke up Russian, whether they liked it or not? Mansky examines some of the unintended consequences, such as the Sevastopol sports club that can no longer compete in the Ukrainian leagues, nor may they be part of the Russian championships, since according to UEFA rules they belong to an “annexed territory.”
In first-time filmmaker Dan Jackson’s “In the Shadow of the Hill,” Brazil’s 2011 plan to rid the gargantuan Rio de Janeiro favela Rocinha of drug traffickers in advance of the 2014 World Cup and the upcoming Olympic games falters when one family’s very public protest of their disappeared patriarch goes global. Winner of the Documentary Australia Foundation Award at the Sydney Film Festival, the impressionistic yet resonant work is a natural for social justice-themed events and nonfiction sidebars.
At first, the elite yet now-notorious elite squad known as BOPE is cautiously welcomed in the slum, having cleared out much of the criminal element without a shot being fired. It might have seemed a good idea on paper, but human nature being what it is the authorities end up policing the favela with an iron fist and remorseless demeanor (the cops’ notorious methods were dramatized in the popular 2007 feature “The Elite Squad” and its sequel “The Enemy Within”).
When images of 43-year-old bricklayer Amarildo de Souza being led away in handcuffs by the police are revealed and the man seemingly disappears from the local “pacification base” (read: police precinct), his family takes to the streets with an increasingly highprofile protest movement under the rubric “Where is Amarildo?”
Less a hard-hitting investigation and more an impressionistic look at a vibrant yet intimidating part of Rio that is well off the tourist track, the film has a leisurely structure that relies perhaps too much on establishing shots, impressionistic softfocus treatments of flashing police lights and time-lapse photography. Yet there is a tangible intimacy to the film that holds interest, as the poor but proud participants stake a rousing claim for equality as a pushback to the criminalization of their poverty. “The favela,” says one, “is a consequence of one’s need to survive.”