Author: Jeremy Clarke

The Picks that spoiled our film critic!

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Some people have a fear of flying. I don’t, but dislike of all the bureaucratic paraphernalia that surrounds airports. Not to mention London’s transport system, which is good most of the time, but not so much when it goes wrong. Coming home from the Festival last year, I got caught up in a tube strike. That didn’t happen this year. Indeed, the travel to and from the airport worked better for a number of reasons.

I could use the Elizabeth Line to travel to and from Heathrow Airport. I currently live on the Victoria Line, which connects directly with three major rail terminals (Kings Cross, Euston, Victoria) but not the Elizabeth Line. The Elizabeth was all a bit too new last year, but Londoners who frequently travel into the centre of town as I do have got rather more used to it, and the Oxford Circus (Victoria Line) to Bond Street (Central Line) to Heathrow (Elizabeth Line) is reasonably easy to navigate. Much more so than getting a train to Gatwick, which involves buying another ticket on Victoria main line rail platform, because the Elizabeth Line counts as part of the tube network.

The other was that I followed the advice of our editor and managed to reduce my luggage to one item of hand luggage and one of carry-on luggage that I could take on the plane, thereby removing the need to check in baggage prior to departure and collect said baggage on arrival. This cuts down the amount of bureaucracy at the airport. It also removes the possibility of your checked in baggage going missing while changing flights.

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Taking off

All my flights were with Lufthansa, who (at least on Android phones) have an excellent app that allows you to check in up to 24 hours beforehand, which further reduces the amount of bureaucracy the traveller has to deal with at the airport itself. Both outward and return flights involved changing at Frankfurt (I still managed to forget to check in for my connecting flight on the app, but despite a scarcity of staff at Frankfurt late on a Wednesday evening, one helpful Lufthansa employee managed to sort me out and print the required boarding pass). Curiously, before my return journey, now aware of this pitfall, I double-checked my app check-ins for the return journey, for which the app checked me in for both first and second legs of the flight in one go. Very bizarre.

I missed seeing last year’s welcoming PÖFF signs all over the airport, but I had a pleasant ride to the Nordic Hotel Forum with PÖFF programmer Niki Nikitin, responsible for the Critics’ Picks section which I was to cover, and fellow UK journalist Wendy Ide, the latter sadly only at the Festival for a handful of days.

There was a slight mix up on picking up my festival pass the next morning (I was trying to sort this out around 9am on my first full day with the festival press people not coming on duty ’til 10am) and I take my hat off to the tireless hospitality team person who tried everything she could think of to locate it before one of us (I forget which) thought of asking at the reception, where it turned out to be sitting waiting for me. And then it was off to the Festival proper, with most of the press screenings and a lot of the public screenings at the Apollo Kino Coca-Cola Plaza, which is helpfully situated about five minutes walk from the hotel.

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At the coalface

The first day or so, everything I saw was of an extremely high standard – three of the animation programmes that happened to screen on my first day (which alas I didn’t manage to review), a French animated Sci-Fi outing Mars Express (Jeremie Perin) that I caught at the Kino Sõprus 15 minutes from the hotel that evening, and the first three Critics’ Picks entries I saw – Ukraine’s Lessons of Tolerance (Arkasha Nepytaliuk), Brazil’s Great Sertão (Guel Arraes; pictured just above) and Hungary / Slovakia’s Kalman’s Day (Szabolcs Hajdu) – all came in at five stars. This never happens, and I was just waiting for some truly awful, one-star movie to turn up. Happily, it never did.

Other than that, most of what I saw was everything in the Critics’ Picks section. After the euphoria of that initial rush, the quality dipped slightly (which is to say, we were in four-star territory apart from one film which I gave three stars). These included Czechia / Slovakia’s Her Body (Natálie Císařovská), Hungary’s Pelikan Blue (Laszlo Caski), The Phillipines’ Your Mother’s Son(Jun Robles Lana), Brazil’s Nobody Leaves Alive (Andre Ristum), Morocco’s Fez Summer ’55 (Abdelhai Laraki; pictured just below) and India’s Mrs. (Arati Kadav), But then, against the odds, the quality went back up to five stars with Greece’s Light Falls (Phedon Papamichael), Observing (Janez Burger), Khazakstan’s The Land Where Winds Stood Still (Ardak Amirkulov; second picture from the top), and the UK’s The Old Man and the Land (Nicholas Parish) . Daaaaaali! (Quentin Dupieux, at the top of this article), I expected to be another five star, and so it was.

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Spoilt by choice

I didn’t manage to see as many films as I’d have liked – you can only see so much – and spent less time socialising or availing myself of various trips and events put on by the hospitality people this year – I effectively lost a day when my personal website unexpectedly turned into the WordPress White Screen of Death, requiring an immediate fix (for the technically minded, the issue turned out to be a combination of conflicting plug-ins and a WordPress software upgrade which must have changed some code somewhere) which put paid to my going to a Berlin-themed dance night. I did, however, discover that the hotel bar did a really nice line in rum-based cocktails.

I also spent a pleasant hour one morning tracking down the beehives on the hotel roof. Every morning at breakfast, there was honey fresh from a honeycomb from the hotel’s beehives, six of them, as it turned out when I located them. Last year I had a view from my window of a pipeline on the sixth floor roof, unaware that the six upright orange boxes behind the pipes were, in fact, the beehives. They were visible from the walkway between the eighth floor’s swimming pool and changing area, as well as from the eighth, seventh and sixth floors if you left the life and took the corridor right along the front of the hotel then round the side to the back, where on the sixth floor the access door to the roof and thence the hives was situated. (The seventh and eighth floors had windows there, through which you could see the hives.)

The Festival’s closing ceremony at the Alexela Concert Hall saw two of my five-star picks win prizes, and, curiously, my one three-star film The Milky Way (Maya Kenig) pick up a prize. To reiterate, though, the Critics’ Picks this year were of an incredibly high standard and I don’t envy the jury having to select three winners which inevitably means that other equally deserving contenders miss out. If I’d had to pick one, I have to say it would be the British entry, The Old Man And The Land. I’m British, but I have to admit British films aren’t to my taste that often. This one, though, is something very special.

The awards after-party was memorable for being held in the basement car park of the venue. I half expected Arnold Schwarzenegger to come in asking for Sarah Connor.

The flight home was without incident, except for flight delays, which meant I arrived back at my house about two hours later than planned. The Elizabeth, Central and Victoria lines did me proud, though, and I was reminded of how good London’s Transport system is when everything works as it’s supposed to. It also helped to have only the two items of luggage.

In the end, this was an excellent year for the Critics’ Picks section. Can that be repeated in 2024? The section is clearly in good hands, so here’s hoping. So, for the rest of the festival, at the moment it’s still of a manageable size where it manages to retain its charm and friendliness, with a feeling of filmmakers, festival people and press all mingling together, something which you don’t get at larger festivals. Long may PÖFF continue in that vein.

Mars Express

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The difference between humans and machines is one of the great themes of science fiction from Blade Runner to Ghost in the Shell. Mars Express takes its name from an Earth-Mars shuttle which, following a bravura action / chase sequence early on, not unlike the one at the start of Ghost in the Shell, is used by private investigator Aline Ruby (voice: Léa Drucker) and her assistant Carlos Rivera (voice: Daniel Njo Lobé) to transport a captured suspect from Earth to Mars where, it transpires on arrival, the relevant paperwork to detain their prisoner has been wiped from their on-person devices and internet-accessible office, meaning they are forced to release their prisoner. The narrative is littered with cleverly thought out ideas like this.

The setting is the 23rd century and mostly Mars, where the pair are hired to search for a second year cybernetics student who has gone missing. This is a world where humans and android robots co-exist side by side, and although the latter are generally constructed to obey various laws of robotics which will prevent them harming humans (Asimov’s three laws are implied but not specifically named), there are various android states in which this prevention no longer applies, for instance robots which have been jailbroken. There are also robots which are cloned copies of human beings, able to live on with those humans’ consciousness after the original humans have died.

Carlos is one of these clones, he himself having been killed in battle as a soldier, and is subject to periodic immobilisation to accept downloads as and when new software upgrades become available. Clearly, no-one thought to give him the ability to switch this facility off until times when it’s convenient – immobilisation can take place when he’s grasped a suspect by the wrist, leaving them trapped in his grip and unable to move while his frozen body’s technology takes the time to do its thing.

He’s also a father who never came to terms with the collapse of his marriage and his ex-wife’s separation in his lifetime, and now periodically visits her when she and her cop husband don’t want him anywhere near them or his daughter. In a similarly well-developed piece of characterisation, the human Aline is a former alcoholic counting the number of days she’s stayed dry who hits the nearest bar when things suddenly go off the rails.

The fairly complex plot, which implicates the well-off Chris Royjacker (voice: Mathieu Almaric) in a conspiracy, is likely to be repaid by multiple viewings, as are the superb art direction and visuals. Like Blade Runner, it marries the aesthetics of film noir with science fiction, but unlike that film it’s realised not in live action but in animation, owing a heavy debt to Ghost in the Shell in particular. The opening action, robots and a giant insectoid tank later on have that film written all over them.

However, the animation is directed with a complete grasp of certain stylistic tricks the Japanese have successfully used for years, for instance scenes or elements within shots which are completely static where they don’t need to move (compared to the Western tendency to fully animate everything, whether or not it contributes to the drive or arc of the narrative).

Yet, even if in places it looks a lot like Ghost in the Shell, the Japaneseness has been replaced by a completely French aesthetic. France is the land which developed the bande dessinée, after all, as well as being one of the small number of countries that, like the US, Japan, Canada and the Czech Republic, can truly be said to possess an indigenous animation industry.

Detail on the twin levels of script and design are extremely well-thought-out or worked through, so that you really believe and feel immersed in the human and robot-populated Martian world into which the filmmakers want to plunge you.

In short, this is a real treat for science fiction devotees, animation buffs and anime fans. Groundbreaking stuff.

Mars Express premiered ion the Main programme of Kinoff and Midnight Shivers sections of the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. Also showing at the 3rd Red Sea International Film Festival, and at the 53rd Rotterdam International Film Festival

PÖFF’s Critics’ Picks Competition: pick me again

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Last year, I was privileged to be invited for the first time by our publisher-editor Victor Fraga to attend the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. This year I’m back again, the major difference being that I have some idea of what to expect. Superb, superfast broadband while I’m there, for a start. Clean air and near- or sub-zero weather conditions (although I confess I haven’t yet checked the weather forecast). And great hospitality.

As for the films, the titles in the Critics’ Picks section were generally an impressive lot, and it grieves me to report that apart from the one British film in there, Carol Morley’s sublime Typist Artist Pirate King – a favoured director as rising star here in the UK and an obvious shoo-in – not one of the other films in the strand has made it into UK distribution. These include Dito Tsintsadze’s superb German / Georgian gangster thriller Roxy and Çigdem Sezgin’s arresting, Turkish feminist drama Suna, both of which some enterprising UK distributor ought to snap up and put out as soon as possible.

I generally dislike writing about films before I’ve seen them: we’ve all seen those films which looked great upfront and turned out to be duds, or films which look the sort to be avoided at all costs which turn out to be masterpieces. With that caveat in mind, the range of films on offer in the Critics’ Picks looks promising.

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A new year

The strand is a little more localised this year, with most of the films from Europe or nearby, including two from Hungary, aside from two Brazilian films, one from Khazakstan, one from India and one French/Israeli production. No Oriental titles in there this year, alas, but one animated film (from Hungary).

The two Brazilian entries are Guel Arraes’ futuristic biker combat action movie Great Sertão and André Ristum’s Nobody Leaves Alive on the disappeared persons of the country’s “Colonia” hospital in Brazil. From India, Arati Kadav’s Mrs. promises a mixture of food porn and a look at the position of women in India. Prolific Greek born, top Hollywood cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (click and look him up!) puts on his directorial hat for Light Falls, a Greek-based thriller about a well-off lesbian couple from L.A. and three Albanian workers.

From Khazakstan, Ardak Amirkulov’s The Land Where Winds Stood Still deals with Soviet genocide and starvation. From Ukraine, Arkasha Nepytaliuk’s Lessons Of Tolerance promises a series of sketches on people of different views and leanings living with each other. Estonia, which is in the European Union, is not that far from Ukraine, which isn’t, and there’s clearly no love lost between Estonia and Russia. There are no Russian films in this section, which isn’t really a surprise.

