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Equal parts political drama, thriller and war movie based on the brutal 1988 repression of an indigenous rebellion in the French Pacific island territory of New Caledonia.  ‘hugely intelligent’

Please note scenes of violence.

L’ordre et la morale.  French, 2012.  Language: French.  135 minutes.  Cert: 15A.  Director: Mathieu Kassovitz.  Starring: Mathieu Kassovitz, Iabe Lapacas, Malik Zidi

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Season Ten starts with this taut French colonial flick which Filmuforia calls ‘a hugely intelligent film’.

Equal parts political drama, thriller and war movie, it’s based on the brutal 1988 repression of an indigenous insurrection in the French Pacific island territory of New Caledonia.

The indigenous tribe, the Kanaks, lived by ancient customs and chafed under the erosion of their independence.  In the spring of 1988,they attacked a police station, killing four gendarmes who resisted and taking 27 hostages.  What began as a confused local incident ended ten days later with a massacre in which two more policemen lost their lives and 19 Kanaks died, a number of whom were executed after their capture.

The film’s central character, sensitively played by director Mathieu Kassovitz (La Haine), is torn between doing what is right and fulfilling his duty as a military man.  Elegantly interweaving dialogue and action with archival news footage, Rebellion evolved through long discussion with Kanak islanders – some of whom perform key acting roles – former soldiers and policemen.

New Caledonia’s only cinema operator refused to screen Rebellion, underscoring how the massacre remains one of the most polarizing military actions in the nation’s recent history.

Click here to read The Guardian review.

 Click here to read Filmuforia review.

An unhappy young woman is transported to the gritty hinterlands of Venice by her Chinese gang masters.  This contemporary snapshot of Italy is a slice-of-life on the meeting of two cultures.

Italy, 2011. 100 minutes.  Language:  Italian.  Cert: Club.  Director:  Io sono Li.  Starring:  Zhao Tao, Rade Serbedzija, Marco Paolini

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Many recent European films have chronicled the social and personal consequences of the recent wave of immigration to Europe, but few with the delicacy and insight of Andre Segre’s lovely film. Brought to Italy by a “broker” who she’s slowly paying off while saving money to bring across her son, Shun Li is sent from her factory job to a bar in Chioggia, a small town in the Veneto lagoon. There she strikes up a friendship with Bepi, a fisherman nicknamed “the Poet,” himself a representative of an earlier immigration to Italy from Eastern Europe. The two come to share a special understanding, and their relationship transforms them both.

Segre effectively draws us into this “immigrant world,” not simply to expose its unfairness but to reveal the ways in which immigrants create their own special support systems. An unusual and compelling first feature deservedly selected for the Director’s Fortnight section of the Venice Film Festival, SHUN LI AND THE POET has a terrific central performance by Zhao Tao, Jia Zhang-ke’s muse in films like Platform and The World. The film takes the essence of an all-too-real situation (the recent influx of Chinese immigrants into the environs of Venice) that is also simultaneously a new filmic look at aspects of Venetian life, refreshingly naturalistic and free of picture postcard tourism. – San Diego Italian Film Festival

Click here to read The Guardian review.  

Click here to read The New York Times review.

Both heart-warming and heart-rending, residents in a group home for at-risk adolescents submit to the tender care of workers who are barely older than they are.  ‘wholly engaging’

USA, 2013.  Language: English.  96 minutes.  Cert: CLUB.  Director: Destin Cretton.  Starring: Brie Larson,  John Gallagher Jr.,  Kaitlyn Dever,  Rami Malek,  Keith Stanfield,  Kevin Hernandez

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A genuinely moving look at life in a group foster home that avoids most of the usual routes into viewers’ hearts, Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12 behaves like an ensemble piece even as it develops a character whose struggles will eventually define the film.  Brie Larson (appearing in four films at SXSW this year) gives a breakthrough performance that should open doors to bigger dramas, but the effortlessly balanced film never feels like a showcase, and the actress doesn’t treat it like one. Theatrical appeal is strong for a wholly engaging film that isn’t the downer it might sound like on paper.

Larson plays Grace, one of a handful of young adults staffing a live-in way station for troubled kids. (Kids are meant to stay for under a year on the way to something better, we’re told, but the authorities sometimes forget about them for much longer.) Fellow counsellor Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), an obviously good guy, is her adoring boyfriend, a fact they try to hide from staff and residents; though he doesn’t know it yet, his girlfriend is pregnant.

Grace and her co-workers aren’t supposed to be therapists — mental health professionals are assigned to each resident — but simply to create a safe environment and keep their wards from hurting themselves and others. But we see how their concern and patience elicits revelations even on-site therapists aren’t privy to: Marcus (Keith Stanfield) lets Mason hear a rap he’s penned about his mother, who forced him to sell drugs for her; Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), a new admission who’s reluctant to open up, has written and illustrated a heartbreaking children’s story that’s clearly an allegory of her own life.

In each of those scenes, both the scripted material and the young actor’s delivery produce the kind of hold-your-breath moment more ostentatiously serious films shoot for often and achieve rarely. Here, Brett Pawlak’s handheld camera work and Cretton’s unsentimental direction have a frankness that acknowledges the dramatic extremes in these lives without needing to parade it before the audience. Cathartic moments come, but not where they’re expected.

Slowly we come to understand how much Grace and Mason have in common with the kids they’re protecting. Grace reveals herself — not strategically, but as if it were the only thing she could do — while trying to help Jayden accept this latest of many institutional homes. For his part, Mason gives every sign of having had an ideal youth until we see him celebrating the anniversary of his own foster parents. As the couple copes with a crisis of their own while juggling life-or-death problems at work, Short Term 12 doesn’t have to explain the ironies at play in its title: Repairing a wounded childhood is never a short-term project, even when everything goes as it should. – John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter     

Winner – Best Actress, Locarno International Film Festival 2013

Click here for website.

Click here to read The New York Times review.

 

A splendid comedy-drama about the 50-something Gloria, a lonely divorcée  in Santiago who decides to hit the singles scene with decidedly mixed success.  ‘pitch perfect’

Chile, 2012.  Language: Spanish.  110 minutes.   Cert: CLUB.  Director:  Sebastion Lelio.  Starring: Paulina Garcia, Sergio Hernandez, MarcialTagle, Diego Fontecilla, Fabiola Zamora, Antonia Santa Maria, Coca Guazzini, Hugo Moraga, Alejandro Goic, Liliana Garcia, Luz Jimenez

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The first and last time we see Gloria (Paulina Garcia), the 58-year-old Chilean divorcee who gives writer-director Sebastián Lelio’s touching midlife crisis drama its name, she’s lost in the shuffle of the dance floor — at once buried by the world and free to roam it. Anchored by Garcia’s nuanced performance, the movie explores this fragile state of being with extraordinary astuteness. It’s an open-ended question whether Gloria ever finds the happiness she seeks while dodging the current of middle-aged isolation, but her constant search is a valiant and deeply involving one.

From the initial set piece that shows Gloria going about her bar-hopping single life, Lelio slowly assembles the details that define her solitary routine, drawing out her apparent ambivalence over it. In her cramped apartment, she spends more time shooing an intrusive cat that creeps into her room and trying to drown out a noisy neighbour upstairs than entertaining company. On the occasion that she does venture out, she maintains a healthy relationship with her two grown children and ex-husband. While this cycle of behaviour shows contentment on the surface, Garcia’s character — typically hidden behind a pair of oversized glasses and heavy makeup — displays a lack of investment in her surroundings that suggests she wants something more.

That void is filled with the arrival of Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), another ageing parent recently divorced and eager for a rebound, with whom she shares a passionate one-night-stand that gradually develops into a greater bond. Though his motives and back story are suspicious, the seemingly tender-hearted Rodolfo’s passionate exchanges with Lelio quickly accumulate emotional weight.
Gloria’s hidden frustrations and burgeoning fear for her own mortality erupt in a series of unpredictable outbursts.

There’s a marvellous sense of defiance to the way Lelio stages their early scenes together, conveying an atmosphere drenched in romance that rejuvenates the couple and strips away the barriers of age. In her newfound companionship, Gloria’s personality erupts with energy that Lelio explores intimately by showing the couple in the nude while in the throes of their sexual reawakening. The connection is so vividly realized that it’s especially tough to watch when the perfect scenario starts to unravel.

Facing another set of relationship problems, Gloria’s hidden frustrations and burgeoning fear for her own mortality erupt in a series of unpredictable outbursts. Garcia’s droopy face, riddled with far more nuance than anything Gloria says, defines the movie’s fascinating trajectory. Rodolfo aptly summarizes her personality as “so physical, so real,” exactly the pair of traits that make her such a fascinating subject.

Lelio has always applied a fair degree of subtlety to his filmmaking, which has carried the unevenness of his two earlier features starting with “La Sagrada Familia,” but the tendency finally blossoms here. Gloria rarely attempts to verbalize her emotions, but Lelio finds ways to do it for her with perceptive visual flourishes, as she frequently stares down symbolic reflections of her mindset — most memorably, when she comes across a dancing skeleton puppet at a mall, but that’s just one of several interludes in “Gloria” where music and imagery speak volumes.

By conveying Gloria’s alienation so effectively, the movie taps into a greater generational anxiety that imbues the character with metaphorical value. At a dinner table conversation, one of her relatives explains that the generation of young adults reared on social networking have experienced “a revolution that’s probably more spiritual” than the ones preceding it. The emerging communal energy of the digital age stands in stark contrast to Gloria’s lack of firm footing — as well as the desperation and self-delusion that results from it.

While “Gloria” may pity its title character, she gets plenty of opportunities to fight back, none better realized than when Umberto Tozzi’s “Gloria” comes through the speakers at a bar and immediately refreshes her. As she jives to the tune as though the star of her own musical, the lyrics complimenting her movement (“You’re heading for a breakdown/so be careful not to show it”), a cheesy pop song transforms into her personal anthem. By that point, she has earned the attention. – Eric Kohn / Indiewire

Winner – Paulina Garcia, Best Actress, Berlin Film Festival 2012

Click here for The Irish Times review.

Click here for Variety article on Oscar hopes.

 

A rare and accurate glimpse into everyday life seen through the eyes of an unconventional  10-year-old girl.  The first film by a female Saudi director – it will make you stand up and cheer.

Saudi Arabia 2012.  Language:  Arabic. 98 minutes.  Cert: PG .  Director:   Haifaa Al-Mansour.   Starring: Waad Mohammed, Reem Abdullah, Ahd, Sultan Al Assaf

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Meet Wadjda, a sarcastic, funny and streetwise ten-year-old girl whose unconventionally carefree demeanor not only sets her apart from most girls in her school but also frequently lands her in the headmistress’s office. Living in Riyadh with her young, beautiful mother who struggles with an absentee husband looking to marry a second wife, Wadjda strikes up a friendship with Abdullah, a neighborhood boy drawn to her confidence and charm. She spots a shiny green bicycle in the local shop and becomes determined to scrounge up enough money to buy it so that she can race Abdullah, a culturally unacceptable action with potential societal repercussions. Wadjda enters her school’s Koran recitation competition with her eye on the cash prize. As her school continues to crack down on the individual rights of its students, Wadjda stands steadfast, wise beyond her years and in opposition to a society loathe to recognize self-expression, a girl unwilling to surrender what she wants.

This groundbreaking first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first by a female Saudi filmmaker, Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda offers a moving, rarely seen picture of everyday life in Riyadh. With a central character so unique to the screen, Al-Mansour has crafted a subtle counterpoint to the images of females the world is accustomed to seeing, a character who holds hope for the future. – Liza Domnitz / Tribeca Film Festival 2013

Winner – CICAE Award, Venice Film Festival 2012

Click here for Wadjda website.

As much a political and societal commentary as a troubled gay love story between a privileged Tel Aviv lawyer and a Palestinian student.  By turns tender and tense, sensual and suspenseful.

Israel, 2012. Language: Hebrew, Arabic.  96 minutes.  Cert: CLUB.  Director:  Michael Mayer.  Starring: Nicholas Jacob, Michael Aloni, Jameel Khouri, Alon Pdut, Loai Noufi

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Los Angeles-based, USC-trained Israeli director Michael Mayer makes a gripping feature debut with Out in the Dark, a troubled gay love story between a privileged Tel Aviv lawyer and a Palestinian student that is by turns tender and tense, sensual and suspenseful. In Mayer’s assured hands, a drama that could easily have become schematic instead pulses with urgency, longing and raw feeling, morphing smoothly in its final third into a lean thriller.

Love across political, sectarian and geographic boundaries is a minefield rife with cliché, but Mayer and co-screenwriter Yael Shafrir mostly sidestep that danger with grace and intelligence. Their film benefits from the instant chemistry between attractive lead actors Nicholas Jacob and Michael Aloni, and from the detachment with which the script considers both Palestinian fanaticism and Israeli Security Forces tactics as dueling cancers. It doesn’t pretend to dig deep into the Mideast conflict, but it does make resonant points about the tentacle-like reach of that divide, even for people determined to keep politics out of their relationships.

