Hunting & Sons – BFI Film Festival

54th BFI London Film Festival

With not much time to

spare in this busy month

of October, I managed to get myself down to the BFI Southbank on Friday and watched Hunting & Sons, by Dutch director Sander Burger.

Without sounding too arty farty, I do love what the BFI Film Festival brings to audiences: that chance to catch something perhaps stripped down and raw. Films with stories and characters at their heart. Films that come with you on the Tube on the way home.

Not the most pleasant upbeat Friday night experience, but an experience none the less. Hunting & Sons is a tale of breakdown of a once happy (if not stereotypically stark) Danish couple, driven to rather unsettling extremes by the realisation they’re pregnant.

Berger co-wrote the script with his two leads. He explained in the intimate time afforded by a Q&A session at the end of the film, that the germ of the idea was an event that happened in his town, in which a policeman killed his young family before himself. He wondered: what might it take to make ordinary people, flip? And for the writers, this is it. That the two leads of the movie are a real life couple, gives the film even more weight.

Hunting & Sons is an uneasy reminder that ordinary people can come to do very strange things when the pressure’s on…

The 54th BFI Film Festival runs til the 28th October.  There are a number of films paying during the day (very convenient for those who live & work in London) but the evenings provide some opportunities. Book soon & enjoy.

Tetro retro

Tetro : So I bit the bullet last week, and went from the safety and relative comfort of Zone 2 London into the madness of central. Piccadilly, no less. To pay an extortionate amount of money to go and watch a movie. But what a movie!

Tetro, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring the off kilter but bottomless Vincent Gallo, was one of the most beautiful films I’ve watched in a long time. A self-estranged man, Tetro, comes to Buenos Aires to escape the turmoil of la familia, and his past. But it finally catches up with him, when his young brother Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich) from NYC, finds himself in the area when the boat he is waitering on docks for repairs. The young brother gets to know the older one, who is terse, short tempered and limping from a road accident, mostly through the kindness of Tetro’s girlfriend, Miranda (Maribel Verdú).

Revelations are unavoidable, as the persistent Bennie, despite Tetro’s will, gradually pulls off the dust sheets to the reasons behind Tetro’s anger and chain smoking . The past plays out in vivd technicolour, bringing the confusion of that past to life. The present plays out in spot lights, humour and pain, all muted in black and white, and all the shades in between. But, there’s not much colour needed, with the characters so rich and deep, carved intricately by the harshness of life. They live on once the credits roll.