Great idea, go see a scary movie that lets out at 1am, then walk home alone to a silent flat. Dumbass. It Follows, or My Cursed Vagina, is a kinda Ringu meets Charles Burns’s Black Hole with a fucking belting score (remember when horror movie scores were half the scare and not just someone’s playlist with NA-NA! every time something jumped out a cupboard?) Not recommended as a first date movie.
A slow-building Danish werewolf coming-of-age movie. Exactly as it sounds.
A Nick Broomfield documentary about an American serial killer who may have killed more than a hundred women over a 25-year period, where the real horror is how little interest the police and the media took in the murders of black women, many of whom were sex workers. An almost unbelievable catalogue of explicit indifference and neglect by the police meant that what was identified as the crimes of a serial killer in 1987 went unsolved and largely uninvestigated until a suspect was caught by accident in 2010.
Not part of the film festival but just went to see Ex Machina. Great movie. Tight three-hander, character-based with palpable tension. A movie about gender set in a sci-fi frame. The showing times for this have been shit, but I highly recommend you go see this.
Also, best use of female nudity in a movie. VERY disturbing.
Fucking hilarious! It’s one of those movies I’m gonna buy on DVD after the festival. Set in Brooklyn, it’s about a bisexual Iranian-American going through the first major break-up of her 20s. The whole thing has kinda a Portlandia vibe and I just laughed from start to finish.
A coming-of-age tale set in Jordan focused on a young Bedouin boy who knows nothing but the safety and happiness of home until one day a guest arrives to ask a favour, and for the first time things like war and colonialism enter his life. Just a beautiful film. There’s another showing tomorrow, if you get a chance go see it.
A tense found footage horror/thriller about a cult, great example of the ilk of life-in-small-idyllic-towns-turns-on-a-dime.
A coming-of-age movie set against rising tensions between native Chileans and their wealthy European-descended neighbours. Beautiful but boring.
A sort of dreamlike fairytale short.
A black and white Polish film about nuns. It’s about a novice, who finds out before she takes her vows that she is ethnically Jewish, and that her parents were killed in the Holocaust. She goes on a roadtrip with her only surviving relative, a lush partygirl aunt, to find her parents’ remains and decide who she is.