News

This story of two sisters, played by Josie Lawrence and Tanya Myers, returning home to sort their dead mother’s belongings avoids predictable genres, narratives and characters

British indie director Jon Sanders creates another of his low-key, thoughtful movies developed through improvisation; it is a static, eccentric chamber piece in some ways, but engaging and pregnant with ideas about mourning and grief. Josie Lawrence and Tanya Myers play Dot and Phoebe, two sisters who have come to the seaside home of their late mother, a singer and entertainer, to confront the daunting task of sorting out all her belongings and theatrical memorabilia.

This opens up painful memories and psychic wounds: however much they loved her, their mother was serially unfaithful to their father – once with a boyfriend of Phoebe’s – and now they don’t know how to feel. These themes of sexual transgression are strangely echoed in the present action,...

Named after the Mary Elizabeth Coleridge poem, Jon Sanders’ gently paced, thoughtful new film opens with a rendition of that poem in song by sisters Phoebe (Tanya Myers) and Dot (Josie Lawrence), with piano accompaniment by Tom (James Northcote). He has been looking after their mother’s house since her death, and now that they have arrived to deal with her possessions and say their final goodbyes to the place, the poem seems to speak to a personality which they both struggled to reconcile with and whose influence continues to shape their behaviour. “You thought because I had a mind that I could have no heart at all.”

Phoebe and Dot are performance artists and their manager, Monica (Anna Mottram), who is also a longstanding friend, is helping with the process of sorting out the house. She acts as a sounding board when they discuss old memories and their complex relationships with.

The British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) have revealed the nomination longlists for Best Feature Documentary and Best International Independent Film categories. In addition, BIFA’s Raindance Discovery Award longlist has also been unveiled.

Of the 15 films longlisted for Best Feature Documentary, eight are directed by women. The 17 films longlisted for Best International Independent Film have already won top prizes from this year’s premier international festivals.

The final five nominations in each category will be announced in early November and winners will be revealed at the 25th annual BIFA ceremony on Dec. 4.

Best International Independent Film Sponsored By Champagne Taittinger

“Alcarràs” – Carla Simón, María Zamora, Stefan Schmitz, Tono Folguera, Sergi Moreno

“All The Beauty And The Bloodshed” – Laura Poitras, Howard Gertler, Nan Goldin, Yoni Golijov, John S. Lyons

“Argentina, 1985” – Santiago Mitre, Mariano Llinás, Axel Kuschevatzky, Federico Posternak, Agustina Llambi Campbell, Ricardo Darín, Santiago Carabante, Chino Darín, Victoria Alonso

“Broker” – Kore-eda Hirokazu,...

Evocative music and a poignant subplot put a shine on Jon Sanders’s story of a marriage cracking up in the south of France

The latest, and most ambitious film from Jon Sanders (Back to the Garden, Painted Angels), A Change in the Weather takes a semi-improvised, organic approach to a story of a failing marriage and a creative partnership that fractures during a theatre workshop in the south of France. Anna Mottram is magnetic in the role of Lydia, the actor wife who gradually realises that her marriage to her playwright husband Dan (Bob Goody) is over. A tendency towards navel-gazing improvised dialogue is balanced by evocative use of music and a poignant supernatural subplot.

Continue reading...

A dramatic impresario enlists his wife and two other women to play avatars of the same person in Jon Sanders’ intriguing work of miniaturism

Director Jon Sanders and his loose ensemble of actors, led above all by his wife, Anna Mottram, who basically improvises all her own dialogue, have been tending their own little peculiar plot of cinematic garden for few films now, starting with Painted Angels and progressing up through Late September and Back to the Garden.

Most of the time, these ultra-low-budget, ultra-rarefied films are about people like, one presumes, Sanders and Mottram themselves: highly educated, haute bourgeois Brits and Europeans with cultural capital to spare, endlessly fascinated with examining themselves, their relationships, their art. Here, the result is more contortedly self-reflexive than usual as regular player Bob Goody plays a dramatic impresario who has enlisted his own wife (Mottram) and two other women (Meret Becker and Maxine...

★★★★☆ Reuniting the trusted troupe of actors with whom he has now become somewhat known for collaborating, British independent director Jon Sanders returns with his fourth feature, Back to the Garden (2013), a typically sombre treatise on intimacy and the stasis brought about by an untimely death. Following Low Tide (2008) and the deeply affecting Late September (2012), this is the third in a trilogy of ultra low-budget, improvisatory films that star regular actors - including Sanders' partner, Anna Mottram - and are liberated from the shackles of artistic compliance, where such freedom allows for a great amount of space for the various methods and themes to fully take shape.

The Rocket | Under The Skin | The Zero Theorem | Suzanne | Veronica Mars | Need For Speed | Plot For Peace

The Rocket (12A)

(Kim Mordaunt, 2013, Aus/Thai/Laos) Sitthiphon Disamoe, Loungnam Kaosainam, Thep Phongam, Bunsri Yindi. 96 mins

Children are often the best ambassadors for world cinema and so it proves here, in a Laos-set tale that's sympathetic but never condescending. The story centres on a displaced boy burdened by a perceived "curse". But it's told with documentary-like conviction and distinctly local details, from James Brown-worshipping war vets to the unexploded ordnance littering the landscape.

Under The Skin (15)

(Jonathan Glazer, 2013, UK) Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan. Krystof Hádek. 108 mins

Glazer's delectably mystifying sci-fi makes Glasgow look like another planet – as seen through the eyes of Johansson's alien seductress, on the prowl for unsuspecting males. It sounds like a highbrow Species, but the imagery and sustained strangeness put it in a realm of its own.

The Zero Theorem (15)

(Terry Gilliam,...

Rock Of Ages (12A)

(Adam Shankman, 2012, Us) Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones. 123 mins

Doing for 1980s hair metal what Mamma Mia! did for Abba, this glossy musical gives you the broad pleasures of pantomime rather than rock'n'roll danger, with theatrical star turns and a playlist of power ballads hung around an archetypal tale of a smalltown girl and a wannabe rock star boy on La's Sunset Strip. You can stop believin' now.

Cosmopolis (15)

(David Cronenberg, 2012, Fra/Can/Por/Ita) Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon. 109 mins

Don De Lillo's prescient novella makes for a cool Manhattan odyssey, centred on Pattinson's jaded banker and the Occupy zeitgeist.

Polisse (15)

(Maïwenn, 2011, Fra) Karin Viard, Joey Starr, Marina Foïs. 128 mins

A Wire-like approach to a French child protection unit reaps dividends for this docu-style procedural.

Red Lights (15)

(Rodrigo Cortés, 2012, Us/Spa) Cillian Murphy, Robert De Niro,...

This British ensemble piece about a 65th birthday party gone wrong is an interesting and high-minded experiment in improv acting

Jon Sanders's zero-budget British ensemble piece is an interesting and high-minded experiment in improv acting: a melancholy, autumnal drama about an ageing married couple, Jim (Bob Goody) and Gillian (Anna Mottram), who throw a family party for Jim's 65th birthday that ends in disaster. Sanders allows the actors to devise the scenes on camera; sometimes the resulting dialogue is clunky, but sometimes brutally and all too plausibly real. Late September is arguably comparable to the recent work of Joanna Hogg – but with much lower production values, looking at times like a moody and startlingly depressing daytime TV drama from yesteryear. But there is something uncompromising in its pessimism, something that another kind of dramatist or film-maker would have tried to dissolve, or sweeten, or explain away.

Rating: 3/5

DramaPeter Bradshaw

guardian.

★☆☆☆☆ Director Jon Sanders' third feature Late September (2012) is a lumbering, tiresome arthouse experiment that cheaply muses on the relationship of a couple who realise, after forty years, that their marriage is failing. Shot over a 24-hour period, the film follows Ken (Richard Vanstone) and Gillian (Anna Mottram) in and around their picturesque cottage in Kent as they prepare for Ken's 65th birthday.

Read more »...