How the films of Jem Cohen reveal the true mean­ing of inde­pen­dent cinema

Despite fac­ing sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing cuts, the IndieLis­boa Film Fes­ti­val remains staunch­ly com­mit­ted to show­cas­ing inde­pen­dent films which com­bine the per­son­al with the polit­i­cal. It was fit­ting then that one of this year’s ​‘Inde­pen­dent Hero’ ret­ro­spec­tives was ded­i­cat­ed to doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Jem Cohen, whose obser­va­tion­al por­traits of urban land­scapes have always been deeply polit­i­cal and compassionate.

“Pol­i­tics is always evi­dent in the envi­ron­ment,” Cohen remarked fol­low­ing a screen­ing of his 2004 narrative/​documentary Chain, a film about cul­tur­al era­sure shot across mul­ti­ple anony­mous malls and hotels. ​“It’s in the types of build­ings that are built and the types of build­ings that are knocked down. I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by how peo­ple nav­i­gate these pri­vate recre­ations of pub­lic space. Humans are resilient and I want to know how they adapt to this world.”

The com­plex­i­ties of our rela­tion­ship to place was a recur­ring theme at this year’s fes­ti­val, with the resilience Cohen spoke of best observed in Eduar­do Roy’s Pam­ilya Ordi­naryo, an immer­sive dra­ma set in the sub­al­tern spaces of Mani­la. Exam­in­ing the poor’s right to their own city, it fol­lows a young home­less cou­ple as they search for the trans­gen­der con artist who stole their baby.

Much of the nar­ra­tive is giv­en over to long takes of the pair being still as the world car­ries on around them, with Roy favour­ing con­stric­tive close-ups to obscure them from the ben­e­fits of the city’s urban expan­sion. But it is Roy’s intel­li­gent use of CCTV footage that ele­vates the film. These silent, seem­ing­ly art­less shots cre­ate an eerie sense of help­less­ness, while also under­lin­ing how their pas­sage through these pri­vate spaces is under con­stant con­trol and surveillance.

“No address equals no job, and no job equals no address” claims Aman­da, the young run-away of Cohen’s Chain, who ekes out a liv­ing tak­ing the type of demean­ing jobs that keep unem­ploy­ment fig­ures high. It used to be that a job afford­ed some kind of secu­ri­ty but maybe not any­more? Take the Boli­vian min­ers in Kiro Russo’s debut fea­ture Dark Skull, who trav­el miles to work tire­less­ly in dan­ger­ous con­di­tions. It’s not the risk of gas poi­son­ing or roof col­lapse that fright­ens them, but the fear of los­ing their jobs.

The sto­ry loose­ly charts the expe­ri­ences of an alco­holic young man who is forced to inte­grate into a com­mu­ni­ty of min­ers after the mys­te­ri­ous death of his father. Rus­so switch­es between the reg­is­ters of doc­u­men­tary and fic­tion, cre­at­ing a haunt­ing atmos­phere that invites mys­tery and ambi­gu­i­ty but sad­ly doesn’t always cohere into a com­pre­hen­sive vision. How­ev­er, once under­ground the film comes into its own, with the repet­i­tive nature of the miner’s work con­veyed through a mechan­i­cal edit­ing style that mar­gin­alis­es their human­i­ty; ren­der­ing them as noth­ing more than expend­able cogs in a well-oiled machine.

Else­where, a more nuanced rep­re­sen­ta­tion of work­ing-class life is found in Affon­so Uchoa and Joao Dumans’ Arábia. Refram­ing the def­i­n­i­tion of ​‘polit­i­cal cin­e­ma’ with a touch of frayed ele­gance, Arábia trades the mis­er­ab­lism of con­ven­tion­al social real­ism for a gen­tler human­is­tic reg­is­ter. A polit­i­cal road movie where the pol­i­tics take a back seat, the film fol­lows the exploits of a mys­te­ri­ous migrant work­er named Cris­tiano. His sto­ry is told posthu­mous­ly through a voiceover that charts his tra­vails across South­ern Brazil, mov­ing from one job to anoth­er with­out ever man­ag­ing to get a sol­id foothold on life.

His seem­ing­ly incon­se­quen­tial encoun­ters, includ­ing ram­bling con­ver­sa­tions, impromp­tu musi­cal num­bers and a failed romance, cul­mi­nate in a stream of con­scious­ness made spa­tial; a qui­et­ly dev­as­tat­ing por­trait of life on the edge of soci­ety that eschews facile moral­i­ty to insti­gate anger through empathy.

Brazil­ian films like Arábia, have been favoured by the fes­ti­val over the years due to the colo­nial ties and shared lan­guage of the two nations. This year, in an attempt to counter nos­tal­gic per­cep­tions of Portugal’s colo­nial past, the fes­ti­val includ­ed a selec­tion of films from Macau, the autonomous region of Chi­na which used to be admin­is­tered by the Por­tuguese Empire.

“This is no longer the Macau I know,” claims the pro­tag­o­nist of Tra­cy Choi’s Sis­ter­hood, an exces­sive­ly sen­ti­men­tal, yet high­ly ser­vice­able melo­dra­ma about a for­mer masseuse who returns to Macau after two decades away. Sis­ter­hood com­bines 16mm archive footage of Macau dur­ing Por­tuguese rule with a deeply felt sto­ry of female friend­ship in an attempt to under­stand what makes a place feel like home. A smooth tech­ni­cal pack­age, com­plete with req­ui­site teary-eyed histri­on­ics, Sis­ter­hood mas­ter­ful­ly com­bines Macau’s colo­nial his­to­ry with its present to show what hap­pens when the past becomes a for­eign country.

The major dis­cov­ery at this year’s IndieLis­boa was El Mar La Mar, a sen­so­ry por­trait of per­haps the most high­ly politi­cised stretch of land on the plan­et; the Sono­ra desert. Each year thou­sands per­ish try­ing to access the Amer­i­can dream by cross­ing this aus­tere and implaca­ble ter­rain, but Sen­so­ry Ethnog­ra­phy Lab grad­u­ates Joshua Bon­net­ta and JP Sniadecki’s focus on the desert’s geo­graph­i­cal obsta­cles rather than its legal ones. The result is a frag­ment­ed series of desert vis­tas which cre­ate a kalei­do­scope of men­ace and unease, giv­ing this con­tentious topog­ra­phy a haunt­ing depth and mys­tery that goes beyond the present moment.

These scenes are inter­spersed with accounts of life on both sides of the bor­der. Played out in voiceover, often against a black screen, this sparse­ness gives the viewer’s imag­i­na­tion space to con­jure images far more unnerv­ing than any­thing Bon­net­ta and Sni­adec­ki could film them­selves. The film is effec­tive­ly a non-expos­i­to­ry tone poem that makes the social and polit­i­cal dimen­sions of the land­scape more vis­i­ble by plac­ing them with­in a broad­er con­text, allud­ing to the desert as a metaphor for the cal­lous cul­ture that forces peo­ple to cross it.

El Mar La Mar’s uncon­ven­tion­al approach to doc­u­men­tary epit­o­mised the type of res­olute­ly indie films on offer at this year’s fes­ti­val. Devot­ed to pro­mot­ing films that recon­fig­ure what con­sti­tutes polit­i­cal cin­e­ma by pur­su­ing alter­na­tive lines of inquiry, this year’s IndieLis­boa show­cased what real ​‘inde­pen­dent’ cin­e­ma is all about.