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  • Protein review – nasty, funny, soulful

    Protein review – nasty, funny, soulful


    A close-up of a shirtless man with a bloodied and bruised face, his expression stern and intense.

    A gang of small-town drug dealing gym rats are set upon by a murderous stranger in this satisfying Welsh genre piece.

    There are worse films to be obsessed with than Shane Meadows‘ Dead Man’s Shoes, and that film’s blood-flecked paw prints are all over writer/director Tony Burke’s witty, Welsh revenge yarn, Protein. The film cheekily adopts its title from the supposed nutritional qualities of human flesh among the more desperate echelons of the body building community, as our hooded, monosyllabic protagonist, Sion (Craig Russell), is in town to take out some tinpot trash and then feast on their freshly carved entrails.

    On the sidelines is kindly gym worker Katrina (Kezia Burrows) who attempts to befriend the shell-shocked Sion, and while he very much remains a closed book emotionally, he does offer her a secret assist by butchering a chauvinist local lout who’s giving her grief. In fact, the horror/slasher element of the film is perhaps the least interesting thing about it, as Burke builds up an ensemble of characters who are all more than mere functional bit-players serving a hackneyed plot.

    For example, two drug-dealing goons who work for a smarmy local kingpin are secret lovers who have been forced to conceal their relationship due to the air of unreconstructed machismo that pervades their grubby little community. Similarly, the two cops investigating this rash of disappearances come freighted with their own traumas, and an initially frosty relationship eventually thaws into something that’s rather toughing for a film that, in the main, focuses on violence, bigotry, exploitation, humiliation and which household tools are best for administering pain to your fellow man.

    The link to Dead Man’s Shoes doesn’t begin and end with its angular loner with zero moral scruples when it comes to offing his targets. Burke injects a much-needed hit of parochial humour into proceedings, exemplified by Steve Meo’s hilarious, hapless Kevin, a wannabe wideboy who loves nothing more than to play dress-up Travis Bickle in his bedroom and have yelled arguments with his (always off-camera) mother.

    There’re no wheels being reinvented here in terms of tone or narrative, but it is a very solid genre runaround that is elevated by its occasional and welcome lapses into soulful introversion. It’s highly satisfying to see a filmmaker transition from a career making music videos and shorts to a work which expends time and effort to flesh-out all of its characters – even if that flesh might be eventually eaten by its cannibalistically-inclined antihero.



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  • The Dreamworld Aesthetic of 8½

    The Dreamworld Aesthetic of 8½


    Illustrated surreal scene with central figure in red suit, glasses, and hat against yellow sky with small figures in background.

    Through its visionary cinematography and costume design, Federico Fellini’s 1963 film masterfully blurs the lines between memory, reality and fantasy.

    This feature is the first in our summer series, La Dolce Vita: A Celebration of Italian Screen Style, in partnership with Disaronno.

    Asked to describe the anarchic ‘plot’ of what would turn out to be one of his greatest cinematic achievements – a towering, madcap, melancholy exploration of artistic endeavour, male ego and personal failing – writer/director Federico Fellini settled on a rather ambitious statement. He sought to depict, he said, the three different planes “on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional – the realm of fantasy.”

    You might say that when it comes to the costuming of these impish, dreamlike figures, fantasy is as much a factor as is any impetus toward realism. They are symbolic as much as they are corporeal, with protagonist Guido Anselmi (played by the dashing Marcello Mastroianni) an autobiographical stand-in for Fellini himself. Piero Gherardi was the man for the job: the costumer and set designer would become a second-time Academy Award winner for 8½ off the back of his 1960 win for La Dolce Vita.

    For the insouciant elegance of Guido, a trim black suit is the uniform of choice. Guido dons Neapolitan-style tailoring in the form of this silk suit – some say it’s Brioni – along with a white cotton shirt, black tie and black-frame glasses. His suit is less angular and more rounded around the shoulders than traditional 1960s tailoring – not to mention paired with penny loafers to suggest a rather more bohemian, unconventional side to his character’s supposed professionalism. You can also see it in the character’s unusual choice of headwear – a rather incongruous, old-fashioned hat – which is remarked upon by other characters in the film.

    Meanwhile, in contrast to the rather tidy black-clad Mastrioanni, the women of the film are peacocks, dressed in various degrees of surrealist adornment. Guido remains both tormented by and in thrall to the women of the film – Anouk Aimee is chic and miserable as Luisa, his long-suffering wife, disguising her malaise behind black wraparound sunglasses.

    Guido’s mistress, Carla (Sandra Milo), wears only negligee, ostentatious white furs and heavy makeup – vulgarity writ large. But Claudia Cardinale plays an actress (who shares her first name) whom Guido casts as his ‘Ideal Woman’. She’s enigmatic and carefree, a beguiling and unknowable figure who can only exist in fantasy. “You’ll be dressed in white with your hair long, just the way you wear it,” Guido tells her, notably mentioning clothing.

    But we never actually see this vision materialise; instead, Claudia is black-clad in their nocturnal foray through Rome, far from the innocent pastoral figure he seems to be idealising her as for his screen role. Her LBD drips with matching black feathers – not the only bird-like echo in the film, and reflecting the more stark reality: less dove, more raven. Indeed, the hatwear worn by women throughout the film is strikingly avian – no doubt a reflection of the symbolic importance of flying and birds to traditional Jungian dream interpretation.

    It is ultimately Cardinale’s style which has the greatest import for 8½ because she is a figure of such projection and fantasy, the muse to an artist desperate for inspiration and a man who is spiritually and sexually conflicted. Failing to fall into the Madonna-mistress dichotomy, the playfulness of her clothing seeming to be either entirely in black or white feels ironic. There’s no objectivity in the way she is seen by Guido. And it’s that subjectivity which is the guiding principle of Fellini’s world of dreams.

    To find out more about Disaronno’s 500-year anniversary* celebrations, visit disaronno.com

    *1525: The legend of Disaronno begins.



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  • Daisy-May Hudson: ‘I want to make films that…

    Daisy-May Hudson: ‘I want to make films that…



    In 2013 Daisy-May Hud­son was study­ing for a degree in Eng­lish and Dra­ma in Man­ches­ter. At the same time, her fam­i­ly back in Essex were being evict­ed from their home, out­priced on the rental mar­ket and forced to go through the social hous­ing sys­tem. Hud­son rushed home, picked up a cam­era and decid­ed to film their expe­ri­ence which result­ed in her acclaimed doc­u­men­tary Half Way. For her first fic­tion­al fea­ture film, Lol­lipop, Hud­son draws from her real-life expe­ri­ence and the women who have inspired her along the way.

    LWLies: Your film has many the­mat­ic lay­ers to it and one of those is a beau­ti­ful trib­ute to the com­plex­i­ties of moth­er­hood. Can you talk me through the many moth­er char­ac­ters we meet and how you decid­ed to por­tray them in the film? 

    Hud­son: Mol­ly was inspired by these women I met out­side the Hous­es of Par­lia­ment who were protest­ing to have their chil­dren back after they had been removed by social ser­vices. Also anoth­er moth­er who became an advi­sor to the film who also had her chil­dren removed. They were these Lioness women who were so deter­mined by that unbreak­able bond between a moth­er and child. I’m also real­ly inter­est­ed in gen­er­a­tional trau­ma and the mir­ror­ing of moth­er and daugh­ter rela­tion­ships. Mol­ly is so deter­mined to be a cycle break­er but she ends up falling into some of the same cycles that her mum went through. She par­ents her moth­er just like her daugh­ter par­ents her. And of course, Ami­na, they just have this mag­i­cal con­nec­tion that hap­pens on screen but also off screen when Idil and Posy get togeth­er. They have this abil­i­ty to see each oth­er beyond their roles as mothers.

    I loved Ami­na and Molly’s ride or die friend­ship. In your writ­ing of female friend­ship what were the most impor­tant things for you to depict? 

    I think there’s a mag­i­cal thing that hap­pens when we allow our­selves to be seen and it takes coura­geous vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. When we do it there’s this depth of con­nec­tion where we can meet with some­one that is trans­for­ma­tion­al. That’s what hap­pens with Mol­ly and Ami­na. They start by hid­ing and fear of show­ing the dark­est parts of our­selves. Ulti­mate­ly, they show those parts, and they fall in deep­er love, a deep­er sis­ter­hood. The thing I’ve always felt about Mol­ly is that she had always been in sur­vival mode and Ami­na pro­vides a safe space where she can put down her guard. She can lean back into love. That soft­ens her and enables her to start lov­ing her­self and mak­ing new choic­es and then show­ing up to life in a dif­fer­ent way. Ami­na real­ly feels this deep grat­i­tude for Mol­ly because she actu­al­ly feels seen as a woman beyond all expec­ta­tions. That was so heal­ing for Ami­na, but also for Idil in real life.

    You’ve been very care­ful not to paint any of the peo­ple we meet in your film as vil­lains. The social hous­ing sys­tem was some­thing you and your fam­i­ly expe­ri­enced first-hand so can you talk to me about the things you drew from real life? 

    The thing we came up against as a fam­i­ly was the lim­i­ta­tions of the rules. You may be speak­ing to a human being but they are work­ing with­in this frame­work. When I was research­ing for the script, I was meet­ing real­ly gen­uine peo­ple who went into the job because they cared and want­ed to make a dif­fer­ence. Then they get lim­it­ed by this red tape… par­tic­u­lar­ly this dehu­man­is­ing lan­guage that they are trained to say. I remem­ber when we were home­less, we kept being told, ​‘in due course.’ It’s this pur­ga­to­ry basi­cal­ly. It was real­ly impor­tant to me that there was no bad­die or good­ie because I don’t think peo­ple go into a job to become bad guys. Also I think we’re just one choice away from being on the oth­er side of the table. When we were cast­ing I want­ed to find peo­ple that looked like Mol­ly, or could be Molly’s friend or aun­tie… that’s the thing about work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties you can be on any side of the table just try­ing to do your best and do right by your family.

    What are the guid­ing fac­tors for the type of cin­e­ma you want to make? 

    I want to make films that crack people’s hearts open in the most beau­ti­ful way. For me human­i­ty is about expe­ri­enc­ing this full spec­trum of emo­tion. That can be the deep­est grief but the high­est heights of joy. I think that’s what you expe­ri­ence in Lol­lipop.



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  • Lollipop review – a gut-punching debut

    Lollipop review – a gut-punching debut



    The past cou­ple of years have seen an influx of women film­mak­ers bring­ing time­ly, work­ing-class sto­ries to the big screen with lived rev­er­ence and fresh tal­ent, from Rocks to Scrap­per to Bird. The lat­est addi­tion to this new social real­ist niche is Lol­lipop, a gut-punch­ing debut from writer-direc­tor Daisy-May Hud­son. The film fol­lows Mol­ly (Posy Ster­ling), a young moth­er released from jail but placed in a dif­fer­ent prison when she tries to reunite with her chil­dren, who are being held in fos­ter care. She finds her­self in a hell­ish Catch-22: she can’t gain cus­tody of her chil­dren with­out a roof over her head, but she can’t get a house via state assis­tance because her kids don’t live with her.

    Hudson’s sharp film, inspired by her own expe­ri­ences, pas­sion­ate­ly takes aim at the pit­falls and para­dox­es of the social care sys­tem. After painful­ly short super­vised vis­its with her chil­dren and miss­ing out on key moments of their growth, Mol­ly reach­es a break­ing point. Hud­son iso­lates Mol­ly when her con­sci­en­tious smile cracks as, off-screen, the voic­es of social work­ers dic­tate that her chil­dren will remain in fos­ter care until she has sort­ed her­self out. Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Jaime Ack­royd frames Mol­ly through the worker’s legs, like the bars of a cell. Sterling’s restrained per­for­mance trans­forms into some­thing explo­sive; anger crum­bles into dev­as­ta­tion as the sys­tem repeat­ed­ly and harsh­ly fails her. ​“You need to do more for me,” she begs, only to be met with: ​“There’s noth­ing more I can do.”

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    Though some of the film’s most dev­as­tat­ing moments occur inside the coun­cil office, it’s also where Mol­ly reunites with her great­est sup­port­er, col­lege friend Ami­na (Idil Ahmed), who is liv­ing in a hos­tel for home­less fam­i­lies. Both women are sol­diers fight­ing with a fierce love for their chil­dren. Their sis­ter­hood inter­rupts the solemn tone as they find pock­ets of joy amid the dev­as­ta­tion, gos­sip­ing in bed and danc­ing to UK garage music.

    These moments high­light the dis­tinct absence of men in Lol­lipop, bar Molly’s 5‑year-old son Leo (Luke Howitt). The com­pan­ion­ship of oth­er women is the foun­da­tion of Molly’s life, under­scored by the chal­leng­ing rela­tion­ships with the all-women care work­ers or her over­bear­ing but inat­ten­tive moth­er, Sylvie (Ter­ri­Ann Cousins).

    The impres­sive nature of the per­form­ers is thanks to cast­ing direc­tor Lucy Pardee, who recog­nised Sterling’s pow­er­house lead­ing poten­tial but also dis­cov­ered the bril­liance of Tegan-Mia Stan­ley Rhoads. The lat­ter, who plays Molly’s 11-year-old daugh­ter Ava, takes cen­tre stage when she tear­ful­ly pleads with her moth­er to obey the rules to avoid get­ting in more trou­ble. But Mol­ly is des­per­ate. The moth­er-daugh­ter back-and-forths are sen­si­tive­ly penned and down­right heart-wrench­ing to wit­ness. It’s a stark reminder of the pain caused by a sys­tem that slash­es wel­fare spend­ing and demands a per­son to jump through hoops with their legs tied. Hudson’s film makes room to acknowl­edge that this is a fam­i­ly affair. Mol­ly is at the epi­cen­tre, but the rever­ber­a­tions impact every­one around her.

    To keep cel­e­brat­ing the craft of film, we have to rely on the sup­port of our mem­bers. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.



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  • How To Train Your Dragon review – never quite…

    How To Train Your Dragon review – never quite…



    Live-action remakes have come to dominate the kickoff of the summer movie season. Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, the creative duo behind early 2000s animated hits Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, have gone their separate ways, each now attempting to win the hearts of longtime fans and a new generation of moviegoers through live-action adaptations of their beloved animated classics. While Sanders has stepped back into the recording booth to reprise the voice of his mischievous alien creation, Stitch, DeBlois takes the reins as director of DreamWorks’ first ever live-action remake, steering the project in its entirety.

    A live-action remake carries far more to answer for than an original film or even a sequel. In the case of How to Train Your Dragon, the adaptation largely follows its source material beat for beat, raising the question: what does the use of real actors and CGI bring to the table that animation does not and can that added tangibility truly offer an experience that surpasses the magic the original still holds to this day?

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    Like everyone else in the Viking community on the Isle of Berk, Hiccup (Mason Thames) longs to prove himself by slaying the dragons that terrorize his village, setting rogue fires and making off with their livestock. But when he finally comes face-to-face with a Night Fury, one of the most feared and elusive breeds of dragon, the moment that should define his bravery once and for all reveals something deeper. Blade in hand, he falters, not out of fear, but out of empathy, and makes a choice that sets him on a path no one in his tribe could understand.

    Unlike his peers, such as Astrid (Nico Parker) – one of the tribe’s most promising young members – Hiccup struggles to meet the expectations of his father, Stoick, the tribe’s formidable chief. Time and again, Stoick is frustrated and embarrassed by his son’s perceived lack of toughness. But what Stoick doesn’t realize is that Hiccup’s empathy and inventive mind may be exactly what their community needs to survive.

