Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Latin America - 6 (52) - Bolivia - Third Cinema : Sanjinés and the Ukamau Group

                                                                                                                                                                                          

Bolivia - 

Jorge Sanjinés b.36  Antonio Eguino b.38

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 Jorge Sanjinés

The National Bolivian Revolution of April 1952 reinstated the 1951 election victory of the leftist MLR party after the outgoing government had refused to hand over power and a military junta had taken over in what was apparently the 179th coup in the country’s  continuously disastrous short history since Bolivia had gained its independence from Spain in 1825.  The MLR's reformist program, backed by the well organised tin miners (tin being the country’s main export), in one of the few genuine social revolutions in Latin America, introduced deep structural social and economic change to one of the poorest countries in Latin America.  These changes were reflected in the arts, especially film with the founding of the Bolivian Film Institute in 1953. Despite the overthrow of the MLR government of José Torres in a CIA - backed military coup in 1971, the momentum for feature film production, begun in the early sixties, just managed to survive.

Although previously lacking an ongoing film industry and any tradition of film production, features with an established Bolivian realist aesthetic and social identity were produced in the sixties and seventies through the efforts of individuals, notably Jorge Sanjinés and Antonio Eguino, working under difficult conditions and limited funding in a period when the government was increasingly at the mercy of the military.  As director of the Film institute Jorge Sanjinés was responsible for the production of 27 newsreels, 4 documentaries and the medium length Aysa (1965). The Ukamau group which he co-founded with writer Oscar Soria and Ricardo Rada when the Insitute was closed in 1966, did get some initial encouragement from the authorities in completing their first indigenous language feature Ukamau (1966) a fictional story made in one of the principal Indian languages with non-professional actors depicting the clash between the Indian and mestizo cultures. The latter representing western culture in a debased form, was completed only because the responsible minister was given one script, when requested, while another was filmed. 

“Sanjinés’ réponse to the mixed reception of the film and the uneven impact of some of the stylistic experiments undertaken to form the basis of the extensive theorisation of revolutionary cinema he undertook in the late 1960s and 1970s (Armes 296). As he made clear, Sanjinés´ concept of utility fundamental to his work was “to assist liberation struggles in Latin America” (Framework 10, Spring 1979). All film work of the group was subjected to rigorous self-criticism seeking fresh insights into the requirements of a cinema that is made for, as well as about, the people to develop awareness as well as entertain (297).

The group took their name, adopted in 1967, from the the Ayamara language, a word meaning 'the way it is'. Their first film in 1966 was about the revenge of a man for the rape of his wife. When the Film Institute withdrew further funding, Yawar Maliku/Blood of the Condor (1969), completed at great personal sacrifice to its producers (Keel), was a huge success. It was based on a newspaper report of a sterilisation program carried out by s team of American doctors on indigenous women in a Bolivian region without their knowledge at a Peace Corps maternity clinic. Recreating the Quechuya community response, a scripted flashback structure is used to contrast the lifestyle of the Americans with the poverty of the Indian population. After being initially banned in response to pressure from the American Embassy, Bolivian press campaigns and demonstrations resulted in the lifting of the ban. In release Blood of the Condor became the most widely viewed film in Bolivian history; the Peace Corps was expelled from Bolivia.

The response of peasant viewers to the flashback structure and the portrayal of protagonists as individuals led Sanjinés to question the efficacy of the style in which the group had been working. “The complex narrative built around flashbacks, in a rethink, was subsequently abandoned in favour of linear structure and a tendency towards sequence shots. This style [was] adapted to the traditions of oral narrative; the players on the screen are the historical actors of the events portrayed, they are dramatizing their own experience. “The use of long takes allows them the greatest space to express their collective memory, and a new kind of cinema is born” (Chanan 746).

