Lesbian Space Princess // Ulster Says No: The Year of Disorder – Belfast Film Festival #bff25

From the blurb in the Belfast Film Festival programme, it was clear that Thursday evening’s Australian animation Lesbian Space Princess had a lot of creativity behind it: “Straight White Maliens” kidnapping the ex-girlfriend of a royal princess who sets off on a quest to get her back. The concept of “maliens” is genius.

The witty script throws in a lot of clever dialogue, along with universal observations around sexism and reflections on lesbian experience in relationships. White men complain about once being the “most powerful beings in the universe … but we’ve been forgotten”. Their “chick magnet” did not function as intended. Queer love does not run smooth.

Feature debut writers/directors Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese have deserved utter confidence their material is good enough that it only needs to be said once. (Office Politics, cough.) It’s all very tongue in cheek, so don’t be surprised to find a Royal Pussy living on the “famously hard to find” planet Clitopolis.

Despite being a lesbian whose coming of age has publicly stalled, self doubt-laden Saira (voiced by Shabana Azeez) steps out of her comfort zone to fly off in a Problematic Ship (brought to life with thick sarcasm by Richard Roxburgh) to rescue the much cooler Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel). A former gay-pop idol Willow (Gemma Chua-Tran) lends more than a helping hand.

The animation is psychedelic and contributes to the surreal nature of the film. The stereotypes are well drawn. The original songs (Varghese) are whimsical yet beautiful. Profound commentary is wrapped up in quirky scenes. A tiny penis is (frankly deservedly and comically) harmed in the making of this film.

The small audience in The Avenue Cinema made a lot of noise as we chuckled at the gags. (It was my first visit to the upmarket cinema and I still haven’t got over the table lights staying on, people ordering skinny chips and mushroom pizzas to their seats, and the sound of people chewing throughout the first fifteen minutes of the film.)

When its festival run finally concludes, I’d hope that the riotous and inventive gem Lesbian Space Princess will return to somewhere like the Queen’s Film Theatre sometime next year.

Saturday afternoon saw the screening of Ulster Says No: The Year of Disorder. It’s the product of a partnership between the UTV Archive and Northern Ireland Screen. Director Evan Marshall combed through two years of UTV news reports to craft a 90 minute that charts the build-up and eventual decline of loyalist and unionist protests and unrest in reaction to the London and Dunlin governments signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

It’s the mid-1980s and Dennis Taylor was potting snooker balls while Barry McGuigan was knocking out opponents in the boxing ring. The Sinclair C5 was launched to a sceptical public. The two governments hoped that their agreement would foster an atmosphere where peace could grow. The launch wasn’t met with raised eyebrows, but active protest by loyalists and unionists (and rejection by Sinn Féin who saw it as “the formal recognition of the partition of Ireland”).

Strangely I’m more aware of the Falklands conflict in 1982 than this period of local history, despite growing up in a house where Good Morning Ulster was the soundtrack to breakfast. 

We watch politicians warn that violence is inevitable one night, only to condemn the actions of people they distance themselves from the next morning. A picture builds up of political anger that was channelled into mobilising members of the public out onto the streets. Violence broke out at the edges of every mass rally in Belfast. Unionist politicians blame republicans and the NIO’s “dirty tricks department” for incidents of loyalist violence.

We see the owner of SS Moore inspecting the damage to his Chichester Street premises which was looted for golf balls to throw at the police. (The sports store permanently closed this week.)

There is much talk of “quislings” (enemy collaborators), a term which has fallen out of the political lexicon. Fresh faced politicians who are now veterans are seen at every major event: curly haired Jim Wells, Nigel Dodds, Peter and Iris Robinson, Jim Allister, Sammy Wilson, Jeffrey Donaldson with a terrible bowl haircut. But it’s the twin figures of Ian Paisley and Jim Molyneaux who provide the drum beat of the 18 months of fevered protest. Paisley calls the Secretary of State Tom King a “yellow bellied coward”.

The DUP leader opines that “this is a war … this is no garden party or picnic … This could come to hand-to-hand fighting .. we’re on the verge of a civil war in Northern Ireland” would also call for the “organisation” and “mobilisation” of forces opposed to the Agreement. Later, loyalist leaders would say there would be “no violence in this phase of the protest” but warnings were also given that unionists needed to be “prepared to go to violence” if necessary to stand up to the continued implementation of the Agreement.

Alongside the backdrop of ‘ordinary’ attacks and murder in The Troubles, this new set of politically-motivated unionist events are serious – Keith White was shot in the face with a plastic bullet and died in hospital on 14 April 1986 – but aspects of what unfolds is also pretentious and unserious.

Unionist politicians take over the phone switchboard in Parliament Buildings and barricade themselves in, even intercepting a call from a Cabinet minister to a Belfast colleague. From their vantage point outside the building, the camera crew’s microphone picks up the sound of the internal door being broken down.

John McMichael (Ulster Democratic Party and prominent figure in the UDA) swerves reporters’ questions but indirectly makes clear that violence may be the only option. There is talk of “laying down lives rather than surrender”. The 400-strong border village of Clontibret is invaded on 7 August 1986 and “held” for around half an hour. unarmed Gardaí were beaten up.

Peter Robinson was arrested and eventually fined 17,500 punts. Peter Robinson is also seen among those wearing a red beret in an Ulster Resistance parade in Portadown. The end credits note that guns imported by Ulster Resistance were used in many murders and attacks in subsequent years.

While the politicians are most often seen and heard on screen, UTV journalist Ivan Little’s reporting stands out. His rhetorical flourishes provide a lot of colour and prick the pomposity of some incidents. The hanging of mayoral chains on a barbed wire fence erected at Stormont Castle signifying the “death of democracy” was “somewhat undermined when [they were] retrieved 15 minutes later”.

The footage from the time was captured in a standard definition 4:3 aspect ratio. Stylistically, it’s unfortunate that the captions sometimes ignore those boundaries and extend into the black bars at the side.

Editor Paul McClintock does a fine job in cutting down reports to pick out the most salient points. While journalism is only ever “the first rough draft of history”, these clips from the UTV archive paint a picture of the mood and depth of feeling in late 1985 and throughout 1986. School history and politics teachers will be keen to get access to the snappy reprise of this important period.

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button! 

Underscore // Housejackers – two feature films enhanced by Phil Kieran’s scores – Belfast Film Festival #bff25

Two very different films celebrated their world premieres at Belfast’s Odeon Cinema last night as part of Belfast Film Festival. One thing linked them: banging soundtracks from Phil Kieran.

