The Interplay of Past and Present in Some of the Best Cinema This Year

I’m a big fan of this manifesto against best of the year lists, which applies as much to film as it does to books and restaurants. Since many of the sources of our collective pleasures are hard to reduce to a subjective opinion on contemporaneity and relevance within a given year.

In the spirit of a non-list I write about a small selection of films that opened new doors to thinking for me in 2024, bringing both rigour and experimentation to topics that merit a conversation. I was drawn to how each of these filmmakers eschews polemics and reimagines how to tell purposeful stories about the interplay between past, present and the shaping of shared futures.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s propulsive documentary trapezes between timelines and continents with an overlapping collage of images, music, text and speech across the screen. He demands the viewer’s undivided attention and duly rewards them for it.

The fulcrum of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is the rise to power and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), elected in May 1960, shortly before the country gained its independence from Belgium. He became a torchbearer for the growing Pan-African movement, which threatened Western hegemony on the African continent. During those months, the African-Asian bloc achieved a plurality in the United Nations’ General Assembly following a wave of decolonisation, posing a threat to the American predominance. In this geopolitical context, jazz became a political tool for soft power. American intelligence employed unwitting legends such as Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie as trojan horses to cover their political meddling in various countries. 

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat has an essayistic quality, which is to say that there is a central thesis and a density of archival material, impassioned speeches by Khruschev and Castro, and musical performances that propel the documentary. The dense layering reflects the work of a filmmaker who respects both his audience and the subject matter. Grimonprez doesn’t simplify the intricate web of geopolitics and resource extraction. There are no talking heads directing a viewer’s attention. Instead the work focuses on illuminating historical evidence on the complicity of powerful Western governments in oppression and human rights violations in the former colonies. Grimonprez interlaces diplomatic speeches and interviews with senior intelligence officials with polyrhythmic jazz beats to recreate an electrifying, dizzying effect. This jolts the viewer from a passive position as a spectator to feeling infuriated and galvanised.

Similar to the improvisational spirit of jazz, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat defies linearity. It hops across decades and lands on contemporary adverts for Tesla and Apple whose supply chains can be traced back to conflict minerals from DRC. Tethering us to the present, Grimonprez summons us to consider that decolonisation is not about regaining a romanticised version of the past but rather a continuous process that requires divesting from flows of capital steeped in centuries of colonialism and decades of neocolonialism.

Dahomey

Historic injustices and their present-day echoes also haunt French-Senegalese director Mati Diop who intermingles non-fiction and fantasy to deconstruct colonial narratives in her remarkable documentary Dahomey. The opening shot is an image of tiny plastic Eiffel Towers, twinkling in the Parisian night, laid out on the ground for sale. Cinematographer Josephine Drouin Viallard documents the repatriation of 26 artefacts looted by the French during the invasion in 1892 of the Kingdom of Dahomey, from the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. These artefacts are to be returned to Benin in West Africa and as the text says, ‘130 years of captivity are coming to an end’. Much of the footage is without any voiceovers leaving the viewer to observe and contemplate fixed shots of artefacts being carefully measured, packaged, eventually uncrated and the manual labour involved in making this happen. Diop adds a speculative element to this process in the form of an intermittent voiceover that speaks from the perspective of artefact number 26, (narrated by Makenzy Orcel in Fon language) voicing experiences of plunder, exile and captivity. 

Diop is astute in probing the complexity of the very act of repatriation – not for the Europeans, but for the Beninese. She has remarked that, “the tricks to avoid were not only the colonial perspective, but also the African political instrumentalization from the Benin state. It was important to navigate through the very official political national narrative of Benin.” She does this by featuring a spirited dialogue between a group of  students at the University of Abomey-Calavi in southern Benin who were born into a postcolonial nation but whose futures are still defined by the legacy of colonialism. Some see it as a watershed for the country. Others draw attention to the hollowness of the French’s government’s efforts given that the 26 objects represent a slim fraction of the estimated 7,000 stolen which still remain in French institutions. They also question the value of exhibiting these returned artefacts as art rather than as sacred ones. Diop’s decision to decenter national governments and Western art institutions and instead focus her lens on the generation of young Beninese, is hugely rewarding. As they reject binaries and interpret how the return of material objects will shape Benin’s future they pose more questions than give answers but still, importantly, contextualise this particular moment within a longer history of exclusion and dispossession.

