Queer as Punk review – joyous portrait of Malaysian LGBTQ+ rebels making noise

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Yihwen Chen’s warm and galvanising documentary follows queer punk band Shh…Diam! as they battle discrimination with humour and raw energy For queer Malaysian punk band Shh … Diam!, every live gig is a small miracle. Their name translates as “Shut up!”, a powerful and defiant cry in a country rife with homophobia. Favouring distorted riffs, heavy drums and swaggering lyrics, the band’s powerful sound seeks to drown out the noise of prejudice and discrimination. Their courage, as well as their simple joie de vivre, thrum through Yihwen Chen’s documentary portrait. Shot over six years, the film charts the monumental changes undergone by the band members and their home nation. Always ready with a joke, lead singer and guitarist Faris is a proud trans man. Rejected by his own family, the charismatic performer finds a safe haven with his bandmates Yon and Yoyo, and their audience. Their songs turn up the volume on issues faced by the queer community, and also bristle with an anarchic sense o...
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Raging Grace review – scary movie suffers an absence of scares

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An undocumented Filipino cleaner is employed at a vast, remote mansion to care for a bedridden David Hayman, while hiding her daughter Grace

There are interesting ideas – and a tremendous final choir sequence – in this scary movie; it offers a critique of British colonialism, and also plays with the text of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden that urged the United States to assume the thankless imperial task of civilising and subjugating the people of the Philippines, and nobly overlooking how ungrateful they are going to be. There is ingenuity here, and good acting, but the film for me feels flawed by its strained melodrama, an absence of scares and by a very odd scene of almost unreal, farcical absurdity.

Joy (Max Eigenmann) is a Filipino woman in the UK with a young daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla); Joy is doing undocumented work as a cleaner and faces racism and exploitation and imminent expulsion. But then she is employed by the haughty Katherine (Leanne Best) to work in a remote, vast mansion as a housekeeper to Katherine’s bedridden and ailing uncle, Mr Garrett, played with relish by David Hayman. Katherine has no idea about Joy’s daughter and there are some weirdly Feydeau-ish scenes when Joy has to hide the girl and somehow distract Katherine from spotting her.

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