    Slowly but surely, Hiccup begins to train and heal the Night Fury he names Toothless, inspired by the dragon’s retractable teeth and endearing, gummy expression. As fans of the original will remember, Toothless’s behavior was famously modeled after a cat, and this adaptation preserves that playful, curious energy, emphasizing the timeless dynamic of a boy and his pet. The bond that forms between Hiccup and Toothless remains the film’s undeniable heart, just as it was in the animated classic.



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  • This Must Be the Place: A Queer East…

    This Must Be the Place: A Queer East…



    This is the first of three pieces published in collaboration with Queer East Film Festival, whose Emerging Critics project brought together six writers for a programme of mentorship throughout the festival.

    Qinghan Chen

    This year, Queer East presents a more defiant stance to the public. I felt it within the first three minutes of Takeshi Kitano’s Kubi, the festival’s opening film. When a headless corpse suddenly appeared on screen, I covered my eyes and nearly screamed out loud. In the next two hours, heads were severed with the flash of blades; homoerotic scenes were folded into the political intrigue. I closed my eyes more than once, retreating into the darkness, anchoring myself emotionally. When a disfigured head was kicked off-screen, the film ended. I fully understood what curator Yi Wang had joked about in his opening introduction: if you feel uncomfortable, please close your eyes.

    In the cinema, I never know whether each passing moment will shock or stun me. Moving images pour down like a waterfall, an overused metaphor for queer desire, yet they are still potent enough to shatter my boundaries. But I can choose to close my eyes. With this act, my attention shifts away from the images on screen and turns inward, toward my own body. As a result, I become more aware of my existence. It feels like my eyes are building a temporary shelter, guarding my perception and granting me respite. When I am ready, I can open my eyes and jump back into that fleeting in-between space between myself and the screen. Perhaps I could discover new interactions between films and space.

    I experienced a perfect accident after traveling an hour and a half to reach the ESEA Community Centre, where the short film programme Counter Archives was held. The screening room is a narrow space with a skylight, loosely covered by a piece of black fabric. Due to British summer time, the lingering daylight disrupted the images on the screen, making them blurry and erratic. Yet this imperfection created a unique feeling for me.

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  • The History of Sound – first-look review

    The History of Sound – first-look review



    When Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) and David White (Josh O’Connor) meet over the top of a piano in a Boston college bar, the spark between them is instant. One is a talented vocal student, the other a composition major preoccupied with recording and cataloguing the folk music of rural communities – their shared passion for song is what brings them into each other’s orbit, and the onset of the First World War is what cruelly divides them for the first time. While David goes off to fight, Lionel returns to his family’s farm in Kentucky, where the work is hard and honest. By the time they meet again, they’re both a little worse for wear. A sojourn to rural Maine to continue David’s folk recording project provides both with a new sense of purpose, and rekindles their tentative romance, but like all great ballads, there’s tragedy on the horizon.

    Oliver Hermanus’ sixth feature takes him to North America for the first time, casting two bona fide heartthrobs: Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor. When The History of Sound was announced in 2021 it set the internet ablaze, with many excited about the prospect of a tender gay romance starring two of the hottest young actors in the industry – but the resulting film is perhaps more restrained and delicate, sparing in its sexual content, for better or worse. In fact, there’s something even a little distant about the film, in which Lionel and David’s romance amounts to a few months across several years, and much of the focus is on its aftermath. The film is more concerned with how this pivotal moment in Lionel’s life changed everything about the person he would become.

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    Josh O’Connor, seemingly incapable of delivering a bad performance, is wonderful and tragic as David, charismatic and glib and fantastically handsome. Who wouldn’t fall in love with him, or the way his tired smile never seems to reach his eyes? It’s a pity there isn’t more of him, and Mescal opposite is perhaps a little lost as Lionel, despite his best efforts to deliver a serviceable American accent and the charming chemistry between them. There’s just something a little too interior about his performance – it’s difficult to buy that his relationship with David really is as significant as the film wants us to believe it is. It’s also a little unfortunate for Mescal that he’s outperformed by Chris Cooper as an older version of Lionel; he delivers a searing emotional monologue in the film’s final act which provides some much-needed resonance. But to Mescal’s credit, his singing sequences are quite beautiful, as are O’Connor’s, and the folk soundtrack evokes Inside Llewyn Davis in its soulfulness.

