Allo la France review – romance of French phone booths exposes funding cuts to rural services

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In an endearingly whimsical road trip documentary, Floriane Devigne takes calls from her interview subjects in the last remaining phone boxes dotted across rural France The humble telephone box, a souvenir from the days of analogue, can also be an intriguing cinematic locus. Floriane Devigne’s road trip documentary begins with such a relic: the last public phone booth in Paris, which also appears in Jacques Rivette’s mesmerising 1981 film Le Pont du Nord. Unlike their Instagrammable British counterparts, French phone boxes are usually painted in a demure grey and blend seamlessly with their surroundings. As it moves from the capital city to more remote areas, Devigne’s film observes the vanishing of a formerly essential utility as her cross-country odyssey sparkles with an endearing whimsicality. Instead of using talking heads, Devigne ducks into various phone boxes scattered across France, as she takes calls from her interview subjects. Stories of love and longing fill these unassum...
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Last Swim review – a London school leaver’s complicated A-level results day

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Deba Hakmat is impressively subtle as a British-Iranian teen whose celebrations come unstuck

Sasha Nathwani is a UK-based director of award-winning short films, of Iranian and Indian heritage, stepping up here to his feature debut. It opens the Generation strandin Berlin and is a sweet-natured, heartfelt and earnestly acted film; a little precious maybe, but saved from emo-sentimentalism by irreverent humour and a wittily self-aware final image of his leading actor’s face.

Last Swim is the story of Ziba, played by Deba Hakmat, an Iranian-British teen who has just stormed her A-levels and landed a place at University College London to read astrophysics; this is despite a certain attitude on the part of her interviewer who shows, if not microaggression, then microcondescension, pointedly asking if any other members of Ziba’s family ever studied this subject. Ziba has got intricately detailed plans for her and her 6th form mates to celebrate on results day; these are Tara (Lydia Fleming), Shea (Solly McLeod) and Merf (Jay Lycurgo).

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