Underscore is a genre busting feature, an experimental film, part poem, part guided meditation, and part cautionary tale about the state of the Earth. Real and special effects landscapes and creatures are fused together. It’s ages before the back of a man appears on screen, and local audiences will immediately recognise Granda Joe Granda Aodhán (Ian McElhinney) from any angle.

One of the film’s concepts will be familiar to fans of Star Trek: Discovery with its ‘spore drive’ taking advantage of the ‘mycelial network’. In Underscore, Laoise (Jessica Reynolds) must educate her grandfather about the mushroom network that allows fungi talk to each other. The film is a cry for people to better connect themselves with the Earth before it’s too late.

Shots jump from macro to micro. What feel like a solid animated structures morph into other forms and then back again. It’s like weaving through a three-dimensional fractal. One of the most sophisticated scenes comes in the shape of feathery fish. The biggest wow moment comes when the fish dissolve into a pastoral scene shot from above. By that stage of the film, the trancelike music and visuals have worked their magic and you barely notice the transition until it’s happened.

Reading that last paragraph without having seen the film may make it sound like a cinema full of people willing took a particularly vivid trip courtesy of some magic mushrooms. No mushrooms were harmed in the viewing of the film. But coming just a couple of hours after attending a heartbreaking funeral, attending the screening of Underscore did prove to be a calming and therapeutic intervention.

It will be interesting to see where Underscore goes. It would be perfect to watch wearing a virtual reality headset, although you need the big bass subs and surround sound of a proper cinema to do Kieran’s music justice and become absorbed in the mood. It might also work projected onto a curved screen that you could walk into the middle of and become consumed by Glenn Marshall’s visuals and the soundtrack. Watch this space to see how Hugh McGrory’s masterpiece develops.

The second premiere had to be switched to a larger screen to accommodate the strong interest. Housejackers watches the chaos wreaked on a student flat as Jerdy invites himself to stay with his foster brother.

While the flat is populated with some predictable stereotypes, the characters are (mostly) sympathetically written. Shauna is ditzy and has her own line in ukelele electronic music (played by Saorlaoith Brady). Raymond (Finnian Garbutt) works in the local filling station shop and is secretly studying for his GCSE Maths exam. Lucy (Eubha Akilade) is a hard-working and kind-hearted medical student who mostly has Raymond’s back. Bobby (Ryan Dylan) is the unlikeable posh fun-sponge who looks down his nose at Raymond’s less refined background.

Actor John Travers regularly wows audiences on the stage with his brash delivery of one-person theatre shows that are full of energy. He’s perfectly cast as Jerdy, the driving force of the film. Jerdy could start a party in an empty room. But one glare could also kill the mood at any celebration. He’s a tad younger than Raymond, but the pair were fostered around the same time by ‘Nan’. They’re good company for each other but might potentially lead each other astray. They may not be blood relatives, but in the past they were as close as brothers in criminal escapades: Jerdy served time but Raymond escaped and took full advantage of his second chance. Now Jerdy is back and is winding Raymond back into his destructive orbit.

The cast turn in performances that match the intensity of the story arc. Director Rian Lennon and screenwriters David Kline and Brian McGleenon gently demonstrate Raymond’s insecurities to the audience in contrast to Jerdy’s extreme heart-on-sleeve unfiltered personality that bursts into all his scenes. The filling station is the location most steeped in humour, yet also the venue for the most brutal violence.

Housejackers certainly provoked lots of conversations on the way out of the screening. The wider fostering network may well recognise the pressures Nan is under and the issues she raises. Raymond’s innumeracy is very credible. The film doesn’t judge and never makes fun of Gerdy and Raymond’s circumstances. But is the depiction of looked after children in foster care growing up to lead a life of crime accurate even at one end of the spectrum? Those behaviours definitely exist across society, whether living with birth parents or not.

Confidently directed and beautifully filmed and edited, Housejackers is a quality product. Its future journey through distribution, release and marketing will be interesting to follow. My bet is that it’s more suited to a streaming platform than the cinema given its lack of mainstream appeal. Time will tell.

Two very different films that show off the talent and creativity of Northern Ireland cast and crew. And still three days to go in this year’s Belfast Film Festival.

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!

Office Politics // Fior Di Latte – an evening of men behaving badly – Belfast Film Festival #bff25

Tuesday evening at Belfast Film Festival featured a duet of movies all about men behaving badly.

North coast tragi-sex-comedy-part-horror Office Politics was screened in the Belfast Odeon cinema and examines the behaviour of three men who staff a tax return advisory company. Self-obsessed Lawrence (played by Neill Virtue) is ill-mannered towards his exasperated pregnant wife (Jenny Marshall), perennially turns up late, and tells appallingly off-colour jokes. David (Gary McElkerney) is obsessed with getting his long-suffering partner (Joanne O’Neill) to “talk dirty” to him. George (Michael Killen) is quickly described on-screen as a “Walter Mitty” character who claims to have fought in Vietnam (despite being the youngest of the three misogynistic degenerates), takes everything very literally, shows signs of having OCD, and struggles to find the right words to say to the feisty waitress in the local restaurant (Christine Clark) who has the hots for him. All three have a torrid fascination with – though little experience of – anal sex.

The trio leave a wake of disruption and disrespect behind them like an HR cluster bomb. To emphasise his absolute lack of common decency, Lawrence bullies George – eating his cookies and snaffling his milk – while David tries to feed advice to improve his younger colleague’s faltering love life. They’re the kind of men who never grew up and race to the window each morning to see a woman in yoga pants walk by, and refer to a woman with many children potentially from different fathers as “machine gun fanny”.

Aside from the office workers, the director and screenwriter Neill Virtue (who also plays Lawrence) throws a few more ne’er-do-wells into the fray, including one ignoramus who calls the waitress “sugar tits” and rightly gets clobbered around the head. The comedy makes little attempt to be sophisticated. An early dance sequence promises a sense of the surreal that isn’t particularly followed through. The element of horror is entirely down to the recurring actions of George which I won’t spoil. The skillful editing, bouncing between parallel locations and storylines, along with Richard Brown’s playful score lift a number of scenes and provide colour in the midst of simple sets.  

Does Northern Ireland need – or deserve – a sex-mad comedy with puerile humour? I’m not sure, but it’s certainly got one. Despite my misgivings, it certainly compares well to The Unholylands which has been screened daily for weeks in Omniplex and Movie House cinemas. Office Politics is a real labour of love, with a short (probably a better format to contain the three coworkers’ mannerisms) produced before Covid and the feature version finally making it to the big screen in 2025. 

While the men are beyond redemption, the objectified women largely grow in confidence, learn to stand up for themselves, and – by the film’s half way point – begin to take back control and emasculate their doltish partners. A final scene is stolen by a grinning pre-schooler in an attempt to give the film a happy ending. Burying the three office workers up to their heads in the sandy beach at high tide might have been a more fitting conclusion and would have cemented the horror vibe.

A fifteen minute race across the city got me over to see Charlotte Ercoli’s feature debut Fior Di Latte being screened in the Queen’s Film Theatre. When struggling playwright Mark (Tim Heidecker) loses the inspiring scent of his comfort blanket (a pair of boxer shorts over which perfume was spilt in his suitcase on a trip to Florence, Italy), he desperately tries to recreate the smell and sense of being valued from the holiday. This is complicated by the presence of Francesca (Marta Pozzan), now lodging in his cluttered New York apartment and the subject of his obsession.

A collector of mostly faux (and sometimes unpleasant) cinema memorabilia, Mark’s ability to relate to women is almost as deeply flawed as his ability to live up to his job as a writer. A looming deadline to produce a draft script leaves him in a panic and his writing method is shown to be all madness, The loss of his prized rag sends him on a mission across the city to find precious ingredients for a master perfumer (Kevin Kline) to recreate his preferred scent.

A strong whiff of the aroma triggers hallucinogenic flashbacks to moments when Francesca has been kind or praised Mark. Her on/off attraction towards rude and thankless Mark is troubling, and feels like a type of Stockholm Syndrome. His utterance of “take me as I am or you scram” could equally have been said by some of the men in Office Politics. 

Ercoli has a much larger budget than Virtue, and the attention to detail in her sets gives the scenes a lot of depth that is understandably missing in the north coast movie. Cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis liberal use of wide-angle lenses gives an other-worldly feel to some scenes. The perfumer’s Heath Robinson machine to blend his ingredients adds to the sense of whimsy along with Andy Street’s score. On two occasions – far too few – characters burst into song … reminding viewers that Mark claims to be a lyricist as well as a writer.

Whereas Office Politics’ menfolk are totally objectionable, Ercoli’s Mark is allowed to veer between pathetic and creepy, written quite sympathetically as a man in the middle of a long breakdown. It’s a stronger approach and plays to Heidecker’s considerable comic talent, leaving Fior Di Latte’s audience wondering whether Mark could salvage a decent personality and a career from the mess he has created.

Belfast Film Festival continues until Saturday 8 November.

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!

Lucky Lu – a man reliant on the gig economy comes close to losing everything – Belfast Film Festival #bff25

Less than a month ago, Queen’s Film Theatre screened the superb Souleymane’s Story about a Guinean refugee who works as a food delivery rider in Paris while waiting for the outcome of his protracted asylum claim. Director Boris Lojkine’s tale (cowritten with Delphine Agut) is one of being taken advantage of at every corner, and ends up focussing on the structural problems with the French asylum process and how that drives migrants into a shadow economy where profiles on delivery apps are rented and more than half the takings are withheld. Parts of the lead actor’s own experience of coming to France were written into the script and the success of the film seems linked to Abou Sangaré being invited by the French government to apply – his fourth time of trying – for residency.

Lloyd Lee Choi’s feature debut Lucky Lu covers a lot of similar territory. This time, Lu Jia Cheng has a visa to work in the US. But his original restaurant business failed and he’s been forced to work as a delivery rider to raise the funds to rent an apartment that will allow his wife and daughter to fly from Asia to join him in New York.

Over two days we witness his entire livelihood collapsing like a takeaway falling through the bottom of a thin plastic bag and the food spreading over the pavement, unable to be recovered into something edible. Lu falls onto a catastrophe curve that only goes one direction. While his family are in mid-air, his e-bike is stolen in the first of a series of losses. No bike means no rented profile on the delivery company’s app, no bike deposit, no income stream, no deposit and rent for the new flat, and soon his physical health is joining his poor mental wellbeing in the gutter. Lu’s life seems to have gone beyond a point of no return into a wasteland beyond precarious.

Chang Chen portrays an utterly broken man who doesn’t know how he’ll get through to the end of the day, never mind find a way of surviving the next. He veers between desolation and depression, with a gaunt face reflecting his undereating. “I’ll pay you back soon – I give you my word” won’t pay an apartment deposit in the morning. People let him down, yet he carries the deep shame of having let other people down in the past.

Less than a day after the film begins, his young daughter Yaya (Carabelle Manna Wei) arrives in New York and the film pivots to experience America through her eyes. Out of the mouth of babes comes many home truths. Her finely tuned emotional intelligence senses that father Lu is not well. The pair spend a full day together, tearing across the city almost heroically trying to raise funds that will surely never meet his immediate needs.

The people Lu meets fall into two categories: those who are tough but end up showing him limited amounts of kindness, and those who are just out to rip him off. Sometimes it’s hard to determine which category characters will fall into. And the challenge to Lu is which camp he will fall into as he discovers the easiest way to make money is by stealing bikes and inflicting pain on other people for his own meagre reward. At one point little Yaya offers a way of making some easy cash and it challenges Lu to consider whether to drag her into his dangerous pursuits.

A glimmer of hope – a physical ray of light – is proffered at the film’s conclusion. But it seems like a false promise. Crawling out of one hole will only lead to landing in another pothole a day or two later. Can the presence of his wife and the restoring love of his daughter materially change the family’s luck?

Lucky Lu is an incredible first feature written and directed by Lloyd Lee Choi. It combines well rounded characterisation with some superb acting to go beyond documenting the gig economy’s exploitation of overseas workers to explore to what lengths people under pressure will go to survive.

Another great screening as part of Belfast Film Festival which continues until Saturday 8 November.

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!

It Was Just An Accident // The Secret Agent // A Private Life – Belfast Film Festival #bff25

Over eight hours on Sunday afternoon and evening, the Belfast Film Festival whisked me away to authoritarian regimes in Iran (contemporary) and Brazil (1977), and a psychanalyst failing as an amateur detective in France.

It Was Just An Accident begins with a family on a late-night car journey who ‘meet’ a dog on the dark road. The driver has a distinctive limp, and he’s recognised while asking for help for his broken down car. Before long, there’s a drugged body in the back of a van, along with a bride, her groom, her wedding photographer, another local man, and a shovel.

A group of Iranian dissidents think that they have stumbled upon the man they nicknamed ‘Peg Leg’ who tortured them. His identity takes time to prove. His fate takes even longer to decide.

Part road trip movie, part exploration of the merits of justice and revenge, It Was Just An Accident is often droll, sometimes farcical, at times emotionally wrought, but always measured. In the face of death, there’s also room for new life, a modicum of compassion, and a bribetastic mentality. The drawn-out plot together with the group’s diffidence reflect the moral struggle of sinking to the level of a torturer or retaining the upper hand without getting a satisfactory result.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned multiple times and was banned from making films. He continues to work as a guerilla moviemaker, without permission and using small casts and minimal crew. His take on a society that lives in fear of state authorities is brave and informed. Even without this backstory, It Was Just An Accident is a classy piece of screenwriting, cinematography and filmmaking.

