Our film reviewers below headed to the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/social-realism-meets-sci-fi-at-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2023">BFI London Film Festival</a> to search for the films of the year for you to seek. Ranging from the big releases to smaller rewarding films, we arrange them according to our very own special categories.
<h5>Heavyweight Champion of the World Award</h5>
This year’s London Film Festival was dominated by the return of the heavy-weight auteur, with new films from Michael Mann, David Fincher, Todd Haynes, Hayao Miyazaki, Sofia Coppola, Wim Wenders, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Errol Morris, Catherine Breillat, Jonathan Glazer and even Victor Erice (his last film The Quince Tree Sun was released over 30 years ago).
But in a year where the future of cinema has come under existential threat – actors and writers <a href="https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/hollywood-actors-on-strike-why-sag-walkout-how-long-last-explained-2478793">striking for better pay</a> and better job security against the looming backdrop of artificial intelligence and the streaming boom – it’s fitting that one of the industry’s most revered and outspoken filmmakers returns with a late-career masterpiece.
At 81 years old, Martin Scorsese is finding a new lease of life thanks to an impressive late-career run in Silence (2016), The Irishman (2019) and now his latest American epic Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), an extraordinary dramatization of David Grann’s novel that systemically examines the industrialised gangsterism behind the 1920s Osage County murders of the local Native American population to powerful effect. As Scorsese said on the LFF red carpet when adapting these kinds of stories, “The aesthetics of it [the film] should enhance the journalistic idea”. Killers of the Flower Moon achieves this through a scope matched by unapologetic rage over historical injustice.
Killers of the Flower Moon is available to stream from January 2024 – TS 
<h5>Most Touching Story Award</h5>
In Past Lives, written and directed by Celine Song, we follow Greta Lee’s character Nora reconnecting with her childhood friend Hae Sung (played by Teo Yoo) from her youth in South Korea, where her family emigrated from to settle in Canada. We are taken back to scenes from their childhood together, then fast forward to their early adulthood where they find each other again, a virtual reunion filled with feeling and romantic potential. But, as life often reminds us, some things aren’t meant to be: the stars do not align and the couple drift apart once again.
As more time passes, Nora and Hae Sung settle into trajectories that separate and differentiate them, yet life brings them together again. Reconnecting with someone, something or some place that played a part in who you once were can be a challenging confrontation. How does it feel to observe or engage with what could have been? How will you deal with what you find? Past Lives explores just this, subtly and tenderly.
I often find myself wondering about what could have been if my parents made a different choice for their lives, our lives. What they had to let go. Who they would have been. In Past Lives, I see that being content doesn’t mean you are immune to imagining possibilities and mourning lost potential. There is so much feeling in this film, I loved it.
Past Lives is available to stream now – HH
<h5>The Everyday Evil Award for Global Trade</h5>
Any pact with the devil begins with an attractive proposition. Europa, directed by Austrian-Iranian Sudabeh Mortezai and set in a remote valley in Albania, begins with businesswoman Beate (Lilith Stangenberg) addressing a crowd of female university graduates to tell them they can be anything they want in life. Beate follows with remorseless zeal her mission on behalf of the multinational EUROPA company: to get the custom-bound farmers of a local village to sign away their land. So, be whatever you want to be, so long as it is within the terms and conditions stipulated in the contract. The precise business of the company is never stated, but Beate attempts to achieve their aims with a single-mindedness that begins with bonhomie and the promise to share the miracles of progress, but turns increasingly imploring, cajoling, then threatening, until finally relying on the brutal reality of force. This satire of contemporary neoliberalism exposes the smiling face of corporate practice to be the mask of an occupying power. Meanwhile, the local village heads of family maintain a power of refusal whose steadfastness attains an almost mystical quality.
Europa does not have a release date yet – LB

<h5>Best British Film Award</h5>
As well as the auteurs, a number of British films appeared in the programme, from crowd-pleasers like Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget to Molly Manning Walker’s immensely powerful debut on female adolescence and rape culture in How To Have Sex that left me emotionally drained exiting the cinema.
But two homegrown products occupied the opening and closing night gala slots representing two class ends of British society. First up was Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s stylish mystery drama about an Oxford Uni student (a type-cast Barry Keoghan) who gets drawn into the world of an aristocrat (Jacob Elordi) in his same year.
More successful was the closing night gala The Kitchen, a brilliant debut from Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares set in a dystopian London where all forms of social housing have been eradicated except for a rundown housing block, nicknamed <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/social-realism-meets-sci-fi-at-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2023">The Kitchen</a>, whose community refuses to move out despite orders from the authorities. The film centres on an unlikely relationship formed between Izi (Kane Robinson, better known by his rapper name Kano), who’s desperate to leave The Kitchen, and 12-year-old Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman, in an exceptional debut performance) who has lost his mother and is searching for familial stability. It includes an outstanding supporting role from football legend Ian Wright as the in-house DJ! Its references to Attack the Block (2011), Blade Runner (1982), Blue Story (2019) and television crime drama Top Boy (2011-2023) – which also stars Kano – add up to a very effective allegory that resoundingly speaks to the current climate of social exclusion, gentrification and knife crime in London. Crucially, it’s a film made by Londoners about London and we thoroughly recommended it when it drops on Netflix in January.
The Kitchen is available to stream from 19 January 2024 on Netflix – TS

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Bikeriders 2023 film still

<h5>“Hand Me the Tissues” Award for Most Tears in the Audience</h5>
 We go through life like rough-hewn lumps of rock, shaped by the impact from billions of years of astral explosions. Distant stars may draw us for a time into their orbit, before their light goes out and we are once more alone in the cold, dark solitude of the cosmos. This metaphor underlies All of Us Strangers, a relationship drama about the things we wish we could say to those who have long since left us, and the love we neglect while it is by our side. Andrew Haigh (45 Years) directs a dream team of Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, Jamie Bell and star Andrew Scott, who render each character in the fine detail of their warmth and their flaws, their hopes and their traumas. Scott plays a middle-aged screenwriter whose encounter with a younger man prompts him to re-evaluate his life as a gay man and his relationship to his parents. In a story that blends fantasy, memory, feeling and reality, Scott embodies the subtle strength of a subjectivity that defines our relations to others at the same time that it inhibits our ability to fully reach them. It is a film of a devastating sadness and beauty.
All of Us Strangers is in cinemas from 26 January 2024 – LB
<h5>Stylish but Disappointing Award</h5>
The Bikeriders is a fictional film directed by Jeff Nichols and inspired by photojournalist Danny Lyon’s photo book of the same name. The photos depict the lives of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club of Chicago, a community on the outskirts of society who Lyon spent four years documenting.
Impenetrable and elusive, Lyon’s work gives us an insight to a lifestyle and people many will never encounter, let alone be welcomed into. I find the photographs of this fringe community fascinating and romantic, so I understand director and writer Jeff Nichols’ drive to create a fiction around these evocative photographs.
The result fails to inspire. This film features beautiful shots and an ensemble cast to match, but it’s tied together by a shallow narrative. There is something here about oral histories being held and stewarded by women, namely Jodie Comer’s character Kathy, but the focus persists on the central male characters, Benny (Austin Butler) and Johnny (Tom Hardy) playing out a tale about succession. The jumps in time, and the numerous underdeveloped (though intriguing) characters, left me wanting. Comer’s performance stands out the most and I wish more of the events of the film prioritised her perspective.
The Bikeriders’ release date has been postponed – HH
HH – <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/halima-a-hassan">Halima A. Hassan</a> 
LB – <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/louis-bayman">Louis Bayman</a> 
TS – Theo Smith

Past-Lives-Still-1 copy

As we come to the end of a turbulent year in global news, we look ahead to find radical joy, meaning and imagination in the cinema.

