Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)

Almayer's Folly, directed by the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman and first released in 2011, is a highly atmospheric and contemplative film that examines, inter alia, the impact of colonialism.  Adapted from Joseph Conrad's eponymous debut novel, the film was Akerman's final narrative feature before her untimely death in 2015; during her lengthy career, Akerman made just one other literary adaptation, 2000's austere The Captive, which was loosely based on Marcel Proust's La Prisonnière.  Akerman took a similarly liberal approach when it came to translating Conrad to the screen, although Francis Ford Coppola's much-discussed Apocalypse Now remains an even more outré stab at the author's work.

Just as Coppola transposed Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the 19th-century Belgian Congo to 20th-century Vietnam, Akerman updates the author's 1895 novel to the 1950s.  Although shot in Cambodia, Akerman's film is set in Malaysia, where it follows the story of Dutch trader Almayer (Stanislas Merhar) and his mixed-race daughter Nina (Aurora Marion).  Almayer, trapped in a loveless marriage to local woman Zahira (Sakhna Oum), is clinging to fading hopes of finding gold deposits in the land that surrounds his riverside home (this building, as explained in the book, is the "folly" of the title).  Moreover, Zahira's adoptive father Lingard (Marc Barbé) is busy burning through the wealth earmarked for Almayer.

With all else failing, Almayer focuses on securing his daughter's future.  After some vague talk of a trip involving visits to Paris and London, Nina is packed off to a colonial boarding school, where it is hoped she will become more in tune with her European heritage; her absence only compounds Almayer's misery.  Merhar, who also starred in the aforementioned The Captive, delivers a well-judged performance as Almayer, capturing the title character's slide into madness as he struggles with both his flailing business and the painful separation from his cherished daughter; Belgian actress Marion brings a beguiling intensity to her role, perfectly embodying the dichotomy of a girl caught between two hugely contrasting worlds.

Almayer's Folly requires patience, and it takes some time for its brilliance to emerge; this demanding film is both elliptical and highly reflective of its director's formally rigorous methods.  Yet it is not inapt to suggest that Almayer's Folly would form a fine double bill with Apocalypse Now—whose redux version features Akerman favourite Aurore Clément—with Akerman's ice providing a counterpoint to Coppola's fire.  Conrad, whose works often hinge on what is left unsaid, proves an ideal fit for Chantal Akerman, with the economy of his storytelling neatly dovetailing with her languid, minimalist approach.  This late masterpiece from Akerman is an exemplary meditation on the death rattle of colonialism.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

The Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000)

First released in 2000, Chantal Akerman's The Captive is an updating of Marcel Proust's The Prisoner, the fifth volume of his epic novel In Search of Lost Time.  This striking, formally rigorous film reframes Proust's study of obsessive control to great effect; perhaps surprisingly, Akerman made just one other literary adaptation, her eponymous 2010 film of Joseph Conrad's debut novel Almayer's Folly.  The Captive is one of four of the late Belgian director's features—the others being Golden Eighties, Tomorrow We Move and De Afspraken van Anna—that have recently been restored in 4K by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium.

The Captive follows Simon (Stanislas Merhar), a rich idler who becomes increasingly obsessed with his girlfriend Ariane (Sylvie Testud).  Simon dictates and monitors every aspect of Ariane's life, and is particularly interested in her friend Andrée (Olivia Bonamy), with whom he suspects she is having an affair; Ariane, for her part, is compliant yet inscrutable.  The long takes and attenuated pacing allow the audience to fully immerse themselves in the characters' fractured psychology, while the immaculate cinematography, by the Léopoldville-born Sabine Lancelin, lends an icy claustrophobia to the proceedings.

Merhar, who later played the title role in the beguiling Almayer's Folly, delivers a fine performance as Simon, deftly capturing the character's vanity and neuroses as he attempts to tighten his grip on Ariane.  Testud, who would also go on to reteam with Akerman (on Tomorrow We Move), is equally impressive, with her Ariane embodying an opaqueness that keeps her a mystery to Simon and the audience alike.  As the film presents the fraught dynamic between the ethereal Ariane and the controlling Simon, Akerman explores wildly contrasting ideas of love and the blurred lines that sit between devotion and possession.

It may well be that Ariane is as unknowable to Simon as Proust is to the non-francophone; it's been posited that English translations of In Search of Lost Time—of which there have been several—largely fail to illuminate the text.  There is also the challenge of another kind of translation: that of adapting Proust, who was openly dismissive of cinema, for the screen.  Prior to The Captive, filmmakers Volker Schlöndorff (Swann in Love) and Raúl Ruiz (Time Regained) grappled gamely with other volumes from the same novel, but it is perhaps Chantal Akerman's haunting effort that best captures the essence of Proust's magnum opus.

