Avant-Drag! review – queer artists light up the streets of Athens with joy and resistance

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Drag is a tool of self-expression and of protest in this kaleidoscopic portrait of the city’s vibrant underground art The queer defiance of Fil Ieropoulos’s kaleidoscopic documentary manifests not only through its subject, but also through its form. Centring on a group of drag performers and gender-nonconforming artists in Athens, this shape-shifting film celebrates a vibrant underground scene that thrives in a homophobic system, rife with state-sanctioned discrimination and violence. Introduced through an episodic structure, figures from the community light up the screen with their artistry and activism as they carve out a safe haven of their own. In each of the vignettes, we get a glimpse of both the joy and the peril of navigating the city as a queer person. Decked out in extravagant costumes and makeup inspired by Leigh Bowery, Kangela Tromokratisch struts in towering high heels, while her drag performances, with their vaudevillian feel, parody heteronormative ideals of motherhoo...
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Is Warfare the most realistic war film ever made?

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In Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s brutal and immersive new film, memory informs the events that take place in real time to a unit of soldiers in Iraq

Warfare, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s assiduous new film on a single episode of the American war in Iraq, opens with a title card typical to a war picture: date, location, barebones summary – 11 November 2006, in Ramadi, Iraq. Navy SEAL team alpha one is supporting Marines in insurgents’ territory. And then one final, unusual detail in place of the standard “based on a true story” – “This film uses only their memories.” The “only” is an ominous indicator: this is a film working against the Hollywood tide to gloss, simplify or narrativize. Warfare, based primarily on Mendoza’s memories of that day as a former SEAL, as well as those of fellow soldiers and civilians present, is as much an experiment of translation as a cinematic achievement, a movie defined by both what it shows and what it does not.

Much of the press surrounding Warfare has focused on this exacting verisimilitude, its mission to create the “most accurate war film possible”. If something could not be double-checked by another account, it was not included. The intricate, fully immersive soundscape, designed by Glenn Fremantle, encompasses the vast volume spectrum of conflict – civilian chatter, a hand grazing a windowsill, burps of radio, destabilizing patters of gunfire and the sonic boom of a “show of force” military flyover that had nearly the same fetal-position effect on the theater audience as it did the characters. With the exception of a first scene observing the soldiers raucously dancing to the erotic music video for Eric Prydz’s Call On Me – underscoring just how young they are, how much pressure must be released – the movie proceeds in more or less real time. Ninety-ish minutes at a house the soldiers picked because one said “I like it”, at first tracking and then fighting nameless insurgents, with dialogue primarily in undiluted military jargon.

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