    The film feels weighed down by some unnecessary sequences that don’t help to drive the story forward, occasionally forgetting that the crux of the film should be Lionel and David’s relationship and its long shadow; a sharper cut might prevent the film from sagging once the lovers part ways. While comparisons with Brokeback Mountain are inevitable among those with a limited understanding of queer cinema, The History of Sound has far more in common with Merchant Ivory – particularly The Remains of the Day and Maurice – in its pervasive melancholy and sense of profound regret at past inertia. It’s not repression that powers The History of Sound, but the tragedy of understanding something far too late to chase it. Its buttoned-up nature and chasteness might frustrate those hoping for a more salacious story, but Hermanus and writer Ben Shatuck (adapting from his own short story of the same name) have produced a unique and moving romance for those willing to listen.

    To keep celebrating the craft of film, we have to rely on the support of our members. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.



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  • Romería – first-look review | Little White Lies



    In her Golden Bear-winning Alcarrás, Carla Simón meets a family standing on the brink of a monumental life change, chronicling the minutia of their lives as it begins to morph into something foreign. In Romería, this change lies in the past, where it remained flimsily buried until the curious hands of young Marina (Llúcia Garcia) came to pluck it back to the surface.

    The girl, raised by her mother’s family after becoming orphaned at a young age, just turned 18, and needs to rectify her birth certificate to include her biological father so she can qualify for a scholarship. This bureaucratic chore sees her travel alone from bustling Barcelona towards Vigo, a small city nested in the northwestern coast, where she is suddenly not only no longer alone but surrounded by dozens of family members she either has not met or has very little recollection of.

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    Romería stands for pilgrimage in Spanish, and the film is as much of a literal pilgrimage in Marina’s long overdue homecoming as it is for Simon herself. The semiautobiographical drama is set in 2004, and sees Marina try to make sense of this new expansive world suddenly engulfing her through the low-quality lens of a digital camera. The director zooms into crooked wooden alabasters and delicately swinging wind chimes, grasping at texture and sound with the voracity of those who understand the stakes of faded memories.

    Like in her two previous features, Simon is most interested in capturing the intricate fabric of familial relationships molded by the intimacy of time and suddenly reworked by life’s tricky, unpredictable hands. Similarly to six-year-old Frida in Summer of 1993, Marina has to make sense of the invisible strings connecting the new people that come flooding into her life as well as thread the foreign environment that has shaped them into being. Unlike Frida, however, Marina is on the cusp of womanhood and therefore privy to thornier, more elusive human complexities, and this is where Romería finds its anchoring emotional core.

    That is because both of Marina’s parents have died young, and not of complications of hepatitis like her father’s death certificate claims. The two, who suffered from heroine addiction, contracted AIDS at the height of the epidemic. Much of Romería is told through passages of Marina’s mother’s diaries from 1983, the pages at times made map, at others maze. As the words echo in the teen’s head, lingering in the air of the film through a poignant voice over, a reality long-buried begins to become clearer and clearer.

    The Spanish director broaches the still-present taboo of the virus in a crescendo. When some of Marina’s many cousins sneakily roll some joints in the labyrinthine underworld of the family boat, they make sure to ease away each other’s trepidations by remarking that a little bit of weed won’t turn them into their parents. Then the uncles and aunties ruminate over lost friends and family, ressusciating the dead through the power of collective recollection. The young fell like flies back in the 80s, they say, it was either “accidents, overdose, or AIDS.”

