Row (Matthew Losasso, 2025)

Matthew Losasso’s feature debut Row received its world premiere at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, where it proceeded to win the award for Best UK Feature, a category that offered some stiff competition from the likes of White Guilt, Breakwater, The Lonely Musketeer, and festival opener Heavyweight.  Row is a psychological thriller, one that wouldn't have looked out of place in Raindance 2025's packed horror strand, which included other edge-of-your-seat fare such as Slovenian three-hander Hole, Argento homage Saturnalia, Pett Kata Shaw sequel Dui Shaw, and Australian horror-comedy Snatchers.

Row opens in medias res, with barely-alive Megan (Bella Dayne) washing up on an Orkney beach in the wake of a catastrophic attempt at rowing the Atlantic.  Megan appears to be the sole survivor of this ill-fated venture, and she's cared for in a makeshift hospital on Hoy as DCI MacKelly (Tam Dean Burn) asks her to recall what happened on the open seas.  Via a series of flashbacks, we learn of the fraught dynamic between the crew members, which, Megan aside, include Lexi (Sophie Skelton), Daniel (Akshay Khanna), and late addition Mike (co-writer Nick Skaugen), who is subbing for Lexi's injured boyfriend Adam (Mark Strepan).

Megan's memory appears to be hazy at best, and as time goes on it becomes clear that MacKelly's attempts to ascertain what happened between Newfoundland and Scotland are informed by the suspicion that Megan may be the author of this small-scale maritime disaster.  Dayne, who received a nomination for Best Performance in a UK Feature at Raindance—the prize went to The Lonely Musketeer's Edward Hogg—is good value as the quite inscrutable Megan, while Burn brings a welcome gravitas to his role and overcomes initial fears that he may have been slightly miscast as the grim-faced police detective.

Yet to focus on the scenes that take place around Megan's sickbed is to rather miss the point of Row, whose raison d'être is to showcase a series of exhilarating set-pieces featuring a tiny vessel at the mercy of the ocean.  Losasso taps into the brutal, unforgiving nature of offshore waters, creating a real sense of isolation as the seascape continually threatens to overwhelm these sailors—none of whom appear psychologically equipped for such an undertaking.  With a runtime of nearly two hours, the audacious Row is a taut, engrossing thriller, one whose clever structure and well-wrought action sequences belie its status as a debut feature.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

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

Raindance 2024: Dog War

Touching and action packed, Raindance selection Dog War follows a team of war-hardened, canine-loving combat veterans fighting to stop the dog meat trade in South Korea. Covertly and overtly, they infiltrate hidden farms and markets to rescue as many dogs as possible. The film’s wide range of interviewees—activists, politicians, dog meat farmers and vendors—provide a 360-degree view of this complex issue. Dog War is not just about dogs, but the clash of perspectives about what is right, ethical, and even natural or cultural.

Director Andrew Abrahams: “My films often focus on hidden stories of suffering, places where boundaries or assumptions collide, and where new life can spring forth. Dog War can be intense and disturbing, but avoids demonizing a people or culture—or showing the brutalization of dogs, which could turn off viewers. Rather, it gives us a window into a country in transition, asking universal questions about animal rights vs. human livelihood, heroism vs. vigilantism, and the breach of contract with man’s best friend.”

The dog meat trade is most widespread in China, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Nagaland in northern India. This trade is well-organized, with high numbers of dogs being stolen or taken from the streets, transported over long distances and brutally slaughtered. In South Korea, dogs are also intensively farmed for the meat trade. Dogs are also known to be eaten in certain African countries, but nothing compares to the sheer scale of the trade across Asia.

Source/images: ARPR

Raindance 2024: Sting Like a Bee

It is now almost twenty years since Leone Balduzzi—better known by the mononym Leone—made his short film Splendida Giornata, and in the intervening years he's directed several other shorts including French Toast and Tram Stories.  The sometimes large gaps between his films can be accounted for by both Leone's prolific work as a photographer and his role as the publisher of C41 magazine.  With Sting Like a Bee, Balduzzi steps behind the camera for his first feature as director; this assured debut, which was filmed in Leone's native Italy, is one of the selections for this year's Raindance Film Festival, where it has been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature award.  