Darren Arnold

Image: BFI

South (Chantal Akerman, 1999)

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's documentary South, which premiered in 1999, centres on racial violence in the southern US.  The film examines the terrible aftermath of the brutal and senseless killing of James Byrd Jr., an African-American man who was murdered by a trio of white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, in 1998.  In South's early stages, Akerman's approach is near-Lynchian in its depiction of the horrors that lurk beneath the surface: the film opens with a series of tranquil and prosaic shots of Jasper, capturing quotidian life in the Deep South; however, as the narrative unspools, these images take on a different hue, reflecting the underlying racial tensions and historical weight of the region.

One of the film's most striking features is its use of long, static shots; Akerman largely allows the visuals to speak for themselves, creating a palpable sense of stillness.  The juxtaposition of the placid scenery with the horrific details of Byrd's death—he was dragged behind a truck for three miles, and his remains were recovered from 81 places—creates a queasy contrast that underlines the viciousness of the crime.  The film includes a number of interviews with local residents, police officials, and members of the wider African-American community, providing a varied perspective on the legacy of the murder.  While insightful, these sequences are eclipsed by poignant footage of Byrd's memorial service.

But South is not just about James Byrd's lynching: it is a broader statement on the embedded nature of racism, and the film's meditative tone invites the audience to consider hate crimes and their lasting impact on individuals, communities and society.  While South may be challenging for some viewers due to its deliberate pacing—despite being a mere 71 minutes long—and difficult subject matter, it is a profoundly moving and important work that grapples with a shameful episode in recent history.  Akerman's sensitive direction and the evocative imagery—the protracted final shot, as seen in the clip below, is gasp-inducing—make South a haunting and harrowing experience, one that lingers in the mind for days.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1986)

Set almost entirely within the premises of a shopping centre, the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman's musical Golden Eighties follows the romantic entanglements of various mall staff as they attempt to juggle their professional and private lives.  Recently restored in 4K by Belgium's Cinematek, Akerman's film sees the director and Delphine Seyrig reunite more than a decade on from their collaboration on the incredible, shattering Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.  Whereas Seyrig commanded the screen for virtually all of Jeanne Dielman's three-plus hours, Golden Eighties features an ensemble cast in which she, playing another character named Jeanne, is joined by Myriam Boyer, Belgian pop icon Lio, Fanny Cottençon, Pascale Salkin and Charles Denner, among others.

The plot revolves around Boyer's Sylvie, a coffee shop proprietor longing for her boyfriend who is away seeking his fortune in Québec, and Eli (played by Boyer's real-life husband John Berry), an American former GI who, by chance, reconnects with clothing boutique owner Jeanne, a Jewish woman he looked after following her liberation from the death camps of WW2.  In a setup not unlike that of Alain Resnais' Muriel, in which Seyrig's Hélène receives a visit from an old flame looking to rekindle their past romance, Eli would like to restart his relationship with Jeanne, which ended with her sudden departure.  But Jeanne now has a husband (Denner) and son (Nicolas Tronc), the latter of whom has his own romantic problems as he can't choose between the flighty Lili (Cottençon) and the devoted Mado (Lio).

Golden Eighties is a most atypical film from Akerman, who is best known for her formally rigorous works, and it is easy—and reductive—to view it as her riff on the musical films of Jacques Demy (one of which, Peau d'âne, starred a customarily radiant Seyrig).  Certainly, its songs, pastel colour scheme and theme of idealised love (which eventually yields to more pragmatic needs) are a good fit for a Demy musical, yet there's a Resnaisian wistfulness present here, and Jeanne's past trauma means that the holocaust, not for the first or last time in Akerman's work, comes under consideration (the director's mother survived Auschwitz).  It says much about Akerman's skill that this weighty element can be added in such a way that the resulting film contains not so much as a hint of tonal uncertainty.

It is not inapt to suggest that Golden Eighties is a fine entry point for those unfamiliar with Akerman's oeuvre, and it is certainly the most accessible of her films; as such, it has sometimes been dismissed as one of the director's lesser efforts.  But anyone rejecting any project involving Akerman and Seyrig should do so at their peril, and indeed this film has much more depth than its frothy, cheerful veneer might suggest.  Perhaps the most striking aspect of Golden Eighties is that it was set and made in the middle of the decade of its weirdly prescient title—the film, especially in this restored version, has the look and feel of a fairly recent 80s parody—so the styles and fashions of the era are presented more or less as they were.  Akerman, it seems, was acutely tuned in to the moment she was living in.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

The Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1983)

Chantal Akerman's The Eighties, first released in 1983, is an experimental film that ostensibly offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Belgian director's 1986 musical Golden Eighties.  The film is an idiosyncratic blend of documentary and musical, and for the first of its two distinct halves it focuses on the casting and rehearsal processes involved in staging this elaborate production.  Shot on video, this footage is presented with neither context nor commentary, but it nonetheless highlights the gruelling efforts of the cast and crew as they make incremental progress.  As with Golden Eighties, the first thing glimpsed in The Eighties is a succession of purposefully scurrying women, shot from the knees down.

Given that it was purportedly a tin-rattling dry run for Golden Eighties, The Eighties manages to be a markedly different beast from the later, glossier film, which stands as arguably Akerman's most accessible feature (although a film she made in the same year as The Eighties, the sublime The Man with a Suitcase, is also a good entry point for those unfamiliar with the director's work).  Clearly, there is much that connects the two films, but where Golden Eighties is fluid and straightforward, The Eighties is choppy and fragmented; while Golden Eighties has received a lavish 4K restoration, it seems oddly apt that The Eighties has only recently made it past VHS, the rickety format du jour of its title decade.

After an hour has passed, the raw, freewheeling rehearsal videos give way to several fully-realised 35mm sequences; if indeed Akerman hoped this film would attract financers for Golden Eighties, these slick, polished numbers seem the most likely way to achieve such a goal—so it seems strange that this dazzling footage is relegated to the film's back half.  While the songs and general mise en scène are recognisable to anyone who's seen Golden Eighties, most of the actors are different: Aurore Clément and Magali Noël, both so prominent here, are nowhere to be found in the 1986 film, although Lio appears in both titles.  As such, Golden Eighties is a palimpsest in which faint traces of this phantom film are still visible.

Clément and Noël, who both starred in Akerman's The Meetings of Anna, give full-blooded performances that provide a tantalising glimpse of a production that went unfinished—or did it?  Such is The Eighties' slippery relationship to its near-namesake.  Certainly, it's a truly baffling experience for anyone who hasn't seen Golden Eighties—which would be everyone who saw The Eighties on its initial run in 1983.  This poignant, life-affirming film finds Chantal Akerman at her most mischievous, and she's also a notable presence in front of the camera: witness her joyful, enthusiastic conducting of professional singer Noël's performance in the recording studio, before she herself gamely steps up to the microphone.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

De Afspraken van Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)

First released in 1975, Chantal Akerman's jaw-dropping masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has since been voted the greatest film of all time; she followed it up with an avant-garde documentary, News from Home, before returning to narrative film with 1978's De Afspraken van Anna.  Variously known as Les Rendez-vous d'Anna and The Meetings of Anna, this introspective and contemplative film wasn't well received upon its initial release, but the decade since her death has seen much, if not all, of Akerman's work reappraised—hence Jeanne Dielman's meteoric rise in critical popularity—and De Afspraken van Anna has recently been restored in 4K by Belgium's Cinematek.

De Afspraken van Anna is an exploration of loneliness, disconnection and the search for meaning in a transient world.  The film focuses on, yep, Anna (Aurore Clément), a Belgian filmmaker and proxy for Akerman, as she treks across Europe to promote her latest movie.  The narrative structure is episodic, with Anna meeting various people over the course of her endless train journeys, including friends, strangers, lovers and relatives; each encounter reveals a different facet of Anna's interior life, but her sense of isolation remains constant.  These lengthy conversations are often marked by a lack of emotional connection—at least on Anna's part—reflecting the title character's own detachment from the world around her.

The film's pacing is glacial, which does allow the viewer to immerse themselves in Anna's world and experience her ennui.  A real strength of the movie—one it shares with Jeanne Dielman—is its ability to capture the quotidian and transform it into something profound and meaningful.  Anna's existence is one of rootlessness and impermanence—quite the opposite of that of Jeanne Dielman, who is more or less confined to her Brussels apartment.  But despite the itinerant Anna's ostensibly glamourous jaunts on the film festival circuit, which are far removed from Jeanne's stultifyingly repetitive domestic chores, Anna has somehow reduced her own life to a level of mundanity that sits on a par with Jeanne's.

Yet De Afspraken van Anna contains nothing in the vein of Jeanne Dielman's shocking dénouement, and the film ends much like it begins.  Akerman's direction is characterised by long, static takes and a minimalist style, which create a sense of stillness, and the film's mise-en-scène is both beautiful and disciplined—qualities which are much more apparent in this newly restored print.  Clément has to carry the entirety of the film, and her Anna is something of a blank canvas, a cipher who seems as interchangeable as the hotels and train stations she pinballs around.  By turns fascinating and exhausting, this austere semi-autobiographical work has taken on an added poignancy since its maker's untimely death.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Raindance 2025: Snatchers (C. Alexander/S. Higgs, 2025)

This debut feature from husband-and-wife team Craig Alexander and Shelly Higgs received its world premiere on Saturday at the Raindance Film Festival, and their film has much in common with another title in Raindance 2025's horror strand: Dejan Babosek's Hole.  Each film is a three-hander centring on a corpse which, rather inconveniently, comes back to life; but while there aren't a surfeit of laughs to be had from Babosek's grimly effective film, humour serves as a cornerstone in irreverent horror-comedy Snatchers.  Alexander and Higgs' film is a riff on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1884 short story "The Body Snatcher", itself inspired by the string of real-life murders committed by two Williams, Burke and Hare.

Snatchers transplants the story from one capital city to another, with the action relocated from 19th-century Edinburgh to a dystopian near-future Canberra.  As a student, I misspent half a decade in Auld Reekie and can provide confirmation, if any were needed, that it's a fine place to live when the Fringe isn't on.  But I've also visited Canberra and consider it to be one of the world's more underrated capitals, so it's pleasing to see a movie that's proudly set and filmed there.  Two of Snatchers' main characters share names with their counterparts in Stevenson's story, although Macfarlane is truncated to Mac, and Fettes—in a move that will make many of the author's fellow Dunediners wince—is pronounced as a single syllable.

Mac (Alexander) and Fettes (Justin Hosking) are hospital orderlies who plan on escaping their impoverished lives by entering the burgeoning black market organ trade.  Given their jobs, the pair have reasonable access to a supply of dead bodies, and when the immaculate, unclaimed corpse of a young Jane Doe (Hannah McKenzie) turns up in the hospital, Mac and Fettes think they've won the jackpot.  With the aid of a surreal dance number, the duo smuggle the body to a warehouse where they prepare to harvest its organs; but just before the first incision is made, Jane comes back to life.  From this point on, the wily Jane gets inside the heads of her rattled abductors and proceeds to play them off against each other.

Snatchers is not the first comedic take on this material—John Landis' unfunny yet oddly watchable Burke & Hare and a 1972 film of the same name both tried to reconcile these hideous murders with cheap laughs, and the results in each case were predictably atonal.  But Alexander and Higgs have delivered a well-judged effort here, and by basing their film on Stevenson's story they place a much-needed buffer between these characters and the real-life crimes (setting the film on the other side of the world also helps).  The performances are likeable, with Alexander proving good value in front of the camera, while McKenzie and Hosking keep things bubbling along nicely as the film heads towards its terrific final twist.

Darren Arnold

Images: Little Train Creative

Raindance 2025: Saturnalia (Daniel Lerch, 2025)

Daniel Lerch's feature debut Saturnalia—which on Friday received its world premiere at the Raindance Film Festival—wears its influences on its sleeve, and anyone with a passing interest in genre cinema will immediately recognise the film's main touchstone as being Dario Argento's 1977 masterpiece Suspiria.  Argento's film was remade, rather loosely but to good effect, by Luca Guadagnino in 2018, although Lerch appears to have little to no interest in that version as he constructs a work that occupies the fine line between homage and pastiche.  Certainly, Lerch's film is the most overt riff on Argento since Brussels-based duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani served up The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears in 2013.

Just like Argento's Suspiria, the 1970s-set Saturnalia begins with a taxi ride on a rain-lashed night as a female student heads to her new boarding school.  Lerch's protagonist is Miriam Basconi (Sophia Anthony, excellent), an orphaned young woman who has been sent to Alstroemerias Academy, an exclusive and elite Virginian college presided over by the bellicose Ms. Hemlock (Velvet), who predictably makes life very difficult for her feisty new charge—as do two other girls (Maddie Siepe, Morgan Messina) in the cohort.  As the hazing continues, the only potential allies for the new arrival take the form of Hemlock's louche enforcer Holden (Dante Blake) and the mousy, victimised Hannah (Amariah Dionne).  

Here, as in Suspiria, it's clear that the crimes of those running the school extend way beyond their harsh treatment of some of the boarders, and Hemlock makes little attempt to disguise her viciousness.  The mystery here is not who, but why, and Lerch sets about whipping up an atmosphere of dread and anxiety as the student population starts to decrease, and he's aided by some fine cinematography from Max Fischer, who also doubled as the film's producer.  Suspiria is often misidentified as a giallo, which is perhaps understandable given Dario Argento's prominence in the genre, but its no-surprises nature is one it shares with Saturnalia and marks it out from the likes of Deep Red, Tenebrae and The Cat o' Nine Tails.

