Coming out of Limited Partnership howling and greeting, as are most of the audience. One of those films that make you realise what a debt people like me, who’ve had it so easy, owe to those that have come before and had to fight for every little thing.
Really fascinating restoration of footage brought to life with colorisation and reconstructed sound.
Queens of Syria is about a production of The Trojan Women put on by Syrian refugee women in Jordan. It was really heartening to watch these women emerge from their experiences in Syria of division and destruction to co-operate and create this play, which was written thousands of years ago but which speaks to them so directly.
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.
A 4 hour documentary on the Holocaust. Is it okay to say it was boring? There were four other people in the cinema with me, one of whom fell asleep and started snoring over the film.
To me it felt bloated, overlong and self-indulgent. Just because the subject is important doesn’t mean your three thousand panning shots of fields and building exteriors are. It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen that might as well have been on the radio, for all the visuals added to it. And it didn’t even have the coherent quality of simply allowing the central figure to speak, to make it a 4 hour long monologue, because of the constant interruptions for this date, that date. The whole way it was made just irritated me.
Sobbing and weeping, watching How To Survive A Plague, a film that’s not so much a history of the AIDS epidemic as it is a history of the undying hope, courage and strength of those who chose to fight for their lives.
A beautifully funny and moving film about the vulnerability of man, both the genus and the gender. It is about a man’s hobby for collecting penises which led to him running the first museum on the subject, and that’s the most normal thing in the whole movie.
An excellent look at everyday life under the Asad regime in the build up to the current civil war.