David Locke wanted to see justice done by the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), but not so surprisingly, he finds the
UN-chartered organization is stymied by politics (imagine that). It is personal
for him, because a Serbian war criminal killed the woman he loved. When he gets
a lead on her killer, the ICTY is too busy winding down its mission and patting
itself on the back, so he goes it alone in director-screenwriter Alastair
Newton Brown’s Here Be Dragons, which screens during this year’s
Cinequest Film & VR Festival.
While
stationed as a UN “Peace-keeper” during the Yugoslav Wars, Locke came face to
face with Ivan Novak, just when he was dumping the bodies of his girlfriend’s
village. Yet, he was ordered to stand down, because his unit was insufficiently
armed and was only authorized to conduct a prisoner exchange. As the top
investigator for the ICTY, he believed Novak had been killed. However, just as
the ICTY announces its dissolution, Locke is approached by his girlfriend’s
brother, Emir Ibrahimovic, the only survivor of the massacre.
Now
a wealthy Swedish industrialist, Ibrahimovic has information regarding Novak’s
whereabouts. It turns out, he is living openly under an assumed name in
Belgrade. To add insult to injury, he currently runs PTSD and reconciliation workshops
for survivors of the civil war.
HBD
is
directly rooted in the events of the early 1990s and 2017, but in terms of tone,
it is very much akin to some of the anti-hero thrillers of the 1970s. Brown
seems to have a bit of a man-crush of the lead actor (and producer) Nathan Clark Sapsford stalking through the dark streets of Belgrade in his half-overcoat,
but to be fair, he is pretty cool looking.
Sapsford
doesn’t merely brood. He plays Locke so tightly-wound, he could snap at any
moment. Yet, he is not an empty existential protag. Throughout it all, Brown
makes it clear the man always holds to some notion of justice. In contrast,
Slobodan Bestic’s Novak is a surprisingly subtle and challenging figure, who tries
to literally embody the notion that healing comes through the passage of time,
rather than cathartic retribution. That is literally what his counseling
argues.
Even the biggest names in jazz often play intimate clubs, so jazz fans have
an unusually good chance of interacting with their favorites. If you go to
up-and-coming musicians’ gigs, you might just make a friend. Some of my
favorite musicians are even in-real-life friends with my entire family. It is
nice to know this can also happen in other musical genres. To illustrate the point,
documentarian Kathleen Ermitage examines the close relationships the Indigo Girls,
jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, and rapper Talib Kweli have with special select fans
in Mixtape Trilogy: Stories of the Power of Music, which screens during
this year’s Cinequest Film & VR Festival.
Sadly,
this film could never screen in China, under the current CCP regime. For one
thing, Indigo Girls super-fan Dylan Yellowlees identifies the Tiananmen Square
Massacre as one of the defining incidents of her late-1980s youth. That would
be simple enough to edit out, but the state censors still would never approve Yellowlees’
open and frank discussion of her coming-out-experience, which largely
overlapped with that of the band’s. Understandably, it was easy for her to identify
with them and she found great meaning in their lyrics. When Yellowlees finally
met them while working as a programmer for a local theater, they got on like a
house on fire.
Likewise,
Iyer found something of a kindred spirit in Garnette Cadogan, a restless
academic with adventurous taste in music. Arguably, this is the most personal
segment of the film, since their relationship appears to be the closest.
Indeed, Iyer often describes Cadogan as a member of his family. Sometimes, Iyer
can be counter-productively didactic, but the greatest controversy he and
Cadogan address in the film is the criticism the pianist does not sufficiently
swing. That is the sort of tired debate that hurts jazz rather than defending
it, so Cadogan was right to call it out. (Indeed, Iyer’s Radha, Radha is
a rich and rewarding composition.)
