Holiday

Director Isabella Eklöf's Holiday is set in the bright sun and colours of a Turkish resort town. Bikinis, swimming pools, clubwear, nightclubs and colourful amusement parks. It is a film about power relationships.

Sascha is the trophy girlfriend of Michael, a Danish gangster more than twice her age. From Michael's point of view, there isn't much of a downside to this relationship. For Sascha, it is more of a trade-off. Endless leisure time and material benefits on one side and verbal, sexual and physical abuse on the other. Is it a reasonable trade-off?

Michael, family and close colleagues are on holiday at a coastal Turkish villa. Consequently, Sascha is isolated from anyone outside Michael's circle of friends, with only casual holiday contacts which she certainly can't rely on to counterbalance Michael et al. Understandably Sascha takes a cautious, timid and mostly passive role in proceedings though her most dramatic act is certainly decisive as is the subsequent decision. Sascha's passivity and her lack of lines leave it very much up to us to conjecture what is going on behind the sunglasses.

While ostensibly filmed from a Male Gaze perspective, the camera often shifts to view Sascha and what is happening to her in a non-glamourous way. There are also plenty of scenes to disturb (including a rape). There were 2 walkouts in the showing I was at (one loudly telling us what he thought).

My initial reaction was that the message of this message was that women should burn their pushup bras, miniskirts, bikinis and high heels and put on their baggy overalls and comfortable shoes. But on further consideration perhaps Isabella Eklöf wants us to consider our relationships and the relationships of those we might judge in all their facets, trade-offs and consequences. What do people get from their relationships? What is the downside? How easy is it for them to get out of situations?

After reading other reviews, I see I am not alone at finding this a difficult film to process.

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Ian's rating 2.5/5

And Breathe Normally

Social commentary through drama is the sort of film we expect from Ken Loach. But And Breathe Normally is by Ísold Uggadóttir and therefore set in Iceland, which probably looks pretty bleak for much of the year and where buildings and other trappings of human life tend to look out of place.

Lara is trying to improve her life. A life which comes with baggage, including tattoos, debts, people she is trying to avoid, a flat she can't afford and a 4 or 5 year old son. She is just starting a job as border guard at Keflavík International Airport. Anxious to impress on the first day on passport control, she notices an imperfection in a French passport of a woman heading for Canada. The woman, Adja from Guinea-Bissau, is also a solo mother with a daughter in Canada and completely out of her comfort zone in Iceland. She is sent to a prison, and then to a downtown boarding house for people awaiting asylum decisions or deportation. Meanwhile, Lara has a major crisis of her own, which leads her to cross paths with Adja again.

Some suspension of belief is required here and there in order to take the plot seriously and to engineer the ending that Ísold Uggadóttir is aiming for, but And Breathe Normally is none-the-worse for that.

And Breathe Normally champions the cause of those on the fringes of society and those who feel they have to break rules when those rules are designed for the benefit of others. There is also a sly, casual promotion of the sisterhood and a super cute kid.

Ian's rating 3.5/5 Anne's rating 3.5/5

Wadjda

Wadjda is a ten year old girl who is an only child and she's a little different from her schoolmates. Her best friend is the (younger) boy who lives next door. They socialize on the trip to their respective schools - she walks and he rides his bike. She's not supposed to ride a bike because she's a girl but at least her trip to school is pretty carefree compared to her schoolteacher mother's trip to work. (Women aren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia,  so her mother and her colleagues are picked up and driven to school by an employed male driver. And if the driver is a tosser, your choices are limited by the fact you can't drive yourself). Wadjda desperately wants her own bike and is saving to buy the one in the local store - and she's pretty enterprising. She makes bracelets to sell to her schoolmates and delivering illicit messages from her schoolmates to boys also provides income. When she finds that a school contest involving reciting the Koran has a monetary prize big enough to buy the bike, she signs up - surprising the head teacher who has her categorised as a rebel

Wadjda  was a great way to kick off the film festival.  It's the first feature directed by a Saudi woman and the first full length feature to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and as I was being entertained I was pleased to feel that a local was telling me "so this is how it is for women in Saudi Arabia". It made me think of Pride and Prejudice - a thoroughly entertaining story, encapsulating life for women in a particular place and time, told by someone who was there. And like Britain in the early 19th Century, life for women in Saudi Arabia in the twenty-first century is heavily dependent on men  and they really need to be married to one. Life has a  bizarre focus on what random men are doing -for example, all the girls in the school playground are supposed to go inside if a man happens to be within viewing distance.

Wadjda's mum is an interesting mix of progressive and deeply socially conservative. She allows her daughter to listen to pop music, wear jeans and sneakers and hang out with her male neighbour, and yet she's horrified when one of her own friends dares to talk to a man with her face uncovered.There's a nice contrast between how she'd like the world to be and being deeply conscious of the price of inviting society's disapproval.

A great cast, a good script, an exotic location and gender issues addressed with humour make for a great watch,

Anne's rating: 4/5  Ian's rating 4/5