“From us to me” (Amber Collective, 2016): a review

It's strange how when watching some films one suddenly feels like one must imperatively write a review about them. Not just because it's a good film, often an excellent film, but because it's virtually unknown. Or at least one hasn't ever heard about it before. It's not like a standalone review in a small, little-known film blog will make too much of a difference, but on the age of the Internet, it may indeed make a difference (see the list of results when googling the last film one reviewed for the Spanish Film Review Club, "Illfares the land", a Channel 4 documentary directed by Bill Bryden back in 1983). You could argue that same as the blog does a service to a certain kind of non-mainstream Spanish cinema like the films by Jaime Rosales by postingvaluable material about it on the Internet, it can also do it for other non-mainstream kind of cinema.

It’s also funny how exactly the same feeling one had when watching the extraordinary documentary about St Kilda at the Edinburgh Filmhouse in May 2018 (two years ago already without contributing to the blog!) came back – I need to write about this for the blog – at the May 29^th, 2020 screening of this “From us to me”. I say funny because this screening was again part of the FolkFilm Gathering Festival – in this case the 2020 edition, while the St Kilda docu was shown as part of the 2018 edition.

It would seem that this particular festival is prone to surface hidden gems of British cinema that find a way to one’s heart – even if being able to just hold this year’s edition was a feat of imagination, with cinemas everywhere officially closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic (a shout out to Transgressive North for their resilience and persistence). As stated on the BellaCaledonia webpage devoted to the event:

“The event, now in its sixth year, is geared to explore the possibility of a ‘folk cinema’. Run by Transgressive North the event (like everything else) has had to be moved online.

So this year it’s completely free and completely online.

The chance to hold a free festival has been welcomed as an “ironic silver lining” within a “horrible situation” by director Jamie Chambers.

“We’ve wanted for a while to run an event that is both freely available and widely accessible but it has taken a lot of thinking on our feet to completely change our approach and revise the whole programme in such a short space of time,” he said.

The theme has also changed slightly.

The theme was originally going to be ‘Resistance’ but has been since changed to ‘Collectivity Against The Odds’ and explores ways in which we can hold on to our sense of community when forced into ever greater levels of individualism – both by the pressures of the pandemic and by the wider, longer-term forces in society. To this end we are hosting a discussion asking:

“What can we do to hold on to our sense of community and stay connected, not only during the Covid-19 pandemic, but once it is over? How can we hold onto our sense of collectivity, and prioritise the ties that bind us all together, rather than the forces pressurising us apart? In a world where the “collective” and the “public” were already concepts under sustained attack, this has become an urgent pressing issue.”

So the whole set of documentary films that made up the programme for the Film Folk Gathering 2020 edition where screened for free via Zoom and the opportunity was offered to attendees to stay in the call for a post-screening chat or Q&A with the film directors. Simply brilliant. It’s easy to see how largerfestivals would not be able to replicate this approach, based on a “small hence flexible” strategy coupled to a people-not-profit drive that clearly not everyone can afford.

The lucky attendees to the May 29^th screening of “From us to me” then had the opportunity to stay online for a chat on the film with several of the Newcastle-based Amber Collective members to discuss how come they were allowed to shoot – back in 1987 – the only British documentary ever made in the German Democratic Republic (“they thought we were left-wing Labour so would be able to convey a balanced picture”) or how the agreement worked with the GDR’s DEFA Documentary Film Studio that allowed them to shoot a return flick (“DieseBriten, diese Deutschen” or “These Brits, these Germans”) in Newcastle in 1988. Not the kind of internationalism we seem to favour these days, truth to be said.

As explained above, this reviewer was both blown away by the film and astonished he hadn’t heard about the Amber Collective ever before despite his deep interest in and substantial previous reading about British social cinema. But as the Spanish say goes, “you’ll never go to bed without having learnt something new”, and a bit of online self-documenting quickly showed some of the reasons why Amber may not be more widely known. This is from the introduction to the just-released (April 2020) book “In Fading Light: The Filmsof the Amber Collective” by James Leggott:

"Amber may have been recognized as the 'most important and enduring collective to have emerged in Britain', but in an interview carried out in 2000, their key founding member Murray Martin lamented how they had hitherto flown mostly beneath the critical and historical radar:

"At times we feel a bit aggrieved that our existence isn't even recognized. If you look at the histories of British cinema, it's not recognized and yes, fifteen years ago, Lindsay Anderson was quoted as saying to someone who was doing a history of British cinema: 'if you don't include Amber there is no history of British cinema'. And yet we're never mentioned"

So this is definitely one of the reasons for writing this review: not just to admit to one’s ignorance but to also hopefully allow others to learn about this amazing group of storytellers.

“From us to me” is actually two films in one. Same as Michael Powell’s “Return to the Edge of the World” 1978 film revisited the people and landscapes of his (way) earlier masterpiece “The Edge of the World” (1937), “From us to me” is the result of a 2016 revisit to the Rostock/Warnemünde people and landscapes that featured in the earlier “From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels”. This FMSME is the 1987 documentary that was part of the original two-way agreement between Channel 4 and DEFA, and it was of course shot before the fall of the Berlin Wall as an attempt to document the reality of life in a rather remote location close to the Baltic Sea where the GDR lifestyle looked set to go on for decades on end. The 2016 film has a deeper feeling to it – it’s not just about documenting the effects of die Wende on the average citizen’s life (especially on working women) but also about exploring the attitudes of current day people we “already met” thirty years ago towards their new socio-economic circumstances – their joys and their regrets. This is sheer gold dust for anyone interested in contemporary European history – with present-daypolitical ramifications too that the film wisely stays away from.

The documentary also provides a refreshing complementary take to the present, neoliberal mainstream narrative provided by stories like the “Letterswithout Signature” exhibition at the Berlin Museum for Communication (until October this year, not to be missed if you have the opportunity) or the great “TheFile: A Personal History” account by Timothy Garton Ash. There were of course lots of political issues around everyday life in the GDR, and the Stasi infiltration of civil society was possibly the greatest one – providing perhaps an ironic counterpart to these current times marked by our ubiquitous very own brand of surveillance capitalism – but that was not all there was to it. There are very interesting facts to be learnt about how everyday life unfolded in places like the Rostock harbour and how things have evolved in the decades after the downfall of the Communist regime. And this “balanced perspective” that could be expected from a group of left-wing Labour filmmakers is indeed there in this documentary.

We listen to the former employees at the harbour cranes now in disrepair who just loved their jobs – it is much harder for women to land these sorts of job these days, they tell us – and the perspective on the dawn and the dusk over the Baltic they would get from their cabins at the top of the huge metal structures. They’re discussing to what extent the statements they provided in the previous round of filming were influenced by a given secretive political climate back then. One of them, a mother of a severely disabled child, celebrates the sophisticated healthcare service that the new political system has allowed her to rely on. The owners of the former fishermen’s cooperative regret that the whole enterprise, together with its strategically placed headquarters at the mouth of the harbour, were liquidated for a pittance following the post-1989 refusal of their fellow GDR countrymen and –women to buy any product that was coming from the local supply chains, favouring instead anything on offer at the brand new, colourful Western-style supermarkets.

There is the ‘successful’ couple who have very effectively adapted to the new reality and regularly enjoy diving and trekking trips to faraway places like Mexico. And there’s the fishing ship captain telling us how he and his crew would be allowed to leave the national territorial waters in order to get their catches further away and how he never considered not returning – a family and a home were waiting for him back in Rostock. He says the biggest mistake the former regime made was to ban the people from traveling abroad – “they should have allowed young people to travel and see the world, and all of them would have returned once they had seen that this was a safe country with jobs for everyone”, the former fisherman, now retired, states.

It’s hard to understate the deeply moving authenticity of this “From us to me”. The fact that its screening was followed by a smallonline discussion with a few Amber filmmakers plus Richard Grassick and Beatrix Wupperman from co-producing Moving Films was a great bonus – we learnt for instance how the filmmakers managed to locate the cast of the 1987 film “From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels” with whom they had never planned to reunite. In a way, the Zoom link provided a chance for an even warmer conversation than the one that would’ve taken place in a cinema room.






Richard Grassick closed the delightful session with a quip: “since we were often being accused of documenting trades on the verge of disappearing -- Yorkshire coal-mining, fishing, harness racing – we though ‘Ok, let’s go and make a film about some rock-solid working-class reality that will not be at any risk of vanishing, such as the German Democratic Republic. This was 1987’”.