    But, despite a taste of confrontation when the film leaves the realm of the harbor and finally enters the family home and a brief, somewhat tonally misguided flashback, Romería is loyal to its sense of withholding almost until the very end. It is then, finally, that Simon reaches the grand apex of her journey of self-reflection, one that holds in the stunning clarity of carefully chosen words a moving encompassing of how one can only build a sturdy foundation for the future after lovingly repairing the unrectified cracks of the past.

    To keep celebrating the craft of film, we have to rely on the support of our members. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.



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  • Monica Sorelle: ‘I’m working through my grief…

    Monica Sorelle: ‘I’m working through my grief…



    The politics of the film are impossible to ignore though, especially as those in power in the United States perpetuate falsities about Haitian immigrants and strip them of rights. Monica is, rightfully, baffled that she has to have this kind of conversation: “It feels so stupid to have to do this, but I also thought a lot about demystifying Haitian culture for a lot of people. Even though we have such large populations in major metropolitan cities, I feel like we’re underrepresented and a lot of what you hear about us is geopolitical tragedies and news from the island. In a way, I just wanted to talk about the culture I grew up in and the family members I know, just honoring them in a way that I don’t think they’ve been honored in cinema before.”

    Films like Fernando Frías de la Parra’s Ya no estoy aquí and Ira Sachs’ Little Men were influential to the approach Sorelle took with Mountains – the former in how to find “relatability in specificity” in its depiction of Monterrey and the latter in its “quiet beauty in approaching gentrification, power, and economic status” – but Italian neorealism also directly influenced its creation. “We’re watching, in real time, an entire city and neighborhood being changed before our eyes, so having a mostly realist approach was the best way to show how capitalism really sucks the magic out of everything.”

    “Haitians and other Caribbean folks are so magical. There’s a mysticality to our experiences and our spirituality, but I wanted to ground the film in realism to imagine that the only thing that existed for our lead, Xavier, was the pursuit of material success. We only lean into magical realism near the end to usher him out of that mindset,” she explains. That realism even ties into the way that language is approached in the film, with characters and actors actually speaking Creole like the Haitian immigrants in our fair city actually do. It’s something that Sorelle is conscious she could not have managed with a bigger movie, but the limitations of the microbudget feature did not stop her from making the film she wanted to make.

    “I was motivated by the personal ethos of the film and the small crew,” Monica says, noting that the community she built with this film is a grand part of what made the experience worthwhile. “Production was really mobile in case of anything, like if a neighbor passed by that we could interview. We kept our footprint small in the community, but there were things that happened that made shooting hard. We’d be on a demolition site and thought they were on break and in the middle of the dialogue, the work started up again and we’re having to scream at each other through the scene.”

    “We had to roll with those punches, but everyone showed up. Everyone who’s there, on screen or off, put their all into it because they believed in the story, and that’s indicative of the kind of community filmmaking that I hope to continue being a part of, even as I scale up. Maybe a smarter filmmaker would make something that can be shot in Belarus or something, but I’ve built a community in Miami and I’m in love with them and want to continue making films about us.”

    For now, she’s continuing to prep and create new work and, as she jokes, Monica is “pretty gagged” about her place in BFI’s Black Debutantes series, which she is thankful to Rógan Graham for putting together and placing these works in front of audiences in the UK. “I’m showing with so many heroes and elders that I look up to, like the fact that my name is anywhere near Cauleen Smith is amazing. Even with the constraints that these women had on their budgets, on their films, on their creativity, they were somehow still able to make groundbreaking work. I’m so proud to be standing arm-in-arm with these brilliant women.”

    Mountains plays at the BFI on May 29 2025 as part of the Black Debutants season.



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  • László Nemes: ‘I wanted recreate the experience…

    László Nemes: ‘I wanted recreate the experience…



    The Academy Awards may be a glitzy party with an arbitrary approach to dishing out Oscars but, within the circus, are moments of gravitas. László Nemes is the embodiment of gravitas. His debut feature, Son of Saul, is a relentless immersion in the quest of a Jewish prisoner whose job, in 1944, is to clear Auschwitz’s gas chambers of the dead.

