No Life to be Lived | Beyond the Here and Now

Part road-trip, part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Revenir follows Kumut Imesh, a refugee from the Ivory Coast now living in France, as he returns to the African continent and attempts to retrace the same journey that he himself took when forced to flee civil war in his country – this time with a camera in his hand.

Traveling alone, Kumut documents his journey both as the main protagonist in front of the camera, as well as the person behind it, revealing the human struggle for freedom and dignity on one of the most dangerous migratory routes in the world. Revenir depicts a courageous journey and a unique collaboration between filmmaker and refugee; which is not without consequences.

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Presented in partnership with GRAMNet.

“What does it actually mean to describe the whole of society, the state of an era’s consciousness? It doesn’t mean to repeat the words that society uses; it has to be depicted in a different way. And it has to be depicted in a radically different way, because otherwise nobody will ever know what our time was like.”

This quote from Austrian poet and writer Ingeborg Bachmann provides the conceptual framework for Sara Fattahi’s devastating meditation on the war in Syria, as experienced by three women living in exile. The women live in different places, from Damascus to Vienna, but Fattahi binds them together in a cinematic conversation that speaks to the complexity of personal and collective trauma, what it means to live in exile, and the cognitive dissonance that governs the way we perceive conflict. It is a conversation between the interior and exterior – an impossible conversation.

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Director Sara Fattahi will take part in a post-screening Q&A.

Having been evicted from their squats in Barcelona, two groups of Senegalese men float in an apparently endless drift. Unemployed, but proud, they try to make the best of an existence punctuated by harassment from the police and citizens who believe that general Franco would have never allowed such unruly behaviour. It begins to dawn on them that their European dream may be nothing more than an illusion.

Director Pierpaolo Verdecchi captures the rage, tenderness and despair of men existing on society’s b-side. Shot in precise black and white, stylish and observational, the film has the fierce pulse of a hip-hop song and the melancholic feeling of a reggae ballad.

Across the water on the island, four individuals experience the end of life. Showing rarely seen and intensely private events, the film follows the progression of illness for each character and, for one, the last days and hours of life, the moment of death, and after death care. A lyrical, slow cinema description of the temporality and phenomena of dying, this film sensitively witnesses the transition away from personhood.

This is a palliative island, the Isle of Wight, an enigmatic landscape where all around rituals persist. In the hospital pathology lab, microscopic close-ups of cancer show the interior of the bodies, our biology, our creatureliness. Death is presented as natural and everyday but also unspeakable and strange.

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Director Steven Eastwood will take part in a post-screening discussion on issues raised by the film via Skype.

Presented in partnership with The ALLIANCE; Good Life, Good Death, Good Grief; Health and Social Care Academy; Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care.

Produced at the height of Japan’s economic boom of the 1980’s, Yama documents the struggles of unionised day-labourers in the San’ya district of Tokyo, on the frontlines of a violent class war. It is a film for the workers, intended to function as a weapon in their struggle – one that cost director Sato his life. On 22 December 22 1985, during filming, he was murdered by Yakuza gangsters whom Sato intended to expose for their criminal involvement in the restructuring of the job market. A collective of directors headed by Kyoichi Yamaoka finished the film, before Yamaoka, too, was later murdered.

The dramatic circumstances of the production reflect the explosive nature of the subject: exposing the corruption at the heart of the state, and the brutal exploitation of the types of people Marx called the “reserve army of labour”: day workers, outcasts, the unemployed, foreigners.