In El coraje del pueblo/The Courage of the People (1971) financed by Italian State Television (RAI), Sanjinés abandoned the linear docudrama mode deployed in Blood of Condor for historical reconstruction in a collective re-living, rather than an analysis, of the massacre of striking tin miners in  northern Bolivia in 1967 - ' the massacre of San Juan' -  made in collaboration with actual survivors of the massacre who appear in the film in what Sanjinés termed 'direct dialogue'. RAI, upset by anti-American statements made in the film, cut controversial scenes. It was the last film Sanjinés would direct for the group and was never released in Bolivia. He was immediately expelled from the country when the Torres government was toppled by the military coup in 1971, going into exile where he continued to make films.

In this oppressive political environment, the head of the military junta, General Banzer, making it clear  that no dissent would be tolerated, confronted the Ukamau Group with the choice of making concessions or going underground. Their next film, Pueblo Chico/Small Time (1974), was directed by Antonio Eguino, the cinematographer who had worked closely with Sanjinés on earlier Ukamau films including Blood of the Condor. It was hailed on its release by the Bolivian press and succeeded with a very heterogeneous audience. “In its planning and realisation,” Keel concludes that, “the group was driven into the politics of style that finally led to a neo-realist picture. Ukamau wanted the Indians to enact situations from their lives, and part of Pueblo Chico’s success is the achievement of that ambition” (ibid).

The narrative strategy in Pueblo Chico adheres to the major tenets of any realist aesthetic, namely verisimilitude of character and setting, and plausibility of action […] the reluctance to set forth a political program or thesis, or to assume even a precise ideological point of view [… ] Ukamau has ingeniously left the ending [ the immediate defeat of the commitment to the central issue in Bolivia of agrarian reform] suggesting the feeling of ambiguity that exists throughout the film.

Antonio Eguino

Erich Keel describes the theme and story of Pueblo Chico “as eminently Bolivian” in attacking one of the central controversies of contemporary Bolivian politics - Agrarian Reform. Decreed shortly after the 1952 revolution, the measure led to significant changes in the socio-economic structure of the country. The class of Creole ‘latifundistas’ were expropriated and disappeared as a class, much liberated land being returned to the Indians, the “compesinos’. Finally after 400 years of slavery and servitude the Indians had become fully integrated citizens.  Set in the regressive period of the late sixties, the fifth feature film of the Ukamau Group tells the story of Arturo, a student of sociology who is returning to his home town to reverse the stagnant order in favour of the native Indians. But rather than overseeing the remaining parts of a large estate, as he is hired to do by his father, Arturo spends more and more time in the nearby Indian pueblo teaching the children and helping the sick. His presence seems to fill the Indians with a sense of pride, courage and assertiveness to demand their rights. Town leaders bribe the agricultural commission into taking land back from the Indians. As he becomes more deeply involved Arturo is increasingly isolated from university friends and threatened by the whites and mestizos in the town.

For Humberto Rios, a Bolivian director of militant films, then living in exile in Buenos Aires. “the Importance of Pueblo Chico was to test the possibilities which would allow cinema to exist in Bolivia” or as Equino insisted and writer Oscar Sofia, contributor to the scripts of all Ukamau’s films, endorsed, “Ukamau makes films for a specific audience […] films for national use, for the middle class and popular groups of Bolivia, and not for the elite.”  - Erich Keel                       

In his 1976 manifesto on the problems of form and content in Latin American cinema, unlike Solanas and Getino with their distinction between first (Hollywood) and second (art) cinema, Sanjinés  lumped the two together as “bourgeois cinema” with individualistic subjectivity and narrative suspense as core drivers, closing off spaces and time for reflection.” Hanlon considers that “his critique of bourgeois cinema, although it does not explicitly condemn European art cinema, implies that it is the most bourgeois of cinemas precisely because it appears to emanate from the imagination of an individual rather than a collective author.                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

The creator in a revolutionary society should be the means and not an end, and everyone should be a  means and not an end, and beauty should play the same role. Beauty should have the same function that it has in the indigenous community, where everyone has the ability to create beautiful objects ,,,We try to make the images of the film, the music, the dialogue, etc., coherent with this culture; we set ourselves the problem of aesthetic coherence. (Sanjinés quoted by Hanlon p.356).                      

