Running from February 14th to the 24th, the 2013 installment of the increasingly popular Glasgow Film Festival marks its ninth incarnation. Advertised as a festival “for the people”, GFF tends to stray from the red carpet approach and curation-heavy feel of its local(-ish) cousin, June’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, though it does have various themed …
Play Written by Ruben Östlund and Erik Hemmendorff Directed by Ruben Östlund Sweden/Denmark/Finland, 2011 Play is a frequently harrowing and thoughtful film about manipulation, bullying, identity, race and customs. Primarily rooted in uncomfortable ambiguity, it is based on a series of real cases of bullying and robbery that occurred in Gothenburg, Sweden in recent years. …
Avé Written by Arnold Barkus and Konstantin Bojanov Directed by Konstantin Bojanov Bulgaria, 2011 Bulgarian film Avé is the fiction feature debut of its director Konstantin Bojanov. A road movie, it is concerned with two hitchhiking youths whose paths collide, leading them to travel together to a small town close to the Romanian border for …
A Boy and His Samurai Written and directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura Japan, 2010 Yoshihiro Nakamura’s fish-out-of-water comedy, based on a manga, concerns an Edo period samurai thrust forward in time to contemporary Tokyo and befriended by a single mother and her young son. Instead of a narrative rooted in the action film genre like one may …
Tales of the Night Written and directed by Michel Ocelot France, 2011 French director Michel Ocelot is perhaps best known for his animated films Kirikou and the Sorceress, that film’s sequel, and Azur & Asmar: The Princes’ Quest. His latest feature Tales of the Night is an anthology film made up of six short allegorical …