Those Whom Death Refused (Flora Gomes, 1988)

Bissau-Guinean filmmaker Flora Gomes' Those Whom Death Refused (original title: Mortu Nega), which screens in a restored print on Saturday at the BFI London Film Festival, is an arresting portrait of independence and its aftermath.  This keystone of postcolonial African cinema blends documentary techniques with an almost Malick-like lyricism as it focuses on one woman’s ordeal, all the while prioritising mood over conventional narrative.  Set during the Guinea-Bissau war of independence against Portugal and the turbulent years that followed, the haunting Those Whom Death Refused expertly conveys the weight of history.

The 1970s-set film follows Diminga (Bia Gomes), who edges her way through war-ravaged landscapes to find her soldier husband Sako (Tunu Eugenio Almada).  Through Diminga's eyes, Flora Gomes deftly builds a story that examines the psychological burden of conflict on women, and, by bringing Diminga to the forefront of the film, neatly subverts our expectations of an 80s war movie.  Once the war has been won, drought and political instability provide a much-needed reminder that the struggle—albeit one of a very different kind—continues long after the colonial powers have left, as the new nation finds its feet.

The first half of the film is a lean, taut affair, one that underlines the asymmetrical nature of the guerrilla forces taking on the Portuguese, with the latter's helicopters raining down bullets on a makeshift army scampering across the ground.  While it's obvious that the budget for Guinea-Bissau's very first feature film is not particularly high, the action scenes are well mounted, and Gomes manages the tension with style.  The film loosens its grip once both the war and its combat scenes are over, with Gomes observing, with an at times near-ethnographic eye, a newly postcolonial country gingerly feeling its way into independence.

As the film gives way to this more contemplative tone, Gomes captures the landscape of post-war Guinea-Bissau as an almost stone tape-like vessel of memory, with sweeping shots of the countryside reflecting both the scars of war and the immutability of the land.  While Those Whom Death Refused runs to a relatively brief 93 minutes, the film is measured, at times slow, which might make the going tough for those unaccustomed to such cinematic grammar.  But this elliptical rhythm dictates the pace of the storytelling, carving out space for a stillness that acts as a most welcome counterpoint to the political Sturm und Drang.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Balearic (Ion de Sosa, 2025)

Saint John’s Eve provides the backdrop for Basque director Ion de Sosa's Balearic, which screens tomorrow at the BFI London Film Festival.  La Noche de San Juan, as it's known in Spain, is a midsummer celebration held on the night of 23rd June.  It has arcane roots, fusing ancient pagan sun rituals that pay homage to the year's longest day with Christian traditions marking the birth of Saint John the Baptist.  Saint John’s Eve is especially popular in coastal areas, where revellers gather to light huge bonfires symbolising purification, prior to bathing in the sea, which represents both Jesus' baptism and the concept of renewal.

Balearic gets off to a strong start as four teenagers—three girls and one boy—wander into the grounds of an isolated, seemingly unoccupied mansion.  After some casual chatter, the group decide to take a dip in the villa’s pool, but their fun is cut short when three vicious guard dogs appear.  One of the girls, who happens to be out of the water when the dogs arrive, is savagely attacked and suffers severe injuries.  Although her friends manage to drag her back into the pool, the dogs—curiously unwilling to enter the water—block all available exits, leaving the teens stranded and terrified as one of them slowly bleeds out.

As we're waiting to see how the situation is resolved, the film abruptly cuts to another villa, seemingly not far from the first, where a group of adult friends have gathered to mark the holiday by eating, drinking, and talking.  These people—for whom the label "idle rich" seems wholly appropriate—appear curiously detached from the outside world and strangely indifferent to a wildfire that has started in a nearby forest; one surreal scene shows a firefighting helicopter replenishing its supplies by scooping water from the pool around which these partygoers are sitting.  Alas, if only it had visited another house to do this.

