Tag: home movie

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Leaving To Remain

Director – Mira Erdevički – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 88m

**1/2

Three Roma people who have settled in the UK after leaving the Czech and Slovak Republics must navigate life both after Brexit and during the pandemic lockdown – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 28th

Something film does extremely well is to show people’s lives or wider social attitudes at a given point in time. This documentary was planned to explore a very specific subject matter, but when events changed, the film changed with them to take account of developments. Erdevički originally intended to study the effect on Roma people immigrating to the UK, but as she was doing so, first, the UK’s vote in favour of Brexit resulted in extra bureaucratic obstacles for these people to navigate should they wish to stay in the UK and, second, trying to deal with all that as well as facing all the challenges everybody else was facing under pandemic lockdown. During the pandemic, she had her three subjects film themselves.

Ondrej

Erdevički has chosen her three Roma subjects well: they are all go-getters. The type of people who get things done. All three have come to the UK because they or their families wanted to better their lives and make a positive contribution.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Julie Delpy
talks about
Three Colours: White

Transcript of interview from 1994 with actress Julie Delpy on Three Colours: White. She plays the short but pivotal role of the main character’s ex-wife, whose appearances bookend the film. At the time, the third film in the trilogy had yet to be screened to press.

She was based in LA., on which subject our conversation started:

“I’m doing everything. Both European and American films. My project there is similar to what I was doing before – American films and European films and co-productions, whatever. I’m not trying to see where I should be, I’m just trying to find something that I like to do. It’s a bigger choice when you’re over there.”

Three Colours: White is very much a European film – not a film set in any one country but partly in Paris and largely in Poland. How did she get involved?

“I knew Kieślowski, I met him a few times, he’s a friend of Agnieszka Holland with whom I had worked on Europa Europa. I had tested on The Double Life Of Veronique, but knew that I wouldn’t get that part because he told me before the casting began that I wasn’t right for it, but he wanted to audition me because he was thinking of something else later.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Fabelmans

Director – Steven Spielberg – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 151m

*****

The life and times of a young boy and amateur US movie maker whose extended family harbours an unexpected secret – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 27th

Throughout his career, Spielberg has continued to surprise. He’s made big blockbusters which seem, very often, to be about the intimacies of family relationships. Perhaps it was inevitable that, sooner or later, he would make something like The Fabelmans.

Orson Welles once said that Hollywood was the best train set a boy could have to play with. Presented with a train set, young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) plays with it by staging train crashes, about which behaviour his brilliant, scientific nerd father Burt (Paul Dano) is less than pleased.

However, his mother Mitzy (Michelle Williams), after some thought, realises that her son need to see the trains crash over and over again, so secretly allows him to stage a crash and film it with the family’s Super 8 home movie camera to enable his required repeat viewing. This kindles within the boy a desire to make his own movies, and soon he’s enlisting his family, friends and neighbours in these enterprises.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Movies Music

Poly Styrene:
I Am A Cliché

Punk biopic

Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché
Directed by Celeste Bell and Paul Sng
Certificate 12a, 96 minutes
Released 5 March at www.modernfilms.com
Viewers can select a participating local cinema to share the revenue of the virtual box office

This documentary about the late Poly Styrene (real name Marion Elliot), the iconic front woman of the 1970s punk band X-Ray Spex, paints a compelling picture of a creative and innovative young woman going against the grain to break new ground in pop music. The band was very much her baby which she put together by advertising for musicians in the music press. She wrote all their material.

Her literal baby is the film’s co-director and co-writer Celeste Bell, who as a young child escaped from her well-intentioned but unfit mother during their time living on the Hare Krishna estate in Hertfordshire. On her mum’s death, Celeste found herself the guardian of Poly’s vast archive. It was five years before she could bring herself to look inside and see what was there… Read more

Full review in Reform magazine.

Trailer: