DEoL at the 2025 London Film Festival - Part 2

Part 2 - the last four films seen at this year's LFF:

Below the Clouds aka Sotto le nuvole (Italy 2025: Dir Gianfranco Rosi) This is my first encounter with the works of Rosi, an Italian documentary maker much revered in critical circles. 

Below the Clouds is the result of the director's near four year sojourn in and around Naples so, as you'd expect, it spreads out in a number of directions, rather like the contents of Vesuvius, which dominates the city's skyline and its history. 

Shot in spectacular black and white, the film is a meditation on the cultural impact of Vesuvius - it hasn't erupted since 1944 - in contrast to the lesser known but more active Campi Flegrei - or Phlegrean Fields - volcano. Its more famous relative is perhaps best known for the destruction of Pompeii in AD79, and visitors to the local museum are seen regarding the tragic victims, their bodies encased in and preserved by lava.

Tourists are led underground to see the antiquities grouped around the structure of the famous Amphitheatre, while others witness the results of the raiding of the tombs and palatial houses for profit. Japanese scientists visit the site to continue the painstaking process of digging through hitherto unexplored layers, fully expecting to uncover further important archeological finds.

Rosi interweaves this activity with the day to day life of the area. A ship imports massive amounts of grain from Ukraine, the mounds themselves resembling volcanoes. The vessel's crew, including a Syrian, are not happy to have to return to the war torn country after unloading. Despatches from a local emergency services department show familiar problems with bored youths setting off fires, domestic abuse and isolated voices expressing the very real fears about tremors experienced from Campi Flegrei; the locals generally don't seem too concerned with their area's history.

A huge cloak of sadness descends over this documentary (the title is taken from a quote by Cocteau; “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world”). Naples is shown as a shadow city, all night time train rides, empty cinemas and antiquities picked out by torchlight; we're far from the Italy of Rossellini or even Fellini here. Its near two hour running time, soporific pace and repetitive sequencing make Below the Clouds a far from an easy watch, but a beautiful and elegiac one.

Cover Up (USA 2025: Dir Mark Obenhaus, Laura Poitras) The rather sensationalist title for this penetrating documentary on American political journalist and author Seymour Hersch may be explained by the familiar Netflix logo which appears at the start.

Don't get me wrong; it's great that Obenhaus and Poitras's movie has been picked up for streaming, the more views the better, but I can't help feeling that the object of the documentary may have been less than pleased with the method of distribution.

Hersch, or Sy as he's known throughout, is an uncompromising writer whose refusal to back down has, over the years, made him a hated figure for Presidents, the CIA and just about anybody in power in the US involved in the suppression of truth.

A bright and gifted student whose talents were recognised at an early age, after a spell on crime reporting Sy's first major work was an expose of the 1969 My Lai massacre in Vietnam. A long forgotten atrocity in which up to 500 innocent men, women and children were murdered by American troops during the war, Hersch looked into the initial verdict on the atrocity, which sought to place the blame on one infantryman, and discovered a massive cover up by the U.S. army and the then government, who had initially tried to explain the killings as a move against the Viet Cong army. 

(l-r) Laure Bonville (BFI), Laura Poitras,
Sy Hersch and Mark Obenhaus at LFF

Although Sy won a Pulitzer Prize for the work, Cover Up shows that even now Hersch is haunted by the details of the massacre and the infinite capacity of humans to enact terrible things. In 2004 Hersch was also responsible for exposing the U.S. military's torture and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad during the Iraq war. Photographs obtained, showing the extent of the brutality, shocked the world when published in the press. 

Cover Up shows, mainly through archive footage and some often tense face to face interviews with the documentary makers, the extent of Hersch's reach and his inability to take the path of least resistance. Uncomfortable with being front and centre - he'd rather other voices speak through his journalism - his surprise appearance at a Q&A following the LFF screening demonstrated his unshifting pessimism about world leaders and events. The documentary shows Sy, still working at 88, receiving intel on activity in Gaza and strongly protecting his sources in the course of his work. Cover Up cannot hope to cover the extent of Hersch's often messy career even over two hours, but makes the case that we should all be a bit more Sy in terms of how we receive information provided to us by Governments.

 

The Ice Tower aka La tour de glace(France, Germany, Italy 2025: Dir Lucile Hadzihalilovic) Hadzihalilovic's previous features have all been located in hermetically sealed worlds, set in unspecified time periods.

Her latest certainly ticks the first box, but is set in the early 1970s, although anyone hoping for period accuracy clearly hasn't seen any of her previous movies. Clara Pacini, in her first feature role, plays Jeanne, a young girl keen to escape the orphanage where she lives after the death of her mother.

Jeanne's wanderings see her missing the last bus home, escaping a lecherous man who gives her a lift, and finding another girl's discarded handbag, which contains identity documents. Seizing on this, Jeanne renames herself Bianca and, seeking shelter, steals into an abandoned facility that turns out to be a film studio.

The production in progress is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, with the divaish Cristina (Marion Cotillard) in the central role. Bianca quickly becomes enamoured with the mercurial star, spying on her as she creeps around the studio; in turn Cristina notices Bianca and a friendship of sorts begins, until events quickly escalate.

Beneath the stunning wintry design lies a rather disturbing tale about age and vulnerability. The characters of Jeanne/Bianca and Cristina are kept consciously unfocused; in the former's case, the tragic death of her mother has clearly traumatised the young girl, who possibly sees in Cristina a substitute maternal figure. Cristina is a flawed soul, addicted to narcotics (administered by Max, a sinister doctor figure played by August Diehl) and as a result capricious and venal. The fairytale in which both characters feature - the 'Snow Queen' project acts as a film within a film - is also a springboard for some time shifts; as a result something which could be perceived as whimsical and peripheral is given a dark, disturbing heart, germane to all the best fairy tales. 

Two Prosecutors aka  Zwei Staatsanwälte (France, Germany, Netherlands, Latvia, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine 2025: Dir Sergey Loznitsa) Ukrainian born Loznitsa has in the past oscillated between fact and semi fact in his short works, features and documentaries. His latest movie locates itself in truth, set in the Soviet Union of 1937 during Stalin’s Great Terror, and adapted from a novella by gulag survivor Georgy Demidov.

Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) is a young, principled investigator/prosecutor, his role to investigate potential miscarriages of justice. A letter from a prisoner, Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko) has found its way into Kornyev's hands; it shouldn't have, as an opening scene shows many such letters, written by other prisoners complaining about the trumped up circumstances of their incarcerations, being swept up and burned. This particular letter suggests authenticity in that it was written in the prisoner's own blood.

Kornyev travels to meet the prisoner and agrees to take the case. But this means dealing with the Kafkaesque nightmare of Stalinist Russia and the administrative legerdemain encountered in seeking justice.

Loznitsa's film is superb in its recreation of a world entirely constructed to obfuscate and wear down any opposition. No voices are raised but there's violence in the enforced indolence of the systems at work. At one point Kornyev, seeking approval for the investigation, is kept waiting for an excruciatingly long time; the camera stays on him while others in the waiting room are seen first. It is only the audience's knowledge that there is a case to answer that stops us willing the lawyer to drop his investigation, because the film carries such a weight of inevitability as to the end point of the whole thing.

The banality of evil at work in the film recalled Jonathan Glazer's 2023 The Zone of Interest, and Loznitsa creates a similarly hermetically sealed world whose violence and oppression is present but barely glimpsed. It's a draining piece and won't be for everybody, but is a stunning, and impeccably styled exercise.

DEoL at the 2025 London Film Festival - Part 1

This year I had the opportunity to watch more than the usual small handful of films at the London Film Festival. Here's the first five films I saw: 

Romería (Spain, Germany 2025: Dir Carla Simón) Marina (Llúcia Garcia) is eighteen years old and planning to study cinema at university. However, she's unable to secure a grant because she cannot provide legal proof of her existence - her biological father's birth certificate lists no children, and both mum and dad are now dead.

The only people able to establish her identity - on paper anyway - are her natural grandparents, part of a network of family with whom Marina has not been in contact for some years. So she travels back to Vigo to reconnect and legally change her father's birth certificate.

Romería (which means 'pilgrimage') charts Marina's journey into the heart of a complicated extended family whose interconnections initially seem to freeze her out; she is known to them (all but her fairly awful grandmother comment how much Marina looks like her birth mother) but they remain distant and confusing to her. Only a cousin, Suso (Mitch Martin) appears interested. But this family are the key to Marina's gradual understanding of why her name has been kept off the records; for both her mother and father were drug addicts and dealers, the former contracting AIDS from a shared needle, bringing shame to the family.

Anyone expecting a traditional epiphanic moment when Marina uncovers the truth will be disappointed; throughout her romeria Marina looks bemused but not unamused, and her discovery of the truth actually brings her closer to the memory of her parents than expected (a nice touch is having Garcia and Martin play her biological parents in the movie's flashback scenes).

Hélène Louvart's camera remains impressive throughout, weaving between the characters, scouting the horizon and always returning to Marina's face as she observes others. Hers is a quest that is imbued with sadness but never hopelessness; Marina's extended family are messy and fractious, but her determination to get what she wants - a change on a piece of paper - never falters.

The Love that Remains aka Ástin sem eftir er (Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France 2025: Dir Hlynur Pálmason) Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) is a struggling artist, her preferred medium a series of large canvases onto which geometric shapes are laid, with the works exposed to the elements to weather and degrade. The awkwardness of her art, and of the unequipped studio in which she forges her pieces, matches that of her personal life. For Anna is in the process of separating from her husband, Magnús (Sverrir Gudnason), a deep sea fisherman whose life is divided between his work, trapped on a boat with his rough and ready colleagues, and trying to salvage his relationship and manage the parenting of their three children, daughter Ída (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) and sons Grimur (Grímur Hlynsson) and Þorgils (Þorgils Hlynsson). 

The Love that Remains follows the family for a year, over which time their relationships and routines change, with Magnús slowly being eased out of the unit, seemingly not accepting that the marriage is over; in fact he seems to be more in lust than in love with his ex, seeing her at one point as a suspended upskirt image. 

As well as this extrication, Anna also experiences continued difficulty in selling her art, or even getting it accepted; one self absorbed gallery owner visits her, leads her on and then lets her down just before he flies home. 

The bleakness of both landscape and situation is leavened by the natural behaviour of the children, whose wisdom sometimes exceeds that of their parents. Puzzlingly there are also some surreal moments, possibly inspired by Anna's mindset, which inject an awkward humour into the proceedings; the plane occupied by the gallery owner for example, who has stolen a goose egg despite being told not to, crashes after flying into a flock of birds. Is this Anna's wishes ideated, or the goose's revenge? 

Pálmason's movie is sometimes willfully obscure, and its visual codes tricky to decipher. But it's a beautifully shot piece, and the performances are uniformly confident, if occasionally unedifying. The opening shot of the film, in which a roof is craned off the top of an empty building, parallels the metaphoric roof removed from Anna's house, allowing us a dispassionate look at what happens within.

Honey Bunch (Canada/UK 2025: Dir Dusty Mancinelli, Madeleine Sims-Fewer) Diana (Grace Glowicki) is being treated at a specialist clinic following a period in a coma as a result of a car accident. The aim of the treatment is both a physical recuperation and a programme to restore her memory, using a number of sensory, associative and dietary experiments. Her husband Homer (Ben Petrie) also lives in to provide support and a connection to her past life.

Day to day supervision of Diana's treatment is provided by head nurse Farah (Kate Dickie), a brusque but caring figure in thrall to the (still living but rarely glimpsed) clinic founder, Dr Frances Tréphine (Patricia Tulasne) and his dead wife Joan, whose portraits occupy the walls in every room.

But as Diana's recovery slowly progresses, she's plagued by horrific visions, and spies Homer, who often vanishes overnight, mysteriously conspiring with Farah. And it's Diana's growing feeling of paranoia, that all may not be what it seems in the clinic, and doubts about her husband's integrity, that drives the core of Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer's second feature.

The directors mentioned in interview that they wanted to evoke the spirit of the 1970s British horror film, even going so far as to use vintage lenses to establish the correct look. The result gives Honey Bunch a slight Peter Strickland feel, creating a world at once both recognisable and off kilter; the muted colour scheme, deliberately slow pace and country house setting (although filmed in Canada) is perfect, providing even more power to the moments of shock and grotesquerie.

But lest this be written off simply as a well done pastiche, Honey Bunch has much more to offer. With no disrespect to their performances, it is perhaps the fact that Glowicki and Petrie are a real life couple that provides the depth of their onscreen relationship, the pieces of the narrative gradually falling into place as Diana struggles to understand what is happening to her. By the end of Honey Bunch Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer have pulled off an extraordinary feat; to bring forth from the bones of a mystery film a stunning portrayal of love and what it means to be in love. A truly special film.

Roofman (USA 2025: Dir Derek Cianfrance) Cianfrance scored heavily with a trio of movies back in the 2010s, namely that year's Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) and The Light Between Oceans (2016). His focus on blue collar lives resurfaces in Roofman, the true story of Jeffrey Manchester, a criminal genius (by others' assessments).

Channing Tatum plays Manchester who, when we first meet him, has established his modus operandum by breaking into remote stores via the roof (hence his moniker), in this case a McDonald's. All he needs is some money for his family, and his good guy credentials are quickly established by donating his own jacket to a coatless employee he's about to shut in the freezer while he makes his escape.

Despite being caught, the enterprising Manchester ingeniously busts out of prison and evades capture by entering and hiding in a Toys "R" Us outlet, his presence masked by creating a kind of dugout behind a bike rack. It's clear that the guy's intentions are ultimately to take some money, but it's also important to establish a home and and to integrate himself into the day to day running of the store, walking around the premises at night and even going so far as to hang his washed laundry in the aisles. He hooks up some CCTV and it's here that he sees shop worker Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst), a single mum with two daughters, for the first time. His subsequent double life relationship with her, and the sadness of his estrangement from his own biological family, make up the heart of the film, ably supported by Peter Dinklage as the horrendous store manager and Tony Revolori as Jeffrey's single male friend.

Tatum is the perfect blank canvas on which to build the Manchester character, his 'lovable hunk' persona perfect for creating the 'crim with a heart' figure. While, despite being based on a true story, this occasionally veers into mawkishness, Tatum is never less than affecting. His foil here, and the real star of the show, is Dunst. When she's on screen the camera can't tear itself away from her ever changing face, veering from happiness to a mask of pain in seconds; a churchgoing woman with two daughters who slowly accept Manchester - under a different name - into their lives. The scenes of the shopbreaker being unknowingly accepted by the parishioners is particularly affecting.

This might be a true life story by the numbers, right down to the the end credit photos of the real Manchester - and footage of an unbelieving Wainscott - but Cianfrance knows what he's doing here, creating an often funny, captivating story about a character who refuses categorisation but seems universally liked (even by his captors), while also saying something about the obvious distance between Manchester's emotional and creative intelligence.

The President's Cake aka Mamlaket al-qasab (Iraq/USA 2025: Dir Hasan Hadi) It's 1990, and Saddam Hussein is Iraqi president. He presides over a country economically on its knees; its citizens place the blame for this crisis directly on George Bush and the withdrawal of food and resources by the UN, so entrenched are they in the country's cult of Saddamism.

So it's seen as an honour rather than an outrage that Hussein demands that every class in every school bake a cake to mark his birthday, irrespective of the difficulties involved in assembling the ingredients because of scarcity. In one school, 9 year old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) is picked by ballot to make the cake; failure is not an option. Lamia lives with her grandmother, Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) in a riverside hut; she is confident to travel by water to school on her own, but is elsewhere a wide eyed child with only a basic understanding of her circumstances. It is assumed that Lamia's parents have perished in the conflict (there are signs of the struggle all around, although it's rarely explicit) and the weight of responsibility on the old woman's back forces her to make a decision which impacts directly on the little girl. 

On the one hand, and despite the challenging conditions in which Lamia lives, there is a certain innocence to her separation from Bibi, with only her pet rooster Hindi and off/on contact with schoolfriend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) accompanying her continued quest for cake ingredients. Her travels highlight the effects on a populace of a country where survival is dependent on trade, barter and favour.

The President's Cake is not without its humour - the military disciplined schoolteacher who fires off instructions to his pupils is like a character from Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, a comparison that also applies to Lamia's exploits; Nayyef is a revelation as the little girl who is exposed to so much and almost grows up in front of us. That this is Hadi's debut feature is astounding; he manages to balance a deftness of storytelling with a light directorial touch which doesn't shy away from the more monstrous aspects of the regime, not least the newsreel which closes the film. A very very fine movie.

The Severed Sun (UK New Wave of the British Fantastic Film 2025: Dir Dean Puckett)

Puckett's debut feature has been compared to Blood on Satan's Claw, The Handmaid's Tale, The VVitch and even Fanny Lye Deliver'd, which places it in some honorable company.

In a time period which suggests the past but, from some subtle design and narrative hints may in fact be the future, an isolated community eke out the most meagre of livings under the supervision of The Pastor (Toby Stephens). His daughter, the mercurial Magpie (Emma Appleton) is young and married to a human monster, in the shape of Howard (Eoin Slattery); but not for long. Magpie poisons Howard and chops off his hand (presumably the one that beat her).

The act unleashes a Beast (James Swanton) who, like the creature in Blood on Satan's Claw, remains in the background, potentially responsible for the heightening of tension and paranoia that grips the village. The Pastor's community is a prime example of the patriarchy in action; the men lay down the law while exercising the power in spite of it, while the women remain submissive and without agency.

But Magpie's actions rupture any stability within the village; she is shunned but unrepentant (her story is that Howard met his death through the misuse of an axe), hated both by the men and women because of her unwillingness to conform to the role of "dutiful wife", and thus suspected of being in league with the supernatural and widely accused of "heresy".

The paucity of budget available to Puckett has worked in the film's favour; the community in The Severed Sun is small in number, their resources even smaller; the religious panic therefore grips more intensely.  The Pastor tells his flock that they are living in a "fallen world", suggesting a medieval creed; but he also references nature which has "had her revenge", suggesting a past environmental collapse.

Explanations ultimately aren't necessary; the suggestion here is that the controlling dominance of The Pastor, and his negative and violent impact on his congregation, has a more universal application. The film is short (80 minutes), controlled and occasionally very nasty. It's not perfect (the lack of narrative explanation will doubtless annoy some) but the film is blessed with some superb natural cinematography by Ian Forbes and a creepy, immersive (and, apparently, improvised) soundtrack by a trio of musicians calling themselves 'Unknown Horrors'. Library of the Occult records, let me introduce you.

The Severed Sun is on UK and Ireland digital platforms from 6 October. The soundtrack by 'Unknown Horrors' is available to stream/download here.