Reviews

Set against the stunning backdrop of Kyrgyzstan’s vast plains, Janyl Jusupjan’s ironically titled feature doc follows the enterprising and warm-hearted Atirkül as she attempts to carve a place for herself in the intensely masculine traditional team sport of buzkashi, in which horse-riders battle to steal the trophy - in the form of a dead goat - from the rival team of riders, all the time on horseback.

The joyous self-sufficiency of elderly French woman Suzanne Claudel is celebrated in generous style in Stéphane Manchematin and Serge Steyer’s absorbing documentary Suzanne From Day to Day, which follows her throughout a year – and across all its various seasons – as she goes through her daily rituals in her isolated family home on the edge of a forest in the Hautes-Vosges.

In this humorous and heart-warming documentary, the relationship between a 103-year-old mother and her mentally challenged daughter (62), who have lived together for years in a Belgian care-home, must be refashioned as their health begins to fail. Bye Mom is, at heart, a charming mother-and-daughter love story.

The life story of Walter Arfeuille is an odd and perhaps even tragic one. He is a man driven by a quest for recognition who once strived to stand atop the competitive strong-man world in Belgium. Now, well into his sixties and struggling with physical issues, he attempts to grab a final modest headline, all watched over by a film crew who he thinks can help him prove himself to the world one last time.

A fascinating and impressively mounted delve into a long-forgotten piece of Communist history, El Shatt – A Blueprint for Utopia tells the story of El Shatt in Egypt where, in 1944, and based on a deal between the Yugoslavian partisans led by Tito and the British allies, a piece of desert became not only a refugee camp for the families of anti-fascist fighters from Dalmatia, but also where a model was created for the future Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The astute, elegant and insightful observational gaze of Austrian documentary-maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter is focussed on Covid-1 and lockdown in his new film The Standstill (Stillstand). The documentary offers a haunting and thoughtful examination on this dark and challenging period as it impacted on his home country of Austria, and Vienna in particular.

The final of Copa 71, an international football event billed as the Women’s World Cup and played at Mexico’s famous Azteca stadium in 1971, remains the highest-attended women’s sporting event in history. But since then, the male-centric FIFA has controlled the football narrative, and the tournament was conveniently wiped from history…until now that is. In their documentary world-premiering in Toronto, UK filmmakers Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine place the lost tournament exhilaratingly back in the spotlight.

The strength of Sisterhood is fully evident in Tana Gilbert’s Malqueridas, in which mothers incarcerated in a Chilean prison help each other through their darkest days, separated from their children. They find affection and community in each other’s presence, together protecting and empowering their existence and humanity, proof that Sisterhood is feminism’s most powerful weapon and therefore the Patriarchy’s mightiest opponent.

The doc, which world-premiered at Venice, charts Capra’s fascinating life in great detail as it unpicks his complex relationship with his adopted America. Extensive and astute use of archive footage – mainly from his films, but also a scattering of home movie material and footage from television interviews– is balanced with interviews with film historians, archivists, writers and filmmakers, even a film studio head…

Hollywoodgate, which follows the Taliban for a year after America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, often feels like a first rough cut, withholding almost all contextualisation of the material. But the film, with unprecedented access to some of the Taliban’s leadership and their chilling discussions of violence and the oppression of women, nevertheless makes for essential viewing.