Tag: k

Kidnapping in the Grand Canyon

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★★★
“Not grand, but adequate.”

Despite my relentlessly commitment to sit through any film with an action heroine that strays across my radar, I’ll admit to suppressing an inward wince, when the film started and the ‘Lifetime Movies’ logo popped up. This origin was news to me. However, I was literally a captive viewer, since I was sitting on a plane to Mexico, so couldn’t exactly pop up and put on something else. At least it did mean I wasn’t going to end up uncomfortably trying to hide my screen from fellow passengers. This has occasionally happened previously, after an ill-considered choice of in-flight entertainment. Inevitably when I’m occupying the middle seat. Say what you like, Lifetime TVMs are safe. 

And to my surprise, in this case, reasonably entertaining. Admittedly, expectations were low. However, this kept my attention. Not that I could exactly walk out. But it keeps things simple, and is the better for it. To mark the twentieth anniversary of their friendship, pediatrician Brooke (Vitori) and photographer Chandra (Rosita) decide to do something special and hike the Grand Canyon. They bump into guide Nate (Boyd), who convinces them to go off trail and see hidden delights. As the title suggests, big mistake. For he is actually in need of a doctor who can tend to a nasty, infected leg wound suffered by extremely reluctant fiancée Tara (Bailey), and won’t take no for an answer, from any of the three women. 

Nothing new in the plotting here (there’s another Lifetime film with a suspiciously similar premise, Vanished in Yosemite),  but it does a decent job of avoiding character idiocy often needed in many of this sort of thing. Chandra is established early on as the risk-taker, so it makes sense when she immediately accepts Nate’s offer, over the objections of the much more cautious Brooke. This, too, is understandable as she lost her husband in a climbing accident two years previously. Yet despite the disparate personalities, the friendship between them is sold by the actresses’ performances. It gives a solid foundation, so that the occasionally rocky plotting doesn’t end up causing the whole endeavour to collapse. By the end, both have clearly changed and moved towards the middle, a nice acknowledgement of moderation being the best policy. Boyd does his part too, initially making Nate seem charming, until the inevitable – for anyone who has seen a man in a Lifetime movie, anyway – heel turn. 

I do suspect not all of it was actually filmed in the Grand Canyon. The stuff at the rim, certainly. But they’re shown entering the National Park, before arriving at the Sugar Loaf Lodge, which is actually in Sedona, a good hundred miles south. Some of the scenery looks more like Utah as well. However, you can’t go wrong with the Grand Canyon. It looks as majestic and imposing as ever, adding value to the production. Weirdly, it ends up being the second film I’ve seen this week, after Deep Fear, where a flare gun is wielded for offensive purposes. What are the odds?

Dir: Derek Pike
Star: Gina Vitori, Philip Boyd, Katrina Rosita, Ryann Bailey
A version of this review originally appeared on Film Blitz.

Knockout Blessing

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★★★
“Punches above its weight.”

Always a pleasure to cross another country off the map, and this is the first movie we have ever reviewed here from Nigeria. Indeed, entries from anywhere in Africa have been very limited, and in general, I found this a pleasant surprise. In some countries, film-makers appear to be trying simply to imitate Hollywood. That’s not the case here: this feels Nigerian, and is all the more entertaining as a result. What it may lack in hardcore action, was made up for me by the glimpse it provided into local culture. The differences are what gave this flavour – though as we’ll see, it appears we are united by a general disdain for politicians and their behaviour!

It begins in a small village where Blessing (Laoye) is the grand-daughter of a boxer, who has brought her up and certainly passed on his skills, leaving Blessing fully deserving of her titular nickname. However, after she punches out the son of a rich local, who was attempting to force himself on her, and he dies as a result, her father is killed by a mob, and she is forced to flee to the city. There, she falls in with a group of hookers, including Hannah (Meg Otanwa) and Oby (Ejiofor). They end up working for low-level gangster Dagogo (Franklin), honey-trapping men whom Blessing then knocks unconscious so they can be robbed. Her goal is to raise funds which Dagogo says he will use to get her a passport to America.

When this shows little signs of happening, Blessing grows reluctant, so Dagogo says he needs just one last job. It’s a high-risk, high-reward job, to steal some diamonds from the notorious Gowon (Adedoyin). Naturally, as “one last jobs” do, it goes wrong. While they get the case, it instead contains a hard drive, with a very incriminating video, depicting the President of Nigeria… Well, let’s just say, there’s a goat involved. [Told you there’s no love lost for politicians] Needless to say, both Gowon and the President are extremely keen to get the drive back, and will stop at nothing to do so. This leaves Blessing and her pals trying to get it to a friendly journalist and online, before the loose ends they represent are tidied up.

This was consistently entertaining. My (admittedly limited) experience of Nollywood left my expectations low, and this surpassed them on most levels: the script, performances and direction are all fine. Credit Adedoyin in particular, whose suit-wearing Gowon becomes a very convincing and menacing villain. It’s never dull, and no special knowledge of Nigerian life and culture is needed here. I did wish more use had been made of Blessing’s pugilistic talents. There’s a significant chunk in the middle, where it feels like the movie forgets about its heroine. Blessing did enough in the early going to win our affections, and she deserves better than to be sidelined. I was still left with an interest in seeing more Nigerian cinema, and that’s not what I expected on the way in.

Dir: Dare Olaitan
Star: Ade Laoye, Bucci Franklin, Ademola Adedoyin, Linda Ejiofor

Kill Craft

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★★
“More kill than craft.”

There is potential in the idea here. It’s a shame it ends up feeling like two separate movies, both of which come out feeling under-cooked. The main focus is on Marina Delon (Loutsis), a teenage girl with the typical teenage girl problems, e.g. bickering parents, generally sullen demeanour, etc. Except, her dad Thomas (Paré) is actually an assassin, working for the very strange Poe (Oberst). This has contributed to the marital strife, because his work is why mom is in a wheel-chair – and is not happy about it, to put it mildly. However, things are up-ended after Thomas is killed on a job, and Marina decides to take over the family business.

Thee are a few interesting directions this could perhaps have gone. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take any of them. Instead, things rumble vaguely on, with Marina doing not very exciting murders for hire, sometimes with the help of her Gother than thou BFF Freya (Eggleston), and to varying success. Such as trying to kill the estranged wife of a gangster, which only results in a bit of flirty chit-chat with the target’s son. Communication with Poe is entirely through dead-drops, so he has no idea his assassin is now a teen girl, until his boss informs him descriptions of the killer no longer resemble Michael Paré. Poe decides to tidy up the loose ends, by terminating what remains of the family.

Why it feels like two films, is mostly because the director can’t seem to commit to whether it should be Marina’s story or Poe’s. It could have been both, adopting a Leon-esque approach of Poe taking her under his wing. However, the two barely share a few seconds of screen-time before the final shootout. Instead, we get unconvincing family drama, e.g. Marina being upset her father isn’t attending the recital at which she is unconvincingly playing the violin, or even weirder stuff such as Poe digging up the grave of his dead mother. I’d actually have been fine with more of the latter – few do unrepentantly weird better than Oberst [he has done a one-man stage show adapting Edgar Allen Poe stories, incidentally, giving resonance to his character name here], and he’s much better an actor than Loutsis.

For whatever reason, I kept expecting some dramatic twist, such as Freya being a figment of Marina’s imagination. I mean, we first meet the pair digging animal graves behind her house, which sets an odd tone for the film from the beginning. The fact Marina and Poe both… have issues, is another way this could have developed. But once we’ve established Marina is taking over – and with remarkable vagueness on the details there – the film more or less grinds to a halt, dramatically and thematically. With action sequences which are no more than competent, despite some gore which is occasionally amusingly excessive, this is one you can afford to miss, despite Oberst’s best efforts.

Dir: Mark Savage
Star: Sanae Loutsis, Isis Eggleston, Michael Paré, Bill Oberst Jr.

The Killing Game, by Kate Bold

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ★★★

Bold is an incredibly prolific author, whose site lists eight separate series of novels, with a total of sixty-four books between them. The series are mostly named in the format, “<PROTAGONIST NAME> FBI thriller”, which does suggest a certain production-line quality to them. I wonder if, perhaps, they are each set in a different part of the country, in order to get the local market. By chance, this one is set around Arizona, where I live – I think it’s the first such action heroine novel I’ve read, and this did add a certain level of interest. “A Tempe reference! I’ve been there!” Hey, I’m easily pleased, what can I say?

The heroine here is Alexa Chase, a former member of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, who quit her job after spending too long staring into the abyss, in favour of a position with the US Marshals in Arizona (I’ve been there!). However, she’s dragged back in to the worst case of her time there, when notorious serial killer Drake Logan escapes from custody during a prison transport. With the aid of his cult-like acolytes, he begins a spree of death and destruction across the state, but with a sinister agenda. He wants to tap into the bleakest parts of Alexa’s psyche and make her embrace his twisted philosophy, with the aim of bringing her across onto the dark side.

There’s an obvious Silence of the Lambs influence here, in the story of a female detective hunting a charismatic serial killer, with whom her relationship goes a bit too close. The most obvious difference is, Logan is not a lone wolf, instead having disciples willing to do his bidding – which is, basically, to get in the way of Alexa’s investigation. It’s an interesting concept, though largely relegated to a side-issue here. Bold instead rolls out some of the usual tropes, like Alexa being given a new partner, FBI special agent Stuart Barrett. Give yourself two points if you immediately guess she initially hates him, but grows to respect his talents over the course of the book. I’d not be surprised if there’s sexual tension in future volumes.

Otherwise, it’s mostly straightforward stuff, and falls into the category of consistently competent, but equally consistently unremarkable. There are a couple of elements which feel like they’re set up to be more important than they are – at least here – such as Alexa’s relationship with the daughter of her neighbours. I was expecting Drake to kidnap her or something: nope. Maybe down the road this matters. This certainly wasn’t a chore to read, but despite being the first book to have scenes set in Sedona (I’ve been there!) and Bumble Bee (I’ve… driven past the turn-off to it), there just was not enough impact to make me enthusiastic about the series. If I was told a well-trained AI wrote this, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Author: Kate Bold
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Alexa Chase suspense thriller series.

Keisha Takes the Block

  By

★½
“Talk is cheap, and so is this.”

Reviewing director Profitt’s filmography on the IMDb is an interesting experience. He seems to have started off in the paranormal, drifted through pseudo-reality TV with titles like Untold Undercover Police Stories, and has now found a niche in the low-budget urban gangster field, for which Tubi seems to have an inexhaustible appetite. But the promise very much exceeds the product. Case in point: while the woman on the cover here is the main character, she does not even touch a gun until, literally, the final shot of the movie. Profitt has instead realized that the best way to stretch his budget is to have long scenes of two characters talking to each other.

So that’s what you get here. A lot. It begins with Keisha (Seaton) talking to a fellow “prisoner” in “jail”. Quotes used advisedly, because after an establishing shot of the outside of a prison, the whole scene takes place in an entirely generic corner of a room. No guards. No bars. Could be a community college classroom. This sets the tone for the next thirty minutes, almost without exception: two people have a conversation. Two different people have a conversation. Two people have a conversation outside. Two people have a conversation on a couch. If you can think of a (slight) variation on two people having a conversation, you are likely to see it used here. It almost becomes hypnotic.

The story unfolds entirely through the resulting dialogue. Keisha is seeking to expand her criminal operations, but is facing push-back from the current boss, Quan (Settles). So she recruits his abused girlfriend, Rayna (Yvonne) to provide inside information on his activities. Meanwhile, her pet dirty cop, Ronny (Profitt), also tells Keisha heat will be coming from law enforcement, especially as the cold war between her and Quan heats up. Keisha’s long-time best friend begs her to leave the criminal life before it all catches up to her, and she begins to realize she needs an exit strategy. All of which sounds considerably more exciting than it is, because it’s far, far too dialogue heavy, and even these scenes are flat and largely lacking in dramatic energy.

The performances aren’t bad, and mercifully, Profitt doesn’t lean on the “my friends’ rap music” soundtrack typically used in this genre. Indeed, the lack of music, while probably another money-saving device, is sometimes effective. But there just is not enough going on here to hold the audience’s interest. The supposed battle for territory between Quan and Keisha doesn’t appear to use more than one clip of ammunition. Then again, both sides could probably hold their gang meetings in a phone-booth, such is the lack of resources here.  It is something of a shame, as there are elements here capable of generating dramatic conflict, in the right hands, and as noted, the actresses generally deliver their lines well. But Profitt the director seriously needs to fire Profitt the writer.

Dir: Jeff Profitt
Star: Brandi Seaton, Vicky Yvonne, Bernard Q. Settles, Jeff Profitt

The Killer

  By

★★★
“All killer, some filler.”

Back in 1990, I saw the original version of The Killer at the ICA in London. I’d never seen anything like it, and didn’t quite know what to think. But it kindled a deep fondness for Hong Kong cinema, and it’s also likely one of the most influential action films of the decade, whose impact is still being felt today. I wasn’t sure what to think about a remake, especially a gender-swapped one. These rarely work – hello, Ghostbusters. But at least this one was going to be done by the original director. Especially after having enjoyed his Violent Night, if there was anyone whom I’d trust not to screw up a John Woo film, it’s probably going to be John Woo.

He doesn’t. Oh, it’s not as good as the original, or even Violent Night. However, it’s perfectly serviceable, especially if you haven’t seen the original. Woo treats his own material with respect. While there are differences, none feel forced for the sake of it. I was quite surprised to see Woo go with a female lead, because his films tend to be pure, undiluted masculinity. I’m hard-pushed to think of a decent, well-written female character in any of them. To be honest, I still am. For Zee (Emmanuel) is just your typical assassin with a conscience, who refuses to kill innocent civilian Jenn (Silvers), after accidentally blinding her during a mission. This brings her the enmity of her handler, Finn (Worthington), but eventually, the support of dogged cop Sey (Sy).

The biggest issue here is simple: Emmanuel isn’t Chow Yun-Fat. Not even close, in terms of charisma, and that renders this a disposable trifle. The rest of the cast fares better, including former football player Eric Cantona as an irascible gangster (he was irascible on the football field too). Quite why Worthington sports an Oirish accent and spouts Oirish phrases escapes me. But I’ll forgive it, given his two-pack of sidekicks. The pick of whom is played by Aurélia Agel, who was Karen Gillan’s stunt double in Gunpowder Milkshake. She gets an impressive fight against the heroine at the end. In a church, naturally. A good drinking game there: take a swig for each Woo cliché: birds, slow-mo diving, guns in each hand, etc.

It runs a good twenty minutes longer than the original and, while it doesn’t often drag, I’d be hard-pushed to say this extra length adds much extra value. Probably best not to think about any of this too much, such as how Zee’s decision to protect Jenn, without knowing the facts, actually leads to far more deaths, of far more innocent victims. Or the dubious, Looney Tunes-like medicine, where a whack on the head can only be remedied by another whack on the head. Mind you, it’s not as if the original stands up to close scrutiny either. Where Woo led thirty-five years ago, many have since followed – and some, gone further. Yet I’d still rather see him at play, than a lot of his successors.

Dir: John Woo
Star: Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy, Sam Worthington, Diana Silvers

The Killing Complex, by K.G. Leslie

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½

There’s something to be said for sparse simplicity, and this delivers on that concept in spades. Except for occasional flashbacks, the entire things takes place in one location: a facility somewhere in Europe. It’s where Cassie ends up, locked in a cage, after being abducted while on a trip from Britain, intending to find herself. She’s then deposited in a hall and made to fight for the amusement, gambling or whatever of online spectators. She starts off facing animals, but through pharmaceutical treatment, her strength, speed and savagery are enhanced, and the opponents – both fauna and, eventually, her own species too – become more vicious. The shock collar around her neck ensures her compliance.

In the early going, much of this unfolds inside Cassie’s head, as she goes through what perhaps seems inspired by the five stages of grief, from rejecting the reality of her predicament, through anger, and ending up in a personal commitment to do whatever is necessary in order to survive – even if this comes at the cost of her own humanity. But just when she’s on the edge of becoming a soulless killing machine, she’s relocated, and placed next to another prisoner, Thomas. He was also abducted, but more recently, so hasn’t been ground down by his situation yet, and his optimism reignites Cassie’s own interest in life. But is everything quite what it seems, or are there other agendas at work?

Without giving them away, there are a couple of very effective twists here, which I did not see coming – and, indeed, I defy anyone to say they did. The first is something of a cheat, considering how much of the time to that point has been Cassie’s internal monologue, and this has carefully hid a key piece of information. But the second works particularly well, because it demonstrates that the bad guys here aren’t stupid: Carrie is going to need to do more than bludgeon her way out. Good though she certainly is at that, as is proven repeatedly. This isn’t a book for animal rights activists though, with Cassie working her way up from herbivores to the top of the food chain, in addition to her human opponents.