Shooting digitally, wherever possible with available light sources, Mayer and cinematographer Ran Aviad take their cue from the film’s title. They create a gritty visual palette of dark textures and murky nighttime scenes, making extensive use of closeups to probe the characters’ hidden worlds.

That approach is evident from the outset as Nimr (Jacob) scrambles over the fence into Tel Aviv from his family home in Ramallah on the West Bank, dodging patrol cars along the way. His journey is sharply modulated through sections on foot and by bus –underscored by Mark Holden and Michael Lopez’s moody ambient music – before making a sudden shift into club-scene mode as he enters a gay bar. Unfolding mostly through the title credits, the opening economically conveys a sense of constricted freedoms, with much at stake.

Dreamboat Jewish lawyer Roy (Aloni) hits on Nimr at the bar, sparking an easy rapport and mutual attraction that soon leads to romance. A psychology student doing his Masters at Birzeit University, Nimr around the same time is issued a partial visa to study in Tel Aviv, which he eyes as a stepping stone to a Ph.D. at Princeton. But that dream seems more precarious when his flamboyant Arab friend Mustafa (LoaiNoufi) is discovered hiding illegally and sent back to the West Bank to be brutally beaten and murdered as a suspected collaborator.

Nimr’s position is complicated by the fact that his brother Nabil (Jameel Khouri) is a member of the hardline extremist group responsible for Mustafa’s death. And while scenes with his mother (Khawlah Haj) and kid sister (Maysa Daw) have a lovely naturalness and warmth, it’s clear that the secret of Nimr’s sexuality is a ticking time-bomb.

He tries to save his relationship with Roy while being pulled between his fear over the dangers to which Nabil is exposing their family, and the cold manipulations of an Israeli security chief (AlonPudt). But Nimr’s options grow steadily narrower.

Particularly through the latter developments, Mayer shows admirable restraint in his use of music, keeping it low-key and brooding to sustain tension in strictly realist terms, rather than cranking it up to artificially heighten the thriller aspect. Much of the visceral impact comes from Aviad’s nervy handheld camera and Maria Gonzales’ mercurial editing.

Touching poignantly on the suffering of gay Palestinians rejected by their families and community, Mayer and Shafrir build a sturdy outsider drama that benefits from the shaded juxtaposition of Nimr and Roy’s backgrounds. Having absorbed the lessons of harsh reality, Nimr remains fatalistically pragmatic, allowing himself hope only in brief interludes. The product of a cushioned upbringing in a well-connected family, Roy persists in his somewhat naïve belief that they can work things out by going through authority channels.

Both leads tackle their roles with sensitivity and conviction. But first-time screen actor Jacob is particularly affecting as a persecuted man dealing with entrapment while grasping at the emotional lifeline offered by Roy. The scenes in which Nimr is ripped apart by the dishonor he has brought upon his family even as they behave monstrously toward him show how deep these conflicts cut.

The script has an occasional tendency to map out divergent points of view a little too neatly. But Aloni is effective in depicting the festering discomfort of an idealist constantly faced with the limits in his liberal parents’ understanding of him.

It’s a sign of how well Out in the Dark works that we are fully invested in seeing Nimr and Roy overcome obstacles and stay together. But it’s also a shrewd choice of the filmmakers that they end instead on a note of somber ambiguity. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter           

Winner – Audience Award, Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival 2012

Click here for website.

Click here for New York Times review.

In a country where killers are celebrated as heroes, this documentary challenges unrepentant death squad leaders to dramatise their role in genocide. ‘powerful, surreal, frightening’ –  Werner Herzog 

Indonesia, UK, 2012.  Language: Indonesian, English.  115 minutes.  Cert: CLUB.  Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

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When Werner Herzog says a film is the most frightening and most surreal he’s seen in at least a decade, you know need to steel yourself. He’s right. Here’s the best, and the most horrific, movie of this year’s Toronto film festival.

It’s a documentary about the Indonesian death squads of the mid-1960s who tortured and killed communists. But it’s also a film within a film, as director Joshua Oppenheimer urges the ageing gangsters to recreate their acts on increasingly elaborate scale (prosthetics, props, drag outfits, soundtrack, location shooting). They grin and mug just as they also take it very, very seriously. A strangulation scene is interrupted by the call for evening prayers. But they return after their ablutions.