                                                                                                                                                                 Bolivian-born Sanjinés further argued “that the politically committed filmmaker, almost by definition an intellectual educated in the Western tradition, must efface his or her personality in the work.” In Sanjinés    assimilation of the response of Andean peasants, unexposed to or uninterested in cinema, to his use of close-ups and a flashback structure in Blood of the Condor, Sanjinés recognised that the viewer cannot  be considered as an abstraction but one who is, always historically and socially conditioned. The Western-educated or influenced filmmaker, Sanjinés realised, must shed his or hers conceptions of what beautiful cinema is, in order to make a film “consonant with the spectator’s non-Western culture” (ibid).

According to Sanjinés in his next film, Courage of the People, he and his collaborators began their experiments in collaboration with their non-professional, mostly peasant, performers. In his subsequent two films, El enemigo principal/The Principal Enemy (Peru 1974), and Fuera de acquí!/Get Out of Here! (Ecuador 1977), Sanjinés began experimenting with long takes or sequence shots, techniques that became increasingly central to his theories of film-making “with the people.” Rather than “rejecting all previous cinematic language what we must reject are the objectives, methods and aims of bourgeois art.” The task Sanjinés set himself, as a revolutionary Bolivian filmmaker, was “to screen the available techniques for their aesthetic coherence with Aymara and Quechua culture ” (ibid 358, my italics ) which would have transformed the “transculturation from above” of his early films (most notably Blood of theCondor) to the “transculturation from below” of his later phase.*

Hanlon agrees with Javier Sanjinés, a professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies, that transculturalism* from above and below is of particular value when analysing the career of Jorge Sanjinés, and Hanlon also suggests that the concept is generally applicable to New Latin American Cinema and, in particular, its relationship to European art cinema. More in keeping with the rhetoric of New Latin American cinema theory, in the case of La nacion clandestina/Clandestine Nation (Bolivia 1989), Holman further suggests, the term “dialectical transculturalism” is neatly expressive in the film where  “various dialectics are at play : colonizer and oppressed, rural and urban, Eisensteinian ecstasy and Brechtian distanciation, European film technique and local conceptions of time.”  Even taking into account the paradox in the heart of The Clandestine Nation Hanlon found “ that despite the return to previously abandoned European styles of filmmaking, particularly evident in Sanjinés´ adaptation of techniques from [Theo Angelopolous’s] The Travelling Players, the film succeeds in expressing the Andean cosmovision and, more important, was and remains well received by [Sanjinés´] desired audience” (359).

Roy Armes concludes that although further work was blocked in the 1980s, in the work of Sanjinés and the Ukamau group, “we have a rare example of a form of filmmaking based on a radical rethinking of the stylistic pattern of film production that allows totally non-western ways of seeing society and depicting interrelationships of individuals to their group to be expressed in a then [historically} predominantly Western medium (304).                                                                                                                          

* Transculturation is a term for a process, more complex than assimilation or acculturation, where a group, often subjugated, creatively adopts and transforms elements from a dominant culture resulting in new cultural forms involving merging and transformation of elements to create something novel.   - John Beverly in an essay “Tensculturism and Subalternity: The Lettered City and Tupac Amaru Rebellion.” His book Subalternity and Representation (1999) begins with a history of the term.   

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Michael Chanan  “New Cinemas in Latin America”  Oxford History of World Cinema ed G. Nowell-Smith 1996                                                                                                                                                       

Dennis Hanlon “Travelling Theory and European Art Film” in Global Art Cinema  R.Galt &  K. Schoonover eds. 2010                                                                                                                                                          

Erich Keel  “Militant Cinema to Neo-Realism : Pueblo Chico   Film Quarterly  Summer 1976                               

Roy Armes  Third World Film Making and the West  1987

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Tort

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso

6 (39) East Central Europe - Czechoslovakia

6 (40) East Central Europe - Yugoslavia

6 (41) - The Soviet Union

6 (42) - Asia - Japan - Part One

6 (43) - Japan - Part Two

6 (44) - Japan - Part Three - Shohei Imamura

6 (45) Asia - India Pt 1 - Satyajit Ray

6 (46) Asia - India Pt 2- Ghatak, Dutt, Sen, Parallel Cinema

Asia - 6 (47) China  (To be published shortly)

6 (48) - Brazil Pt 1- Cinema Novo, dos Santos, Rocha

6 (49) Brazil Pt 2 - de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra

6(50) - Latin America - Argentina

6 (51) - Chile - Allende and Popular Unity

Criminal Minds - A quick run through eleven series of crime, thriller and spy stories that went out on TV and the streaming services.

If there has been one major change to my viewing habits in recent years it has to be the amount of limited episode streaming series I watch . Series TV passed me by back in the day. I’ve never seen an episode of The Simpsons let alone all those other network staples. Somehow or other though I’ve got hooked on more than a few things that only go out on the streaming services and which you can binge watch in huge dollops. The Sopranos  and Breaking Bad  were examples. I only got to them years after they began. Now I hunt them down though I haven’t reached the stage of repeat viewings. One run through of every ep of Spiral  or The Bureau  has been enough. There always more out there and some, like The Man in the High Castle took a while to get through, which doesn’t help the comprehension of the very twisty network narrative plots. But here are eleven shows I watched this year.

Richard Gere, Jeffrey Wright, Michael Fassbender
The Agency

THE AGENCY (Created and written by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, based on The Bureau/Le Bureau des Légendes by Eric Rochant, Paramount +). The Bureau  is one of the great ones. The Agency  less so. But it has its own charms and a superior cast (Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere and a late appearance by Hugh Bonneville which might develop into a much bigger part in the already announced second series).

Solid plotting but not in the ranks of the best spy stories. It stays fairly close to Eric Rochant’s original, a drawback rather than a plus I suspect. The original, just by the way, was once described to me by a Canberra denizen as the most authentic picture of what modern spies do he had ever seen. 

Brian Tyree Henry, Wagner Moura, Dope Thief

DOPE THIEF  (Created by Peter Craig, based on a novel by Dennis Tafoya, Apple TV, 2025, thanks Rod Bishop for the steer to this one) In the grimy backblocks of Philadelphia a couple of lowlifes (Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura) have a steady sideline in impersonating Drug Enforcement Agency officers, busting small time drug  dealers and making off, only, with any cash on the premises. Needless to say one such goes badly wrong, they hit a much bigger operation that involves heavyweight gangs and undercover DEA officers and all shit rains down on them throughout the eight episodes. It has the grimmest set of characters, few with a solitary redeeming virtue. (Spoiler Alert) Moura’s character is killed off. Amazingly there’s the slightest moment of hope at the very end which suggests a possible series 2 but no news there yet. 

Beth Goddard, Tom Cullen, The Gold

THE GOLD Series 2 (Written by Neil Forsyth, BBC production. Series one went out in 2023 and was based on a remarkable London airport robbery where a bunch of crooks looking for a modest haul happened to come across about  £26 million  worth of gold. Needless to say the police were not amused. Hugh Bonneville played the lead copper and Jack Lowden the leading crook. Series two of The Gold is speculative. I’m quoting The Guardian here:” At the end of the first series of The Gold, it dawned on the officers of the Met’s Flying Squad that for all of their multiple investigations into the infamous Brink’s-Mat robbery of 1983, they had only ever been chasing half of the stolen bullion. Arriving two years after its highly entertaining predecessor, series two sets off with an irresistible premise: what exactly happened to the rest of it?... a note at the beginning explains that the (second) series is based on both real events and theories as to where the loot went.”

No Jack Lowden this time. The chief spiv is Tony Palmer (Tom Cullen), who got away with it in series one but this time the net closes in. The prolific  Scots writer Neil Forsythe also provided the starting point for Reckless, q.v. below.

Katharine Kelly, In Flight

IN FLIGHT (Co-created by Mike Walden and Adam Randall, directed by Chris Baugh) Set in Belfast this once centres on Jo (Katherine Kelly) an air hostess whose son gets caught smuggling drugs in Bulgaria. She becomes entangled  with the gang smuggling the drugs and is forced to become a drug mule herself. Six eps. A Channel 4 UK series (copy supplied by a friend) but apparently headed for SBS  and its SBS On Demand streaming service. Watch it there if you don’t mind the constant distraction of advertisements you cant ignore. Many of the ads are just promos for other titles on the stream. A good program selection but mostly easily avoided because of the way stuff is shown.

Tasma Walton, Hunter Page-Lochard, Reckless

RECKLESS (Lead writer /creator Kodie Bedford, NITV production for SBS and the BBC. Bedford is an Indigenous woman, slowly assembling a high quality series of credits writing for episode TV. The director is Beck Cole another Indigenous woman with a seriously good debut feature, Here I Am, and some exceptional TV drama and documentary work on her C.V. Reckless adapts the Scottish TV drama Guilt  to a Fremantle and Perth locale and plays fast and loose with the relationships. Brother and lesbian sister are in entanglement after entanglement. The plot twists are funny as well as clever. Tasma Walton and Hunter Page-Lochard as the blackfella brother and sister, she being of the view that her brothers and sisters get far too much doled out to them by government, he finally having it dawn on him his business is a cog in a criminal enterprise, are great character creations. There was a second series of Guilt in the UK. Let’s hope for more here. 

Mark Coles-Smith, Tuuli Narkle, Mystery Road Origin

MYSTERY ROAD ORIGIN Series 2  (Written by Stephen McGregor, Jada Alberts, Erica Glynn, Samuel Paynter, Gary Hamaguchi, Directed by Wayne Blair, Jub Clerc, ABC-TV and ABC I-View, BBC) Ivan Sen’s redoubtable, phlegmatic, take no bullshit detective Jay Swan is now up to its sixth iteration. After two movies and three prior series, two with Aaron Pedersen and now two with Mark Coles-Smith devoted to the early detective story of the young Jay. In this one, set in WA forest country, he has a heavily pregnant wife (Tuuli Narkle) and his cop colleague (Robyn Malcolm) is a lazy female sergeant who calls him, until he snaps, “Boney”. You have to go a long way back to know the meaning of that one. Clarence Ryan who plays Jay’s brother Sputty is a great character actor. He‘s also brilliant as Roddy in Reckless. The two series made by Indigenous film-makers this year are as good as it gets for Australian TV.

Sascha Alexander Gersak, Petra Schmidt–Schaller
The Marnow Murders

THE MARNOW MURDERS Series 1 (Written by Holger Karsten Schmidt, Directed by Andreas Herzog). Marnow is a town in what used to be the DDR. This element provides lashings of plot and skullduggery and dirty dealing because the background is the old DDR’s willingness to conduct medical experiments on whomever can be pressed into service. Detective Elling (played with much sweaty, unkempt and unshaven relish by Sascha Alexander Gersak) gets a case to investigate a fairly gruesome murder. Elling has problems with a wife he suspects is having an affair with her boss. He has two offsiders both of them with some eccentricities.  Lonas Mendt (Petra Schmidt–Schaller) lives in a motor home and Soren Jasper (Anton Rubstov) has a fiancée but is still quickly in the romantic thrall of Lona. Sub-plots abound, chief of which is Elling  tempted by an offer of a bribe. There is quite a bit of monkey business with that brown paper bag. Crime stories which delve into digging up the past are staples of the genre but the extra dimension of yielding up the secrets of the East German regime adds some extra oomph. It’s another one streaming via the advertisement filled SBS On Demand and if you can handle that element it’s worth a look. Series two awaits. 

