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A Childless Village (Sonsuz)

Director – Reza Jamali – 2022 – Iran – Cert. – 81m

****

A village’s documentary filmmaker returns to the subject of local infertility for which the village’s women beat him up two decades ago – gentle comedy premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

20 years ago, Kazem made a film about his village’s women being unable to bear children. As a result, they beat him up. And many of the men in the village divorced them only to feel guilty and remarry them some three times. Now he wants to make another film because the problem may lie not with the women, but the men. Who, reckons the narrator, are equally likely to beat him up. A visiting lady doctor, generally referred to by the locals as Miss Doctor, hopes to run tests on the villagers and establish the cause of childlessness.

Moslem, who is also the narrator, wants to learn how to be a director – and to just be in the film. He claims that all the women in the village are related to him, so he’ll have no problem getting them to talk on camera. But, of course, it doesn’t work out that way.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Third Murder
(Sandome
No Satsujin,
三度目の殺人)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2017 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

For a director usually associated with family dramas like I Wish, Like Father, Like Son and After The Storm, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Third Murder might seem like a change of direction. It begins with a murder, and focussed on a lawyer trying to uncover what actually happened, a narrative template familiar from countless films about journalists in search of a story, detectives trying to solve crimes and courtroom dramas of lawyers at work.

Yet there are plenty of Kore-eda concerns evident here. Ambitious young lawyer Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama from Like Father Like Son and John Woo’s thriller ManHunt) is a workaholic estranged from his wife. His daughter commits petty offences like shoplifting. His client Misumi (Koji Yakusho) was imprisoned for a murder over thirty years ago, but since his release has confessed to a second murder. He, too, has a daughter, but she wants nothing to do with him.

As for the murder victim, [Read the remainder of the review at All The Anime…]

Trailer: