The Rocket

The Rocket’s title refers to a traditional Lao festival featured in the film’s final act: a rambunctious celebration at which participants compete to see who can blast their home-made missiles furthest skywards. The plucky efforts of ten-year-old Ahlo, hoping to reverse the bad fortune superstitiously believed to have haunted him since birth, makes for a stirring conclusion to a lively piece of magic realism. Yet shadowing the film’s feel-good aspects is another, wholly insidious kind of explosive – the innumerable tons of undetonated ordnance that litter Laos's landscape as a result of indiscriminate US bombing during the Vietnam War.

Returning to a subject previously examined in his 2007 documentary Bomb Harvest, Australian writer/director Kim Mordaunt handles his first foray into fiction filmmaking with considerable skill, sensitively executing sharp shifts in tone (from childish exuberance to stinging tragedy and back again) and eliciting an exceptional performance from first-time actor Sitthiphon Disamoe. [Chris Buckle]