Fischer's camerawork does a good job of approximating the look of Suspiria, a film whose vivid colour palette served as a last hurrah of sorts for the Technicolor process in Italy—Argento used the company's last facility in Rome for his film—as cheaper alternatives were becoming available.  But Saturnalia's biggest coup is securing the services of the legendary Claudio Simonetti to provide the score; Simonetti and his band Goblin composed the music for many an Argento film, including, naturally, Suspiria, and his perfectly calibrated contribution to Saturnalia augments the film without ever being showy.  This is an assured, well-crafted horror, one that will hopefully enjoy a long life on the cult movie circuit.

Darren Arnold

Images: FilmFreeway

Raindance 2025: God Teeth (Robbie C. Williamson, 2025)

God Teeth, the debut feature by Robbie C. Williamson—AKA Double Diamond Sun Body—is a dazzling, innovative slice of experimental cinema, one that shuns conventional narrative in favour of a hypnogogic journey set on a drifting, abandoned ship, where four recently deceased souls share the details of their untimely deaths.  Williamson's film has already played at several international festivals, and it's nominated for the Discovery Award for Best Debut Feature at this year's Raindance Film Festival, where it screens on Thursday and Friday.  Friday marks the end of this year's festival, with the closing night gala taking the form of the international premiere of Camilla Guttner's The Academy (Die Akademie).

God Teeth’s protagonists—a 10-year-old girl named Boom, biker Albert, sports agent Rose, and family man Campbell—tell their stories piecemeal: Boom, a keen swimmer who excelled at holding her breath, attempts to come to terms with the death of her father while negotiating an underwater world populated by magical creatures; Albert recalls both a dark secret and his final moments speeding through a tunnel in his adopted home of Hong Kong; Rose, who formed a famous power couple with her footballer husband, outlines the mistake that led to her current state; and Campbell escaped a forest fire by climbing a 10,000-foot pole, but appears doomed to both stay there and refer to himself in the third person.

The quartet are up against the clock—incidentally, God Teeth runs to a wonderfully crisp 60 minutes—as a school of manta rays are circling the ship, intent on devouring the four souls' memories; with no realistic way of stopping this, it's vital that the stories are told before the rays descend on the vessel's inhabitants, else anyone who's failed to recount their demise will spend an eternity in purgatory (although drifting at sea on a ghost ship already seems suitably purgatorial).  As these tales unfold, there are occasional glimpses of a disembodied smile featuring the divine teeth of the title, with this disconcerting image recalling the equally unsettling mouth that forms the focus of Samuel Beckett's monologue Not I.

Made over the course of several years, this singular vision, quite remarkably, consists almost entirely of material Williamson found on the internet, with the characters' eerie voices created by text-to-speech software.  It's a clash of form and content, one that probably shouldn't work nearly as well as it does, but Williamson's painstaking efforts have resulted in a haunting, strangely moving piece of experimenta.  The film's ethereal, oeneiric nature sits completely at odds with the overconsumption of social media and fidgety browsing habits that were, presumably, necessary for its creation.  It's all very counterintuitive—as is the notion that the most original film of the year contains barely a frame of original footage.

Darren Arnold

Images: NYC Independent Film Festival

Raindance 2025: Our Happy Place (Paul Bickel, 2024)

For his feature debut, the Raindance-selected Our Happy Place, Paul Bickel has proved to be an extremely hands-on filmmaker, and a brief glance at the end credits reveals the extent of his involvement; beyond Bickel's duties as actor-writer-director, his responsibilities include editing, producing, makeup, cinematography, art direction, and recording the sound.  Bickel's multitasking is a direct result of the constraints imposed by COVID-19, as opposed to a rabid desire to control virtually every aspect of this handsome-looking production.  We should also note the fine contributions of Bickel's on-screen (and real-life) partner, Raya Miles, who not only impresses as the film's star but also serves as one of the producers.

Our Happy Place sees Miles and Bickel play, yep, Raya and Paul, a couple living in a remote cabin in the woods while the pandemic rages on; it's a beautiful house, one surrounded by jaw-dropping scenery, and there are certainly far worse places to spend lockdown.  But Raya and Paul's domestic situation is not a happy one: he's catatonic and bedridden, while Raya is his sole carer, and it's clear that she's mourning the carefree life the couple once enjoyed.  While the days may be rather gloomy, the nights are flat-out terrifying as Raya is plagued by a series of gruesome nightmares, each of which ends with her waking alone in a nearby forest, lying in a freshly-dug grave whose exact location changes with every bad dream.

In a bid to break the cycle, Raya, in a FaceTime chat with her worried friend Amy (Death Proof's Tracie Thoms), hatches a plan to stay awake until dawn, but this and subsequent efforts make no difference in terms of stopping Raya's nightly ordeal.  At Amy's prompting, Raya maps out the various grave sites, extrapolating that these plots are gradually getting closer to Paul and Raya's home.  Where this is all headed is quite the mystery—indeed, the film generally proves as discombobulating for the viewer as this experience is for Raya; only once, in a scene where Raya goes to pick up her mail, does Bickel show his hand a bit too much, but little is telegraphed in a work that keeps us guessing for the bulk of its runtime.

Some will struggle with Our Happy Place's somewhat repetitive nature as Raya endures night after night of torment, but it's a film that's worth sticking with.  The payoff is nicely rewarding, with Bickel eventually pulling the disparate threads together in a way that makes for a satisfying dénouement, one that put me briefly in mind of the very last scene in Twin Peaks: The Return.  There is no deus ex machina ending here, but rather a carefully thought-out conclusion that feels earned by all the groundwork laid out in the previous 80 minutes.  Filmed entirely in and around Bickel and Miles' eerily quiet southern Californian home, this tense low-budget horror stands as a robust example of pandemic-era indie filmmaking.

Darren Arnold

Images: Strike Media

Raindance 2025: Dui Shaw (Nuhash Humayun, 2024)

Bangladeshi filmmaker Nuhash Humayun's horror anthology Pett Kata Shaw deservedly won Best International Feature at the 2023 Raindance Film Festival, and his sequel, Dui Shaw, has been selected for this year's edition of the festival.  This unsettling work is set to screen on Sunday at London's Vue Piccadilly, which serves as the main venue for this year's Raindance.  Like its predecessor, Dui Shaw is formed of four creepy stories, each of which puts a modern slant on traditional Bengali folktales.  Also as with Pett Kata Shaw, Dui Shaw has played on Bangladeshi streaming platform Chorki, but the Raindance screening will provide a rare opportunity to see this handsomely mounted production in a cinema.

Dui Shaw begins with "Waqt", an episode in which a group of five young men are paid to desecrate a temple.  Following the crime, a pattern emerges in which daily prayer time coincides with the violent death of one of the perpetrators, until the last man standing thinks he's figured out a way to cheat fate.  Destiny also forms the basis of the second segment, "Bhaggo Bhalo", where a poor fortune teller is desperate to find the money to pay for his mother's kidney transplant.  The third episode, "Antara", centres on the housewife of the title, who seems to lose her memory in the wake of a tragic accident.  Finally, "Beshura" tells the story of a girl ostracised by her village on account of her lack of singing ability.

Of these episodes, "Waqt" is undoubtedly the pick of the bunch, although all are worth seeing; there are many small details here, including references to other episodes in both anthologies, that make Dui Shaw a good candidate for repeat viewing.  Having set a high bar with Pett Kata Shaw, Humayun's second foray into this territory doesn't quite live up to what came before, but perhaps that's because what was a highly novel setup now feels a bit more familiar.  That said, horror films from the subcontinent are still far from commonplace, and it's always refreshing to see such material evoked from a non-Western point of view.  Its lack of reliance on jump scares also sets Dui Shaw apart from most current genre offerings.

As with Pett Kata Shaw, a strong streak of black humour is common to all of the stories told here, and Humayun never overplays his hand when it comes to gore, opting for fleeting glimpses of gruesome scenes when other directors might be tempted to linger over the carnage.  Nuhash Humayun is a confident filmmaker who knows how to exercise restraint, and in a sense both Dui Shaw and its forerunner feel as if they have more in common with early 70s TV anthology series Dead of Night than they do with anything in contemporary screen entertainment.  Far from being a superfluous imitation of the original, Dui Shaw is a clever slice of story-driven supernatural horror; another instalment would be no bad thing.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

Raindance 2025: Hole (Dejan Babosek, 2024)

Hole, the new film from Dejan Babosek—whose previous features include WW2 tale Winter War and heist-gone-wrong flick Exit—screens at this year's Raindance Film Festival on Saturday.  Hole (original title: Jama) sees the Slovenian filmmaker take on the horror genre, and the result is a generally impressive if slightly over-familiar effort.  Horror is well represented at Raindance 2025, and for a very reasonable £75 you can obtain a pass that will give you access to all 16 horror films screening at the festival; Hole aside, these include Argento homage Saturnalia, Pett Kata Shaw sequel Dui Shaw, Australian horror-comedy Snatchers, interactive movie The Run, and ambitious slow-burner Our Happy Place.

