State of Statelessness review – Dalai Lama presides over intimate dramas about Tibetans’ life of exile

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Tibetan directors, who all live outside Tibet, deliver a quartet of films that explore the pain of separation and migration The wrench of exile is the theme of this quartet of short films from Tibetan directors, who themselves all live outside Tibet. Their intimate, emotional family dramas tell stories of separation and migration. In two of them, the 90-year-old Dalai Lama smiles out from photographs on shrines, a reminder of the precariousness of Tibet’s future. As a character in one of the films puts it bluntly: will there be anything to stop China erasing Tibetan identity when its rock-star spiritual leader is no longer around? In the first film a Tibetan man lives in a kind of complicated happiness in Vietnam. He loves his wife, and they both adore their sunny-natured little daughter, but he has mournful eyes. Home is a town on the banks of the Mekong River, which has its source in Tibet. The river is a constant reminder of the region – and of Chinese might too, since Chinese hyd...
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Eileen review – Anne Hathaway transfixes in off-kilter thriller

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Sundance film festival: the Oscar winner gives a pitch-perfect turn in an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s hit novel that doesn’t push its weirdness far enough

There’s a fantastically well-measured performance from Anne Hathaway in the strange, if not quite strange enough, thriller Eileen, an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Booker prize-shortlisted novel. She’s an actor who doesn’t always find her sweet spot, admirably trying to show extensive range for a star of her high wattage, yet often not proving to be the right match for her material, big swings frustratingly filed away as big misses.

Hathaway has an outsized energy that can jar with roles that require a performer who can more convincingly, quietly disappear, and so in Eileen, where her character Rebecca is exploding into the drab world of 1960s Massachusetts as a glamorous, and potentially dangerous, bombshell, it’s a match-up that feels like kismet. Her arrival is a ground-shifter for bored 24-year-old Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) whose life consists of caring for her cruel alcoholic father (a horribly believable Shea Wigham, a sterling character actor long overdue for more attention), controlling her sexual desire and working a thankless job as a secretary at a juvenile facility. When Rebecca joins the staff as a psychologist, Eileen, like the men surrounding her, is unable to stop staring, a sudden flash of colour in an otherwise muted world.

Eileen premiered at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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