November - 2018

REVIEWS

Nov 24, 2018

Wind in the Night [Jesse Harris, USA, 2018]

Opening out in the Texan desert, the camera slowly zooms in on a stationary pickup truck, as a man in a cowboy hat at the wheel leans out of the window pensively smoking a cigarette. This languid and sumptuous framing skilfully builds up a sense of foreboding before a single word is uttered and immediately we know that, in terms of the film, we are in safe hands. Cut to our protagonist Guillermo, a family man and a drug mule for a Mexican cartel. He consoles his emotional wif

SHORT FOCUS 2018 - JURY PRIZE: One Night [Alex Marshall, UK, 2018]

Walt Eastfield

Nov 16, 2018

SHORT FOCUS 2018 - JURY PRIZE: One Night [Alex Marshall, UK, 2018]

The final film to screen in a programme of outstanding short films at Short Focus 2018, One Night faced some fierce competition, to say the least. A near zero-budget student project, this ingenious slice-of-life comedy is a testament to the power of imagination and teamwork and proved a deserving winner of the festival’s Special Jury Prize. Shot brilliantly in one unbroken take, the camera follows one group of characters to the next as they discuss everything from extortionat

Knock Knock [Grace Lambert & Noemi Gunea, UK, 2018]

Michael K. Adler

Nov 16, 2018

Knock Knock [Grace Lambert & Noemi Gunea, UK, 2018]

Knock Knock is the zany comedy sketch dreamt up by London-based female comedy duo Cheap Thrills (Grace Lambert & Noemi Gunea). The short opens on Noemi, seen through the spyhole of the front door, as she zips around the living room carpet with a vacuum cleaner. With her hair wrapped up into a bun and face plastered ghostly white under a cleansing face mask, the comforts of her domestic ablutions are betrayed by the sound of a knock at the door. Immediately unnerved by this pe

Rokeaux – ‘Silent’ [Gorkem Tekdal, USA, 2018]

Walt Eastfield

Nov 15, 2018

Rokeaux – ‘Silent’ [Gorkem Tekdal, USA, 2018]

Silent is the title of this catchy, calypso-tinged, hip hop track by independent rapper/singer Rokeaux and also the name of its accompanying music video, directed by Gorkem Tekdal. The film has a very new-age, “millennial” aesthetic, displaying all the hallmarks of a media-savvy videographer; the kind of content creation savant that, with a decent drone camera and on an exceptionally low-budget, can make anybody look like a star. The film mostly consists of scenes of the Roke

Walt Eastfield

Nov 15, 2018

99 [Stephen Kilkie, UK, 2018]

Two friends, Jen and Becky, stroll down a quiet street casually interacting with their respective smartphones, and arrange plans with friends in a mutual chat group. Their conversation swiftly turns to social media, Jen complimenting Becky on a recent photo she had posted. Becky seems particularly aggrieved that her post only received 99 ‘likes’ and more pointedly irritated because Jen hasn’t liked the picture, which would bump the amount of likes up to the consecutive triple

Quadrant [Marta Arjona Blasca & Mei Casabona, Spain, 2017]

Alison Girault

Nov 15, 2018

Quadrant [Marta Arjona Blasca & Mei Casabona, Spain, 2017]

Marta Arjona Blasca and Mei Casabona’s Quadrant is a socially conscious dance film that interrogates modern notions of gender roles and hegemonic constructions with which we automatically identify without question. It is an intelligent and imaginatively choreographed piece that works to reveal the source of our obsession with fitting in, and how that very motive in itself is self-destructive, producing greater conflicts between our fellow human. The opening aerial shots creat

Finding a Way to the Suomenlinna Toy Museum [Marjo Tokkari, Finland, 2018]

Patricia Watney

Nov 15, 2018

Finding a Way to the Suomenlinna Toy Museum [Marjo Tokkari, Finland, 2018]

For all of the great things that technological advancements have offered the world, its ability to emulate older, and sometimes even obsolete forms of technology has yet to prove convincing. There is a likeness that these ‘so-called’ improved copies allude to but can never faithfully recapture. It is a perennially curious incidence, where new innovations usurp their so-called outdated counterparts, only for the obsolete technology to become an object of nostalgic heraldry and

Acquainted with the Night [Tony Rayner, USA, 2018]

Patricia Watney

Nov 11, 2018

Acquainted with the Night [Tony Rayner, USA, 2018]

Tony Rayner’s Acquainted with the Night is dark thriller about family, money and betrayal. The film opens with young, married couple Anthony and Cassandra immediately after a morning of passionate sex (kindly treating the audience with more than any eyeful of both parties’ bare posteriors in the coital aftermath!). It is very early on that we discover, after an appointment with his therapist, that Anthony is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and hallucinatory visi

Michael K. Adler

Nov 8, 2018

Hair [Olivia Coppin, UK, 2018]

The ubiquitous issue of ‘body-shaming’ seems by all means a modern one, a term that exists within a millennial taxonomy under which one could also confidently expect to find a ‘meme’, ‘selfie’ or ‘troll’. But, the sentiments to which this ‘hip’ vocabulary pertain are, of course, age-old and universally understood. In Hair, Olivia Coppin places body-shaming under the microscope and zooms in on the sociopolitical pitfalls that still occur in a postmodern world that isn’t perhap

Lemon [Timothy Michael Cooper, USA, 2017]

Alison Girault

Nov 6, 2018

Lemon [Timothy Michael Cooper, USA, 2017]

How well do we really know the people we love? And at what moment can one really decide when it’s the right time to devote the rest of their life to that special someone? The basic principles of love and marriage appeal to mutual trust, devotion and sacrifice, but to what degree the boundaries of these pillars can be pushed is a complicated and idiosyncratic mire of personal rules, regulations and emotions. Seconds after their matrimonial ceremony has taken place, a newlywed