From heavyweights to debuts – The Platform&#8217;s 2023 film awards

While 2023 will go down in film history as the year that, inexplicably in my opinion, audiences chose Oppenheimer over The Flash, the BFI London Film Festival offers a chance to look ahead to the year to come. It is a prestigious affair, which means that it is dominated by big-name directors whose films will soon be queueing up for Oscars recognition, along with many lesser-known films that won&#8217;t make it to UK cinemas outside of the festival.
This year is especially notable for the number of distinguished directors lining up who are returning to the big screen for the first time in years. Wim Wenders makes a return with not one but two films: the documentary profile of artist Anselm Kiefer Anselm and the Tokyo-set drama Perfect Days. David Fincher teams up again with his co-writer from Seven for The Killer and Lukas Moodysson presents the sequel Together 99. Meanwhile Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes wins the prize for longest absence, coming a full 30 years since the Spanish director last made a feature film.
Joining them are Sofia Coppola’s biopic of Elvis’s wife, Priscilla, Richard Linklater’s neo-noir comedy Hit Man and festival favourite Koreeda with Monster. Steve McQueen widens his epic vision after the Small Axe film series that chronicled racism and immigration in the UK, with Occupied City. Occupied City is a four-and-a-half-hour chronicle of 130 locations in Amsterdam, contrasting their present-day to historical footage when they still hosted the persecuted Jewish community. The Nazi past is also revisited in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which promises a more dreamlike or hallucinatory experience than McQueen’s exploration of archival memory.
If instead it is actors who draw you to the cinema, then you will keenly await All of Us Strangers, an intimate portrait of a friendship that brings Andrew Scott (the ‘hot priest’ from Fleabag) together with man of the moment Paul Mescal. Bradley Cooper stars in and directs Maestro, about the life of legendary 20th century conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick feature in the Australian Outback thriller The Royal Hotel, reuniting Garner with director Kitty Green after the excellent study of workplace abuse The Assistant.

The film that picked up the greatest buzz over the summer festival circuit is Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo star in this Victorian-set sci-fi adaptation of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. Lanthimos has made a career in staging the unruly clash between imprisoning convention and sexual desire, each time in a more outlandish setting. Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon instead plays its historical re-enactment in a more sombre key, recounting one of the most unremittingly grim episodes in the genocide of the Native American population – with Lily Gladstone and <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/how-david-attenborough-is-getting-planet-earth-wrong">Leonardo DiCaprio</a> playing the leads. Intersecting with the discovery of oil in Oklahoma and the beginnings of the FBI, the story is a reminder of the brutality underlying capitalism, racism and state force.

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The-kitchen-kano-kaluuya

Two British productions provide the opening and closing night galas, neatly representing two contrasting views of the nation. The first is Saltburn, a tale of privilege and desire in Oxford University with an ensemble cast that includes Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant. The second is The Kitchen, the directorial debut of actor Daniel Kaluuya. Set on an estate in 2040, the film is a near-future critique of gentrification and its effect on working class family and community.
You may have noticed that both The Kitchen and Poor Things use sci-fi to insert flights of creative imagination in the otherwise more imprisoning genres of, respectively, social realism and costume drama. This seems in fact to constitute a new trend. Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal are taken into space in the relationship drama Foe, while the 80s-set coming of age story Croma Kid promises to be ‘the <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=croma-kid-lff23">only Dominican-set scifi</a> you will see this year’ according to the BFI’s programme. Add to this the romance Fingernail and the character study Sky Peals and sci-fi is now boldly going into genres where it had rarely gone before. While the sci-fi boom of the 50s came at a time of the space race and the atom bomb, this intimate, lower-budget sci-fi is perhaps more appropriate to a time when technological change has more lowly ambitions than the post-war attempt to conquer the universe.
Before we go, we would like to draw your attention some films that are unlikely to make it to the multiplex – but will be well worth your time to seek out. Cobweb is a 70s-set thriller comedy amid the South Korean film industry. Housekeeping for Beginners provides a queer perspective on status and sexuality in what is the latest entry from the small but impressive Macedonian film industry. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, director of the slow, beautiful Drive My Car, takes a poetic look at community and the environment in Evil Does Not Exist. Europa promises a thrilling critique of neoliberal capital and rural landscapes by Austrian-Iranian director Sudabeh Mortezai. Starve Acre is a return for Daniel Kokotajlo after his impressive debut Apostasy. While Apostasy examined the cult mindset of a Jehovah’s Witness, Starve Acre sees him move more firmly into folk horror, a genre which is now everywhere, offering as it does the chance to expose the unsettling weirdness underlying the everyday habits we take for granted.
See <a href="https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526164926/folk-horror-on-film/">new book</a>, Folk horror on film: Return of the British repressed, edited by Kevin J. Donnelly and Louis Bayman, out this October. The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">4 to 15 October 2023</a>.
<pre>Featured photo: Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)</pre>

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Our film editor Louis Bayman previews the 67th BFI London Film Festival. Here’s what to look out for.

Social realism meets sci-fi at the BFI London Film Festival 2023

If we were to sum up the main gala presentations at the festival in a word, it would be: mixed. Sam Mendes’ 1980s-set Empire of Light offers some touching moments. But its shifts from comedy to more serious political and emotional subject matter don’t really come off as all that convincing, leaving this a pleasant but insubstantial experience. Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry make Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway a watchable character study. An army vet finds difficulty overcoming her injuries – both physical and emotional – but, rather like its central character, this film struggles to really go anywhere beyond its opening premise. The Wonder, which sees Florence Pugh’s English nurse called to a rural town in 1860s Ireland to attest to the miracle of a girl who apparently survives without eating, has moments of psychological thriller, religious commentary and folk horror that were a bit too sporadic for us to really enjoy. We were surprised that Corsage won the Official Competition for the Best Film of the festival. Last year’s winner, the Iranian comedy-drama Hit the Road, was a classic for the ages, whereas Corsage’s intriguing aspects make it worth a watch but don’t really merit the highest accolade of the festival.
A number of international auteurs polarised critical opinion at the festival. Alejandro Iñárriu’s <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/venice-international-film-festival-2022-competition-u-turns-and-talent-packed-surprises">Bardo</a> was either visionary self-referentiality or bloated self-indulgence. Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave had some audience members falling asleep and others praising a return to the crime-story verve of Oldboy and sexual tension of The Handmaiden. Both Florian Zeller’s The Son and Darren Aronofsky’s The Wale were praised, respectively, as touching portrayals of mental illness and eating disorders, while also receiving criticism for being mawkish exploitation. Noah Baumbach either succeeded in filming Don DeLillo’s ‘unfilmable’ postmodernist novel White Noise or produced an incoherent mess.
So here we get to the good news: our critics’ picks of the festival. Unlike the films already mentioned which divided opinion, we have decided to make our picks the unambiguous winners of their own custom-made categories, all the better to guide you through this autumn’s upcoming cinema releases. – LB

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Aftersun Charlotte Wells Film 2022

<h5>Best female feature debut</h5>
The year 2022 will easily go down as a vintage year for debuts by women filmmakers at the festival. From Australia, there was artist Del Kathryn Barton’s Blaze, a visually sublime and audaciously crafted portrayal of a young suburban girl (Julie Savage) who retreats into a fantasy world constructed in her bedroom after witnessing a horrific act of sexual violence. This was a fascinating yet riveting watch from a neurodivergent stance. From the crowded American indie market rose Liquor Store Dreams, a personal documentary from So Yun Um that uses her father’s business as a springboard to explore generational family gaps, historical Asian stereotypes in pop culture and racial tension between Korean-American and Black-American communities – a sweet sincere film from a distinctively fresh voice. Meanwhile, on UK shores, Georgia Oakley’s low-key drama Blue Jean (nominated for Best First Feature Award at the festival) is a quietly searing look at the plight of the queer community in Thatcherite Britain when a woman’s dual life from PE teacher by day to frequenter at a local lesbian bar by night comes under threat.
But amid this rich selection, nothing came close to topping one of the festival’s most sought-after entrees, Aftersun. Hot off the heels from critical acclaim in Cannes and Edinburgh, Charlotte Wells’ debut arrived with huge anticipation amongst critics and public audiences alike, especially with involvement of rising star Paul Mescal from Normal People playing a divorced father who takes his young daughter (newcomer Frankie Corio in a breakout role) on holiday in Turkey. But within this deceptively simple premise evoking summery nostalgia in its ‘90s setting (particularly in its subtle music choices taken from bands like The Lightning Seeds and Catatonia) is an autumnal reflection on childhood memories, how they get framed in our subconscious or become relics on camcorders, and how the naïve innocence of childhood our own parents’ struggles. And it is the achingly sad afterthought at the end of these long reflections which Wells sharply articulates through subtle visual suggestions and carefully crafted performances from Corio and Mescal, where the film finds a devastating emotional tug. Not just an impressively confident opening statement from Wells, but one of the finest films to be released this year and we urge you to seek it out when it hits UK screens in November. – TS

