Aubrey Malone
A still from 'Notes from Sheepland' The silly season is upon us with its customary crop of seasonal treats. Noah’s Ark (G), is an animated film in which a pair of mice called Vini (a poet who suffers from stage fright) and Tito (a guitarist) become stowaways on the eponymous ark, using the beauty of words and song to ensure they stay aboard.
Thelma (PG) features a 93-year-old widow (June Squibb) who’s scammed out of $10,000 when she’s wrongly informed that her grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) has been arrested.
Not a woman to take things lying down, she sets out on her scooter to track down the culprit, aided by a friend from a nursing home, Ben (Richard Roundtree). Don’t let the wild plot blind you into forgetting this is a film about the importance of family ties.
Notes from Sheepland (12A) is a documentary about a Wexford woman called Orla Barry who combines two strikingly contrasting lifestyles, mixing sheep-farming with her prowess as an artist. She also lectures on sculpture. Shearing by day and sketching by night, the manner in which she dovetails her art with the pressing demands of eco-farming is captured entertainingly by Cara Holmes.
You’ll need patience to withstand the 3-hours-plus of About Dry Grasses (15A) but considering it’s directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, maybe the running – or should I say strolling – time won’t surprise you.
I’ve extolled the merits of this Turkish director before, having been highly impressed both by his 2002 feature Distant and the more recent Winter Sleep. Here he tackles the theme of a disillusioned art teacher, Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) who’s been working in a remote area of Anatolia for some years and harbours a wish to move to Istanbul.
His life is disrupted when both he and his flatmate and fellow teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici) are accused of inappropriate behaviour by two female pupils, one of whom he was particularly close to in the past. A subplot involves the friendship of both men with Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a teacher from a neighbouring village who’s been the victim of a terrorist attack, losing a leg during a peace rally in Ankara.
Ceylan’s films always have a ring of truth about them, mainly due to the improvisational nature of the way his stories unfold. He doesn’t go by the traditional rules of film-making, preferring to let them develop organically rather than imposing rigorous restrictions on them.
This gives them the feel of documentaries more often than not. The conversations of his characters drift and dangle as they do in real life. Often, also, their circumstances are unresolved at the end.
If you like your characters and plot wrapped up in pink ribbons, don’t go to this, but if you let it have its head you’ll be rewarded. There are enough directors out there playing the middle-of-the-road game. We need more like this man, who’s always evinced a pronounced disregard for the straitjacketing demands of ‘the business’ in his quest for authenticity.