Sting Like a Bee unfolds in and around Leone's hometown of San Salvo, a southern Italian resort on the Adriatic coast.  The film's opening stretch focuses on the Piaggio Ape, that distinctive three-wheeled light commercial vehicle favoured by many Italian youths; in Italy, you only need a moped licence—available to those aged 14 and over—to drive one.  The Ape ("bee") is basically a scooter with a cab, and it's the slightly younger sibling of Piaggio's ever-popular Vespa ("wasp"), with both models having remained in continuous production since the mid-late 1940s—a period when, with the economy having tanked on account of WW2, Italians were in need of cheap transport options.  

Apes aren't so cheap nowadays, and the youths featured in Sting Like a Bee spend much time and money on all kinds of after-market modifications for their prized vehicles.  As Leone goes about interviewing a selection of San Salvo's Ape enthusiasts, Sting Like a Bee feels very much like a garden variety documentary—albeit a highly engaging one.  But once the film has settled down into familiar territory, a very different picture emerges, one in which the director sets about casting some of these Ape-mad teens in a film centring on first love.  Thus, Sting Like a Bee morphs into a hybrid work where these young adults attempt to navigate the choppy, uncharted waters of dating and romance.  

In a sense, the film's slippery blend of reality and fiction recalls Ben Petrie's The Heirloom—another Raindance 2024 title—in that there are times when it isn't clear if what we are watching is scripted or simply documented.  Parallels can also be drawn between Leone's film and Gaspar Noé's Lux Æterna: each work was commissioned as a piece of branded content—Piaggio sponsored Sting Like a Bee, while Noé received funding from Yves Saint Laurent—before it veered off into very different territory from what its financer had expected.  This charming, engrossing film plays on Thursday, when it is showing at the Genesis cinema; the screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Leone.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Raindance 2024: The Heirloom

Having had its world premiere at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam—where it took its place alongside the likes of Jonathan Glazer's Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's horror The Soul Eater, Kaouther Ben Hania's documentary Four Daughters, and Sean Durkin's biopic The Iron Claw—Ben Petrie's The Heirloom plays at the Raindance Film Festival tomorrow, when it screens at London's Prince Charles Cinema.  In terms of the festival's prizes, The Heirloom has been nominated in the same categories as Dorka Vermes' Árni, with both films up for Best Debut Director, Best Performance in a Debut, and the Discovery Award for Best Debut Feature.    

Prior to The Heirloom, Ben Petrie had made half a dozen shorts, the most recent of which is also the best known: Her Friend Adam (see trailer below).  Heavily reliant on a DIY aesthetic, Petrie's feature debut feels like a very natural progression from his short film work.  In The Heirloom, the director himself stars as Eric, a filmmaker labouring over a script he started some years earlier.  As in Her Friend Adam, the writer-director's real-life partner Grace Glowicki plays Petrie's character's companion, and as Eric toils over his screenplay, Glowicki's Allie is desperate to get a rescue dog.  Eric has some misgivings about such an endeavour but eventually agrees, and the wheels are set in motion.

With lockdown looming, the race is on to secure a dog before the pandemic makes such a transaction impossible, and Allie and Eric arrange to rehome Milly, a whippet from the Dominican Republic.  Given the restrictions that are in place on account of COVID, Allie and Eric need to collect Milly directly from the airport; cue a vaguely threatening nocturnal scene in which the couple meet their new pet on the wintry tarmac.  Once this tense sequence passes, Milly is taken to Eric and Allie's home and, as you might expect, it takes some time for her to get used to these new surroundings.  Milly is a sweet girl, but one lacking in confidence, and Allie and Eric work steadily to integrate the dog into their lives. 

As Milly becomes established in the couple's home, Eric—who now firmly states his desire to achieve a work-life balance—abandons his moribund screenplay in favour of making a film about the couple's relationship with their pet.  From this point on, The Heirloom turns into a most slippery metafiction, one in which we're never entirely sure if what we're watching is simply the film, or the film within that film.  There are a few clues here and there—a stray boom mic, multiple takes of Allie reacting to Milly urinating on the floor, the diegetic noise of a drone engine as it films an overhead shot—but it says much about Ben Petrie's filmmaking that The Heirloom works so fluidly.  The screening will be followed by a Q&A.

