No longer a programme advisor to the BFI London Film Festival, I haven’t yet seen many movies in this year’s edition (now underway and continuing until Sunday 20th October), but there are a few films I’ve already caught which I feel I should recommend. I’m sure there are others well worth investigating (I myself am particularly curious about new works from Mike Leigh, Pedro Almodóvar, Matt Diop, Mohammad Rasoulof and Guy Maddin), but here below are some words about four titles I’ve been especially impressed by.
At Averroès & Rosa Parks (Nicolas Philibert, France)
One of the greatest documentarists at work today, Nicolas Philibert – best known for Être et avoir – follows last year’s Berlin prizewinner On the Adamant with another, just as wondrously insightful, compassionate and unsentimental account of encounters between psychiatric patients, doctors and other staff in a Parisian clinic looking for new and better ways to deal with mental illness. You don’t need to have seen the earlier film to be drawn into these people’s lives, anxieties, regrets and… yes, occasionally, joys too; this one (image at top) is also profoundly moving in its own right.
I’m Still Here (Walter Salles, Brazil)
Making his first feature in his homeland in 16 years, Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries, On the Road) relates the true story of a woman trying to hold herself and her family together following the sudden, unexplained arrest of her husband in 1971, when the military dictatorship was responsible for the mysterious disappearance of a great many people. The storytelling is classical, restrained, forthright and very affectingly heartfelt – the teenage Salles was a friend of the Paivas – while the film benefits from a superb lead performance by Fernanda Torres. (Incidentally, I shall be giving a brief talk about Salles’ work at the LFF on Saturday 12th October; details here.)
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (Raoul Peck, France-USA)
The veteran Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (The Man on the Shore, Lumumba, I Am Not Your Negro) pays tribute to the late Pretorian photographer with a documentary that mixes Cole’s pictures (of life in late 50s/early 60s apartheid South Africa, and then in the USA, where he lived in homesick exile) and a voiceover (by LaKeith Stanfield) partly taken from Cole’s own writings, partly written by Peck but still in the first-person. An intelligent, lucid, illuminating homage, memorable not least for Cole’s sometimes painfully expressive images.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Quay Brothers, UK-Poland)
Characteristically haunting, witty and exquisitely beautiful – not to mention occasionally opaque in terms of narrative detail – the latest feature from the brilliant Brothers Quay (Street of Crocodiles, Institute Benjamenta) is inspired by the writings of Bruno Schulz, and chronicles (partly, at least) a man’s trip to a remote sanatorium in search of his ailing or dead father. Almost mind-bogglingly imaginative and idiosyncratic, the film – part stop-motion animation, part live-action – is not for those who like their stories spoon-fed; but if you enjoy forays into the strange, unsettling domains of dream, memory and mirage, this is a dark, dazzling gem to savour.
For further details about the London Film Festival, click here.
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notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 