Pogo Cafe

Monday 19th March; Film, Mesrine, Public Enemy Number One at 7.30pm

The second part of the story of Jacques Mesrine, France’s Public Enemy No. 1 during the 1970s. After nearly two decades of legendary criminal feats Mesrine was gunned down by the French police in Paris. Vincent Cassel wonderfully depicts this flawed and flamboyant legend.

Monday 5th March Film, Waltz With Bashir

Has Israel made a mass, semi-conscious decision to forget about the Sabra and Chatila massacres of the 1982 Lebanese war, in which Israeli forces allowed Christian Phalangist militia into Palestinian refugee camps to slaughter civilians? This extraordinary animated documentary by Israeli film-maker Ari Folman – a kind of fictionalised docu-autobiography – suggests that Israelis have indeed forgotten, in a kind of huge, willed amnesia. But his movie makes an acid-trip down memory lane, and Folman might have created his generation’s very own Apocalypse Now.

Has Israel made a mass, semi-conscious decision to forget about the Sabra and Chatila massacres of the 1982 Lebanese war, in which Israeli forces allowed Christian Phalangist militia into Palestinian refugee camps to slaughter civilians? This extraordinary animated documentary by Israeli film-maker Ari Folman – a kind of fictionalised docu-autobiography – suggests that Israelis have indeed forgotten, in a kind of huge, willed amnesia. But his movie makes an acid-trip down memory lane, and Folman might have created his generation’s very own Apocalypse Now.

Like that movie, it is open to the objection that the overdog’s pain takes precedence over that of the oppressed, but this is a fascinating and often electrifying film in which Folman submits to his very own ‘Nam flashback: a memory of how the Israel defence forces, of which he was a part, effectively presided over mass murder.

Over the past quarter-century, the massacre’s horror has been absorbed and repressed within the Israeli mind, Folman suggests, but only partly. The very concept of Israel’s partial or indirect guilt, established by the government’s own Kahan commission, and therefore a guilt which Israel can concede without admitting to direct culpability, makes it a uniquely painful and potent subject. It’s a reproach drifting just beneath the surface of memory and liable to break cover at any time.

Vivid and horrifying events leading up to the massacres are disinterred by the movie’s quasi-fictional “reconstructive” procedure, somewhere between oral history and psychoanalysis. The film uses hyperreal rotoscope-animation techniques, similar to those made famous by Bob Sabiston and Richard Linklater. Live-action footage on videotape has been digitally converted into a bizarre dreamscape in which reality is resolved into something between two and three dimensions. Planes and surfaces stir and throb with colours harder, sharper, brighter than before. It looks like one long hallucination, and therefore perfect for the trauma of Folman’s recovered memories.

The director, in grizzled middle age, is visited by a guy with whom he did military service. Over a beer, this man complains that he is plagued by a recurring dream about being chased by 26 savage dogs, and explains how the dream relates to the 1982 Lebanese war – a period to which he has hardly given a second thought before now, but which has mysteriously returned to plague him. Folman realises something that his friend can hardly believe: he simply cannot remember if he was anywhere near the camps, and can’t remember anything distinctly about the war at all. He does not appear to be suffering from amnesia, particularly, and neither are there definite, sharp-edged holes in his memory. It is just a fuzz. So he goes on a journey to track down his old comrades; he asks them to remember, and hopes these memories will reignite his own.

His only real memory is no memory at all: it is a dream, a reverie, in which he and his fellow teenage soldiers emerge from the sea and wade on to the beach at Beirut: like a slo-mo parody of a military landing, or like the evolutionary progress of torpid, amphibious creatures. His interviewees tell him ferociously real anecdotes of blood and terror – the enemy’s and their own – anecdotes which put his dream into perspective. One remembers being on a marine troop transport, where he fantasised about a giant naked woman taking him away while the others were killed. Another tells him of a young Palestinian boy attacking his unit with a rocket launcher in an orchard: a bizarrely beautiful, almost bucolic episode. Another is almost killed in an ambush, and escapes by swimming out to sea in the moonlit night, round a headland, and miraculously rejoins his unit. How much of this really happened?

Little by little, Folman sneaks up on the subject of Sabra and Chatila. Was he there? Right there? A hundred yards away? Three hundred yards away? Or nowhere near? His confusion testifies to the fog of war, or perhaps to the fact that this fog is created as a way of not facing up to war-guilt. Or perhaps it shows the individual’s dissociation from news events, his disoriented, perspectiveless feeling that what he sees on TV had nothing to do with him: history was happening somewhere overhead or behind his back.

Finally, the film puts him right at the scene of the crime, and there is a bold shift from animation to TV news footage. I am not sure quite what to make of this shift, and have an uncomfortable feeling that it is an aesthetic error, and a tacit concession that the animation techniques used until that moment are lacking in seriousness: once the tragedy is directly broached, they must be abandoned. A minor loss of nerve, perhaps. Never mind. This is still an extraordinary film – a military sortie into the past in which both we and Folman are embedded like traumatised reporters.