<h5>Best blockbusting entertainment</h5>
We were asked to give away none of the many spoilers to this sequel to whodunnit <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/revolutionary-time-our-critics-picks-for-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2022">Knives Out</a>. So let’s just say that it joins the exclusive ranks of a sequel that actually improves on the original film. Knives Out was best when its ensemble cast bounced off each other to showcase the devious stupidity of the idle rich. Such moments are extended here to cover the entire runtime of the film, making this the best-orchestrated, paciest, most note-perfect film you’re likely to see all year. – LB
<h5>Most bittersweet feelgood film</h5>
Just as a sequel will nearly always fail to live up to the original, one of the key rules of filmmaking is that only fools remake a classic. We therefore didn’t go into Living with especially high expectations. The original film, 1952’s Ikiru, is acclaimed director Akira Kurosawa at his bitter, philosophical finest, with a story about a lowly clerk who finds out he only has a few months left to live. The remake is not better than Kurosawa’s original, but its retro evocation of the final actions of a 1950s bureaucrat, played by Bill Nighy, has more than enough heart to make it well worth your time. The setting displays the manners and understatement of a lost world of regulation, hierarchy and colourless administration. However, the film’s nostalgic longing is for the possibility that this same world of constraint might also contain the values of mutual assistance that really make life worth living. – LB
<h5>Best extended display of evil</h5>
The festival continued Netflix’s reputation for dramatic adaptations of true crime stories, with two films that are already available to watch on the platform at the time of writing. Joel Edgerton stars in The Stranger, about the undercover operation that captured a child murderer. Meanwhile, Jessica Chastain discovers the gruesome truth about Eddie Redmayne’s treatment of vulnerable patients in <a href="https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81260083">The Good Nurse</a>. These are grim stories taken from real life told with sombre thoughtfulness. If you want to revel in the pure wicked fun of evil then try instead to see L’origine Du Mal, a French thriller in the mould of the suspense dramas of Claude Chabrol. A worker from an anchovy-packing plant arrives at a luxurious family mansion claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of its commanding, but ailing, patriarch. The question is not so much whether she has secrets to hide, but which family member’s wicked secrets will ultimately triumph in this domestic battle of mutual self-interest. – LB

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<h5>Tommy Wiseau tribute act award</h5>
And then there was My Policeman, an adaptation of Bethan Roberts’s novel about a policeman called Tom in a friendship triangle involving two conflicting relationships: one is a closeted sexual relationship with art curator Patrick (David Dawson) and the other is his own marriage to schoolteacher Marion (Emma Corrin from The Crown). It has the middle-class comfortability of an early-2000s TV Soap drama destined for repeat on ITV3 but, most intriguingly, features a leading performance from current music sensation Harry Styles as Tom in his second film outing of 2022. I think Styles has the potential of becoming a fine actor in the future which is evident in his brief impactful appearance in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and even in Don’t Worry Darling as Florence Pugh’s picture-perfect husband. But his performance in My Policeman is the result of shoving a very inexperienced actor into a lead role requiring complexity that takes years of work to achieve, and the acting deficiencies are accentuated by a terrible screenplay and inert directing. One-note lines like “I think you have a dirty mind” are delivered with such emotional bluntness, plates are thrown across dinner tables in child-like tantrums, and orgasms are confusingly expressed; to say there was inappropriate laughter during the screening is an understatement. – TS
<h5>Most batshit crazy film</h5>
This year’s festival served up some enchanting animated films. From <a href="https://www.cartoonsaloon.ie/">Cartoon Saloon’s</a> latest tale, My Father’s Dragon, set on a sinking island with adorable animal designs that effectively harness the studio’s trademark 2D animation, to a more robust auteur offer in Guillermo Del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Pinocchio, which uses gorgeous stop-motion set against the backdrop of 1930s fascist Italy. But none of these are as batshit crazy and idiosyncratic than Spanish-French anti-war animation Unicorn Wars, about an army of religiously bigoted teddy bears raging a bloody war against environmentally friendly unicorns who reside in the magic forest. It is quite literally a fever dream hybrid of Care Bears meets Apocalypse Now as it delves into areas of phantasmagorical grotesque, even though its allegorical rhetoric is well-worn (for one, all the bears are male while all the unicorns are female). To put it simply, if a teddy bear priest throwing a grenade with a pink love heart on it into a bunch of charging unicorns sounds like a perfect night at the movies then be our guest. – TS
The <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">BFI London Film Festival</a> took place 5 to 16 October 2022. Select films mentioned in this review are now available to see at the cinema or on Netflix.
LB – Louis Bayman 
TS – Theo Smith
<pre>Featured Photo: My Policeman (Michael Grandage)</pre>

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Louis Bayman and Theo Smith offer a glimpse of the films that will be jostling for position come awards season, as well as a chance to find out about the films that won’t appear elsewhere on British screens.

Films of the season: The Platform’s special categories following the BFI London Film Festival 2022

Over the last few years, the <a href="https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2022">Venice International Film Festival</a> has established itself as the launchpad for films which aspire to win an Oscar. This year, the presence of the major US film companies at the Lido seems to have also had a trickle effect: the quality of the line-up for the main competition was consistently high and the minor sections of the programme offered plenty of pleasant surprises. In the last few years, Venice has benefited from a more relaxed stance towards Netflix productions – at least, compared to Cannes. In 2018, this approach was crucial for securing the premiere of Roma, which then went to win the Academy Award for best film. This year, the streaming giant was behind several of the films selected in the main competition including Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde and Alejandro Iñarritu’s Bardo.
In the past, Venice has had some troubles with gender representation. In 2018, while at the Berlinale almost half of the selections were films made by women, Venice had only one film directed by a woman in the main competition (Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale). On that occasion, following much criticism within the industry, the response of the festival director, Alberto Barbera, appeared inadequate. “We look at the quality not at the gender [of the directors]”, he claimed. Ever since that incident, Barbera and his programming team seem to have learned their lesson. This year, incidentally, the two top prizes went to two films made by female filmmakers. The Golden Lion was awarded to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a documentary on legendary photographer Nan Goldin’s career and her fight against the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharmaceutical, whose shameless promotion of the highly addictive drug OxiContin has been deemed responsible for the worst opioid epidemic in US history.
The Silver Lion went to Saint Omer, the first feature film directed by documentarist Alice Diop. Inspired by the real-life case of a French-Senegalese woman who killed her baby in 2016, Saint Omer was one of the bravest, most uncompromising films seen this year at Venice. A writer, Rama (played by Kayije Kegame), has come to observe the trial of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a young African woman who is accused of drowning her one-year-old baby in the sea. Laurence has pleaded guilty. Like almost everyone in the court room, she seems bewildered by what she has done.

The central dilemma that the film explores is why this young woman has committed such a horrific act. Much of the emotional sway of this film comes from the protracted long-takes of Laurence during the trial, which exalt the outstanding performance of Malanda. The conflict between, on one hand, the horror that the monstrous act of this Medea-like figure may generate in us and, on the other hand, our fascination with this highly educated, eloquent philosophy graduate, turns the trial into a compelling prism refracting questions about motherhood and issues around race, postcoloniality and class. As the film explicitly reminds us, a young black woman in 21st century France is not supposed to sound the way Laurence speaks. Interestingly, this defamiliarising narrative device, ingeniously exploiting a collective racist mindset, is precisely the trick that draws us in to listen and pay attention to what this woman is saying, as she tries to make sense of what she has done.
One of the most exquisite findings at Venice for me was Without Her, the debut film by Iranian director Arian Vazirdaftari. Partly psychological thriller and partly absurdist drama, this is a film that challenges our expectations about what an Iranian film reaching the international film market is supposed to look like. There is no apparent gesture toward social realism here. Gifted with a captivating soundtrack that accompanies the maddening journey of its female protagonist, Without Her is a film about an identity crisis that evokes George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944). The protagonist of the film is Roya (Tannaz Tabatabei), a young woman living in Tehran who is getting ready to move to Denmark with her husband. One evening, she finds a young, distressed woman (Shadi Karamroudi) outside her building. Roya takes her in. The nameless girl becomes increasingly attached to Roya and her husband. Gradually she starts behaving like Roya, who becomes more and more invisible to her husband and to the people around her. Informed by the experiences of several Iranian women who tried to emigrate, the film also adds an extra dimension to current discussions inspired by the ongoing protests for women’s rights in Iran. Without Her may perhaps suggest the distinctive identity crisis of Iranian women facing a new life in the West, with the radical changes that such an experience entails. In another sense, the film is a mesmerising journey through the mind of a woman who feels that the world around her has gone mad and sees no way out.

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Amanda was the debut feature film for the hugely talented Carolina Cavalli, delighting the Venice audience with one of the wittiest films shown at the festival. Amanda succeeds in that very rare balancing act between being a quirky, elegant film with a very personal cinematic language and one that is undeniably funny, despite its dark undertones. The homonymous protagonist of the title is a jobless – and friendless – twenty-something played by Benedetta Porcaroli, who, after her debut in the Netflix series Baby, here reaches a level of maturity that gives much hope about her acting future. Porcaroli brings to life an eccentric character who goes on a mission to make an agoraphobic girl her new best friend. Despite her fanatical resolve, Amanda fails miserably. It is this obsessive aspect of Amanda’s personality that makes this character both hugely funny and, as the story develops, movingly vulnerable. Is this the story of a young woman on the spectrum? It does not matter, because through Amanda, Cavalli ends up celebrating a kind of difference that, divested of any judgment, strikes for its warm-hearted imaginative power.
Historically, one of the prerogatives of top film festivals such as Venice has been to support and promote the rise of emerging auteurs, those filmmakers eventually developing a loyal relation to the festival that has launched them. The most recent ‘adoptive’ child of Venice has been Luca Guadagnino, who came back this year with Bones and All and won the award for best director.
It is hard at this stage to anticipate which emerging filmmaker will be the next to receive the Venice stamp of approval, but the young directing talents that we have seen this year at the Lido may indicate that perhaps something is moving.
The <a href="https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2022">Lido Di Venezia</a> ran from 31st August to 10th September 2022, organised by La Biennale di Venezia. It was the 79th Venice International Film Festival.
<pre>Featured Photo: Saint Omer (Alice Diop)</pre>

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Films to look out for from this year’s Venice International Film Festival, which finds mesmerising talent among a wealth of new female-directed films.

Venice Film Festival 2022: Competition u-turns and talent-packed surprises

Even in the darkened shelter of the cinema theatre, it has been hard these days not to think of the political instability and economic hardship outside of it. So, in this first Platform report from <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">BFI’s London Film Festival of 2022</a>, we try to find out which of the films will offer insight into our present predicaments. The twelve days of the festival start this Wednesday 5th October, so here’s what we made of it, politically speaking.
During an earlier crisis of capitalism, German radical playwright Bertolt Brecht once asked: “What’s robbing a bank, compared to owning one?” The film Emily Is a Criminal (John Patton Ford) seems like a relocation of this question to the modern gig economy. Aubrey Plaza offers a standout performance in this pretty decent combination of social realism and crime drama. She plays Emily, a woman whose job delivering food doesn’t even earn enough to pay off the mounting interest on her debts. Drawn into criminal fraud, her performance expresses an intense nervous vulnerability. Ironically however, organised fraud turns out to offer more opportunity for her entrepreneurial spirit than the legalised theft practised by employers who cancel shifts, offer unpaid internships, and bully the poor hopefuls at job interviews.

As American independent films often do, Emily Is a Criminal aims to show the reality behind the American dream. But to find an alternative vision of living we need to look elsewhere. Unrest (Cyril Schäublin) takes us to the late 19th century in a small watchmaking town in Switzerland, during the visit of Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin. He has come to make a geographical survey of the town, so as to find out how it can be organised not for the purposes of profit, but the needs of the people. At the same time, the town is being restructured by the local authorities according to the dictates of modern bureaucracy. This restructuring centres on regulating no less than four unsynchronised times that the town lives by: church time, train time, factory time and municipal time. Both the factory owners and local officials use the regulation of time as a way of imposing discipline and a mechanised order. In their turn, the workers, enthused by the ideas of revolution, share a vision of organising a collective life together where the labour of each benefits the development of all. 
The film is true to history. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin">Pyotr Kropotkin</a> was a real-life 19th century radical, and it wasn’t until well into the 20th century that the world worked according to a uniform, standard time, nor for that matter that the populace was subdued to the impersonal rhythms of the state and of industry. This is no straight-faced period drama however. The film’s innovative design turns the mechanism of the clock into a metaphor both for the inhuman strictures of capitalist production and the liberating possibilities of a collective re-organisation of life. 
Despite the massive changes in contemporary British society, the British films in the festival don’t seem that engaged with the problems of the present. It seems instead that they find more dramatic opportunity in our recent past. Maybe this is a form of nostalgia, or a way of working out where exactly it all went wrong. We will have a better idea once the big state-of-the-nation gala presentation premieres: Empire of Light, directed by Sam Mendes, his first film since the movie 1917, with <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/remorseless-cathartic-petty-but-just-revenge-films-paving-the-way-to-oscars-2019">Olivia Colman</a> leading an all-star cast. A seaside town is blighted by social decay and with a resurgent far right (who says history repeats itself?!). Meanwhile, the local cinema in the fictional town prepares for the regional premiere of Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson), a patriotic film set in the 1920s that typifies what is known as ‘the heritage film’, the costume dramas set among the nation’s middle and upper classes that were especially popular in the 1980s. I’m not sure whether the film is more This Is England (Shane Meadows) or The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo), but the publicity describes it as a testament to the magic of cinema. Let’s see whether it manages to uphold that claim.

unrest-bfi-lff-2022

The trend for large-scale historical dramas with obvious contemporary relevance is not exclusive to the UK. Another gala performance is Till (Chinonye Chukwu), the story of the brutal killing of 14-year-old African-American <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till">Emmett Till </a>in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Rather than victimhood, the film promises to show the movement that made the tragedy into one of the key moments in the fight for civil rights in America. Meanwhile the ambitious political thriller Argentina, 1985 (Santiago Mitre) recounts the epic legal struggle to gain justice against the country’s deposed military dictatorship. We are also looking forward to 1976, a debut feature directed by Manuela Martelli set during the early years after General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup that overthrew Chile’s left-wing democratic government. My Imaginary Country is the latest film from veteran documentarist <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/the-pearl-button-documenting-the-shadow-of-water-and-tyranny">Patricio Guzmán</a>, an exile from Pinochet who has dedicated his life to exposing the abuses committed by the regime. 
The detective format can be an especially rich way of investigating both a specific violent crime and a broken social system. We’re looking forward to Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi), a film about a serial killer whose attacks on sex workers in the early 2000s in Iran enable a critique of the broader social position of women and the hypocrisy of harshly imposed moral codes. The film is especially timely given the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/03/iranian-students-defy-security-forces-as-anti-regime-protests-continue">protests that are transforming the country</a> since its release. Another film to look out for is Next Sohee (July Jung), a South Korean story about the suicide of a young intern, whose investigation reveals the everyday exploitation and oppression of call centre workers.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson) provides the festival’s closing night gala, by way of ending on a laugh. The sequel to the Hollywood comedy whodunnit Knives Out will offer the spectacle of the greedy rich as they fall about killing each other. Let’s hope it provides some relief to the more familiar story of them killing all the rest of us.
The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">5 to 16 October 2022</a>.
Preview by <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/louis-bayman">Louis Bayman</a> and <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/halima-a-hassan">Halima Hassan</a>. 
<pre>Featured photo: Empire of Light (Sam Mendes) via SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES</pre>

Empire of Light BFI LFF 2022

Louis Bayman and Halima Hassan offer a preview of the BFI London Film Festival of 2022 with real-life history, epic legal battles, and more political explorations.

Revolutionary time: Our critics’ picks for the BFI London Film Festival 2022

In-person screenings and gala events are back at this year’s <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">BFI London Film Festival</a> (6 to 17 October) after last year’s online event. This time, you can watch your festival picks at London’s South Bank and West End cinemas, with a number of viewings expanding across the country. Tickets are on sale now, and The Platform’s Louis Bayman and Halima Hassan are here to tell us what to look out for.
If you’re in the mood for a headliner, there are plenty of star-studded events each year at the festival, and here are four of the big releases we’re looking forward to:
<h5>THE FRENCH DISPATCH 
Dir. Wes Anderson (USA)</h5>
Described as a “star-studded homage to journalism and literary magazines”, The French Dispatch is also the name of a high-brow magazine that’s reached the end of its run. Sharp, weird and aesthetically pleasing is what I’ve come to expect from Wes Anderson – and from the trailer, it looks like this film will deliver. Granted, there are many ways Anderson’s films may not be for everyone, with odd storylines and unrepresentative casts leaving much to desire. But I don&#8217;t need representation all the time and fantasy is fun. – HH
<h5>SPENCER 
Dir. Pablo Larrain (UK / Germany)</h5>
Kristen Stewart stars in this drama about the late Diana Spencer, aka Princess of Wales. Director Pablo Larraìn’s previous films include explorations of Pinochet-era Chile and a recently widowed Jackie Kennedy. That promises to make this a thoughtful and politically astute contribution to the ‘90s nostalgia that has recently been gathering pace. – LB 
<h5>THE HARDER THEY FALL 
Dir. Jeymes Samuel (USA)</h5>
I have found myself enamoured with all things relating to the American West. Stories of outlaws and cowboys, operating in a lawless time so vastly different from our hyper-surveilled present. The Harder They Fall is inspired by the real-life stories of African-American cowboys and features an incredible cast (Idris Elba, Regina King, LaKeith Stanfield). I am expecting something epic and beautiful and satisfying. – HH
<h5>LAST NIGHT IN SOHO 
Dir. Diana Rigg (UK)</h5>
Although it played to a standing ovation by critics at the Venice Film Festival, I don’t quite know what this sci-fi/horror hybrid by Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright will hold in store. But it promises to get its audience high on style and atmosphere with a time-travel plot that travels back to the Soho clubs of London in 1966. The ensemble cast is worth the price of admission alone, starring Anya Taylor-Joy but also showcasing Rita Tushingham, Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg in her last ever role. – LB
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last-night-in-soho

Last-Night-in-Soho

Away from the noise of the red carpet here, are a few personal critics’ choices:
<h5>RED ROCKET 
Dir: Sean Baker (USA)</h5>
Director/Writer Sean Baker’s third feature’s premise is an uncomfortable one but I’m hopeful considering how his debut (Tangerine) and sophomore (The Florida Project) films are some of my favourites. A once successful LA porn star goes back to his old ways and his ex-wife, and finds himself fixated on an underage girl who he decides should join him for his adult movie comeback. I’m curious to see what this film is about. – HH
<h5>IL BUCO 
Dir. Michelangelo Frammartino (Italy / Germany / France)</h5>
This film is in the official competition for an award for best film. While I would think a film about speleology – cave-mapping – is probably a bit too left-field to win, it offers a rhythmic, poetic view from the mountains of southern Italy. Director Michelangelo Frammartino last film, Le quattro volte, was similarly a tale of goat-herding mountain-dwellers that hovered somewhere between documentary and art installation with one single word – ‘grazie’ – in its hour and a half runtime. A bold filmmaker returning with a unique vision. – LB
<h5>ENCOUNTER 
Dir. Michael Pearce (USA / UK)</h5>
Science fiction x Riz Ahmed?! Sign me up. Something strange is afoot and Riz Ahmed’s character, a war-veteran, is in the know and desperate to warn his family of the danger (an impending alien invasion!). – HH
<h5>THE SOUVENIR II 
Dir. Joanna Hogg (UK)</h5>
An autobiographical tale of her own ‘80s art school experiences and a slow, almost plotless reverie on disappointment, Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir wouldn’t really strike us as the typical film to make a franchise out of. The title sounds to me like deliberate provocation from a director whose scrutiny is always on the awkwardness of the deficiencies of the upper-middle classes. Hogg’s attention on the most privileged sections of British society is too narrow a perspective for some viewers, but she always succeeds in wreaking a devastation that is all the more effective for its quietness.  – LB

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THE HARDER THEY FALL

Last but not least, we’ve picked a few titles especially for The Platform’s readers. Here are some of the politically conscious films with a global reach at this year’s London Film Festival:
<h5>THE GRAVEDIGGER’S WIFE 
Dir. Khadar Ayderus Ahmed (Finland / France / Germany)</h5>
This film is directed by Somali filmmaker Khadar Ahmed and stars a Somali cast. It follows Guled, played by Omar Abdi, a gravedigger whose wife falls ill. To raise the money for her treatment, he is forced to leave his ailing wife in the care of their son to seek the help from his community. Filmed in Djibouti, I cannot wait to see this story set in East Africa, with East African leads. I think it’ll be an exciting and important addition to the African film canon. – HH
<h5>A HERO 
Dir. Asghar Farhadi (Iran / France)</h5>
Asghar Farhadi is already well known to international audiences, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2011 with The Separation and then refusing to travel to the ceremony in 2017 for The Salesman in protest against Trump’s Muslim ban. He specialises in family dramas whose moments of acute personal crises still succeed in drawing a broader picture of contemporary Iranian society. This should particularly be the case in his latest film, where a man in debtors’ prison tries to confront his creditor. – LB
<h5>ALL THESE SONS 
Dir. Bing Liu and Joshua Altman (USA)</h5>
All These Sons is a documentary about two Chicago organisations, The Inner City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) and MAAFA, which recruit young Black men to get them off the streets and tackle gun violence. I’m interested in this documentary from a reform and prevention perspective. – HH
<h5>LEAVE NO TRACES 
Dir. Jan P. Matuszyński (France / Poland / Czechia)</h5>
This Polish film is set amid the military dictatorship in 1983 and concerns the killing of a student by security forces. This will be a new discovery for me, as I am not familiar with its cast and crew. However its historical investigation into not just one act of violence, but the whole system that sustains it, has brought comparisons with classic Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda and that’s enough to get me interested! – LB

the_gravediggers_wife_-copy

The_gravediggers_wife_ copy

The BFI London Film Festival takes place <a href="https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp">6 to 17 October 2021</a>. 
HH – Halima A. Hassan 
LB – Louis Bayman

a-hero-farhadi

Louis Bayman and Halima Hassan preview the BFI London Film Festival of 2021 as it returns to cinemas this year.

Our Critics’ Picks for the BFI London Film Festival 2021

We reported <a href="https://www.the-platform.org.uk/2020/10/06/the-platform-preview-to-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2020/">earlier this month</a> that the London Film Festival would be a more intimate affair than usual, much of it at home, with no gala performances and a smaller selection of films.
Of course, the festival did still have its headline acts. Ammonite, its closing finale, was a touching tale of love set in 1840s Lyme Regis (which we will review at greater length soon), with Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan as its leads. It was an effective if conventional choice, like the festival opener, Steve McQueen’s historical recreation Mangrove. Personally, I found McQueen’s other entry to the festival, Lovers Rock, more interesting, although a minor film and a kind of ‘B-side’ to Mangrove. McQueen’s genius is more for establishing a certain setting than in plot and it is put to especially good use in this almost non-narrative film of a Ladbroke Grove house party thrown at some point in the 1980s.
In the absence of an official competition the online audience picked the festival winner, awarding the prize to Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, about a group of schoolteachers who realise that their job is more fun if they drink every day. While there’s no arguing with taste I found this somewhat moralistic film a rather white, male and middle-aged choice compared to the diversity that the festival had put effort into displaying elsewhere.
The clear winner for me of the more crowd-pleasing films was the gorgeous, touching, One Night in Miami. Based on a stage play by first-time director Regina King, it imagines a meeting in a Miami hotel room between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown, as they each contemplate a life changing decision: Clay to join the Muslim Brotherhood and Malcolm to leave it, Cooke to address social change in his music and Brown to depart the NFL to try a career in Hollywood. The decisions are as personal as they are political, and its central question – what does black success mean in a white society – is made to resound with a contemporary relevance despite the retro setting.
However, the festival is a chance to see films which won’t ever get the red carpet treatment. So here’s my list of six of the best to look out for beyond the big releases:

one-night-in-miami

one night in miami

<h5>UNDINE 
Dir. Christian Petzold (Germany/France)</h5>
Undine turns the conventional romance of a random city encounter into an absorbing and ultimately disquieting tale of love and pain. It will be familiar territory for viewers already acquainted with director Christian Petzold and lead actress Paula Beer, but it develops his concern with Europe’s historical scars in a more allegorical direction. Its lead character, Undine, is a guide to the architectural history of Berlin and is named after a water nymph of ancient legend. She becomes a figure who skirts the enigmatic realms of fantasy and disappointment, memory and myth.
<h5>NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN 
Dir. Małgorzata Szumowska, Michael Englert (Poland/Germany)</h5>
Another film that holds a delicate balance between social commentary and fantasy is this film about a Ukranian masseur who accrues a cult following in a wealthy Polish suburb. Born in Pripyat in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, masseur Zhenia seems at first like he might have arrived as part of a moral lesson about migrant labour for the privileged members of the gated community, who simultaneously depend upon and look down on him. But as they fetishise the healing power of his tender strength, the near-wordless presence of this mysterious outsider comes to take on an altogether different, almost magical-realist quality, as the possibly sacred emissary of some cosmic power.
<h5>THE INTRUDER 
Dir. Natalia Meta (Argentina/Mexico)</h5>
This Argentine film takes its enigmas in a creepier direction. Starting out in comic vein as a woman realises that she doesn’t actually like the man she has gone on holiday with, his death soon after their arrival paradoxically makes him someone she can never truly be rid of. Meanwhile, she becomes the subject of the rather insistent attentions of an admirer she meets in the church where she sings, and, in a further inconvenience, her mother randomly decides to move in indefinitely. As a voiceover artist for horror films, this film is also part of a sub-genre of thrillers about a sound recordist, along with Blow Out, The Conversation and Berberian Sound Studio, that explore the eerily disembodied nature of the voice. The intruder of the title could thus be any one of a number of uncomfortably close beings, including her relationship to her own physical self.
<h5>A COMMON CRIME 
Dir. Francisco Márquez (Argentina)</h5>
This second Argentine thriller is another imaginative recreation of the slow falling apart of the boundaries, and the sanity, of its central female protagonist, but the dissolution here reveals a series of uncomfortable truths about social class. Cecilia is a university lecturer, happily able to quote Althusser and Gramsci on bourgeois ideology. But when her maid’s son knocks on her door, her refusal to help him has fateful consequences. While showing up her conformity to the ultimately brutal logic that it is her day job to critique, this is also the first film I have ever seen that manages to find dramatic material in a dissertation supervision session, and a superb combination of psychological and political insight.
<h5>AFTER LOVE 
Dir. Aleem Khan (UK)</h5>
The success of this deeply moving British drama owes in large part to the central performance of Joana Scanlan, who plays Mary Husain, a resident of Dover whose ferry-captain husband Husain dies unexpectedly in the opening sequence, only for her to find out that he had a secret life just over the border in Calais. The film follows her as she works her way into the household of his secret mistress and son. While such a plot would in less capable hands be barely credible, the quiet brilliance of Scanlan’s performance means that the themes of betrayal, race, death and mourning are played with intelligent subtlety and heart-breaking conviction.
<h5>LIMBO 
Dir. Ben Sharrock (UK)</h5>
It was a good year for British features, as shown by this comedy-drama about refugees seeking asylum in Scotland. What begins as a deadpan, rather absurdist culture-clash comedy turns to an intense portrait of the tragedies of dislocation. The humour’s absurdism is a nice way to show up both the awkwardness of cultural awareness and the bureaucratic cruelty of the exile situation. But it reaches real emotional depth in its second half as it probes the travails of Omar, a gifted young musician and Syrian refugee who must contend with the family he has left behind, the war he has fled and the music he may never play again.

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Limbo Film 2020

<pre>Featured: After Love (Aleem Khan)</pre>

After Love Film 2020 cropped

A Chernobyl-born cult leader, a hypocritical university lecturer, and a Syrian musician turned refugee are some of the memorable characters in our selection from this year’s London Film Festival.

Six of the Best from the BFI London Film Festival, 2020

* Contains mild spoilers
During a period of bleak uncertainty, where life as we know it is transforming into a kind of dystopian horror, Spanish director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia does not seek to offer a comforting hand – but instead holds up a mirror to our society of greed. I am referring to his recent thriller The Platform, added to Netflix at the beginning of March this year, where Gaztelu-Urrutia delivers a sickening commentary on class structure and mankind’s insatiable appetite in this horror feast.
When our lead character, Goreng (Ivan Massagué) wakes up to find himself in a vertical prison of incalculable levels, he is horrified to discover the only form of nourishment is an extravagant banquet, travelling down the tower of two-person cells on a platform. The horror derives from the concept of equal distribution, seemingly non-existent within these concrete walls, as the prisoners on the upper levels indulge leaving the victims of the lower levels to starve. Goreng hopes to change the injustice that permeates the prison, but soon discovers that our selfish instincts are a lot harder to tame than he expected.
Gaztelu-Urrutia’s concept is a disturbing illustration of class structure for the senses and certainly entices audiences to question the morality of such practices. Its premise is, of course, bizarre and barbaric but also incredibly accurate. A fundamental flaw of the universal class system is its entitlement, mirrored perfectly by Gaztelu-Urrutia’s storytelling, as this prison’s occupants do not earn their place at the highest level but are merely placed there. Those at the top behave with hostility and have little respect for those below them, their gluttony draining the food from the platform and their contempt showering the remaining scraps with their own bodily fluids. This metaphor carries a horrifying depiction of a reality steeped in classism and unjust privilege.
Writers David Desola and Pedro Rivero make certain we understand the important messages which echo our current civilisation with their ‘matter of fact’ scriptwriting. The moral of the film is encapsulated entirely in one particular piece of dialogue when Goreng’s fellow inmate Imoguiri (Antonia San Juan) states, “if everybody ate only what they needed, the food would get to the lowest level.” This allegory is about as subtle as a brick through a window, and in fact arrives like a perfect accident, as the film was in development long before the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-food-bank-stockpile-panic-buying-donations-uk-cases-outbreak-a9393201.html">stockpiling</a> and <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-behind-behavior/202003/why-are-we-panic-buying-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic">panic buying</a> that hit the UK in March during the escalation of the coronavirus pandemic, illustrating that the world needs to listen to these lessons now more than ever.
The fact the themes of the film are in plain sight points to cinema’s freedom to address issues that many choose to turn a blind eye to. Although the script could have benefitted from more subtlety in order to encourage moral contemplation, The Platform’s lack of restraint holds our attention and lends itself perfectly to Netflix. Gaztelu-Urrutia uses this film as a soapbox at a time when society is fixed in its traditional class structure. Gaztelu-Urrutia excels in providing a clear and frank visualisation of our own selfishness. The nauseating visuals and stomach-turning sound design are enough to make audiences think twice about stockpiling food, as they will lose their appetite within the first five minutes of the film. This caricature of the survival instinct uncomfortably displays the type of class entitlement we see every day on the news.
The film’s messages aren’t the only thing lacking subtlety in this fever dream thriller. Gaztelu-Urrutia and his crew effectively convey anxiety and dread through a claustrophobic set design and invasive cinematography. One of the most striking attributes is the film’s dramatic lighting changes, where at times we are engulfed in a sea of red, reminiscent of the Italian Giallo horror which seeks to conjure feelings of unease and paranoia through its colour palette. The theme of decay is also made prevalent through other aesthetic choices, the many close-ups of food that feature throughout alluding to abandoned war zones and decomposing landscapes, illustrating the repercussions of our own self-interest. Even shots of life are muted with a dull hue, as a close-up of Goreng’s eye at the very beginning of the film hints at a loss of spirit in its lack of colour and depth. The Platform’s attention to detail achieves multiple atmospheres and spaces while being restricted to the same four walls. The cast, particularly Massagué and Zorion Eguileor, seem anything but trapped, as their performances are powerful and their chemistry palpable.
Without giving too much away, The Platform’s conclusion probably asks more questions than it answers. Although it gives audiences the freedom of interpretation it also seems a lacklustre ending to an intense narrative. No one could accuse the ending of being predictable, but it is not fully satisfying and left me feeling hungry for more. It seems Gaztelu-Urrutia sends a message that is not quite as bleak, hinting at a chance of redemption for humanity and providing a portal to a less hostile and selfish world, if only its citizens can find the key to unlock it.
The Platform perfectly utilises sensory horror and explicit gore to communicate its all too relevant messages. It projects an ugly side of humanity, leaving it to rot on screen, until it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. This is until the film’s conclusion where audiences are given the freedom to write their own ending. At such a desperate point in history, we need to see this film as a turning point for our attitudes towards class, privilege and entitlement, and remedy the problems they cause through mutual kindness and respect for one another, regardless of the level we find ourselves on.
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<pre>Photo Credit: The Platform film / Netflix</pre>

The Platform Film

Netflix horror &#8216;The Platform&#8217; directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia shows us the ugly face of class and capitalism.

The Platform Film: A Feast of Greed and Privilege

Expectations were high for the 70th edition of the Berlinale. This year’s anniversary edition coincided with the much-awaited debut of the new festival director duo Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian. The Berlinale was never a glamorous red carpet-oriented film festival. Yet, this year’s edition felt even more sombre than usual. There were no big Netflix productions. Though, contrary to what happened at Cannes in the last couple of years, this did not seem like a political decision. There were also hardly any big Hollywood stars or directors. Some losses come with gains, however: the level of the main competition line-up was consistently higher than in the last few years and included the kinds of gems one would expect from the curatorial talent of Chatran, who has gained the respect of the film festival community during his much-acclaimed seven-year stint as the artistic director of the <a href="https://www.the-platform.org.uk/tag/locarno/">Locarno Film Festival</a>.
One of the most remarkable films shown at this year’s Berlinale was <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11697690/">The Woman Who Ran</a>, a beautifully unassuming film by Korean director Hong Sang-Soo. Over the course of three days, a young woman called Gambhee visits three old female acquaintances. The women have not seen each other for a while. Gambhee compliments them on the furniture of the houses they have bought; they talk about the weather and their everyday routines. There is something deeper behind these deceptively simple, almost banal exchanges. “How can he be sincere, if he only repeats himself,” asks Gambhee about her friend’s novelist husband, who always says the same things in his frequent TV appearances.
The Woman Who Ran celebrates the value of unhurried, subdued exchanges between people who try to do their best to be kind to each other. These people are women and this seems to matter. All the encounters are interrupted by men who turn out to be quite unpleasant. One of them knocks on the door of the first house that Gambhee visits to complain about the stray cats that the women feed, explaining that his wife is scared of cats and that they should stop. The exchange is extremely courteous and yet the women stand their ground, asserting that cats are not less important than human beings and that they need food too, to the disbelief of the man who thinks humans should come first. The Woman Who Ran contains one of the best cat scenes in the history of cinema, but I will not say more so as not to spoil the fun! “I never start from any kind of generalisation about topics,” said Hong Sang-Soon during the post-screening press conference. It is a comment that might explain why this film seems so interested in the truths that lie in the small, unspectacular moments of our lives. This is not really a cinema of endurance, but a kind of cinema which is inviting us not to look for fireworks, because the fun – and the substance – may be just there, in the everyday scenarios that most of us already live.
A big favourite for the Golden Bear, Kelly Reichardt’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9231040/">First Cow</a> was unfairly snubbed at the awards ceremony. It is a real shame because this was the kind of film that, for its gentleness and modesty, would have been a very fitting winner of this year’s edition of the Berlinale. First Cow could be jokingly summarised as a film about two men in the Old West living together under the same roof, making scones. Cookie is a shy young man from Maryland, while King Lu is a savvy business-minded labourer from China who has travelled the world before reaching the Oregon Trail to seek his fortune. The two men team up to share a shack in a remote settlement. The outpost is sparsely populated by brutish rogues and a pretentious English man who acts as the colony’s chief. Cookie and King Lu are the kinds of men that the cinema of the old American frontier has rarely shown us. They are gentle and reserved men, a far cry from the kind of aggressive pioneer masculinity that we have come to know through cinema history. One of the most exquisite pleasures of this film comes from the candle-lit night scenes inside the shack, Cookie and King Lu quietly busy with their domestic chores and occasionally exchanging a few words like a couple of married pensioners. They could be lovers but there is no evidence of any romantic feelings between them, only kindness and mutually supportive comradeship. It feels as though, with this film, Reichardt wants to rewrite a foundational American story, inviting us to imagine an alternative genealogy of US masculinity, one based on cooperation and resourcefulness, rather than aggressive individualism and competitiveness
For me, the third and final highlight of this year’s Berlinale was <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8478554/">Hidden Away</a>, Giorgio Diritti’s magnificent biopic on Italian artist Antonio Ligabue. The narrative arc of the film is fairly conventional. It follows Ligabue’s life from his childhood in native Switzerland, where he was put into confinement due to his mental illness, to his mature years in northern Italy. An untrained sculptor and painter, Ligabue became one of the most influential Italian artists of the 20th century. Boasting an extraordinary performance by Elio Giordano in the role of Ligabue, Hidden Away does more than simply celebrate the genius of a great artist. The film makes viewers embrace the perspective of someone who was mistreated all his life for being different, even in the face of the great admiration that his work inspired. Firmly aligned with Ligabue’s subjective experience of the world, Hidden Away attempts to articulate his unframed perspective. Signalled by frequent subjective shots conveying a blurred peripheral vision, this perspective seems to express optically the special connectedness to the world that this artist developed through his art. It is a type of connectedness which at times strikes one as primitive and unhinged, and other times appears surprisingly full of wisdom and tenderness. Giordano’s highly physical performance combines feral abruptness and child-like vulnerability. Giordano is truly magnificent at embodying the loneliness and anguish experienced by Ligabue throughout this life. Yet, this is far from a tragic story. Hidden Away is a film about an irrepressible man who has fought all his life to assert his humanity and different way of being in the world against the bigotry surrounding him.
The Golden Bear for Best Film went to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11697844/">There is No Evil</a> (Mohammad Rasoulof). The full list of awards can be viewed <a href="https://www.berlinale.de/en/festival/awards-and-juries/international-juy.html">here</a>.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Allyson Riggs via A24 Films (First Cow)</pre>

FIRST COW

With new festival curators, this year’s Berlinale showcased new and underrated film talent. Enjoy three selections below.

Berlin Film Festival 2020: Redefining Masculinity and Masterminds

The Korean Film Festival of 2019 marks 100 years since the first Korean film was made, with special guests including a number of eminent Korean filmmakers. To observe this milestone, the festival will specifically focus on classic cinema from across the century. Other strands include Cinema Now, Women&#8217;s Voices and Documentary. We asked a group of Korean cinema scholars from Southampton University to give us their highlights, old and new.
The Korean Film Festival 2019 will take place in various London cinemas from <a href="http://koreanfilm.co.uk/">1 to 14 November</a>, and will then tour cinemas throughout the UK from 18 to 24 November.
<h5>The Seashore Village 
Dir: Kim Soo-Yong (1965)</h5>
Review by Hee-Young Chung
Hae-Soon prays for her husband’s safe return from fishing but, despite this, he drowns. After the funeral, her neighbour Sang-Soo makes advances on her. The young widow rejects him at first but soon accepts his proposal of remarriage. However, Hae-Soon is widowed once more as her new partner falls to his death in the mountains. She returns to the seaside village where her previous neighbours welcome her back.
Reversals of fortune are pivotal to the narrative of The Seashore Village (1965) directed by Soo-Yong Kim, a classic of South Korean cinema and an example of its tendency towards literary adaptation. An even more significant element in this film is its emphasis on depicting the space of the seaside village. Hae-Soon’s interest in and longing for seaside life has nothing to do with the loss of her partners. Her name Hae-Soon can be seen to imply her return to the seaside since one of the meanings of ‘Hae’ in Korean is ‘sea’. The village embraces her again as the sea remains an eternal presence. The seaside village constitutes not only the background of the narrative but also foregrounds the thematic spatiality of ordinary people’s lives.
Part of the festival’s Special Focus: a century of Korean cinema.

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Korean Film Festival - Seashore

<h5>Youngju 
Dir: Cha Sung-duk (2018)</h5>
Review by Jia Kang
Female director Cha Sung-duk’s debut feature Youngju (2018) is about a 19-year-old girl, Youngju, who takes care of her troublesome younger brother after their parents die in a traffic accident. Yongju is played by Kim Hyang-gi, previously a child actress and star of the Korean fantasy blockbusters, Along with the Golds (2017, 2018).
Revenge is common in Korean films, but Cha directs this film unconventionally. Five years after the accident, Youngju’s younger brother Youngin (Tang Jun-sang) takes part in a robbery and is arrested. She gets the money for his fine from the couple who were responsible for her parents’ death. Youngju decides to stop her vendetta against them, but the film takes an unexpected and tragic turn when a shocking revelation about her real relationship to them occurs.
The film uses the journey of Youngju to save her younger brother to highlight the many difficulties for the younger generation of women living in South Korean society. These include poverty, unemployment, social problems and family breakdown. The depressing narrative presents a continuing dilemma that might leave little space for viewers to breathe, but it is the way in which Cha designs this into a fantasy told from a female perspective that represents the film’s main achievement.
Part of the Women’s Voices strand.

<h5>Grass 
Dir: Hong Sangsoo (2017)</h5>
Review by Thomas Humpal
Areum, a sensitive yet distanced writer (Berlin 2017’s Best Actress winner, Kim Minhee), eavesdrops on a series of intertwining conversations and characters revolving around an alleyway coffee house in Seoul. Those familiar with Hong’s naturalistic style and gift for understated plot will not be disappointed in this black-and-white short about the fine line between observation and participation in the sorrow, inspiration and comfort of human connection.
Imposing her observational commentary into each dialogue, the beauty and clarity of her writing, as well as the gradually closing distance to her subjects, this series of repetitions and coincidences illustrate the connections that give us comfort despite the hardships of life.
Among the vignettes: a younger couple (Gong Minjeung and Ahn Jaehong) reconnect after the death of a friend, an older pair (Ki Joobong and Seo Younghwa) discuss winding down, and two writers (Jung Jinyoung and Kim Saebyuk) talk about collaborating. Pretence, pain, and soju (a Korean alcohol) are shared in equal measure. In usual Hong fashion, the lives of creatives are dramatised and punctuated with observational subtlety and thoughtful, personal flair. Comparisons to Hong’s other films are inevitable. However, the barebones cinematography and classical soundtrack ring with rare charm.
Part of the Cinema Now strand.

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Korean Film Festival - Night Before the Strike

<h5>The Night Before the Strike 
Dir: Lee Eun, Lee Jae-gu, Chang Younhyun and Chang Dong-hong (1990)</h5>
Review by Thomas Humpal
As a forgotten classic of labour cinema, and a film that was forcefully banned by military riot police on university campuses showing it, The Night Before the Strike is an artefact from a time when cinema was a mobilising force for the people, and it inspired change at a time of dubious democracy in South Korea. Two hundred downtrodden steel workers at Dongsung Metal meet their newest co-worker Joo Wan-ik (for Lim Young-gu) and, during his welcoming dinner, a future is forged by the hands of those who dare organise. Each man has his reason for joining and seeking an existence where workers are more than just “machines that keep breaking down”. In a country built on cheap labour, at a time of democracy movements and student protests, the depictions of greed and insidious behaviour by the company directors and managers galvanised the 300,000 Koreans who watched the film under threat of incarceration.
Pulsating with a gritty and unforgiving rhythm, the film not only depicts the organisation of a steel union and their confrontations with the merciless management structure, but does so with an earnestness that cautions equally both fatalism and expectation. This is, in equal part, independent and industrial cinema.
Part of the Documentary strand.

<h5>Peppermint Candy 
Dir: Lee Chang-dong (1999)</h5>
Review by Jia Kang
Peppermint Candy (1999) is South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong’s second drama. It opened the 1999 Busan International Film Festival and was a commercial and critical success. Starting with the protagonist’s suicide on a railway bridge, the film unfolds in flashbacks to the protagonist Yong-ho’s (played by Sol Kyung-gu) personal life, up to the eve of the Kwangju Massacre. This social movement was a watershed in South Korea’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, and the film shows the national traumas behind socio-political change.
Yong-ho is a middle-aged homeless man who is abandoned by his family. In reverse order over 20 years, we see him as a suave businessman, an agitated policeman, and a young innocent man. Yong-ho is confronted with the question of whether life is beautiful. This also serves as the musings of director Lee regarding that troubled time.
However, life is cruel and painful. Yong-ho’s life is full of betrayal, corruption, financial crisis and social crime – but he is remembered by his first, terminally ill, girlfriend. Like the peppermint candy she gave Yong-ho before, his memory of her is the sweetest and purest thing in his life.
Part of the festival’s Special Focus: a century of Korean cinema.
For the full programme, booking, venues and further information, please see: <a href="http://koreanfilm.co.uk/">http://koreanfilm.co.uk/</a>.

korean-film-festival-peppermint-candy

Korean Film Festival - Peppermint Candy

Hee-Young Chung is a PGR student at the University of Southampton. He’s interested in the representation of breath in South Korean cinema.
Jia Kang is a PhD student at University of Southampton. She is doing research on South Korean art cinema and interested in exploring South Korean art films’ narrative techniques and industrial strategies.
Thomas Humpal is a PhD candidate at the University of Southampton and an assistant professor at Dongseo University’s Im Kwon Taek College of Film and Media Arts in Busan, South Korea.
<pre>Photo Credits: London Korean Film Festival website</pre>

Korean Film Festival &#8211; Youngju

Three scholars preview the London Korean Film Festival for The Platform, which, this year, marks the centenary of the first Korean film made.