THE WATER MURMURS
Other movies
FREEDOM WAY
Director: Afolabi Olalekan
When two young software engineers set up EasyGo, a ride-sharing scheme for commercial motorcyclists in hectic Lagos, it is a godsend to riders like Abiola, who is soon depending on its customers to support his family. The success of the app, however, attracts the attention of corrupt police and government ministers who contrive to get it banned. Other stories – one about a doctor wrestling with his conscience, one about two police officers at loggerheads over the common practice of shaking down young people in the street – show that this kind of low-level violence is everywhere.. Like Lagos itself, the melodramatic storylines are fast and intense; as the characters’ stories start to dovetail, as if the city itself were pushing them together.
LUMIÈRE, LE CINÉMA
Director: Thierry Frémaux
A contemporary film collating works shot by Louis and Auguste Lumiere from the earliest years of cinema, superbly preserved and restored by the Lumiere Institute in Lyon. Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux provides an informative commentary as toddlers squabble, a magician performs a trick and a train pulls into a station; the score is by Gabriel Faure, a composer favoured by the Lumiere brothers themselves. More than a hundred short films of 50 seconds each, provide a window both into ordinary life around the turn of the 19th century – not only in France but in places as far-flung as Japan and Algeria - and the wonder felt at the Lumieres’ astonishing invention, the cinematograph, a miracle whose magic continues.
THE LAST RONIN
Director: Maksim Shishkin
Haunted by the ghosts of the past, lone traveller Ronin wanders the post-apocalyptic wastelands in search of his father's killer. The devastation caused by climate change led to a global nuclear war, destroying civilisation as we know it: lands are scorched and cities destroyed. Electrical equipment no longer works and gasoline has long lost the properties that made it the world's greatest resource. The main currency in this new world is AK47 cartridges. Everywhere Ronin goes, he encounters blood-thirsty headhunters and rogue gangs all fighting for scraps in this dangerous new world. Then, one day, Ronin meets a wayward teenage girl who offers him a precious bounty for escorting her to her birthplace, a journey that will require all his fighting skills.