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Features
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The Legend of Barney Thomson
26 November 2015, by Abla Kandalaft
Carlyle plays the titular role of socially inept barber in his entertaining directorial debut, based on the first of a series of novels by Douglas Lindsay. The film kicks off with two seemingly unrelated stories unfolding in Glasgow; awkward and unpredictable Barney is unpopular with customers; he is unhappy and frustrated and is on the verge of being fired from his job. A serial killer is cutting up the bodies of young men and posting various parts to the police.
A not altogether (...)
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Suffragette
11 November 2015, by Abena Clarke
This isn’t ’the story’ of how women got the vote. Nor is it a tale of how activists shocked the nation with their efforts to obtain suffrage for women. This is a snippet view of one (fictional) woman’s experience in a militant cell of white suffrage activists, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. But you’d be forgiven for leaving the cinema without realising that these women are members of an organised grouping, not just Mrs Pankhurst’s fanatical private army. This partly (...)
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Divorce, Iranian Style
27 October 2015, by Nisha Ramayya
In 2014, Sight & Sound asked 340 critics, programmers, and filmmakers to name the best documentaries ever made. This autumn, in partnership with Sight & Sound and Open City Docs, DocHouse is running a season of ‘Filmmakers’ Favourites’, inviting award-winning documentary filmmakers to present their choices from the poll. Director Brian Hill (Songbirds [2007], The Confessions of Thomas Quick [2015]) presents his choice, Kim Longinotto’s 1988 film Divorce Iranian Style which she made (...)
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Q&A with Oliver Nias, dir. of The Return at Raindance London
6 October 2015, by Abla Kandalaft
Director Oliver Nias’s first feature The Return premiered at the Raindance Film Festival in London, where it was nominated for Best UK Feature.
A sober, atmospheric atmospheric psychological thriller, the black and white production is an impressive first film and augurs well for Oliver’s next projects...
How would you describe the genre of the film? Where did the idea come from?
The Return is a psychological thriller about a small time criminal who screws up a heist and has to deal (...)
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Rocks in My Pockets
16 September 2015, by Ryan Ormonde
Signe Baumane’s Rocks in My Pockets is a magic realist cartoon, revelatory in its examination of the repercussions and repetitions of mental illness within a genealogy. The hand-drawn animation is flat, jerky and superimposed onto footage of gloomy papier-mâché sets painted in bold colours. Fluidity of movement takes second place to the power of transformation as humans repeatedly change into monstrous or animal versions of themselves, illustrating social and psychological tensions. The (...)
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How To Change The World: the birth of the modern eco-movement
7 September 2015, by Abla Kandalaft
The Sheffield Doc/Fest Environmental Award winner charts the early days of Greenpeace and the eco-movement, from its humble beginnings as a ragtag band of hippies attempting to stop a nuclear test to the establishment of a media savvy, international campaign group.
The starting point is 1971, when a small group of activists, including rookie journalist Robert Hunter, set sail from Vancouver to try and stop a US nuclear test in Amchtika, an island on the west coast of Alaska. The coverage (...)
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Pasolini
1 September 2015, by Alice Haworth-Booth
Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini opens in the dark: the Italian director is interviewed in French, in sunglasses, in a smoky room, in 1975, about Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is the last film he will make. Pier Paolo Pasolini appears suave and patient with the questions (‘Sex is political?’ ‘Naturalmente’). His face is deeply serious, furrowed, and unsmiling, with just a ripple of knowingness running across his chiselled jaw. Willem Dafoe, brilliantly cast in the title role, is a perfect (...)
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Clear Lines Festival: Brave Miss World & The Unspeakable Crime: Rape
7 August 2015, by Ryan Ormonde
Earlier this month, filmmaker and academic Winnie M. Li and psychologist Dr. Nina Burrows presented Clear Lines: ‘the first ever festival dedicated to talking about sexual assault and consent through the arts and discussion’. This programme included a double bill of films (Brave Miss World and The Unspeakable Crime: Rape) in which rape survivors tell their stories. If we understand these two films as valuable testimonies and educational resources it is useful to consider their two very (...)
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Q&A with film maker Mark Brown, co-director of Corinthian
16 July 2015, by Abla Kandalaft
Mark Brown is a screenwriter and founding member of Braine Hownd Films. The P.O.C. teaser of his film Corinthian is currently on the festival circuit, screening at the Reading Fringe Film Festival this week. Mark is also a playwright and has had his plays performed at theatres such as The Old Red Lion, The Kings Head and the Soho Theatre in London.
How as the film company set up?
Braine Hownd Films was set up in 2006 by Phil Haine and myself when we made our first film The Empty Chair. (...)
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La Ligne de Couleur, Paris press screening
10 June 2015, by Abla Kandalaft
This is one for the francophones amongst you....
Calling La Ligne de Couleur a documentary about the French “minority” experience would be reductive. It is this and much more. It is also a quietly moving and intimate collection of personal stories, “filmed letters” as director Laurence Petit-Jouvet calls them, that their authors read out loud. They are 11 French citizens, French born and bred, men and women, of various ethnic origins, displaying a palette of skin tones. Petit-Jouvet (...)