Gary Oldman, Slow Horses

SLOW HORSES Series 5  (Showrunner Will Smith, Written by Will Smith, Morwenna Banks, Jonny Stockwood, Mark Denton. Edward Docx, Sean Gray,  Directed by James Hawes, Jeremy Lovering, Saul Metzstein, Adam Randall). Meticulously working through Mick Herron’s novels, one book per series, some say it turns them into cartoon versions of the books, others, moi included, think they are knockouts. Australian company Seesaw seems to be the lead producer but some credit for the rigor of them might also go to one of the credited producers Graham Yost, whose talent for smart episode TV has previously been on show with the Elmore Leonard adaptation Justified and is also on show in Sneaky Pete. Screens on Apple TV.

Jack Gleeson, Safe Harbour

SAFE HARBOUR  (Created and written by Mark Williams, Directed by Mark Williams, Arne Toonen, Inti Calfat, Dick Verheve. For some reason the creators don’t bother to explain, the drug trade in Rotterdam is being fought over by, on one side, the son (Jack Gleeson) and daughter (Charlie Murphy) of an Irish drug dealer (Colm Meaney) who mostly prefers to stay at home and fuss over his prize horse stud until it comes to the crunch round about the  second last ep. On the other side is an equally young gang leader of indeterminate Middle Eastern origin. The Irish siblings are a complicated pair. The sister is running the show. The brother is a murderous, conscienceless thug.   She’s gorgeous.  He’s not even remotely good looking, a visage made worse by affecting a wispy moustache. The Irish pair first enlist and then enforce the help of a pair of young computer hackers (Alfie Allen and Martin Lakemeier) who work out how to bust into the security system of the Rotterdam port. It sounds, and is, wildly farfetched but it has a certain edgy, twisty, unpredictable quality and a level of violence to rival Gangs of London. Streaming on SBS On Demand.

Giovanni Ribisi, Sneaky Pete

SNEAKY PETE Series 1 – (Created by David Shore and Bryan Cranston, showrunner for series Graham Yost, separate director for each ep including Bryan Cranston (ep 8)) The pilot was made in 2015 and the series in 2017. It was followed by two subsequent  series that I await with some anticipation. Con man Marius Josipovic (Giovanni Ribisi) assumes the identity of his prison cellmate, Pete. He heads for Pete’s domicile and fools his relatives. He’s taking refuge from a casino operator/gangster played by Cranston who wants both money and revenge and is not averse to chopping off the brother’s fingers to get Marius’s attention. As with much else described here when you want to run your story through ten eps (as here) and approximately 500 minutes then you have to have lots of dizzying twists, turns, misdirects, cliffhangers. Enough to satisfy Louis Feuillade in fact. 

Martha Plympton, Mark Rufalo, Task

TASK – (Created by Brad Inglesby. Written by Brad Inglesby with additional writers for some eps, Directed by Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield. Made for HBO. Streaming where HBO streams including Prime.) In the backblocks of Pennsylvania Tom Brandis, once a Catholic priest is seeing out his days as an FBI agent by running booths at careers exhibitions. But the FBI is shorthanded and a major operation is mounted when some maverick crooks start robbing a series of drug houses run by a bikie gang, The gang are not happy at all and they suspect they have a mole of some kind who is tipping off the robbers, a couple of garbagemen named Robbie and Cliff. Are we seeing a riff on Dope Thief ( q.v.)  or vice versa.Tom has the job of quickly assembling a team. Needless to say the team bring a bundle of personal neuroses to the story. Mark Rufalo, all shaggy and downtrodden with a family backstory that interrupts the action, is terrific as always. Series 2 is promised.

For 2026 a new Mick Herron adaptation, Down Cemetery Road already beckons. As does a big catch up on Sneaky Pete  and follow up series of Task, Marnow Murders, The Agency  and Slow Horses. Perhaps we can also hope for another series of Justified just to top things off.