Pietra Brettkelly / New Zealand / 2008 / 95 mins

Vanessa Beecroft's website: http://www.vanessabeecroft.com/

If you think an ethnically sourced baby is the ultimate fashion accessory to emote your sensitivity to native people's then you'll love Vanessa Beecroft. Beecroft is a darling of the art world with an English father, an Italian mother and a wholly baffled husband. On her continuous mission to build new conceptual art works she came across a pair of very loveable Sudanese twins living at an Orphange she was visiting. Without consulting her husband - but apparently after consulting documentary maker Pietra Brettkelly - she decided she wanted to adopt the twins.

The problems are, predictably, multiple. To start with many orphanages are not strictly places only for orphans in the old fashioned Oliver sort of way but instead - like UK care systems - tend to be the place that children are cared for when their families can no longer take care of them. Beecroft thus finds a major fly in the ointment in the form of the twin's genuinely interested father and extended family. Whilst Vanessa may traverse the globe with four assistants and a bag full of cash once every three days these are intelligent but poorly resourced people who know that the twins leaving Sudan will, effectively, mean they will never see them again. Not that that puts off our petulant Art Star...

In trying to pull together this real life drama with a mini biography and Beecrofts artistic output a very strange film emerges. Brettkelly is clearly a fan of Beecroft's conceptual art (which sits somewhere between Sam Taylor Wood and Helmut Newton: each work featuring highly artificial, highly choreographed models, usually nudes) and so works various pieces into the film either using clips of Beecroft's video pieces or showing images of past work. Since the works are an uncomfortable take on female sexuality and waxed adolescent wide-eyed women's adulthood, everything about Beecroft's work screams of quiet exploitation something that gels completely and unsettlingly with her passion for these young Sudanese twins. Brettkelly's decision to intersplice the two aspects of Beecroft, her life and her work, both brings context and suggests a sort of collusion in Beecroft's process. That Brettkelly lets Vanessa talk rather than questioning her is both enlightening and frustrating as questions about her fetishistic treatment of women, black people (at one point she asks a group of black models to apply make up to look blacker) and most particularly the Sudanese twins are longing to be asked but are never directly touched. And whilst we hear from Vanessa's long suffering husband and father (both of whom seem uncommonly full of sense given their relationship to this egocentric whirlwind) we only ever see her created dramas about her "home" life away from art (if she has such a thing) and there is never a sense that we understand why she is married or has her own child as all the passion she has the twins is strangely lacking when she is shown at home in the U.S. Since this is a documentary it is bizarre not to question her motives for the adoption in the context of her marital and maternal roles rather than only discussing her decision in the context of her own parents and childhood.

The exploitation and collusion factor is ramped up substantially by lengthy looks at the work created during Beecroft's visits to the Sudan where the horrific situation in Darfur (a worthy subject for exploration) are created by grabbing local Sudanese people on the spot and creating images parodying religious works or depicting grizzly massacre in beautifully wrought but troubling photographs. However seemingly the models do not get told about the context, the pieces, the fact that some images will later be substantially digitally altered to change in tone and, worst of all, the fact that Beecroft appears to switch between paying these models a pittance and paying them nothing for their contribution to work that will go on to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to her. Footage of this process significantly tarnishes the allegedly empathetic nature of the work but Brettkelly does not seem to interested in questioning Beecroft's mechanical use of people as props.

Brettkelly does however manage to capture the sheer bizarre hypocrisy of a woman so self-absorbed she is attempting to move two children thousands of miles from their own family to join her own young son who is looked after day and night by... a housekeeper and a nanny because Beecroft is never there and is instead absorbed in creating art - in the case of the Sudanese work at least - about treating other people more humanly.

Perhaps inevitably even spending 95 minutes in Vanessa's strangely childlike company one gets no closer to understanding her obsession with these children. They are clearly charming babies but they equally clearly will have a good life in the care of their own community and the best parenting money can buy will not be automatically better replacement. Beecroft's husband and young son - who are just as deserving of attention - appear to have dropped off her radar apparently due to her boredom with stability and, alas, Brettkelly does not ask either Beecroft or her husband why they ever got married or stay married. The clue may, however, be in Beecroft's manipulative penchant for portraying women in nothing but tights and heels perhaps gives a clue to the baffling inaccessibility of her curatedly "natural" persona which blends little girl selfishness and vulnerability with a very adult bank balance and coquettish deviance.

In the end Brettkelly's film is an ode to the modern conceptual artist: many people who inhabit a very real world contribute labour and creativity to one superstar's vision formed in a very separate, very unreal life of self-conscious drama, every moment a possible detail to journal and exploit in ones next work. If the clips from Beecrofts work to date are a little fawning, and the cross examination of her decisions often lacking Brettkelly has, nonetheless, given us one of the most irritating, compelling and brilliant glimpses into a most bizarre sort of life.

Reviewed by Nicola Osborne.

Tickets are £8.00 full price / £6.40 for concessions and can be booked through the EIFF website or by calling the festival box office: 0131 623 8030.

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