Really interesting documentary about Jordi, a man with cerebral palsy who experiences a crisis of faith after moving into a care home. Jordi has lived at home with his parents his whole life, but they are getting older and are unable to care for him full-time anymore. Jordi is extremely close to his parents, and…
Good Day For The Bad Guys is a short film about an insufferable and tyrannical actor in a pantomime. Filled to the brim with that Scottish black humour, it’s written and directed by Peter Mullan, a man I only associate with films that are bleak as fuck, a man who would read Dostoyevsky for the…
Funny, quirky animated short film about a group of women who decide to take action on King James VI for the reign of terror on the country’s women during his witch hunts. It has a really interesting animation style, with these water colour drawings leaving ghosts of the previous frames. Based on the real, and…
A romantic short film about a film archivist and a struggling actress. Thomas works in the dingy depths of an old film archive, but the one highlight of his job is Ruby. He has worked loose a brick in the adjoining wall of her dressing room, and spies on her like a massive creep. Ruby…
A retelling of the myth of Sisyphus in Scots, with the man himself recast as a cairn builder, endlessly pushing stones uphill to mountaintop cairns. Tongue in cheek, with more than a little added humour, a great chance to see this little animated short from the 70s.
A crime noir complete with grizzled detective, femme fatale, and a missing husband. Filmed on the streets of 90s Edinburgh, the smoky black-and-white plays to the mean side of a city increasingly being whitewashed for tourists. Funny and stylistic, both the tropes and the setting filled me with satisfied nostalgia.
79 Springs is a short documentary biopic of Ho Chi Minh. Now maybe, like me, you know sweet fuck all about Ho Chi Minh. I know that he wrote the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, which directly lifted words straight from the American Declaration of Independence in hopes that it might make the Americans not shit…
When Che Guevara died, Fidel Castro himself told Santiago Alvarez to make his obituary film, and he gave him 48 hours in which to do it. What Santiago created was a feat in resourcefulness and ingenuity as well as a moving testament to a man who lived and died for his cause. As I said…
Lena Horne’s song Now! was banned from the airwaves in the US, because its call for civil rights and racial equality was deemed in danger of starting a riot. Which, to quote Toni Morrison who had her book banned for the same reason, “How powerful is that!” Lena gave the song to Santiago Alvarez, who…
The retrospective on the work of Santiago Alvarez kicked off with LBJ, an acerbic look at the career of US President Lindon B. Johnson. Santiago basically made newsreels, like the Pathe News reels we had here. But with the Cuban embargo ensuring a dearth of equipment and, well, everything needed to make a film, Santiago…