Sebastian review – journalist turned sex-worker aims to turn side-hustle into art

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Ruaridh Mollica is very good as Max, a freelance writer with a secret app life in prostitution, but Mikko Mäkelä’s film is not clear enough about his motivations Sex work as a window into human nature is a longstanding theme in cinema, from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, and onwards. It is intensified here by the fact that the protagonist Max (Ruaridh Mollica), who mines his side-hustle escort work for material, is also a writer. But this uneasy, self-regarding sophomore effort by Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä, never fully distancing itself from the narcissistic prism of artistic creation, only fleetingly makes contact with flesh-and-blood human truths. By day, Max is a freelance hotshot for London’s trendy Wall magazine; he has just bagged himself a sweet assignment to interview Bret Easton Ellis. By night he is “Sebastian”, a hot commodity on an app called DreamyGuys. Typically servicing the older gentleman, he turns his experiences...
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Dreaming an Island review – an eerie tour of planet Earth’s depopulated future

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This documentary about a small Japanese island, a once thriving mining outpost that now has only 100 residents, lightens its existential concerns with a focus on human connection

In his second full-length documentary, Swiss director Andrea Pellerani gives us a guided tour of what a post-industrial, post-growth, or even an eerily post-human future might look like. We are on the south-western Japanese island of Ikeshima. Once a thriving mining outpost that was home to 8,000 people, since the facility’s closure in 2001 it has been reduced to just 100 mostly elderly holdouts. As the residents fish the grey sea off abandoned wharves, inspect pregnant cats and loiter around derelict lots, there is a sense they inhabit the set of a long-shuttered stage play, and are awaiting new lines.

Though it begins with long tracking shots of greenery choking empty apartment blocks, Dreaming an Island isn’t exactly ruin porn. Pellerani is more interested in the vestiges of human activity, and milks a distinct absurdity from the stalwart locals. One collects “fun” beach flotsam, there are guides waiting rather optimistically for an upswing in coal-mining tourism, while Ikeshima’s sole restaurateur hopes for a customer. “Is there anything interesting to see?” asks one who finally turns up. “In what sense interesting?” she replies.

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