De Sosa's emphasis on both fire and water—two elements that feature so prominently in Saint John's Eve celebrations—forms the foundation of a social critique in which one generation sits pretty while the next is, quite literally, left to the dogs.  This is an intelligent, risky piece of filmmaking, one in which the bold decision to move from the teens' ordeal to something much more diffuse and elusive—the poolside scenes featuring the adults feel almost loose-limbed—might alienate some.  But this nagging, unsettling work, superbly shot on tactile 16mm by Cristina Neira, retains a peculiar grip throughout its brief running time.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

The Deal (Jean-Stéphane Bron, 2025)

The Deal is a six-part TV series that tells the story of the 2015 US-Iran nuclear negotiations, which took place in the very neutral state that is Switzerland.  Focusing on Geneva-based chief of protocol Alexandra Weiss (Belgian actress Veerle Baetens), the show—the first two episodes of which screen today at the BFI London Film Festival—provides an engrossing insight into these sensitive diplomatic talks.  The entire series is directed by Jean-Stéphane Bron, and this material feels a particularly good fit for a filmmaker who became known for his political documentaries—including L'expérience Blocher—before branching into fiction.

Weiss is a sort of diplomatic factotum, and the early stretches of the show focus on her seemingly endless duties as she attempts to smooth the ground for the negotiations.  She's serious, measured, and does her utmost to remain unruffled—even when being talked down to by Fenella Woolgar's ghastly EU delegate.  It is difficult to imagine the rather inscrutable Alexandra having any kind of private life, but this all changes with the introduction of her ex, Iranian scientist-engineer Payam Sanjabi (Arash Marandi), who has been released from prison so that he can play a role in the discussions; suddenly, we see a different side to her.

Sanjabi's arrival demonstrates how the series deftly combines the personal with the political, an aspect of the show that is underlined by a fraught telephone call between the US Secretary of State (Juliet Stevenson) and her aging, ailing mother.  The ever-dependable Stevenson is good value in the part, and her scenes with her Iranian counterpart (Anthony Azizi)—who doesn't consider her his equal—crackle and fizz in a way that adds real dramatic heft to the proceedings.  There's also a notable role for André Marcon, an actor perhaps best known for his work with Jacques Rivette, including the epic two-part film Joan the Maid.

But The Deal is glued together by Veerle Baetens, who excels as the put-upon Alexandra.  She's an assured, magnetic presence, and one suspects that her recent experience behind the camera—her directorial debut, the Belgian-Dutch co-production Het smelt, won Best Flemish Film at last year's Magritte Awards—has helped her further refine her technique as a performer.  Baetens carries the series with this complex character, one who must always remain impartial as the often bullish participants—who appear more concerned with not losing face than reaching an agreement—constantly threaten to derail the negotiations.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Sirāt (Óliver Laxe, 2025)

As with Galician director Óliver Laxe's previous film, Fire Will Come, his latest effort, Sirāt, will screen at the BFI IMAX as part of the BFI London Film Festival, where it plays on Monday in the Dare strand.  Following its outing on the UK's biggest screen, Sirāt will receive a second showing on Tuesday at the ICA.  The fact that both Fire Will Come and Sirāt have been programmed in the IMAX says much about Laxe's films, which are immersive, transportive experiences.  Yet this new work is quite a different beast from its predecessor: Fire Will Come exemplified slow cinema, whereas Sirāt possesses a tense, driving narrative.

In Sirāt, Sergi López delivers a knockout turn as Luis, a father desperately searching for his missing daughter, Mar.  Luis' quest has taken him and his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), from their native Spain to southern Morocco, where they attend an outdoor rave in the hope of learning something about Mar's whereabouts.  As the pair circulate through the party, handing out fliers and questioning indifferent attendees while blaring trance music hampers their efforts, the scene feels extremely familiar; it’s clear that everyone Luis approaches will barely glance at the photo before claiming never to have seen his daughter.

The missing person trope has been heavily overused in cinema, but here Laxe cleverly uses it to draw the viewer in.  After Luis notices a group of five people sequestered from the rest of the partygoers, he decides to ask them about Mar.  The answer is quite predictable, but there is mention of another rave that might be happening much deeper in the desert.  The group seems rather guarded when Luis asks if they’ll be attending, and the current event is abruptly broken up by soldiers declaring a state of emergency.  As all the vehicles line up, waiting to leave, the quintet flee the scene, and Luis, urged on by Esteban, follows them.

The father and son—accompanied by their very cute dog, Pipa—are in a small van that is not ideally equipped for the Moroccan desert, yet they generally manage to keep pace with the two much larger trucks as the caravan treks through increasingly inhospitable terrain.  As Laxe builds this strange, isolated world, it becomes easy to forget about the absent Mar—and you soon realise that the hunt for her is little more than a MacGuffin.  Shot on tactile Super 16mm stock, the shattering Sirāt is a quite brilliant piece of sensorial filmmaking, one punctuated by a couple of jaw-dropping moments that will shake you to your very core.

