Film Shapes

Time to run down the 13 films I saw at this year's Revelation Film Festival. It was a great edition for the 25th anniversary, with some excellent films on show. Here are my thoughts, in ascending order of quality. After Blue   ★ This was quite hard going. It reminded me of struggling through Aleksei German's impenetrably muddy Hard to Be a God (2013). After Blue shares much of that film's aesthetic, with amateur looking sets, foggy darkness and animalistic performances. Director Bertrand Mandico is one of the creators of the Incoherence Manifesto and it certainly shows in this film, which follows a young woman and her mother on the hunt for wanted killer, Kate Bush (not that one). It's set on a planet peopled only by women (the men have died off after growing hair internally) and the story, if you can call it that, sends the mother and daughter to a mountain lair and back again. There are worthy feminist and environmental messages here but I didn't have the stamina...