The Girls review – poignant coming-of-age romance is an understated gem of Sri Lankan cinema

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Sumitra Peries’ 1978 film about teenage sisters and thwarted romance is laden with passions that can’t be spoken aloud Here is a gem of South Asian cinema from 1978, by the Sri Lankan director and editor Sumitra Peries. With its lucid monochrome cinematography and calm, natural, unselfconscious performances, there is a freshness and warmth to this film. It is often on the brink of melodrama or soap opera, many shots having a tendency to slow zoom into the actors’ faces, and yet The Girls is in fact rather understated. A great deal of its poignancy resides in this very suppression of emotion. We are in a world of passions that can’t be spoken aloud. It is a story through whose entire running time I wistfully hoped for a happy ending, but that is what Peries ruthlessly withholds from her audience. Kusum (Vasanthi Chathurani) is a studious, serious teen from a poor family with a scholarship to a very good school. Her father is seriously ill and her mother works hard to make ends meet. She...
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The Investigator review – harrowing documentary details search for justice after Balkan wars

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Viktor Portel’s film follows Czech investigator Vladimír Dzuro as he returns to sites of torture and death, and meets survivors as well as supporters of perpetrators

Revisiting the blood-soaked conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Viktor Portel’s harrowing documentary follows Vladimír Dzuro, a Czech investigator committed to bringing war criminals to justice. Drawing from Dzuro’s bestselling book The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War, the film primarily focuses on the atrocities committed by Serbian forces; as Dzuro returns to sites of torture and death, his encounters with the survivors as well as supporters of the perpetrators are at once riveting and heartbreaking.

The Vukovar massacre, one of the most infamous incidents of the war, is recounted in eye-opening detail. In 1991, in the final days of a battle between the Croatian National Guard and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) during the Croatian war of independence, the latter vetoed an agreement to evacuate the Vukovar hospital and turned it over to Serbian paramilitaries. In the end, nearly 300 people were executed in cold blood and dumped in mass graves. In 1996, Dzuro was a part of a mission to exhume the victims. Flickering archival footage of the campaign shows piles of bodies laid beneath the ground, a chilling visual manifestation of how history can be buried and erased. In contrast with the lo-fi quality of these newsreels, contemporary footage of Dzuro has the stylisation of a crime thriller. The look creates a gripping atmosphere, even if it also occasionally verges on overdramatisation, which the film’s already shocking true stories don’t necessarily need.

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