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Ali & Ava


The preview for this year's British Film Festival was a warm, inclusive relationship drama in the Mike Leigh vein called Ali & Ava. This is directed by Clio Barnard and stars Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook as our titled pair. It's probably the simplest plot to explain - guy slowly separating from his wife, meets a woman from another circle. They get along, but will respective influences allow them to be together? That's pretty much it, but it's the kind of film that doesn't require plottage - a functionally viewed genre pic. If we can assume the likes of Barnard, Shane Meadows, Leigh, Ken Loach, and going further back to Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, etc, all worked on and off in the Kitchen Sink Realism genre, then these lines from Warren Buckland (in Teach Yourself Film Studies) seems apt:

"The genre film sets up hopes and promises and brings pleasure if these hope and promises are fulfilled. In studying genre films, we first need to isolate the patterns and themes that appear repeatedly in them. For genre critics, these recurring patterns are not merely formal patterns; instead, they reflect the basic questions, problems, anxieties, difficulties, worries and, more generally, the values of a society and the ways members of that society attempt to tackle those basic questions and problems."

Barnard's film follows these 'patterns' but with an added racial and cultural angle. Ali is from a Sub-continental background, whereas Ava is Irish Catholic (it's notable that she once mentions her father was angry when she took up with not her daughter's Indian father, but her son's English one). The multi-cultural setting of Bradford, Yorkshire, makes this pairing likely but it's all a world away from John Osborne's kitchen.

The two leads are very natural, unsure of themselves at certain points, comfortable in other situations (Ava doing a karaoke number on 'Dirty Old Town' is a highlight). They're just a couple of middle-aged, working folk, trying to get by in the bleak north (apologies to northerners but, jeez, Bradford looks like a miserable old place). It's not too often you see a couple so normal, so 'unfilmic' on the big screen, and this is probably the main reason to see Ali & Ava.

Ali & Ava is now showing at Luna and Palace cinemas. See the above link for details.

See also:

Some potential highlights from the 2021 British Film Festival. Such as:

  • The Duke (2020) Roger Michell
  • Belfast (2021) Kenneth Branagh
  • Best Sellers (2021) Lina Roessler
  • Boiling Point (2021) Phillip Barantini
  • It Snows in Benidorm (2020) Isabel Coixet
  • Last Night in Soho (2021) Edgar Wright
  • Operation Mincemeat (2021) John Madden
  • The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021) Will Sharpe
  • The Last Bus (2021) Gilles MacKinnon
As well as '7 from the 70s':

  • A Clockwork Orange (1971) Stanley Kubrick
  • Barry Lyndon (1975) Stanley Kubrick
  • Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) John Schlesinger
  • Quadrophenia (1979) France Roddam
  • Straw Dogs (1971) Sam Peckinpah
  • The Go-Between (1971) Joseph Losey
  • The Railway Children (1970) Lionel Jeffries


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