The Secret Agent heads back to the late 1970s and the Brazilian military dictatorship. Former teacher Armando (known by the alias Marcelo for much of the film) is on the run as a political refugee. He takes shelter in an apartment block run by a 77-year-old landlord in the city of Recife. But the safe house doesn’t provide all the protection he needs when a contract is taken out on him and comes under an active threat.

Cut into this sepia tale of living under threat are occasional scenes with modern-day researchers listening to old interviews from the resistance network who are able to piece together Armando’s fate. Watch out for the conjoined cats, and a missing leg which performs some neat karate moves (a distraction story planted in the media rather than the film swerving into magic realism).

While the grindhouse style is a strength, The Secret Agent’s unhurried (ie, monstrous) runtime (over two and a half hours) isn’t quite justified by the on-screen storytelling. Yet Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film still manages to be a vivid insight into a terrible period of Brazil’s history.

Sandwiched between these two stories of corruption and violence was A Private Life. Jodie Foster plays Lilian, an American psychoanalyst in Paris. Not all her clients are happy. One wants a refund for a decade or more of therapy after a simple trip to a cheap hypnotist helped him quit smoking the same day. Another client is dead, presumed to have taken her life. But Lilian wonders if there’s a darker reason for her death. Together with her optometrist ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), she delves into her dead client’s husband’s life and affairs.

As a fan of the MiniDisc format, it’s of particularly note that Lilian archives her client interviews using portable MiniDisc recorders. While Sony stopped selling MD devices in 2013, they only ceased production of blank MiniDiscs in January this year.

A Private Life feels like a rare opportunity to see Foster playing a comedy role, and only her third French-language film. The amateur sleuths aren’t afraid of bin-hoking or larceny. They get embroiled in plenty of false leads. But Lilian and Gabriel’s bonhomie and overthinking approach means that this 103-minute-long film could cheerfully have been extended.

A great Sunday at Belfast Film Festival which runs until Saturday 8 November.

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!

Previewing Belfast Film Festival – some picks from this year’s smorgasbord of cinematic treasures (Thursday 30 October to Saturday 8 November) #BFF25

Belfast Film Festival is 25 years old. This year’s smorgasbord of cinematic treasures will be screened between 30 October and 8 November. Here are some of picks from the gazillion films on offer in the full programme (PDF).

Thursday 30 October

19:00 | Die, My Love | Cineworld | Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star in Lynne Ramsey’s film (co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch and based on Ariana Harwicz’s novel). An intense exploration of a new mum Grace whose depression descends into psychosis as she lives in the solitary Montana countryside.

20:40 | The Love That Remains | Queen’s Film Theatre | As a rule, anything Icelandic merits viewing at Belfast Film Festival. An artist leaves a large-scale sculpture to rust in the Icelandic landscape. Her husband almost lives on a fishing trawler. Land and sea are separated, much like the couple’s union. Hlynur Pálmason directs. Panda, the family dog, won the Palme Dog award at Cannes.

Friday 31 October

19:00 | Aontas | Cineworld | Damian McCann (Doineann) and Sarah Gordon’s new Irish language thriller is a noir heist where three women rob a rural credit union.

Saturday 1 November

20:00 | Undisclosed Mark Cousins Project | Black Box | Flâneurial obdoc What is This Film Called Love (2012) and Here Be Dragons (2013, set in Tirana) are my favourite Mark Cousins’ movies. More recent efforts like But 6 Desires: DH Lawrence & Sardinia and I Am Belfast (being screened on Friday 7 at 18:00 in the Beanbag Cinema at 18:00) fell flat. If you’re willing to sign an NDA, you can catch a screening of a new secret project from cineliterate Cousins ...

Sunday 2 November

10:30, 12:30, 14:30, 16:30 | New Irish Shorts | It’s great to see some familiar faces – and some new names – screening their work in the New Irish Shorts programme, with a shout out for Nick Larkin’s Punt, Conor McCauley’s handpainted animation Behold!, Louise Parker’s Jeggies and Will McConnell’s A Tourist Story.

13:00 | The 1939 Diary of a Belfast Cinema-goer | Black Box Green Room | While I’m totally against the concept of reducing the complex multi-dimensional ways in which a film can be judged to a number of stars out of five, I do keep a spreadsheet throughout the year with actual stars (and a couple of justifying sentences) as a shorthand so I can quickly filter out the best and worst films for Banterflix’s end of year review TV show. I’m not planning to ever make the spreadsheet available. But perhaps the Belfast resident who used their own rating system to log the 325 films they saw in 1939 – no sitting on the sofa watching streaming services at x1.25 speed in those days – didn’t expect their diary to be the focus of a talk by cinema historian Sam Manning. With no name or address on the diary, what clues did the cinematic critic leave.

15:15 | It Was Just An Accident | Queen’s Film Theatre | A family driving home hit a stray dog. Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s film sets a series of dominoes falling as attempts are made to identify the driver. Surreal humour mixed with brutal political oppression. (reviewed)

17:30 | Rosemead | Queen’s Film Theatre | The American dream slips out of Irene’s hands when she is widowed. A window into the rarely portrayed on film Chinese community in Los Angeles. Introduced by Lucy Liu (who plays Irene).

17:45 | A Private Life (Vie Privée) | Queen’s Film Theatre | Jodie Foster stars as a psychiatrist unpicking the threads of the death of a Parisian patient in this French-language psycho drama. (reviewed)

18:30 | Zodiac Killer Project | Black Box | An unidentified serial killer murdered at least five victims in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969. Charlie Shackleton set out to make a documentary about the so-called ‘Zodiac Killer’ for a streaming service. Despite the world being saturated with true crime shows, his proposed streamer doc wasn’t green lit. This film-behind-the-film explores the tropes and conventions of true crime, and sheds some light on the one that got away. Followed by Q&A with Charlie Shackleton. (Which all reminds me of a bum-numbing screening of Zodiac back in 2007.) 

20:40 | The Secret Agent | Queen’s Film Theatre | A university researcher comes under scrutiny from the dictatorial Brazilian regime. Set in the 1970s with many nods to that era’s cinema, a bittersweet historical story rooted in the present. (reviewed)

Monday 3 November

21:00 | Lucky Lu | Queen’s Film Theatre | A New York delivery rider’s only source of income, transport and accommodation are lost on the eve of his family arriving from Taiwan. The great American dream is in tatters in this pressure cooker of a film, a contemporary reimagining of Bicycle Thieves. (reviewed)

Tuesday 4 November

16:00 and 18:30 | NI Independents Mid-length Programme | Odeon | Some longer but not quite feature length local independent cinema, including Olcan McSparron’s Petyr which follows a group of small-time criminals who bugle a heist and learn about betrayal and violence. 

