• BFF 19: Birds of Passage

    April 17, 2019 - By 

    Plagues, locusts and temptation in the desert: Birds of Passage is biblical in its grandeur and moral ruin. The current cultural fetizishation of drug cartel savagery is vampiric and lazy racism. Can-you-believe-this travelogues and “dark tourism” tours take the cash of white hipsters to show them the houses where monsters lived, while much TV and film deploys stock montages of whirring cash counting machines, biped planes stuffed with narcotics and South Americans going loco, bro. But Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s follow-up to 2015’s Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent cuts through the fake glamour and returns to the roots of…

  • BFF 19: A Bump Along The Way

    April 15, 2019 - By 

    Opening the 19th Belfast Film Festival, Mark Cousins, newly installed Chairperson and mega-watt generator of cinematic enthusiasm, advertised the rectangular frame of Movie House Dublin Road as a place where Belfast will “meet the world”. For the inaugural night, at least, the world is the other side of Ulsterbus 273. Northern Ireland’s second city, and the experiences of the women living there, is receiving fresh attention with the success of Lisa Magee’s likeable Derry Girls, and is joined by Tess McGowan and Shelly Love’s A Bump Along The Way, a broad, sometimes difficult local indie with a sympathetic eye for feminine…

  • Belfast Film Festival Euro Comedy Season

    January 24, 2019 - By 

    The Belfast Film Festival’s Euro Comedy season continues this week with two eccentric, original offerings: The Man without a Past and A Town called Panic. Aki Kaurismaki’s (The Other Side of Hope) The Man Without a Past plays like a cross between the Coen brothers’ character driven, noir-influenced cinema and the dryly deadpan, surreal films of Roy Andersson. It’s also incredibly beautiful to look at, with cinematographer Timo Salminen and Kaurismaki achieving a kind of live-action Edward Hopper painting in the film’s golden lighting and the precise posing of the characters.   The plot follows M (Markku Peltola) as the…

  • Pull Focus: I, Dolours

    August 15, 2018 - By 

    Maurice Sweeney didn’t want to make a Spotlight special, lost in the evening television schedule, he tells the audience after a screening of I, Dolours, his hybrid documentary about Dolours Price, the late Provisional IRA volunteer, bomber and hunger striker. He wanted to make a movie. Party it’s strategic: a movie gets a slot at doc festivals like Pull Focus, attracting a packed multiplex audience. Partly it’s a way to use story-telling to do justice to Price’s extraordinary story of a life as a Republican soldier. On this ambition, the often-harrowing film is half-successful. I, Dolours tells the story of the Troubles and…

  • Pull Focus: The Image You Missed

    August 15, 2018 - By 

    Outlining an ethics of documentary making in The Image You Missed, the late, acclaimed film-maker Arthur MacCaig (via Ernest Larsen’s crisp, twangy voiceover) describes the subject of the lens’ gaze as one who is forced to ‘account for themselves’ — their choices and responsibilities and lived experience. Who are you? And why are you doing what you’re doing? McCauley’s son Donal Foreman, Image’s director and editor, uses his own film to turn the camera’s scrutiny back on his absent father, producing an engaging, clever consideration and critique of MacCaig’s legacy, of political docs more generally, and of the subtle differences between looking at…

  • Pull Focus: The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid

    August 14, 2018 - By 

    The word ‘foreign’ is used a lot in The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid, Feargal Ward and Tadhg O’Sullivan’s portrait of a Kildare farmer holding out against the Irish state’s property vultures. Mostly it’s in the context of ‘foreign direct investment’, or FDI, the economic incentive at the heart of Thomas Reid’s problems. The socially isolated farmer’s home is in the sights of electronic manufacturer Intel, who want to expand their local factory facility. As explained by a representative from Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency, the arm of the state responsible for scouting and securing land for multi-nationals, the farm is ‘really the most appropriate’ site for…

  • Belfast Film Fest: The Rider

    April 23, 2018 - By 

    Lame horses get shot and broken cowboys get put out to pasture in Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, a soulful, touching look at ranchers and riders in the modern American heartland, based on the real-life experiences of its lead, former rodeo performer Brady Jandreau. Zhao, who previously looked at vulnerabilities on the open plain in 2015’s Songs My Brother Taught Me, casts unknowns and keeps the film light and loose, its wide open landscapes of sky and rock the backdrop to the pain of a talented rodeo cowboy forced to hang up his stirrups and face the existentialist wilderness after suffering a…

  • Belfast Film Fest: Golden Dawn Girls

    April 19, 2018 - By 

    Ourania Michaloliakou, a dumpy Greek twenty-something, loves Disney movies. She has a bookcase full of them. She loves board games with her friends and cute cats and doggies, using her position on the Athens city council to support stray animal causes. She also wants to liquidate her political rivals. Ourania is the daughter and only child of Nikolaos Michaloliakos, founder and leader of the far-right, ultra-nationalist political party Golden Dawn, a previously obscure movement rocketed into national prominence in the fallout of the financial and European refugee crises. In the chilling but limited Golden Dawn Girls, Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes probes…

  • Kissing Candice

    June 20, 2018 - By 

    This review was originally published as part of the Belfast Film Festival ’18 coverage. The Omagh-born Aoife McArdle showcased her feature debut, Kissing Candice, at the Belfast Film Festival, but she’s a director and screenwriter with plenty of experience and a well-developed eye, a confidence that shines through in the film, a mad, bad, thrilling vision of libidinal teenage energy. Billed by McArdle at a post-show Q&A as a look at ‘Irish youth in crisis’, Candice, from Venom Films and the Irish Film Board, is so much more interesting and vivid than the description, with its suggestion of bleeding-heart melancholic…

  • Belfast Film Fest Blog: Day 9

    April 7, 2017 - By 

    It’s engines go for festival, and we’ll be running daily reactions, reviews and previews of upcoming screenings here on this regular blog. There’s going to be a lot to get through. Send us your film reactions at conor@thethinair.net, or tweet @thethinair – we want to hear what you’re seeing and what’s good. Day Nine – Friday 7th We’re closing in on the home stretch here. Expect more reviews and reflections over the weekend, including cinematographer Kirsten Johnson’s absorbing, reflective doc-collage Cameraperson and Breaking Bad‘s Betsy Brandt’s not-bad (that’s a lot of Bs) lead turn in missing-husband drama Alice in Motion, but for…