Darren Arnold

Images: IFFR

Raindance 2024: Árni

Dorka Vermes' debut feature Árni has already enjoyed outings at both the Hong Kong International Film Festival and La Biennale (the film was developed by Venice's Biennale College Cinema initiative), and it continues to play the fest circuit with a screening at this year's Raindance Film Festival.  As of now, Raindance has been moved from its traditional autumn berth in the festival calendar, and the 2024 edition will occupy a midsummer slot, running June 19–28; shifting the festival away from the crowded autumn season seems a sensible move, although Raindance 2024 is very much a pilot edition as far as its timing is concerned.  A ticket for Wednesday's UK premiere of Árni includes a nice extra in the form of a Q&A session with the film's director.

Vermes, who previously directed the short films Anyák napja and Alba Vulva, has made a remarkably assured film in Árni , in which the lead role is played by the excellent Péter Turi—an actor who provided the inspiration for both the title character and film.  Turi's Árni is a handyman at a travelling circus, and he appears to be the only non-family member in the setup.  The circus itself is a truly joyless spectacle, one populated by forlorn animals and grim-faced humans, and Árni appears to have more in common with the creatures he cares for than the family circle he sits on the fringes of.  Árni is a hard worker: in addition to looking after the circus' animals, he is tasked with various other jobs such as putting up advertising boards and recruiting local manpower to help erect the big top.   

While Árni says very little, it's clear that he's a much deeper thinker than most of his colleagues, who are content to party the night away once the day's business has been concluded (it doesn't take very long to tot up the daily sales of souvenir pictures and bags of popcorn).  But Árni's quotidian drudge is interrupted by the arrival of a python, who the family have ordered for the circus' reptile show segment; the snake is way bigger than expected, and as such the owners of the circus are wary of incorporating it into their act.  Yet Árni forms a bond with the reptile, whose presence seems to unnerve many of the other workers.  The film's final stretch sees it take a sharp left turn as it moves into an extended trance-like sequence in which Árni, for once, takes centre stage in his work milieu.   

I'm not sure if this closing passage is entirely successful but, for the most part, Árni is a highly compelling work.  Wednesday's screening of the film takes place at the Curzon Soho—one of five London venues being used for this year's festival (the others being the Genesis, Prince Charles and Curzon Mayfair cinemas, with the industry hub based at Wonderville on Haymarket).  Made under the auspices of none other than Béla Tarr (Werckmeister Harmonies, The Turin Horse), who, seven years ago, was the subject of an exhibition and retrospective at Amsterdam's EYE Filmmuseum, Árni is nominated for several awards at this year's Raindance: Best Debut Director, Best Performance in a Debut, and the Discovery Award for Best Debut Feature.  Don't bet against it winning at least one of these prizes.  

Darren Arnold

Images: Proton Cinema

Raindance 2024: Eternal You

What if a person's death did not mean their end of life? What if their loved ones could still talk to them long after their body has been cremated or is lying lifeless in the ground? Eternal You—which screens tomorrow as part of this year's Raindance Film Festival—accompanies people who use AI to ‘connect with the dead’. Offering a powerful commentary on the commercialisation of grief, from the perspectives of ethicists and technologists to entrepreneurs, the film follows Joshua who chats day and night with the digital clone of his deceased first love and lets her take part in his everyday life; Christi, who just wants confirmation that her late best friend is doing well in heaven, but has a harrowing experience with his AI likeness; and Jang Ji-Sung, who meets the VR clone of her daughter. 

The inventors of the services deny any responsibility for the profound psychological consequences of those experiences. Numerous competitors hope for a lucrative market, with major players such as Microsoft and Amazon entering the race for afterlife-related services. A new, secular narrative of salvation through ‘digital immortality’ is emerging, as religious and collective forms of mourning lose relevance. From the multi-award-winning directors of The Cleaners (2018), Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, Eternal You is an exploration of a profound human desire and the consequences of turning the dream of immortality into a product—and in turn the possibility of the end of human finitude.

Source: Margaret London

Images: Max Preiss / Konrad Waldmann

Raindance 2023: White Plastic Sky

Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó's first animated feature White Plastic Sky is no stranger to this year's festival circuit, with the film having already played at the likes of the Berlinale, Annecy IAFF, and Vancouver IFF.  As 2023 heads into its last couple of months, White Plastic Sky shows no signs of letting up on its globetrotting as it takes its place among the selections for this year's Raindance Film Festival, where it screens tomorrow, which marks the close of this year's edition.  As is not uncommon with Raindance titles, White Plastic Sky's screening—which takes place at 2 p.m. at London's Vue Piccadilly cinema—will be followed by a Q&A session with the filmmakers; given the thought-provoking nature of Bánóczki and Szabó's movie, the post-film discussion should be among the most fascinating at this year's festival.    

