The distributor synopsis reveals later plot developments.
Two features with very different starting points
Sharjah Art Foundation announced the ninth Sharjah Film Platform awards on November 10. Zamo Mkhwanazi’s Uhlanjululo (Laundry) won best fiction feature and Rania Rafei’s The Day of Wrath: Tales from Tripoli won best documentary feature. Those two awards make a good entry to the programme because the films begin with different kinds of evidence. A drama can give a character an immediate choice about the way a family makes its living. A documentary can begin with something a family has kept and ask what other histories come into focus when it is placed alongside public records.
Arief Budiman’s Shadow of Sakura won documentary short, Asim Abdulaziz’s I Broke a Vase won fiction short, and David Bim’s To the West, in Zapata received a documentary feature special mention. The short categories are worth keeping in view when reading an awards list. A short can concentrate its argument in a few images, while a feature can let a situation change meaning over a longer stretch. The festival gives each form its own place. That makes it easier for a viewer using the awards as a watchlist to find work of a different scale from the headline winners.
An archive and a business
The Berlinale Forum, where The Day of Wrath had its world premiere, describes a film that draws on a letter to Rafei’s late father, family stories and archive material to tell the history of Tripoli. These materials do different things. A photograph might tell a viewer who was together without showing who was missing. A recollection can change the weight of an image long after the image was made. A letter to a dead parent gives the filmmaker an addressee who cannot supply a final answer. The structure has room for a personal memory to matter even when it remains unresolved.
Swiss distributor First Hand Films describes Laundry as the story of a young musician under apartheid who is expected to take on his family’s laundry business. In an interview with Swiss Films, the feature debut is placed in Johannesburg in 1968. A business gives a drama something a history lecture cannot provide in the same way. Someone has to decide who does the work, who has the right to be in the room and what might be lost if the door stays closed. The pressure on the household becomes legible through the decisions involved in making an ordinary day happen.
Music opens another set of choices. What the musician hopes to do with an instrument can show a different relationship to time than the work that keeps a household going. One commitment may be measured in practice and opportunities that have yet to come. The other has customers and tasks with immediate deadlines. If a film makes both forms of work feel specific, the argument can stay complicated. An audience can see why a family would want to protect the business and why a person inside it would need a way to imagine a life beyond it.
How to use the results as a watchlist
The difference between the feature winners is a question of structure for viewers. A fiction film can compress the consequences of a system into a single scene by changing what a character is free to do. A documentary built from different kinds of records can ask how the same place has been described by people with very different access to power. The two forms invite different kinds of attention. One makes the audience test a character’s alternatives in the moment. The other makes the audience hear what a new voice does to an account it thought it already understood.
An awards list can make those approaches easier to discover without turning them into interchangeable examples of serious filmmaking. The question to bring to a screening is how the camera or the sound makes history available in each case. A work room may quietly reveal how people have learned to share space under pressure. A recording from a different decade may sound entirely new when a film puts it beside a family voice. Those are distinct reasons to seek out the two films, and the awards offer a point of entry for audiences meeting either filmmaker for the first time.