RKS 2024 Film: HOT DOCS: “Back to Riaño” (Vuelta a Riaño): Spanish Destruction and Relocation all for Nothing

“Back to Riaño”, a film by Miriam Martin, is one of the four films showing in the Hot Docs Made in Spain Shorts Programme screening on 3May2024. It is a case study in government waste and arrogant stupidity.

The locality of Riaño had nine 14th century villages destroyed in order to construct a dam that was supposed to provide irrigation and hydro electricity but proved to be a useless governmental infrastructure project (some pockets no doubt were lined) and made operational hours before an EU environmental directive would have halted the operation of the dam and required the area to be restored to its original condition.

Fierce opposition to the project by inhabitants brought crushing repression by the army.

The story is told in between segments of a major Spanish bike race which is cut into by footage of the repression, interviews with inhabitants facing relocation, footage showing pre demolition beauty of both architecture and topography and actual demolitions. The bike riders glide through the beautiful locality (what’s left of it) oblivious to history as their goal is to win as was the socialist government’s aim to defeat all opposition and proceed with the construction. Simultaneously real and surreal.

RKS 2024 Film Rating: 85/100.

RKS 2024 Wine: Morgon: Classy Name: Good Beaujolais?

I have always thought Morgon was a classy name. When I was a wee tadpole in Montreal there once was a classy department store called Morgon’s. Morgon’s stores were eventually purchased by the Hudson’s Bay. Enough reminiscing. We try a Domaine Laurent Gauthier Morgon.

Aroma:  Cheerful and light black cherry. That’s all folks and it is fine with me.

Palate: More of that lightish black cherry initially but it gains in intensity making the wine richer than its aromatics suggest. A nifty little updraft of spice on the medium finish. Smooth with some mellowish tannins. A certain purity to the wine due to its sustainability?

Personality: I am a simple, straightforward and friendly wine.

Food Match: The smooth tannins here make it an interesting match with grilled Irish organic salmon.

Cellarbility: Drinking beautifully now through 2025.

Price: $22.95 CDN (Ontario).

RKS 2024 Wine Rating: 92/100. Jamessuckling.com 91.

(Domaine Laurent Gauthier Grand Cras Morgon, Beaujolais Cru, AC Morgan, Laurent Gauthier, Ville Morgon, France, 750 mL, 13.5%).

RKS 2024 Film: HOT DOCS 2024: “Aqueronte”: A Mystical Voyage of Light, Sound and Images for Your Imagination

“Aqueronte”, a film by Manuel Muñoz Rivas, is one of the four films showing in the Hot Docs Made in Spain Shorts Programme screening on 3May2024. Despite the fact it is not a documentary short it is a short of a mystical voyage of light, sound and images your mind can journey on with.

A destination to where?

A group of passengers of various types and ages travel on a ferry with their cars on a journey that seems of endless duration. It departs in the darkness and ends in the darkness. Snippets of conversations including several on death and grave illness add to the mystery. Some children speak of Charon and another puts coins in his eyes as is the custom with the deceased in many countries. Ancient Greeks put coins in the eyes of the deceased to ensure Charon, receiving full payment, ferried them to their after-death destination. Should they not pay they would be stranded in between the world of the living and dead. One of the children on the ferry queries where Charon is taking them.

The passengers arrive in the dark at their destination. What that destination is best left to your imagination. There is no spoon feeding of the viewer here.

Rivas speaks of the film, “When I first approached the location where later I would shoot my film “Aqueronte”, the river Guadalquivir and more specifically the ferry boat that crosses it, I was struck by the aesthetic characteristics of the scene. Everything that I identify as defining elements of cinema was there: movement, faces, bodies, landscape,
sound atmospheres, light and shadow, reverie, the visible and the latent force of the invisible… all present in the raw material with which to shape fragments of time and space.
Because ultimately that is what we filmmakers do: compose with fragments of time and fragments of space.“

You can watch the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqZ9W8MZibU

RKS 2024 Film Rating: 92/100.

RKS 2024 Wine: McManis 2022 Petite Sirah: Berlin Wall of Blackberry: Bland? Predictable? Reliable? Uninspiring? Consumer Friendly? Cali Conundrum

It is not common to encounter a Petite Sirah as a single varietal wine. It produces tannic wines with a savoury and almost meaty character and dense blackberry fruit making it a useful blender but if the tannins are carefully managed it can make an age worthy and supple wine on its lonesome.

