Author: gffreviews

What a fucking great movie! I laughed until my vision greyed. My favourite film of the festival so far. I highly recommend you take the chance to see this.

Just perfect. The dry, dead-pan comedy is just dead on, combining the asylum process’s Kafkaesque absurdity with the dark Scottish sense of humour. At one point the main character and all his mates are gathered around the only phone box on the island, everybody wearing those shit clear plastic ponchos while smoking a fag, and his mate, looking down at his mobile, is like, “There was a better signal in the middle of the Mediterranean.” There is nothing more Scottish than complaining about Scotland. Staying here and hating it is all there is to it.

Even the wee neds doing donuts on the beach, rock up to him and go, “Don’t blow up shite or rape anyone, right? Right, you want a lift back up to town pal?” As my pal once said, Scotland: Simultaneously the angriest and friendliest place.

Limbo is about Omar, a Syrian refugee and musician, parked on a Scottish island while awaiting the decision on his asylum application. Limbo describes the state of his fate, this hanging in the balance, neither one thing nor the other, but it also describes this place, this spit of land in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. Not terrible, but not great, it has this timeless quality in a way that seems to be both interminable and yet somehow also awe-inspiring. The rugged landscape, the raging sea, the mercurial sky. Limbo is also the state in which Omar finds his identity. Back home he was a well respected musician, here he is no one, and he cannot yet move on to build a new life, a new identity. At the same time, he is calling home to his parents, who are living as refugees in Turkey, and much is made of the bad blood between him and his brother, who has stayed in Syria to fight for the people. The brothers don’t speak, and yet his brother may be killed in the fighting at any time, and Omar may be deported to God knows what without warning. You’d think that would be enough to make them try to make peace, but their issues remain unresolved, as though ignoring it and suspending its discussion is preferable than a confrontation to bring it to its conclusion.

Every shot in this movie, every beat of silence and sound, every performance is just perfection. Loved every minute of it. Go see.

Sweetheart is a coming-of-age first love story set in a crap British caravan resort. Reminded me of holidays at Southerness, enjoying it so much I’d hide in my bedroom wardrobe reading pick-you-own-adventure books.

In some ways Sweetheart is like a 21st century British John Hughes film, about one life-changing summer. There’s something so timelessly naive and disarming about it.

In the style of classic love stories, a woman stands on the Liberty Bridge in Budapest waiting for the lover to show at the pre-arranged time and place to show that their love is true. And he does not show. And when she tracks him down, he does not recognise her and says he has never met her before.

So starts Preparation to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time. The question becomes is he a gaslighting bastard or is she delusional? My immediate reaction was, statistically, it’s much more likely he’s a gaslighting bastard than you’re having your first psychotic break at 40. But the movie manages to handle the ambiguity with nuance, never straying into the frustrating or boring. The main character is aware that both are options, and signs up for therapy.

But as her therapist tells her, “I think you want me to diagnose you with a personality disorder so you have a piece of paper that tells you your love didn’t cheat you.” She pours through photos of the conference where they first met for some corroboration of their first meeting, and you as the viewer question, is this simply the logical thing to do, or is this the first steps in stalking based around a delusional obsession? Everything in this film is about micorexpressions, tilts of the head to keep the other in view. And the constant question is, am I reading something into this that isn’t there? Which is why the film is so resonant, because it speaks to a universal experience of love, as something which we feel inside ourselves and yet feels like it is shared, reverberating between two poles. It is an internal experience of something we perceive to have an external element.

As time goes on, this need for her to fact-check her memory recedes as she begins, to some extent, to fear a decisive verdict on its reality, as even the fantasy of love is better than its total absence. A sensual film of wordless attraction and the disorientation of love.

BIG vs SMALL follows Joana Andrade, a professional surfer, and the first Portuguese woman to surf the waves at Nazare, where the waves can reach up to 80ft tall. Andrade at 5ft 1″ cuts a small silhouette by comparison against these monstrous waves.

Andrade is frank about the fear she feels regarding tackling these giants. Many people have been injured surfing at Nazare and Andrade fears that she could break her back and end up paralysed, or even drown. But Andrade is not the kind of person to be ruled by her fear, so she sets off to train with Johanna Nordblad, a record breaking free diver.

Nordblad is a Finnish world champion, who once set the record by swimming under the ice in nothing but a bathing suit, no breathing apparatus, for over 160ft. She can hold her breath for over 6 minutes. She trains Andrade in her breathing techniques and takes her out to swim in a frozen lake, literally cutting open a square with a saw in the surface.

You do watch them climb into this makeshift swimming pool, and think, “Are you insane?!” It looks absolutely baltic. It looks like it would hurt. It looks like the kind of thing that would send you into shock. Why are you doing this for fun?!

But Andrade draws strength from the challenge. From the warm climes of Portugal, she is even less used to the cold, but she perseveres with the training, finding in Nordblad a kindred spirit, whose determination and positivity nourishes her. By the end of their session, Andrade is able to free dive under the ice, and feels like she has the confidence to return to the big waves of Naraze.

For facing her fear and moving forward towards it, Andrade makes an inspirational figure, and with Nordblad helping her, you see how the support of strong-willed women can make you do the impossible. But there is another aspect to Andrade’s story. Part of her difficulty tackling the big waves was that the panic response she would get from being knocked under a wave would trigger her, set off a physical and emotional chain-reaction reaching back to her trauma, when as a child she was groomed, plied with drugs, and sexually abused. It left her with psychological scars and addiction issues. And while she has worked hard to overcome them in her daily life, the panic of being submerged beneath a powerful wave would trigger those feelings of powerlessness and fear once more. Andrade’s story is not simply one of becoming a better surfer, it is about showing you are greater than your trauma, able to feel it and make room for it in your life without letting it control or limit you. Andrade can look at the giant waves of Nazare, that so dwarf her tiny size, and which seem so impossible to conquer, and feel the fear, and charge, confident in the knowledge that she has the tools to deal with them.