London Film Festival review - The Central Park Five

This documentary looks at a high-profile crime and the less high-profile miscarriage of justice that went with it, showing how difficult it is to get justice when the public are baying for your blood.

In 1989 a young woman was raped and brutally beaten while out jogging in Central Park. At the same time in a different part of the park, a large group of teenage boys from Harlem were causing trouble. When the jogger was found barely alive, the police started interrogating the boys they had in custody, using the classic “good cop/bad cop” technique and telling each one that their friends had already dobbed them in. Using 14-, 15- and 16-year-old logic, five made statements that they saw the others rape the woman.

The Central Park jogger case was the last straw for embattled New Yorkers. Their city was a mess, ravaged by a crack-induced crime wave. Mayor Edward Koch called it “the crime of the century” (quite a claim for a town which a decade earlier had been terrorised by the Son of Sam, but there you go) and said that prosecuting these boys would be a test of the criminal justice system. The trouble was, the boys had nothing to do with it. Their statements didn’t add up, they didn’t know details of the crime, their DNA didn’t match, and the timeline didn’t make any sense. They had never been in trouble before. These small issues didn’t seem to matter to the police or the prosecutors. Or the jury.

The Central Park Five is a very angry film, showing the indifference, cruelty, racism and just plain stupidity of the system. The boys, now men, speak eloquently about what happened (after watching this and West of Memphis, I swear going to prison for a crime you didn’t commit makes you really clever and poetic). Directors Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s unfussy approach uses archive footage really well, painting a picture of a New York very different from the city seen today. Hopefully this means that mistakes like this are less likely now, but you just can’t be sure. If the press gets whipped up into a frenzy, the truth can still just go out the window.

London Film Festival review - Compliance

Truth really is so much stranger than fiction. While there have been films centring on a menacing phone call before, no Hollywood screenwriter would have come up with the plot of Compliance off the top of their head, it is just too outlandish.  These events happened in real life, making this low-budget indie thriller into an examination of the very nature of free will.

The film takes place over a day at a branch of the Chick-Wich fast food chain. Manger Sandra (Ann Dowd, the spitting image of Lisa Dingle from Emmerdale) is having a bad day because someone left the freezer door open overnight. But it is about to get worse. A policeman (Pat Healy) rings the office and tells her that one of her employees, Becky (Dreama Walker), has stolen money from a customer. This sparks off a chain of events which I won’t spoil, but suffice it to say that are as disturbing as they are unbelievable.

The cinematography is plain and to the point, bathing the claustrophobic sets in a sickly beige light which perfectly suits the events. All the performances are excellent and the characters feel real. Dowd walks the thin line between villain and object of pity well, and Walker puts her wide eyes to good use. I particularly liked Ashlie Atkins as Marti the shift supervisor, part of the staff who gave the whole thing a realistic workplace vibe.

Compliance is a film which asks us how much power we give to authority, how much we are willing to ignore for an easy life, and who amongst us will stand up and say “no”. To me it had echoes of the Holocaust, but interestingly at the LFF screening, a lot of the questions centred on America (both about the perceived passivity of its people and – for reasons I didn’t fully understand, other than some people see Iraq everywhere – its foreign policy). The director Craig Zobel explained that everywhere he showed the film people said “That could never happen here!” including in America, so nationality is probably a red herring. You would hope that most people would be more questioning than the characters in the film, but it only needed a few people for it to happen.

This is an uncomfortable watch, but one that will definitely spark a debate with your friends.

London Film Festival review - Bayou Blue

This documentary is an interesting counterpoint to West of Memphis.  What happens when the police investigate murders thoroughly, prosecutors act fairly, and the media doesn’t turn the whole thing into a three-ring circus? The right man is arrested and sent away for a long time.  Does it make an interesting film? Not really.

Bayou Blue looks at a spate of murders of young men that took place around New Orleans between 1997 and 2006.  Body after body was found face down in creeks or on verges, victims of rape and strangulation. Some of the men were openly gay, some were straight. The police were baffled as to how the killer had lured each one into his car and gained their trust enough to overpower them.

Eventually the killer was caught, but the world wasn’t interested and one of America’s most prolific serial killers hardly made the papers. In a culture obsessed with the grizzly details of crime, you’d think that the sheer number of victims would guarantee column inches, but in this case many of the victims were homeless, most were black, and the area they lived in was poor and remote.

This lack of interest on the part of the media is a scandal, but unfortunately directors Alix Lambert and David McMahon’s style doesn’t let the viewer get too worked up about it. The film is as lugubrious as the flow of the titular bayou. The story isn’t really shown in order, so there is no sense of a story unfolding, of the growing concern of police or really how they pieced together the investigation. It’s just one body discovered in 2003, one in 2002, one in 1999.

The families and friends of the victims are interviewed – their words heart breaking, their faces testaments to their hard lives. But their stories are presented in a very haphazard way, again chopping back and forth. The detectives come across as extremely professional people who take their work very seriously. We hear from the killer himself, but the audio recordings are crackly and just contain perfunctory details of each death that are played behind lingering shots of yet more barren fields and remote ditches. We learn nothing about the killer’s background, a staggering omission that leaves him an almost faceless figure.

Perhaps the aim was to make a quietly creepy film full of menace, but to me it was just dull. I don’t want to say that the papers and news channels were right not to cover this story – the victims deserve our attention as much as any middle class white girl who vanishes – but you have to prove its worth to the audience by making it gripping. It would have been better if the makers of Bayou Blue had used a few more of the enemy’s tactics and sensationalised what happened just a little to keep the audience’s emotional interest, rather than just piquing liberal guilt.

London Film Festival review - My Amityville Horror

I think I was the only person at the screening of this documentary who hadn’t seen any of the Amityville Horror films. While I am interested in the supernatural, I am not really into horror. Despite not knowing anything about the original case or its pop-cultural aftermath, I could still enjoy My Amityville Horror as a very odd character piece.

The film looks at Daniel Lutz, who was ten years old when his family moved into 112 Ocean Avenue in 1975, where the DeFeo family had been murdered a year earlier. The Lutzes abandoned the house after 28 days, claiming that they had experienced a smorgasbord of ghostly activity, including poltergeists, possession and ectoplasm.  It would be fair to say that these events have affected Daniel deeply. He is a very intense guy, a tough nut who left home as a young teenager never to return. He appears to have been in therapy for most of his life.

Director Eric Walter has been fascinated with the case for years, and started a website as a teenager dedicated to gathering together all the evidence he could. He said that even he found a lot of new information in Danny’s testimony. Certainly Danny’s feelings about his step-father bring a whole other dimension to this story.    

I have one specific issue with this film – the cinematography is a little too slick and artistic. Digital technology allows professional results at a fraction of the cost compared to a few years ago, but that doesn’t mean that it is always necessary to have moody lighting. In a documentary like this it seems unnecessary and distracts somewhat from the person in question.  

I don’t know what to make of the events at 112 Ocean Avenue, and we’ll never know what really happened.  The tales Danny tells seem unbelievable, but he does seem to believe them.  This is diverting rather than fascinating little film about a very strange guy who had some very strange experiences.  Though I’m sure it is essential viewing for classic horror fans.

London Film Festival review - Free Angela & All Political Prisoners

To most people, Angela Davis is the afro-ed figurehead of the Civil Rights movement whose trial for murder resulted in a worldwide campaign to free her.  Director Shola Lynch’s aim for this biographical documentary is to put some meat onto the bones of this image and flesh out Davis’s story. The result is only semi-successful, but it is still a fascinating look at a strange time.

Angela Davis was an activist and academic who accidentally became the centre of a political controversy when she was appointed a professor at the University of California in 1969. You see, they made the mistake of hiring a communist as a professor of Communism. Davis was fired by the university, and became heavily involved in a campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, three African-American prisoners accused of killing a white guard. Then in August 1970, the younger brother of one of the Soledad Brothers attempted to hold a judge hostage to negotiate the release of the prisoners, resulting in a shootout which left the judge and several others dead. The guns used in this crime were all in Davis’s name, so she went into hiding and ended up on the FBI’s most wanted list. She was later found and put on trial for first degree murder. The campaign to free Angela spread across the world, with children in East Germany sending sacks of letters of support.  She was cleared of all charges in 1972.

The film goes through these events, looking at how and why Davis became radicalised, and her feelings about the strange events of 1969 to 1972. Davis, who has been reluctant to talk about this time, is interviewed extensively, and it is great to hear from the lady herself. Archive footage is well used, and some scenes are recreated, with Davis’s niece playing her.

Unfortunately the details of the case are not explored in that much detail, making the film slightly confusing. I suppose the events are confusing in themselves (the kidnap of the judge strikes me as a very strange plan), but it would have been good to hear more about the evidence for and against Davis’s involvement. It would also have been interesting to look at what Davis has done since she was freed. It is mentioned that she has continued to campaign for prison reform, but there are no details of her life post-1972. These are the things which she wishes to be known for, rather than her arrest and trial, so it seems strange to leave them out.

With these additions, this could have been the definitive portrait of one of the key female figures in the Civil Rights movement. As it is, it is an engaging examination of a time when it seemed as if American society was teetering on the edge of anarchy.

London Film Festival review - West of Memphis

The West Memphis Three

Director Amy Berg does not shy away from heavy subjects. Her first film, the Oscar-nominated Deliver Us From Evil, examined the cover up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.  This, her second feature, examines the murder of three eight-year-old boys in Arkansas in 1993, and the litany of mistakes and lies involved in the ensuing investigation and trials. West of Memphis is an exquisitely detailed look at how justice can remain elusive, and it is likely to make you very, very angry at the unfairness of it all.

When the bodies of three little boys – Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore – were found naked in a ditch in May 1993, the police believed that the murders had been part of a satanic ritual. Three teenage boys – Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, known as the West Memphis Three - were arrested. Misskelley, who has learning difficulties, confessed after a long interrogation, and implicated the other two boys. At the trial, witnesses came forward attesting that they had bragged about killing the little boys as part of an occult rite. In the end Echols was sentenced to death, and the other two were sentenced to life in prison.

Berg examines the “facts” presented at trial in detail. The level of incompetence on display and the wilful disregard for the truth is astonishing. But this documentary is not just about bashing the police or the American criminal justice system. It also looks at the effect of the crime on the families involved, adding to the emotional impact. The mother of Stevie Branch is interviewed extensively, and her words are painful to watch.

Despite the bleakness of the horrific events and their aftermath, there is some light in this film.  A huge campaign was launched in support of the West Memphis Three. People marched carrying banners, concerts were held, and celebrities got involved – really involved. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and Henry Rollins of Black Flag campaigned for over a decade, becoming friends of Damien Echols. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh (producers of this film) paid for private detectives, forensic experts and DNA tests. In this case, people power ultimately made the difference.

West of Memphis is a relentless look at how a triple tragedy became a sextuple one, and how hope can stay alive in the face of tremendous odds.  I urge you to see it.