CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Rotterdam Film Festival
New young global talent gets a chance to shine
Scene from Pebbles winner of Tiger Award
[Rotterdam Film Festival]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
ROTTERDAM Film Festival is a key event for the independent film industry internationally, particularly from Asia and the Global South. Appropriately, the Tiger Award top prize went to the Indian film Pebbles.
Set in a rural village in southern India, Pebbles follows an alcoholic and abusive father and his young son as they embark on an eight-mile walk under scorching sun in a bid to reunite with his wife, who has fled his violence.
The feature debut of director Vinothraj PS, it has a a non-professional Tamil-speaking cast and, despite its grim subject matter, is a captivating and warm-hearted tale imbued with beauty and humour.
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ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review The Ceremony, Eddington, The Life of Chuck, and The Thursday Murder Club
RITA DI SANTO gives us a first look at some extraordinary new films that examine outsiders, migrants, belonging and social abuse
MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family