Podcasts
Podcast: Lynden Barber's Top Picks - Final Week
Watch the Podcast for Artistic Director Lynden Barber's top recommendations for the final week of Festival screenings:
In Bed
This admirably smart and sexy two-hander begins exactly where its title suggests, as a lithesome young man and woman engage in frantic love-making. Orgasms out of the way, it soon becomes obvious the couple, who have only just met, have a lot of interpersonal issues to explore. Set entirely inside their Santiago motel room, the film sustains its premise without flagging for a second as its characters move between playfulness, bravado, deception, passion, fear and self-revelation. In between further sessions of intense coupling, they discover that sex between strangers is rarely as simple as it initially looks.
Beyond Hatred
In this deeply moving film - an award-winner at the Berlin Film Festival - a family attempts to move beyond the emotions of hatred and revenge as they contemplate the death of their 29-year-old son. In September 2002, three French skinheads were out looking for an 'Arab' to bash when they came across François Chenu, walking through a Rheims park, and asked him if he was gay. For refusing to deny his sexuality he was severely beaten and left to die. The film follows the fascinating legal case but its greatest emotions spring from the calm, quiet dignity of Chenu's family, who, in a devastating coda, write to the three convicted killers.
The President's Last Bang
This virtuosic retelling of the real-life assassination of South Korean dictator General Park Chung-heui in 1979 is both compelling thriller and acid black comedy. Clearly director Im Sang-Soo does not subscribe to the Oliver Stone conspiracy school, preferring the cock-up theory of history. The head of the secret service sees a rare opportunity to get rid of Park and hastily improvises a murder plot that amazingly works. But what if North Korea hears about it and decides to invade? Oops, he never thought of that. The film has the structure of the Bard's Julius Caesar - first act set-up, assassination in the middle followed by fight to fill the power vacuum - and grips like superglue.
October 17, 1961
If life were fair, Alain Tasma's October 17, 1961 would be catapulted into every multiplex, but that unfairness constitutes part of this movie's message. Stripping away the official silence that still conceals the events of that hellish autumn night in Paris, when a police riot led to a massacre of unarmed Algerian protestors, this dramatisation employs the step-by-step procedural structure familiar from The Battle of Algiers and Bloody Sunday, summoning up every bit of the torn-from-the-headlines immediacy of those films. Tasma recreates the tensions that led from outrageous police abductions and murders of North African immigrants to retaliatory firebombing of gendarmeries and spot assassinations of police officers. - Bright Lights Film Journal
