1 My Life As a Courgette (PG)
(Claude Barras, 2016, Swi/ Fra) 66 mins
A film about childhood that doesn’t treat viewers like children, this lovable stop-motion animation captures the hard knocks and innocent pleasures of childhood better than most live-action films. It’s set in a rural care home for orphans, where our hero is sent following the death of his alcoholic mother. But this is no Dickensian institution: refreshingly, it’s a place of communal healing.
2 The Other Side of Hope (12A)
(Aki Kaurismäki, 2017, Fin/Ger) 100 mins
Kaurismäki broaches the European refugee crisis via an encounter between two lost souls: a Syrian stowaway seeking asylum and a Finnish divorcee starting a restaurant. Beneath the deadpan comedy and retro stylisation, it’s a hymn to humanity, and a reminder that embracing other cultures makes us all stronger.
3 The Red Turtle (PG)
(Michaël Dudok de Wit, 2016, Fra/Bel/Jap) 81 mins
Less is more in this wonderfully restorative animation, whose wordless, semi-mythical parable is of a piece with its minimalist aesthetic. The setting is a desert island, where our Robinson Crusoe figure’s run-ins with a giant turtle set in motion a story that touches on big themes with subtlety and breathtaking beauty.
4 Daughters of the Dust (12A)
(Julie Dash, 1991, UK/US) 107 mins
A deserved restoration for Dash’s pioneering debut, exhibiting a promise that went under-fulfilled. It’s a captivating one-off, shifting through successive generations of South Carolina’s isolated Gullah community in a lyrical language that captures their struggles to preserve their African culture.
5 After the Storm (PG)
(Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2016, Jap) 118 mins
Another wise and subtle family drama from the Japanese auteur. The ingredients are familiar: a sad-sack failed writer and incurable gambler, an eccentric mother and an estranged, exasperated ex-wife – but the small moments accumulate into something unsentimentally life-affirming.
