Category: GFF strand – Audience Award

Comedy crime caper set during the reunification of Germany.

It’s the last week before the East German currency becomes obsolete. Everybody’s been laid off, and are considering how to start all over again now their way of life is ending. A trio of old friends persuade a security worker to let them into the local military bunker, and swipe a fortune from the stockpile of withdrawn currency. They are millionaires for the next three days, but how to spend it?

Two to One is about the tussle in the East German cultural psyche as capitalism meets communism. “Greed eats brains” a character says at one point, and god that’s right. It’s not simply about money, taking and spending it – it’s about how it changes how you think, who you consider, what is the unit of ‘you’. Family, friends, community, what price to protect them?

A lovely warm film that invokes hope is the aftermath of a world washing away.

Restless is about Nicky, a kind, considerate, decent, hard-working carer, who is kept awake by her new noisy neighbour until she eventually starts to lose her shit.

Loved this movie. Loved how it manages to trace all the ripple effects of this mundane and downplayed problem without ever being heavy-handed about it. It explores how it affects Nicky physically, psychologically, how it drains her of patience, leaves her with nothing of herself to give to others, makes her resentful, spiteful, darkens her spirit. How it makes her feel like people see her as doormat to walk over, and her kindness and politeness as an invitation to exploitation and mockery.

And if all that sounds miserable, I should also say, it’s very funny. The drama walks hand-in-hand with dark humour, as she tries to cop-off with a boring traffic warden just to use him for a bed to sleep in for the night. Desperately trying to listen to the soothing tones of a directed sleep meditation podcast while dance music thrums incessantly in the background.

Lyndsay Marshall is excellent in this, and keeps believable the extremes of Nicky’s reactions. Aston McAuley is also to be commended as the noisy neighbour, Deano, a role which has the difficult job of not simply descending into stereotype, but is kept still feeling fully human.

Deano is also an interesting character, despite being the out-and-out villain of the piece. He moves in and immediately starts up with all-night ragers. He’s not a considerate man, but when Nicky first comes over to ask him to turn the noise down, he is initially friendly. He’s been “away” and is celebrating being back with friends. He has that just-out-the-jail excess, which combined with the cocaine he’s on, makes him not the most thoughtful person. The real problem comes when the next night she threatens to phone the police. BIG MISTAKE. It’s the one thing you never do, mark yourself out as a grass.

I really like this film because it isn’t often you see movies with ordinary working class people as leads, unless it’s in the regulation mold of British class struggle period pieces. Restless is a nice change of pace, balancing drama and humour, that will leave you cheering at the end. Go Nicky!

This is one of those documentaries where you are surprised folk agreed to be in it at all, given how intimate and sensitive the subject is.

Mistress Dispeller follows a wife discovering her husband of many years has begun having an affair with a much younger woman. Mrs Li chooses to deal with the situation by hiring a mistress dispeller. This is a service in China, kinda like a reverse honey trap – instead of hiring someone to prove your man’s a cheater, you are hiring someone to stop your man cheating. In steps Miss Wang.

Miss Wang is introduced by Mrs Li to her husband, who coaxes the story out of him, and through him makes contact with the woman he is having an affair with, Fei Fei. She always comes across as non-judgemental, empathetic, offering to help, and protect their confidence and their reputation. And she uses her influence to slowly dislodge Fei Fei from the Lis’ lives.

The documentary also takes the same tack, showing each person without judgement, with sympathy and sensitivity. It is up to you as the audience to form your own opinion, both about the people involved, their choices, and how the mistress dispeller service works.

I think the film did very well in this regard. The film initially focuses on Mrs Li, your sympathy is naturally with her as the injured party, but when the focus moves to her husband, it also treats him with the same humanising lens, showing his shame, his unhappiness at knowing that no matter what he chooses to do now, it will hurt someone he cares about. And finally Fei Fei is also shown with tenderness, as someone who is young and lonely, who has kind of lost hope, and has sought comfort in a romance with a much older married man.

The tactics of the mistress dispeller service are equally shown without judgement, as a hired service to untangle a knot in people’s lives. All three people involved do not want exposure of their issue, and all want it resolved, and in some ways, the service can be said to be simply coming in and forcing people to deal with the reality of the situation. It could be argued that yes, there is an element of deception, but no more than any private detective would use, and an element of manipulation, but no more than is already going on as part and parcel of the existing affair.

This is the part where I have to say, the film might be able to take that step back, but I in the audience could not. The mistress dispeller service is very manipulative, and were it not for the documentary, only the person who hired them would even know who Miss Wang truly was. Obviously it was necessary for the filmmakers to gain access to the mistress dispeller service for them to be open and non-judgemental in how they portrayed them, and I think it’s great because otherwise we would never get to see this really interesting look at what actually goes on. But wow, befriending people so you can end their relationships, orchestrating arguments between couples, sabotaging people’s dates, it is all very unsettling to watch.