Monday 27th Feb. Film, Shed Your Tears and Walk Away

“Shed Your Tears and Walk Away is a harrowingly honest portrait of young lives wasted in Hebden Bridge, a picturesque northern enclave beset by drugs, alcoholism and tragic self-destruction. It may sound unappetising, but Jez Lewis’s documentary is something special – a poetic, powerful and often very painful film made with a raw intimacy that bespeaks harsh truths.” Mark Kermode, The Observer

Monday 20th Feb Film, Visions of Abolition: From Critical Resistance to A New Way of Life

Visions of Abolition is a new feature length documentary about the prison industrial complex and the prison abolition movement.

Part I, “Breaking down the Prison Industrial Complex” weaves together the voices of women caught in the criminal justice system and leading scholars of prison abolition, examining the racial and gendered violence of the prison system. Our film features the work of Susan Burton, a formerly incarcerated mother who established A New Way of Life, a group of transition homes for women coming home from prison in South Los Angeles (39 mins).

Part II, “Abolition: Past, Present, and Future” documents the recent history of the prison abolition movement through the organizing efforts of Critical Resistance and explores the meaning of abolitionist politics. By focusing on the collaboration between Critical Resistance and A New Way of Life, (known as the L.E.A.D. Project) the second half of the film unfolds a vision of abolition in practice (48 mins).

Interviews in the video include: Melissa Burch, Susan Burton, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Dylan Rodríguez, and Andrea Smith

Monday 13th Feb Film, Everlasting Moments

Sweden, early 1900s – an era of social change and unrest, war and poverty. A young working class woman, Maria, wins a camera in a lottery. The camera grants her the eyes to view the world, and empowers her over several decades to raise and nurture her family of six children and an alcoholic, womanizing and sometimes violent, although ultimately loving, husband.

Film Night Mon 6th Feb, Guerrilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst

In 1974, a militant, fringe political group kidnapped teenage newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. In the months that followed, Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation Army (S.L.A.), and their constant, paramilitary audio messages dominated headlines globally.

Using a treasure trove of archival footage and audio material, this American Experience film follows the bizarre saga from the establishment of the S.L.A., through the kidnapping, Hearst’s conversion to her captors’ cause, and the bank robberies and shootouts that followed.

First-ever interviews with two surviving members of the S.L.A. provide insight into the politically charged times and the reasons why the group embraced revolutionary rhetoric and a terrorist agenda. As the spectacle unfolds, and journalists camped outside the Hearst home become consumed by the story, the film begins to explore questions about the role of the media and the ethics of broadcast journalism.

Film Night, The Unloved, Mon 30th Jan

Samantha Morton’s directorial debut is a powerful single drama about a young girl growing up in a children’s home. Working alongside acclaimed writer Tony Grisoni, Morton has created a fictional script that gives an honest and intimate child’s-eye view of the care system in the UK.

Filmed in Morton’s hometown of Nottingham, the two young leads – Molly Windsor as Lucy, and Lauren Socha as Lauren – were cast through a series of open auditions held across Nottingham schools, drama groups and at The Television Workshop, which Morton herself attended aged 12.

Film Night, If A TREE FALLS, Mon 23rd Jan

In December 2005, Daniel McGowan was arrested by Federal agents in a nationwide sweep of radical environmentalists involved with the Earth Liberation Front– a group the
FBI has called America’s “number one domestic terrorism threat.”

For years, the ELF—operating in separate anonymous cells without any central leadership—had launched spectacular arsons against dozens of businesses they accused of destroying the environment: timber companies, SUV dealerships, wild horse slaughterhouses, and a $12 million ski lodge at Vail, Colorado.

With the arrest of Daniel and thirteen others, the government had cracked what was probably the largest ELF cell in America and brought down the group responsible for the very first ELF arsons in this country.

IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT tells the, remarkable story of the rise and fall of this ELF cell, by focusing on the transformation and radicalization of one of its members.

Part coming-of-age tale, part cops-and-robbers thrilller, the film interweaves a verite chronicle of Daniel on house arrest as he faces life in prison, with a dramatic recounting of the events that led to his involvement with the group. And along the way it asks hard questions about environmentalism, activism, and the way we define terrorism.

Drawing from striking archival footage — much of it never before seen — and intimate interviews with ELF members, and with the prosecutor and detective who were chasing them, IF A TREE FALLS explores the tumultuous period from 1995 until early 2001 when environmentalists were clashing with timber companies and law enforcement, and the word “terrorism” had not yet been altered by 9/11.

This Revolution, Film Monday 19th Dec 7.30pm

In this politically charged homage to Medium Cool, a photographer covers the urban guerrilla war on New York streets during the RNC.
Amusing if nothing else!

The Bubble, Film Monday 12th Dec 7.30pm

The movie looks at young people’s lives in Tel Aviv through the POVs of gays and straights, Jews and Arabs, men and women. It all begins when Noam, a young Israeli soldier, serves in the reserve forces and meets at a check point a Palestinian young man called Ashraf.
Following an incident during which Noam misplaces his ID card at the check point, Ashraf shows up on the doorstep of the apartment that Noam shares with a gay man and a straight woman. How will the meeting affect all of their lives?