My Father’s Diaries review – haunting home-video excavates trauma of Srebrenica massacre

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Ado Hasanović’s moving documentary transforms footage filmed during the Bosnian war into a devastating portrait of memory, survival and inherited grief For years, film-maker Ado Hasanović has wanted to ask his father, Bekir, about his harrowing experiences during the Bosnian war but their conversations usually ended with curt, abrupt answers that obscured rather than illuminated the past. Bekir might be uncommunicative, but his collection of self-taped films and diary entries recorded during the height of the conflict tells a different story. Culled from this powerful personal archive, Hasanović’s poignant documentary forges a dialogue not just with history, but also across generations. In 1993, along with two other friends, Bekir formed a film-making collective called John, Ben & Boys in the small mountain town of Srebrenica. As the war escalated, what began as a playful amateur exercise quickly transformed into intentional documentation, as if Bekir was already aware of the genoc...
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The Idiots review – Lars von Trier’s appalling-taste Dogme satire is irritatingly original

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Whether intended as a satire of bourgeois hypocrisy or not this tale of boorish nihilists announced von Trier as a consummate provocateur

Lars von Trier’s film from 1998 is re-released as part of the ongoing retrospective dedicated to this director, a film pioneeringly shot on digital video according to the minimalist guidelines of the Dogme 95 collective, which undoubtedly helped create an affordability-revolution in indie film-making. After a quarter of a century, The Idiots looks as cheerfully shallow, smug and manipulative as anything he has ever done, yet revisiting this needlingly insistent and epically tiresome film does bring into focus the way in which the debate around disability representation has changed, and also the subversive prank aesthetic that has to some degree governed the entire career of this unique film-maker.

The Idiots is about people playing tricks, gigglingly pretending to have cerebral palsy or some form of learning disability in order to freak out the uptight bourgeois in their restaurants and workplaces – and, of course, the cinema auditorium. They callously call it “spassing”, or use the English phrase “mentally retarded”. Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) is a deeply unhappy woman, in shock after a tragedy in her life which is explained only at the very end. Dining alone in a restaurant one day, she is intrigued at what appears to be a group of disabled adults there, minimally controlled by their carer and embarrassing the other diners, whose fastidious politeness prevents them from expressing their obvious disapproval and disgust. Karen goes back with these people to their house, where she finds they are simply pretending: a commune-cult led by the charismatic Stoffer (Jens Albinus) whose wealthy uncle owns their HQ and believes his nephew to be house-sitting the property prior to it being sold off.

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