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Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
Bhutanese writer-director Pawo Choyning Dorji’s first feature film – made on an extremely small budget – weaves together images and stories that he collected as a photographer within Bhutan. Filming in the remote Himalayan village of Lunana was sun-dependent, as solar panels were used to power the crew’s camera, sound and laptop; Dorji explains that…
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Aftersun
Though widely described as a coming-of-age film, Aftersun is more accurately an essay in reflection as the adult Sophie (Rowlson-Hall) looks back on a holiday at a Turkish resort in the 1990s spent with her father, Calum (Mescal). While the wider circumstances are never fully explained, it’s clear that this was a pivotal moment for…
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El Sur
Victor Erice is little known outside Spain despite the plaudits earned by his 1973 debut, The Spirit of the Beehive. In part this is because he has only made 3 feature-length films. El Sur was his follow-up, and arguably his masterpiece, though the finished film is only half of what he planned, the producers having…
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The Banshees of Inisherin
The setting of the film is obviously meant to represent a larger canvas. Inisherin literally translates as Island of Ireland. But this may be just one of many misdirections by Martin McDonagh who gleefully toys with the tropes of Irish history. Far from being a parable about the distantly-heard Civil War, this is a more…
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The Doo Dah Man
The film features some of the classic tropes of American cinema, most obviously from the road-trip movie and the ill-assorted buddy movie, but this familiarity belies a more substantial story about fathers and sons, as well as a deeper literary tradition that goes back to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. A young man, Jake (Brittain), leaves…
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The Quiet Girl
The debut feature film from the Irish documentary maker Colm Bairéad has earned plaudits both in Ireland and abroard, culminating in its nomination for the 2023 Academy Awards (Best International Film category). Bairéad both wrote the screenplay, based on the 2010 English-language novella Foster by Irish writer Claire Keegan, and directed the film, and his…
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Benediction
A non-conventional film biography of the poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden), Benediction spans three distinct eras: the horror and waste of World War I, and the poetry it gave rise to; the interwar years of “gay” society (and covert homosexuality); and finally the 1960s, where we see the elderly poet, played by Peter Capaldi, attempt…
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Hit The Road
Debut writer/director Panah Panahi is inevitably described as ‘the son of Jafar Panahi’; he has acknowledged that fear of being compared to his famous father “completely paralysed me for years”. Jafar learned his craft working as the assistant of celebrated Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami – Panah remembers learning as a child from both filmmakers, “sitting…