The other thing this film shows very well, even if it doesn’t comment on it, is the absolutely rigidity and uniformity of society’s expectations of romantic relationships. There is only one type of romantic relationship that should take place, it is compulsory heterosexual lifelong married monogamy. And when presented with the fact that people actually have all sorts of experiences, all that happens is to double-down on enforcement.

Fascinating documentary handled with superb sensitivity which will leave you unpacking the ethical and moral dimensions long after it’s over.

Absolute bollocks.

If you like Alice in Wonderland, you might like this. It’s not for me.

To the extent that anything is actually happening in this film, it’s about a stage magician who checks into a hotel only for the exit to disappear, leaving him trapped in a labyrinth filled with a cast of characters. When I first read the description for the film, I was on the fence, worried it might be wacky. It’s worse than wacky. It’s boring.

“Cast of characters” is a bit of an exaggeration. There are people, one or two of which have a shtick, but neither they, nor the interactions they have with the main character are meaningful. Everything is just an obstacle course for the main guy reaching his goal.

So what about the main character? Is he interesting? Is his goal compelling? No. Since the world has no rules, there are no stakes. Even if you were just watching the main character go on some emotional journey, you could forgive the nonsense of it all, but Crispin Glover gives a really muted performance that goes nowhere.

I have absolutely no idea what they were going for with this, but whatever it was, the result is dull as sin.

I so wanted this to be good.

It’s not good.

The Teacher is about a Palestinian teacher in the West Bank trying to keep a kid in his class on the straight and narrow while the Occupation impacts every single aspect of their lives. What could be a more relevant story in our current times? Yeah, but it’s basically Dangerous Minds set in Palestine. The dialogue is cringingly obvious and on-the-nose. Much of the plot just feels like a checklist of headline topics being ticked off. Despite great performances from Saleh Bakri and Muhammad Abed Elrahman, they are confined by characters which function more as vehicles for the writer’s point than as three-dimensional people. It’s very after school special.

Imogen Poots shows up as the sympathetic white Western audience insert character, touring the lives of people she can do nothing but cry about and wring her hands over. She’s there as love interest and pseudo-mother figure. Only at one point does anyone mutter anything under their breath about her, otherwise she’s universally welcomed.

I feel that I have to say in fairness, it does get slightly better as the film goes on, as it delves into the teacher’s backstory, how he took his only son to a protest which led to the son’s arrest, imprisonment and death in custody. But again, it feels very functional to the plot, explaining why he’s taking such an interest in this boy in his class, and trying to teach him how to survive the Occupation while somehow staying out of trouble.

While 90% of the film follows the teacher, there’s a strand following an American couple whose son has emigrated to Israel to fight in the IDF, and who is now captured and being held until he can be traded for the release of Palestinian political prisoners. The entire point of this storyline is so there can be a confrontation between the teacher and the soldier’s father, where he can say the line, “they believe your son is worth a thousand of mine”. In my opinion, this whole storyline could be cut, and just the scenes leading the father to learn the teacher’s name and confronting him at the school would be enough. There’s literally nothing added by watching the father and mother drive around in cars and fight over blaming each other.

The problem with this whole film is the bones of what the filmmaker intends the audience to think, feel, believe and take away is laid so bare, there’s almost nothing to immerse yourself in as a story, as characters. You can tell beat for beat where this all going, it’s painfully obvious, and you feel talked at rather than talked to.

Skin Deep is a body swap romantic drama. Leyla and Tristan attend a sort of hippy dippy retreat on an island in hopes of gaining more insight into their relationship by swapping bodies with another couple. There they ask is love possible beyond the body, beyond gender, beyond the self? But not really, this is just a glorified swingers party with a lot of gorgeous people getting off with each other. The real story here is about depression.

The crux of the dynamic is that Leyla is desperately depressed and Tristan, while caring for her with utter devotion, is in denial about the depths of her despair. And that’s the part about the whole body swap drama that resonates most clearly. The idea of cracking open your skin and escaping that sense of drowning, of being pulled through the floor. God, who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t do anything for that?

And I like that the film doesn’t just shrug and say, “Everywhere you go, there you are”, it doesn’t cop out. Leyla’s depression is portrayed as bodily, part of her biochemical makeup, and inhabiting her skin means experiencing that agony. When she is liberated, she is given a whole new lease on life.

Tristan tries everything to support her but he can’t truly understand. Skin Deep is really about how letting someone truly love you means letting them carry your pain.