Babosek's film is a three-hander in which his co-writers Lea Cok and Marko Plantan star as criminal couple Mia and Kevin, whose carefully-devised plan to rob the wealthy Ema (Darja Krhin) goes badly wrong when Mia goes off-script and brutally murders the woman, leaving the pair with a body to dispose of.  After driving to a secluded forest, Mia mercilessly taunts Kevin as he digs a hole, but when the time comes to place the corpse in the shallow grave, it has vanished from the car.  This, unsurprisingly, causes great panic as the pair frantically search the expansive woods for Ema, who, it transpires, isn't dead; despite her severe wounds, she's mustered just enough strength to instinctively edge away from her assailants.

From this point on, the film settles into its cat-and-mouse game as the injured, frightened Ema tries to evade her complacent pursuers—who have a gun to aid them—but as time progresses, Ema's senses begin to sharpen and she's able to use her meagre resources to good effect.  Conversely, Kevin and Mia's numerical advantage is essentially cancelled out by his drug use and her blind rage, leaving the contest finely balanced as the pair close in on their prey.  Babosek takes this limited setup and fashions a story that contains some real moments of tension, and there are several nice flourishes, particularly the striking scene in which the ailing, exhausted Ema comes face to face with an angel of light (Katja Fašink).

Clocking in at just over 70 minutes, this lean, taut film never outstays its welcome, and for the most part it's an admirable exercise in low-budget horror, one that is only slightly let down by a rather underwhelming ending—although that's the sort of, ahem, hole that many a film from the genre has fallen into.  It's a well-crafted work which boasts excellent cinematography, with Gregor Kitek—who also shot Winter War for Babosek and will return for the director's next film, Zadnji dnevi—expertly capturing the lush green forest in which the bulk of the film is set.  Much is demanded of—and indeed depends on—the three actors, but their committed performances ensure that Hole is never anything less than watchable.

Darren Arnold

Images: Jinga Films

It's Not Me (Leos Carax, 2024)

Leos Carax's magnificent, striking essay film It's Not Me is an experimental piece that delves into the mind of its elusive maker; one of cinema's most enigmatic auteurs, Carax has made just a handful of films in a career that spans more than four decades.  This 42-minute film—whose running time sees it classed as a feature in the US and UK but not in its director's native France—offers a welcome glimpse into Carax's private and professional worlds.  The film is a reflective, byzantine journey in which Carax mixes excerpts from his and others' movies with newly shot footage to create a patchwork view of his career and influences.  Carax has experienced his share of tragedy, but a more uplifting aspect of his personal life is represented by the inclusion of his daughter Nastya among It's Not Me's eclectic cast.

The film also features Denis Lavant, an actor who has starred in four of Carax's six previous feature films, who here reprises his role as the unnerving Monsieur Merde from anthology film Tokyo! and Holy Motors.  It's Not Me's narrative is at once chaotic and controlled, a testament to Carax's ability to weave disparate elements into a cohesive, satisfying whole.  The film is littered with nods to his earlier works, such as Les amants du Pont-Neuf, Annette and the aforementioned Holy Motors, as well as references to several cinematic luminaries, particularly Jean-Luc Godard, whose essay film aesthetic greatly informs the look, feel and sound of this self-portrait.  Like Godard's final film—the coruscating The Image Book—It's Not Me is a densely packed work, one whose brevity belies its depth and scope.

In terms of visual style, It's Not Me is almost slavishly Godardian, with its choppy edits, bold intertitles and occasionally confrontational imagery serving to recall the work of the most obtuse member of the New Wave—yet Carax's film possesses a warmth that was never present in the oeuvre of his cantankerous idol.  As Carax offsets black-and-white clips against hyper-saturated colour sequences, the film's diverse soundtrack—which includes several Bowie classics, one of which is hidden in a post-credits scene—further enhances the emotional impact of these eye-popping images.  Yet one of the most moving aspects of It's Not Me is Carax's own voiceover, which is both illuminating and self-deprecating as it offers some insight into this singular filmmaker's working methods and artistic touchstones.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Cannes Film Festival 2025: IFFR-Backed Selections

A spread of films and talent presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart and backed by the Hubert Bals Fund are once again a fixture of the Cannes lineup in 2025. Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón brings her family trilogy to a close with Romería, a moving story of love, yearning and family anguish, this time through an adolescent lens as orphan Marina travels to meet her grandparents in Spain. Erige Sehiri's second feature Promised Sky focuses on a pastor whose home becomes a refuge for Naney, a young mother seeking a better future, and Jolie, a strong-willed student, before an orphan girl arrives and tests their solidarity.

Italian-American filmmaker duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis continue their investigation into the legends and myths of Italian folklore with the surrealist Italy-set Western Testa o croce? (Heads or Tails?). The name derives from a bet between Buffalo Bill’s American cowboys (who visited Italy with their Wild West Show in 1890) and Italian cowboys over which team was better at taming wild horses. The film follows two young lovers on the run, played by rising French star Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Red Island) and Italy’s Alessandro Borghi (The Eight Mountains), with John C. Reilly co-starring as Buffalo Bill.

