If cinema as a medium is up against the wall, as some industry doomsayers are fond of observing, no one can say it’s for lack of product. There are, at any given moment, more films being made than anyone reasonably knows what to do with. As the average number of weekly cinema releases climbs further into double figures, those titles represent but a small, privileged drop in the ocean of films floating around the festival circuit, searching for any form of distribution. Many remain in that limbo for good reason, though festivals from Cannes to Karlovy Vary abound with off-the-radar gems that will never find the audience they merit.
That’s where sites such as Flix Premiere are stepping into the breach. Now in its fourth year of operation, the UK-based outlet isn’t just a streaming service, but an underdog distribution company that picks through the purgatory of independent films left unsold on the festival circuit, offering an exclusive platform to what they deem the best of the bunch. If the name evokes a kind of off-brand Netflix, that’s no accident. It is, if you will, the Lidl of indie cinema: few familiar titles will jump out even to well-informed cinephiles as they browse the Flix Premiere menu, but that’s not to say many of them aren’t very good value.
Even as someone who attends a dozen-odd film festivals a year, I must guess my way through much of Flix Premiere’s selection. The site requires a hefty investment of trust in their curators’ collective taste, though a free trial period of one month should be sufficient to gauge whether you’re on their wavelength or not. (If you are, a month-long subscription is a modest £3.99; the monthly rate drops with longer subscriptions.)
A film such as their recent addition, Falling – one of the few I recognised from my festival travels, and fondly so – would be enough to justify a month’s subscription on its own. A shiveringly delicate 2017 debut feature from Ukrainian director Marina Stepanska, it’s a first-blush portrait of young love that doubles subtly as a new generation’s essay on guarded hopes and stunted futures in a conflict-raddled corner of Europe. Where the Ukrainian crisis has inspired a surfeit of nightmarish, concrete-hard documentaries and features from auteurs such as Sergei Loznitsa, Stepanska’s film casts a gentler but equally incisive gaze on those managing everyday life in the cracks. For beautiful twentysomethings Anton and Katya, the prospect of escape and romantic fulfilment appear to be very separate happy endings. You can see why commercial-minded distributors passed on Falling’s lovely, low-key blend of dreamy melancholy and bruised optimism, but it deserves your attention.
So, in a more prickly, precocious way, does Necktie Youth, a startling vision of teenage waste in the high-walled suburbs of Johannesburg from first-time director Sibs Shongwe-La Mer. Triggered by the live-streamed suicide of an affluent high-school girl, this discursive ensemble piece – sharply shot in stylish, thematically on-point black and white – tangles universal adolescent ennui with a variety of social tensions unique to today’s semi-integrated South Africa. There’s nothing much like it in cinemas – or online, for that matter.
In contrast to such international selections, an American film such as Sara Colangelo’s Little Accidents – a Sundance-earnest but rather affecting small-town tragedy from 2014, acted with integrity by a cast including Elizabeth Banks and Chloë Sevigny – represents Flix Premiere’s version of a blockbuster. Colangelo’s excellent new film The Kindergarten Teacher hits UK cinemas in March, so she’s at least moved up the distribution ladder. It’s good to have a site preserving such film-makers’ intermediate steps.
New to DVD and streaming
The Wife
(Spirit, 15)
Glenn Close may well win an Oscar for her tightly coiled, gradually raging performance as the long-suppressed, secret-keeping spouse of a blowhard Nobel laureate; the film itself, however, is a bit wan.
1985
(Saffron Hill, 15)
Like a more internalised companion piece to 120 Beats Per Minute, Malaysian-American director Yen Tan’s elegiac Aids-era drama follows a young, closeted gay man’s Texas homecoming with piercing tenderness.
The House With a Clock in Its Walls
(Entertainment One, 12)
Tricksy production design and a gamely hammy Cate Blanchett give horror director Eli Roth’s bland attempt at Potter-style family fantasy a classier veneer than it merits.
Tehran Taboo
(Saffron Hill, 15)
The rotoscoped animation is strikingly stylised, but real, troubled human life bustles angrily beneath the technique in Ali Soozandeh’s witty, locally controversial mosaic of rebellious citizens in Iran’s law-bound capital.
Orphée
(BFI, PG)
Jean Cocteau’s inventive, ravishing interpretation of the Orpheus myth carries all its silvery beauty over to this Blu-ray reissue – carefully restored from its original 1950 nitrate negative.
