OUR LIVES ARE replete with things that happen for reasons we don’t know. Things force our plans to change. Sudden news changes what constitutes our identity. We don’t really know what causes what, and why. Even though, in our hubris, we think we do. The Romanian film Mikado, […]
VIOLENT POLITICAL CONFLICT is always the ideal setting for very complex emotional tales of love and trauma. Mohamed Kordorfani’s first foray into film direction offers a clear and convoluted path of friendship between two women. It’s called Goodbye Julia and is the opening film for this year’s European […]
THE UNCERTAINTY AND wildness of a country in a constant state of civil war comes under the loupe in José Miguel Ribeiro’s astonishing achievement of a film, Nayola. Animated with a deep and convincing understanding of hand-drawn colour and landscape and a respect for the bubbles of air […]
PICTURE THE SCENARIO: You’re on the cusp of adulthood, the eldest of many children. Contrary to your father’s wishes, you have decided to be educated. It’s the late 19th century and your mother supports this great wish of yours to make a life for yourself. And it’s all […]
LOSS. IT’S A wound that can open at any time. An absence that will change your life forever, in ways that you cannot fathom. The complexities of bereavement are under the loupe in Narcosis, an extraordinary and deep film from the pen of Martijn de Jong. One of […]
PUT TWO PASSIONATE intellectuals together in a remote chalet in the French Alps. Add an almost disabled tween and his seeing-eye Border Collie, and sprinkle more publishing success on the one than on the other, and you get some extraordinary fireworks. Toss in a sudden violent death, and […]
HE HAS EYES like lamplights: big and bright. He cries vocally when he is very sad. And sniffs when he’s feeling miserable. You can see the tears staining his face. His emotions take him away from peccadilloes like carrots from human hands. This is Eo, a small grey […]
WHAT DO YOU think you were put on this planet for? To hone your artistic instrument? Make babies? Save the world? Whatever the question, the answer sometimes comes rather unexpectedly and with great gusto, from the universe itself. The Bulgarian film Mother, written, directed and produced by Zornitsa […]
WHEN YOU DEEM yourself capable of putting another person into a categorising box, you perform an act of unmitigated violence. And you can do this by simply calling those people ‘foreign nationals’, ‘migrants’, ‘others’, ‘a problem’, the list goes on. It’s a magic gesture which strips another person […]
SOMETIMES A NOTHING of a story can be the perfect shell for a mix of humour, philosophy and drama. And with the fabulous Javier Bardem at the helm of The Good Boss, you can anticipate narrative magnetism. It’s on this year’s European Film Festival; designed to be hybrid, […]
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