    Bodies – out of focus, naked and stacked high – are in Saul’s peripheral vision. This creates grief and empathy for a character who searches for reprise, despite the nightmarish horror all around. Seeing Nemes with his baby face and bullshit-free speech collecting the shiny Best Foreign Film gong is a positive omen for the future of this impressively serious Hungarian 39-year-old.

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    LWLies: How did you recreate the conditions of the extermination camps?

    Nemes: The film takes place in and around one of the crematoriums of Auschwitz, so we found the right location and building. It had all the levels of the crematorium, from the attic to the ovens level to the lower levels – the underground undressing room and gas chamber, outside the court of the crematorium and the outside. Everything was in one place so you could have a continuous experience filming between the one level and the next.

    And all the piles of bodies that you see in the background?

    I’m not going to comment on that. This is the secret of the workshop. I know how we did it but it has to remain a sacred thing when we’re talking about the dead. I don’t want to disclose too much about that.

    What are your thoughts on creative independence? Do you strive for it? If so, how?

    It’s scary how little we are allowed, as filmmakers, to have our own worlds created because of people who want to second guess the market but actually don’t know more about the market than we do. They try to say we should make this film so it looks like another film, which already had success. But filmmaking is about taking risks. If a filmmaker doesn’t take risks then cinema is dying. You can see how a sort of very static mindset has taken over European filmmaking and worldwide filmmaking.

    So how did you do it?

    Just stick to your ambition, then you wait until you get lucky and hope that the project doesn’t die within you. I think I got lucky. When I was close to not realising it – actually not making this film happen – the Hungarian Film Fund was the only organisation willing to support this film. Had they not done this, it would have been impossible to do this film.

    Did you come close to crying or did you cry at any point?

    No. Inside, yes, I still am.

    How close is the finished film to the vision you had before you made it? 

    Sixty per cent. I only think of the 40 per cent missing. I never think of the 60 per cent that I made happen.

    What was your full ambition? 

    To have it the same but better.

    Would that have been a technical change? 

    No, not technical. I’m the only one who knows but it just frustrates me. It’s not really an emotional change, it’s not the approach. It’s more the scope of it.

    And that still haunts you?

    Of course, that’s why I can’t watch the film, but I think in two years it’s going to be easier for me to watch it.

    Did you make Son of Saul because it was an issue you were obsessed with?

    Yeah.

    Has making this film changed the nature of your obsession?

    Yeah, it makes it a little bit easier to live with the thought of… I tried to communicate something that I had an intuition of, the experience of being a human in the midst of the extermination machine – something that hasn’t been communicated in cinema, the visceral experience of it. Not the external point of view, not the survival point of view, but something immersed in the reality of one human being with the limitations, the impossibility of knowing what’s going to happen. I wanted the imagination of the audience to recreate the experience of the camp.

    Did you always… because I read that some of your family members…

    People were killed in my family. It was not unusual for Jews to be killed. But it’s a very traumatic experience and I think it’s transmitted from generation to generation, in an almost genetic way. I wanted to make a film about that because people tend to consider the concentration camp as either something remote and abstract or historical, not really taking place here and now. Or in a very over-aestheticised fashion. I wanted to make it harder for other people to make films in the camp because it’s so easy to go there but it should be very hard to go there. You have to have the responsibility as a filmmaker to go there and talk about it. I wanted to bring the present of it, the here and now, and not this remote point of view.

    Have your family seen the film?

    My mother, my aunt, a few people. I made this for people who died in my family who have no trace of their existence apart from a few pictures. So many people died in terrible ways and they tried to erase even the fact that they existed by not even scattering their ashes. There’s something very… the destruction of people is something very… I’m very obsessed by it.

    What’s next for you?

    I have a project that takes place before the First World war; it’s the story of a young women in Budapest.

    Have you written the script?

    We have a script but it’s being rewritten and we are already working the preparation of the film.

    Does this symbolise that you’re moving on from…

    Yeah, I have to leave the subject. I don’t want to live in a crematorium forever.

    Son of Saul is released 29 April.



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