Rewind and Play starts with a white tv presenter lounging over Thelonious Monk’s piano, delivering a monologue in French directly to the camera, while Thelonious himself sits, soaked in sweat, poised to begin playing, breathing in deep deliberate breaths. You are immediately struck to ask what has brought him to look so wrung out while…
Xiaodi is a documentary about a Chinese trans teenage girl’s multiple escape attempts from conversion therapy. Xiaodi herself is so impressive. She has a dead-centre strength, a ‘live free or die’ attitude. She narrates her story in the film through interviews and visits the sites of her escapes. She even stands outsides the conversion camp…
Baby Girl is a short documentary about Cunenk, an Indonesian trans woman who is living with the loss of her mother. Her mother always told her to be a useful person, so Cunenk decides to raise money for the local hospital maternity ward in her memory. We get to see Cunenk confident and outgoing in…
In much the same tradition as getting a telegram from the Queen here, in the Philippines when you turn 100 you get a payment of 100,000 pesos from the government. Lola, a modest trans woman living alone in her small home, has waited patiently for a year for her payment to arrive. While her home…
I love Harriet Tubman. I read about her as a teenager and had her picture on my wall for years. So when I found out they were making a movie about life, I was super psyched. Then, like a dafty, when it came out at the pictures, I missed it! So happy the GFT decided…
La Volutaria asks is good a product of people or systems? Marisa is a retired doctor, and comes to volunteer at a refugee camp. Over dinner with the other volunteers, all of whom are in their 20s, they begin to lament the state of the Spanish public health care system. The younger volunteers confidently rattle…
As everyone who’s ever worked in education knows, dealing with the weans is the least of it. In The Staffroom, new start Anamarija discovers by trial and error the unwritten rules and social hierarchy of her new workplace. When you think of dramas, there is a tendency to focus on the exceptional – crime and…
Phhffffftt! This film hits like a sledgehammer. Based on the true story of Maixabel Lasa, whose husband was killed by ETA and whose subsequent work supporting victims of violence led her to meet with her husband’s killers. Now. I am actually a bad one for going into a story like this, because films about the…
A short animation about a submariner who meets an astronaut. A sweet tale of friendship about being different in the same way.
Great little animated short. Colour! is dialogue-free, but uses colour and music to illustrate the daunting experience of being the odd-one-out from a child’s perspective. It tells a story about race, but strips it back, without dialogue to articulate the historically- and socially-laden topic, to just the way it makes you feel. The main character…