Cultural Highlights #Dave
Creative Producer, Dave Evans, gives an insight into some of his typically wide raging cultural highlights. “There’s so much I could have included here from art exhibitions to museums and podcasts but I wanted to focus on these choices in a little more depth. I come from a film a background and as a director and producer that’s where I wanted to start this week’s blog”
Film
The Beasts (dir; Rodrigo Sorogoyen)
Man With a Fork (dir; Grzegorz Pacek)
I’ve got two choices and one hasn’t even been completed yet! Both of them are antidotes to TikTok culture (I’m currently looking after two kids under 10 so nothing against TikTok but sometimes you like to stop picking at sweets and tuck into a large raw steak). They’re raw, uncompromising exercises in cinema. Every shot gives you a reason to wait in expectation for the next. There’s thought, there’s intelligence and raw emotion in both of them. Firstly As Bestas (The Beasts), a Galician film. We’re used to seeing sun drenched images of Spain but this is the North West, drenched in rain and spattered with mud and sometimes blood. A middle aged couple from France having sunk their life savings into their dreams of the good life find themselves at odds with their neighbours. It’s never going to end well. The beasts of the title are the wild horses that are visually threaded through the story. The locals symbiotic relationship with them and the sheer visceral way in which they tame them becomes a metaphor for the way that each character enters into a battle not just with each other but with the environment itself.
Grzegorz Pacek’s similarly raw, beautiful movie Man With A Fork is still in a rough cut but already this documentary portrait of a man at odds with society and driven further into isolation has the potential to be a cinematic triumph. Made entirely on clockwork cameras and 16 mm film, the landscapes of North and West Wales become characters in their own right as each shot takes us further and further into the mind of our protagonist as he battles society and the harsh environment in which he seeks solace. You’ll be hearing more and more about this film as it reaches completion and hopefully release, later in the year.
Book
On the one hand a revealing tale of growing up in the hallucinatory world of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship in Albania. On another, a reflection on the nature of freedom and the disastrous economic experiment performed on Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you want to partially understand our current refugee crisis, you can do no better than read this book to the end.
Ypi is a London based philosopher who has written about Kant, Hegel and Marx. In Free, amongst the evocative prose and memories, she creates a balance sheet of the pros and cons of growing up in a closed society and what freedom means in a world where raw economic reality often dictates what we can and cannot do rather than state policy.
Theatre
At The Pinter at The National Theatre in London, Semmelweis is Mark Rylance’s labour of love, co-written with Stephen Brown and starring the man himself. I saw it staged at Bristol Old Vic a while ago and I’m looking forward to seeing what changes has been made for the National I thought it was a bit of an odd choice for Rylance to put his cultural weight behind what, on the surface, looks quite an old fashioned, traditional piece of story-telling, but he clearly sees himself reflected in Semmelweis; an outsider, a man full of pride and rage who will not compromise and finds himself cast out for many years. Or at least that’s how Mark saw his younger self. Sparse, imaginative set and lights evocatively sketch out for the audience the period setting in a Viennese hospital and Budapest drawing rooms.
It’s feels very contemporary now with its themes of the importance of science and data and public health. Though I guess none of that would have been apparent when it was first developed. In that sense it’s very much a play that appeals to our current concerns and I’m sure this will resonate with London audiences.