Io Capitano (2024)

Written for RAF News April 2024

Two Senegalese teenagers risk life and limb to travel across dessert, ocean and hostile territory to get to Europe, where they think their dreams will be realised.

Seydou (Seydou Sarr) lives with his mother and sisters but spends most of his time with cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall). They play football, exclusively wearing an assortment of faded European team’s kits throughout the film, but their passion is in music, which they write and perform together a cappella with friends on the street.

Though the two boys seem happy with their lot, buzzing with a contagious cheerfulness, they have been sneaking out to work on the sly, stashing away earnings until they have enough to runaway from home, and embark upon an impossible journey to Italy – entrusting their lives to various criminals and gangs who promise anything for enough money.

Matteo Garrone, the film’s director is Italian, and so the motive here seems pretty clear: not only to humanise the immigrants that arrive in the country, but to appeal for empathy on what we will soon learn is a death-defying journey where practices of kidnapping, torture and slavery are commonplace.

There is a rich and diverse score to Io Capitano, which at times carries a bluesy soulfulness that can fill you with hope for what could be the adventure of a lifetime for two young boys. This will grow darker as the reality sets in, but it never loses its rich, West African voice.

The heart of the film lies with Seydou, who appears in turn confident and fearful, uncertain of the huge decision he is making, but able to focus on the hurdle that lies directly infront of him. Although it could be easy to make this a bleak and gruelling watch, Sarr’s performance along with the film’s tone, makes this thrilling and hopeful.

March 29, 2024 0

Shoshana (2024)

Written for RAF News February 2024

A defiant relationship between a Jewish woman and a member of the British Palestine Police Force is at the heart of Michael Winterbottom’s political thriller set in late 1930s Tel Aviv.

Based on real people and events, the backdrop to the romance between Assistant Superintendent Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) and journalist Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum), is the violent foundation of the Israeli state during the British Mandate of Palestine. At a time when Jewish immigrants are seeking refuge from Nazi-occupied countries, and the division between Arab and Jewish populations is becoming more pronounced, British forces are tasked with containing radical extremists. Acts of terrorism are growing in size and severity, presenting ideas and imagery that resonate with the ongoing Israel – Hamas conflict.

Shoshana is the daughter of a revolutionary Marxist Zionist, and a member of Haganah: an underground territorial defence force that advocates for the creation of an independent Jewish state. Wilkin is shown to have embedded himself into the community, earning a mutual trust that is abandoned by the new Superintendent Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling) who intends to snuff out the Jewish independence movement, despite their wish for peace. Forcing Tom and Shoshana into opposition, their relationship looks to become just another casualty in this enveloping war of ideals.

The shooting style and editing pace do well to suspend you in uncertainty, as the ticking time-bomb of political unease is probed in the hunt for Avraham Stern (Aury Alby), leader of the Zionist paramilitary organisation Irgun.

Intended to show how political extremism forges enemies, even of lovers, the tensions of the relationship are symbolised in the warring factions of the region, however the combat makes the quarrelled love affair feel trivial by comparison.

Despite shifting focus the final act of Shoshana is thrilling, and though it has been a passion project 15 years in the making, it is unfortunately more relevant than ever.

February 16, 2024 0

Samsara (2024)

Written for RAF News January 2024

Samsara is an experimental film about reincarnation that does away with conventional narrative to create a meditative experience.

Beginning in a Buddhist temple in Laos, the day to day routine of the monks is shown in long, slow takes. Watching them chant collectively or queue for food, there is a deliberate focus on the repetition in which you can feel the time pass.

Amid (Amid Keomany) is a young man who reads passages of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to Mon (Simone Milavanh) an elderly woman who is preparing for death, in this body at least. When she passes, the film breaks the fourth wall by inviting you inside: text on the screen informs that you will join Mon’s soul on its journey through the Bardo, the space between life and death. This requires closing your eyes and experiencing the soundscape along with a series of coloured flashes that have been designed to be sensed through your closed eyelids. It is novel idea that lasts for 15 minutes, and so depending on your disposition it can have a deeply profound or alienating effect.

