Extra Geography review – a sweet and spiky coming-of-age debut

Sundance film festival: two teenage girls find their friendship put to the test in a witty and charmingly odd British comedy If you know, you know that first best friendship is a world unto itself – lush, rugged and expansive, nutritive and intoxicating, vulnerable to freak changes in the weather. Its specific terrain stays invisible to outsiders; only the two within it know, and they themselves are likely to lose it in time. So goes the perilous trekking in Extra Geography, Molly Manners’ nimble and frequently funny debut film, which astutely maps the peaks and valleys of one charged friendship between two adolescent girls at an English boarding school. Minna and Flic, played by remarkable newcomers Galaxie Clear (coming for Chase Infiniti’s name game) and Marni Duggan, begin year 10 sometime in the early 2000s, in a sunny meadow of boundless, heady entanglement. They move in playful unison, share beds and mannerisms, hold common goals (Oxbridge) and disdain (for boys, and those wh...

Motherboard review – enthralling smartphone self-portrait of family life

Copenhagen documentary film festival
Victoria Mapplebeck’s documentary stitches 20 years’ worth of footage into a home video love letter to her son, whose whole life so far is observed

Victoria Mapplebeck is a British director and lecturer who has worked in film, video, VR, user-generated content, and with her personal, revelatory projects she’s shown a magic touch with a smartphone camera: she won a TV Bafta in 2019 for her iPhone short Missed Call, about her life as a single mum, working out her relationship with her teenage son and his absent dad. Now she has developed this into a tender, intimate, funny and entirely absorbing full-scale feature documentary, the title of which is a reference to the central circuit board on a computer – meaning perhaps both the importance of the digital equipment she’s using to record everything, and her own central importance to the computer of their own family unit, the motherboard that isn’t allowed to go wrong or take a day off.

Motherboard is essentially a home video love letter to her son Jim that crafts 20 years’ worth of footage, showing her own life and that of Jim growing surreally from a tiny baby into a fiercely opinionated, smart young adult who suddenly towers over the parent. The film lasts around 90 minutes, which is about how long the growing up process seems to take in real life for a parent. And at the same time she has to deal with exhaustion, a breast cancer diagnosis, anxiety and her own complex relationship with her father who walked out on the family when she was still young.

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