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Tales of Truth in Modern ChinaJia Zhangke’s films all comment on the state of modern China; his latest, A Touch of Sin, could be the most controversial yet

There’s a lovely meta-moment towards the end of Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures. Somewhat self-

deprecating, or perhaps just a bitter-tinged piece of social commentary, a DVD hawker is propositioned on the street: “Do you have Xiao Wu?” No, the man is told. “Platform?” Again no: the director’s Hometown Trilogy is apparently out of stock. Perhaps this is how Zhangke’s works have themselves remained unknown pleasures to the Chinese mainstream, living mainly through festival screenings and the international art-house scene. Presenting China’s modern truths appeals more to a niche market of global cineastes rather than those who live it.

From this trilogy, to the beautiful visual portrai-ture of Still Life, and the blended reality of 24 City, Zhangke has provided illuminating visions of Chinese life. Still Life is painted over the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam project, where thirteen cities and hundreds of smaller conurbations were submerged, resulting in the relocation of 1.3 million people. We drift alongside the personal stories of an estranged husband and wife, their alienation and dislocation synchronised with the extended population. Striking images of a condemned town are beautiful and con-flicted, more at home on a gallery wall than cinema

screen. A building suddenly taking off like a rocket accurately reflects the surreal truth of the situation.

Bleak reality is later contrasted against the glossy eighties fantasy of A Better Tomorrow, playing on a small dirty screen. Weary workers on one side, men crushed between the cogs of capitalism and com-munism; Chow Yun-Fat on the other, confident, cool and lighting a cigarette with a burning one hundred-dollar note. This was followed in 2008 with 24 City, a merging of documentary and scripted scenes, telling the story of a collapsing state factory and way of life. The fictional moments are well camouflaged in the main, leaving the viewer to pray over which were staged, some stories too excruciating to contemplate as reality; a mother separated from her child, never to be reunited; insignificant causalities dwarfed by a country in inhuman flux. Truth and fiction are interchangeable, the artificial almost hyper-real, like Wang Bing’s The Ditch. Both directors prove there can be human truth in poetry as in reportage.

Zhangke brings bold new truths to GFF14 with A Touch of Sin, making its Scottish premiere. His latest film remains true to modern China while exploring it in a more extreme, violent aesthetic. The film is made up of four loosely-interlaced narratives taken from

actual news stories on Chinese internet site Weibo; individual expressions of anger against a system demanding inhuman social change. A politically provocative work then, even for him, but one which he hopes will reach mainstream Chinese audiences, mainly because he is now working within the system, co-producing with the state affiliated Shanghai film group. Let’s hope that broadening his audience will not dull his edge, nor bring him entirely into the fold alongside Zhang Yimou (until his recent illicit child scandal). It is more interesting for Zhangke to stay closer to outlaw social commentators Jie Han (Mr. Tree) or fellow 6th Generation and temporarily banned filmmaker Lou Ye (Summer Palace).

If there are eight million stories in the naked city, then what of China? A billion? As a mine owner in Li Yang’s stunning, banned début Blind Shaft remarks, China “Has a shortage of everything but people,” and each one a separate story leaving filmmakers much inspiration to choose from.

22 Feb, Cineworld, 8.30pm 23 Feb, Cineworld, 12.45pm

Words: Alan Bett

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ReviewsSalvoDirector: Fabio Grassadonio, Antonio PiazzaStarring: Saleh Bakri, Luigi Lo Cascio, Sara Serraiocco

Blue RuinDirector: Jeremy SaulnierStarring: Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves

20 Feet from StardomDirector: Morgan NevilleStarring: Lisa Fischer, Tata Vega, Merry Clayton, Claudia Lennear, Darlene Love

Cutting a scene a little long can render it dull; somehow, elongating it further leads to intrigue. So what of Salvo, a Sicilian hitman tale, which stretches acts out like dough, testing but never quite breaking?

From a standard opening of bullets and bloodshed it morphs in pace and format in unexpected directions. Mafioso Salvo (Saleh Bakri), while pursuing a target, encounters the man’s blind sister and an existential crisis is sparked from a miracle. There are underlying notes of The Killer, with a saviour blind to inner ugliness, but with the added harsh realism of Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah.

Problems lie in the characters themselves, infused with such meaning it detracts from their truth. These sparsely scripted abstracts refuse to allow us in. Visually confident with a notably bare sound design of introspective silences, ticking clocks, a solitary barking dog, it’s a film sure of its movement, strolling like a lion. But it may prove divisive: audiences are often uninterested in pure grace and beauty. Occasionally we want to see tricks. [Alan Bett]

22 Feb, Cineworld 17, 1pm

Morgan Neville has roped in an impres-sive rostrum of superstars as talking heads for this lively music doc – Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and Sting all pop up – but it’s the lesser-known backing singers, who festoon the fringes of these male rock-stars’ stages and add soul to their records, who’ll be the reason why you rush to Spotify to hear more of their songs post-credits. Not that the likes of Lisa Fischer, Tata Vega, Merry Clayton, Claudia Lennear and Darlene Love will get any royalties, though. The film shows how these powerhouse singers have all been screwed over, one way or another, by misogynistic record producers. Love’s recounting of how she found out that her recording of He’s a Rebel for producer Phil Spector would be credited to another act, The Crystals, when she heard it on the radio is particularly blood-boiling.

20 Feet From Stardom never feels bitter, though. It’s the opposite, in fact: a celebration of these kickass music heroines and their hair-raising voices. Of the numerous joyous moments in the film, watching Clayton while she listens to her original recording of Gimme Shelter, where she knocked Jagger’s socks-off with her blistering delivery of the chorus (‘Rape, murder! / It’s just a shot away’), takes some beating. [Jamie Dunn]

22 Feb, GFT 1, 3.20pm 24 Feb, GFT 1, 4pm

Blue Ruin is a revenge film filled with enough unpredictability to keep your attention and violence that serves the story rather than being gratuitous - though it does, at times, make for diffi-cult viewing. Not for the faint-hearted, the audience is forced to watch a revenge spree clumsily executed by the inexperienced main character, and all that it bloodily entails.

Macon Blair plays lead Dwight, a detached loner, homeless and living

hand-to-mouth out of an old Pontiac on an abandoned beach until some news calls him home and motivates him to seek vengeance for past crimes against his family. The plot thickens when he realises his car is registered at his sister’s address and his actions may have endangered her young family. Blair’s performance is emotive and convincing, and he carries the film for large segments without dialogue, framed by the stark, haunting

cinematography.Blue Ruin is New York filmmaker

Jeremy Saulnier’s writing and directing debut, and an ambitious one at that, with crowdfunding topping up produc-tion costs. Saulnier delivers his tense, bloody film with such swagger that it earned him the International Critics Prize at Cannes last year. [Yasmin Ali]

22 Feb, GFT 2, 11.00pm

Salvo

Blue Ruin

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Mackenzie’s CrooksScottish director David Mackenzie on being real in his powerful prison drama Starred Up

When Jack O’Connell is a world-conquering star, they will talk

of this film. In Glasgow-based David Mackenzie’s Starred Up, the 23-year-old from Derby plays Eric Love, a lethally violent, deeply traumatised aggressor-victim who is starring up – that is, moving from a juvenile facility to a maximum security penitentiary, where society’s most dangerous men live shoulder to shoulder.

In the film’s opening scene, Eric is processed. His belongings are screened, he’s stripped down and searched, and then gruffly shown to a single cell. Once alone, he sets straight to work. In a practiced routine, he places two bottles of baby oil and some knitting needles in easy reach. Then he burns the end of a toothbrush with a cigarette lighter and secures the blade of a disposable razor in the melted plastic. Then he hides his lo-fi weapon in the casing of the strip light.

Each tool, we deduce, has a very specific purpose. When the guards descend on Eric in riot gear, he covers himself with the oil, slips from their grasp as they pin him against the cell wall, and holds the needles against a guard’s neck, threatening to stick him like a pig. Later, when a feared inmate wrongs him, he waits for the man to call home, approaches him from behind and slices his cheek in two. Then he prepares to sever the man’s lower lip while asking him for information. In a cinematic culture that promotes sensationalism, it’s unerr-ingly believable.

Starred Up never leaves the confines of the Belfast prison where the film was shot in sequence. O’Connell’s Eric, Ben Mendelsohn’s Nev, Rupert Friend’s well-spoken therapist Oliver, or indeed any of the prison’s inmates, barely talk of life beyond the prison walls. They communicate plenty, but in the primal, half-decipherable patois that men tend to descend into when shorn of the opposite sex. Yet we’re told, in the

most skillfully cinematic way, who these men are, where they’ve come from, how they ended up here, and why they must be so comfortable with violence.

“Big expositional scenes tend to stink of big expositional scenes,” a surpris-ingly nervous Mackenzie says when we meet in London. “So I don’t like scenes that are purely there to provide back story. I prefer the process of accumu-lating information. It feels more real – that’s how you get to know people. So it was important for me to try and make something that was authentic, or felt authentic at least.”

Or felt authentic at least – a key phrase there. Starred Up is a prison drama in the socially-minded tradition of British cinema. It was written by Jonathan Asser, a first time screen-writer who used to work as a therapist in Wandsworth prison – “who basically is the Rupert Friend character,” ac-cording to Mackenzie. It was filmed in sequence, and is shot with rigorous clarity and purpose – long-held track-ing and sequence shots with barely a spare edit. If any film can be called realist, it is Starred Up.

Yet Mackenzie declares himself suspicious of realism: “Because it’s not real. It is as bogus as everything else. This is a fiction.”

Mackenzie, 37, admits to struggling through a day of doing press. He seems a deeply intelligent man driven by a sense of uncertainty. He often takes a few tries at composing an answer, trip-ping over his words or pausing to stare at the floor before a response comes rushing out. It’s pretty clear he hates being interviewed. Yet, for all the divas in this industry, he’s an honest, open host, insightful in the details he gives.

That attitude, you get the impres-sion, works well on set. While he’s a veteran of nine feature films, he’s hardly a household name. But just look at the Scottish talent he has champi-oned: Young Adam was a breakthrough role for Tilda Swinton; Hallam Foe was

the emergence of an adult Jamie Bell. He’s directed Ewan McGregor in two of his most underrated roles – as a malcontent, deviant writer in Young Adam and as the rakish, caring every-man in Perfect Sense, Mackenzie’s sci-fi parable set in present-day Glasgow.

Now he has handed a first leading role to O’Connell, the Skins actor who, later this year, will play the lead in survival story Unbroken, directed by someone called Angelina Jolie. Maybe she got hold of an advance copy.

“Jack auditioned for the part, along with all the bright young things of the

British acting scene,” Mackenzie says. “But he was so far and away the strong-est; his demeanour, the way he seemed to understand the material. He made it clear to me that he connected with the character, that he seemed to know who Eric Love is. When we first met, he said that if a couple of things had gone dif-ferently for him, he could have ended up in not dissimilar circumstances.”

The script came through a fortuitous route – his friend taught Jonathan Asser on a creative writing course. “We had the raw bones of what we ended up with,” he says of reading Asser’s first draft, “but the dialogue was quite a lot more extreme. We had to soften a lot of it to make it half-comprehensible. But there was a lot of anger there, and a lot of honesty.” Irony abounds here, as the American press are calling for Starred Up to be subtitled.

This is a deeply violent, deeply trou-bling film, but it’s hopeful. It shows Eric learning that trust might be possible, that everyone isn’t out to get you all of the time, that some people are willing to watch out for you without asking for anything in return. The revelation takes root after Eric joins a group-therapy session led by an intense, conflicted outsider (brilliantly played by Friend), in which long-termers are encouraged to talk about how they feel. The story, to all intents and purposes, is taken from Asser’s own experiences.

“Asser was a bit of a pioneer in Wandsworth prison, because the control-problem prisoners weren’t given any sort of treatment for their violence,” Mackenzie says. “You had to prove you weren’t violent to get any sort of therapy. But Asser went in there and sat down with the men considered the most dangerous. He was told there was going to be blood on the walls, but there never was. He was able to do that, essentially, because he identified with these guys in some way.”

When they started rehearsals, Friend was caught up in the United States, so Asser played his part. “And he brought some of the men whom he had treated in prison, and we played those scenes with them in the room. They were tak-ing part – reliving it almost,” Mackenzie says. “A lot of the scenes that ended up in the film were direct copies of how Asser dealt with these therapy sessions when they kicked off. He knows what it is to be angry, and he knows what to do with it.”

Asser should count himself lucky. Jack O’Connell will take the plaudits for this film, as he should; it could truly be the birth of a great screen actor. Yet Asser also found, through his script, a retiring, nervous guy who prefers to stay behind the camera – who is maybe growing into something great himself.

22 Feb, Cineworld, 6.15pm

Interview: Tom Seymour

“It was important for me to try and make something that was authentic” David Mackenzie

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What’s new online?The Book ThiefWriter Marcus Zusak and director Brian Percival are interviewed by Collider for the WWII drama. “We didn’t fight at all.”

tinyurl.com/ColliderZusak

GFF BlogThe inimitable Sean Welsh kicks off this year’s round of Festival diaries with a witty roundup of day 1, and advice on how to choose from the brilliant programme.

tinyurl.com/FestBlog1

Richard DreyfussScreendaily interviews Richard Dreyfuss and producer Mark Mon-tefiore about the road movie, Cas & Dylan. “I thought it was an extraordi-narily romantic idea.”

tinyurl.com/CasDylan

Festival FlickrKeep a track of photos from every event, Q&A and party by going to the GFF Flickr. See if you can spot yourself at the opening night.

tinyurl.com/GFFFlickr

Allison GardnerThe festival director is grilled by STV and reveals two of her favourite films from the line-up, as well as the film that got her into cinema in the first place.

tinyurl.com/GFFGardner

Jonathan GlazerThe closing night director Glazer spoke to The Skinny about his mystifying, brilliant Under the Skin. “The booing and clapping combination is, to my ear, a phenomenal sound.”

tinyurl.com/GlazerSkin

@andgingerThe Glasgow Film fest opening party was so good it’s given me typos. Can’t wait for all the filmy action! #GFF14 @glasgowfilmfest #CINESKINNY

What did you think? Eight of the best tweets

@TheGlassCaseBecause this weekend is about Blue Ruin, Grand Budapest Hotel, Starred Up, A Touch of Sin and The Double at #GFF14 #CINESKINNY

@ClaireRonald#GFF14 fab opening night. Amazing that the film festival has been going for 10 years. Looking forward to more fab movies. #CINESKINNY

@salens_lotOff to the @glasgowfilmfest today to check out @BlueRuinMovie and #LFO. Both look fantastic. #GFF14 #CINESKINNY

@sambrookeCracking start to #GFF14 with Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. It’s beautifully put together and Ralph Fi-ennes is utterly hilarious! #CINESKINNY

@NathanaelSmithAt @glasgowfilmfest opening party we played a game of ‘who looks most like they could be in a Wes Anderson film?’ Candidates were plentiful. #GFF14 #CINESKINNY

GFF Box OfficeOrder tickets from the box office atwww.glasgowfilm.org/festivalor call 0141 332 6535or visit Glasgow Film Theatre12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 6RBboxoffice@glasgowfilm.org

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GFF co-directors Allison Gardner and Allan Hunter with Scotland’s Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop

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@rosstmillerThe Double is a true oddity. Unsure if it hangs together as a whole but great moments and fascinating performance(s) by Eisenberg. #GFF14 #CINESKINNY

Today’s Picks 20 Feet from StardomGFT 1, 3.20pmWith a Q&A from American soul singer Claudia Lennear and Glasgow Gospel Choir singing a selection of hits before the film commences, this toe-tapping documentary really will have you just 20 feet from the stars.

Cas & DylanGFT 1, 6.00pmA charming road movie with lead actor Richard Dreyfuss, director Jason Priestly and producer Mark Montefiore all in attendance for this UK premiere. Much cheaper than an actual ticket to Canada.

Of Horses and MenGFT 2, 5.45pmDon’t trot, gallop to the UK premiere of this original and beautiful debut by Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson. You can let him know if you liked it at the Q&A afterwards. Don’t say neigh.

Hank and AshaGFT 3, 6.15pmThe story of a student who falls in love with a filmmaker after seeing his work, this screening will attended by co-directors James E Duff and Julia Morrison, so you never know what might happen.

Nort Atlantik DriftCCA, all dayA unique day of film, performance and discussion, these events promise to be a fascinating insight into the culture and identity of Shetland. Du widna want ta miss oot.

@TomLinayWas so tightly wound after BLUE RUIN it’s taken me half hour to relax. Very impressive thriller. #GFF14 #CINESKINNY

Cas & Dylan