Aroma: Wow almost a Berlin Wall of blackberry!

Palate: Solid and full-bodied oozing with blackberry, smoked meat and just a bit of milk chocolate. The tannins are well managed here and almost minimal as well as the acids. A long finish. An example of that please everyone smooth California red inoffensive to no one.

Personality: I am a big brute without a plethora of muscle popping out of my shirt. I have been neutered.

Food Match: Roast lamb full of garlic which you have placed in the slits you have made in the meat.

Cellarbility: Drink until the end of 2026 as it will soften a bit more but it is already mighty supple.

Price: $23 CDN (Ontario).

RKS 2024 Wine Rating: 86/100.

(McManis Family Vineyards 2022 Petite Sirah, AVA Lodi, McManis Family Vineyards, Ripon California 13.5%, 750 mL).

RKS Literature: Chez Robert Declines after Ketchup Riot (William S. Burroughs)

“Imperceptibly the quality of the food declines until he is serving literal garbage, the clients being intimidated by the reputation of Chez Robert to protest.

    SAMPLE MENU

The Clear Camel Piss Soup with boiled Earth Worms

The Filet of Sun-Ripened Sting Ray basted with Eau de Cologne and garnished with Nettles

The After-Birth Suprême de Boeuf cooked in drained crank case oil,served with a piquant sauce of rotten egg yolks and crushed bed bugs

The Limburger Cheese sugar coated in diabetic urine doused in Canned Heat Flamboyant”

William S. Burroughs, “Naked Lunch”, 1959

RKS Literature: Ketchup on Haute Cuisine Causes a Riot! (William S. Burroughs)

“(Alternative: A.J. whips out a bottle of ketchup and douses the haute cuisine.)

Thirty gourmets stop chewing at once. You could have heard a soufflé drop. As for Robert, he lets out a bellow of rage like a wounded elephant, runs to the kitchen and arms himself with a meat cleaver….The sommelier snarls hideously, his face turning a strange iridescent purple….He breaks off a bottle of Brut Champagne….’ 26..Pierre, the head waiter, snatches up a boning knife. All three chase A.J. through the restaurant with mangled inhuman screams of rage…Tables overturn, vintage wines and matchless food crash to the floor…Cries of “Lynch him!” ring through the air. An elderly gourmet with insane bloodshot eyes of a mandrill is fashioning a hangman’s knot with a velvet curtain cord…”

William S. Burroughs, “Naked Lunch”, 1959

RKS Literature: Americans Dying of Shame (William S. Burroughs)

“A.J.’s cover story? An international playboy and harmless practical joker. It was A.J. who put the piranha fish in Lady Sutton Smith’s swimming pool and dosed the punch with a mixture of yagé, hashish and yohimbine during a Fourth of July reception at the U.S. Embassy, precipitating an orgy. Ten prominent citizens-American, of course-subsequently died of shame. Dying of shame is an accomplishment peculiar to Kwakiutl Indians and Americans-others simply say “Zut alors” or “Son cosas de la vida or “Allah fucked me, the all Powerful.”

William S. Burroughs, “Naked Lunch”, 1959

RKS 2024 Wine: A Montepulciano Lost in Letters and Numbers at a Bunga Bunga Party Frequented by Punters

Although Montepulciano is almost always an easy drinking wine in this case it is lost, or perhaps I am, in too many letters and numbers. The wine was bottled by ICQRF/4495/IT on behalf of TG SRL 72015. If we dig further are there Cayman and Bulgarian offshore accounts involved further complicating the matter. Wanna bet this was the house wine for a Berlusconi Bunga Bunga Party. And if numbers and letters are getting a bit fishy a Luca Maroni 95 rating casts a further cloud of suspicion over this wine! OMG are punters involved here?

Aroma: A good measure of black cherry, blueberry, blackberry and roadside diner chocolate cream pie.

Palate: Easy going and smooth reminding me of that 2 Euro Montepulciano you filled up in 1.5 litre water bottles back in 2002 in Tuscany and no insult intended as it was very quaffable! Mostly blackberry and blueberry with a hint of milk chocolate. Acidity is hiding under a rock.

Personality: I am not sophisticated, just straightforward and delicious. Quite quaffable in the summer heat provided chilled down.