For the rest, the Czech Republic’s Natálie Císařovská offers Her Body about an injured Olympic athlete forced to switch career to porno actress. In a different bodily emphasis, Maya Kenig’s The Milky Way is an Israeli drama about the commercialisation of breast milk sales. Nicholas Parish’s Brit entry The Old Man And The Land, with Rory Kinnear and Emily Beecham, sounds like another of those interesting, rural, farming dramas the UK is currently producing.

Finally, one of the two Hungarian entries is Szabolcs Hajdu’s weird sounding drama Kalman’s Day about various people visiting a loveless couple in a house by a lake. The other is the Critics’ Picks’ first animated film (hooray!), Laszló Csaki’s Pelikan Blue (pictured at the top of this article), a narrative set in the late 1980s in which three young men decide to take a train from behind the Iron Curtain to the West, in which fun turns to black market enterprise and pursuit by the authorities. The film is based on an idea by Son Of Saul’s producer Gabor Sipos.

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The films below are listed in alphabetical order:

1. Fez Summer ’55 (Morocco, Abdelhai Laraki);

2. Great Sertão (Brazil, Guel Arraes);

3. Her Body (Czech Republic/Slovakia, Její Telo);

4. Kalman’s Day (Hungary/Slovakia/United States, Szabolcs Hajdu);

5. Lessons of Tolerance (Ukraine. Arkasha Nepytaliuk);

6. Light Falls (Georgia/Albania/Greece/Germany, Phedon Papamichael);

7. Mrs. (India, Arati Kadav);

8. Nobody Leaves Alive (Brazil, André Ristum);

9. Pelikan Blue (Hungary, Laszló Csaki);

10. The Land Where Winds Stood Still (Kazakhstan, Ardak Amirkulov)

11. The Milky Way (Israel/France. Maya Kenig);

12. The Old Man and The Land (United Kingdom, Nicholas Parish);

Out of competition:

13. Daaaaaali! (France, Quentin Dupieux);14. Observing (Slovenia/Croatia/North-Macedonia, Janez Burger); and15. Your Mother’s Son (Philippines, Jun Robles Lana).

PÖFF’s Critics’ Picks Competition: The Aftermath

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

So, let’s start with the bad stuff. That terrible moment when you arrive for your flight from Gatwick Terminal 5 only to discover that there is no Gatwick Terminal 5, only a South and a North terminal and the helpful airport staff desk man you talk to, while your mobile phone decides to restart for five minutes at the exact moment you plan to show him your emailed airline ticket, gently explains that Terminal 5 is at Heathrow not Gatwick. Fortunately, the sinking feeling doesn’t last long: the flight notification says Gatwick Terminal 5 (so I haven’t misread it, at least) but the actual ticket says Terminal S. Something got lost in transcription, not unlike the French labelling the box of gold Eiffel Tower models with a letter pronounced differently in French and English in the Ealing Studios classic The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951).

The rest of the journey on Air Baltic proceeds without incident, except that I make the mistake of wearing heavy boots and a thick ski jacket borrowed from the neighbours back home, overheat en route and arrive at the Nordic Hotel Forum in Tallinn late at night with a filthy headache. By 3am I’m still not asleep, so I drag myself down to the main desk. The hotel staff aren’t allowed to give out medication, but the night desk manager in his capacity as a compassionate human being rather than a rule-bound employee helpfully gives me two of his own Ibuprofen, which I take and finally get off to sleep. I feel much better in the morning. (This is indicative of the generally high standard of service from the helpful and pleasant desk staff at the Nordic Hotel Forum.)

To backtrack: Before getting off the plane, I use the loo which means I’m last off and have a short walk through an almost empty Tallinn airport. I’m greeted by signs saying BEWARE STRANGER! YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER THE AREA OF INFLUENCE OF THE BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL, PURE MIND and the ubiquitous festival acronym PÖFF. Before even picking up my checked luggage, I feel I’ve arrived in the Festival; Tallinn is not that huge a city (compared, for example, to London, which is so big that the annual London Film Festival inevitably gets lost among myriad other, concurrent, urban cultural activities) and PÖFF makes a sizeable impact on the city for the best part of two weeks for which it runs. It clearly helps that the PÖFF team know how to pitch the Festival to give it some much-needed branding presence. Being quite a small festival probably works in PÖFF’s favour too.

The Wi-Fi at the Nordic is as good as I can remember Wi-Fi being anywhere. The room is a thing of beauty, although I have to improvise a bit using folded bedspreads to raise the height of the desk seating, a big oblong pouff. Anyway, it’s a good working space. Next time, I must remember to ask for a room facing outward as the view would be better, although on the sixth floor, I have a nice view of the fifth floor roof. After a few days, I get round to trying out the pool, steam room and sauna, all of which provide a welcome break to working.

The day after I arrive, the news comes through on the BBC that Russia has launched a missile at Poland, which landed in a field killing two people. Since I’m due to fly back with a stopover at Frederic Chopin Warsaw airport, this is a cause for some concern. But as the days pass, the Western politicians talk it down and it eventually turns out not to have been the Russians at all, but a missile fired from Ukraine which went off course and which they tried to blame on the Russians. There’s clearly no love lost between the international film community and the Russians at the moment: not a single Russian film in the catalogue. Let’s hope Putin falls soon and is replaced by someone who can take the country in a more sane direction.

Festivals often put on events for guests, to promote both their national and local culture and various films or strands within the festival itself. On the first count, I availed myself of a bog walk and a trip round the town. The bog walk turned out to be a marshland walk, for which we had to be loaned snowshoes, something I’ve never worn before. The day we went, the second day I was there, it had just snowed, so everything has a light dusting of white. We went through some woodland, all natural, no wooden walkways or anything man-made underfoot, then donned the snowshoes for the more open marshland. With a dozen or so pairs of feet going squish squish squish it was rarely quiet, but when we all stopped and stood still for a minute or two, as we did on a couple of occasions, the silence was palpable. Walking on this springy land was a curious experience: I was reminded of the landscapes of C.S.Lewis’ SF novel Perelandra a.k.a. Voyage To Venus (1938) as well as the movie Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979). You couldn’t plan or book this happening on the first day of snow; it just happened that way, which turned out to be really good luck and I felt immensely privileged in that regard.

