REVIEWS


SPECIALSCREENING


UK. 2012. 105mins Director/screenplay Candida Brady Production company Blenheim Films International sales Blenheim Films, www. blenheimfilms.com Producers Candida Brady, Titus Ogilvy Executive producer Jeremy Irons Cinematography Sean Bobbitt Editors James Coward, Kate Coggins, Jamie Trevill Art director Garry Waller Music Vangelis


dering in its structure to break into the tiny cine- doc niche. After a montage of garbage-strewn landscapes


scored to ominous political-thriller music, we are into ‘Land’, the first of three sections about how we currently dispose of our waste. Irons is first seen striding around a 14-metre-high beachside dump near Sidon, Lebanon, whose waste is carried across the Mediterranean by waves and tides. Interviews with two UK environmental business and science experts fill us in on some of the shocking facts and figures about the sheer amount of waste the world generates, and Irons meets local activists (once more in the UK) who are campaigning against landfill sites. The same mix of location footage, interview


inserts and on-screen narrator interaction with experts and campaigners — all of them on the good, green side — is followed in the film’s other four sections. ‘Air’ looks at the pros and cons, or rather the cons, of incineration — chief of which is exposure to dioxins — while ‘Water’ examines what happens when rubbish ends up in our rivers, seas and oceans, as it inevitably does. And the film’s main commercial calling card, its


Trashed Reviewed by Lee Marshall


A committed, thought-provoking documentary about how the world is failing to deal with its mounting piles of garbage is given a starpower boost by Jeremy Irons, who acts both as off-screen narrator and global roving reporter.


Me And Me Dad Reviewed by MarkAdams


Me And Me Dad is an intimate family film par excellence. It tenderly (at times amusingly) and gradually exposes the relationships between the Boormans — film-maker father, John, his ex-wife and adult children — to reveal a charmingly com- plex family still trying to come to terms with inci- dents in the past. The film is directed by his daughter Katrine —


who had never previously held a camera — who followed her father over a period of four years. The director in him means he cannot help but point out issues around lighting and camera positions, and while genially elusive he slowly reveals more about himself, his work and his feelings towards his fam- ily as time draws on. The film starts out as a general series of discus-


sions about John’s early years and his career in cin- ema — with engaging anecdotes about his films including Deliverance, Point Blank, Hell In The Pacific, Excalibur, The General and The Emerald Forest — but gradually morphs into a more emo- tionally driven series of conversations about his attitude to his family and how the choices he, and his ex-wife Christel, made when he was busy mak- ing films impacted on the family dynamics. As well as interviewing her father, Katrine has


conversations with brother Charley, sister Daisy and their mother Christel, who is now divorced from Boorman. Towards the end of the film she


n 10 Screen International at Cannes May 23, 2012 Luminous photography by Steve McQueen’s


regular cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and a lush soundtrack by Vangelis ramp up the documenta- ry’s cinematic credentials, but despite all this, Trashed is more of a prestige TV product than a theatrical number. With neither the confrontational drama of a


Michael Moore doc nor the slickly edited look and sheer journalistic authority of, say, Inside Job, Trashed is a little too limited and UK-oriented in its selection of talking heads, and a little too mean-


celebrity on-screen narrator, is also one of its weaknesses, as although there is no doubt about Irons’ commitment to the cause, his theatrical mannerisms, voice and dress sense distract from the message. With many of his interviewees, Irons simply tuts


and looks serious, or cuts in with a “This is appall- ing!”, and on the one occasion when he attempts to play the investigative bad cop a la Michael Moore, while grilling an Icelandic politician, we can see his heart is not really in it. Confining him to off-screen narration duties, like Matt Damon in Inside Job, might have been a better idea.


CANNES CLASSICS


UK. 2012. 66mins Director Katrine Boorman Production companies ColourframeLtd,Embargo Films International sales HighPoint Media Group, www.highpointfilms.co.uk Producers Katrine Boorman, Danny Moynihan, MelAgace Executive producers Rose Garnett, Christopher Simon, Felix Vossen Cinematography Sophie Pierozzi EditorAsh Jenkins With John Boorman, Katrine Boorman, Charley Boorman, Daisy Boorman, Christel Boorman


shoots a dinner party that brings them all together, and which, while punctuated by humour and anec- dotes, also has an undercurrent of lingering unhappiness at some of the imperfections of the past. But the family movingly all draws together


when it comes to remembrances of Telsche Boor- man, Katrine’s sister who worked with their father on the screenplay of his film Where The Heart Is, and who died of ovarian cancer in 1997. Her mem- ory is very much the glue that binds the family together, and scenes of John and Katrine visiting her grave in Paris and mulling over the tree he


planted at his house in Ireland in memory of her death are open, honest and touching. Since separating from Christel, John Boorman


has remarried (though he is now divorced again) and had three more children — who are not seen in the film. As she visits his house in Ireland again Katrine admits it is many years since she has been there. While Me And Me Dad offers a few tantalis- ing clues into Boorman the film-maker (bolstered by home-movie material from various film sets) the film actually works for better as an examination of an imperfect family drawing together to share happy moments from the past.


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