What to watch: The European Union Film Festival 2017

This nerve-shredding German thriller begins in the pulsing white light of a nightclub strobe and spends the next two hours taking us on a tour of Berlin as day breaks over the city. We follow a young Spanish woman, Victoria (Laia Costa, excellent), as she falls in with a young German guy, Sonne (Frederick Lau), and his mates, who she meets outside a basement club. 

It feels like one of those blissful, freewheeling, prime-of-their-lives nights: they mess around on the street, steal some beers, smoke on a rooftop. Is this a fledgling romance we’re witnessing? After 40 minutes, there’s a sparky, charged scene between Victoria and Sonne in the coffee shop where she works. It looks like they’re like falling for each other. But in a heartbeat the story takes another turn entirely when Sonne’s friend, not long out of jail, gets a phone call that means his mates – and Victoria – are in serious danger. 

Did I mention that ‘Victoria’ was filmed in a single take? Director Sebastian Schipper shot the entire film three times in real time, and picked the best take. It’s an astonishing, brassy act of choreography, especially considering the film moves all over the city, with a sprawling cast of bit-players beyond the main characters. 

Schipper’s cinematic stunt, assisted by a terrific score by Nils Frahm, gives the film an incredible sense of immediacy and momentum, even if it means that a few sections are slightly dragged out. Some key elements of the story feel born of the world of movies more than of the real world, but ‘Victoria’ is an extraordinary filmgoing experience, raw and exciting.

BY: DAVE CALHOUN
POSTED: TUESDAY MARCH 29 2016

BY: TOM HUDDLESTON

POSTED: MONDAY JULY 25 2016

BY: TOM HUDDLESTON

POSTED: TUESDAY MAY 5 2015

BY: JOSHUA ROTHKOPF

POSTED: TUESDAY MAY 30 2017

The true story of a long-forgotten Finnish featherweight’s crack at the world boxing title in the late 1960s is the jumping-off point for this unexpectedly lyrical drama about life’s innocent pleasures – and surely one of the year’s most charming arthouse treats. Captured in atmospheric 16mm black-and-white, Juho Kuosmanen’s film is a deceptively simple recreation of the run-up to the big bout. Jarkko Lahti is Olli Mäki, a wiry, modest 25-year-old country baker and fighter who struggles to cope with the hype whipped up by his ambitious manager. Really, he’d much prefer to be spending time with the new love he’s just met at a wedding.

Thanks to Lahti’s instantly likeable performance, we’re soon rooting for him, and the movie slowly reveals itself as a parable about all that is lost when professionalism, greed and image-conscious PR muscle in on the purity of sport. With its loving recreation of the period, this is a must for vintage design fans. But what’s most remarkable is how the film somehow avoids the trap of twee nostalgia. Instead, it’s an authentic celebration of the timeless delights of country bike rides and skimming stones. Absolutely lovely.

BY: TREVOR JOHNSTON

POSTED: TUESDAY APRIL 18 2017

What role can cinema play in making sense of Europe's migrant crisis? Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi ('Sacro GRA') spent two years on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa to craft this artful, thoughtful portrait of a place currently best known as a staging post and rescue centre on the refugee route to mainland Europe. Rosi's documentary is partly reportage – we see harrowing scenes of naval rescue and the recovery of the dead bodies of migrants from Syria, Nigeria, Eritrea and elsewhere. But 'Fire at Sea' also offers careful, thematic juxtapositions as it moves between shots of naval ships and detention centres and follows a young local boy, Samuele. We watch as he makes a DIY catapult and has a lazy eye tested, as well as spending time with a doctor, a radio DJ and Samuele's fisherman father and elderly grandmother.

At first, you wonder if Rosi's interest in Samuele, a spirited young boy flinging stones at birds, is indulgent compared to the plight of migrants heard on a radio calling desperately for help from the sea. But he carefully builds to an insight into the suffering of refugees that is pointed, upsetting and very different from what you’d glean from 'pure' factual journalism. The personal and human angle Rosi takes on the tragedy of fleeing one's home is all the more affecting for how he connects this experience to other, indirectly linked lives of Lampedusans. The point, made poetically and calmly, is that all lives are as equal, and equally deserving of interest and respect, as each other. The film's quietly angry plea is for compassion, understanding and more than one eye open on this modern horror.

BY: DAVE CALHOUN

POSTED: SUNDAY FEBRUARY 14 2016