This quite astounding docudrama by brothers Bill and Turner Ross seems to coalesce all that is precious and precarious about the US on the brink of the 2016 election that saw Trump come to power and the lives of the powerless crumble.
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Ray Yeung’s sad and beautiful drama sensitively shows the genteel oppression of family in contemporary Hong Kong.
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I’m not sure what I was expecting with this low-key Canadian documentary by Jean-François Lesage that uses the lost and found office at the Montreal metro as a jumping off point for a meditation on loss. From the first bleak and beautiful scene of snow falling against a night sky as a clarinet mournfully plays, you know this is going to be about more than a lost mitten.
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A documentary about Colonia Dignidad, the German fundamentalist evangelical cult based in a Chilean rural compound and led by subsequently convicted paedophile Paul Schäfer, seems to promise shock and horror at the uncovering of the many atrocities that happened there in the 60s and 70s. Directors Marianne Hougen-Moraga and Estephan Wagner manage instead to craft a contemplative and non-didactic meditation on human nature, trauma and denial.
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Who knew that the comedy 9 to 5 (1980) was based on an actual grassroots organisation that began in the 70s to advocate for fair work conditions for (mainly female) clerical workers?
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I was expecting a somewhat easy ride from this Irish thriller starring GOT villain Aiden Gillen. Its slow and sparse storytelling occasionally faltered but it sucked me right in to its compelling and unsettling tale.
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It’s good to start a film festival on a high and this sweet, sexy, lyrical and hopeful first feature by Faraz Shariat hit just the right note.
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I knew that I was going to choose a film about Australia’s First People for this prompt and was gearing up to feature The Song Keepers (2017), Naina Sen’s radiant documentary about the funny and spirited women of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir. Dujuan, the star of Maya Newell’s In My Blood it Runs, has been on my mind, though, with the talk in the news and our socials lately about systemic racism and violence.
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A South Korean zombie epic might not be everyone’s first choice but I have yet to get through this without crying in two particular scenes.
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This one was a hard one to decide. There are a few that I’ve already listed for other prompts and I was going to choose Yiorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) until I realised it’s in English (duh!). It came down to exquisite Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In or astounding Estonian B&W In the Crosswind (Risttuules) (2014).
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