GFF Reviews

Category: GFF strand – Country Focus

  • Alone at my Wedding

    Alone At My Wedding is about a young Roma woman who tries to get into being a mail order bride. She’s not very good at it, coz she’s lazy, messy and can’t cook. But you’re routing for her. Why should tidy bitches get all the breaks?

    The main character manages to be sympathic despite in many ways not being that likeable. Her secret is that she’s sending money back home for her infant daughter, who she got knocked up with way too young. It’s pretty irreconcilable with her new life.

    A surprisingly funny look at power differentials between two people using each other to fulfil a fantasy.

  • Girl

    I’d heard some of the criticism of Girl, that it focused too much on the trans body and placed too much emphasis on medical transition. Then I saw it, and boy howdy! Does it ever. I mean, wow. Yeah, not difficult to see why folks had problem with it.

    This is very much a trans story told through a cis lens. There’s even an element of gawking in much of the camera work, and it does feel very objectifying, which works against its central drive. I mean, you see her genitalia so many times, you see her put on or take off her tuck tape so many times, you see her morning glory. A lot of the shots having the feeling of the cis gaze looking in on the trans experience.

    And it’s almost every third scene. You can almost count off every scene in this order: transition scene, ballet scene, family scene, transition scene, ballet scene, family scene. Just same content round and round.

    I feel the director really did intend to develop a three-dimensional trans girl as the main character but where are her friends? This teenage trans lassie doesn’t know a single other queer person. In a major city. Doesn’t have a single conversation with a queer person online or engage with any community space. Who ever heard of that? This is so a cis idea about the life of the one trans person you know.

    And I genuinely do feel the director came to this movie with good intentions, but its portrayal of the trans experience is that it is isolating, lonely and sad. In many ways, it’s a big step backward from the more diverse storytelling about a range of experience we’ve seen in recent years.

    I’m not saying don’t go see it, because it is a worthwhile film in many ways, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself cringing at some of the shots.

  • Angel

    Angel is the story of a Belgian professional cyclist hiring a Senegalese sex worker for the night. He is the most unbearable self-pitying, braggart, blowhart, drug-addled, misogynistic, abusive, utter cunt. He is as likeable as Joffrey. I genuinely spent the movie hoping he’d die soon. For all his privilege, wealth, fame and talent, he is the architect of all his own problems, and has the gall to moan about them and blame everyone but himself.

    He spends the evening talking shite in her ear, then turns on her after some more coke and smack. Weirdly the film doesn’t seem to realise he’s just the worst cunt and the title Angel is actually for him, his nickname. Indeed, the lassie seems to actually be taken in by his shite, which it is difficult for me to imagine any woman, especially a sex worker, not seeing through this immediately. 

  • Keep Going

    Keep Going is a cowboy movie of a kind. Two partners cross the Kyrgyzstan steppe on horseback. An angry young man and his estranged mother, struggling to find common ground across this trying journey. In another way it is a love story, of a man letting go of years of resentment and allowing himself to love his mother.

  • Kissing Candice

    An Irish film about a lassie whose epilepsy may or may not be giving her psychic visions, and a local gang of drooges who are responsible for the disappearance of a young boy. That being said, it feels like the film’s about nothing. I got bored very early in (although it felt long enough for me) and there was nothing to regain my attention for the rest of the film.

  • The Cured

    A zombie allegory for the release of political and paramilitary prisoners and their reintegration back into their community after the end of The Troubles. To hammer it home, the zombie virus is called the Maze virus (Maze Prison, Maze virus, gedit?) It’s one of those films where I actually would have preferred to read as a book. There’s a lot of really interesting ideas, but the actual characters feel more vehicles for that than real, lived in people. It’s also one of those horror films that confuses loud for scary. But it does have plenty of good zombie shit so I was still happy.

  • The Breadwinner

    It was excellent. Just beautiful.

  • Good Favour

    It was good. No idea what it was about, but I liked it. A stranger is taken in by an isolated religious community and you spend the whole movie waiting for something terrible to happen and by the end you’re not sure if it has. Would love to hear others’ take on it.

  • In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America

    John Hume was instrumental in utilising the American Irish diaspora to provide political influence to drive the peace process in Northern Ireland. You may remember him from news reports your dad put on when you wanted to watch Home And Away.

