Categories
Movies Features Live Action

You Can Live
Forever

You Can Live Forever

Directors – Mark Slutsky, Sarah Watts – 2022 – Canada – Cert. 15 – 96m

***

A not especially religious 17-year-old sent to live with her Jehovah’s Witnesses uncle and aunt becomes smitten with a devout Witness girl her own age – out in UK cinemas and on SvoD and EST streaming platforms from Friday, June 16th

Following the breakdown of her mother (who we never see), 17-year-old Jaime (Anwen O’Driscoll), pronounced Jamie, is sent to live with her aunt Beth (Liane Balaban) and uncle Jean-Francois (Antoine Yared). She’s the sort of girl who wears Siouxsie And The Banshees or New Order t-shirts, prompting a remark by her uncle that he went to see the former many years ago, but these days he doesn’t do such things. That’s because the couple are Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs) and consider such things worldly. Like the Witnesses in Apostasy (Dan Kokotajlo, 2017), they are waiting with eager anticipation for the Return of Christ and the establishment of the New System, when all things will be renewed and made good. The couple have decided not to have children until that state of things comes to pass, which they believe it will soon.… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Features Live Action

Apostasy

Disfellowshipped

Apostasy
Written and Directed by Dan Kokotajlo
Certificate PG, 96 minutes
Released 27 July (Cinemas and On Demand)

Now on Amazon, BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema.

Review first published in Reform magazine.

In Dan Kokotajlo’s debut feature film Apostasy, student sisters Alex (Molly Wright) and Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) and their working mum Ivanna (Siobhan Finneran) are Jehovah’s Witnesses in Manchester waiting for the New System, when Christ will return and paradise will be restored on earth. Alex has a blood condition and is only alive because a hospital nurse gave her a transfusion after birth before her mum and the elders were aware of it: now she’s 18 and must decide for herself whether she will allow transfusion in the event of a life-threatening emergency. She’s a model Witness, attending Urdu Bible classes in order to take the Word to the local ethnic minority community.

Luisa, in contrast, gets pregnant… [Read the rest]

Now on Amazon, BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema.

Review first published in Reform magazine.

Trailer: