It's an opportune time for this film to land, what with attacks on journalists filling the news cycle in recent days. The correspondent in question is Australian Peter Greste, who was arrested in Cairo at the end of 2013 while working for Al Jazeera. Potted history - the leaders of the military coup that ousted Mohamed Morsi want Al Jazeera brought to heel and so they accuse Greste and his crew of being agents for the Muslim Brotherhood, a party affiliated with Morsi. The story plays out as a dissection of the kangaroo court that tried the three men, while also couching Greste's ordeal as a possible payback for his part in the death of a colleague years before. The film, directed by Kriv Stenders, is based on Greste's book about his arrest and imprisonment, The First Casualty , and there's also a credit for Greste as a story consultant, so I think it's safe to assume everything on screen has had final approval from the man himself. It's all held together admirab...
I took a post-work trip to the Palace cinema in Perth's Raine Square for this anxiety-inducing drama at the Alliance Française French Film Festival . There have been a few of these 'snowball' films of late, where one innocuous moment gets misunderstood and events spiral from it. In this case, a good-looking, young literature teacher, Julien (François Civil) is accused of trying to seduce a student in his class. It's clear she has misconstrued innocent looks and utterances, but the letter she writes to the deputy principal needs to be looked into. A chain of missteps begins. This is based on events from the life of the director (and co-writer with Audrey Diwan), Teddy Lussi-Modeste. It seems something similar happened to him when he was teaching in a northern Paris school, and here he scratches open a few old wounds. Assuming the lead character's (and by association, the director's) innocence, the knock-on effects are dispiriting, to say the least, and fucking f...