WHEN THE ECONOMY is in tatters but you still believe your dreams are salvageable, you take chances you otherwise might not have. It is in Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures that we meet Tat (Beatriz Batarda), a Portuguese immigrant to the United Kingdom, who against implacable odds is holding on with everything she’s got to her dreams of happiness and prosperity. It screens on this year’s European Film Festival South Africa, in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and online for free via the festival’s website, until 19 October 2025.
From the outset, this is an intense and difficult film to watch. It is beautifully edited and supremely well cast and performed, but the underlying degradation central to the grand narrative here is hard to stomach. And even harder to watch.
As with any diaspora that has experienced waves of immigration over generations, a hierarchy is established. Those who have managed to put down roots in the new country, however flimsy they may be, will help those newly arrived. Or use them, as the case may be.
Tat has married into lower class British culture, where obscene bullying is de rigueur, on every level. She is attempting to earn her living and her life by grasping at straws and her roots back in Portugal wherever she can. She’s ‘Mom’ to the next generation of Portuguese immigrants, whose English is poorer than hers, whose dreams are more tarnished and hopes, fainter. She’s the overseer in a turkey production plant, a factory that readies turkeys for the fridge.
And it is here where the horror of the meat market is made explicit. There are scenes in this factory from which you will turn away weeping – and they’re not only human scenes, but ones involving the turkeys themselves. There are other scenes in the degraded slum of Great Yarmouth, formerly a popular holiday venue, that will turn your stomach. It’s about filthy and desperate intimacies and crushed dreams, as it is about racial humiliation and crushed spirits.
Resonating with the kind of grit and anger that underpins the 2000 film Billy Elliot, particularly in its scenes of poverty and police intervention, it also evokes the horror articulated by South African-born performance artist Steven Cohen, in his works blood and fat. It’s also about the whippet-racing industry, trust and betrayal, but more than all of this, it is about birds. Wild birds in flight. How they group and regroup and the visual poetry they make in cohesion. Book-ended with depth, it is a tale brought to sensibility with a damning reflection on Darwin and the horror that humankind brings to itself and other creatures.
It’s an exceptionally fine piece of filmography, but the message hits so unequivocally hard, it is a film difficult to get up from and carry on with your life.
- Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures is directed by Marco Martins and features a cast headed by Beatriz Batarda, Hugo Bentes, Rita Cabaco, Robert Elliot, Josh Farr, Anna Frostic, Kerry Gedge, Sidney Hart, Kris Hitchen, José Lopes, Nuno Lopes, Félix Magar Phibbs, Abdul Razac Seco, Vitor Ramos, Michael Rawson, Joseph Ross, Romeu Runa, Craig Smith, Ted Tank, Andy Whittred and Eve Woods. Written by Ricardo Adolfo, Guilherme Branquinho and Marco Martins, it is produced by Kamilla Hodol and Filipa Reis and features creative input by Jim Williams (composer) João Ribeiro (cinematography), Mariana Gaivão, Karen Harley and Marco Martins (editor), Jessie Frost and José Pires (casting), Wayne Dos Santos (production design) and Isabel Carmona (costumes). In English and Portuguese with English subtitles, it is part of the 12th European Film Festival in South Africa, screening at The Bioscope independent cinema in Milpark, Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town and Hyde Park NuMetro in Johannesburg, as well as online via the festival’s website, until 19 October 2025.