As for the trip round the town, we got a glimpse of cobbled streets, incredible medieval architecture and a look inside the Orthodox church (where various people were told off for not removing their hats). There was a marked difference in the area where the rich people lived, with the houses much bigger and more mansion-like. Our guide, a Mexican lady with a long-haired chihuahua, was supposed to take no more than twenty, but our numbers were maybe twice that. “It’ll be a shitshow,” she cheerfully declared as we set out; her upbeat attitude was infectious. As we worked our way round the town, the numbers dwindled, rather like a horror film where people in a touring party get picked off one by one, until there were only about four people left. I’d like to think those who vanished left to explore food or drink emporia, or sites of historical interest, or art galleries, or whatever caught their eye, rather than being kidnapped by some nefarious Estonian gang or bumped off by some terrible, dark monster lurking in the shadows – but, who knows?

On the second count, there are the parties and events put on by either the Festival or a company promoting a film or perhaps a particular country with a number of films in the Festival. My best evening this year was the Shorts Awards – I hadn’t actually realised that’s what it was initially, although the fact that preference was given to people working in animation and shorts sounded good to me.

So we meet outside the Metropole Hotel at the appointed time, have orders barked at us to stand in line at -4°, are marshalled to a tram stop, wait, get on, probably about twice as many people as should legally be a on a tram, so all the windows steam up, and you can’t see anything outside the tram, which doesn’t really matter, are handed shots of vodka (which quickly warms you up!) and beer, drive around for a while, people write PÖFF with fingers on the steamed window (pictured above), we come to a stop where we are marshalled off the tram on to a coach which drives out to the edge of Tallinn and this massive, unheated warehouse with weird blue light like something out of a science fiction movie (below).

Everyone goes down one end, where you can’t see the awards presentation properly because the stage isn’t high enough, but that’s immaterial because they project the recorded speeches of the winners on a screen up the other end of the warehouse. An amazing experience, forever etched on my memory, unlike any other awards ceremony I’ve ever attended.

That ought to be enough for one night, but to cap it all, back at the Nordic, I get introduced to the writer-director of one of the films I most enjoyed this year, Çigdem Sezgin of Suna (2022; pictured at the top of this article), and a number of us chat about this and that for quite a while. Her English is pretty good (my Turkish, sadly, is non-existent). Later on, the film’s lead Nurcan Eren, who hadn’t said much (I suspect she doesn’t speak English) and is a huge singing star in Turkey, is persuaded to sing a couple of songs impromptu at the hotel bar. Somehow, this seems to capture the open spirit of the Festival, journalists, talent and other industry types all mixing with one another. Altogether a memorable evening.

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The movie marathon begins

I had all sorts of ideas about seeing lots of movies in addition to the Critics’ Picks strand I was there to cover, but in the end I didn’t see that much beyond those. The first day, unplanned, I managed to watch the three Kids Animation Programmes as they were press screening back to back and was impressed by the high standard – not one dud in there, one of the best programmes of children’s animated shorts I’ve ever seen. I caught some other animation: the wonderful My Love Affair With Marriage (Signe Baumane, 2022, pictured below) in which a woman outlines her experiences with sex, romance and finding a life partner (or not) which deserves a wide release, the harrowing but brilliant Aurora’s Sunrise (Inna Sahakyan, 2022) which mixes animated recreation of a survivor’s testimony with fragments of a silent feature about the Armenian Massacre believed lost ‘til recently, and had a long discussion with Elisa Eliash the director of animation / live action hybrid Fever (2022), which hopefully I’ll catch before long.

I also managed to see a few Oriental entries, among them South Korea’s full on but ultimately disappointing The Other Child (Kim Jin-young, 2022) and Japan’s rather better, beautifully handled Double Life (Enen Yo, 2022). In the Critics’ Picks section, the best of the Oriental films for me was Kim Ki-duk’s decidedly weird Call Of God (2022), screening out of competition, while About Us But Not About Us (Jun Robles Lana, 2022) from the Philippines picked up the Jury Prize in the Critics’ Picks section.

Italian crime movie The Bone Breakers (Vincenzo Pirrotta, 2022) about people agreeing to have their bones broken in an insurance scam picked up a special mention. Unless you’re on a jury, you’re not privy to all the deliberations as to why one film was picked up rather than another, and I’ve often found that the films which win awards aren’t the ones that speak to me – I was far more affected by the other crime movie in the strand, Roxy (Dito Tsintsadze, 2022) about a German taxi driver and a killer dog. As well as the two crime movies, there was a good spread of work in the section, most of it strong – a comedy, an historical drama, films about identity and memory, films about filmmaking.

The other Critics’ Pick I particularly liked was the aforementioned Suna, a perfectly constructed and compelling essay on the plight of 50-year-old Turkish women. That doesn’t sound like my sort of thing, but it had me hooked from start to finish. I hope both Roxy and Suna catch the imagination of international – and UK!!! – distributors. As for the name directors, Typist Artist Pirate King (Carol Morley), Sparta (Ulrich Siedl) and Call Of God (Kim Ki-duk) all deserve to be more widely seen. Not one animated or part-animated feature in the section though – why not?

For the return journey, I had a half hour delayed first flight, and was worried I might miss my connecting flight, but was impressed overall by Polish airline Lot who did everything to put passengers at ease, including a choice of sweet or savoury Polish bun and free tea or coffee. Brexit meant that at Warsaw, Brits had to get passports stamped because we are no longer in the EU’s Schengen free movement area, a nerve-wracking experience as there is always the possibility that you’ll get stuck behind someone with an impossibly complex issue and as a result miss your connection. If you are one of the great gaslit who voted Leave, or didn’t bother to vote, this unnecessary, extra bureaucracy is your fault!

I was glad to be back in London, although it didn’t take long to be reminded that the UK is run by a government who hold most of the population in contempt, which is why we got Brexit (people believed that that contempt was the EU’s fault) and is also why various sectors are now going on strike. Friday night, the RMT union (whose cause generally has my sympathy) decided to remind everyone, on the anniversary of the Kings Cross fire, that current Tube staffing levels would make evacuation difficult if anything similar happened again. They did this by closing a number of Tube stations, including those intersecting with rail terminals on the Victoria Line. Sadly, no one bothered to tell this to passengers coming in from Heathrow on the Friday night (in order to avoid the rail strike scheduled for the Saturday) until an in transit Circle Line announcement informed the travelling public that trains were not stopping at Kings Cross.

