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When a family man is disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship, his wife must fight for justice while raising their family of five children alone – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 21st

1971. The middle of Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship. Former government commissioner Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a trained civil; engineer, lives with his family in Rio de Janeiro where he is designing the new family home he plans to build. The purchased plot of land, in view of the Christ the Redeemer monument, is staked out, and he has made little models of what the whole thing will look like, captured along with his partying family on Super-8 film by his home-movie-camera-wielding, eldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage). Said eldest daughter (he has four of them plus one young son) is about to go to college. Taking the lead from his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who is concerned that their daughter’s likely involvement in radical student politics will get her in trouble with the dictatorship, Rubens sets her up with an old family friend to study abroad in London.

With reports on the TV news of various diplomats being kidnapped by paramilitaries, who want to exchange them for political prisoners, in a worrying taste of events to come, Veroca is travelling and filming her Super-8 as a passenger in a friend’s car wherein weed is being smoked, when they hit a military roadblock in a road tunnel.… Read the rest

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A young Iraqi migrant is hunted by mercenaries after he crosses the Turkish/Bulgarian border – out in cinemas and on demand on Friday, March 18th

A number of movies hang over this bold adventure thriller about Kamal (Adam Ali), a young Iraqi migrant who after crossing from Turkey into Bulgaria finds himself hunted by paramilitaries with guns and balaclavas. One is the gothic classic The Most Dangerous Game / The Hounds Of Zaroff (Irving Pichel, Ernest B.Schoedsack, 1932) in which the passengers of a luxury liner shipwrecked on an island find themselves in a deadly relationship with the big game hunter who lives there. The others are much more recent. Utøya July 22 (Erik Poppe, 2018) is a one take recreation of the Utøya teen camp Summer massacre in which kids attempted to survive a rampaging gunman while Son Of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) follows a Jewish worker-prisoner around a Nazi death camp.

The connection with The Most Dangerous Game may actually be coincidental rather than deliberate, since what inspired Rashid was stories of real life migrants’ experiences. The locations are a Bulgarian woods not a constructed Hollywood jungle set, yet it fits neatly into that lineage.… Read the rest