 |
| Beyond the Hills |
The favourite son of Romania’s New Wave follows up his jarring, Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, with another film about two quietly defiant young women- their struggles and their friendship. Cristina Fluter and Cosmina Stratan play Alina and Voichita, two orphaned friends whose troubled past we can only guess at. There are hints that abuse and paedophilia plagued the girls’ orphanage but still, they survived. They also fell in love. We pick up with Alina returning home from a working spell in Germany to find that Voichita has taken solace in the local Orthodox convent. Alina is distraught. She wants nothing more than for Voichita to join her abroad and so decides to fight the priest for her affections. She lashes out and throws fits but when it goes too far the nuns suspect possession. The leading ladies shared the acting plaudits at Cannes for two greatly complimentary performances with Stratan remaining distant and tender while Fluter writhes with fury and passion. Framed beautifully in the grey autumnal light, there’s a fitting coldness here too. Like 4 Months…, this is a film devoid of any sentimentality, there’s just no room for such indulgences. With all of this Beyond the Hills should feel like a horror but amazingly, it looks like real life. Indeed, the films of the Romanian New Wave have seldom told us how to feel. They simply tell us how it is.
 |
| Chasing Ice |
National Geographic photographer James Balog assembles a crack team and sets out to gain visual evidence of our planet’s retreating glaciers by painstakingly capturing time-lapse footage over a number of years. Director Jeff Orlowski shoots a travel log of the mission intercut with the usual ominous looking graphs and interviews with straight shooting intellectuals. Orlowski’s documentary can feel a little sparse at times but unlike many of its kind it chooses sentimentality over scaremongering, portraying these vanishing behemoths not as something to fear, but instead as an endangered species.
