Much like how Pulp Fiction spawned an entire genre of poor imitators, Andrew Haigh’s 2011 film Weekend has a lot to answer for. The beautiful simplicity of that whirlwind gay romance seems effortless in the hands of such an accomplished filmmaker, to the extent that countless other filmmakers have seen it and assumed they too…
Category: Film events and festivals
BFI Flare: LGBTQ+ Film Festival: “Valentina” Review
In Brazil, 82% of trans kids will drop out of school at some point during their education. Among these children is Valentina (Thiessa Woinbackk) a 17-year-old girl who’s just moved across the country with her mother Márcia (Guta Stresser) to start afresh in a new town and retake her sophomore year. However, problems arise when…
BFI Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival: “P.S. Burn This Letter Please” Review
Autumn-time 1958, two individuals have broken into the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City and made off with thousands of dollars’ worth of luxurious Italian wigs. The accused are the two drag queens Claudia – Claude Diaz – and Josephine Baker – Robert Perez – who stole the wigs for their own drag acts…
BFI Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival (Preview): “Cowboys” Review
In just a few years, there have been major steps forward in trans representation on screen. Complaints about cis gender actors signing on to play trans roles are increasingly becoming a thing of the past, whereas just five years ago it could have been a cynical way for an actor to get an Oscar nomination….
BFI Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival (Preview): Poppy Field Review
Protests at screenings of LGBTQ+ films are a common sight in Eastern Europe. Most notably, a screening of the Georgian film And Then We Danced led to violent protests after debuting in Tbilisi cinemas, with arrests and hospitalisations as those hostile to the queer coming of age story burned pride flags on the streets outside….
Sundance Film Festival: “Pleasure” Review
Film festivals carry an element of prestige, despite being one of the worst possible ways to watch and assess movies. When you’re watching a minimum of four films a day, films that would otherwise captivate you under normal circumstances become schedule fillers, the festival experience making it easy to wax lyrical about the work that…
International Film Festival Rotterdam: “I Comete – A Corsican Summer” Review
Winner of one of the two Special Jury Awards at this year’s IFFR, I Comete – A Corsican Summer is an ambitious and intricate observation of life on the sun-soaked French island of Corsica in the Mediterranean. The feature debut of director and writer Pascal Tagnati, I Comete is a lulling but earnest exploration of…
Sundance Film Festival: “Wild Indian” Review
Native American cinema (North American) has been present for over a couple of decades. However, it started to receive more attention when Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, directed by Zacharias Kunuk, became the first indigenous-language film to win the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2001. Acted entirely in the Inuktitut language, this extraordinary production, in some…
Sundance Film Festival: “Judas and the Black Messiah” Review
Structuring a biopic around a controversial figure is a near impossible art, with mixed results likely to stem from either leaning into or neutering their status. Judas and the Black Messiah opts to lean into the innate complications of William O’Neal, the informant who worked as a Black Panther mole for the FBI, transforming a…
International Film Festival Rotterdam: “Archipel” Review
The French noun for archipelago – an extensive collection of islands, Archipel is a murmuring and drifting exploration of the Saint Lawrence River that runs from The Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Directed by Félix Dufour-Laperrière, Archipel blends the real with the dreamed as it weaves history together with imagination in the form of…
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