Streaming on MUBI UK

La Chimera

​​La Chimera, Alice’s Rohrwacher’s fourth feature, begins with a dream. A young woman’s glowing face, a shard of light, a stain of memory. Arthur (Josh O’Connor), a British archaeologist newly out from a stint in prison is in a state of wakeful dreaming, imagining the visage of his absent lover Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello). Arthur is the de facto leader of a group of tombaroli (tomb raiders), who rob funerary goods from Etruscan graves to sell on the black market. He has a divine gift – with the help of a rod he can detect graves, which hold objects dear to the dead not meant to be seen any longer by the eyes of the living.

Dahomey and La Chimera are both ostensibly about looted objects and Diop and Rohrwacher employ magical surrealism to explore a society’s relationship to its past through ancient artefacts. While Dahomey grapples with the uncertainty of both the past and future of royal treasures and the value placed on them, La Chimera gestures us towards the idea that ancient art transcends materiality, that it is in the realm of the sacred, that it belongs to the earth.

La Chimera is the third in an “involuntary trilogy” of films that Rohrwacher has described as exploring Italian identity and its relationship with time and the past. Set in the 1980s, a period marked by a rise in grave robbing in rural communities when the illegal trade in artefacts in Italy was more lucrative than the drugs trade, La Chimera, like much of the rest of Rohrwacher’s filmography presents an unvarnished portrait of rural life, continuing the legacy of Italian neorealist cinema.

One of the arcs of the film that I most loved is the formation of a matriarchal community in an abandoned train station that belongs to all and no one. It is beautiful (and so rare on screen) to witness a cabal of women from different communities and social formations imagine a way of living and thriving beyond the structures of the heteronormative family, the Church, and capitalism. Rohrwacher conjures a richly concrete world that is folkloric, wondrous and ethereal. La Chimera doesn’t announce its themes but it’s a film with plenty on its mind, not least the commodification of culture and the conflicting ideals of modernity and tradition, the sacred and the profane, the seen and the unseen.  

In Camera

Naqqash Khalid’s debut feature, In Camera, a biting satire of the British entertainment industry and its performative lip service to equity and inclusion is brilliantly attentive to the dissonances of being an ethnic minority artist operating under late-stage capitalism.

Aden (a breakout performance by Nabhaan Rizwan), a young jobbing actor, goes through a series of humiliating auditions, portrayed through surrealistic vignettes laying bare the racial microaggressions at play. He frequently finds himself in claustrophobic rooms filled with men of similar height, age, and skin colour vying for the one tokenistic role available to the minority actor.

The dehumanisation faced by Aden is mirrored in his flatmate Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne), an overworked junior NHS doctor on the brink of burnout, who is struggling with nightmares and hallucinations. The introduction of Conrad (a terrific Amir El-Masry), an outgoing and confident fashion influencer who moves in as a new flatmate, offers a counterpoint to both men, but particularly to Aden. Conrad urges him to see diversity as currency and Aden begins to realise that the role he is expected to perform off camera is no different to the one on it. The awkward dynamic between Conrad and Aden, both men of colour, but divergent in terms of outlook and character, is fascinating and jarring and veers into the realm of magical realism that could well be Aden’s subconscious.

The three men embody a generational portrait of the British millennial experience – the alienation of living an atomised existence in a big city, the disillusionment and burnout from an unsatisfying career, the performative aspect of social media and influencer culture, curating a version of oneself that is more desirable but not necessarily authentic.

Khalid conceives and stages In Camera in a poetic manner as images and motifs are repeated, interrogated and transformed. Dialogue, props and scenarios are duplicated with such deftness that they become structural. A modernist sensibility is evident, and Khalid has cited the influence of British-Pakistani artists such as Rasheed Araeen and Anwar Jalal Shemza in informing how he approached the structure of the film.

Audacious and experimental, In Camera is preoccupied with themes and ideas that go beyond the confines of the film industry – the commodification and performance of identity and the farce of representation, which struck me as deeply resonant with contemporary British politics. The masterful stroke by Khalid is to continually remind us that his characters are not ideological stand-ins, they are simply trying to survive in a world not designed for them to succeed.

Streaming on MUBI UK



Rida Bilgrami is a writer based in London. Her work spans poetry, essays and reported features with a focus on travel, books, visual culture and cities. Header photograph: still courtesy In Camera, MUBI.