FAR NORTH. Dir Asif Kapadia. 2008

Sara Maitland’s short story is set in the Arctic, filmed in barren icescapes and stony shores. Saiva (Michelle Yeoh) has cast herself out into the cold wilderness, cursed: all who love her are doomed, so she keeps moving, away from people, eking out her existence. Her only company is a baby she saved from a massacre when she was a young woman, and the girl is now full grown.

The two women hunt seals, birds, deer, and keep warm under layers of wolfskin, pitching their yurt in bleak landscapes amidst the Arctic winds. The silence of the film is calming, the script is almost wordless, but the cinematography is rich with facial expression and graphic killing scenes.

The film opens with Saiva hungry to the point of desperation. Cradling the head of one of her dogs, she soothes it, caresses it, then cuts its throat. The meat is tough but the two women have to live.

Into this menacing territory stumbles Loki (Sean Bean), close to death and at their mercy. Saiva’s curiosity about this ill equipped man is her weakness. She saves him, tends him and he tells her he is an escaped POW, on the run after being ordered to kill women and children. Soldiers venture into the icy wastes to track down and kill the nomadic people but Saiva and her adopted daughter have managed to evade them.

Two women and one man in a small tent... it seems that Loki is warming to Saiva but, when the daughter notices, she competes, and wins. Young, pretty and flirtatious, unbroken by tragedy, she and Loki become lovers and plan to leave the lifeless ice to seek a community where they can raise a family.

In this astonishing film, Saiva gives Loki life and he repays her by taking from her what is most precious, company. She stands alone, bereft. The climax to this story is unexpected, shocking and macabre.

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GLORIOUS 39. Dir Stephen Poliakoff. 2009

Glorious 39 strips away illusions. Poliakoff presents the apparent idyll of an English aristocratic family headed by genteel patriarch Lord Keyes (Bill Nighy). He presides over a country estate in Norfolk and his elegant townhouse in London – a world of golden light, romantic ruins, servants, house parties and happy children. But this is 1939, a mere 21 years since the Great War, the war to end all wars, in which millions died, Britain was crippled with war debt, and the English country house system which he so values was almost annihilated. There are many references to the ancientness of his family and tradition, but now, few male servants remained alive or unmaimed to work the English landscape or to be in service to the old families. Fearing domestic and political upheaval, appeasers such as Keyes sought to prevent Churchill leading the country and taking Britan to war, and to buy off Hitler to preserve British cultural and national identity. Nighty is excellent, contro...

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