French cinema gave the world the Nouvelle Vague, but its adventurousness runs far deeper, from the philosophical strangeness of Fantastic Planet to the quiet alienation of The Man Who Sleeps. France has long rewarded directors who treat film as a genuinely literary form, and that spirit runs through everything here. See what Macca made of it below.
Rating: 3.5★
Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot oversaw one of the twentieth century's most catastrophic acts of mass murder, killing somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians through execution, forced labour, famine, and disease. What is often less discussed is the regime's
Rating: 2.0★
The legend of La Llorona, the wailing woman who drowned her own children and now wanders waterways weeping for them, is one of the most enduring pieces of folklore across Latin America. Versions of it predate the Spanish conquest, and the figure has since been absorbed into everything from nursery
Rating: 4.0★
Released in 2004, Turtles Can Fly arrived at a moment when the dust from the 2003 invasion of Iraq had barely begun to settle. Shot on location in the Kurdish regions of Iran and Iraq, the film plants itself on the Turkey-Iraq border in the days just before the
Rating: 2.5★
The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest lake in the world. By the early 2000s, decades of Soviet-era irrigation projects had reduced it to a scattering of shallow, salt-crusted remnants surrounded by desert, leaving fishing boats stranded on dry land miles from any water. It is one
Rating: 3.5★
Jafar Panahi has spent much of the last fifteen years making films under conditions that would stop most directors outright. Arrested in 2010, banned from filmmaking and from leaving Iran, he has continued to work anyway, producing features on the quiet and smuggling them out to festival circuits while the
Rating: 2.5★
Cape Verde in the mid-1960s was a place caught between worlds. Still a Portuguese colonial territory (independence would not come until 1975), the archipelago was watching the old certainties crack under pressure from economic and social forces that no amount of tradition could hold back. The volcanic island of
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of anger that does not shout so much as accumulate, building pressure through image and rhythm until the audience has no choice but to feel its full weight. That is the mode Med Hondo chose for Soleil O, his feature debut, released in 1970 and
Rating: 4.0★
July 1995. The town of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, became the site of the worst mass atrocity on European soil since the Second World War. Over the course of a few days, more than eight thousand Bosniak Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered by Bosnian Serb forces under the
Rating: 4.0★
Iran in the mid-1970s was a pressure cooker, and for many young men caught up in the revolutionary fervour of the time, political violence felt less like a choice and more like an inevitability. Mohsen Makhmalbaf was one of those young men. In 1974, aged seventeen, he attacked a
Rating: 3.5★
Brazil's military dictatorship, which ran from 1964 to 1985, is one of the twentieth century's more persistently under-examined periods of state repression in mainstream Western cinema. Tens of thousands of citizens were detained, tortured, or forced into exile during those two decades, yet the regime
Rating: 3.0★
Djibouti is not a country that tends to feature prominently in film criticism, or in much cultural conversation beyond geopolitical news bulletins. A small nation on the Horn of Africa, bordered by Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, it has a population of under a million people and a film industry that,
Rating: 4.0★
Few films arrive with quite the weight of expectation that Capernaum carried into cinemas in 2018. Directed by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki and premiering at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize, the film centres on Zain, a twelve-year-old boy living in the poverty-stricken backstreets of Beirut,
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