La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
La Chimera made me think of Orpheus and Eurydice. Of Powell & Pressburger. Of how long it had been since I’d been sent on such a vagrant, enjoyable path at the movies. Italy in the early 1980s: Josh O’Connor is a moody, Belmondo-esque archaeologist who—dowsing rod in hand—loots Etruscan tombs with a band of life-loving reprobates. Also on his mind: lost love Beniamina. Squabbles and camaraderie. Costumes and colourful songs. Do they all really know where they’re going? They range across a country that has a funny relation to its past. They run into high-class crooks too. What will become of them? The marvel of this wonderful film is that its end leaves them—and us—gleefully guessing.
Burning Bridges: The Story of Paul Burwell (Matt Stephenson & Alan Jones)
Who was Paul Burwell? Jazz musician Evan Parker calls him “the world’s first fine art drummer”. For much of the 1970s and 1980s he was a key figure in the British margins—the thrilling but poorly-attended and minimally paid worlds of jazz improvisation, experimental poetry and performance art. He believed in magick. He loved water, fire, noise. He had a genius for pyrotechnics. In another life, he would have directed the London Olympic Ceremony. As it was, he drank prodigiously, fell out with many close to him, headed up to Hull to live in a broken rowing clubhouse. His blazing work and terrible demise are reanimated in this brilliant portrait of an almost-extinct British bohemia.
Green Border (Agnieszka Holland)
How Polish-born Holland must have bristled when government spokesmen accused her of making an “anti-Polish” film. Heart and humanism infuse all her work. Green Border is an impassioned call to ignore the jingoistic parochialism of Fortress Europe ideologues. Set in 2021, at the Polish-Belarusian border, it focusses on people—a family seeking to escape the Islamic State in Syria, an Afghan woman trying to join her brother, a trio of African teenagers. Here, in this forest of fear, when time is fractured and deranged, there are other people—a humanitarian who wants to make a difference, a young guard who witnesses atrocities. Tautly structured and unblinkingly observed, this is, once seen, very difficult to forget.
My Undesirable Friends: Part 1—Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev)
Loktev, born in Leningrad but living in America for decades, is renowned for her conceptual rigour and forensic, almost icy films. Here, chronicling the last days of TV Rain, one of the last remaining independent news channels in Putin’s Russia, she changes tack to extraordinary effect. Armed with just a smartphone, she tags along with a group of mostly young women journalists, traduced as “foreign agents” by the state, who try to expose the lies and repressions of the present regime. She squishes into cars with them, shows their tears and rage and humour, and creates a dark thriller that, even though it lasts almost five and a half hours, is not a minute too long.
Being John Smith (John Smith)
John Smith, this country’s top absurd conceptualist, was treated for head and neck cancer three years ago. A rough time. His voice is a bit weaker now. His thoughts understandably pensive. In this autobiographical essay, he talks about growing up with the most boring name imaginable, being nicknamed “Piddly Smith”, getting kicked out of school for having long hair. His delivery is droll. Old photographs are punctuated unexpectedly—“Stop the genocide. Ceasefire now.” What, he wonders, is the point of making art in the face of species extinction? He’s rarely been so rueful, but his narked, naughty sensibility still shines brightly.
All We Imagine As Light (Priya Kapadia)
Writer-director Kapadia’s rapturously received feature debut is set in modern-day Mumbai, but its abiding mood—drift and reverie, metropolitan tristesse, so much longing—recalls the beautiful, haunted Glasgow of The Blue Nile’s classic LP A Walk Across the Rooftops. Three women: nurse Prabha whose husband moved to Germany shortly after they were married; her colleague Anu who is having a secret affair with a Muslim man; Parvaty, a widow who’s getting kicked out of her apartment by greedy developers. The city—everything—is changing. Not obviously for the better. Should they go with the flow? A film about caring. A film worth caring about.
Wind, Tide & Oar (Huw Wahl)
A film about engineless sailing? What kind of cranks would be into that? British filmmaker Huw Wahl’s gorgeous film shows engineless sailing is by no means a thing of the past—and nor is it a crankish concern. Shot on 16mm film, a supposedly anachronistic medium whose grain and texture suits the topic, it captures groups of men and women engaging the sky and the sea, learning how to make and fix gear by hand, improvising with their boats but also with nature. It’s unhurried, attentive to the sailors’ hands and feet, edited in a way that emphasises how sailing is a journey in rhythm as much as a journey with a destination.
Santosh (Sandhya Suri)
Suri is best known for I for India, a 2005 tone poem about her parents’ journey to Britain in the 1960s and their subsequent ups and downs. Her feature debut is a moody and consistently gripping police procedural that stars Shahana Goswami as a widow who takes over her late husband’s job as a rural constable. Investigating the murder of a teenage girl, she receives—in morgues, dalit villages, sprawling homes—a dark education into the daily poison of corruption, patriarchy and caste politics. Santosh is never doctrinaire: precisely but elegantly photographed, blessed with a hugely charismatic performance by Goswami, it reaffirms Suri’s standing as a premier filmmaker.
Making Dust (Fiona Hallinan)
Irish artist Hallinan is one half (alongside Kate Strain) of the Department of Ultimology, founded in 2016 to study things that are dead or about to die. Making Dust uses the demolition of a church (Ireland’s second largest) in Finglas West, Dublin, as an opportunity to think about what kinds of life it—its building materials, hydraulic needs, physical presence—had displaced or destroyed. Working with architectural historian Ellen Rowley, and making artful use of interviews with local residents, it asks fascinating questions about “congregation” and “community”, the ways in which churches channel or embody “energy”, what it means for something to be “hallowed ground”.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez)
“If Africa is shaped like a revolver,” wrote radical psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, “then Congo is its trigger.” Belgian artist Grimonprez, operating like a DJ as much as a traditional essay filmmaker, cuts and pastes extraordinary, electrifying archival footage from the early 1960s—time of the Cold War—when independent Congo’s prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated. The cast includes Washington strategists, mineral-seeking multinationals, adventure-seeking mercenaries. And also a raft of jazz musicians whose sounds expressed freedom and modernity, but who—especially Louis Armstrong—were also deployed as cultural soft power.