A good film if a bit obvious.

Punch is the story of Jamie, a boy in a backwater, small town in New Zealand who is training as a boxer under the tutelage of his alcoholic father, and who has a coming-of-age romance with a local openly queer Maori boy, Whetu.

I came to this film wanting to like it so much. Queer romance with an indigenous lead character? Yes please! But Punch is absolutely all over the place. I could nitpick over the overuse of slow motion, but it’s a first feature, you expect the director to still be learning the ropes. But Punch has bigger problems.

Midway through the film Whetu is the target of a hate crime, and is physically and sexually assaulted. I think the filmmaker did not understand how that scene changed the entire film. I think they thought that, as long as you don’t show the penetrative act, it’s not graphic, but massively underestimated how graphic and traumatic it felt. After that the film goes back to following Jamie preparing for this big match he has coming up, and you are like, “Seriously, do you think anyone gives a fuck about this now? Why is the white kid’s boxing match being forefronted? Literally nothing else matters compared to this.”

It changes the whole trajectory of the film. Their tentative romance storyline treats it as a blip, as though that wouldn’t have any impact on your first romantic sexual experience. And you are waiting for these attackers to get their comeuppance, for a movie called Punch centred on a boxer whose lover has just been assaulted to move towards some kind of confrontation. But it’s put on the back burner for much less interesting stuff, and when it finally is addressed, it’s so clunky, reacted to so unnaturally, and even stevens as though that’s the end of things in a way that’s wholly unbelievable and narratively unsatisfying.

The film suffers from a failure to show, don’t tell. People state the obvious repeatedly, like saying, “You’re drunk” to a swaying man, as though the audience don’t have eyes. The main character has a monologue about how it still isn’t safe to be gay, in what feels like the filmmaker just using the character as a puppet to speak through, unnatural and not actually touching on the character’s emotional state, and utterly redundant after we just sat through and watched a homophobic sexual assault.

I’d love to be able to recommend Punch, it has some fine performances from Tim Roth as Jamie’s father, and from the two young actors playing Whetu and Jamie. But it’s a film that is unknowingly traumatising, and doesn’t handle the weight of what it’s dealing with mindfully enough.

The Ordinaries is one of the most original films I’ve seen in years.

In life, there are Main Characters, Supporting Characters, and Outtakes. Paula is in training for her exam to see if she will be a Main Character like her deceased father, or be relegated to the sidelines like her Supporting Character mother. All she wants in the world is to pass her exam, that is until she ends up drawn into the world of Outtakes, the people the film has no use for.

Now, making a movie in which casting is a metaphor for class sounds cool, but it could be very one-note and on the nose. The Ordinaries is anything but. The film is just so inventive and creative. The film starts from that concept, then spills out in so many directions, playing with its central premise in different ways.

And it’s funny. Sending up the tropes and obvious cues to the audience. Something so Brechtian might be more clever than funny or so meta might be more irritating than humorous were it not for the extraordinary warmth and playfulness of The Ordinaries.

The Ordinaries is about whose stories matter. The Main Characters are all fitted with little panels on their hearts that convert their emotions into transcendent, sweeping scores. Everyone else’s emotions remain silent, self-contained. As the plot develops more into a political-social satire, you see Outtakes with pixelated mouths, censored further to silence them utterly.

But it is not just about those done-to, but about how regardless of what has been decided in the world at large, people on the margins do have their own stories, their own agency, their own narratives.

One of the most interesting characters for me is the maid that leads Paula into the world of Outtakes. She works in the house of Paula’s wealthy Main Character friend. While their musical genre family jump up on the dinner table and sing about how happy they are, her job is to actually set it up for the meal they’ll eat when the singing stops. They call her Miscast, and at her first appearance you think she is a throw-away sight gag. Because at first glance she is a not-that-attractive, middle-aged man in a French maid’s outfit. But as the film goes on you learn her name is Hilde and she is exactly who she is, just a woman, looking after her sick brother, trying to make ends meet and keep her head down enough to get by. At the same time, she is politically active, protecting and supporting those targeted by the police, and speaking out about the erasure of the experiences of those on the margins. She is just Hilde, but it’s been decided she doesn’t look like she’s supposed to, so she is relegated to being Miscast, her existence reduced to a joke in the background of others’ world. I have never seen such an interesting and succinct way of describing what it’s like being trans. That is literally all it is, society deciding you don’t look like you’re supposed to to be who you are.

I was so impressed with The Ordinaries. Nothing is done in a boring and expected way if it can be done in a more interesting one. Like when the police fire at you, the scene starts to cut to black in chunks as they try to delete your scene. So cool, so creative, great film.