8 Features

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Cannabis Medicinal
Argentina
61 mins
Sara Silvia Kochen, Emiliano Serra

The beautiful pioneers of cannabis research in this solidly enlightening documentary inspire and console us, and it’s not just the autism and epilepsy mums who’ve done so much to end prohibition. At its heart is a university research chemist whose brief ‘The Scientific Basis of Cannabis’ is covered by special governmental permits. “We don’t know the chemical difference in our brain between when we’re happy and unhappy,” he says, explaining the compound he’s named Anandamide from Sanskrit Anandamida, “The mechanism of cannabis is a great mystery.” Other memorable lines: “It’s not a gateway drug but a gateway to exit addiction. That’s part of the demonising” (a hospital doctor); “It was the first time he found something funny” (mum whose autistic son laughed for the first time in his life); “You can’t be healed if you aren’t stoned!” (old hippie grower fed up with criticism of side effects of cannabis).
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It’s A Wrap
Israel
56 mins
Amit Miller, Miri Urman

Haya invites family and friends to a farewell party. Farewell to what? “To life,” she says cheerfully. She has terminal cancer and wants to die on her own terms, with dignity. It’s getting hard to swallow so she’s stopped taking food and medicine, though she does smoke enormous joints (“Cannabis…Good”) and still paints her lips red. Her determined stoicism is both wise and natural, and reasonable. “I’m afraid of pain and nothing else,” she says firmly. She would die as cheerfully and logically as she has lived, as we soon learn from her secrets. There is no fear of death to poison love, and it is miraculous to watch this indescribably lovely grandmother musician take leave of this world by making peace with all in it. An extraordinary documentary and the opposite of depressing.
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Blood Rain
Thailand
73 mins
Achitaphon Piansukprasert

If true cinematic horror is achieved with an instinctual understanding of movement, of shapes that change in eerie ways, that instinct is on grand display here in ‘Blood Rain’, another tactile soul-sucking experience from the man who brought us the also wordless and grandiose ‘Gagee: The Lady’s Tale’. The innocent but near-obscene images will stay with you: the shrouded humanoid carcass with red eyes; the crescent moon or lunar eclipse gaping and shutting its malignant grin like a hungry mouth in the sky; a fluorescent purple python with distended belly escaping from an ornate golden frame, empty of portrait; the giant red vampire lips that shimmer and suck away our life force. All of it plays to camera, in your face, no escape, with unrelenting intensity. As shapes shift and things become, as shadows grow alive and pulsate with intent energy, it dawns that the film has captured the textures of the primeval Thai animist worldview, where the elementals are very much alive, and reaching out for you.
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Pain of Silence
Thailand,
77 mins,
Christopher Janwong McKiggan, Poomphong Kumwong

Three years gone by, no gig. The pandemic lockdown has plunged traditional performance arts into a coma, with many accomplished Isan musicians forced to take up construction jobs. The star is Boonma, a blind Isan phin master who taught himself from hearing others play. He has to be carefully led to a red plastic chair on a makeshift stage, but then plays like an angel from heaven. We see him perform seated on a junk cart pushed by his not young wife; the COVID mask has scrounged up his face, giving him a sour and bewildered look as he fists up the coins at an intersection. We see a mermaid puppet swim in air among ancient ruins. But all interviewees are wonderful, the real thing, in this beautifully-shot labour of true love that dives headfirst into the meaning and purpose of art. Where is the Ministry of Culture in all this? In a priceless scene an official at the Cultural Promotion Dept details his massive workload: cultural promotion of course, royal ceremonies as well, and “contemporary art is important too—we can’t just stay the same.”
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Take Your Space
Czech
76 mins
Karolína Alvarez

There’s not one bad frame in this beautifully filmed and edited art documentary, a headlong dive into Mexican graffiti and street art. Initially a Californian import, it has grown hybrid Olmec roots, in a country so welcoming to wall painters who fit neatly into its Mexican School of Muralism. The soundtrack is anti-colonial rap: “Remember, Gringo, you stole our land! You call me illegal but you took everything!” Where “clouds of money bring showers of bullets”, rapping, skateboarding, graffiti and street art are not just cool but an authentic act of defiance. How much richer the world is that these people have chosen to paint walls instead of blowing them up.
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Winter In Pluto
US
56 mins
Riley Teahan

We dive into the navel of the iconic torso of the Venus de Milo, and find Disco Persephone/Aphrodite alone in her throbbing pink 1970’s prison cell/boudoir, gazing out of her round window and sometimes her pink TV, at lovers on earth. This is a contemporary dance movie, Bollywood on shroom with bodies of every shape and colour. The dancing is awesome and inspired. The last sequence has flashing lights, not good for epileptics, who scientists say should smoke more weed.
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Ujan Story
Armenia
70 mins
Shahram Badakhshan Mehr

It starts with a quote from Job (“I’ve heard of Thee by ear. Now I’ve seen Thee.”) so you know it’s about the trials of life in Armenian Kalava, but the dreamy realism is delicious. Yes, life is tough but also joyous. So what? If that’s not stoned, what is? The movie’s textures are pleasurable. A grape-festooned courtyard; fruit ripening on trees as old people tend to them; bare feet squishing grapes to make wine; a highway through empty brown fields where the very earth seems charred by war; a child in pink with dark intense eyes. Families are separated by migration to safety and security in Fortress Europe and life is kind of sad but, always, beautiful, and the neon crucifix atop the hill that has gone out is restored to light. A rare film that takes you almost physically there on a magic carpet.
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American Pot Story: Oaksterdam
US
96 mins
Ravit Markus, Dan Katzir

