During Autumn 2024, Scarborough Film Festival staged three screenings of films that speak to our present moment, providing windows into issues and events that are vital to the current state of the world but also reach through time in urgent and poignant ways.
Firstly, on the 24 October, we screened Godzilla dir. Ishirȏ Honda (1954), the original Godzilla outing, celebrating the film’s 70th Anniversary. Godzilla’s legacy endures and while the original Kaiju hasn’t ever really gone away, the franchise’s recent output has been especially notable with popular appearances in both Japanese (Godzilla Minus One, dir. Takashi Yamazaki, 2023) and American (Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, dir. Adam Wingard, 2024) releases in the last year. Going back to the original, however, I found that during the film I was thinking less of Godzilla as an originator of the Action Blockbuster, and more about Christopher Nolan’s time-hopping drama Oppenheimer (2023).
The film has incredible effects for the time period, and the central attack on Tokyo remains hugely impressive and influential. But what really stood out was the time taken for the discussions about how to deal with the creature, should he be studied or destroyed, should the public be let in on the knowledge of Godzilla, how should the weapon able to destroy Godzilla be used and what are the implications of this weapon for global politics. The film is so unflinching in directly addressing and giving voice to the anxieties of Japanese society in the aftermath of the Atomic Bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and further on the Lucky Dragon Incident of 1954 in which US Nuclear fallout infected the crew of a tuna fishing boat and killed a member of the crew, Kuboyama Aikichi. This incident reignited fear of further US Nuclear testing in the vicinity of Japan, and clearly had a direct impact on the opening scene of the film. Godzilla’s emergence is directly caused by Nuclear fallout disturbing his home in the depths of the sea, and he can be read as a direct parallel for the Atomic Bomb, wreaking havoc first on the island Odo, before taking to Tokyo. One scene shows a mother comforting her children by telling them they’ll be with their father soon as they wait for their inevitable death, scenes that portray the inescapability of the destruction and the powerlessness of the Japanese public at the hands of the Kaiju.
The film also reckons with the possibilities of how to respond to Godzilla’s attacks. When Dr Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) shows Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kȏchi) the weapon he has been developing to destroy the monster, initially we witness only Emiko’s scream of horror at his creation. Serizawa’s decision to burn his research and sacrifice his own life in the process of destroying Godzilla is incredibly heroic and his conflicted speech about the havoc his Oxygen Destroyer could wreak if it fell into the hands of governments reflects the conflicted nature of the discussion around Japan’s participation in the war and the horrors of the Atomic Bombs. This film echoes through time to give voice to the powerlessness many of us feel in the face of so many avoidable horrors of war. It serves as a vital reminder that when looking into the past we often encounter equivalences to the present moment and that we are bound to listen to the warnings at the heart of these stories or else be doomed to repeat the past.
Next up, on 29 October, we screened Jumana Manna’s Foragers (2022) in collaboration with Mandy Apple, with all proceeds being donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians. In the light of the current genocide being wreaked upon the Palestinian people by Israel, this film is an important archival piece documenting and preserving experiences of Palestinians, while also shedding light on the way the Israeli state controlled and subjugated Arabs in times of relative peace.
The film examines the ways in which Arabs are excluded from participating in harvesting and foraging plants that are central to their cooking, and have traditionally been harvested by multiple generations. Focusing on this lens through which to explore everyday life of Palestinians allows a deep insight into how their lives are significantly affected by the Israeli occupation on many levels, including financially, culinarily, and legally. The Israeli investigations of the Palestinians ‘caught’ foraging wild za’atar and ‘akkoub are quietly terrifying. The state legally restricts Arabs from trading these plants, with the authorities suspicious of anyone foraging even when simply for personal use. The creation of Israeli ‘akkoub plantations to control the crop and essentially force the Arab people to pay Israeli farmers to access the harvest, aims to eliminate the intergenerational practice of harvesting these crops and restrict the non-Israeli population’s connection to the land.
A particularly illuminating interview with an Israeli farmer highlights the inequalities between the Israelis and Arabs - revealing how Israeli land insurance operates with kibbutzim being fully covered for crop failure due to weather, whereas most Arabs can’t afford land let alone the insurance for it. This film paints a picture of the way in which the Israeli state has been enabled to stack the deck in their favour and against the Arab inhabitants, importantly Manna counterbalances the film by showing ways that the spirit of resistance endures in the face of such systematic oppression. At one point despite being arrested and given the option between a 6000 Shekel fine or 30 day imprisonment, the defendant refuses to bend to the will of the judge. Throughout the film there are glimpses of resistance to a system that is rigged at every level, which provides grains of hope despite the darkness.
Finally, on 3 November, we were treated to a showing of Smoke, Sauna, Sisterhood, dir. Anna Hints (2023) at Bike & Boot. In the week following this screening I know I’m not alone in grieving over the state of women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights, spotlighted by Donald Trump’s second presidential victory. Hints takes a methodical approach to the construction of this film, and allows space to really absorb and sit with the women’s stories. The poignancy of women nakedly (metaphorically and otherwise) having a place to share their experiences with one another: both in the Saunas as a place of collectivity as well as within the film-space as an enduring record of their stories. In a time where we are witnessing the stripping away of women’s rights, this film feels so urgent in how it allows the women to talk plainly about their lives as women navigating the world in all their complexity. It is notable that there doesn’t feel a need for the women to excessively relate to one another or compare their experiences, as women we can be united as a sisterhood by the multiplicity of the female experience. The film doesn’t make any outwardly political statements, but it is impossible not to connect the womens’ stories with the multitudinous oppressions of living under patriarchy and not to think about how it is still a radical act to grant a group of women the space to talk intimately and to share these intimate truths with the world uninterrupted. With the Gisele Pelicot mass rape trial, we may hold space for hope in the way sexual assault is discussed in the media, but this is importantly a break from the norm within the legal system. The film culminates a woman powerfully sharing her personal experience of being raped - societally, rape as a topic seems to be discussed conceptually in the political sphere as a method of garering voter support or in film is most often the inciting incident in a revenge narrative. It is horrific that women actually sharing their stories frankly and publicly remains such a taboo. The way society discusses womens’ right to control over their bodies is rarely discussions which purely involve or are fundamentally led by women, and watching the conversations play out over the course of this film brought this issue to the front of my mind.
The conversations are interspersed with different stages of the smoke Sauna experience such as beating the body with leaves, plunging into a hole drilled through the ice, dousing each other with snow, and scrubbing to exfoliate the skin. There is clearly an emotional catharsis in the telling of their stories, Hints uses the film language to signify this with the physical catharsis of the scrubbing away of dirt by depicting striking images and sounds of the washing and cleansing rituals. Like Foragers, Smoke, Sauna, Sisterhood is vital in its documentation of a moment and the way it enables a collective witnessing of everyday experience.
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