
OMEN

Other movies

FAMILIAR TOUCH
Director: Sarah Friedland
Anchored by a precise and sensitive performance by 79-year-old theatre actress Kathleen Chalfant, Sarah Friedland’s debut film – made in collaboration with the residents and care workers at a Los Angeles retirement home – shows the experience of dementia from this elderly woman’s own point of view. Her son, whom she mistakes for a date, takes her to the care home that she thinks is a hotel bar. Once a professional chef, she takes over the kitchen for a morning, then escapes to go to a produce stall, bits of reality she can still grasp. Her triumph is to find the life worth living where she is, as she is. A celebration of the human mind, in all its complexity.

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.

MOON
Director: Kurdwin Ayub
Sarah, a former mixed martial arts champion in Austria, knows she needs to make a new start. While her sister urges her to start a business, she jumps at an unexpected offer to go to Jordan to train three teenage daughters of a dazzlingly rich family living in an isolated, fiercely guarded mansion. Sarah soon sees that the girls don’t want to train, but have little else in their closeted lives: no internet allowed, no friends and only rare outings to the mall, where they are closely watched, for entertainment. The house, moreover, seems to hold its own secrets; why is Sarah forbidden to go upstairs? Director Ayub maintains the tension of a thriller in this story of life in a golden cage.