Animol review – gritty young offenders drama challenges conventional machismo

Institutional menace and an idealistic take on redemption sit side-by-side in Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ empathic and occasionally over-earnest film The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder ’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test. This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/CLu4l65 via IFTTT

Landscapes of Resistance review – an enigmatic meditation on a life marked by Auschwitz

This documentary by Serbian-born director Marta Popivoda is a mildly psychedelic drift into the horror of one woman’s deportation and determined survival

Much of this Serbian documentary uses a striking, mildly psychedelic technique: a super-slow dissolve between images that morph near-imperceptibly into the next. Cracks in rendered rural walls appear to shift and Balkan forest vegetation undergoes subtle mutations, as the film’s subject, nonagenarian Sofia Vujanovic, recalls her past in voiceover: one of Tito’s partisans, her wartime activities and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz. It’s as if an ineluctable force – history – is moving through the material world, warping and reshaping it.

These tectonics operate on human flesh too: Vujanovic’s Auschwitz tattoo has slipped down her forearm as the years have gone by. Purpose still weighting her words, she recounts her journey into activism: she was attracted to communism by progressive classmates in the countryside; cherrypicked as a cell leader during the second world war because being a woman allowed her to escape attention; and then sickened by taking her first life, an SS officer during a raid on a supply train. Vujanovic was then captured, tortured and shipped off into darkness in Poland, with Czechoslovak railwaymen taunting the prisoners en route: “Gas, gas!” She thought they were being sent to work at a gas-processing plant.

Landscapes of Resistance is available on True Story on 2 February.

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