Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 108 i Little White Lies

Directed by WES ANDERSON Starring BENICIO DEL TORO, MIA THREAPLETON, MICHAEL CERA Released 23 MAY Allow me to propose a theory: The Phoenician Scheme is the third part of what we shall loosely and unofficially refer to as Wes Anderson’s ‘Life of a Filmmaker Trilogy’. 2021’s The French Dispatch was his unabashed ode to the maverick American journos and culture writers of the ’50s and ’60s, yet when taken in the longview it is also a film that is fascinated with the writing process itself, particularly how the human mind sculpts reality with the use of literary and documentary tools. The film is about finding entertainment in the apparently mundane, and Anderson himself could stand in for any of the scribes on show. Then in 2023 we got the meta-cinematic jewel, Asteroid City,…

Directed by BEN RIVERS Starring JAKE WILLIAMS Released 30 MAY In his 2011 film Two Years at Sea, artist/filmmaker Ben Rivers decamped to Scottish wilds with his hand-cranked 16mm camera and hung out with a bearded loner named Jake Williams. The film did little more than capture the everyday minutiae of a man who had chosen to partition himself from urban society and the company of others, yet the resulting film played more like a pastoral post-apocalyptic riff on something like The Omega Man. It’s over a decade later and we’re back in the woods with Jake, still eking out a happy existence in his tumbledown shack and drinking in the pleasures of the rugged and serene landscape The key difference with this new film, Bogancloch, is that there is more interaction with…

Directed by SEAN BYRNE Starring JAI COURTNEY, JOSH HEUSTON, HASSIE HARRISON Released 6 JUNE Near the beginning of Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, Surfers Paradise local Moses (Josh Heuston) asks American free spirit Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) if she likes the aisle or the window seat. It is is his way of getting to know her which immediately teases out the obvious differences between them: he is an aisle person, open and sociable, while she is very much the window type, private and aloof. Still, his gambit pays off, for they are soon sleeping together in the back of her van, parked outside his house that she is not yet willing to enter – and in spite of her vaunted independence, she likes Moses, and is thinking of seeing him again. Unfortunately, though, Zephyr is…

Directed by ANDREAS DRESEN Starring LIV LISA FRIES, JOHANNES HEGEMANN, LISA WAGNER Released 27 JUNE In East Germany, where director Andreas Dresen grew up, Hilde and Hans Coppi were talked about with the kind of reverence normally reserved for saints. Members of a Communist German resistance group known as the Red Orchestra, which was working to aid the Soviet Union against the Nazis, Hilde and Hans were regarded more as symbols of heroism rather than real people who lived and died for their cause. From Hilde, With Love attempts to breathe life into the legend that Dresen was brought up with, but this handsomely crafted biopic is too staid to make a lasting impact. Hilde, played with quiet resilience by Babylon Berlin’s Liv Lisa Fries, is picking strawberries when the Gestapo arrive to…

Directed by HIND MEDDEB Released 27 JUNE There’s a kindness in the ability to forget. I myself constantly try and not remember the childhood streets I walked down a child in Khartoum, of eating fatoor at my grandmother’s home and of the hope that erupted on the back of revolution in Sudan in 2019. The place and its people now live in disarray, among the cruel remnants of a purposeless war. The optimism of that era feels ludicrous in retrospect so better to try and forget the things you once held dearest. Yet that, of course is a privileged position, as unlike I, so much of the Sudanese diaspora could not speak of the horrors enacted by the genocidal militia leader known as Hemedti, and so work like this documentary from Hind…

Directed by KEI PRITSKER, MICHAEL T WORKMAN Released 30 MAY With documentaries exploring very recent events, filmmakers can source all the relevant footage and interviews needed in a short period of time. But conventional wisdom suggests that the longer you spend grappling with your subject, the greater the delivery of your message. That said, the urgency of an ongoing issue can far outweigh the merits of sticking to standard journalistic practices. A faster turnaround was necessary for Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman’s The Encampments, which arrives barely a year after the specific student protests that it covers. The film’s main focus is the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia University’s lawn in April 2024, pressuring the New York City university to divest from companies manufacturing weapons used by Israel that target and…

Directed by FRAN RUBEL KUZUI Starring CARRIE HAMILTON, DIAMOND YUKAI, TAIJI TONOYAMA Third Window OUT NOW Fran Rubel Kuzui directed only two films. The first was Tokyo Pop (1988). The second was the 1992 film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, later adapted into the successful television series. After Buffy took off, Rubel Kuzui moved to Japan, where, with husband Kaz Kuzui, she became a distributor of American movies in Japan. It is fitting, then, that it started for her with Tokyo Pop, a film about an American abroad, the lure of Japan, and cultural differences and international connections. The film starts in New York City, but within a matter of minutes aspiring popstar Wendy (Carrie Hamilton) is in Tokyo, chasing her dreams. So begins a gently funny story wherein Reed flounders…

Since 2017, a dangerous moral panic has been propagating through a prominent anti-trans movement in the UK, with the right-wing media adding fuel to the flames of a concerted political campaign to degrade and humiliate transgender people in public life. Instead of challenging these hateful narratives, the current Labour government has joined in on the hysteria, banning trans youth from accessing gender-affirming healthcare and aligning with a recent Supreme Court ruling strictly defining “woman” on biological terms. While UK domestic policy enforces the erasure of trans people from public life, healthcare and history, the state’s foreign policy materially bolsters the violence of a belligerent settler colonial regime that is intent on the erasure of the Palestinian people and their land. Although it goes without saying that these struggles cannot be…

Directed by DAVID CRONENBERG Starring VINCENT CASSELL, GUY PEARCE, DIANE KRUGER Released 4 JULY It’s become a cliché to say that David Cronenberg’s The Fly remains one of the most heartbreaking films of the 1980s, a film which culminates in an investigative journalist having to put down her scientist boyfriend for being too overzealous with his toys. With his ruminative latest, The Shrouds, Cronenberg once more makes a play for the heartstrings in what must be one of the most nakedly moving and revelatory films within his canon. There is, of course, a lot of ironic levity too, as seen in an opening sequence in which melancholy widowed tech magnate, Karsh (Vincent Cassell, made up to look exactly like the filmmaker), decides to dive into the dating scene once more, organising a lunch…

Directed by JOHN MACLEAN Starring KÔKI TIM ROTH, JACK LOWDEN Released 13 JUNE An entire decade has slipped by since the release of John Maclean’s debut feature, the frisky meta western Slow West, which, if nothing else, presented a savvy operator hankering to get his mitts dirty in the world of genre. His belated return to writing and directing retains a dash of eccentricity and a fondness for folding up and repurposing convention like it were a little origami bird, but this sadly feels a lot more like a rough-edged first film than Slow West did way back when. Drawing on the macho, high-plains sagas of Sergio Leone as well as Akira Kurosawa’s games of psychological chess, Tornado follows a Japanese father-daughter duo trundling down the muddied byways of rural Scotland in the…

Directed by DAISY-MAY HUDSON Starring POSY STERLING, IDIL AHMED, TERRIANN COUSINS Released 13 JUNE The past couple of years have seen an influx of women filmmakers bringing timely, working-class stories to the big screen with lived reverence and fresh talent, from Rocks to Scrapper to Bird. The latest addition to this new social realist niche is Lollipop, a gut-punching debut from writer-director Daisy-May Hudson. The film follows Molly (Posy Sterling), a young mother released from jail but placed in a different prison when she tries to reunite with her children, who are being held in foster care. She finds herself in a hellish Catch-22: she can’t gain custody of her children without a roof over her head, but she can’t get a house via state assistance because her kids don’t live with her.…

Directed by AMALIA ULMAN Starring CHLOË SEVIGNY, ALEX WOLFF, GUILLERMO JACUBOWICZ Released 16 MAY How do you follow up an acclaimed debut? Amalia Ulman’s answer is to commit to satirical absurdism wholeheartedly. Following her 2021 mother-daughter comedy El Planeta, Ulman’s Magic Farm sees the director return to her birthplace of northern Argentina for a farcical tale of a self-absorbed VICE-esque film crew descending on a rural community to profile a local, bunny-ear-wearing musician. However, they soon realise they’re in the wrong country (it didn’t occur to their producer that there’s more than one San Cristobal) and must scramble to amend their catastrophic error. Casting herself as Spanish-speaking Elena, Ulman’s character stands apart from the outsiders as a native speaker. She’s repeatedly caught in the middle, translating for the kindhearted locals and the crew…

Directed by JAMES GRIFFITHS Starring TIM KEY, TOM BASDEN, CAREY MULLIGAN Released 30 MAY “No man is an island,” so goes the poem by John Donne, which was an idea resolutely rejected by Hugh Grant’s dedicated bachelor in the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s About a Boy who stated, “I am an island. I am bloody Ibiza!” It’s a sentiment that may have been embraced by the two main characters in this gentle British bromance written by comic genius Tim Key and Tom Basden who both star as men who are a little lost. It’s directed by James Griffiths and based on a short film from 2007 which has been expanded to include more characters and tenderly composed folk tunes by Adem Ilhan. Key plays Charles, an eccentric millionaire who inhabits a mansion on…

Directed by REBECCA LENKIEWICZ Starring EMMA MACKEY, FIONA SHAW, VICKY KRIEPS Released 4 JULY This icy psychodrama of deep familial discord plays out on the powdery-hot sands of the Spanish coast (although the film was shot in Greece) and sees the astonishing codependence of a mother and daughter come to a violent head. Sofia (Emma Mackey) has a permanent scowl on her face, and it’s easy to see why. She has to tend to her ailing mother, Rose (Fiona Shaw), who has a strange affliction where she is unable to walk, but has no physical issue and, indeed, can occasionally just hop out of her wheelchair. Hoping that a visit to a new-age clinic will get to the bottom of this issue, Rose receives pseudoscientific treatment while Sofia hooks up with Ingrid (Vicky…

Directed by ALEX PROYAS Starring RUFUS SEWELL, KIEFER SUTHERLAND, JENNIFER CONNELLY Arrow Video Released 23 JUNE One year before The Matrix (1999) came Dark City (1998), another turn of the millennium cyberpunk noir about a man waking up in an unfamiliar world and realizing that nothing is quite as it seems. While less commercially successful – Dark City made $27 million at the box office off a budget of $27 million, whereas The Matrix made more than seven times its $63 million budget – Dark City has a formidable cult following, with fans who argue fervently that it is the better film. Yet the comparison with The Matrix is simplistic, and in some ways unflattering. Despite the surface similarities, Dark City is different, somehow both silly due to its heightened acting, daft dialogue,…

Directed by FRANÇOIS GIRARD Starring DON MCKELLAR, COLM FEORE, CARLO ROTA Blu-ray/DVD Released 23 JUNE There are many ways to make a filmic biography, but since the same formulaic approach is generally taken this is something that can be easily forgotten. François Girard’s portrait of the concert pianist Glenn Gould disregards all conventions, taking a totally original approach. Instead of opting for narration, archival material, or interview, the filmmaker unpacks Gould’s life and work via a series of short films, each a few minutes in length and each accompanied by music played by the pianist. These vignettes are presented roughly chronologically, starting with one showing a young Gould showing a preternatural aptitude for playing piano at his family’s peaceful lakeside home. Most see actor Colm Feore playing Gould in narrative episodes that slowly…

Directed by BEATRICE MINGER Released 16 MAY A painterly recollection of pioneering architect Eileen Gray’s struggle for creative autonomy in a bygone art world – dictated by gender politics, romance, and nostalgia. Director Beatrice Minger erects a Durasian world of female endurance and pain against the structural emergence of the Modern Movement. he melodramatic yet true-to-life tale of Eileen Gray’s intentional obfuscation by her Swiss colleague, famed architectural designer Le Corbusier, unfolds within the space of the titular house E.1027, located on the elite coastal playground of the Cote d’Azur. Filmed with remarkable style, these cinematic backdrops serve as a striking stage for quite an unusual method of re-enactment; neither documentary, fiction or theatre, but somehow all at once. Steering away from the recent slew of genre biopics, Minger truly holds her…

Directed by MARIANO LLINÁS Starring PILAR GAMBOA, JULIANA LAFFITTE, MARIANO LLINÁS Released 19 JUNE Argentinian filmmaker Mariano Llinás’s Triptych of Mondongo starts simply enough. In a 70-minute feature titled El Equilibrista, he documents the Argentine artist collective Mondongo’s construction of their ‘Baptistery of Colors,’ a small enclosure lined with coloured plasticine bricks arranged in accordance to the concepts of art theorist Johannes Itten’s ‘The Art of Colour’ and that recalls Gerhard Richter’s stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral. Comprising interviews with collective founders Juliana Lafitte and Manuel Mendanha and footage of them and their group planning and constructing the baptistery, the documentary is a perfectly serviceable look at the working methods of mixed-media artists. At the margins, however, are quirky touches that hint at the director chafing against such a simple assignment.…

Directed by KATELL QUILLÉVÉRÉ Starring ANAÏS DEMOUSTIER, VINCENT LACOSTE, MORGAN BAILEY Released 30 MAY At a funeral, a character reads out the deceased’s favourite poem; it’s a blazing, lonely love poem that articulates the private space where passions light up the night. “For where secrets exist, life also begins,” says the character in a voice strong enough to force back the tears threatening to fall. The life force created by keeping a secret proves to be lightning fuel in Katell Quillévéré’s post-World War Two French family drama that takes the same epic sprawling form as her brilliant 2013 film, Suzanne. A black and white prologue depicts images of women having their heads shaved and swastikas painted on their bodies before the film switches to colour and we meet Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier) and her…

Directed by RÚNAR RÚNARSSON Starring ELÍN HALL, MIKAEL KAABER, KATLA NJÁLSDÓTTIR Released 23 MAY The blurred outline of Una’s head is seen from the back as the sun peeps up from over the horizon. The soft intensity of the morning light is such that her view from a rocky outcrop to the sea in front of her is obscure and hazy. It is sometimes hard to see just a little bit ahead of us, says this new film by Icelandic filmmaker Rúnar Rúnarsson, and Una (Elín Hall) certainly has little idea what the next 24 hours has in store. In that gorgeous opening sequence, she is seen with her boyfriend, Diddi, and theirs is a tender, tactile relationship that doesn’t rely too much on spoken words. They head back to his and then…

Directed by ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI Starring CALEB LANDRY JONES, HARRY MELLING, ROSY MCEWEN Released 18 JULY The residents of a remote hamlet in pre-industrialisation Scotland are suspicious of outsiders in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, and after a barn is set on fire at the film’s outset, their fears seem warranted. Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) looks on with his piercing blue eyes; he’s a man of few words, but nothing escapes his gaze. Walter knows the lands like the back of his hand. Once the direct employee of the benevolent but meek Master Kent (Harry Melling), Walter gave up his comfortable life and his joy comes now from the natural world; in the film’s gorgeous opening sequence, he is seen roaming the wild fields, pausing to gently admire a butterfly upon his hand.…

Directed by AYLIN TEZEL Starring AYLIN TEZEL, CHRIS FULTON, ALEXANDRA DOWLING Released 6 JUNE Someone has been reading a little too much Sally Rooney, and that someone is director/writer and star Aylin Tezel, whose ambitious debut feature, Falling Into Place, plays like a finely-honed piece of Rooney-core for the big screen. Not a criticism, per se, but definitely a signifier of the film’s strident views on love, happenstance, shame, trauma, romantic demons, family demons, professional demons, and any type of demons really. Tezel plays Kira, a speak-as-you-find German living in the UK, who meets cute (twice!) with Chris Fulton’s ultra-sensitive modern guy, Ian, initially while the pair are holidaying on the Isle of Skye, and later back in their normal lives in the urban hellscape of London. Their idyllic first contact is represented…

Directed by WAYNE WANG Starring KWAN-MIN CHENG, CHUNG LAM, LO LIEH Radiance Released 23 JUNE Born in Hong Kong but living in America since he was 17, filmmaker Wayne Wang has had a varied career. From a tasteful tear-jerker of The Joy Luck Club (1993), to the sexually explicit The Center of the World (2001), to rom-com Maid in Manhattan (2002) – no two of his projects are alike. Life Is Cheap… But Toilet Paper Is Expensive (1989), his sixth film, embodies this eclecticism well. A strange, unpredictable, rough-edged film, it really is a genuinely singular work. A mystery film, its loose story is triggered by a MacGuffin in the form of a prop. A nameless figure (played by the documentary filmmaker Spencer Nakasako, sometimes also credited as the film’s co-director) is dispatched…

It would be impossible to walk through the sprawling streets of Lisbon in early May without spotting at least a couple of posters promoting the IndieLisboa film festival. In metro stations, shop windows, on the side of bus stops, buildings and kiosks, the city appears immersed in an infectious love for the movies, which reverberates across each of the festival’s busy venues. Having had the privilege of attending the final few days of IndieLisboa’s 22nd edition, I spent most of my time between two venues: the elegant Cinemateca, a historic institution renowned for its film restoration projects and vast archival collection; and Culturgest, a stylish cultural hub housed in an incredibly striking modernist building. I was keen to be immersed in the versatile universe of this year’s jam-packed programme, from…