Finishing up Rialto Channel’s Encore Documentary season on Wednesday evenings is You’ve Been Trumped. Like many people, some weeks I just can’t get enough of the US Presidential election, and other weeks I find myself wishing it was all just a reality television show of no consequence. Love him or hate him, Mr Trump has come further than anyone predicted, and caused quite a stir along the way. You’ve Been Trumped is a documentary from 2011 that captures Trump’s campaign to build a controversial golf course on the North East coast of Scotland. This probably won’t come as a shock, but his behavior is appalling.
You’ve Been Trumped premieres Wednesday 28th September, 8.30pm
Those who watched Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, or his campaign speeches know Trump can work the camera. Take him away from that contrived world though and suddenly Trump’s media moves are revealed for what they are - shallow PR spin. This David and Goliath documentary follows Scottish locals attempting to stop Trump building a golf course on their unique coastal wilderness area.
Director Anthony Baxter, arrested while shooting this film, is just one of the characters in this saga to feel the full force of a powerful multinational company. Environmental concerns and economic benefits are pitted against each other as to why this project should or shouldn’t go ahead, but when the local Scottish people begin to question the project, Trump and his team give us a glimpse of their modus operandi which largely comes down to arrogance, disrespect and bullying.
James White premieres Friday 30th September, 8.30pm
The melancholic drama James White is producer Josh Mond’s (Martha Marcy May Marlene) directorial debut. With three short films under his belt, Mond debuted James White at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Audience Award.
The film tells the story of a twenty-something New Yorker James White (Christopher Abbott) who deals with his mother’s terminal illness by retreating further into a self-destructive and hedonistic lifestyle. It’s an intimate, raw and unflinching look at a sensitive young man’s attempt to nurse his mother through the awful final stages of her cancer; a task made all the more difficult by the fact his mother isn’t ready to let go.
It’s a premise that has been explored before, but the performances by Christopher Abbott, and Cynthia Nixon as White’s mother are excellent. Abbott’s nuanced performance allows Mond to capture his character’s pain and suffering through intense close-up shots, and Nixon is unpredictable and utterly convincing as she fades away from us. The film was inspired by Mond’s own experience of losing his mother, but the end result is a collaboration of ideas from various people involved in the project from Nixon through to the film’s cinematographer Mátyás Erdély. Regardless of where the idea came from, there’s no doubt this film captures the pain, mess and sadness of death.
The Sea premieres Saturday 1st October, 8.30pm
Saturday evening’s film also ventures into the theme of death and grieving with an adaptation of John Banville’s Man Booker Prize Winning novel The Sea. Banville wrote the screenplay that Stephen Brown, in his directorial debut, brings to life with subtlety and beauty.
Even though Banville had nothing to do with the film once he’d handed over the script, he was reportedly thrilled with the finished product which he describes as a “mood piece”. There’s not a huge amount of plot in this yarn that follows Max Morden (Ciaran Hinds), a grieving art historian struggling to deal with his wife’s death, who returns to the Irish seaside resort he visited as a child where his past is as unresolved as his present. Instead we flash back in time as Max nostalgically remembers the summer he became infatuated with a wealthy British family who also came to seaside in the 1950s, and in the present we watch him drink himself into more misery.
Nicely acted, Hinds is also joined by Charlotte Rampling, Natascha McElhone and Rufus Sewell, along with some talented youngsters who handle the material well.