Tony Hickson’s Review a Lift-Off Film Festival Trilogy

Wednesday evening’s selection of the Festival at the Curzon Soho.

Killing Anna (29m, Australia) Documentary.
After his long term girlfriend asked him to move out. The filmmaker finds himself wishing that she had instead died in a tragic accident. In order to investigate his attitudes towards loss and grief he organises and performs a funeral service as if her death was real…and films the entire process.

Shooting Freetown (29m, United Kingdom) Documentary.
A decade since Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war, from the ashes rises a new dawn of creativity in audio-visual media. Inspired by Jean Rouch’s ‘shared anthropology’ and ‘ethno-fiction’, Shooting Freetown follows three people forging their way in film and music in the nation’s capital, facing the constant struggles with vision and resourcefulness.

Without (87m, USA) London Lift-Off Best Feature Narrative Award 2012.
On a remote wooded island, a young woman becomes caretaker to an elderly man in a vegetative state. She has no cell signal, no Internet. Only a year removed from high school and forced to meet the needs of a man who cannot respond, Joslyn vacillates between finding solace in his company and feeling fear and suspicion towards him.