So I got out at Euston Square only to discover that Euston underground station was closed as well as Kings Cross, something the announcement had neglected to mention. I promptly caught a 73 bus to Dalston, then worked out I could get the 259 home to Tottenham where I live from York Way, outside Kings Cross. Fortunately it wasn’t too crowded. We Londoners live with this kind of pandemonium all the time, which makes for an interesting comparison with Tallinn where for the 10 days I was at the Festival I felt very well looked after. People I talked to who lived there seemed to like it a lot. And the Black Nights Festival is a good size – not too large, most of the screenings within minutes of the Nordic Hotel and generally scheduled to avoid silly clashes or overlapping screenings (are you listening, London Film Festival?!!) Basically, a real pleasure; my first visit to Tallinn, and almost certainly not my last.

Critics’ Picks – In Competition

Critics’ Picks – Out of Competition

  • Call of God (Kim Ki-duk) ****;
  • Karaoke (Moshe Rosenthal); and
  • Sparta (Ulrich Seidl) *****.

Bonus – Kids Animation Programme

Critics’ Picks: a brand-new film selection hits Tallinn

Suna (Suna Kahevahel)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In a hotel room, sitting on two beds at right angles to each other, she says to him: “you won’t be too controlling, right? I don’t want anybody interfering with my life.” Then he sets out his own stall. “I’ll eat whatever you cook me,” he says. “When necessary, I’ll take a bath immediately.” You get the impression that that might not happen all that often.

Played by Turkish singing star Nurcan Eren, Suna craves the security of a relationship without any of the male domination that so often accompanies it. The man she has chosen, Veysel (Tarik Pabuccuoglu), has recently become a widower and wants a companion and partner in life. Not only that, he seems to want someone very like his former wife. He seems a kind, gentle man.

So they have an Imam wedding, a discreet Muslim ceremony with the local Imam present, which joins them in the eyes of Allah but may not have quite the same legal force as a regular marriage in Turkish society. For instance, if he dies, there’s no automatic legal provision that she gets the house.

With the help of the Veysel’s son Erol (Erol Babaoglu), Suna moves in to his house which is situated in a small, rural village. Veysel takes great delight in showing her his pair of caged budgies, which clearly mean a great deal to him.

She has worked as a cleaner and sets about cleaning up his house, which hasn’t been done for three years. A neighbour invites her to the local woman’s meeting, where you go along with a bit of money which Veysel, when asked, is happy to supply. But in the event, she goes out for a walk along the beach instead.

She enjoys walking outside, and on another occasion, when Erol is bringing the couple back from a shopping trip, she insists on being dropped off at the same place as Veysel and walking home alone. Walking home, a man hassles her, but fortunately another man comes to her rescue and sees him off. Her rescuer’s name is Can (Firat Tanış) , and they hit it off.

She seems to have more in common with Can than she does with Veysel, and often drops round to visit and chat with him. It turns out that he is a film critic, and in their conversation it emerges that she played parts as an extra in movies in Germany. She also visits a local restaurant bar, and one night stays there for sex with the owner, who, it turns out, has violent tendencies and likes inflicting pain on women during sex. It’s not clear whether Suna enjoys this, but given that she never goes back to the restaurant, one imagines not. She invents a cover story about being mugged on the way home from the women’s meeting earlier in the day to explain bruises on her face and neck.

As an independent, older woman in a deeply conservative society, Suna is in a difficult position: it doesn’t look like things are going to end well.

Fairly early on, a static image fills the cinema screen, a tapestry hanging on the wall with a picture of a peacock. On the soundtrack can be heard Veysel;s grunts and groans as he has sex with Suna. ‘With’ might be the wrong word: ‘to’ might be more accurate because we hear no noise emanating from her, the obvious assumption being that she is simply lying back as he takes his pleasure with no regard for hers. Aside from a shorter rerun of this scene, the other similar scene here is at the restaurant bar, where silhouettes of a rock band on a section of wall are shown while we hear the restaurant owner’s aural expressions of sexual enjoyment alongside Suna’s cries of discomfort and pain.

The sex scenes in this film are one of its great pleasures, although not in the way you might expect. All truly great directors reinvent the language of cinema and mould it to their own ends. Director Sezgin here has reinvented the cinematic grammar of the sex scene. It’s long worried me that actors and actresses (and more often than not, it seems to have been actresses, presumably because at least until recently, the vast majority of directors have been heterosexual men) have been required to expose their private parts to the camera and simulate coitus for it (and in rare cases, engage in actual coitus). I’m not being prudish about this, and I’m absolutely not talking about people’s personal behaviour outside of filming cinema, or morality, or anything like that – each to their own – but requiring actresses or actors to shoot sex scenes is, at least arguably, problematic. You shouldn’t be required to exposed yourself on the screen in that way, in my opinion.

Here, however, Sezgin has found an alternative way of portraying sex on camera without making any of those visual demands on her cast which works a treat (there’s a short clip of it in the trailer below, but when you watch the film, which unfolds at a very deliberate and measured pace, it has a greater impact than the little excerpt shown there). You could certainly argue that she’s borrowing heavily from the language of radio; sound, after all, is a significant component of cinema; I’d like to think that Orson Welles, in his Mercury Theatre on the Air days, would have been proud of her.

Also impressive is the portrayal of a film critic. I’ve seen this done in films before, but I’ve never seen a director get it right. On this occasion, however, I didn’t spot any gaffes, completely believed the character I saw on the screen and was delighted to have seen the film. (It’s not the primary reason I liked the film, and I realise this element is more likely to appeal to film critics than anyone else, but nevertheless, this element is a real pleasure.) The film is dedicated to the late Turkish film critic Cüneyt Cebenoyan.

I should add that personally, as a non-Turkish speaker unfamiliar with either the language or Turkish names, I didn’t immediately cotton on that the director was a woman – although looking at the movie’s subject matter about the plight of women of a very specific age in a very specific culture the fact of her gender would have been a reasonable guess. On one level I don’t care – it’s about whether a director is competent, has a vision and can realise it on the screen. If people can tick those boxes, I’m all for it – and if they happen to be women, then fine. Sezgin, in this film, ticks those boxes.

