Piggy (Cerdita) first published by SciFiNow Pink is a colour associated with girlishness, and with pigs. The opening credits of writer/director Carlota Pereda’s feature debut Piggy (Cerdita) are pink, to match the colour of its teenaged (anti)heroine’s trainers – yet the film also begins with the image of a pig’s head being placed on…
Rites of Passage, Fluidity and Metamorphoses: The Imagery of Education in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Innocence, Evolution and Earwig first published by Senses of Cinema, Issue 102, August 2022 Coming of age is often conceptualised in religious terms as a rite of passage and an initiation into adulthood – and so Lucile Hadžihalilović’s films figure themselves as ritualised mysteries, with children at…
Therapy Dogs has its European première at Glasgow Film Festival 2023 “You have to change. This is the last year of high school, you can’t be fooling around anymore. It’s time to start thinking about your future. What you wanna do, who you wanna be. And how you go through high school affects all of…
Eating Miss Campbell had its world première at FrightFest 2022 Eating Miss Campbell begins with a mixture of signals. First there is the Troma Team Release ident, setting a certain tone of trashy tastelessness (Lloyd Kaufman will later cameo with a two-word joke that practically defines ‘too soon’). Then Joe Renzetti’s jaunty upbeat score kicks…
Menarche is the transitional rite of passage in a young woman’s life when she first starts to ovulate and to bleed. An egg, and a lot of blood, will also play prominent parts in Hanna Bergholm’s feature debut Hatching (Pahanhautoja), as Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) emerges from childhood into adolescence and from innocence into experience, along…
Over The Edge first published by Little White Lies, as the 128th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “Welcome to New Granada,” reads the roadside billboard which opens Jonathan Kaplan’s Over The Edge, with the subtitle “tomorrow’s city… today” – but behind it is only empty space. This planned community was meant to be a…
Bright Future (Akarui mirai) first published by EyeforFilm Beautiful, fragile, free-floating and amorphous, jellyfish seem to exude a brilliant lustre all of their own, and are inscrutable to any but their own kind – try and get too close, however, and they are liable to deliver a killer sting. These creatures feature aplenty in Kiyoshi…
John and the Hole had its UK première at FrightFest 2021 13 years old, with a little boy’s lankiness and a voice not yet broken, John (Charlie Shotwell) is at an awkward age. In the opening scene of John and the Hole, when he is made to stand in front of his maths class and…
Paranoid Park first published by musicOMH Known to those who frequent it as Paranoid Park, the East Side Skate Park is a network of ramps and tunnels built by skaters for skaters – a sometimes frightening hang-out for the disaffected, dispossessed and disconnected youth of Portland, Oregon. It is also very near the location of…
Made in Hong Kong (Heung Gong jai jo) first published by Little White Lies, as part 112 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “The world is moving much too fast. So fast, that when you finally get to fit in with it, it’s become another brand new world!” So says Mid-Autumn (Sam Lee), the young skinny…
A Swedish Love Story (En kärlekshistoria) first published by EyeforFilm In 1970, Erich Segal’s novel Love Story was the top-selling work of fiction in the US, while in the same year Arthur Hiller’s film adaptation (with a screenplay by Segal) was the number one box office attraction. So when En Kärlekshistoria (literally ‘A Love Story’)…