Film Review by Bernadette Kent

It can be so easy to miss out on small gems. So you will be forgiven if this film event passed you by -which is why I am reviewing it for you now.

To celebrate “World day of Social Justice” Brighton and Sussex Medical School hosted the showing of four short films in partnership with “Medfest Egypt” entitled “Social Justice through a film lens” held at The Dance Space in Brighton on the 13th February. It included a panel and discussion following the showing of the four films to a very mixed international and responsive audience highly engaged with the themes in the films. The films themselves were international in their perspective coming from the Uk,Egypt and Switzerland but universal in the shared humanity of the themes expressed.

The presentation, chaired by Dr Khalid Ali , with an invited panel to lead the Qand A and discussion need to be introduced to you as well - coming as they do from such interesting backgrounds and bringing with them through the particularities of their lens a wealth of experience in which to view these films : they were able facilitators for the enriched and lively discussion that followed . They included Dr Fionnuala Finnerty a consultant in sexual health/HIV working closely with refugees and asylum-seeking groups. Dr Patrick Nyikavaranda whose research interest involves migrant populations and mental health and is co-director at “Diversity Resource International.” Manal Ahmed a Sudanese national working with refugees in Egypt,Chad and Uganda. And lastly Lotje Sodderland an Emmy nominated director of “My Beautiful Brain” and director of the second film “Limbo” that was shown and which I will outline first in more detail here as it will be of particular interest to you the audience of this OPC website.

“Limbo was filmed in the U.K in 2020 when covid created conditions for us all of the lockdown and increased isolation and none more so than for older people receiving care in their own homes .The film charts the experiences of both the care worker ( an immigrant ) and the experiences of about four or so elders receiving care at home. There was a shared bond tenderly expressed in the film between the carer and the elders in their shared predicament of experiencing the cruelty ,humiliation and degradation of a care system that is miserly time- limited: providing “token care” instead of compassionate care. The carer in this film does his best despite conditions that trap the carer- making the giving of compassionate care an almost impossibility.

At the start of the film we are introduced to the carer in the company of friends being ridiculed by his peers for the menial nature of his job -working with elders needing such things as toileting which highlight the ageism that is all too prevalent in the U.K. A recent report by Women and the Equalities Committee concluded that the U.K has a ”pervasively ageist culture” and the film showed this. Caring for our elders has low status ,low pay and poor working conditions. The film follows the carer as he chases about from one elder to the other attempting to give the time- restricted care to the elders he was responsible for. It was poignant to observe the many occasions the elders and carer attempted to establish rapport with each other that were interrupted by the buzzer sounding – alerting the carer to having to leave and dash off to his next visit .This showed in the fragmentary nature of their dialogues which were slowly built up over time -always interrupted and never completed . Both carer and elders struggling to establish rapport and knowledge of each other in these fractured moments. The frantic rush involved of the carer picking up medication at a pharmacy and the inherent risks when time short of administering the wrong medication and dosage under such time contraints illustrated the dangers. The director’s masterful brushstrokes in this short film conveyed a wealth of nuances not lost on the audience in the subsequent discussion of the film .

The elders in the film were not actors playing a part but willing service users showing the normality of their everyday: sadly as the credits testified a couple of these elders had since died of covid in the epidemic.

The first film shown was “Selma” an Egyptian film made in 2017 by the director Nesma Zazou. It follows the day in the life of a young impoverished mother in her desperate attempts to find out which hospital a visiting surgeon might be located in her search for the medical help needed for her young child who was losing his eye sight .The audience follows her frantic journey across the city and race against the clock as she is fruitlessly sent hither and thither. The director transmits successfully to the audience a sense of vertigo, desperation and breathlessness the tension of which put you on the edge of your seat throughout sharing in Selma’s predicament.

The third film shown “Ward’s Henna Party” directed by Morad Mostafa made in 2020 and also set in Egypt showed how quickly racist violence can erupt and be directed at “the other.” In this film it is a Somali mother who is negotiating these tensions as she earns a precarious living giving henna tattoos at pre-nuptual bride parties with her sick young daughter in toe. We see events unfold mostly through the daughter’s eyes who attempts to help her mother when the racism and violence erupts and the director’s skilful unfolding of the way the daughter reacts suggests that this is not the first time .

The final film shown was an animation rich and multi-layered in its imagery which was unpicked and discussed at length by the panel and audience. It was the 2016 “Au Revoir Balthazar” directed by Rafael Sommerhalder from Switzerland. I would encourage you to search it out on line and watch it if you can find it on the internet.It encompassed many of the themes redolent in the films shown and is a brilliant bit of animation.