The ninth edition of the European Film Festival is a hybrid event this year. If you want a big-screen experience you can buy tickets to watch the films at The Zone in Rosebank or The Labia in Cape Town. If you’d prefer to enjoy the 16 films on offer in the comfort of your own home, you can stream them free.
As always there are a wide variety of genres and contemplations of different aspects of life across the continent to whet your visual and intellectual appetites. Here are three of the best.
Ali and Ava (UK)
Yes, strictly speaking England is no longer officially part of Europe but there’s a distinctly European social-realist sensibility to director Clio Barnard’s small, heartfelt and un-Hollywood take on the romantic dramedy.
Set in the grimy, grey environment of Bradford, it’s the story of two middle-aged ordinary people drawn together and hoping for what seems to be the promise of much-needed redemption only to find that love, like life, is always more complicated than we’d like it to be.
Adeel Akhtar delivers a gently empathetic, Bafta-nominated performance as Ali, a hapless wannabe DJ whose refusal to act his age has led to the breakdown of his marriage. Veteran British working-class screen empath Claire Rushbrook plays Ava, a widowed teaching assistant at a local primary school whose affection for the child of one of Ali’s tenants brings the two unlikely loners together.
Ava is slowly but surely charmed by Ali’s passion for music, easy affability and boyish smile. Ali is taken by Ava’s dedication to her family and the children she looks after and sees in her someone who is willing to give him a chance to perhaps be the man he always believed he could.
The simple, lived-in performances of Akhtar and Rushbrook make for a natural chemistry and endearingly watchable bond that’s hard not to fall for.
Barnard’s keen eye for the small, sometimes heartbreaking details of lonely life in the depressing world of northern England never allows you to forget that fairy-tale love stories don’t exist in the real world. But maybe Ali and Ava might just be able to make things work, in spite of all the forces slowly grinding down on them.
The Worst Person in the World (Norway)
The third in the loose, unplanned but thematically and aesthetically linked Oslo Trilogy by Norwegian punk existentialist Joachim Trier. The previous films, Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31 (2011) are available on Mubi.com but you don’t have to have seen them to appreciate the singular black comedy and energetic visual flare of this one.
Trier’s films all stand out thanks to their smart combination of European philosophically angst rumination and punky use of the medium that harks back to the frenetic joys and playfulness of 1960s’ new wave cinema.
In this case we’re offered a rollercoaster journey through four years in the life of the “worst person in the world”, indecisive and easily bored young woman Julie (Renate Reinsve) who is trying her best to find herself as she chops and changes her way through university — beginning as a medical student, changing to psychology and finally sort of settling on photography — and trying to convince herself that maybe love will offer her the answers she wants out of life.
When she meets underground comic-book artist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) it looks like she might have found a suitably nonconformist, freethinking, creative partner. But Julie soon discovers that Aksel, though older, is not necessarily wiser when it comes to issues of middle-class social expectations and conformity.
If anything, Julie’s story — impishly injected at key moments with Trier’s trademark punky visual asides — ultimately offers a sliver of belief in the goodness of people, no matter how long it may take for them to embrace it.
Reinsve gives a shining, remarkable and multilayered performance that makes it hard to accept that Julie could be as terrible as she thinks. The overall experience of the film’s telling of her small but memorable story also cheekily reminds us that even in Norway where oil keeps the population wealthier than most and social democracy takes care of most basic needs, there’s still plenty of space for good-old fashioned human failure, self-doubt and anxiety.
Petit Maman (France)
Céline Sciamma’s 2019 festival and awards favourite Portrait of a Lady on Fire was acclaimed as a tightly wound, erotically charged, lesbian period drama. This follow-up is a complete change of direction as it focuses on the touching friendship between two French girls bound together by mutual experiences of loss and grief and the healing escapism offered by their youthful imaginations.
Starring real-life twin sisters Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz it’s the story of eight-year-old Nelly who after the death of her beloved grandmother makes a pilgrimage to her mother’s childhood home in the countryside. There her mother shows her childhood objects and tells her stories of how her imagination helped her to overcome loneliness as she played by herself in the surrounding woods.
When her mother disappears, Nelly is left alone with her distracted father and soon finds herself exploring the woods where she discovers remnants of her mother’s childhood escapades and meets Marion, a girl about her own age who lives nearby and has also recently suffered a death in her family. Together the two girls form a touching bond as they use their shared grief to fuel their imaginations and overcome their loneliness.
Sparsely executed with no flashy effects or trickery it’s a quietly moving examination of childhood, friendship and solitude in the face of the sometimes overwhelmingly confusing emotions of the wider, adult world.
• The European Film Festival runs until October 23. For more information visit eurofilmfest.co.za.
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