Set in a climate change-ravaged Budapest a century from now, White Plastic Sky's world is one in which every human has a maximum lifespan of 50 years and, upon hitting this milestone, each person undergoes a procedure that sees them transform into a tree, which in turn is used to sustain the current human population; as 50th birthday experiences go, this one is a far cry from a champagne afternoon tea or a short break in a boutique hotel.  Then there are those who opt to check out even earlier, as is the case with Nora (Zsófia Szamosi), a young thirtysomething who has recently lost a child and—shortly thereafter—the will to live.  Nora's sacrifice is gratefully welcomed by the authorities but, as you would expect, her husband Stefan (Tamás Keresztes) has a very different response when he learns of his grieving wife's decision.  

The situation is made all the more urgent by Stefan only hearing this news after Nora has attended the clinic to commence her transformation, and she has less than a day left before her human form is gone forever.  Stefan works as a psychologist, one whose work mainly involves getting patients (and those close to them) to accept what's coming as the fateful half-century approaches.  Yet all of Stefan's professional acumen goes out of the window when he's faced with Nora's imminent death, and in his denial he insists on finding a way to halt a process that is widely regarded as irreversible.  While Stefan fares particularly badly when it comes to taking the same advice he's been dishing out for years, he is at least able to use his standing to blag his way into the secure facility where Nora is being treated.

Via countless beautifully-rendered backgrounds, Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó have created a credible, immersive environment, one that is worryingly plausible given that humans are on a collision course with the natural world.  While one would hope that the planet will not be in this condition when it comes to the year 2123, White Plastic Sky is a speculative fiction that doesn't feel as outlandish as, well, virtually any 20th-century sci-fi movie did when first released; it is not so much that cinema has slowed down for us, but rather we who have rapidly moved closer to such predictions—and not in a good way.  The directors' decision to employ rotoscoping—that most divisive of animation styles—will either engage or alienate, depending on whether you view the technique as adding or removing a human layer; indeed, this existentialist eco-thriller raises many questions regarding both its form and content.        

Darren Arnold

Images: Films Boutique

Raindance 2023: Aurora's Sunrise

Inna Sahakyan's latest documentary deals with the Armenian genocide, and while it's certainly not the first film to do so—previous notable efforts on the topic include Atom Egoyan's Ararat and the Taviani brothers' The Lark Farm—it does take a novel approach to the subject.  For Aurora's Sunrise mixes animation with interview footage of its title character, a genocide survivor who starred in a 1919 silent movie which also features prominently here; as is sadly the case for around three quarters of original silent-era films, the movie was lost to the sands of time, although fragments of it were recovered shortly after Aurora's death in 1994.  Having already played at several film festivals including Tallinn Black Nights and the Netherlands' Movies that Matter Festival—where it won the Audience Award and received a special mention in the Camera Justitia competition—Aurora's Sunrise continues its festival run with a screening tomorrow at London's Raindance Film Festival, where the film will be followed by a Q&A session with producer Vardan Hovhannisyan.

Aurora's Sunrise comes hot on the heels of Sahakyan's previous documentary, the Dutch co-production Mel, which followed a record-breaking Armenian weightlifter who hastily left his home country after being publicly outed as transgender.  There's an obvious parallel between the stories of Mel Daluzyan—who sought asylum in the Netherlands—and Aurora Mardiganian: in both cases, extreme persecution led to a desperate need to flee Armenia.  Yet while the vendetta against Mel was of a highly personal nature, Aurora was one of countless civilians facing the Ottoman Empire's systematic annihilation of its ethnic Armenian population.  Estimates vary, but it is generally accepted that roughly half of all Armenian Christians were killed in the Constantinople-ordered slaughter—yet the genocide has consistently struggled to be recognised as such.  While there is no denying that the catastrophe was obscured by the fog of the Great War, the world has since had over a century to acknowledge what happened in eastern Anatolia.

The film picks up the story of the 14-year-old Aurora as she attempts to outwit the Ottoman troops.  Having been forced on a death march towards Syria, Aurora—who has lost her entire family—is subsequently kidnapped and put into slavery, but she engineers an unlikely escape and eventually edges her way to Norway, from where she boards a ship bound for New York.  On arriving in the US, Aurora lodges with an Armenian family, and it isn't long before her incredible story is told through the newspapers, which in turn leads to an offer from Hollywood.  While a movie studio's interest in this miraculous journey to freedom isn't too surprising—after all, cinema's enthusiasm for a ripped-from-the-headlines drama is by no means a recent phenomenon—a more outlandish development occurs when the filmmakers propose that Aurora stars as herself.  Thus this survivor of a massacre, who is now aged 16, has to relive her nightmares for the sake of the movie cameras; while the atrocities Aurora both experienced and witnessed are diluted for the screen adaptation, there's still something very troubling about this arrangement.

The resulting film, Auction of Souls (AKA Ravished Armenia), proved to be a runaway success on its release in early 1919, so much so that some cinemas were able to charge a whopping $10 for a ticket at a time when admission generally cost a quarter.  The surviving footage, which adds up to roughly the equivalent of two reels of silent film, was carefully restored and edited into a cohesive piece of work, and clips from this are judiciously spliced into Aurora's Sunrise.  Despite its age and sanitised representation of the genocide, Auction of Souls is surprisingly strong meat, with an all-female mass crucifixion scene proving sufficiently disturbing even before you learn, via an interview with Aurora, what really happened to these women.  Despite the trauma that Aurora Mardiganian would likely have suffered while making Auction of Souls, the film did at least bring the story of the Armenian genocide to a wide audience.  More than a century on, Sahakyan's harrowing, moving documentary serves the same much-needed purpose.     

Darren Arnold

Images: CAT&Docs

Raindance 2023: Satan Wants You

With a title as lurid as the name given to the subject it examines—the so-called satanic panic of the 1980s—Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams' documentary looks, at first glance, as if it might be a worryingly glib kitchfest that makes light of mass hysteria; such sensational labelling can easily mask the fact that this particular moral panic was anything but a laughing matter for those whose lives were destroyed by spurious allegations.  Thankfully, it turns out that this thoroughly absorbing film takes a respectful, but not overly reverent, approach as it digs into a dark and painful episode in Canadian and US history.  Having debuted at this year's SXSW Film Festival, Satan Wants You will have its UK premiere, quite fittingly, on Halloween at the Raindance Film Festival.  The film will be followed by a Q&A session with producer Melissa James, but the fun doesn't stop there: anyone who buys a ticket for Tuesday's screening will be given a complimentary wristband for entry to Raindance's Halloween party.

Satan Wants You is a Canadian production, and for much of its snappy running time its focus is on Victoria, that fine Vancouver Island city that has long since been saddled with a rather unfair, if somewhat amusing, soubriquet: home of the newly wed and nearly dead.  Back in the early 80s, however, a semi-affectionate nickname was the least of the British Columbia capital's problems, as one of its residents, Michelle Smith (née Proby), claimed that she had been abused by a Victoria-based satanic cult which numbered her late mother among its members.  Smith was an adult when she made these accusations, the supposed basis for which was unearthed by psychiatrist Larry Pazder.  Smith had been under Pazder's care for some time on account of a depressive episode brought on by a miscarriage, but it was approximately 600 hours of hypnosis over the course of 14 months that led to the assertions that would kick-start satanic panic—a name that might be funny if the reality wasn't quite so tragic.

Following the apparent surfacing of these hitherto-buried childhood memories, the doctor and his patient wrote a bestselling book—Michelle Remembers—detailing the five-year-old Smith's alleged ordeal, and the pair would go on to marry.  Horlor and Adams spend a good while examining the couple's relationship, and what emerges is a picture of a setup that, even at its best, was highly unethical.  As Smith and Pazder turned their professional arrangement into a personal one, a number of people close to the couple were hurt: Pazder's wife and children; and Smith's father and sisters.  Yet the unfortunate reach of the Smith–Pazder alliance would extend way beyond their respective family circles as satanic panic began to take hold; to date, it is estimated that some 12,000 unsubstantiated cases have been raised.  While it may be a tad harsh to blame Smith and Pazder's book for every one of these instances, there is little doubt that its publication sparked a hysteria, one that was largely supported by venal motives and, worse, may well have obscured actual abuse issues.

While both Michelle Remembers and the the recovered-memory technique employed by Pazder have now been discredited, this will prove cold comfort to those who found themselves on the business end of baseless allegations.  Larry Pazder died nearly 20 years ago, and Michelle Pazder—who was effectively satanic panic's patient zero—declined to take part in Satan Wants You, but Horlor and Adams' film is nevertheless packed with insightful interview subjects, with Michelle's younger sister Charyl proving the pick of the bunch.  While the filmmakers' position is fairly clear, they have been careful to include a range of opinions, and they steadily paint a picture of a climate of fear that would eventually spread beyond North America to other countries, including the Netherlands; just a few years ago, journalists from Dutch radio show Argos conducted a lengthy investigation into alleged organised ritual abuse, the findings of which were aired in an episode called Glasscherven en duistere rituelen.  The impressive Satan Wants You is an intense and engaging experience—but also a deeply chilling one, for reasons that have nothing to do with its title character.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Raindance 2023: Pett Kata Shaw

This terrific horror anthology sees Bangladeshi filmmaker Nuhash Humayun successfully splice the ancient and the modern, with the results taking the form of a quartet of deliciously creepy yarns which put a contemporary spin on traditional Bengali folktales.  While Humayun has assumed authorial control over the entirety of Pett Kata Shaw, it is not his first experience of portmanteau films, given that he previously directed the first of the eleven segments that constituted 2018 drama Sincerely Yours, Dhaka, which was selected as Bangladesh's entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2021 Oscars.  Pett Kata Shaw—which began life as a Web series on Bangla streaming platform Chorki—has already enjoyed outings at both Rotterdam and Fantasia, and it continues to play international festivals with a Halloween screening at this year's Raindance Film Festival.  A ticket for Tuesday's UK premiere—which takes place at London's Genesis Cinema—includes a couple of nice extras: a Q&A session with Humayun, and a wristband for entry to Raindance's Halloween party.

Pett Kata Shaw kicks off with "Something Sweet", a story in which put-upon sweet shop owner Mahmud receives an after-hours visit from a djinn, who apparently wishes to sample some of the vendor's products.  As you might expect, the rattled, panicking Mahmud has some trouble remembering what sweets this uninvited guest ordered, yet his forgetfulness can't entirely be blamed on the presence of the spirit; it turns out that Mahmud is infamous for his poor memory, but the djinn might just have a way of solving this particular problem.  Next up is "No Girls Allowed", which sees an angler inadvertently lure a malevolent piscivorous demon back to his apartment, where she promptly murders the young man's roommate before turning her attention to the terrified host, who can't afford to take his eyes off her as he fumbles to cook the fish responsible for this nightmare visit.  In the original series, "No Girls Allowed" was transposed with "Something Sweet", but here the running order feels much more effective.

"Hearsay", the third—and quite possibly eeriest—tale on offer here, can be viewed as something of a meta-comment on the whole film.  In this instalment, a young urban couple are hiking through a remote region when they happen upon a village where countless—or maybe even all—Bengali superstitions have originated; exposition is provided by a local elderly couple, who take the time to recount various cautionary folktales.  The bickering hikers—who have strayed far from their intended path—are predictably dismissive of such talk as they wait for help and/or a phone signal, and we all know how horror films treat those who don't heed warnings.  In a neat flourish, marionettes are used to depict the myths and legends that underpin this microcosmic segment.  Pett Kata Shaw is rounded out by "Call of the Night", a sad, downbeat episode in which a man starts to connect the suicide of his ex-girlfriend with a spate of child disappearances in the seaside town of Cox's Bazar.     

While anthology films are nothing new, they generally comprise work from several different filmmakers, which in turn often leads to such projects possessing a certain unevenness.  With this in mind, Humayun's bold decision to serve as writer-director for all of Pett Kata Shaw's episodes pays off handsomely, as his film plays as a remarkably fluid and consistent affair, one that belies its piecemeal origins.  It is difficult to identify a weak link among the segments—each offers something different, although a strong streak of black humour is common to all of the stories.  There's a visual cohesiveness, too, with Tahsin Rahman's gorgeous cinematography uniting the four instalments.  Humayan's adaptation of the source material is so adroit that it's very easy to forget that these are age-old tales, all of which have been passed down orally from one generation to another; indeed, this striking, memorable film, which sees ancient spirits mingle among smartphone users, achieves something of a timeless quality. 

Darren Arnold

Images: IFFR