Monthly Archives: February 2023

BFI, Features, Film

10 to see at Glasgow Film Festival 2023

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Back for its 19th edition, the 2023 Glasgow Film Festival– taking place from 1 to 12 March – will host 70 UK premieres, six world premieres, 16 European or international premieres, and six Scottish premieres at Glasgow Film Theatre, the city’s giant Cineworld and other venues across the city.

The festival opens and closes with the UK premieres of two debut features that just launched to considerable acclaim at Sundance. The opening night gala is dedicated to Girl, Adura Onashile’s Glasgow-shot story about a mother-daughter bond becoming fraught in a new environment, influenced by the matriarch’s struggle with a legacy of violence. Onashile recently made waves with BAFTA-nominated short Expensive Shit (2020).

Closing the festival is action-comedy Polite Society, directed by We Are Lady Parts creator Nida Manzoor. In it, British Pakistani schoolgirl Ria (Priya Kansara) dreams of a career as a stuntwoman, while also being suspicious of her big sister’s abrupt abandoning of her dreams to marry someone she barely knows. Something doesn’t add up… but is kidnapping your sister on her wedding day the right move?

Minus the two bookending films, here are 10 further festival highlights on our radar. As always, this isn’t an exhaustive selection and there’s plenty of films to discover in the festival’s full programme…

Full feature for the BFI

Features, Film, Little White Lies

Why ‘Decision to Leave’ deserves the Best Costume Design Oscar

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hen it comes to costume design prizes and the Academy Awards, the choice will almost always be between history or fantasy. The Oscar nominations generally favour period pieces, or the odd ‘prestige’ genre movie that’s also found love in other categories – Mad Max: Fury Road or Black Panther, for example.

On very rare occasions where non-fantastical features set in the present enter Oscar conversations for costuming, it’s usually for films where contemporary fashion is explicitly prominent in the story, such as The Devil Wears Prada. Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, set just a few years before its 2011 nomination, also falls under this umbrella, in following very wealthy characters who can afford runway fashion on the regular.

With this in mind, there’s a far less showy contemporary contender that was overlooked with this year’s nominees, but is no less crucial in reflecting the characters and narrative of the respective film. The tale of a married Busan-based detective getting too close to a suspect under his surveillance, Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave most immediately stands out in costuming terms with the sumptuous outfits worn by Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei), the wife of a murdered man, who’s being interrogated by inspector Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il)…

Full feature for Little White Lies

Film, Interviews, Little White Lies

Elegance Bratton: ‘Growing up, I never saw any Black queer heroes in movies’

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Produced by A24, The Inspection is the fiction feature debut of writer-director Elegance Bratton, who previously earned acclaim for Pier Kids, a documentary on young queer and trans New Yorkers coping with homelessness. A fictionalised depiction of Bratton’s own experiences, The Inspection is set in 2005, and follows Ellis French (Jeremy Pope), a young Black man who’s been living on the streets for roughly a decade, after being kicked out of his New Jersey home in his teens for being gay. With few options for his future, and partly in an attempt to reconnect with his homophobic mother (played by Gabrielle Union), he decides to join the Marines amidst the peak of the US military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, which prohibited serving LGBTQ+ individuals from disclosing their sexuality from 1994 until 2011.

Bratton got his own pre-college filmmaking start in the marines, thanks to an eventual videographer role, though The Inspection – a recent Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award nominee – largely sticks to his onscreen surrogate’s time navigating a tough South Carolina boot camp…

Full interview for Little White Lies

Film, Reviews, The Skinny

Blue Jean (Georgia Oakley, 2022)

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It’s 1988, and bulletins report on Clause 28, which would see the prohibition of any “promotion” of homosexuality as an acceptable “pretended family relationship” by local authorities in Britain, including schools. Politicians on TV and radio – including Margaret Thatcher – justify the measures on grounds of tackling so-called deviancy. Section 28, as it’s more widely known, wouldn’t be repealed in Scotland, England and Wales until the early 2000s. Among its many repercussions were the ways in which organisations created to support vulnerable LGBTQ+ individuals were pushed into self-censoring or outright closure.

The soulful, textured debut feature of writer-director Georgia Oakley, Blue Jean explores the self-censorship of someone in an authority role hiding their homosexuality as the clause is introduced, when there’s heightened discussion of the visibility of queer lifestyles, exposing prejudices among staffroom colleagues who would usually just deal in idle chatter. P.E. teacher Jean (Rosy McEwan), who was previously married, works at a Tyneside secondary school a fair drive from her home, to keep her professional and personal lives fully apart. That personal life includes girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) and their circle of lesbian friends…

Full review for The Skinny