Dreams Travel With the Wind review – communing with the spirits to preserve Indigenous culture in Colombia

This intensely personal film follows Colombian director Inti Jacanamijoy’s grandfather to the ancestral lands of the Wayuu people Spirituality and history collide in Inti Jacanamijoy’s debut documentary, shot among the rugged, enigmatic terrain of La Guajira, Colombia, the birthplace of his grandfather, José Agustín. Now in his 90s, the older man muses on the inevitability of death, all while looking back on his painful upbringing as a Wayuu Indigenous person . His voiceover, laid over the sight of lush forest and babbling brooks, recalls a cruel separation from his mother and his ancestral land, forced by Catholic invaders. This sense of fracture resonates throughout the family lineage. Jacanamijoy too speaks of his feelings of loss caused by generational trauma. Against such emotional and geographical disconnects, the film looks to dreams – and even the afterlife – as a possible space for reconciliation and healing. José Agustín’s mother has long passed, yet he often sees her in hi...

The Exorcist review – Friedkin’s head-swivelling horror is still diabolically inspired

The 50th anniversary extended director’s cut of the 1973 tale of teenage possession still shocks

William Friedkin’s deadly serious contemporary horror, adapted for the screen from the bestseller by novelist William Peter Blatty, is back now in cinemas for its 50-year anniversary in the extended director’s cut. This is the film that whispered its evil into the ears of US audiences traumatised by political and generational upheaval. It is also the great ancestor of the entire horror genre: a 132-minute jump scare – with horribly malign slow sections – taking place in upper-middle class America rather than some exotic central European locale. (I have in the past suggested that it brought supernatural fear into the American suburbs; well, I should admit that Georgetown in DC is hardly a suburb, in fact the point is that it is very near the political centre of the free world.)

Ellen Burstyn plays movie actor Chris MacNeil, a single mother ordinarily resident in California but currently renting a handsome townhouse in Washington as she shoots a film called Crash Course; she is playing a liberal academic at odds with the student body who are violently possessed with revolutionary ideas. Her director is a louche and boozy Brit called Burke Dennings, whose persona is maybe inspired a bit by Ken Russell, who is played by veteran Irish stage actor Jack MacGowran and whose death shortly after shooting helped create the “cursed film” aura that surrounds The Exorcist.

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