18:30 | Office Politics | Odeon | Neill Virtue’s bawdy North Coast sex comedy about the colliding lives and loves of three office workers. Misunderstandings, mischief and mayhem. (reviewed)

21:00 | Fior Di Latte | Queen’s Film Theatre | Even for an anosmic like me, memories can be tied to smells. A playwright struggling for inspiration returns to the perfumed scent of his most treasured holiday … taking ever more desperate measures to find the smell and fulfil his dreams. Throw in the unrequited love of a flatmate and you have Charlotte Ercoli’s offbeat comedy feature debut. (reviewed)

Wednesday 5 November

18:00 | Underscore | Odeon | Ian McElhinney and Jessica Reynolds star as bewildered relatives on the frontier of a strange new world. A grandfather and granddaughter face up to the end of the world, the end of their environment, as the very fabric of reality mutates into something new. Directed by Hugh McGrory. (reviewed)

20:00 | Housejackers | Odeon | A darkly funny psychological drama about family and identity from the twisted minds behind the Funboys sitcom. Raymond (Finnian Garbutt) and Jerdy (John Travers) deliver magnetic performances as two foster brothers who move in together, upsetting the vibe of a middle-class student house and threatening to explode their rekindled bond. Directed by Rian Lennon. (reviewed)

Thursday 6 November

18:00 | Bulk | Queen’s Film Theatre | Ben Wheatley’s film takes a madcap plunge into the unknown as a Bogart-like protagonist investigates an elusive scientist whose string theory experiments threaten to break down the dimensions of reality. Back-projection, model car chases and cardboard. A freewheeling lo-fi odyssey through the multiverse.

18:45 | Lesbian Space Princess | The Avenue | Animated comedy space adventure with a heartbroken space princess trying to rescue her kidnapped ex-girlfriend from the clutches of the Straight White Maliens. Fast, funny, unserious, with a belting soundtrack. (reviewed)

Saturday 8 November

15:15 | Kontinental ‘25 | Queen’s Film Theatre | A tragic eviction causes a bailiff to see philosophical solace. Dry wit and subtle symbolism from auteur Radu Jude in this ‘side project’ filmed in Cluj on an iPhone that went onto win Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. (Jude’s take on Dracula is being screened on Sunday 2 November.)

16:00 | Ulster Says No – The Year of Disorder | Black Box | Created entirely from UTV archive footage, this documentary follows the year of turmoil that followed the signing of the Ango-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle. “Never! Never! Never! shouted Ian Paisley at a rally outside Belfast City Hall. Clontibret was ‘invaded’. The red bereted Ulster Resistance took up ‘arms’. Relive the moment Northern Ireland almost tipped into the abyss through this archive footage and the UTV news teams. (reviewed)

19:00 | Saipan | Cineworld | The festival closing gala screening returns to Belfast directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (Ordinary Love and Good Vibrations – being screened on Wednesday 5 at 18:45 in The Avenue) whose new film takes a comedic look at the 2002 Japan World Cup falling out between Mick McCarthy (Steve Coogan) and Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke).

20:30 | Sirât | Queen’s Film Theatre | A rave in southern Morocco. A missing woman. Illness. Landmines. Death. The end of the world. Oliver Laxe’s fourth film was fêted at Cannes and won the Jury Prize. A movie whose soundtrack and landscapes suit the big screen. Are you willing to walk the narrow bridge between heaven and hell?

Another gem ...

Running throughout four days of the festival is A Bunch Of Questions With No Answers. A record of questions posed by journalists to the US State Department at press briefings between 3 October 2023 (four days before the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel) and the end of the Biden administration. Endless demands for clarification and accountability were swerved by spokespeople … and edited out of the 23 hour film, which runs in six-hour blocks from 10:00-16:00 on Saturday 1, Tuesday 4 and Wednesday 5 November, and 16:00-21:00 on Thursday 6 in the Beanbag Cinema. Free entry, just drop in. On Saturday 8 November at 14:30 in the Black Box Green Room, a panel of journalists will discuss their response to the film, its wider context, and the large number of deaths of journalists in Gaza during the last two years.

The Other Way Around – a couple’s attempt to celebrate ending well (Belfast Film Festival at Queen’s Film Theatre) #BFF24

Belfast Film Festival certainly had its fair share of surreal and absurd movies this year. The final screening I attended was Spanish director Jonás Trueba’s The Other Way Round.

An actor and a director have decided to part company after 14 years together. The decision is amicable. There’s no stated cause. And they want to end well. In fact, inspired by her father’s view that separation should be celebrated with a party, they talk themselves into organising a shindig to which they’ll invite their friends and maybe even their families to mark this pivotal moment in their lives.

In the home full of Billy bookcases, there are scenes of sorting through and boxing up books and CDs as the couple split their possessions. One may stay in their apartment while the other rents a small flat: a decision-making process that becomes another point of stress that must be overcome. Splitting up is also the theme of the dialogue in a self-tape audition that Alex asks Ale to film.

“I’ve always though it’s a good idea for a film … but in real life I don’t know.”

Itsaso Arana plays the Ale, a director who is in the final stages of editing her new film. The Other Way Round becomes quite meta with husband Alex (Vito Sanz) the lead actor, and his scenes – and the aspects of the storyline we see – impossible to distinguish from real life events.

Ale is examining the process of breaking up from both sides of the lens. The film-within-a-film device works to the film’s advantage, allowing lots of on-screen commentary about whether the narrative is linear or circular, and creating the opportunity for some fun editing techniques to play with the storytelling. Ale’s father also places a copy of Søren Kierkegaard book Repetition into the hands of his daughter. The concepts of recollection and repetition and reconnecting were already frequent responses from the couple’s friends upon being informed about their breakup: “sure you’ll soon be back together”.

The Other Way Round is a sweet and thoughtful consideration of separation. Ending well and doing so in an attitude of grace and amicability seems rare but is surely a worthy ambition. Oddly, the film is never moving, and doesn’t even seem to attempt to elicit that kind of reaction. There’s an irritating sense of inevitability about the conclusion. Yet the credits will keep you glued to your seat as you watch the montage of faces at the party, people that have been incredibly important to Ale and Alex over the years.

Screened in Queen’s Film Theatre as part of the 2024 Belfast Film Festival.