At first you suspect this will riff on familiar ground, with the main interviewees, former members of paramilitary organisation Pancasila Youth, explaining how they were inspired in both their look and sadism by the movies. The most charismatic of them, Anwar Congo, who has a radical hair dye job a third of the way through in reaction to the rushes, is slightly haunted by his acts, he admits, which he tries to forget with music and dancing. And booze. And marijuana. And ecstasy. Others are scornful of any regret: “You feel haunted because your mind is weak. It’s just a nerve imbalance.”

Some have criticised Oppenheimer for not interviewing anyone who survived the ordeal. It doesn’t matter. We know this was genocide. We know that they’d be likely to feel fairly aggrieved. These men hoist themselves and do more besides. The most extraordinary scene comes during one of the recreations. One of Anwar’s neighbours, who is moonlighting as the victim, laughingly suggests they use in the film a story that he has. It’s of a man – ok, it’s his stepfather, he says – who was dragged from his bed at 3am by the death squad, to the sound of the screams of his wife and children (that’s him, he laughs, that’s me!). The next day they found his body beneath a barrel and then buried it by the side of the road, “like a goat”, so frightened were they that they too would be taken. The percolation of reaction among the men listening is the most compelling thing you’ll ever seen.

It’s often said of documentaries that they deserve to have as wide an audience as possible. This doesn’t deserve; it demands – not for what it says about present-day Indonesia or even about its former horrors. But because almost every frame is astonishing. – Catherine Shoard, The Guardian

Winner – Audience Award, Berlinale International Film Festival, Panorama

Click here for website.

The wedding night of an arranged marriage between a beautiful young girl and a middle-aged man reaches a shattering conclusion.  Unforgettable cinema with two brilliant performances at its heart.

Turkey, 2012.  Language: Turkish.  92 minutes.  Cert: CLUB.  Director: Reis Çelik.  Starring: lyas Salman, Dilan Aksüt, May eker Yücel, Sabri Tutal, Sercan Demirkaya, Ahmet Nuri Aydın

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The title is a misnomer. When a lovely young girl is married off to a pockmarked middle-aged man, she – with a nod to 1,001 Nights heroine Scheherazade – changes the subject and pouts and does everything she can to delay consummation.

Reis Çelik’s sad, lovely standoff (a Crystal Bear winner at Berlin) starts out with the sublime tableaux and stately pacing we’ve come to expect of the Anatolian’s oeuvre before retreating into the bedroom for a claustrophobic two-step. First-person shots add to the sense that the bridal chamber is merely a prettified tomb. Recited tales – one mythical and one historical – remind us that the likelihood of the girl ever seeing her family again rests somewhere close to zero.

This is a political union. The groom repeatedly dismisses the gunfire outside as stag- party japes, yet as he does so, he reaches for a pistol.

Slyly, both lens and narrative shift allegiances to reveal that the marriage is just as prescriptive for the groom. A final impassioned monologue – “What I am except for a clown?” – heralds an unexpected denouement. – Tara Brady, The Irish Times          

 Winner – Crystal Bear, Berlin Film Festival 2012

Click here to read The Guardian review.

An unpredictable, compassionate drama about a conflicted priest stranded at a rural retreat for teenage tearaways.  Quietly provocative with an impressive, impressionistic handling of its milieu.

Poland, 2013.  Language: Polish.   96 minutes.  Cert: CLUB.   Director:  Malgorzata Szumowska.  Starring: Andrzej Chyra, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, Maja Ostascewska, Lukasz Simlat, Tomasz Schuchardt

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After an awkwardly glossy French-language venture with her Juliette Binoche starrer Elles, Polish director Malgoska Szumowska returns to home territory, and grittier material, with In the Name Of (W Imie…) an intelligent, non-judgmental drama about a committed youngish priest grappling with the urges of the flesh. The film plays against a background of recent revelations about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, but Szumowska deals with less obviously controversial material, offering sympathetic insight into how one man’s desire might be at odds with his vocation and its requirements.

A strong lead by Andrzej Chyra gives this thoughtful, well-textured film its magnetic centre, but unfocused narrative and a tendency to edge increasingly into melodrama weaken In the Name Of considerably. Still, solid, often energetic execution style should encourage modest export success, given the film’s closeness to a prevalent model of mainstream-friendly art cinema.

