I find that documentaries at MIFF about Indigenous people are consistently good.
Continue readingSantosh (2024)
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Santosh (Shahana Goswami) is a young Indian widow cast adrift by the death of her policeman husband. Her in-laws hate her so her best option, as a woman, is to take a compassionate position as a police woman, symbolically replacing her husband.
Continue readingSeptember Says (2024)
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First time director Ariane Labed almost makes this darkly gothic tale work but fumbles its tricksy reveal.
Continue readingDahomey (2024)
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The Substance (2024)
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I think what threw me about this often delightful, often gross body horror was the expectation from reading the synopsis that it was feminist. It has made me muse on what my expectations are when that term is applied to a film, and I think it is about more than putting women’s stories at the centre, It’s about stories of women’s power and autonomy.
Continue readingGreen Border (Zielona Granica) (2023)
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I sat in the front row of the Capital cinema for the first time to watch this intensely emotional epic from Agnieszka Holland as a man across the aisle from me was chewing on something that sounded like a hard lolly with his mouth open for the first 10 minutes of the film and I couldn’t handle it. The front row was a good choice as it enveloped me in the austerity and complexity of this story of asylum seekers in Europe.
Continue readingThe Moogai (2024)
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Director Jon Bell has expanded his award-winning short film of the same name into a feature horror that enjoyably blends horror tropes with Indigenous history.
Continue readingThe Outrun (2024)
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I couldn’t hold back the tears through the ending of this film. It ends with a magnificent crescendo of hope that I found profoundly beautiful and poignant, and then, as the credits roll, the first notes of The The’s This is the Day starts to play and I dissolved.
Continue readingDying (Sterben) (2024)
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You would think that a three hour film called Dying would be depressing or perhaps overwhelmingly emotional or sentimental. Director Matthias Glasner delivers an absorbing story of a family, told in chapters about each person, and laces it through with humour and an almost dispassionate emotion.
Continue readingA Different Man (2024)
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This was not what I was expecting at all. It’s an oddly torturous, funny, thought-provoking story of a man who has significant facial disfigurement.
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