Given that half the humans on the planet are women, and that a good number of the rest of us humans are men who find women fascinating, the story ought to be of interest to a great many people. And it is so beautifully told, and the film so rigorously constructed and shot (on a minimal amount of resources, I might add) that it deserves to be widely seen. I can’t claim much knowledge of Turkish cinema, but Sezgin’s film reminded me of the poetic realism of the likes of English director Terence Davies (notably The Terence Davies Trilogy, 1983) and The Bill Douglas Trilogy (My Childhood, 1972; My Ain Folk, 1973; My Way Home, 1978, all directed by Scotland’s Bill Douglas).

There’s a similarity in the way these visual narratives are constructed via a series of small incidents to build up a compelling picture of the ordinary life of a character. Clearly Sezgin is a woman while these other two are men, so on some level her film is going to be very different from theirs. Yet, like these films by Davies and Douglas, Suna is a masterpiece.

Suna premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Typist Artist Pirate King

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In these days of US-style promotion, branding and media, it’s easy to think of artists as high profile, rich and successful. While some are, that’s not what an artist is: an artist is, quite simply, someone who makes art. (If they’re a good artist, they make good art. Whatever that is.) The subject of Morley’s new road movie is the artist Audrey Amiss (1933-2013) who, although she exhibited her work a number of times during her lifetime, received scarcely any recognition in that period. She suffered from mental health issues and was in and out of mental hospitals throughout her life.

Audrey (Monica Dolan) is regularly visited in her London flat by psychiatric nurse Sandra (Kelly Macdonald). One day, she asks Sandra to drive her to an exhibition which has an open call for artists, as she’s never exhibited and feels the time has come. Sandra first turns her down, but on a later date after some consideration agrees – although she’s somewhat horrified en route when Audrey’s “local” turns out to mean “Sunderland”, the best part of 300 miles North.

Thus, the pair yet out in Sandra’s bright yellow car Sunshine band undergo a series of encounters with people from Audrey’s past. In reality, they aren’t the people from Audrey’s past, but she mistakes them as such in her mind. Just as she isn’t always convinced Sandra is really Sandra or even that she herself wasn’t taken over by an imposter at an early age (following a specific traumatic experience, which the narrative explores in the final reel towards the end of Audrey and Sandra’s journey).

There are many joys to be experienced on the way. A wise vicar (Gary Bates) breaks into a church lavatory after Audrey accidentally locks herself in and, unlike numerous media presentations of clergy, manages to say and do just the right things to help her. A hitchhiker (Issam Al Gussein), who turns out to be another artist, gets thrown out of the car after addressing Audrey as a “freak”. A van driver (Neal Barry), who gives Audrey a lift after a row with Sandra, seems a pleasant chap until he starts trying to take sexual advantage of her (a rare moment when this largely brave and original film lapses into cliché). Eventually, she visits unannounced her Sunderland-based sister (Gina McKee) who she’s not contacted for six years.

Dolan is fantastic as the woman who exhibits both a personality disorder and a talent for expressing herself visually; her performance is ably complemented by short bursts of little sequences showing three or four of Audrey’s works in rapid succession throughout. The role is a gift for an actor, not only because of the wide palette of motion and behaviour undergone by Audrey in the course of the film, but also because she has to interact with characters she believes to be a person from her past when in fact they are someone else she has never met.

Macdonald provides an anchor to Dolan’s out of control persona, while McKee, although she doesn’t appear until late in the story, proves a huge presence in the final reel, a good and generous sister.

There’s a fascinating religious (Christian) subtext to all this, too. Audrey wears a cross and, however messed up her life might be, appears to have a deep-seated faith in God as expressed in the Christian tradition. As well as the aforementioned episode in a rural church building (the name St. Christina The Astonishing can be seen on a notice board inside the premises), there are comforting religious words, there is one in-car conversation about Jesus, there are references to hymns and hymn singing which, as any Christian person will tell you, can carry and communicate great nuggets of spiritual truth, often in a clear and concise, albeit almost subliminal way. Not that the film is proselytizing, or anything like that: far from it.

Morley is far from your typical British director; she tends not to repeat herself, except for the fact that her films are consistently provocative. This new film is well up to par. As a bonus, it has a scene with Morris dancers.

Typist Artist Pirate King premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally. Its UK premiere takes place at the 31st Raindance Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, October 27th. On Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, December 8th.

The Rise & Fall Of Comrade Zylo (Shkelqimi Dhe Renia E Shokut Zylo)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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Comrade Demka (Donald Shehu) just can’t say no. It’s 1971, and he’s strongly in demand as a political speechwriter. As fast as he can churn out speeches, it seems, he’s asked to write more. His wife Zenepja (Xhoana Karaj) is fed up with him working all the time, feels he’s wasting his talent and anyway would rather he spent more time with her. And then, there’s Comrade Zylo (Aleks Seitaj), appropriating speeches Demka has written for others, such as the one on the tedious-sounding ‘Innovative Developing Elements in the spread of our culture throughout Albania’.

Watching Zylo read one of Demka’s speech through the circular windows of the auditorium doors, Demka listens to the praise for Zylo pouring from the mouth of Zylo’s wife Adila (Enisa Hysa). She’s impressed by the words her husband has written, unaware that Demka, not Zylo, actually wrote them. She’s less impressed, along with most of the audience, with the speech of committee chair Comrade Q (Petrit Malaj) – which Demka also wrote, on a tight deadline – going down rather less well. At the after-speech dance (with a traditional and very conservative Albanian folk band) she dances and flirts with Demka.

Q meanwhile, is less than happy, feeling that Demka could have written better for him. No sooner has he stormed off than Zylo, who clearly knows a good thing when he sees it, is asking Demka to come and work for him. He introduces Demka to one of his sons, the composer Diogenio (Samuel Vargu). Also in Zylo;’s circle are the playwright of The Storm Is Defeated, Adem Adashi (Amos Muji Zaharia), and his wife, the singer Cleopatra (Jorida Meta).

Zylo becomes obsessed with the potential effect of socialism on West Africa, and wants Demka to write him a speech for an upcoming conference there. The pair of them go to Africa on a delegation, accompanied by Cleopatra. There’s clearly something going on between Zylo and Cleopatra. No-one in the party pays any attention to the delegation, which proves something of a non-event. Except that it’s the beginning of the end for the career of Comrade Zylo.

