Good Girls is a short film about the relationship between two sisters. Julia is resentful that Paula has entered puberty and abandoned her for boys. She avenges her sense of rejection by constantly annoying her sister. The family live on a farm and their stables have become so full that foals of varying sizes have…
The Amateurs is about a theatre troupe of actors with learning disabilities who get the chance to perform on a professional stage. The theatre director is none too keen, and insists professional, able-bodied actors must be part of the production. He then further ham-strings them by insisting that it must be a Shakespearean performance. Like,…
The Goodbye is an exquisitely put together short film about Rosana, a maid who prepares her departed mistress for her funeral. The film is only 15 minutes long and it is not overburdened by dialogue, but it is able to evoke a sense of entire history, of relationships really expertly. Rosana is silent interacting with…
Transoceanicas is correspondence between friends through the medium of film. Meritxell Collel and Lucia Vassallo exchange letters, texts and emails over several years, sharing the ups and downs of their lives, breakups and new relationships, pregnancy and children, and their enduring affinity with film. Very much like the style I’ve seen in Meritxell’s short films,…
Legendary filmmaker Barbara Hammer spent a month at Cape Cod in 1998 making film, recordings, and journal entries. A year before her death 20 years later, she gave the material to director Lynne Sachs, and she created with and for Barbara this beautiful short. It is like a dream, described to herself through her diary,…
Fucking belter of a documentary about the 80s London S&M lesbian scene. Told by the legends that lived it, Rebel Dykes covers the founding of Chain Reaction, the publication of Quim, and the House of Lords abseil protest of Section 28. Yaldi! It traces its roots to the Greenham Clapham peace camp, which was a…
Really interesting short documentary on A Toute Epreuve, a book of poetry that was created by surrealist painter and sculptor Joan Miro, conceiving of the book as a form of sculpture and each illustration as a work of art. The book was created in collaboration with Paul Eluard, the French surrealist poet. He composed the…
Architectures In Silence is a short film combining shots of an abandoned dog track with historical silent footage of architects Le Corbusier and Antoni Bonet with their thoughts on architecture on black title cards. I didn’t like it. I had a think about what I didn’t like. Was it the architecture of the building, the…
Los Tarantos is a flamenco version of Romeo and Juliet set in Franco’s Spain. It is great fun. Everybody is dancing all the time. The Romeo character goes to his mum and is like, Mum, I love Juana!, and the maw’s like, No, she is from a rival clan and I will dance the dance…
When the credits rolled on Belle, it was a standing ovation. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house. Spectacular. Belle is the story of a shy young girl whose avatar becomes the biggest singing sensation in the online world of U. When her concert is interrupted by the renegade user labelled…