 

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!

Nightbitch – exhausted mum by day, cuddly dog killing other animals and burying them in the garden by night (Belfast Film Festival at Queen’s Film Theatre) #BFF24

Amy Adams plays a mum who stays at home to rear her toddler while her husband (Scoot McNairy) travels far and wide with his work. Hearing Mum’s inner monologue builds empathy. Recognising the heaven-twinned-with-hell nature of the weekly Book Babies meetup only consolidates our understanding of her frustration at managing the wee lad all on her own.

The first sign of something odd is the way dogs are playfully attracted to her when she’s out in the park. The title Nightbitch (taken from Rachel Yoder’s novel) sums up the magic realism* element of the movie. In the evenings, the longest part of any parent’s day, Mum intermittently turns into a dog and will slip out the front door and go for a trot around the neighbourhood, killing other animals, digging holes in the garden. The soil under her fingernails and the mess she makes in the shower are hard to explain to her husband. *It’s firmly in the magic realism and stops well short of proper body horror, shying away from the gruesome end of her nocturnal activities, yet still ends up with an R rating in the US!

Twin boys Arleigh and Emmett Snowden play the part of the toddler, with gorgeous naturalistic footage of them playing with Adams. Norma the librarian who makes special book recommendations adds older wisdom (and yet more mystery) to the story, a beautiful performance by Jessica Harper.

Nightbitch is a tad confusing. Permission to just get on with believing that Mum can become a dog at night is never quite implicitly granted by director Marielle Heller, so for considerable parts of the film I found myself waiting for a giant metaphor to be revealed. Instead, the takeaways seem as simple as parenting isn’t easy, parenting on your own is really hard work and changes your whole sense of self even more than how other people perceive you … oh, and men are simply insensitive, inconsiderate, and very self-absorbed. A filmmaker doesn’t really need 98 minutes of screentime to rehearse those concepts. Yet there is much to enjoy.

The cat skeletons are visually inventive, along with lots of biting asides and commentary: “What happened to my wife? / (whispered) She died in childbirth.”

While Nightbitch looks at motherhood from a perspective of what it can force someone to give up, the more interesting lesson would perhaps be to talk about what doesn’t have to be given up if others step up to provide support. Screened in the QFT as part of Belfast Film Festival, there’s a good chance that Nightbitch may reappear in one or more local cinemas in December or January.

 

Appreciated this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!

VIVA & Communion – two thoughtful short independent films showcased at Belfast Film Festival #bff23

Two of the NI Independents short films caught my eye in the Belfast Film Festival programme. They were screened this afternoon in the Strand Arts Centre.

Marie Clare Cushinan’s VIVA imagines a world twenty years hence where old people trade their life for a final year of holiday, exploring places that were special to them. Nicole and Justin (Kate O’Toole and Lalor Roddy) have made this decision, leaving their house and wealth to daughter Ellie (Sara Dylan) and avoiding its use for care home costs.

A final ‘departure day’ dinner party with Ellie, her husband Jack (Richard Clements) and good friend Tony (Bosco Hogan) reveals that their somewhat clinical last goodbye is a trade-off between certainty and an unpredictable old age. Around the table there is lots of laughter, warmth and love, as well as some regrets and differences of opinion. Nicole and Justin see the environmental benefit of their euthanasia, while Tony sees their unburdening as social suicide. Meanwhile, Ellie’s lip begins to curl, and husband Jack adds a frisson of tetchiness.

While dialogue is mostly absent from the second half, the strong storytelling continues under Michael Mormecha and TRÚ’s beautiful soundtrack. Even without the framing device of the Cards Against Humanity game, VIVA is a warm and intelligent contribution to the growing debate over euthanasia, asking whether we fear an unknown future more than we want to embrace what life throws at us.

Séan Coyle’s Communion weaves together the death of a local man, the last days of a woman in a hospice, and the looming closure of the local Catholic Church. Parish priest Father Owens (Steven Jess) finds parallels between his imperfect home life as a child and thirty-something Aoife’s experience of marriage and death. His sensitive response to her confession opens a door for Aoife (Sadhbh Larkin Coyle) to rebuild her faith.

Meanwhile, his flock may be diminishing in size, but Fr Owens tends to them all with diligence, patiently sitting by the bedside of Grainne (Maria Connolly). Great performances from Coyle, Jess and Connolly enrich the pathos and empathy.

While all around is in decline, Communion demonstrates how faith can heal – even in death – and how God ultimately is bigger than buildings and can overcome any crisis our lives can muster.

Check out my other recommendations at Belfast Film Festival which continues until Saturday 11 November.

 Enjoyed these reviews? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!

Double Blind - new Irish Horror with young lab rats battling against Big Pharma (Queen’s Film Theatre at 20:30 on Saturday 4 November) #bff23

If you go down to the woods Belfast Film Festival today, you’re in for a big surprise.

Double Blind sees seven young people check into a spartan facility to take part in a medical trial. They’re in it for the cash. Many are frequent visitors. All are down on their luck. The cheery announcement “Welcome to Blackwood pharmaceuticals … we hope you enjoy your stay” is ominous.

When a ‘mild’ dose of the drug has unexpected wide effects, the isolated holiday camp becomes more tense. When the first trialist falls asleep, they become rats literally trapped in the lab and the film firmly shifts from psycho-procedural into proper horror.

Millie Brady plays Claire, the newbie in the group, less clubbable than the others, and prone to original thought. As the near-narcoleptic triallists struggle to stave off fatal sleep, they drift into hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, and paranoia.

Darach McGarrigle’s script has no need for zombies when the human mind is already such an effective threat. Double Blind studies small group dynamics, examines what happens when sleeplessness and panic set in. It’s not a spoiler to suggest there are a lot of deaths. Each of the deceased gets a different cause of death.

Director Ian Hunt-Duffy creates a feeling of claustrophobia despite the seven rattling around an expansive underground bunker. Countdown clocks and long corridors all add to the sense of foreboding. The few splashes of solid colours are soon joined by pools of red on the floor.

The baddie is Big Pharma: the powerful rich are bribing the disposable poor. One character speculates that a mouse found in a cage may be more valuable to the company than the human triallists. There are clunky aspects to the plot, and some of the dialogue is a bit too didactic. But overall, the film succeeds in creating a sense of menace and a satisfying dispatch of its characters.

The film’s title is troubling. A double blind trial is usually one in which neither the test subjects nor those administering the experiment have full knowledge of the experiment: often, who is given the drug and who is being given the placebo. In the case of Double Blind, it feels like a stretch since everyone is receiving the same dosage of the drug, and it’s only the ill-effects that are unknown.

