Reviews

Winner of the Grand Prix at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, director Arthur Thomas-Pavlowsky’s engagingly immersive The Struggle is the End (La Lutte est une fin) takes a refreshing and astutely provocative look behind-the-scenes of the pugilist Collectif Boxe Massilia near Marseille, France.

Even for those, like me, unfamiliar with the later Turkish filmmaker Ömer Kavur’s oeuvre, this hybrid road movie which bears his name is a compelling and gorgeously shot meditation on how to live, travel and work. Melancholic and seemingly outside of time, Kavur, which world-premiered in Rotterdam’s Cinema Regained section, is a rare find.

An engaging, charmingly candid and ultimately warm-hearted film that depicts the complex lives within a neurodiverse working-class Australian family. We have seen verité-style documentaries that follow families before…but this family is unlike any other, and the film appropriately offers them a lovely (and loving) filmic platform.

Less about protestors on the streets and more about the personal and emotional impact of fighting against a brutal regime, Syrian filmmaker/journalist/campaigner Lina’s film is a moving and thoughtful look into how protests are planned, how friendships are challenged and how fear of violence is a terrible constant.

A brotherly bond on the sea is tested by tradition, family, global warming and changing ways in Sarvnik Kaur’s absorbing and beautifully shot documentary Against The Tide, which premiered in Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition. Two good friends, a pair of indigenous Koli fishermen in Bombay, find themselves on different sides of the increasingly desperate debate as to how best to fish within a sea that no longer offers up catches in abundance.

A search for a video and DVD treasure trove lies at the heart of the thoroughly enjoyable Kim’s Video, as it veers from an archival exercise in re-telling the story of the now-legendary US video-rental chain through to a tale that blends possible Mafia activity and a film-themed heist before heading to a happy ending.

‘I want to reclaim my body,’ says director Mania Akbari at the start of the film, as we watch her in a bathtub filled with black water - an octopus clung to her chest. And reclaim it she does in this documentary that both re-examines the male gaze in Iranian cinema and sets out to demythologize the so called era of female liberation in pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema.

Submerged hints of suffering slowly surface in Faustine Cros’ absorbing and gently moving, and deftly insightful, A Life Like Any Other (Une vie comme une autre) as she uses archival material shot by her filmmaker father, as well as her own intimate interviews, to delve into her mother’s barely noticed depression that ultimately led to a suicide attempt that traumatised the entire family.

Thelma and Sahlina are just your typical teenage Swedish girls. Chatting, giggling, comparing photographs on their mobile phone…and practising their hunting and shooting skills and refining their ability to skin a wild boar. Charming, intimate and nicely non-judgemental, the film is at heart the simple story of two best friends as they come of age.

A beautiful portrait of aging and loneliness, Simon Chambers’ Much Ado About Dying dwells on an often-tragicomic but warm relationship as filmmaker Chambers returns to London to grudgingly look after his Shakespeare-loving uncle, a former actor who has grown old and infirm but who still yearns for a diet of attention and applause that clearly he feels his nephew can provide.