Tag: wilderness

Jungle Girl

  By

★★½
“You can take the girl out of the jungle…”

This is nominally based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1932 novel of the same name, also known as The Land of Hidden Men. Though there’s very little beyond the title in common. The book was set in Cambodia, and told the story of explorer Gordon King, who finds a civilization which has been lost for a thousand years. This… isn’t. It is instead the story of Nyoka Meredith (Gifford), the daughter of a doctor working with the Masamba tribe in the middle of Africa. “Nyoka” is Swahili for snake, and she seems to spend most of her free time swinging through the forest on vines.

But there’s trouble in paradise, as ne’er-do-wells Slick Latimer (Mohr) and Bradley Meredith (Bardette) show up, hoping to get their hands on the tribe’s stash of diamonds. Their plan involves Dr. Meredith’s twin brother, who just got out of jail. They knock off the doctor, replacing him with his sibling, who feigns “amnesia” to explain the holes in his memory. They also team up with disgruntled witch-doctor Shamba, who was displaced from his tribal position by Western medicine. But Nyoka, along with Jack Stanton (Neal) and Curly Rogers, stand in the way of the villains. Though naturally, they will have narrowly to dodge death – I’m guessing, fourteen times, give or take.

While this was the first serial in the sound era to have a female lead, it’s a little disappointing in this regard. It feels like, over the course of the 15 episodes, Nyoka is more rescued than rescuing, though it does work both ways. In terms of getting into the action, there’s more than one occasion where she just yells “Look out!”, then lets the menfolk get on with punching each other. However, Nyoka still has her moments, such as in Episode 5, where she dives into a gorge and goes hand-to-hand with a crocodile, in order to save a native child. I did appreciate the lack of any romance here. Despite the obvious candidacy of Jack, everyone is too busy narrowly dodging those deaths, I think, for emotional entanglements.

Considerably less progressive is the portrayal of the natives. I guess we should be happy Shamba is at least played by a non-American, Frank Lackteen being Lebanese-born. But the native boy saved from the crocodile? Born in Minnesota (the actor, Tommy Cook, was still active almost eighty years later, playing a senator in an episode of Space Force!). Even aside from the blackface, add patronising lines like “It took a white man to figure it out,” and there are a lot of elements which have not aged well, to put it mildly. Some of the plot threads are also a bit implausible, such as Jack and Curly building an impromptu refinery in the native village, to convert crude oil into airplane fuel. I’m fairly sure it’s not that easy.

One of the stunt co-ordinators on this was the legendary Yakima Canutt. He would go on to choreograph the chariot race in Ben-Hur, though there’s none of his renowned equine stuntwork here. Helen Thurston was the main double for Gifford, though for the scenes where she’s swinging from vine to vine, a male stuntman (David Sharpe) took over. Apparently, Gifford said he looked better in the costume than she did! The series was so successful it became the first Republic serial to be re-released, six years later. A lot of the action footage from this was reworked into 1955’s Panther Girl of the Kongo, but we’ll talk more about that in its own review.

Dir: William Witney and John English
Star: Frances Gifford, Tom Neal, Trevor Bardette, Gerald Mohr

Resilience and the Lost Gems

  By

★★
“Lost and found”

I certainly admire the aim here; there’s aren’t enough action-heroine films which are aimed at a family audience, especially with a young protagonist. We’ve had The Golden Compass, Enola Holmes and Abigail, but they are pretty rare. This is a considerably lower-budget entry than those, though make no mistake, it still certainly qualifies here. Its 11-year-old heroine, Resilience O’Neil (Finn) – known for obvious reasons as Rizzie – has no apparent fear, whizzing around the Utah desert on her mini-bike, until a flash flood separates her from her parents and younger brother. She then has to survive on her own, fending off wolves, haboobs and a pair of predatory creeps, while making her way back to civilization to get help for her family.

What’s weird is, the titular gems are all but irrelevant. In the opening twenty minutes, there’s a lot of talk about them, and their loss 150 or so years ago. But apres le deluge, they are almost entirely forgotten, and what we have instead is a straightforward wilderness survival story. To be honest, this is a considerable improvement over the thoroughly unconvincing historical re-enactments in the beginning, complete with sepia tinting and fake film scratches. The flood is staged surprisingly well, to the point I was convinced everyone concerned was sure to be dead. Finn seems to do a lot of her own stunts too, and not just on the bike. There’s a sequence of her clambering down a rockface which had me looking up the number for Child Protective Services. Decent dronework and the pleasant Utah scenery also stopped me from turning this off entirely.

For much, much worse are both the script and the performances. There’s hardly a line here which doesn’t seem forced and/or unnatural, and as noted above, the lost treasure thread is set up at painful length, before being abandoned for an hour. Then there’s the stuffed chicken carried around by one of the villains, who in addition are so incompetent as to pose no credible threat at all. I will give Kiara a pass; it’s her debut, and few actresses her age would be able adequately to put over the emotions necessary here, after the apparent loss of her family. [Natalie Portman in Leon remains the gold standard]

However, none of the adults are any better, either engaging in wild over-acting or resorting to a dull monotone when delivering their dialogue. It doesn’t help that there are issues with some of the audio, which varies wildly in quality, and is occasionally indecipherable. As a result, you’ll find yourself gritting your teeth just about every time anyone opens their mouth. This is probably the first time I’ve felt that a movie would have been better off, filmed as a throwback to the silent era – just pit Rizzie against the natural world, without chit-chat. I admit it would have been considerably more challenging as a project. Yet even if unsuccessful, I think I’d have preferred that approach.

Dir: Brian Finn
Star: Kiara Finn, Don Shanks, Adam Johnson, Gisi Hong
a.k.a. Resilience and the Last Spike

Goodbye Honey

  By

★½
“Trucking terribly written.”

There is a good concept here. Unfortunately, rarely have I seen an idea so conspicuously derailed by dreadful execution. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, and begin by focusing on the positives here. Dawn (Morgan) is a truck driver who is on a cross-country route, and pulls off the road into a remote, wooded location for an obligatory rest stop. Barely has she come to a halt, when a terrified young woman, Phoebe (Gobin), shows up outside her cab, demanding help. She claims to have been abducted, and been held nearby. But she managed to escape from her kidnapper, who is now hot on her heels, with evil intentions. However, is the new arrival speaking the truth or is she dangerously deranged?

It’s safe to say, you have my attention with this set-up, and Morgan is nicely unarchetypal as an action heroine, both in her middle-age, and a world-worn appearance which is about as unglamourous as you could imagine. She’s likely the best thing about this, and her performance was good enough to stop the whole thing from imploding entirely. This matters, because the script appears almost intentionally crafted to wreck any suspense or interest, resulting from both the premise or the lead performance. Within a few minutes of Phoebe’s arrival, Dawn has lost the keys to the truck and had her phone broken. Given the character is intended to be a highly competent, no-nonsense sort, this just doesn’t work. 

There are then two major mis-steps in terms of story-telling. A pair of stoner dudes show up, and the film grinds to a halt as Dawn has to deal with them. It’s painfully obvious they have nothing at all to do with Phoebe’s situation, and it’s embarrassing how shallow the writing for them is. Then, after they have mercifully departed the film, we get a lengthy, entirely superfluous flashback, telling us in detail how Phoebe was abducted, and what life was like in the cellar where she was kept for months. Guess what? We don’t care. It doesn’t matter, and adds nothing at all to the situation at hand. The final straw is the revelation of a connection between Dawn and the kidnapper, Cass (Kelly), which completely defies belief. I may have snorted derisively.

Inevitably it leads to him showing up and a confrontation between him and Dawn, where we learn the truth about Phoebe’s claims. Guess what v2.0? By this point, I didn’t care about then either. The film was on the screen, and I was looking in its general direction. But it would be a stretch to say I was paying any kind of attention, There is something to be said for a low-budget film cautiously writing its story within the limitation of what can be afforded: here, that’s a truck and a forest. However, the failure to convert that into anything meaningful or interesting thereafter, must also be laid at the door of the writers. 

Dir: Max Strand
Star: Pamela Jayne Morgan, Juliette Alice Gobin, Paul C. Kelly, Peyton Michelle Edwards

While She Was Out

  By

★★★
“Christmas shopping can be hell”

Della (Basinger) is stuck in a marriage with her abusive husband (Sheffer). But she deals with it, for the sake of their two children, whom she adores. It’s Christmas Eve, and she escapes to the mall for a little retail therapy. The lot there is packed, and she leaves a passive-aggressive note on the windscreen of a particularly selfish parker. Big mistake. For it belongs to Chuckie (Haas) and his young group of multiracial thugs (one black, one Hispanic and one Asian, so that’s nice…). The subsequent altercation leads to the death of a mall cop, with Della as the only witness. So they pursue her, first to a construction site, then into the nearby woods, intent on making sure she can’t testify against them.

It’s kinda daft, and that’s putting it mildly. Takes a bit of time to get going too, with scenes of Della mall-ratting, and suffering microaggresions like a barista spelling her name wrong. Eventually, it gets to the violence, and things pick up, even if the silliness persists. Most obviously, Della lugging a big, red tool-box with her, shown in the poster, while she runs around the forest. It is, admittedly, a tool-box necessary to the plot, not least for its part in an energetic and impressive, “tyre-iron repeatedly to the face” sequence. This is just one of the ways in which Della dispatches the gang members, although the first is more the victim of an unfortunate accident than enemy action. 

The loopiness reaches its peak at the end, when the face-off between Della and the last gang member goes in a direction you probably would not have expected. Let’s leave it at that. But overall, this is an enjoyable enough slice of nonsense, with a story which is all the better for being extremely simple. Though it is easy enough to think of ways in which it could be improved though. For example, give Della some kind of back story to explain her ability to best young men in hand-to-hand combat. The story makes mention of her classes in Pilates, Spanish and mechanics; would it be so hard to have thrown in a karate class as well?

Probably the major potential area for improvement is on the villains’ side. Haas has a somewhat creepy vibe, however it’s one better suited to a lone psycho than a gang leader. Some of the dialogue between the members is also risible, as if writer/director Montford had no experience she could use to relate to her characters. They come off as largely unthreatening, more like kids playing dress-up than actual psychos, and the relative ease with which Della can counter them doesn’t help. But Basinger is good value in her role, and I will confess to nodding in appreciation at the final scene, even if it’s something we should probably have seen coming. I was entertained adequately by this, and that’s all I wanted.

Dir: Susan Montford
Star: Kim Basinger, Lukas Haas, Leonard Wu, Craig Sheffer

Skull Forest

  By

★½
“Going Dutch can be a very bad thing…”

I think Len Kabasinski probably is the director with more  films reviewed here than anyone else, save perhaps Andy Sidaris. This is the fifth; the previous four have seem palpable improvement, from the near-unwatchable Warriors of the Apocalypse, to the reasonably competent Hellcat’s Revenge II: Deadman’s Hand. This, however, is one of his earlier efforts, and you have to peer pretty hard past the dreadful film-making style to see any worthwhile elements.

In particular, it feels as if it was made as a wager, after someone bet him he couldn’t make an entire film with the camera pointed at a 30-degree angle. The Dutch angle shot, in which the camera is tilted to evoke a sense of unease, is a well-known cinematic technique, used by the likes of Hitchcock. But it’s one that needs moderation. In a famous review of Battlefield Earth, Roger Ebert said of the director, “Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.” The same is true here of Kabasinski, who appears to think every shot is better at 30 degrees off vertical. Or perhaps he was just drunk throughout filming. Then there’s the excessive close-ups and violent shaking of the camera. No. Just, no.

The story open with a quote from The Most Dangerous Game, and that’s what we get. Four women, on a weekend getaway, find themselves targeted by a group of rich hunters, and have to fight for their lives. That’s the entire plot, and I’m fine with that. The action is no great shakes, to be honest; a lot of something happening off-screen, then cut to a not-too-convincing make-up effect. The only sequence that succeeded in holding my attention, was when two women among the hunters had a falling out, and ended up fighting each other. Kabasinski plays another one of the villains, and I’m not sure which is more distracting: the single contact lens his character wears, or the bad English accent employed, for no apparent reason.

However, there is a surprising amount of nudity, so the film, clearly aiming at shallow exploitation (and I’m fine with that too!), does at least deliver on this score. Though it is a bit of a mixed bag; Playboy model Neeld looks the best, but Brooks has the most memorable (if not exactly erotic)  shot, clawing her way naked out of the shallow grave in which she was left for dead, and beginning her quest for vengeance. However, the impact of these and any other credible moments, are sucked away by the truly dreadful camerawork employed. It seems likely to induce motion sickness and/or a migraine. If he’d simply nailed the camera to a tree, it would have been an enormous improvement, and likely been worth close to another whole star. I guess this was early enough in his career Kabasinski was still experimenting. We should be glad it’s not a style with which he persisted.

