Maqoma’s work has a tendency to leave you trembling in anguish. It’s an earth shattering experience you might not be able to rationally find the vocabulary to describe. How could it be possible to say so much with just music and movement? Genesis may take you deeper you believe possible.
The text is penned by people much younger than Homer, which presents a flattening of the old narratives, and a simplifying of them into platitudes of anger that sees the bashing up of guys perceived to be worthy of a good bashing up, or better still, a very violent death.
From a giant toothbrush to a car tyre tutu, there’s a giraffe’s torso and a box from cremated ashes: the precious, the profane all in a beautiful conglomeration. There is respect both earnest and cynical paid to deceased mothers and representations of the horror of hate that leaves you queasy.
Featuring a gorgeous understanding of light, the work feels effortlessly elegant and sexy. It enables you to gratuitously indulge in the sheer beauty of Italian aesthetics of the 1980s. This is a slice of life from Italian literary great, Giolardo Sapienza, luminously directed by Mario Martone and featuring Valeria Golina.
‘Unicorns’ thoughtfully presents an understanding of love that reaches beyond the expected and in doing so, pencils in a wise reflection on what a relationship can be, if gender, hatred, bias and taboo were not an essential part of the mix. The electricity between Luke and Aysha is very real.
Here we see a family stripped of a backstory to go home to; we get a glance at how an idyllic place can turn hostile, in its landscape and in the elements which hours before seemed perfect. Strangers’ laughter feels antagonistic. The time delay until you get home seems cruel.
From the outset, ‘Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures’ directed by Marco Martins is an intense, astounding and difficult film to watch. It is beautifully edited and supremely well cast and performed, but the underlying moral degradation central to the grand narrative here is punishing to stomach. And even harder to watch.
The film is Beckettian and biblical in its representation of being in the world. It focuses on beauty that is so big and terrifying that we as mere mortals really haven’t the wherewithal to grasp very much of it at all, hungry though we may be, to conquer it all.
The value of this film is more than about unexpected heroes in a world rotten with narcissistic villains who will stop at nothing.
It is also about goats, and how a concrete coastline to a beautiful piece of this world is the fruit of dreams of men who want wealth.
Leni Huyghe’s film ‘Real Faces’ casts a number of imperatives about being human, adult and independent in a social world, into the fabric of its tale, but none of them are offered as two dimensional imperatives. It’s a complex, beautifully edited piece of work, featuring Leonie Buysse and Gorges Ocloo.
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