Deniz Gamze Ergüven's festival opener Mustang quickly serves up a vision of youthful release. School's out for the five orphaned sisters of a small Turkish village, and they're off to the beach to sloosh about in the water.
They dry off in their uniforms and feast on a neighbour's apples, the Edenic violation hinting at the sin, shame and burdens of womanhood to come, as their conservative Islamic family begin pairing them off for marriage.
One by one the girls fall, like victims of a firing squad, only the youngest (Günes Sensoy) showing real resistance. She's got a few years on the others; time enough to observe and plan a break-out.
Mustang is serious, outlining the crude policing of female agency, but it's also sensitive and light on its feet, buoyant with love and solidarity.
The barricades are up in Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin follow-up, a riotous punks v neo-Nazis showdown with a gruesome slasher sensibility.
Anton Yelchin and Alicia Shawkat (Arrested Development's Maeby) head up a gutsy band holed up in a white supremacist clubhouse, fending off Patrick Stewart's band of skinhead psychos. Boxcutter-sharp thrills.
"The roar of the furnaces; the slush of shovelled ashes: it’s the details that scorch the memory. Searingly, appallingly immersive film-making. And it’s Nemes’ first movie!"
Green Room had a lot of buzz but the real critical weight was behind Son of Saul, Lazlo Nemes' Oscar-winning journey into the bowels of Auschwitz.
Géza Röhrig is our man in hell, part of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who bargained manual camp work for delayed extermination. The roar of the furnaces; the slush of shovelled ashes: it's the details that scorch the memory. Searingly, appallingly immersive film-making. And it's Nemes' first movie!
Speaking of immersive: Lucile Hadžihalilovi's Evolution is a bolt of beautiful alien strangeness, an uneasy saltwater body horror about a young boy on a mysterious island.
The photography is intense and mesmerising, especially in the water, with rolling submarinic swirls of foamy blues, neon fauna and cascading undergrowth. The Island of Dr. Moreau meets Under The Skin meets Finding Nemo.
Some feature debuts didn't impress. Simon Stone's The Daughter, an Ibsen update set in modern Aussieland, has a good cast (Sam Neill is an enjoyably gruff grandfather) but is too melodramatic.
Departure, Andrew Steggal's well-shot but pseudo-sensitive French holiday home coming-of-age romance, is sunk by an unbearable central performance.
Better was Traders, Rachael Moirarty and Peter Murphy's fairly nasty economic fable, starring Killian Scott and John Bradley (Game of Thrones' Sam) as a pair of busted Dublin bankers who start an online murder club, Bradley going against type as a weaselly psychopath.
He shares a beta-male desperation with Douglas Ray's Swan Song, in which a jealous, struggling musician kidnaps his unfaithful wife and her female lover and ties them up in the woods, a low-budget counter-punch to the ridiculous gestures of self-pitying men.
Men and Chickens is a not-funny Austrian comedy about poultry-fuckers, while grief drama Louder Than Bombs gets a bit lost in its own ambiguities.
There was a lot else of course: live podcasts, classics, special events and a showcase of NI's emerging cinematic identity. A personal highlight was The Black Box screening World of Tomorrow, Don Hertzfeldt's wonderful short about a kid girl taken into the future by her time-travelling third-generation clone. Available on Vimeo, it's a funny and poignant animation about life, death and the beauty of the biggest trap of all: our ticking-clock mortality.
Conor Smyth
@belfastfilmblog