I do wonder quite why the people are wasting the remarkable drugs, which help Cassie survive massive damage as well as enhance her fighting abilities, on an inter-species fight club. I’d have said the military-industrial complex would pay better than Fanduel for that stuff. But sadistic perverts gonna pervert, I guess, and so here we are. By the end, I was galloping through the pages, staying up well past my usual bedtime to do the dreaded “one more chapter.” It does end on something of a cliffhanger: usually that’s something I don’t like, but I didn’t feel like I’d been sold half a story here, and can definitely see further entries appearing here down the road.

Author: K.G. Leslie
Publisher: Self published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Killing saga.

Kiss of Death

  By

★★½
“Issues of trust”

The relationship between Mykah (Leason) and Jameson (Chandler) is quickly heading for the rocks, as the honesty between them has evaporated. He suspects her of lying to him and having an affair: and he’s half-right. For Mykah is misleading him about the reason for her odd hours, though it is work-related as she claims. It’s just that her job is as an assassin, who kills the husbands of battered women, assisted by family friend Lady (Frazier). After successfully offing a prospective politician, Mykah’s next job is Dyson (Jackson), after his wife Chantelle tearfully tells her story of abuse, and offers to pay half a million dollars for a job well done. 

Mykah is initially not keen on accepting the offer, partly because she’s trying to fix her marriage, partly because Dyson is a notorious crime boss. But it turns out Chantelle has incriminating footage of Mykah’s last hit, giving the assassin no option. As she gets closer to her target, things begin to get murkier. Dyson reveals he knows about Mykah’s early family life, which ended when her parents died in a murder-suicide. Or was that actually what happened? In addition, are Chantelle’s motives justice and escape, or are they considerably more mercenary? And will Mykah be able to get to the bottom of all this before Jameson stumbles to the entirely wrong conclusion and crashes the situation? It’s a lot of questions, and I did like the script here, which manages to keep a complex story clear.

However, it is fair to say that it does take way too long to get to the interesting stuff, with the first half being populated largely be banal chit-chat between Mykah and either Jameson or Dyson. Throw in a teenage daughter, and the soap-opera elements are in danger of toppling this over before it can get going. There’s definitely a shortage of action, between the opening murder and the final confronatation when the truth gets revealed. Virtually all we get is a brief fight between Mykah and a pair of Dyson’s minions, after he begins to suspects she is not what she seems to be. It’s okay: I liked Mykah pausing to remove her heels before going into battle. It just needs more.

Director Sesma has a fairly long track record of low-budget action, and technically it’s competent enough. That’s particularly true, when compared so some of the other urban genre entries we’ve seen here, and at least he avoids the obvious cliches of drugs and gangs. But if you compare this to, say, the Thai TV movies we’re previously reviewed, such as The Secret Weapon, also about an assassin, the gap in energy and action becomes inescapable. Perhaps it’s a budgetary thing. If this had not apparently been so reliant on the mantra that “talk is cheap,” then it could have been more than just an acceptable time-passer overall, with only the last third measuring up to scratch.

Dir: Christian Sesma
Star: Sheila Leason, Kevin Blake Chandler, Dontelle Jackson, Cheryl Frazier

Knuckle Girl

  By

★★★
“Punches below its weight.”

This film is based on a Korean webcomic, but has been relocated to Japan. I can’t help wondering if something was lost in the process, because it feels like I should have liked this more than I did. Ran Tachibana (Miyoshi) is a promising amateur boxer, who gets devastating news when the body of her sister Yuzuki is found inside a burned-out vehicle. The cops call it suicide and quickly close the case. Except Ran doesn’t believe the corpse is Yuzuki, and begins to investigate what might have happened. The search leads her to an underground fight club run by the brutal Nikaido (Ito), who is holding Yuzuki hostage. He makes Ran an offer: beat his undefeated champion, and he’ll let Yuzuki go.

Naturally, it’s not as simple as that, with Nikaido reneging on his word. Fortunately, Ran has help in the shape of bike mechanic Kamiya (Maeda) and hacker Naruse (Hosoda), who help her go after Nikaido and take down his operation. There’s also concerns on the criminal side, with Nikaido’s bosses feeling he’s a loose cannon. It all feels too much to cram into a single movie, and I suspect it might have been better served in the form of a TV series. As is, elements like Yuzuki’s “magic blood” don’t appear to have much purpose. They seem there purely so fans of the comic will go “Oh, yeah!” and make little or no sense to casual viewers like me.

I think it’s probably a case whee less would have been more in terms of plotting. Keep it simple, perhaps removing side characters like Kamiya or Naurse, and focus just on Ran infiltrating the fight club and working her way up through it. Sure, it wouldn’t score points for originality, but it might have sustained my attention better. As is, in between the action, I must confess this sometimes struggled to retain focus. Considering the obviously non-trivial amount of resources that went into the production, it’s a shame they didn’t put as much effort into the story. For this undeniably looks spiffy, with the underground arena, in the shape of an eye, well-designed, and I liked the over-perky pair of MCs as well.

But I’m here for the fights, and these were… decent enough. I appreciated that the film acknowledged the heroine’s lack of size, and explicitly discussed how she would need to use her speed and agility to beat larger opponents. That’s true, even with the equalizer of knuckle-dusters, given to her by Nikaido to even up the betting odds a little. Miyoshi only had a few months training, but it’s likely easier to train an actress to fake fight, than a fighter to fake act, and it’s adequately convincing. But there are really only three or four sequences in the whole thing, with the story having to rush past most of them, because it has to deal with all the other elements. It’s all okay, I suppose, yet definitely feels like a wasted opportunity.

Dir: Hong-Seung Yoon
Star: Ayaka Miyoshi, Gôki Maeda, Hideaki Ito, Kanata Hosoda

Kobanê

  By

★★★
“It’s clearly no Nirvana…”

Yes, let’s get the obligatory Kurt Cobain joke out of the way quickly and painlessly. This is instead about the Kurdish city, located in northern Syria, which came under assault from forces belonging to the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014-15. The defenders eventually repelled the attack in what has been called the Kurdish version of the Battle of Stalingrad. Even before that, we had covered how groups such as the YPJ put Kurdish women on the front-line, in a way rarely seen in modern warfare. One such woman is the focus of the film, Zehra (Arin), who is forced into a commanding role after backup is refused, and the city is cut off by the advancing ISIS army.

What follows is basically your traditional war movie, with a small group of defenders coming under attack from a numerically superior opponent. We’ve seen this often enough, in the likes of Zulu, Saving Private Ryan, 300, etc. But making the central character female is certainly unusual, and better still, the film ignores her gender entirely. Seriously, I don’t recall a single time it was so much as mentioned. Any Hollywood film would surely make an obvious point of it, with a male character questioning her competence, or worse still, shoehorning in a cringeworthy, Avengers: Endgame,”She’s got help” moment. Here, everyone is far too busy trying to survive to indulge in that kind of nonsense, and if you want an up-close street fighting experience, this certainly delivers.

However, there are issues. At a whopping 159 minutes, it’s overlong, and there are also times it feels you need a Wikipedia crash course on the complicated situation involving the Kurds, Turks and Syrians. For instance, there’s a point at which the defenders are set up for betrayal. Perhaps the logic of this makes sense if you know the situation, but it felt like I had to take the logic on trust. It’s also worth remembering that this is, at heart, a piece of propaganda, and sometimes it’s not exactly subtle about it. The ISIS soldiers feel as if they strayed in from a Disney class in villainy, and there are times when the story resorts to equally blatant emotional cliché.

I was impressed by the technical aspects, with a sense of destruction – they found a lot of razed city blocks – and deaths where people get shot, sit down, and slowly pass away. Reportedly, a lot of the cast were genuine fighters who took part in the siege: that’s a bit of a mixed blessing, as sometimes the lack of acting experience shines through. I’m not sure if Arin is among them: her IMDb listing has no other roles. But she’s fine, with a face which simply feels as if has been through a lot. The film is helped significantly by Mehmûd Berazî’s score, and I think it does work better that similarly-themed features such as Soeurs D’Armes or Sisters Apart, feeling more grounded and “real.”

The makers have put the whole thing up on YouTube with subtitles, below – and if it’s imperfect, I’d say it remains worth a look.

Dir: Özlem Yasar,
Star: Dijle Arin, Awar Eli, Reger Azad, Nejbir Xanim