Once back in the mortal realm, the story is now in Zanzibar, among a small beachside community of seaweed farmers. Here the women make a living by picking seaweed, which will be compacted into soap – reincarnated perhaps. This is not your typical film, it is artistic and experiential with pacing and editing that feels uninfluenced by contemporary cinema. There are moments of visual effects but they are incredibly simple and primal, which makes it all the more appropriate. Old art forms are combined with early film techniques, overlaying mosaic and cave paintings, and simply changing the hue of the image.

Samsara is a singular experience – a treat for the adventurous filmgoer, or avid meditator.

January 19, 2024 0

Liberation (2024)

Written for RAF News January 2024

April 1945, the war is almost over but Nazi rule perseveres in Denmark, where over 200,000 German refugees have arrived looking for shelter. Residential colleges are instructed to house these large groups of civilians, including many children, wrongly informed that the occupying forces will provide food and medicine, they are abandoned sick and hungry.

Ryslinge Folk High School is the setting of this story, where over 500 Germans have arrived. Head of the school Jacob (Pilou Asbæk)is commanded to make room for them by the Wehrmacht, whilst the board of directors insist that he must not share any resources. This becomes extremely challenging when the elderly and very young begin to die, diphtheria spreading through the numbers, made worse by the cramped living conditions of the gymnasium where they are being housed.

Liberation is about the extreme difficulties of a place in transition, the moral complexity of trying to help those in need without jeopardising the safety of others. Jacob along with his wife Lis (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal) can not sit idly by whilst people are dying but members of the resistance, who are readying themselves to revolt, do not take kindly to sympathisers. Any help offered to these refugees is seen as aiding the German war machine.

The film is largely told from the point of view of Jacob’s boy Søren (an impressive Lasse Peter Larsen). He, like many kids his age, resents the influx of the starved and destitute now in his home. There is a particular viscousness to the children, as they turn on Søren for his father’s perceived betrayal. This retribution is an echo of the ideas playing out among the resistance. Birk (a brilliantly conflicted Morten Hee Andersen) is a student at Ryslinge, vengeful after his father is killed by Nazi’s he becomes an impassioned member of the resistance, and seeing Jacob as a traitor, will try to convince young Søren to turn against him.

Liberation is an interesting and nuanced story well told with a brooding tension, upheld by great performances.

January 19, 2024 0

The Holdovers (2024)

Written for RAF News January 2024

A lonely and vindictive tutor at New England boarding school draws the short straw in looking after the students who will remain on campus over Christmas – as if this wasn’t punishment enough.

Set in 1970, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers – the nickname for the children who will stay at school over the break – is a film from another time. The look, pace and even the trailer all lend itself to a cinematic feeling of the 70s. It is cosy filmmaking, that is warm and inviting but also very funny and with a lot of heart.

Paul Giamatti plays Mr Hunham, or ‘Wall-eye’ as he is nicknamed on account of his lazy eye. A disciplinarian who lives on campus by himself and delights in the torment of his students. The boys in his care are a rag tag bunch of kids left behind, if they didn’t have abandonment issues before, they will now as cantankerous Mr Hunham intends on keeping the regular school schedule throughout the holidays.

Angus (Dominic Sessa) is at the centre of the film, a bright but cocky young man who is shouldering a complex depression, and that’s before he lands in the crooked crosshair of Wall-eye. Offsetting the tension among this makeshift family, is Miss Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) the school’s cook who will make meals for everyone out of whatever ingredients have been leftover. Reeling from the loss of her son serving in Vietnam, she does not give much away, but provides a vital maternal balance.

Stuck together in the confines of an empty school, these warring personalities find their own harmony, not without great resistance, and make The Holdovers a delightfully enjoyable film, tinged with sadness, that should be played for many Christmases to come.

January 12, 2024 0