By Orla Smith.

The 71st Edinburgh Film Festival started with a simmer rather than a bang. Yorkshire set drama God’s Own Country opened this year’s festival, and those who see the film continue to be taken aback by it. It’s quite an accomplishment for a tiny movie with a first time director and very little star power to gather so much steam, but God’s Own Country deserves its steadily building reputation.

You many not have heard of Josh O’Connor, but that will undoubtedly soon change. O’Connor has so far taken small roles in British productions such as Florence Foster Jenkins and The Riot Club, as well as a bit-part in Steven Knight’s BBC drama Peaky Blinders and a regular role in ITV series The Durrells. He’s no staple yet, but he gives a performance in God’s Own Country that suggests it’s only a matter of time. As Johnny Saxby, a young and careless farm worker, he captures a stifled sensitivity and loneliness in the early scenes, when Johnny is at his most brutish.

We first see him as a pale, bare body crouched over a toilet bowl, violently throwing up after a night of hard drinking. It soon becomes clearly that this is nothing out of the ordinary. There are two sides to Johnny: he’s often drunk, is sullen with his grandmother (Gemma Jones) and ailing father (Ian Hart), and he engages in casual sex while actively avoiding a deeper connection with his hookups. He only softens when he’s with the sheep he tends to every day. With no-one around, he talks softly, handling them gently.

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That is, until the arrival of Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian migrant worker who has come to help on the farm over the weekend. Johnny picks him up from the train station at night and Gheorghe bemoans the lack of phone signal: he’s entered a new world, up on the Yorkshire moors that are cut off from the rest of civilisation. Director Francis Lee has stated that he made the film in an effort to express the isolation he felt growing up there. The film is not autobiographical: Lee moved away from his home to become an actor at age 18, similar to the old friends that Johnny meets one night at the local pub. Instead, the film explores an alternate reality: what if he had stayed? What if someone had come along to ease that isolation? What would life have looked like then? Johnny taunts Gheorghe at first, and Gheorghe makes no effort to appease him. However, the two quickly become curious about one another. To start with, their relationship is a rough, physical one. Soon, that gives way to romance, and a deeper connection that makes their oppressive surroundings more bearable – even beautiful.

God’s Own Country calls to mind various influences, including British social realism such as the cinema of Ken Loach, and the elemental Yorkshire scenery of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights. The film has been compared most often to Brokeback Mountain, which is in many ways reductive, however Lee does include a few explicit visual references to that film.

There’s a frank unsentimentality to the filmmaking, and a thoughtful avoidance of cliché in the queer elements of the story. Johnny is already aware of his sexuality before Gheorghe’s arrival, making it less a story of self-awakening, and more of a pure-bred romance that demonstrates the ways in which love can help us to open up. There are still issues of acceptance hanging over the character’s heads, but they are allowed to speak for themselves. In particular, the film’s handling of Johnny’s family’s discovery of his relationship with Gheorghe is a refreshing divergence from what we’ve been taught to expect.

Secareanu is every bit O’Connor’s equal. His role is the less volatile of the two, but there’s always warmth behind his eyes. He holds himself with assured strength, and so we understand the safety that the more unstable Johnny finds in their companionship. The two have wonderful chemistry. Ever since I saw the film, I’ve found myself smiling as my mind drifts back to the small, comforting moments they craft together. Despite the grey toned vistas captured by cinematographer Joshua James Richards, this is a warm and welcoming film, at its best akin to sitting in comfortable silence around a campfire.

God’s Own Country charts the incremental emotional unfurling of its protagonist, but despite its subdued build-up, the emotional pay-off is huge. You are forced to realise just how much everything you’ve just seen has meant – all in one of the year’s most sublimely acted and written scenes. It plays out against a silent landscape, just as much of the film does, but is preceded by a burst of score. Instrumental music only features at three points in the film, which act as emotional markers. Rather than being unnecessary, they allow you a moment to step back and enjoy the view.

Despite having being scripted before the referendum was announced, the shadow of Brexit inevitably hangs over God’s Own Country.

It is hopeful, like a plea for a future in which we see the welcoming of immigrants as a chance for connection and co-operation, rather than an imposition. This is not a film that tries to be political – in that sense, it’s far from Ken Loach – but its simple and honest story sends a clear message about small lives, and the things that make them feel a little fuller.

By Last Caress.

A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey, the documentary by Harold Monfils chronicling the work of war photographer Jason P. Howe begins with Jason jumping out of a Chinook helicopter with a squadron of British soldiers into Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in November 2011. They immediately have to traverse a minefield. Jason photographs the scene. Then, they sweep a compound for enemies, explosive devices or materials, weapons et cetera. Jason photographs the scene. Moving through a second compound, one of the soldiers – stepping through a doorway many of the other soldiers, and Jason as well, had already passed through – triggers an improvised explosive device (an IED), blowing his leg off. Jason photographs the scene.

They then have to get the injured soldier, along with his separated leg (“at the end of the day, we don’t want to leave it behind because then the Taliban would probably use it as trophies and that…”) to another Chinook, this time taking enemy fire across an open field. Jason photographs the scene. In fact this entire sequence, recalled in voiceover by Jason and by members of that quadron, is being illustrated for us entirely by Jason’s pictures. It’s a scene which manages to convey brilliantly well and at extremely close quarters the brilliance of the British armed forces but there is little here of the jingoistic romance of war as seen all too often in war movies (particularly older war movies). “It was quite strange,” recalls a corporal, “Because when I was treating the casualty all I could picture was me and my son playing football in the garden.” These men are scared for their lives, their futures. And that was just their first day of that particular operation. It was also the tenth anniversary of Jason’s life as a war photographer. Many of Jason’s days had been like this, all around the world. Colombia, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan. In A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey, we’re about to see a number of them.

At the heart of A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey is the tale of how Jason taught himself to become a photojournalist, in his own words: “Not by attending some theoretical university course, or taking portraits in a cosy studio, but by pitching myself in at the deep end.” So what was the deep end? For Jason, it meant going to Colombia and placing himself in amongst the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a Marxist guerilla outfit operating in various parts of Latin America in opposition to numerous government-sponsored right-wing paramilitaries and funded by a variety of unsavory means including kidnap, ransom, extortion and drug production and distribution. Here he was able to photograph plenty of harrowing images of the decades of conflict in Colombia but, hoping to build a more rounded picture both narratively and photographically, Jason went looking for the FARC’s principal nemeses, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). What he found was Marylin.

When Jason met her, Marylin was a civilian living in the Colombian capital of Puerto Asis, with friends in the AUC (or simply “The Paras”). Jason stayed with Marylin and her family as he photographed the strife in Colombia from an opposing perspective and, as he did, he and Marylin became close. Eventually Jason had to briefly return to the UK but, upon going back to Colombia, he found that Marylin had since become an active member of the AUC. This didn’t curtail his further research in Colombia however and, as his work began to garner critical attention, he was encouraged to go photograph the war in Iraq. After six months in Baghdad he returned yet again to Colombia to find that Marylin had graduated to becoming a full-blown assassin for the AUC, killing traitors to the cause. Beyond this, however, she was also operating as a contract killer, happy to execute anyone for whom anyone else might pay a price. Does this budding romance have a happy ending? I guess maybe it would if A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey was a fictional piece. But it’s not.

A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey is a hugely episodic look at a number of conflicts across the globe, as seen through Jason Howe’s lens. It’s also a look – I mean, a REAL look – at the horror of those conflicts, up-close and personal, and a look at just how personal the documenting of these horrors can become. Harrowing in several places, but recommended nonetheless.

www.hokaheymovie.com

By Orla Smith.

Blaring ambulance sirens set the tone for Heard, a London-based religious short that plays more like a music video, or one of those non-specific adverts that seem to only exist for the purpose of making you feel very, very bad.

The whole ordeal scored to one generically sad piece of music, it builds to a cacophony of over-egged crying and screaming, pitched to feel like an incessantly annoying ringing in your ears.

We’re presented with a series of tragic scenarios – a little boy covering his ears to drown out the sound of his arguing parents, a man living with a cancer that he refuses to medically address,  a woman who has lost a loved one to a car accident… At four minutes, the film only gives itself time to glance at each of their lives. Their suffering is reduced to a couple of shots each of crying, and just looking, y’know, sad – in a non-specific sort of way.

But at least they’re pretty shots. Cinematographer Pete Coggan is the greatest asset that Heard has. He shoots the film in an unusually wide aspect ratio, both the interiors and the mountainous vistas stretching across the screen like pieces of ribbon.

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But director Chris Smyth has no idea how to harness this powerful image-making. At one point, one of his actresses, mid-cry, whimpers out a strained ‘why’ into the distance. It’s one of the only pieces of dialogue in a very noisy film, and it rings shockingly hollow. The credits name these characters Fear, Anxiety and Loss, and I couldn’t think of anything more apt; these aren’t real people. They’re vague echoes of what real people are. They’re blurry reflection of fear, anxiety and loss. Naming them would be giving them too much credit.

The film’s ending attempts to add a touch of hope to its misery fest, but it’s hard to parse any meaning from it whatsoever. Heard begins and ends with two quotes that might clue its audience into what it’s trying to say.

The problem is, if you take away those bookends the actual film itself in no way supports their message. With those quotes, we know what the film wants us to take away: that ‘the cries of man echo into the heavens’. Without them? Well, I could only guess, but perhaps we’re being told that if you’re in pain, don’t worry! Some dude will take your stuff and leave it at the top of a mountain, and it’ll all be okay.

By Orla Smith.

From the very first frames of Limbo, director Will Blank asks you to look closer.

He holds on the sky just long enough for you to notice the shape of the clouds. His camera creeps towards a chipped billboard bearing the image of an old painting. The nearer we get, the more shapes emerge from the writhing mess of brown and grey paints.

With nothing but images of a desolate desert and the kind of art that could only have been created before any of us were born, you might think that Limbo is set in another time. That illusion is shattered when a mobile phone crashes against that billboard, cutting through the agitated sound of wind that soundtracks the film’s opening minute.

At only eight minutes, Limbo doesn’t feel clipped. It flows at its own strange pace, gracefully shifting in style and direction. The presence of that mobile phone feels like an intrusion, but it’s nothing compared to the jarring effect of hearing the film’s lead actor Raúl Castillo speak for the first time. His gravelly voice – reminiscent of Adam Driver’s – is a jolt, as a human presence takes over from the dominance of nature. He’s soon dwarfed by it again, as the camera pulls back and replaces him as a small and aimless figure against the enormity of the plains that stretch endlessly around him.

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Voiceover is used liberally, less as exposition and more to verbalise the stray thoughts of our protagonist, who remains nameless. The words we hear feel in line with a thought bubble in a comic strip – it was adapted from one, written by Marian Churchland. We follow the protagonist’s train of thought as it wanders to and fro, occasionally allowing us glimpses of what has led him here and what he has left behind.

The title Limbo might lead you to believe that he is stuck in an uncertain space between life and death, but upon further consideration of the film, it feels as if it is evoking a kind of limbo that may be more familiar to the living people watching it. We never find out the contents of the text message that compelled the protagonist to drive away from his life and hurl his phone away in spite, but  there’s no doubt that it contained the kind of information that sent him skewing off onto a different path. We’re afforded glimpses of the girlfriend he has left behind. If this is the story of the end of a relationship, his limbo is more akin to the one we all experience when looking for a way to move from one chapter of our lives to the next.

But the film has a final trick up its sleeve, in the form of a large, dying dog whose design contains just enough wise mysticism to make it easier to buy when he starts to speak, in the voice of Sam Elliott no less. The communication between the human and the dog is telepathic, but there’s enough expressiveness in the slow heaving of the dog’s struggling form to make sure there’s no doubt that this voice is connected to that body.

Limbo manages to be so expressive because it has the directorial confidence to focus on its most crucial details with microscopic scrutiny.

The sound design is masterful, zeroing in on tiny moments, like the folding of a burrito, or the slow opening of a heavy eyelid. Our protagonist remembers sitting in the kitchen, thinking about food and recalling the image of a teabag slowly seeping into water. All the while, his girlfriend wanders around the periphery of the frame.

It’s the loss of her that he laments, yet he can only think of times when she was there and he ignored her. It’s a film about regret and moving on, and maybe more still that I haven’t yet been able to parse from its flurry of sound and images. This one’s a thinker, worth experiencing and discussing, and worth letting live in your head for a while.

Limbo has the release date of 27th June 27.