Isolation is the story of Britain’s dispossessed war veterans; over 25% of former soldiers are living on the streets. Told by Stuart Griffith, a former veteran who too was once homeless, the story retraces his steps across the streets of England as he encounters former soldiers on the streets, on park benches, in temporary hostels – strong men, angry men, lost men with tattooed bodies and scarred minds.
It was eerie to watch this shadow-filled movie especially with the unforgiving and jarring live music; we see veterans whose flesh has been gouged out by shells and peeled by fire, who have lost limbs, lost half their mind watching friends die, who struggle everyday to make it to the blessed night. The stark loneliness of civilian life seems to be often the biggest shock for these men so used to the espirit-de-corps of military; Griffith walks us through the despicable unfairness of a system that grinds young men through war in strange lands and almost abandons them when they reach home.
In the post-screening discussion, the directors talked about how their movie was almost a portrait of the netherworld, of people inhabiting two different worlds. They explained how, after a while, a normal person might become immune to war statistics & body counts in the media; their making of this movie was intended to break through that veneer. As one of the directors said “How does society deal with the monsters it creates to fight wars? It would prefer that they be brushed under the carpet but I am going to annoy them”.
The movie ends on a grim note… More veterans of the Falklands war committed suicide than died in combat.
This Way Of Life on the other hand is the joyful celebration of a wild and fragile existence. It follows the life and family of Peter Karena as he copes with the burden of his ‘integrity’, his insistence on making a living off the land in the wilderness of New Zealand. Through the chaos of a burnt home, stolen horses and a raging father, Peter manages to hold on to his beliefs and manages to pull his family and his 50 horses through, barely at times, with him.
A strong man battling nature and malevolent family is cause enough for some spellbinding cinema but watching his brood, all 6 of them, grow up unabashedly, unafraid, untamed becomes a fiery raucous paean to mankind itself. As a 5 year old girl rides horses bareback and a 12 year boy guides fully loaded animals down a steep mountain slope, we gasp and sigh… in relief and in wonder of the impossibility of a man without a job, living in the forest with a woman he loves and teaching 6 lovely children how to lasso horses, swim naked and skin hogs. Amen.
Image sourced from the LIDF website here.
3 comments:
Wished I had caught a few myself. That is a shocking anecdote that more soldiers committed suicide than died in the F.War.
Hope you were at least able to catch some films at The Palestine Film Fest?
Yes I did. I caught Elia Suleiman's wonderful 'The Time That Remains' and another by female directors called 'Thorns and Silk' and 'Masarat'. Lovely short films.
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