Renowned Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada has made a number of highly acclaimed features across the last fifteen years dealing with “domestic disequilibrium”, including Harmonium (2016)—which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes—A Girl Missing (2019), The Real Thing (2020) and Love Life (2022). Inspired by real cases in Japan, his latest, Love on Trial, follows Mai, a rising J-Pop idol whose big break is threatened when she falls in love, violating the “no love” clause in her contract. The project was presented at CineMart in 2022, where it picked up the IFFR Young Selectors Award.

March is mourning his wife Nat—who has recently passed away due to dust pollution—when he discovers her spirit has returned by possessing the vacuum cleaner. So begins the premise of Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s unique, playful, genre-mixing debut A Useful Ghost (pictured top). Boonbunchachoke’s short Red Aninsri; Or, Tiptoeing on the Still Trembling Berlin Wall won the Junior Jury award at Locarno in 2020. A Useful Ghost was supported by the HBF+Europe: Minority Co-production Support scheme in 2023, where it received €60,000 of production financing.

Source: IFFR

Image: THE PR FACTORY

Cannes Film Festival 2025: Belgian Selections

Several Belgian-funded titles will be screening at this month's Cannes Film Festival (13–24 May), including Cédric Klapisch's Colours of Time, Sylvain Chomet's The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol and Momoko Seto's Dandelion's Odyssey. In Colours of Time, four cousins discover they share a mysterious family history; in 1895, their ancestor Adèle, then aged 21, leaves her hometown to search for her mother in a Paris bustling with newfound avant-garde creativity. As her descendants retrace her steps, they unravel Adèle's past. The two timelines of 1895 and 2024 intertwine and collide, confronting the cousins’ contemporary attitudes with life in late 19th-century Paris, leaving everyone’s future forever changed.

Animated Luxembourgish co-production The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol focuses on the eponymous author. At the height of his fame, Pagnol is commissioned by the editor-in-chief of a major women’s magazine to write a literary serial, in which he is free to recount his childhood. As he pens the opening pages, the child he once was—little Marcel—suddenly appears before him. In fellow animated title Dandelion's Odyssey, four dandelion achenes that survive a series of nuclear explosions are propelled into the cosmos. After crash-landing on an unknown planet, they set out in search of soil where their species might survive. However, they must face countless obstacles: the elements, fauna, flora, the climate.

Source/images: THE PR FACTORY

Summer's Camera (Divine Sung, 2025)

Divine Sung's feature debut Summer's Camera, which had its world premiere at this year's BFI Flare, is a charming coming-of-age tale that examines the themes of first love and grief.  This Korean-set film follows Summer, a teenager who becomes enamoured with Yeonwoo, the standout football player at her high school.  Summer—who has a wonderfully analogue hobby in the form of film photography—is seldom spotted without the camera of the title, which once belonged to her father and houses a roll of film he began before his untimely death.  Quite understandably, Summer can't bring herself to take the final few photographs.

This changes, however, once Yeonwoo quite literally enters the frame, stirring emotions in Summer that inspire her to click the shutter of the Nikon until the film runs out.  Once the photographs are developed, Summer studies both her shots of Yeonwoo and the pictures taken by her dad, and in the latter set she notices a man she doesn't recognise.  It's not exactly the severed ear that kickstarts the events of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, but given that Summer seems unconvinced by the official version of her father's death—it's said he died in a car crash—the stage appears to be set for a mystery in which she will play detective.

Yet Divine Sung proceeds to wrongfoot her audience by having Summer track down the mystery man—who, it transpires, owns a hair salon—in short order, leaving the film to unfold as a character study, one that deftly captures the peculiar combination of joy and awkwardness that is so often a feature of first love.  Sung is aided by a note-perfect performance from Kim Si-a as Summer; hitherto best known for her prominent supporting role in the Netflix film Kill Boksoon, Kim is entirely convincing as the high schooler attempting to reconcile the emotions of a grieving daughter with those of a new girlfriend.

Sung's movie is beautifully shot, with much emphasis on the warm, tactile nature of "real" photography as Summer carefully handles her camera equipment.  The film possesses an oneiric quality that serves to place Summer in a tolerant, gracious society, with this ethereal atmosphere only undercut by the incongruous punk rock songs that bookend the film.  Yet such dissonance reflects both the protagonist's jumble of feelings and the difficulties of navigating those oh-so-tricky teenage years.  Summer's Camera may look controlled and measured, but an undercurrent of divine chaos lies beneath its sweet, stately surface.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI