TEXT: Gail Tolley

How did you come to find the village of Goptapa where you filmed?

I realised that I needed to set the film in a microcosm, a small place, so that ruled out the towns. Then I met the little boy, Mohamed, in Goptapa, and liked his openness and way of speaking. Then there were [the village’s] cinematic qualities and its extraordinary panorama.

As well as encouraging the children to get involved in the film-making you brought a mobile cinema with you and showed five films about childhood – did you receive any reactions you weren’t expecting?

I chose what I think are the five best kids’ films ever made. I was surprised by nearly everything about the screenings – that so many kids came, that kids only came, that three-year-olds came, and that they screamed and cheered. They LOVED the Iranian film in particular [The Boot by Moha-mad Ali Talebi] – and that part of the world has a complex relationship with Iran. But the kids just looked at the films as stories.

There are some wonderfully playful moments in the film – am I right in saying that there’s a shot near the beginning which is played in reverse so a passing car goes backwards?

Yes! We reversed that shot and quite a few others – the one where the girl

pops red balloons into life, a dream sequence where fireworks implode and the flight of the bird that appears quite often. I love the simple magic of the films of Jean Cocteau, especially The Blood of a Poet, which has lots of reverse action footage. The tech-niques are so simple, so child-like. What is slightly unusual, perhaps, is to use such techniques in a documen-tary film. But documentary is about seeing, and we see magical things, we sometimes see as kids see, we misrecognise things all the time, or at least I do! And the things we see by day loom up, or run backwards, as comedy or tragedy, in our dreams, and I was trying to film those too.

How did you find filming in Iraq? There is a mention at one point of the authorities asking you to stop – did you encounter them again later on?

It wasn’t an easy shoot, for various reasons. The heat (40-43 degrees) was too much for a peeley-walley Celt like me, there were killer scorpions on the floor where I slept and the mos-quitoes and bites were annoying. It was the secret police that stopped our filming twice. The Kurdish Regional Government gave us full permission, but there are layers of authority there. We stopped and politely waited until our production team challenged the ruling.

The First Movie is showing at GFT, Wed 24 Feb, 18.00. Mark Cousins will be attending for a Q&A session following the screening.TH

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DAILY GUIDEWEDNESDAY 24 FEBRUARY

WHAT’S INSIDE?

GFF BOX OFFICEOrder tickets from the box office at

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or visitGlasgow Film Theatre

12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 6RB

info@glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

2>>FEATURE:STRIKING A CHORD Giles Borg discusses the music, the emotion and the reality of band life in his debut film, 1234.

3>> REVIEWSThe City of Life and Death Beetle QueenConquers Tokyo The Good Son

4>> LISTINGSComprehensive guide to what’s going on at the Festival.

4>> PRIZESWin two tickets to Soundless Wind Chime, a tale of love and loss in Hong Kong.

4>> WHAT’S NEW ONLINE? Our pick of the gossip on Facebook, Youtube and Flickr.

THE CINESKINNY

Produced by The Skinny magazine in association with the Glasgow Film Festival.

EDITOR Gail TolleyEDITORIAL Becky BartlettASSISTANTDESIGNER Emma Faulkner

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ONE MAN AND HIS MOVIE

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TEXT: Chris Buckle

‘WRITE WHAT you know’ goes the cliché. Giles Borg appears to have taken the advice, using his experiences as a musician to write and direct his London-set feature debut, 1234. Ian Bonar plays Stevie, a sensitive dreamer who wears black-rimmed specs, cardigans, and his heart on his sleeve. He has songs but no one to play them, so with drummer friend Neil (Matthew Baynton) he recruits moody scene veteran Billy (Kieran Bew) and conceptual artist Emily (Lyndsey Marshal). One practice session in the local community centre later and the 1234s are on their way to fame and fortune - sort of. Borg’s first-hand familiarity with the trials and triumphs of a young band chas-ing an elusive record deal ensures an authenticity all too often lacking in such stories. “It always annoys me when I watch films with bands playing the smaller gig circuit and the place is mobbed, because I don’t believe that’s the experience of 99% of bands or people who regu-larly go to gigs”, says Borg. “From the word go, we were determined to show things how they really were.” The result is a charming, funny and romantic take on the music industry that doesn’t sugar-coat the disap-

pointments.A passion for music drives both

1234 the film and its eponymous protagonists. The quartet’s sound is pitched as having “that kind of Scottish thing going on”, so Glasgow seems the perfect place to premiere the jock-rock love affair. “I’ve always loved the Scottish music scene”, agrees Borg. “It’s produced so many of my favourite bands and contin-ues to do so. Making it Stevie’s main influence was a great way to choose bands who were both influential and yet proper indie.”

