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Agnieszka Holland is not one for heroes and villains. The Polish director has revisited the darkest power abuses of Europeâs last century throughout her career â depicting the Holocaust in Europa Europa (1991) and In Darkness (2011), and Soviet Ukraineâs Holodomor in Mr. Jones (2019) â with an emphasis not on ideological divisions but the capacity within every human, tested by high-stakes oppression, for both great integrity and the pettiest of cruelties.
A deep moral ambiguity drives psychological suspense, too, in Charlatan, her loosely inspired biopic of Jan Mikolášek, a herbalist persecuted by the Czechoslovak state. Regimes come and go in a film set in the communist 1950s that flashes back frequently to the Nazi-occupied 30s, but the pressure on citizens to bend thei
Cowboys was made during the twilight of Donald Trumpâs presidency, which saw the dialling back of health protections for trans people and a military ban, since overturned by Joe Biden. Right-wing commentators during the Trump era dedicated many hours to mocking transgender people, with trans kids being weaponised as evidence that the âtrans agendaâ has gone âtoo farâ, and that children are incapable of identifying as anything other than their assigned gender at birth.
In this context, Anna Kerriganâs Cowboys â in which Troy (Steve Zahn) goes on the run with his young trans son Joe (Sasha Knight) through rural Montana, a solid Republican state â stands as a forceful bid for tolerance and acceptance. The two males hope to cross over to Canada, a migration many Americans pledged to make following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, seeing the country as a liberal haven compared to the bigotry associated with Trumpism. Flashbacks show how Tro
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â¶ï¸ Zana is available to stream on BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema and other digital platforms, and to buy on DVD.
A woman leads a placid cow through a drowsy summer meadow; the air thrums with clean life as they pick their way down to a stream. But when they get there, the water is foul: a bovine corpse is rotting in the mud. The woman recoils, turning back towards the living cow she has been leading. But sheâs gone â thereâs only lush summer air where the cow used to be. Most chillingly of all, the woman doesnât seem particularly surprised.Â
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The orange-green glow of heat camera footage reveals a couple of figures, likely soldiers given their bulky clothing and weaponry, standing around a small trench. A prostrate body is dragged in and pitched into the shallow grave, shovelfuls of dirt slung over it.
The image is so alien it takes a minute to process its real horror â the blob representing the victim is glowing orange as the black earth gradually obscures it: he is being buried alive. Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovychâs remarkable Venice 2019 Horizons winner Atlantis may immediately switch to exquisitely composed, live-action images of startlingly crisp, austere devastation but his filmâs most potent motifs are all established in this eerie, alien opening: war, death, callousness, heat and dirt.
As a pandemic of amnesia hits Greece, forcing forgotten souls to reconstruct their identities, we wonder whether one man just wants the chance to start again.