Food Match: Being the fancy, sophisticated know it all wine writer I am blowing my cover by suggesting pair with a COSTCO Vegan Mushroom Stew recipe or whatever they are serving at your next Bunga Bunga party if your eyes are wide shut.

Cellarbility: Keep it around until the end of 2025 but it will not improve.

Price: $17 CDN (Ontario).

RKS 2024 Wine Rating: 89/100. Luca Maroni 95. Silvio Berlusconi 106.

(Ferrovieri 2022 Montepulciano DOP, TG SRL 72015, Fasano, Italy, 14%, 750 mL).

RKS 2024 Film: “Queendom”: Tough Going for Performance Artist in Nouveau Tsarist Russia

Gennadiy, known in costume as Jenna, is a performance artist in Russia who managed to escape to France obtaining asylum there fortunate enough not to have “fallen out of a window”, gunned down or to have consumed that FSB special plutonium tea.

You see Jenna is a queer that loves to parade about the streets of wherever she may be in outrageous costumes beautifully designed but scorned by Russian rednecks, security guards in supermarkets and those in the official Tsarist camp.

Jenna is from Magadan a dismal city of 137,000 known as a transit centre for political prisoners and forced labour in gold mines in the Stalinist era. He lives with his grandmother and grandfather who have difficulties understanding their grandson urging him to drop all the nonsense of his performance art and to get a good job by focusing on his education. Jenna endures a litany of criticism from his grandparents refusing to buckle in.

When he is not parading the streets and subways with his delightfully outlandish outfits he is making Tik Tok videos of his performance art. He is not welcome within officialdom but in the midst of an anti-war demonstration a small crowd follows him hurling insults on fascist Putin and praising opposition figure Navalny before he was murdered by the FSB.

In Moscow he attends cosmetic college until he is expelled for participating in a demonstration critical of Tsar Putin. In footage of an anti-war demonstration, we watch police haul off demonstrators and smacking them with truncheons. These are times when the Tsar has enacted legislation making LGBTQ status more or less illegal as well as any criticism of the war effort which we hear Tsar Putin on television confidently state will shortly be won as Russia defeats Ukrainian genocide of Russians.

Motto of the story Russia, in true Tsarist White Russian tradition, has devolved in a backwards fashion crushing all political opposition and those like Jenna whose appearance, sexual orientation and attitudes don’t fit in the good and obedient Russian mould.

Nice to know Jenna is safe in Paris where he feels like a human being.

Directed by Agniia Galdanova.

The film will be playing in theatres 14June2024 and available on demand.

RKS 2024 Film Rating 87/100.

RKS 2024 Film: HOT DOCS 2024: “Qoryqpa” (Streets Loud with Echoes)

Being a part of the Soviet Empire when the Berlin Wall fell Kazakhstan declared itself an independent democracy but not having much of a history of democracy it quickly slipped back into the comfortable ways of totalitarianism.

It was the 19July2018 murder of Kazak 25-year-old figure skating Olympic bronze medalist (Sochi 2018 Olympics) Denis Ten in Almaty that lit the fuse to simmering dissent in Kazakhstan. Police were used to solidify totalitarian rule by tracking, spying, harassing and imprisoning anyone criticizing the regime. Ten’s murder sparked a backlash amongst political opponents of the regime and also amongst the non politically active citizenry outraged over the daylight murder of Ten by two assailants who were in the midst of stealing his car mirrors. Citizens were outraged over the lack of police response to emergency calls, the failure to press charges for petty crime, failure to apprehend criminals and bribery. Each of assailants received an 18-year prison sentence.

Filmmaker Katerina Suvorova captures the rise and fall of a movement called “Reform the Police” which transcended the issue of police reform into a wider form of political opposition. Suvorova’s camerawork and narration reveal the fragmented and tenuous nature of the leadership of Reform the Police and the omnipresent security services watching, filming, arresting, beating to the point on January 22, 2022 when 241 demonstrators were killed and thousands detained and many of those tortured. The presidential election results were part of the protest. One queries if the lack of democratic traditions fostered an inability to mount a coherent and unified political opposition. Fascinating to watch how a criminal event, being the murder of Denis Ten, sparked outrage against the police which steamrolled into a wider political protest.

A strong resemblance of Kazak and Belarus opposition to the left-over Soviet hack leaders.

Hot Docs screenings of “Qoryqpa” will be on 28April2024 and 1May2024.

RKS 2024 Film Rating 73/100.