The whole thing oscillates between a bureaucratic drama with Comrade Q, Zylo and various factions vying against each other to get ahead, an existentialist drama in which Demko struggles to write to deadline, a domestic drama in which Demko’s wife thinks he’s a great writer wasting his time on political speeches, and the occasionally very funny scene of satire about life in an Eastern Bloc socialist state.

Perhaps the best scene occurs when during a visit to a village, Zylo gets drunk at a gathering convened in his honour and starts talking about all men being equal, that they shouldn’t oppress their women like tyrants, and so forth. He starts waving his pistol about (not with the intent of discharging it, except maybe to put a bullet in the ceiling) while everyone around him is getting increasingly worried. He’s speaking out for an equality which can’t possibly exist under the current bureaucratic, socialist system, with its Party hierarchy, and it’s as if everyone is aware of the existing pecking order but him, the person in charge.

Overall, this is a film likely to make more sense or to appeal to those who have experienced life under a totalitarian leftist regime than those of us who haven’t.

The Rise & Fall Of Comrade Zylo premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

About Us But Not About Us

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

[dropca[]A[/dropcap]n older man meets a younger man in a restaurant. Both are gay. The older man, Eric (Romnick Sarmenta), has recently lost his longtime partner Marcus (who we never see… well, not exactly) while the younger man Lance (Elijah Canlas) knew Marcus as his writing tutor, both elder men working as professors at the English language faculty of the university at which Lance is a student.

As the narrative plays out in real time, it moves through a number of difficult areas. Lance was having problems at home; specifically, being beaten by his stepfather, so Eric intervened by letting Lance stay at his place, bringing upon the pair rumours that they were lovers (although everything in the restaurant conversation suggests those rumours to be unfounded). It later transpires that Lance has written his first novel. When Lance presents the manuscript to Eric, Eric accuses Lance of plagiarism after reading the first few pages when Lance walks offscreen for a minute or two to take a toilet break.

Director Lana deploys a variety of theatrical and cinematic tricks in order to make the piece work. He has thought a lot about where to place the camera, and what each specific shot contributes to the whole. He deploys some bravura cinematic tricks. A clever combination of blocking, camera positioning and Lance cleaning his spectacles lenses allows Lance to temporarily transform into Marcus; a similar setup allows Eric talking to Lance to transform into Marcus talking to Lance, all acheived without lap dissolves, traditional flashback techniques, different actors or prosthetics makeup.

Whereas Hitchcock undertook Rope (1948) as a kind of stunt, which still delivered as a thriller, About Us But Not About Us doesn’t have any such genre trappings. It’s fundamentally a film about two people talking over a meal in a restaurant, something Hitch would have decried as “photographs of people talking”. To be fair, it does contain some bravura cinematic tricks, but somehow those look like trickery rather than enhancing the tale of the characters and making the audience feel for their plight. I, for one, didn’t really care about what the characters were going through. Unlike Rope, the film lacks Hitch’s understanding of the psychology of audiences.

Although no masks are worn, the pair are only allowed a 90 minutes because of the restaurant’s post-COVID policies and characters make references to the pandemic throughout. That’s not the subject of the film per se, but it’s good that it at least acknowledges the pandemic in passing when so many movies seem to want to pretend it never happened, that it’s business as usual. Whatever my other opinions of the film, this, at least, is something in its favour.

About Us But Not About Us premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The Chambermaid (Sluzka)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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Part British television drama Upstairs Downstairs, part illicit lesbian romance, this film undercuts fears of stodgy, conservative product to deliver instead a story full of fearless performances which, for all its faults, constantly disturbs and surprises. The action takes place in Prague before and during the time of World War I.

he late 19th century, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anka (Dana Droppová) is the bastard child of Eva. The pair are close until in Anka’s teenage years, her mother marries a man with three children who promptly finds a position for Anka to get her out of the way. Thus, the girl commences work as a chambermaid in a wealthy German household in Prague where she’s told to say Yes Milord and Yes Milady whenever anything’s asked of her by the master and mistress of the house.

She arrives when there’s a big social gathering going on, and is asked by Milady (Zuzana Mauréry) if she can sing. This leads to a her confident rendition of a Slavic folk song. You might think this is going to develop into a narrative thread but it doesn’t, an indication of the film’s major weakness: it constantly throws in new ideas some of which then don’t go anywhere, and there are even new ideas coming up in the final reel, for instance that Milord (Karel Dobrý) has been involved with various dodgy dealings (arms manufacture and sales, perhaps?) for which the incriminating paperwork needs to be burned when there has been no hint of this up to that point.

Likewise, she’s warned that the daughter Resi (Radka Caldová) can be difficult, but nothing quite prepares you for a sequence where Resi, on the pretext of not being able to find a brooch, orders Anka to strip off to prove she hasn’t stolen it. This seems to be primarily about humiliating the servants rather than any peculiar sexual fetish, and bears no relationship to their subsequent friendship and lesbian relationship either.

Other ideas thrown up by the narrative ARE however taken up to emerge as major story threads, and there are quite a few of them. Milord is partial to violently slapping those to whom he objects, which sometimes includes his wife should she dare to offer her opinion. As she later explains to her daughter when talking about marriage, you soon learn to keep quiet after you’ve been slapped a few times.

Milord is also partial to seeking temptations of the flesh elsewhere, something one of the older, more established maids Lisa (Vica Kerekes) is keen to exploit, working her was up to becoming his mistress with a house that he’ll pay for. The gardener is upfront about messing around with any woman who will let him, so when Resi is on the verge of marrying Gustav (Cyril Dobrý from All Quiet On The Western Front, Edward Berger, 2022)), she sends Anka to sleep with the gardener to obtain a full report. Anka’s verdict is, bearable and over quickly, but when she attempts to demonstrate this to Resi, it lasts longer, is far more satisfying and develops into a long-running relationship. So much so, that after Resi has birthed her first daughter, Anka becomes the child’s nursemaid until Milady bans her from that position after discovering Anka and Resi sharing a full bathtub together.

The cook Kristina (Anna Geislerová) is branded an old maid by Lisa, although she also possesses midwifery and abortionist skills which makes you wonder what happened to her in her past. Nevertheless, a memorable scene or Resi giving birth in which there’s a real possibility she might die is brilliantly conveyed in a lengthy reaction shot of Anka’s face. A later sequence has Kristina diagnose Lisa as pregnant and perform an abortion, with Anka required to drop a foetus-sized package of one of the city’s bridges into the water just as throughout the film she also empties chamber pots into street drains under the admonition, our employers must be allowed to think their shit smells sweeter than ours.

