Category: GFF strand – Pioneer

An American shows up in an Australian town with Pandora’s box under his arm and becomes a rolling bombshell of mayhem. 

Well, Bridgend was the first dud of the festival for me. Still 1 out of 31 isn’t bad.

It’s about the string of suicides that took place in the Welsh town of Bridgend, mostly by teenagers. Despite the dramatic and interesting subject, the film managed to be both boring and add absolutely nothing to the topic. The teenagers, while played well by the cast, were like sock puppets from an adult fantasy of teenage life, where everyone’s young, beautiful, hedonistic and drinks, dances, gets their kit off at every available opportunity and leaves a pretty corpse. The low point for me was when a lassie washes her boyfriend’s shitey arse, and to thank you, he shags her with the unsuccessfully cleaned shite still clinging to his arse and legs. Painful load of toss.

I mean, at no point does any of the action take place anywhere other than Bridgend and yet the number of establishing shots of the treeline surrounding the town was unreal. I started to silently think, “Meanwhile in San Francisco” like when there’s a shot of the Golden Gate bridge in The Room.

It was like Skins but with a suicide every 20 minutes. Which thinking of it, would have improved Skins.

Slow, atmospheric with sparse, brief dialogue, it is a French coming-of-age reproductive horror. Think Shadow Over Innsmouth meets Rosemary’s Baby. 

Fucking love Goodnight Mommy, it’s great to watch it surrounded by Glaswegians wincing, gasping and muttering, “Aw fuck!” 

A delightfully over-the-top Arabic crime noir/Western in which an Arabic Tom Waits is trapped in a cell when a psycho killer disguised a cop takes over the precinct. The killer cop’s manic depiction reminded me of Andrew Scott’s Moriarty in Sherlock, i.e. bonkers.

Labyrinth of Lies, an absolutely excellent film about a turning point in German history, where the prosecution of former Auschwitz guards marked a decisive cultural change about whether Germany chose to forget the crimes of the past as simply part and parcel of the nature of war, or as an atrocity to be remembered lest it ever be repeated. Highly recommend you go see this if you get the chance.

The Grief Of Others is about a family recovering from the loss of miscarriage, through various levels of disfunction.

A beautiful but grim film about a man slowly choking to death on the ash from the surrounding burning sugar cane fields, and his family struggling to make the decision about whether to hold on to the sliver they’ve carved out for themselves or gamble it on the unknown.

This was my most looked forward to film of the festival, with an opening line in the blurb of ” In the fictitious Iranian ghost town, a lonely, hijab-wearing female vampire stalks the streets by night in search of prey.” And I fucking loved it! It had me from the very first scene of a James Dean look-a-like stealing a cat. This film was SO for me! 

One scene was of a doofus dressed as Dracula, high on MDMA, staring at a streetlamp as a vampire skateboards by him. LOVED it.

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.