Tag: child abuse

Memoir of a Snail

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 13 February 2025
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Director – Adam Elliot – 2024 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 94m

*****

A young woman recounts her life story to her newly freed pet snail after her best friend dies – stop-frame animation marvel is out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 14th

Following a bravura title sequence which consists of a camera moving around (a scale model set of) detritus from a life, everything from soap on a rope to snail poison, with various objects bearing upon themselves various credits for the film, a young woman has tears in her eyes as her bedridden friend Pinky (voice: Jacki Weaver from Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell, 2012; Animal Kingdom, David Michod, 2010; Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir, 1975) breathes her last, briefly coming back to life to utter the legend, “potatoes”. But what can this word mean?

Taking her pet snail Sylvia (the name is painted on the back of the creature’s shell) out of a glass jar and setting her free to cross Pinky’s garden in the course of her subsequent narrative, the woman remembers her childhood down to the smallest detail, and starts to recount it to the liberated gastropod. She was born prematurely as Grace Prudence Pudel (voice: Sarah Snook from Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle, 2015; Predestination, The Spierig Brothers, 2014), shortly followed by her twin brother Gilbert (voice: Kodi Smit-McPhee from Maria, Pablo Larraín, 2024; The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion, 2021; The Congress, Ari Folman, 2013; ParaNorman, Chris Butler, Sam Fell, 2012).… Read the rest

Tags accountant, Adam Elliot, alcoholic, Alexander Esenarro Santafe, apple farm, Australia, bedridden, Bernie Clifford, Big Dipper, birthing, blood transfusion, book deposit, Canberra, cheap labour, child abuse, Child Services, childhood, Christian, church collection, cleft palette, cleft upper lip, correspondence, creating her story as a vehicle for his stop-frame puppetry, Dominique Pinon, drunk driver, eccentric, Eric Bana, exploitation, fairground, farmers, fathers and children, foster homes, foster parents, freedom, friend, fundamentalist, Garden Of Eden, gibberish, head sculptor, heroism, hoarding, hospital, Jacki Weaver, key parties, Kodi Smit-Mcphee, letters, library, love of fire, Magda Szubanski, marriage, Memoir of a Snail, memorabilia, molluscologist, music box, netball, Nick Cave, nutcase, orchard, ornament, orphan, orphanage, paraplegic, Paris, Paul Capsis, pet snail, potatoes, pray, premature birth, production line, religious, Sarah Snook, school bully, self-help books, separated, shoplifting, snail, snail poison, soap on a rope, stop-frame, stop-frame puppet, street artist, swingers, Tony Armstrong, toxic relationship, twins, volunteering, woodshed

Features Live Action Movies

The White Ribbon
(Das Weiße Band)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 13 June 2024
1 Comment on The White Ribbon
(Das Weiße Band)

Director – Michael Haneke – 2009 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 144m

Reviewed for Third Way magazine to coincide with UK release date 13/11/2009.

Haneke’s first period drama for the big screen is set in 1913-14 in a Northern German Protestant village where strange accidents befall the community. A doctor (Rainer Bock), out riding a regular route, is brought down and injured by a wire between two trees. The wife of a farm labourer is killed when factory floorboards give way beneath her. Children are abducted. A baby’s window is left open in Midwinter. A building burns. But who is – or are – responsible?

The film sets out its cast of characters in terms of the social hierarchy. The landowning classes are represented by the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur), his wife (Ursina Lardi) and their child; the professional classes by a widowed doctor, the midwife (Susanne Lothar) “who has made herself useful to him”, the Baron’s steward (Josef Bierbichler), the village Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) and the local teacher (Christian Friedel) – also as an old man the narrator (Ernst Jacobi) – who is courting the nanny of the Baron’s son; the working classes by numerous agricultural labourers who generally feature less prominently in the story.… Read the rest

Tags 1910s, 1913, 1914, abduction, accidents, agriculture, aired in public, baby. window left open, baron, black and white, bring down, building burns, Burghart Klaussner, cane, child abuse, children, chils abduction, Christian Friedel, closed door, community, corporal punishment, corruption, crime, cruelty, death, declaration of war, deduction, dirty laundry, doctor, Ernst Jacobi, factory, factory floorboards, facts, fallen world, farm labourer, Germany, half-truths, hearsay, horse and cart, ineffectual, injury, insidious, Josef Bierbichler, killed, kitchen, labourers, landowning class, Leonie Benesch, malevolence, midwife, Midwinter, misinterpretation, mortality, motive, nanny, narrator, Northern Germany, organised religion, outsider, pastor, picnic, powerlessness, professional class, Protestant, punishment, pure intentions, puzzle, Rainer Bock, riddle, riding, social class, social hierarchy, steward, Susanne Lothar, teacher, town, tree, Ulrich Tukur, underpinning, Ursina Lardi, village, widowed, wife, wire, working class

Animation Movies Shorts

Pachyderm
(Pachyderme)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 9 March 2024
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(Pachyderme)
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Director – Stéphanie Clément – 2022 – France – 11m

*****

A nine-year-old struggles with the trauma that befalls her at her grandpa’s – nominated for Best Animated Short at the 2024 Academy Awards, VoD details below review

She’s nine (voice-over: Christa Theret), and in the Summer she goes to stay with granny and grandpa. She plays on a swing, missing mum and dad, she watches a cabbage white butterfly in the garden. The house is tidy, ordered, perhaps obsessively so. It smells of polish; the kitchen smells of bleach. Tomorrow, grandpa will take her to the lake, where he likes to fish. To get to her bedroom, she must pass the big, intimidating horn mounted at the top of the stairs, a hunting trophy from a pachyderm. In her room, she can see eyes watching her from the wood grain of the ceiling timbers. She doesn’t sleep by counting sheep; she kills monsters. As the floorboards creak outside her door, she hides in the wallpaper, in the flowers, in sleep. After all, as grandma says, what could happen?

Before the trip, she accidentally pricks a finger on one of grandpa’s fishing hooks – lures, as they call them – but grandpa kisses the cut better with the kiss that heals all things.… Read the rest

Tags 2D animation, Academy Award, Academy Awards, Academy Awards 2023-24, Academy Awards 2024, Alfred Hitchcock, animation, arms, bedroom, bike, birdsong, bleach, bush, butterfly, cars in landscape, ceiling timbers, CG animation, child abuse, children playing, Christa Theret, computer animation, counting sheep, countryside, crushed, cypress trees, Dario Argento, death, deserted, dread, drown, eyes watching, fenced-in, fiery orange, fire, fishing, floorboards creak, flowers, France, garden, girl, grandpa, grandparents, grandparents and children, granny, granny and grandpa, grave, hair, Henri-Georges Clouzot, hide, hooks, horn, horror, hunting, hunting trophy, idyllic, incendiary, into the night Psycho, kiss, knickers, lake, landscape, malice, Marc Rius, monsters, night animals, nine-year-old, Olivier Militon, open the door, ordered, Oscars, Oscars 2023-24, Oscars 2024, outside, pachyderm, Philip Ridley, Pierre-François Renouf, play area, Polish, portent, pricks a finger, pruning, quiet, road, rose head, roses, roundabout, seaweed, secateurs, sleep, spillage mug of tea, stabilisers, stairs, Stéphanie Clément, summer, surveillance, swimming costume, swing, tidy, toads, trauma, trellis, tusk, Van Gogh, vegetation, wallpaper, watched, water, wedge of light, wild reeds, wood grain

Features Live Action Movies

One Night
(Hitoyo,
ひとよ)

Director – Kazuya Shiraishi – 2019 – Japan – Cert. N/C 15+ – 123m

****1/2

A woman murders her violent husband after years of his beating up the kids, goes to prison then returns 15 years later to find the siblings in turmoil – played online in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2021 in the UK

A night of torrential rain proves a defining moment in the lives of the Inamura family which owns and runs a taxi business. Koharu (Yuko Tanaka – Princess Mononoke, 1997) enters, dressed in her usual suit she wears to drive customers around, to announce to her three teenager children, “I’ve just killed your father. Nobody will ever beat you again. You can live however you want. You’re totally free.” Expressing no remorse and convinced she’s done the right thing, she promises to return in fifteen years then disappears to hand herself in to the cops.

Koharu’s designs of freeing her kids from their father’s years of violent abuse don’t quite play out the way she had hoped. Their father would beat them for any suggestion that they’d want to do anything other than work in the family taxi business. The eldest Daiki (Ryohei Suzuki – Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015; Tokyo Tribe, Sion Sono, 2014) is a stutterer whose relationship with wife Fumiko (Megumi) is mired in divorce proceedings as he struggles to hold down a regular job.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

By The
Grace Of God
(Grâce À Dieu)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 7 September 2020
No Comments on By The
Grace Of God
(Grâce À Dieu)

Abuse in church

By the Grace of God (Grâce à Dieu)
Directed by François Ozon
Certificate 15, 137 minutes
London Film Festival, 5 and 6 October
Released 25 October

First published in Reform magazine. Now on Amazon and Curzon Home Cinema.

Over two hours long, this gripping and hugely topical affair dramatises the scandal of child abuse at Catholic summer camps over 20 years ago in the diocese of Lyon, France. The case has shaken the Church there since it became public in recent years. Despite Father Bernard Preynat (Bernard Verley) admitting his guilt, his superior, Cardinal Barbarin (François Marthouret) failed to curtail Preynat’s access to children thereby enabling his abuse of more victims in the ensuing years.

At a press conference, the cardinal uses the phrase ‘by the grace of God’ about the statute of limitations on many of the abuse cases. He is immediately criticised for the comment but it reveals how Barbarin is concerned more with protecting the institution of the Catholic Church than in caring for his flock.

Writer-director François Ozon constructs his narrative around three survivors… Read the rest

First published in Reform magazine. Now on Amazon and Curzon Home Cinema.

Trailer:

Tags abuse survivors, atheist, Catholic, child abuse, church, faith, France, guilt, Lyon, parishioner, priest, prosecution, religion, suopport, transparency