If you want a hit of new Irish Horror, check out Double Blind in the Queen’s Film Theatre on Saturday 4 November at 8.30pm as part of Belfast Film Festival.

The festival continues until 11 November with more recommendations in my preview post.

Enjoyed this review? Why not click on the Buy Me a Tea button!

Previewing Belfast Film Festival – a programme stuffed full of home-grown and international treats (2-11 November) #bff23

We’re now into peak festival season in Belfast.

Belfast International Arts Festival is into its last week (finishing on Sunday 5 November), local events in the ESCR Festival of Social Science are ongoing (last one on Saturday 11), Belfast Film Festival is about to start (Thursday 2–Saturday 11), and Outburst Queer Arts Festival is just around the corner (Thursday 9–Saturday 18).

Belfast Film Festival is squeezing in an early spooky screening tonight for Halloween (Tuesday 31 October), with Haunted Ulster Live in the QFT at 21:00. Then the main festival begins on Thursday 2 November with the (sold out) opening film All Of Us Strangers in Cineworld at 19:30. Paul Mescal is back with a fantasy about love.

The first of eight movies from emerging filmmakers in the International Competition is being screened on Thursday night at 20:45 in the QFT with the non-preachy, non-judgemental end-of-school holiday in the sun film How To Have Sex [reviewed] (Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature) which exposes the teenage hurt and angst that lies beneath the carefully curated exterior. A story of loneliness in a crowd, of predatory behaviour, of coerced consent.

Also in the competition is Tótem, a Mexican family drama with a party steeped in tragedy seen through the eyes of a seven year old girl. Lila Avilés’ second feature is in the QFT on Friday 3 at 18:15. One last competition film to mention is Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry [reviewed] from Georgian director Elene Naveriani (QFT at 18:00 on Monday 6) about a middle-aged woman’s near-death experience which kick starts a drole journey of longing and loneliness.

You can pretend you’re a member of the jury in the tense French courtroom drama when a man falls to his death in Anatomy of a Fall [reviewed] on Friday 3 at 20:30.

Mark Cousins lit up many a Belfast Film Festival for me with his off-the-wall documentaries like What is this Film Called Love? and Here be Dragons which were filmed on days off while on overseas trips. He’s back in the 2023 festival with Cinema Has Been My True Love (QFT at 12:45 on Saturday 4) which promises to be a candid and inspirational portrait of film festival programmer, author and producer Lynda Myles who championed the early work of directors who would go on to become ‘the movie brats’ (a phrase that she coined). Also on Saturday 4 you can catch new Irish horror film and Ian Hunt Duffy debut Double Blind [reviewed] where young volunteers hopes of earning easy money from participating in a medical drug trial are dashed.

The Delinquents is an Argentinian bank heist with an unusually moral motivation. QFT at noon on Sunday 5. A series of sub-half hour films from Northern Ireland directors is being screened in Strand Arts Centre that afternoon. Viva (15:00, Marie Claire Cushinan) [reviewed], Communion (15:40, Séan Coyle) [reviewed], Desideratum (16:20, KC Connolly), Three Way Mirror (17:00, Kevin J Mc Corry) and Heaven Scent (18:00, Michael McNulty).

Monday 6 is a day stuffed full of treats: The Secret of Ronan Irish (The Avenue at 19:00) is a family-friendly Celtic mystery, part of the festival’s John Sayles retrospective; a preview of the Fine Point Films’ origin story of the West Belfast hip hop artists Kneecap who are rarely out of the headlines (Black Box at 20:00); and Silent Roar (20:30 at QFT) [reviewed], a Hebridean tale of grief, tradition and teenage discover.

You can bring your pouch to a screening of Whose Dog Am I? in the Black Box at 19:00 … as long as you and your pet can promise to be well-behaved in a room full of other canines. No pets required at Monster [reviewed] (QFT at 21:00), a Japanese tale of family, childhood and generational alienation from director Hirokazu Kore-eda.

The greatest spectacle on Wednesday 8 might well be the screening of Joel Coen’s Barton Fink (The Avenue at 19:00) which picks up awards like a giant magnet.

John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996) is being screened in Strand Arts Centre at 18:00 on Thursday 9. And you can check out Pierce Brosnan’s accent in the gala screening of Terry Loane’s The Last Rifleman [reviewed] in the Cineworld at 19:00.

Circus master and serial filmmaker Ken Fanning is hosting Out of the Big Top Onto the Screen, a selection of circus shorts and exploring the many ways his world can be presented on screen. Friday 10 November at 20:00 in Circusful (the new name for Belfast Community Circus School). Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in William Oldroyd’s subversive noir Eileen in the QFT at 21:15.

Saturday 11 November is the final day of the festival. ReVision sees what young people and students of filmmaking have been able to create from Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive (QFT at 10:00). And in the same venue at noon, one of the films being digitally restored by the archive will be screened: Brian’ Drysdale’s The Boxer (1979). The Shadowless Tower (Strand Arts Centre at 14:00) is a tribute to Beijing though the eyes of a failed poet and restaurant critic who is going through a midlife crisis.

Belfast Film Festival closes its curtain and powers down its projector with Oscar-tipped Poor Things (Cineworld at 19:30) from director Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Favourite) starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo.

And if none of those picks is to your taste, the full programme is available on the Belfast Film Festival website!

Big Man – bravura performance by Tony Flynn in Paul McVeigh’s new play (Lyric Theatre until 13 November as part of Belfast International Arts Festival) #BIAF22

Big Man is Paul McVeigh’s first play for 20 years, and marks his return to theatre after a career that morphed into comedy before shifting towards short fiction and the publication of his award-winning debut novel The Good Son in 2015.

Big Man is also the moniker given to the 50-something narrator by the lad, half his age, who catches his eye and shakes his soul in a Belfast nightclub after a fallow decade free from love. The first twenty minutes – the strongest and most climactic act – deals with their meeting (“the future came towards me, pint in hand”), greeting and the journey home from The Spaniard that night. The precision of the landmarks and street names conjures up the route.

Life can’t all be Dusty Springfield and Kate Bush, so the second act skips through the months that follow. The physical fissures in Tracey Lindsay’s floating set are soon linked to the cracks that form in the relationship between Big Man and ‘himself’. A glitterball hangs above a dark hole in one quadrant of the stage: the former spins when we’re in a nightclub; the latter allows actor Tony Flynn to sit down, though this symbolic dark heart oddly isn’t where he heads when times are most obviously bleak. The thrust stage keeps the audience very close to the performer, easily heard even when his back is turned. James McFetridge’s razor-sharp lighting adds a real sense to drama to the propless performance.

The final scenes interrogate the conclusion of the relationship, and a beautifully ambiguous ending leaves as much room for hope as it does for doubt. I’m sure there was a debate in the rehearsal room about the line which finally gives a name to himself, but I’ll come out firmly on the side of being disappointed that detail was revealed.

Flynn is in his acting element as the vulnerable, self-preserving himself, and is master of McVeigh’s unforgiving script. The rapt audience sit in total silence – a rarity for post-pandemic theatre where the stalls are now full of chit chat as if watching a boxset on a sofa at home – as the actor guides them through the Gobbins-like twists and scary turns of Big Man’s time with himself.

Director Patrick J O’Reilly’s has an eye for small movements – the rolling of an eye or shifting of weight on a foot – which keeps everyone’s attention on the storyteller even before Flynn begins to pound around the tectonic plates of the set. Stuart Robinson’s sound effects are kept to a minimum with a subdued sonic palette, reminiscent of science fiction cinema.

At times, the script feels closer to a novel than a play, particularly in the opening scenes when adjectives and vivid descriptors rain down on the swollen script like a waterfall of cornflakes dropping out of a family-sized cereal box and landing in a generously proportioned Denby stoneware bowl. Comedy helps embrace the necessarily racy moments that make Big Man sound authentic and the audience are tickled by the mention of ‘lumbering’ and the apt comparisons of gay culture with straight experiences. Though the “the hairs on my neck stood up like little erections” and “we created a new language through touch” are a bit Mills & Boon. There’s a sense throughout the whole middle section that Chekhov’s deadly gun has been cocked but never ends up being fired.

Big Man is the story of a relationship, layered on top of an analysis of vulnerability, loss and the difficulty to find and sustain love. The play’s premiere run at the Lyric Theatre continues until 13 November, part of the theatre’s season of new writing, and presented as part of Belfast International Arts Festival. Check out the preview post from a few weeks ago to find out what other treats the festival is serving up between now and 6 November.

Photo credit: Ciaran Bagnall.

Enjoyed this review? Why click on the Buy Me a Tea button!

Sometimes Always Never – the charming and witty story of a Scrabble shark who knows about losing #bff19

The last time I sat in the very front row of a Belfast cinema was on a snowy day after queueing outside in the snow for two or more hours to see ET in the ABC cinema where Jurys Inn now stands.

Last Sunday night, the front row held the last two remaining seats together in Queen’s Film Theatre’s screen 1 which was showing the sold out Sometimes Always Never as part of Belfast Film Festival. While I feared a crick in my neck, they were remarkably comfortable.

Even better was the film. I’m a sucker for nearly anything Bill Nighy appears in, even if he sometimes plays a single, transferable, hesitant, overly-polite character no matter the film name printed on the ticket. But Sometimes Always Never gives him a chance to work his magic on less predictable characterisation.

It’s a story split over two parts and three generations. The initial road trip sees Alan Mellor (Bill Nighy) as a grandfather and a tailor who travels with his son Peter (Sam Riley) to see if they can identify a body washed up on the shore in a town around the coast from where they live. Staying overnight in an unmodernised hotel, he hustles another guest (Arthur played by Tim McInnerny) into a sizeable side bet around a game of Scrabble.

Then it switches to be a domestic drama, enjoying the injections of Scrabble strategy and wordplay as the generations learn more about each other and straighten out the tensions among the living while the prodigal son remains missing. Alan’s interactions with grandson Jack (Louis Healy) are very positive and eventually explain the titular three-button suit rule.

The women in the Frank Cottrell Boyce’s screenplay are neither central nor disposable. Ella-Grace Gregoire’s minor role as the apple of young Jack’s eye is well acted, while Jenny Agutter’s interactions with foolish husband Arthur and the charming Alan are fun while they last.

Despite the very soft focus throughout the 91-minute film, classic cars, my childhood friend the Dymo label machine, and the patterned and dowdy locations that keep on suggesting that the story is set in the past, Sometimes Always Never is set in the age of smartphones and online word games.

The moral of the story is that we should value the ordinary over the absent, and consider whether we really know our loved ones. The Mellor family have plenty of words at their fingertips but are terrible at communicating.

Sometimes Always Never could easily be reimagined as a stage play. On the silver screen it is a charming, eccentric and witty story of a Scrabble shark who knows about losing. Screened as part of Belfast Film Festival, watch out for Sometimes Always Never’s return to UK cinema screens from 14 June.

Woman at War – smart, funny, quirky and possibly the best action film of the year (QFT from 10 May) #bff19

Woman at War could be my action film of the year. On the surface, Halla conducts a community choir, choosing beautiful folk ballads for her friendly singers to rehearse. Her flat is decorated with portraits of heroes like Mandela and Gandhi. Underneath the model-citizen veneer lurks an eco-activist who takes direct action against the government’s plans to expand the aluminium-smelting plant to take on Chinese orders. She treks across the bleak landscape with a bow, firing a metal cable across the high-tension electrical lines to short out the power.

Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir plays the conflicted woman at the heart of the film, torn between an opportunity to adopt a Ukrainian orphan and taking her environmental campaign to the next stage. Geirharðsdóttir portrays a warm and easy-going nature that attracts people to help her character, whether in the choir or her outdoor excursions. The talented actress also plays the role of Halla’s sister Åsa.

Jóhann Sigurðarson plays the farmer Sveinbjörn, perhaps a distant cousin, upon whom she grows to rely, while Juan Camillo pops up as a hapless foreign backpacker – wrong time, wrong place – who is persecuted by the authorities, blaming him for much of Halla’s disruption.

Icelandic films often enjoy off-beat humour and a crazy sense of creativity. Benedikt Erlingsson, director of Woman at War, does not disappoint. Much of the film’s quirky score is performed live on-screen by a band (sousaphone, drums and accordion/piano) that pop up in the most remote and intimate locations while the Halla wanders past. The irony of running out of battery power under an enormous pylon is magical. The nipple badge pinned to Halla’s coat gives her the feel of an Amazonian warrior.

The scenes of Halla disguising her infra-red footprint and battling all manner of flying surveillance are worthy of a Bond film. Halla certainly tolds true to her mother’s two pieces of advice: “Moms can do anything” and “Find solutions”.

The cataclysmic climate-conscious climax is apt. Challenging society’s environmental concern that is more tempered by profit than stewardship of the earth as well as a nod to modern surveillance culture, Woman at War asks what we can do “to save future generations”, individually or en masse.

Woman at War is smart, funny, very quirky, and was screened in Queen’s Film Theatre as part of Belfast Film Festival. While Jodie Foster has signed up to direct and star in an English-language remake, watch out for the Icelandic original when it gets a UK cinema release and returns to Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 10–Thursday 16 May.