A serious film about seriously brave and lovely people, this important documentary on the history of the legalisation campaign in the US is the untold story of the ‘Mayor of Oaksterdam’ Richard Lee, a ganja activist in a wheelchair (“Business is my activism”; “Break the law to change the law”; “Control and tax pot”), as told by his sidekick and successor Dale Sky Jones. The dark climax is reached when no cops are available to stop a mass shooting at a Christian university nearby because they are all busy staging an overkill FBI raid on Richard’s Oaksterdam University pot business school. Dale: “This is about decriminalisation as much as legalisation. People are arrested, their lives destroyed.” The raid and the expensive lobbying campaign to end prohibition ruin them, but by putting the ganja debate into mainstream politics, “We can honestly say we’ve left the world better than we found it.” Indeed you have, and thank you.
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[All reviews by Dr Alice Skinhead unless otherwise stated]

3 Short programs

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SHORTS 1: GREEN SPIRIT
(Total R/T 79 mins)

Lava Lamp
Slovenia
10 mins
Aljosa Toplak
Yes, it’s 2 dudes watching TV and a lava lamp, but it’s authentic and mesmerising. Some magical realism with a glass of juice as images of ancient cathedrals play on TV. As one of them says of the lava lamp, “So simple, yet it completely takes over you.”

The Green, Green Pyramid
Thailand
23 mins
Tony Cheung
Rock climbers in Thailand tackle the ultimate ‘Sailor Moon’ route up a steep pyramid of limestone and jungle in Kanjanaburi (pronounced “Ganja-naburee”). This riveting cinematic feat by the Climbing Documentary Project is one hell of a way of getting high.

Blessed Demon
Thailand
11 mins
Kitpasit Tinnachartarak; Peerapat Singtothong; Thanarote Khaopare
The former Kingdom of Ubon, Northeast Siam, AD 1900. It’s a battle between Good and Evil as men in modern colonial military uniform shoot down uncivilised savages. This is likely the first cinematic depiction of a movement that officially-sanctioned historians have named ‘Gabot Phee Boon’—the Blessed Demon Rebellion. Now we know its t rue uncorrupted name: Gabot Phu Mee Boon’—the Blessed One Rebellion. ‘Blessed Demon’ is no cutesy animation; the art is accomplished and beautiful. This hybrid expressionist video art cum counter-propaganda scream is a cry for historical justice and accuracy. The fascistic propaganda machine is chillingly, and realistically, portrayed, as is the courtroom presided over by a faint white tiny figure that fades away.

Pah Paisal
Thailand
10 mins
Pichai Pusumpun
Beauty and sincerity lift this film far above your average ‘green Buddhist propaganda’. Lovingly filmed with a nice rhythm reminiscent of walking meditation, it’s green, it’s healing and it’s good to watch when you’re stoned.

The Door
Romania
13 mins
Alessandro Cubicciotti
A man walks through a door and is caught in a loop. Horror and transcendence together suggest this is a film about the bewilderment of sudden death, and ultimate surrender. Wordless but utterly crystalline.

Head In The Clouds
Germany
12 mins
Moritz Göbel
As black and white and German as it gets in the best sense, visually a contemporary baby Metropolis. A man wakes up to find himself larger than life. The disconcerting yet potentially sublime experience of sudden death or instantaneous enlightenment, whichever suggests itself to your heart: You know Me; You know Who I Am: Who You Are.
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Shorts 2: FREEDOM & HYPOCRISY
(Total R/T 122 mins)

Fatih The Conquerer
Turkey
15 mins
Onur Yagiz
A Middle-Eastern freedom screamfest deriding sexist attitudes with devastating precision and abandon, as a group of young men sneak a joint in a parked car at a wedding.

Ate OG
Phillippines
17 mins
Kevin Mayuga
COVID lockdown finds Ate the housemaid stuck 24/7 with 2 spoilt brats trapped at home. They run her ragged and we hate the rich. But weed is discovered in the boy’s room, and shared. Unpredictable and surprisingly non-judgemental.

Housemaid
Thailand
20 mins
Prach Rojanasinvilai
While class is the major theme of Thai melodramas, this more realistic and much more accomplished exploration of class relations is a shamelessly sincere tearjerker for anyone who’s ever bonded with that special nanny and any nanny who’s ever bonded with that special child. No, there’s no weed in it, but it goes with the Filipino film about a housemaid that does have weed in it.

The Heart Through Deserts Runs
Germany
15 mins
Gary Vanisian
Both the oppressed: a perfect specimen of a woman athlete for whom sex is verboten, and the headless black monolith behind a desk oppressing her, have resonance beyond a German filmmaker’s creepy, poetic nightmare, as she changes into a scarlet velvet dress to masturbate in a poppy field.

That Smell
Thailand
11 mins
Nuttorn Kungwanklai
Someone tapes a joint under a—school desk? No, it’s a hallway table in a young couple’s home. The man is sneaking out to smoke it in their nothing backyard. She sniffs his clothes for tell-tale scents, tells someone on the phone, “It’s suspicious, he’s suddenly using perfume.” The long takes and determinedly mundane surroundings aux serious farang art films may put some off, but what it says about hypocrisy is a very Thai punch in the gut.

Lucia
Slovakia
24 mins
Mikulas Krispin Izdinsky
An actress turning 50 with a phone-addicted daughter and a martial arts fanatic husband suddenly realises “I don’t have to worry about what people think of me.” Time for new things. ‘Lucia’ has a lovely light touch and oozes charm.

Purple Dalha
Thailand
20 mins
Prim Patnasiri
“I’ve never heard my mother speak her mother tongue,” says a woman whose parents’ cross-cultural romance was opposed by their families (Thai and Malay, presumably Buddhist and Muslim). Some lovely images in this stream of consciousness, ripped open by her cry from the heart: “I want to leave this bastard country!”
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