The setting is a one-horse rural community, where the youngish Adam (Chyra) has been posted as resident priest in a small residential centre for young men and teenage boys from reform school backgrounds. Playing football and joining in manual work, T-shirted Adam is the modern equivalent of the no-nonsense ‘muscular priests’ once played by the likes of Spencer Tracy and Anthony Quayle. Unsurprisingly, his daily life crackles with tensions: among them, tentative sexual approaches from Ewa (Maja Ostascewska), unhappy wife of Adam’s teacher colleague Michal (Lukasz Simlat), a taciturn, somewhat undeveloped character.

Adam also has his own chequered career, and the temptations of alcohol, to contend with. But most of all, Adam is troubled by his sexuality, finding it hard to resist his increasing mutual attraction to Lukasz (aka ‘Humpty’ in English subtitles), played by Mateusz Kosciukiewicz – an attractive local who works at the centre, and whose brother Marcin, with learning difficulties, is glimpsed being tormented by local children in the film’s prologue.

Adam and Lukasz share a moment of apparently chaste ecstasy in an exuberant scene where they run wild through a cornfield making monkey noises – a sequence which teeters perilously close to the ridiculous. But the catalyst for disaster is Adrian (Schuchardt), a surly new arrival at the centre, whose own no-holds-barred sexuality sparks for one boy’s downfall and accelerates Adam’s crisis.

The film generally sticks to a pensive, introspective tenor. But Szumowska and co-writer Michal Englert (who’s also cinematographer) often find it hard to resist a more flamboyantly expressive mode, sometimes to uneasy effect – notably when Adam starts to crack up, drunkenly dancing with a picture of the Pope to a hard rock soundtrack. Chyra is a charismatically moody actor, conveying a tangible sense of emotional and spiritual depth beneath a grizzled saturnine exterior, but he’s less effective when called on to let rip emotionally, and the scene where the priest Skypes with his sister in Toronto is the film’s weakest point, veering into the outright histrionic.

The film is narratively wayward too, its disjointed narrative line playing for understatement, but often leaving us wondering where characters have disappeared to for long stretches, as Lukasz and his brother do. Some ellipses are awkwardly handled: at one moment, for example, it comes as a revelation out of the blue that one key character, whose funeral we see, has actually hanged himself.

What makes the film most impressive is the impressionistic handling of its milieu, in particular the tensions between the centre and its rural surroundings, with locals often hurling anti-semitic taunts at the boys.

Apparently improvised ensemble scenes with the teenagers bristle with energy, and Englert’s energetic camera and often luminous naturalistic photography provide a distinctive signature. Overall, In the Name Of suffers from its dramatic looseness, and doesn’t finally transcend a traditional vein of art-house melodrama. But as a humane, non-judgemental look at enduring contradictions of Catholicism and mortal sexuality, it’s a film to be admired, if not worshipped. – Jonathan Romney, Screen International

Click here to read The Guardian review.

Click here to read The Independent (UK) review.

This rich, raw, heartache of a film tracks a relationship from beginning to end, propelled by a soundtrack of foot-stomping bluegrass.  ‘romantic-drama of the highest order – this year’s Once‘

Belgium, Netherlands, 2012.  Language: English.  100 minutes.  Cert: CLUB.  Dir: Felix van Groeningen.  Starring: Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg, Nils De Caster, Robby Cleiren, Bert Huysentruyt, Jan Bijvoet Flemish

Winner – Audience Award, Berlin Film Festival 2013

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A remarkable film in every respect, and one that takes you on a constantly surprising and emotional journey of love, passion, tragedy and joy, The Broken Circle Breakdown won the Audience Prize at the Berlinale, where it was rapturously received. Infused with gorgeous bluegrass music, and with performances of rare power and magnetism, the film takes you on a rollercoaster ride that leaves you exhilarated and reeling. More than mere background music, bluegrass is integral to the story, linking the main themes of life, love, death, America and parenthood.

Elise and Didier have been together for seven passionate years. When their little girl Maybelle is diagnosed with a serious illness, all the turning points in their intense and moving relationship seem to flash by. They remember their love at first sight, courtship and passion, coming closer through their bluegrass band, braving marriage, pregnancy and the joy of parenthood. But as the stress and sorrow of Maybelle’s treatment takes its toll, Didier and Elise begin to respond in different ways – their love in threat, just when they need it most.

Felix van Groeningen has created a masterful, exuberant film; one which miraculously seems to encompass all of human emotion. – Sydney Film festival 2013

Click here for website.