Dir: Len Kabasinski
Star: Sara Brooks, Lisa Neeld, Pamela Sutch, Melissa Scott

Wilderness Survival for Girls

  By

★★★
“Just because we’re girls, why do we have to be afraid all the time?”

Three teenage girls, Ruth (Brox), Deborah (Henning) and Kate (Humiston) head off to the remote mountain cabin owned by Kate’s parents for a weekend away. Initially, it’s an overdose of teenage drama bullshit in various flavours, as they drink, smoke weed, talk about sex and so on. But their soap-opera idyll is interrupted by the unexpected return of Ed (Morrison), who has been squatting in the cabin. The girls capture him, using the gun he left behind, with the intent of taking him down the mountain to the police the next day. But as the night goes on, the tensions between the three young women begin to fracture their friendship. There’s also the question of Ed: is he the innocent drifter he claims to be, or is there a connection to a long-buried trauma in Kate’s history?

If you’re hoping for definitive answers to at least some of the questions asked by the film, you’re going to come away disappointed. Ed is almost a MacGuffin in human form. He exists largely to propel the rest of the film forward, and act as a force which will cause the girls to reveal their true nature over the course of events. They are three very distinct personalities, to the point that I wondered if (and not for the first time) they were intended to represent the three aspects of the psyche: id, ego and super-ego. While my recent knowledge of teenage girls is strictly limited to parental experience – and thus not that recent – if there’s one thing I know, it’s that they tend to congregate with those like them. The disparate trio we get here wouldn’t last 10 minutes in high school before tearing themselves apart. Though I guess that is what happens for a good chunk of proceedings here.

You should probably be forgiven for having strong reactions to them: my instant dislike of Kate, turns out to be not unjustified, considering the ease with which she embraces her inner psychopath. Deborah, meanwhile, is a little too one-dimensional and obvious for my tastes, so it’s left to Ruth to do a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting. Brox does well enough in that task to keep the movie interesting; at least, once it gets past a rocky opening 20 minutes, and the thriller aspects come into play, more than the “teen angst” ones. I will confess to being somewhat disappointed by the ending, which seems contrived in such a way as to achieve closure, without any of the participants having to take personal responsibility for their actions. There are also any number of poor choices made by the trio, in order to reach that point. Though, against speaking from my parental experience, that’s probably about par for the teenage girl course. There was just about enough here to sustain its brisk 78 minute running-time, and going much longer would likely have been a mistake.

Dir: Eli B. Despres, Kim Roberts
Star: Jeanette Brox, Megan Henning, Ali Humiston, James Morrison

Alone

  By

★★
“Getting away from it all.”

Jessica (Willcox) is making a break from her new life, packing up her possessions and driving away from her home and family in the big city. However, it’s not long before her journey through the countryside begins to hit bumps in the road. Specifically, in the shape of another driver (Menchaca), whose actions against Jessica veer between the aggressively hostile and the creepily over-friendly. The two encounter each other on a number of occasions, the incidents escalating until he finally drugs and kidnaps her. She wakes to find herself locked in the basement of a remote cabin, and needs to find a way to avoid a fate which, it appears, others before her have suffered.

A remake of Swedish film Gone, the major failing here is not enough happening to sustain the running time. The story needs to spend significantly less time on the build-up; for example, by cutting out the background stuff about exactly what it is, that Jessica is escaping from. We are given no reason to care, and it has little or no relevance to the movie’s central conflict. Similarly, there are likely too many encounters between her and him, before he finally abducts her. We get the picture after virtually the first one – and I have to say, the sensible thing for anyone to do thereafter, would have been to reject any further attempts, rather than engage in additional contact.

Of course, logic and common sense tend to be anathema to this genre, though there are times here where Jessica does behave credibly. For instance, her method of getting out of the basement is genuinely smart. I also liked the scene where, after her escape, she finds a hunter in the woods – only for the man to show up, and claim she’s his mentally-ill sister (an idea made plausible by her understandably hysterical reaction). But for every one of these positives, there are two negatives, such as her getting hold of his phone and calling… his wife, to let her know she’s married to a predator. While I admire the spirit of sisterhood there, I’d have suggested self-preservation might have been a better use of those cellphone minutes.

Eventually, we get to a finale, which has some more credibility speed-humps. Firstly, the coincidence that, in this gigantic forest, he buries a body right next to where she is hiding. And secondly, that when someone attacks you from the back seat of your car, you will immediately accelerate away which simultaneously fighting them, driving at top speed down a narrow forest track until the inevitable accident. Okay… This does lead to a half-decent brawl between them, on the scorched earth of a patch of cleared forest, with the crash having acted as a nice equalizer (despite the apparent lack of seat-belts!). It is, however, very much the definition of “too little, too late”, and can’t rescue this from the multiple missteps which have preceded it.

Dir: John Hyams
Star: Jules Willcox, Marc Menchaca, Anthony Heald

The Devil to Pay

  By

★★★★

“The hills have eyes. And hands, apparently.”

In the Appalachian Mountains, the residents are fiercely, even ferociously independent. They live by their own rules, known as the Creed. It’s a harsh, Old Testament version of law, which replaces conventional society. The lifestyle is well explained in a quote from a census taker which opens the film: “They want nothing from you, and God help you if you try to interfere.” It’s in this world that Lemon Cassidy (Deadwyler) lives with her young son on their smallholding. Her husband has gone off, but this seems not abnormal. At least, until Lemon gets a summons from Tommy Runion (Dyer), matriarch of her clan. Turns out Mr. Cassidy had owed her, and agreed to carry out a task in payment. His disappearance means the debt falls on Lemon, and if she won’t do Tommy’s bidding… Well, see the film’s title. 

The deeper Lemon gets, the more apparent it becomes she is not intended to get out alive, becoming the patsy in a long-running feud between the Runions and another mountain family. Escaping the fate intended for her will require guts, tenacity, a commitment to violence (when necessary) and the unlikely help of a local religious cult, who are… A bit different, even by the high standards of that term in Appalachian society. We have seen this kind of society before, such as in Winter’s Bone. However, what we have here is so alien, it almost beggars belief that this forms part of the contemporary United States of America. Indeed, some elements, such as the cult, are so out there, it’s positively distracting, taking attention away from the core storyline and characters. I must admit, there were several points where I felt additional explanation – in a format suitable for foreigners like myself – would have been quite welcome. 

The husband and wife duo of the Skyes also wrote Becky, one of 2020’s most effective works, and the script here is similarly impressive. It avoids the typical hillbilly stereotypes; while these people may be different to us city folk, they are clearly not idiots. But the key to the film’s success is Deadwyler, who is extremely good in her role. She’s black, and initially I did have qualms about this; given the setting, I wondered how much her character would be defined by her race. The answer? Not at all, and no-one else even mentions it, the material again choosing to avoid the easy route in its source of conflict. This is simply a non-issue, which you quickly forget about entirely,  and the film is all the better for that. Plaudits must also go to Dyer. She only has a few scenes, yet crafts a scary presence in a woman who can go from discussing the finer points of biscuit making, to threatening to bury you alive in a sentence or two. It’s a casual approach to violence, which makes it all the more frightening. 

Dir: Lane Skye, Ruckus Skye
Star: Danielle Deadwyler, Catherine Dyer, Jayson Warner Smith, Adam Boyer
a.k.a. Reckoning

Army of One

  By

★★
“Basic, and in need of training”

Husband and wife Dillon (Passmore) and Brenna Baker (Hollman) are out on a camping trip in the Alabama wilderness. They have a brush with some crude locals, led by the mountainous Butch (Kasper), but are saved by his diminutive mother (Singer), who takes no crap from anyone, and whom everyone locally calls Mama. Later, while sheltering from the rain in a deserted cabin, the Bakers stumble across a cache of arms. Before they can do anything, they are captured by the owner – Butch, of course, since his family are involved in a whole slew of criminal activities, including white slavery. Any hopes of playing the innocent tourists are wiped out when Butch finds Dillon’s police ID. Oops. He and his gang dispose of the couple, but do a poor job on Brenna. And, it turns out, she’s a former Army Ranger, who now has vengeance on her mind.

It’s a solid enough idea, albeit nothing we haven’t seen before. Hollman looks the part too, plausible enough in her attitude that she could be a soldier who has gone back to civilian life. The action, in general, is well-enough handled to pass muster. The lead actress was in Spartacus and Into the Badlands, while she is apparently going to be in the fourth Matrix movie (though I’m restraining my expectations for that). She does seem to know her way around a hand-to-hand fight sequence, and the film has some well-staged examples, helped by Durham avoiding editing them to death.

Unfortunately, the plotting is flat out terrible. I think it begins with the couple opting to have sex in the highly grubby cabin, and goes downhill from there. It’s never quite clear how Brenna survives Butch’s murder attempt, she just kinda gets up and starts walking about. Then she returns to the campsite and finds an ax. Yeah, she has a weapon… which she uses to sharpen a branch, then drops the ax back on the ground and wanders off with the pointy stick instead. She waits for daylight to infiltrate the family compound, rather than taking advantage of darkness. Brenna spends days just wandering the forest, rather than getting help or trying to leave. A booby-trapped branch appears, seemingly out of nowhere. The random Aussie guy.

The idiocy on view here goes on and on, and the missteps are so frequent and painfully glaring. They rob the film of almost all its energy, and any chance of real success. They’re too much of a distraction to ignore, and certainly stick in my mind more than the positive elements. There are few surprises as events unfold, with Butch, Mama and crew continually underestimating Brenna, even after she has wiped out half of their number. Rather than putting a bullet in her head, the idea of “breaking” Brenna and making her as docile and submissive as their other trafficked women, is just another example of the dumb writing in which this indulges. By the time the (no more plausible) ending eventually comes, it’s almost as a relief.

Dir: Stephen Durham
Star: Ellen Hollman, Gary Kasper, Geraldine Singer, Matt Passmore

Breaking Surface

  By

★★★★
“Highly af-fjord-able.”

This chilly slice of Swedish survival thriller is the perfect film to watch during an Arizona summer. For it does an excellent job of capturing the cold world of a Scandinavian winter, where diving into fjords is, apparently, a credible leisure pursuit. While offering a viable alternative to air-conditioning, it has to be admitted Chris turned to me at one point to say, “So why do people do this, exactly?” It’s a fair question, and one this film doesn’t even attempt to answer. There’s no sense of beauty here. You are voluntarily entering an environment where, if the lack of oxygen doesn’t get you, the cold might. Or perhaps other inhabitants. I mean, they are called “killer whales” for a reason, y’know.

If you ever had such an interest, this film might do for it, what Deliverance did for canoeing holidays. The story is about half-sisters Ida (Gammel) and Tuva (Martin), who separated after their parents divorced, but have now re-united. Both have issues. Ida’s marriage is crumbling, while professional diver Tuva just escaped being turned into chopped liver by a ship’s giant propeller. This get-together is supposed to involve them diving with their mother (Wiggen), but her illness makes it a two-woman trip. There is also history here; things open with a flashback to a childhood incident where Ida’s inattention almost cost Tuva her life. When an underwater rock fall traps Tuva, it’s entirely up to Ida to find some means of rescuing her sister from the freezing, suffocating depths. 

It’s an exercise in contrast between the siblings. Tuva is remarkably calm, considering her circumstances, while Ida falls apart at the slightest problem. Had their roles been reversed, this would have been over in about 15 minutes. But as is, Ida has to deal with an almost unending series of issues. At times it feels like a particularly fiendish adventure game. Find the tool to open the car boot to get the other tool to lift the boulder and rescue the princess. There are some plot holes. For example when she can’t find the boot release, why not ask Tuva where it is? But it’s fair to imagine she may simply not have thought of it, in her harried state.

Similarly, I was a little disappointed the orcas didn’t play a bigger part, especially after Ida becomes a bit… bleedy. I do feel that this goes against the famous rule of Chekhov’s Cetaceans. “If, in the first act, you have carnivorous aquatic mammals hanging about, then in the second or third act, they must attack.” But the pace is so gloriously relentless, you don’t have the chance to dwell on such things. Hedén does an excellent job of ratcheting up the tension, and I found I spent most of the second half holding my breath. Or feeling cold. That too. While you could criticize Ida’s near-hysteria (probably a factor in her failing marriage), I can’t say I’d be any better, and you can only admire her tenacity and loyalty to Tuva. Just don’t expect us to don scuba gear soon.

Dir: Joachim Hedén
Star: Moa Gammel, Madeleine Martin, Trine Wiggen