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…
Category: Film events and festivals
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…
“The Present” Review
The directorial debut of British-Palestinian writer and director Farah Nabulsi, The Present follows the story of Palestinian father Yusef (Saleh Bakri) and his young daughter Yasmine (Mariam Kanj) as they set off across the West Bank to pick up groceries and find an anniversary present for Yusef’s wife. Facing relentless roadblocks, checkpoints, and apathetic IDF…
Hong Sang-soo’s “The Woman Who Ran” Review
While her husband is out of town on a business trip, florist Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) decides to embark on a venture of her own to reconnect with three different old friends living across Seoul. Although reciting a script, Gam-hee routinely mentions to every friend how her and her husband haven’t spent a day apart since…
Nomadland Review
Nomadland is a curious beast; a sobering look at the ramifications of an ageing, expanding workforce in the gig economy following the 2008 recession, critical of the corporations who have forced people into this position, while also feeling at first glance like it’s pulling some of its punches. At least, that’s how this writer interpreted…
I am Samuel Review
The criminalisation of same-sex relationships in Africa is commonplace. In 2013, 38 African countries made homosexuality a crime under the law. Opposition to people of different sexual orientation has become more and more visible, with Kenya being one of those countries where homosexuality is criminalised and socially unacceptable; if convicted, a person could face up…
Moloka’i Bound Review
Winner of the Oscar-qualifying Cynthia Lickers-Sage Award for Best Short Work at this year’s ImagineNATIVE festival, Moloka’i Bound is the story of Kainoa (Holden Mandrial-Santos), a formerly incarcerated man who is trying to reconnect with his preteen son, Jonathan (Austin Tucker). Showing up out of the blue one day outside Jonathan’s school whilst Jonathan is…
64th BFI London Film Festival: ‘Relic’ Review
When Kay (Emily Mortimer), along with her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote), visits her mother Edna (Robyn Nevin), a wave of bizarre incidents begins to occur. Upon arrival in Edna’s house, the woman is nowhere to be seen and she is reported as a missing person. Three days later, Edna comes home, dirty, disoriented, without shoes…
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