Darren Arnold

Images: Pyramide Films

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025)

Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens' documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which was selected for this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, continues its run on the fest circuit with screenings at the BFI London Film Festival, where it plays today and tomorrow as part of the Debate strand.  It's now been more than 30 years since David Lynch stepped in to save the production of Almereyda's black-and-white vampire flick Nadja—Lynch funded the entire film after the initial financing fell through—a witty, highly stylised work that brought its director into the arthouse spotlight.

Since then, Almereyda has continued making narrative features, several of which—including his most recent effort, the biopic Tesla—have starred Ethan Hawke, but he's also no stranger to documentary, having directed the likes of This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World and Escapes.  John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, co-directed with Courtney Stephens (Invention, The American Sector), sees Almereyda once again embrace non-fiction as he and Stephens essay the strange tale of the dolphin-bothering neuroscientist of the title, whose work inspired a classic video game.

Lilly is best remembered for both his invention of the isolation tank and his attempts at establishing communication between humans and dolphins.  It is hard to say which of these projects was the more outlandish: the former has endured as a means for those seeking sensory deprivation, while the latter gained a lot of publicity yet yielded no notable legacy.  The received wisdom about dolphins is that they are highly intelligent mammals that possess advanced cognitive skills, but Lilly believed they were also capable of language acquisition, and conducted countless cruel experiments on these fine marine animals.

If floatation tanks and talking dolphins aren't sufficiently outré, also consider Lilly's LSD and ketamine-fuelled insistence that there was a cosmic entity—the Earth Coincidence Control Office, or ECCO, of the title—managing earth's inhabitants.  Lilly coasted through his life and career on the back of a seemingly bottomless trust fund, and died in 2001 at the age of 86.  What, if any, value can be placed on his crackpot theories is something Almereyda and Stephens appear to be on the fence about, yet this doesn't prevent John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office from being a hugely entertaining and engrossing 90 minutes.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Fwends (Sophie Somerville, 2025)

Fwends, the debut feature from Australian filmmaker Sophie Somerville, follows twentysomething friends Em (Emmanuelle Mattana) and Jessie (Melissa Gan), who embark on an often surreal odyssey through Melbourne as they attempt to reconnect with each other over the course of a weekend.  Somerville's film—which screens tomorrow and Friday at the BFI London Film Festival as part of the Laugh strand—taps into the same vein as Mike Leigh's somewhat overlooked 1997 film Career Girls, a deeply profound exploration of two old college flatmates reuniting after six years of adult life has put their friendship on hold.

As with Leigh's a deceptively slight film—which also unfolds during a single weekend—Fwends, at least in its early stages, uses humour to mask the pathos.  The story begins with Jessie and Em searching for each other in a Melbourne Metro station; Em is visiting from Sydney, where she has a demanding job at a law firm, and Melburnian Jessie, who has spent several years travelling the world, is dealing with a difficult breakup from her boyfriend.  It soon transpires that Em has been experiencing sexual harassment at work, and she's unsure what—if anything—she should do about it, lest it derail the career she's built for herself.

Both women, it seems, could really use this break from their respective worries—although it's not clear what they'll do, as Jessie has not made any plans for the weekend, nor has she gone to the trouble of organising suitable bedding for her houseguest.  But the situation regarding the sleeping arrangements becomes moot once the pair, upon returning from dinner, find they are locked out of Jessie's apartment; Jessie thinks she's left her keys in the restaurant, which has now closed for the day, and while her ex still has a key to the flat, he's since relocated to Brisbane.  Cue an After Hours-style schlep around nocturnal Melbourne.

Gan and Mattana—both of whom are terrific in what is essentially a two-hander—are given writing credits alongside Somerville, and this alludes to the Leigh-like improvisational nature of the project.  But Fwends is no pale imitation; rather, Somerville's own cinematic voice is present here, and she's expertly captured the awkwardness that comes with seeing an old friend for the first time in years.  Somerville highlights both the silent gap that lies between these women and the painful inevitability of this time-induced schism, and her film is infused with a melancholy that makes the final shot almost unbearably poignant.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI