In the Name of the Land is the first feature fiction film for Edouard Bergeon, a former photojournalist and documentarian. It has been largely inspired by the life of his own father, a farmer who passed away in 1996, and to whom the film is fittingly dedicated. This is a grim – often bleak –…
How tough a job is teaching and disciplining a bunch of lively, but often disinterested and unmotivated students? The engaging French dramedy School Life (La Vie Scolaire) explores that question. A new vice-principal, Samia Zibra (Zita Hanrot), arrives at a school in economically disadvantaged Saint-Denis. She wants to do all she can to make a…
While a largely enjoyable romp, The Mystery of Henri Pick becomes too convoluted for its own good. Henri Pick made pizzas for a living in France’s Brittany region. No one could have guessed was a gifted author (so much so that he could juxtapose Russian novelist Alexander Pushkin with the last throes of a relationship)?…
A Polish film about a teenage criminal might seem an odd vehicle to explore big questions of morality. But that’s what you get in director Jan Komasa’s extraordinary Corpus Christi. This deceptively simple story turns out to be one of the most inventive and profound films of the (admittedly disrupted) year. The film would almost…
– The Mystery of Henri Pick – Only in cinemas from 29 October 2020 We have 10 double in-season passes thanks to Limelight Distribution. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE Based on David Foenkinos’s 2016 book of the same name, The Mystery of Henri Pick revolves around the film’s enigmatic title character…
Director Egor Abramenko delivers a creepy creature-feature with Sputnik. It starts with two cosmonauts planning to return to Earth, but quickly morphs into something else entirely. It’s 1983. After a Soviet space mission returns into barren Kazakhstan, the support team find one of the intrepid travellers hasn’t make it and the other – the commander…
Are you an Agatha Christie fan? Does nothing get you going quite like a drawing room mystery? If you said yes, then Régis Roinsard’s stylish mystery The Translators (Les traducteurs) will be catnip for you. But Roinsard and his screenwriting collaborators Daniel Presley and Romain Compingt give the genre a modern sheen with a comprehensive…
The ST. ALi Italian Film Festival is back and will screen (hopefully) nationally from 29 September. The flagship event will showcase Italian culture, stories and language in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Byron Bay at reduced capacity and then in Melbourne, when restrictions permit. The festival opens with a new live-action version of the…
The sensitive and affecting film Adam takes a close up look at two women from a poor Casablanca neighbourhood caught in an emotional maelstrom. Abla (Lubna Azabal) is a dour widowed mother who can’t get over the untimely death of her husband. Meanwhile, Samia (Nisrin Erradi) faces the imminent birth of a child alone and…
In the opening scene of Fatima, a scared 10-year-old girl has a vision that would shape the course of her life. That was in 1917, shortly after Portugal had become a Republic and turned anti-clerical. Next, the film cuts to a convent in the city of Coimbra in 1989. That girl, now an ageing nun…
