Reviews

Palestinian political figure Marwan Barghouti, often described as the ‘Palestinian Nelson Mandela’, is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison following what was seen by many as his unlawful arrest and imprisonment. Sophia Scott and Georgia Scott’s film may well be straightforward in tone and structure, but this takes nothing from the strength of this provocative and compassionate story.

Very much the perfect fit for public audiences at the Sheffield DocFest, the engagingly enthusiastic Studio Electrophonique tells the strange and rather wonderful story of an amateur music engineer who built a sound studio in his own modest house, ending up working with a series of now-iconic local bands during the 1980s and 90s and helping them onto the road to success.

A deeply prescient and gently revealing documentary, One Day in Ukraine delivers just as the title states…a snapshot of one day in a country under siege as ordinary people (and sometimes extraordinary ones) go about their lives, whether it be preparing food or walking devastated streets, heavily armed and ready to fight.

In The Super 8 Years, one of two documentaries screening at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, celebrated French author Annie Ernaux and her son David revisit their family’s home movies, reinterpreting them, with melancholy hindsight but also a sense both of emotional and historical detachment, as a sign of their times.

For his directorial debut, Ethan Coen offers up a vibrant and often exhilarating look at the turbulent life of a true rock’n’roll legend, dealing with the demons that drove Jerry Lee Lewis. To an extent this is a non-judgmental film that is as much about his determined resilience as it is the scandals that haunted his life, but it is also tight and lean, brimming with mesmerising footage and illuminating interviews.

The multi-layered documentary takes you on a journey through the minds and worlds of three like-minded and intrinsically connected thinkers and artists. Filmmaker Jose Luis Lopez Linares had the good fortune to film French writer Jean-Claude Carrière a year before his untimely death as he retraces Goya’s footsteps, all the time expounding lyrically on art, history, humanity and love.

In his film selected for Cannes Special Screenings, it is incredibly moving to see veteran filmmaker Patricio Guzmán return to a changed Chile where his old political dreams, crushed when the Pinochet coup killed Allende and democracy, are being revived by a new generation.

Edited from countless home movies, Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend not only shows her best friend Kimi’s descent into drug-induced depression and death, but indirectly portrays a whole generation growing up – but often not growing old – in Putin’s Russia.

It seems shrewdly appropriate that director Julie Bertuccelli’s documentary Jane Campion, The Cinema Woman should have its world premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Classics section. Not only does it highlight the importance the festival has played in her illustrious career, but it also reinforces the challenges women still have in terms of making films in an industry historically dominated by men.

A chilling and heart-wrenching portrait of wartime life in Ukraine, Mariupolis 2, added at the last minute to the Cannes programme as a Special Screening, is a posthumous but living monument to its director, who was killed in Ukraine by invading Russian forces.