FALCON LAKE
Other movies
AGORA
Director: Ala Eddine Slim
A blue dog and a black crow narrate the strange story of three revenants – people who are not quite dead, but not alive either – who resurge in a remote town, reviving the unsolved mysteries around their respective disappearances. Fathi, the local police inspector, is on the case, assisted by his friend Amine, the local doctor. What begins as a conventionally recognisable crime thriller, however, becomes more of a mood piece once Omar, a police investigator from the city, arrives to shine a light on what has happened and is overwhelmed by the irrationality of the chain of events. At once absurd and disturbing, Agora gradually reveals itself as both poetic fable and a political commentary on the state of Tunisia.
SABA
Director: Maksud Hossain
Saba, 25, lives in Dhaka with her demanding mother Shirin, a paraplegic whose frustrations and rage often find a target in the daughter who cares for her. When Shirin’s worsening condition requires surgery it falls to Saba to find the money to pay for it. Securing a job at a seedy Shisha bar, Saba befriends the manager Ankur and, for the first time, pictures what a life of her own could look like. Maksud Hossain’s debut feature is a close-up look at a complicated bond between mother and daughter that lurches between love and guilt, co-dependence and the longing for autonomy - but it is also a social drama, detailing the hardships that underlay the riots in Bangladesh earlier this year.
AÏCHA
Director: Mehdi M. Barsaoui
Aya is the sole survivor of a bus crash on a mountain road. When she realises that nobody knows she is alive, she makes a snap decision to escape her dead-end village existence and become someone else. In thriving, liberal Tunis, she calls herself Amira, a thrilling change until one of those men is murdered and the investigating police start to question “Amira”’s sketchy life story. Fatma Sfar is vivid and immediately sympathetic as Aya/Amira, while narrative twists and nested details gradually reveal that she isn’t the only trickster with something to hide. Aicha was judged Best Mediterranean Film from the Academy of Fine Arts at this year’s Venice Film Festival.