    This is not so much of a documentary as a eulogy. More time is dedicated to extolling how amiable and likeable John is than actually quantifying what his actions were and what their impact was.

    It was a rather curious pick for the festival because, on the one hand, it had such a huge array of key figures from Irish, British and American politics, on the other hand it had some of the worst actual filmmaking I’ve seen. Seriously, I would have guessed this as a final year or master’s student’s end of term project, rather than an internationally funded professional film. It is surprisingly redundant visually. This could easily have been made for radio and then stock footage added to show in a cinema. Everything is either a talking head in a chair, Evocative Image of the Sea #1, or time-lapse landscapes. What little historical footage is used is ridiculously brief and short on context.

    When information is provided, it is provided in a frustratingly corkscrew fashion. At one point a quotation appeared on screen, over a background of two letters of dense text in a similar font going in opposing slanting directions, then the paragraph started to slide up the screen, before, after a pause, a static line of text appeared at the bottom of the screen explaining who the quotation was from and where it had been published. And I just thought, “Are you fucking kidding me?! Is that seriously the easiest way you could have presented that information? Not even had it read out by the narrator who is LIAM FUCKING NEESON?! No, no, I mean why pay for Liam Neeson and then make him read out piddling paragraphs of text scrolling lazily up a screen of overlapping text?! Fuck!”

    So yeah, that annoyed me. What also annoyed me was this was possibly the best gathering of key figures in ending the Troubles and yet this documentary failed to give any idea of when the Troubles started, ended, why it was prolonged or what contributed to its end. While the documentary seems to list slavveringly all the famous people John Hume met, the actual tracing of the conflict all this was in reference to was glaringly absent.

    Perhaps the documentary presumed a level of knowledge on the part of the viewer that I was lacking, but isn’t that the point of a documentary? To educate? And CONTEXT. Necessary to establish no matter how informed your viewer. At one point they mention the reaction to the death of Bobby Sands without having ever mentioned Bobby Sands before or who he was. Come on!

    So you come away feeling distinctly uninformed despite this procession of talking heads. Everyone from Bill Clinton to Jimmy Carter to Gerry Adams to Tony Blair to Bono. Ugh, Bono. Can anything happen about Ireland without that guy sticking his oar in? Yes, let’s all hear Bono’s analysis.

    And, and, AND, the *cringeworthy* comparisons of John Hume to Martin Luther King. Aye, only if you completely whitewash and neuter Dr. King’s actual legacy do you then get to compare him to a guy you are also holding somehow above and separate from the very violent contexts in which they both existed. For the record, Martin Luther King is not the loveable teddy bear mascot of black people who calmly steered both hang-dog whites and polite blacks to agreeing to do better before shaking hands and calling it a draw. He’s not just a word that can bubble up out of your mouth whenever you need to invoke a warm feeling in the room.

    AND how can you make a full-length documentary about the peace process and not mention the actual violence? Outside of Bloody Sunday, there is almost no mention of the actual violence of the Troubles. No mention of the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher. No mention of the Omagh bombing. No actual context to what might have been causing resistance to concessions to Republicans as the conflict wore on.

    And this elevation of non-violence as though it always glides elegantly into peace if only others would listen. No one would have given John Hume a seat at the table or had any reason to listen to him were it not for the spectre of a very non-non-violent resolution otherwise. All those conflicts where oppression met with nothing but non-violence tend to get called massacres. You may not agree with violent resistance in general or the violence in Northern Ireland especially, but for fuck’s sake, it is crucial and vital to the context of any history of The Troubles. How can you not mention it?!

    In conclusion, Whit? 

  • Angry Inuk

    An engaging and challenging look at seal hunting by Inuit people. It sets out very clearly what seal hunting means to Inuit and the Inuit way of life, and how the portrayal of seal hunting and anti-seal hunting campaigns have impacted them. What I found astounding is that in the 8 years it took to make this movie, despite constant requests to a variety of the major anti-sealing campaign groups, and despite the fact that animal rights groups and indigenous peoples should be effectively be on the same side, not one person would meet with the filmmaker or any of the Inuit activists to discuss the matter, or hear their side of the story. I’d actually highly recommend you see this one, you don’t commonly come across Inuit perspectives and this is a great film.