The Summer Book review – Glenn Close powers sweet-natured take on Tove Jansson’s kids’ classic

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This sensitive adaptation of Jansson’s 1972 novel, set in the beatific Gulf of Finland, is a quiet treatise on life and death Glenn Close brings her totemic presence to this gentle movie – as well as a makeup-enhanced grandmotherly face. This is a sweet-natured adaptation of Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel; it has charm, though it’s sometimes becalmed in its own sensitivity. Close plays a tough, wise, humorous-yet-cantankerous eightysomething woman who likes cigarettes and walking around outside stark naked when there’s nobody else around. She brings her recently widowed son (Anders Danielsen Lie) and six-year-old granddaughter Sophia (newcomer Emily Matthews) to a tiny, idyllic island in the Gulf of Finland, where they have a summer cottage. The grandmother may, incidentally, have unresolved feelings for local man Eriksson, in a fleeting cameo for veteran Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Byd3OvG via IFTTT
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Anqa review – women in Jordan share harrowing testimony of their abuse

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Helin Çelik’s documentary mixes impressionistic visuals with chillingly matter-of-fact accounts of abduction, incarceration and domestic violence

Helin Çelik’s otherworldly, impressionistic documentary opens with lines from a poem by Rumi evoking Mount Qaf, a mystical mountain erected by Allah. In this place that encircles the Earth and touches heaven dwells the anqa, a fabled female bird that symbolises resurrection after misfortunes.

The three Jordanian women at the heart of Çelik’s film are going through their own journeys of healing and rebirth. Mostly shot in profile or from behind, they speak of the horrifying violence they have endured. Their stories of abuse, abduction and incarceration starkly contrast with their domestic surroundings, which are shot with amazing warmth. From the rustling of the curtains to the gentle shimmering of a dallah coffee pot on the stove, the sights and sounds of the everyday are at once calming and eerie. It seems unimaginable that life can go on in all its normalcy while these suffering souls are still walled in by their harrowing experiences.

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