This September, Khushi Jain entered the IFI for Blossoming: Tales of Growing Up, a carefully curated selection of shorts programmed by GALPAL Collective.
The 28th of September was a mundane Dublin afternoon, but inside Cinema 1 of the Irish Film Institute, the atmosphere was electric, buzzing with anticipation for the screening of the shorts section of the 2024 IFI Documentary Festival. This year’s programme was curated by GALPAL Collective’s Aisha Bolaji and Lulit Luis around the themes of growth, identity and self-discovery. Aptly titled Blossoming: Tales of Growing Up, it featured six films exploring everything from language, grief and ‘diffin’ to secretly growing cannabis in your back garden.
An Exploration of Documentary
The screening started with One Flower at a Time, a film documenting the thoughts of an illegal cannabis grower, a literal nod perhaps to the programme’s title. Directed by Plex Goldwin, an independent film-making collective based in Melbourne, One Flower was as much about the person as it was about the plant. Politically, the film did not take a moral stance but allowed the protagonist to express herself freely. Joining together hallucinatory clips of the cannabis plant with technical schematics and videos, the narrative showed the two different sides of cultivating this controversial flower. In this reel landscape, the protagonist telescoped in and out wearing a white hazmat suit, a ghost brought to life by the narration and Michele Covio’s soft trumpeting soundtrack. Seeing this ghost on a skateboard, speeding down a road, was the highlight for me.
The second short complemented its predecessor in a lot of ways. Elena Horgan’s Cumha ‘loneliness’ or ‘grief’ was about growing up by growing back; it described the experience of (re)learning the Irish language, and through it, (re)turning to her Irish roots. “I ended up hating something that should be mine,” she confessed within the first few minutes. The regret and cumha dominating the film’s first half (which was narrated exclusively in English) gradually evolved to excitement and inspiration. This was as a whole new – but familiar – world opened up to Elena when she started learning the Irish language. In her journey as a student, Elena was also stimulated by the intersections of language, land, and identity. It was important that we first see her in the second – the Irish – half of the film. Visually, Cumha was a warm, sun-kissed montage of wild outdoors and indoor slice-of-life scenes, all of them, in one language or another, signifying home.
The next film flew us all the way to South America, to Peru. Titled Nido ‘nest’, this was a day-in-the-life of a midwife in Palma Real, an indigenous community hidden deep in the Amazon. The film opened with a woman in maroon scrubs using a broom to clean the floors of what was then revealed to be the Palma Real Health Station. This was Theysi and she had been running this local clinic for three years. Like Theysi’s multi-faceted role in the community, her clinic was also not a simply singular space, existing both inside and outside at the same time. Other than her patients, who ranged from a young girl and a pregnant woman to an octogenarian, the clinic also played host to stray dogs and cats. Director José Miguel Jiménez did not ‘capture’ or ‘record’ Theysi but accompanied her as a silent, almost invisible, presence. Theysi never acknowledged the camera. It was with utmost care and reverence that José entered her life, and without actually inviting her, welcomed her into his film. This ensured the film to somewhat disappear entirely, which in turn allowed Theysi to emerge in all her realness, humanity and melancholy. It was not surprising that Nido had been awarded Best Irish Short Doc at DocsIreland 2024.
Deeper Themes
Here the programme took a sharp turn, moving away from cultivation, reintegration and birth, looking instead to loss. Ashish Prasai’s Dear Ishan was a deeply personal and poetic letter to his brother. Running on the narration of a rap-like poem, Ashish’s film incorporated artistic cinematography (expertly done by Alexandru Vesa) with autobiographical archival material like family photographs, home videos and voice notes, to compose an ode to Ishan. In quite a short short, Ashish addressed and contextualised his grief in a variety of spheres, including family, individual generational history and music. Extreme close-ups of his parents’ eyes distilled the essence of this music-video style documentary: remembering.
The darker themes continued with the next short. A funeral cortege appeared on screen, bookended by roaring cars and motorbikes. The audience were informed that for their final salute, a soldier gets a volley of shots while a ‘differ’ gets a junction blackened. And thus began Ruairí Bradley’s We Beg to Differ. Taking the camera into the underground world of diffing (drifting in a car, centred on making figure-eights), Ruairí talked to those have not only found solace in the revving and speeding but also community amongst their fellow drivers. Everything was awash in neon colours and bright headlights in this world; DOP Daniel Sedgwick and colourist Leandro Arouca brought to life the ‘happy buzz’ this motorsport bestowed on its participants. But beneath the thrill lay the sombre reality of struggles with mental health and social challenges. For a film that began and ended with death, We Beg to Differ exuded a surprising amount of life. There was a sequence shot from the inside of a first-time differ’s car which showed just what this small, cramped vehicular space and its freedom of mobility can mean. Rightly then, Ruairí’s final scene finished with the words ‘You have to believe in something.’
The last and final short, with its intention and formal politics, presented a culmination of the programme. The Archive: Queer Nigerians by Simisolaoluwa Akande was a collection of Queer Nigerian accounts from the UK, gathered so as to never be erased. The film blended mythic-folk style storytelling with testimonies about lived experiences from real people. In its own words, it comprised of the ‘genderless’ and the ‘genderfull’ coming together in an ‘overspill of possibility’. On the fantastic plane, this was shot in monochrome and characterised by three costumed figures inspired by the Yoruba culture, narrating the story of the world. On the testimonial level, Simisolaoluwa chronicled the ever-evolving identities of a small group of queer people in respectfully intimate and domestic settings. The camera seldom showed these subjects explicitly, as though DOP Bea MacDonald was protecting them and their stories in the safety of the film. In reflections and shadows, behind curtains and splotchy windows, and in fragments, The Archive meditated on issues of family, love, home, colonisation, language and morality.
Memory
If there was anything other than the theme of ‘blossoming’ that united these six films, it was reverence. Some of the shorts had very clear objectives while others simply wanted to tell stories, but all of them showed admirable respect for their subjects, both matter and people. The programme flowed neatly, sowing seeds (literally) of genesis in the beginning and closing with an epilogue on conclusions, an archive. In a way, Blossoming traced the complete ontology of the cinematic documentary and laid bare its foundation: memory. The screening was followed by a swift collection of audience votes, and while those were being counted, the IFI brought out a short doc from their own archives, Herman Boxer’s 1959 The Irish in Me.
The results of the Audience Competition:
3. The Archive: Queer Nigerians
2. Cumha
1. We Beg to Differ
The IFI Documentary Festival ran from 25th – 19th September 2024.