In the film, said scene is identified as “a bit Postcard, a bit Jeepster, a bit Chemikal Underground, if you know what I mean”, and if you don’t happen to know your Yummy Fur from your Pastels, the avalanche of name-checks might seem off-putting. But beneath the scenester-sheen a conventional boy-meets-girl heart beats, making the film accessible to those who couldn’t give two hoots about a band like Comet Gain (who appear in the film performing onstage). “While I hope that the initial audience will be people who love the music, laugh at the references, and recognise something of themselves in the characters, I also hope there’s an audience that responds to the un-derlying story”, considers Borg. “For

me it’s a film about choices - work/passion, love/money, things that everyone has to face every day, and I hope that strikes a chord with a wider audience. I don’t think it mat-ters what music you like; the film is supposed to be an honest account of what it’s like trying to make some of those decisions.”

If you do happen to be a badge-wearing aficionado, however, the film is an indie-pop treasure-trove - from a soundtrack stuffed with Belle and Sebastian and Bikini Kill to the music of the 1234s themselves, written by Borg especially for the film. “We put a small band together and spent a few sessions in the rehearsal room trying to write something that had all the same influences that the band talk about in the film. I thought it’d be easy - I was very wrong. But after a while we came up with a few bits and pieces we liked and mixed them all together. By the time we’d finished we’d ended up with three tracks, one of which we really liked, but it never really came to life until Ian Bonar added his lyrics.”

Bonar wasn’t the only cast mem-ber to become musically involved. “Originally the idea was to have the band mime all the songs, for ease of shooting if for nothing else. Ev-eryone bar Lyndsey already played

an instrument, so we gave her a few lessons and some videos of Kim Gordon to watch and soon she looked the part. Then, on the day of shooting, Kieran came up to me and said that they’d learnt the songs and would really like to try playing them live. Looking back I can’t imagine doing it any other way now. It just wouldn’t have felt the same if they were miming.”

Working with a limited budget raised through private channels (accompanied by all the frustrations that inevitably beset the filmmaker of modest means), it’s easy to draw underdog parallels between the film’s genesis and that of the band whose progress it narrates. It’s a similarity not lost on Borg. “I think that filmmaking and song writing are very analogous.” he observes. “I’ve always thought film and music are closer than any of the other art forms.” And, of course, “they’re both full of struggling artists trying to make their dream.” You can enjoy the fruits of one of those dreams on the 24th.

1234 is showing at Glasgow Film Festival.  Kieran Bew and Ian Bonar will be attending to introduce the film. www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

Striking a Chord1234 takes inspiration from Giles Borg’s musical background, but you don’t have to be an indie connoisseur to appreciate the story at its heart.

THE SIXTH of fourteen, The Good Son is part of a series of alterna-tive music documentaries by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Employed to create a short to accompany each Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ album, this screening was preceded by a series of the duo’s other Nick Cave shorts, including trailers for Dig, Lazarus, Dig! in which the band experiment with Victorian séance parlour tricks, and excerpts from Cave’s latest book. The documen-tary itself, fittingly considering the directors’ background, is more like art than film, with unnamed talking heads – some famous, others not – discussing the impact and

impression songs from the album have had on them. This simple, minimalist film stays interesting, while the inclusion of the shorts at the beginning offers a glimpse of the undeniable genius (and probable madness) of the band. Forsyth and Pollard’s aim is to create a portrait of Cave’s work through his fans, and it seems to have succeeded. [Becky Bartlett]

Cineworld, Wed 24 Feb, 18.30Cineworld, Thur 25 Feb, 15.30

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ReviewsCITY OF LIFE AND DEATHDirector: Lu ChuanStarring: Liu Ye, Hideo Nakaizumi, Fan Wei

NOT SINCE Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) has a film captured the atrocities of war in such a vivid, powerful fashion. City of Life and Death documents the appalling events of the Nanking massacre, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were murdered by Japanese forces. Lu Chuan devotes the first half of his film to the invasion, and the second half to the occupation. Shooting in stark, beautiful black-and-white, Chuan’s film unfolds on an epic scale, creat-ing a horribly authentic portrait of a city under siege. There are a few key characters to cling on to as Nanking

slides into chaos and degradation, with dead bodies littering the streets and women lined up to be raped by bored soldiers, and these subtle performances ensure the film retains a strong core of humanity. City of Life and Death is a master-piece that spares us nothing, and while it’s certainly difficult to watch, it’s impossible to look away. [Philip Concannon]

Cineworld, Wed 24 Feb, 18.00Cineworld, Thur 25 Feb, 13.00

BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYODirector: Jessica Orek

YOU KNOW what to expect from this film. A terrifying insect, standing 100 ft tall, wrecks havoc on Japan’s capital city: the results of genetic mutation, it’s on the warpath and nobody knows how to stop it! Sadly, if that’s what you’re hoping, go and rent a Godzilla movie, because American entomologist Jessica Orek’s film is a different kind of monster, an elegiac documen-tary account of Japan’s fascination with insects. But it does have much in common with those old Toho rampages: it taps into childrens’ obsession with the strange and bizarre; it carries a strong eco-mes-sage; it’s unafraid of providing the

odd bit of gloopy spectacle. Don’t be expecting the high density wonders of an Attenborough film or the anthropomorphism of Disney: this is a new kind of nature doc, utilising aphoristic narration, abstract visual juxtapositions and getting up close to collectors, artists and enthusi-asts. The novelty of the approach does wear off, but it’s a worthy endeavour. [Michael Gillespie]

CCA, Wed 24 Feb, 18.30GFT, Fri 26 Feb, 15.30

THE GOOD SONDirector: Iain Forsyth, Jane PollardStarring: Blixa Bargeld, Noah Wyle, Mick Harvey

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CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH @ CINEWORLD (RENFREW STREET)06:00PM

UNTIL 08:15PMWHEN YOU’RE STRANGE: A FILM ABOUT THE DOORS @ GFT06:15PM UNTIL 07:45PM

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COMEDIE & HERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING ELSE, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BAS JAN ADER @ TRAMWAY07:00PM UNTIL 08:30PM

I AM LOVE @ GFT08:15PM

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COMPETITION

Directed by Kit Hung, Soundless Wind Chime is a “lyrical autobio-graphical tale of love, loss and bittersweet memories”. With so much emphasis put on fast-paced action and large set pieces, it’s nice to know there are still some interesting, low key films out there, and anyone who’s ever experienced an intense relationship cut abruptly short will relate to this story. To win two tickets to see this Hong Kong gem, just tell us:

Which famous martial artist died in Hong Kong after taking a headache pill?

Email your details with the answer as subject line to: gail@theskinny.co.uk by 10am Thursday.

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Comprehensive film and event listings for each day of the festival

YOUTUBE

Did you miss the opening gala? Or Zombie Zombie playing the music of John Carpenter? Or would you like to see a film’s trailer before you buy your ticket? If so, check out the GFF Youtube channel, which has coverage of the above nights, plus trailers of films like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, so you need never miss a GFF event again.

FACEBOOK

You can get in contact with GFF and The CineSkinny whenever you please on Facebook. Share your love for the CineSkinny, just pop in to say hello, or try your luck at the special

competitions available through GFF’s page.

FLICKR

Our photographers and guests have been uploading a whole array of pictures onto Flickr, and you’re welcome to add your choice images too. Online already are some great photos of the Lucky Me Party from GSFF’s opening night, as well as some lovely shots of James Earl Jones at the GFT.

THE SKINNY ONLINE

Don’t forget that you can find even more reviews of GFF films at The Skinny’s website – www.theskinny.co.uk