Plenty to savour as Edinburgh’s film festival goes online
Tim Robey picks his favourites from a 12-day programme of dramas and documentaries
In lieu of June’s traditional iteration of the Edinburgh Film Festival – the longest continually running one in the world – the organisation is staging a digital edition. Teaming up with Curzon Home Cinema, it’s created Ed Film Fest at Home, which launched this week with a new film premiering, for rental in your living room, on all 12 days of the event.
The opener is Clemency, a coolly searing drama, neglected on its US release, about the corrosive toll of capital punishment. It’s ironic that the Academy will be hunting high and low for worthy nominees next April, but missed the boat with the single best performance from this past year. Chinonye Chukwu’s film offers a strong reminder of what 67-year-old Alfre Woodard can bring to the table.
She plays Bernadine Williams, a death row warden burdened with a profession that few would pursue or envy. In the opening sequence, a lethal injection goes wrong. Woodard, drawing shut the curtain to the public gallery where the convict’s mother is looking on aghast, manages the situation with mounting agitation, but also a kind of moral rage.
Her next all-consuming duty is to organise the execution of Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), a soft-spoken African-american who has spent 15 years mired in hopeless appeals, contesting his conviction for shooting a police officer. Chukwu resists the obvious urge to overstate a warden prisoner bond: their stories, while clearly intertwined, run for the most part in thoughtful parallel. Bernadine has to keep her remove – it’s her job. But to her husband Jonathan (Wendell Pierce), a teacher who keeps dropping hints that he’d prefer her to retire, she can hardly explain how alone she feels.
Every flicker of Woodard’s performance takes what Chukwu’s script has laid out and mines it for extra meaning. As an executioner’s song, it’s a suppressed howl that leaves you thinking for days. (Star rating: **** )
Mining the script for meaning, Woodard puts in the year’s best performance
Dropping on Saturday is A White, White Day. A handsome Icelandic mood piece from Hlynur Palmason, it starts with a long take of an SUV driving recklessly down a mountainous highway in thick fog, until a dangerous curve claims the life of the driver.
She’s the wife of police chief Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson), who two years later has not come to terms with her death when he finds a possible clue to an affair. His fixation on revenge twists this into a churning study of the male psyche in freefall. ( **** )
On Sunday, The Traitor arrives – an impressively muscular comeback for the 80-year-old Italian veteran Marco Bellocchio. His hefty but absorbing Mafia biopic stars an excellent Pierfrancesco Favino as Tommaso Buscetta, a renowned Sicilian mobster who turned informant in the mideighties. The scenes of his court testimony explode into riots of loathing and infamy, while Bellocchio – whose films are rarely this entertaining – grandly ratchets up the paranoia. ( **** )
A final mention, too, for the nevermore-timely antiracism documentary White Riot, winner of the Grierson Award last year. Set for wider release in September, Rubika Shah’s film charts the rise of the protest movement Rock Against Racism, which sprang up in 1976 as a response to Eric Clapton’s notorious onstage backing for Enoch Powell.
All details and listings at edfilmfest.org. uk. Available until July 5 on Curzon Home Cinema as part of Ed Film Fest at Home