No One’s Child
I watched this film at Hyde
Park Picture House, directed by Vuk Rsumovic from Serbia. This film was based
on a true story, which made it even more interesting.
The opening scene begins with
a group of men hunting and in the woods they find a small boy, looks to be age
nine or ten.
They take him to an orphanage
where he is cleaned, shaven and dressed. The boy is silent and non-responding,
only to growl or bite when someone leans closer to him.
The audience is not given
much information to the boy’s background as the orphanage provide him with a
new name and is listed as no known parents.
He joins the orphanage where
he is trained in civilian lifestyle, I found the boy’s acting very good, he had
very few lines throughout the film but his facial expressions definitely
conveyed his thoughts.
The pace of the film is not
rushed; it builds up slowly and is able to give a little background to the main
characters allowing a better understanding of the story.
The ending is unexpected but
after obvious, ‘’ It takes a pack of wolves to raise the young
protagonist of “No One’s Child,” and the dogs of of war to drop him back into
the abyss’’, this is Guy Lodge’s opening
line of the review of No One’s Child.
The style the film was shot
aids in showing how the boy Harris’s mind is expanding with the new
communication skills he learns at the orphanage. His behaviour gradually
improves according to civilian standards and before he joins a group men
fighting in the war, he passes the first year of elementary school.
The House at the End of Time
The Venezuelan film produced
by Alejandro Hidalgo, was a unique horror film that I watched.
It had the main jumps and
scares but with continual shocking twists and turns I found it very interesting
and puzzling through the film, until the end when all loose ends were tied
together.
The story opens with a woman
lying on the floor, injured, she wakes up and in a panic rushes looking for her
son Leopoldo, who is being chased by the father.
Then the scene switches to
the woman being charged thirty years in jail for the murder of her family. She
is then released and the government grants her re-entry to her house, though
she is reluctant to return to the place that haunts her.
As days go by, guarded by
police in her house, a priest visits her frequently to restore her faith in God
while simultaneously solving the mystery, as he does not believe the woman
committed the crime.
The rest is worth watching. The way it has
been film definitely keeps the audience on their toes, it does a really good
job of weaving through past and present without confusion. Each time it jumps
from past to present or present to past, it only reveals subtle details that
need to be taken into account to understand the whole story at the end. The
visual storytelling techniques were interestingly done. The camera angles were
sharp when they needed to be in places and the sound majorly emphasised scary
or tense moments. The lighting of the film was dark, this helped emphasise how
the characters were feeling, the scenes where the children were playing was
always bright conveying the happiness and fun they were experiencing.
I learnt through that only
focusing on films released by Hollywood or major movie companies does not
always guarantee entertainment. I wish I was able to book more films to watch
but the three that I watched were
very interesting and the stories told in a unique way by the director.
The quality of the production
for these independent films were high and it did not depend on special effects
to keep the viewer interested which some movies today I feel do not accomplish,
and depend highly on special effects.
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