Resi, meanwhile, comes to despise her husband. He is sheltered and foolish enough to be delighted to get called up for active service in WW1, and Resi is so keen for him not to come back that Anka elicits details of how to curse somebody from Kristina so that Anka and Resi can perform a makeshift witchcraft ritual (basically, walking round a room stark naked with a broomstick between her legs) to curse him. He comes back from the war wounded, an embittered figure who has lost one leg, one eye and, perhaps more significantly, whatever self-dignity he previously possessed.

Anka is religious enough to pray nightly for her mother and the Emperor, so clearly her Christianity (probably Catholic or Orthodox) is of the state- and establishment-bolstering variety. It’s difficult to see what other impact it has on her life.

For all its veering around all over the place narrative-wise, this proves an engrossing two hours, far more so than you might reasonably expect.

The Chambermaid premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Wake Me (Zbudi Me)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A man wakes up in hospital, clearly traumatised. His head is bandaged. He has no idea who he is beyond his name, Rok (Jure Henigman). His girlfriend Rina (Živa Selan) drives him home.

When the door of the social housing apartment opens, and the woman inside (who we later realise is his mother, played by Nataša Barbara Gračner) realises who it is, she tries to shut the door but not before he can get a foot in. He forces entry, and the lady social worker explains that this is the last address he remembers, that he should regain his memory in time. And already, he remembers a name, Jure (Timon Sturbej). Who turns out to be his little brother. His brother at his mother’s insistence makes up the bed in the brother’s room.

Rok hangs around on walkways in Jesenice, as the local railway station is named, walks through an underpass to a cafe where he asks after Damjan (Jurij Drevenšek), another remembered name, who he finds doing his day shift as a watchman in a school. Back at home, his girlfriend Rina (Živa Selan) brings over some of his stuff. At night, he watches Jure spraypaint graffiti images. After the pair of them have a run in with the man whose wall it was, they watch an old video of people fleeing Rok as he wields an axe. Later, says Jure, who only heard the details second hand, things got really messy as Rok cracked a guy’s head open.

Rok calls in on Denana (Tamara Avguštin) and her wheelchair-bound husband Selim (Blaž Setnikar). Later, his mother tells him how he and Selim got in a fight which crippled Selim. Later still, Damjam suggests that now he’s Back, Rok will want revenge. This is news to Rok. He visits an Inspector Janežič (Jure Ivanužič) at the police station who tells him he’s forgotten that he was “a good guy who left all this”. That doesn’t stop him and his mother talking Jure into leaving for Austria, where life chances are better.

He watches a video of him and his girlfriend fooling around as she cooks dinner: happier times. He realises he has a key, so travels over to her apartment and lets himself in. She’s not pleased. So he returns the key. Later, he gets attacked on a covered pedestrian rail / road bridge after doing his grocery shopping by people who know him from before, and who Jure – who is now back – is with.

The whole thing benefits considerably from urban Slovenia locations, crisply shot by cinematographer Ivan Zadro. The shot towards the end when Rok gets attacked is particularly impressive: a long shot of the covered pedestrian bridge as he walks across screen left to right, two men running towards him right to left and one running from behind him left to right to deliver the knockout head blow with a handheld object.

You’ll also remember shots of railway stations at night, and trains passing through the city. There’s a clear sense of purpose to the whole film and Jan Vysocky contributes an eerie orchestral score that adds much to the overall atmosphere. As a picture of a man suffering memory loss trying to reconnect with his past, which is how it sels itself, the piece does what is says on the tin. It isn’t likely to want to make anyone move to Slovenia anytime soon, though.

Wake Me premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

A Childless Village (Sonsuz)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Twenty years ago, Kazem made a film about the village’s women being unable to bear children. As a result, they beat him up. And many of the men in the village divorced them only to feel guilty and remarry them some three times. Now he wants to make another film because the problem may lie not with the women, but the men. Who, reckons the narrator, are equally likely to beat him up. A visiting lady doctor, generally referred to by the locals as Miss Doctor, hopes to run tests on the villagers and establish the cause of childlessness.

Moslem, who is also the narrator, wants to learn how to be a director – and to just be in the film. He claims that all the women in the village are related to him, so he’ll have no problem getting them to talk on camera. But, of course, it doesn’t work out that way.

An hilarious running gag has people going up to local sound recordist Samad and asking him this or that while he’s trying to record sound. Director Jamali has a lot of fun with elements such as this – for instance, Moslem proudly proclaiming that he’ll use the clapper board so professionally that no-one will need to do any writing. Or tossing leaves onto a patch of ground in an unsolicited attempt to make the shot look more beautiful for the camera.

“When you show up,” one of the women tells Moslem, “there’s always someone dead or something wrong.”

Another episode has one of the oldest women in the village – Granny Nazi – about to give birth. Kazem wants to film her, but her menfolk are unwilling. Eventually a compromise of sorts is reached and Samad, having agreed to record sound after the birth, promptly installs himself on the roof to record the event itself.

The film abounds with gags about the art of filmmaking. Kazem screens a silent film for the men of the village, but they want to know why it has no sound. Elsewhere, one man wants to be recorded in sound only so his relative won’t know from whom the testimony comes. So Moslem borrows a frosted window pane from a local house to use to blur the on camera image while the man is being filmed. Only, he can’t resist moving the glass so that the camera glimpses the man’s face.

Like Italian documentary The Truffle Hunters (Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw, 2020), in which the old men of the village prove so incredibly watchable on camera, both Moslem and, to a lesser extent, Kazem, bring an irrepressible humour to the film. Unlike that film, this one isn’t a real documentary so much as a film about three characters making one. Its heart is in absolutely the right place, though, with its story about a group of women who got a raw deal as a result of patriarchal prejudice that blamed them for infertility that turns out not to be their fault but the men’s.

Audiences will be drawn to it not because of what it has to say about male bias and injustice but rather because of the humour with which it achieves this. A quiet, gentle and genuinely funny little film.

A Childless Village premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It then shows at the 2nd Red Sea International Film Festival.