‘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.
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.
It is Emma (Kaya Toft Loholt), the family’s younger daughter, who makes this work sing with a poignancy that hurts, it is so finely tuned. She’s a deadpan youngster, subject to the whims of grown-ups. Her passion lies in kicking the ball; she hates the colour pink and girly frocks.
Oliver Laxe’s film Sirât, could be the defining moment of this year’s European Film Festival in South Africa. It’s a tale in the here and now, conflating a music rave with an aggressive military presence, the fragility of life against the enormity of desert energy. It is magnificent, terrifying: simultaneously.
This beautiful tale of Chopin and Ravel brought to life on an out-of-tune piano features moody silences and devastatingly subtle filmography. It is a work about how one holds the deepest of pains and sharpest of taboos closest to one’s chest. Because words are tools too lumpen to describe them.
ansunecilliers
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Chester Miggels
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erinventer02
Geoff Sifrin
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Peta Kaplan
Robyn Sassen
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Willem Pieter
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