Best debut feature films of 2016 so far
Brady Corbet’s behind-the-camera debut, The Childhood of a Leader, arrives in cinemas this week and it’s one of the year’s most impressive first features. We take a look at the other great directorial debuts to appear on UK screens so far this year
Cameraperson
Dir. Kirsten Johnson
Kirsten Johnson is hardly a novice. For the last 25 years she’s been the eyes behind the camera for documentary filmmakers as diverse as Laura Poitras, Michael Moore and Barbara Kopple. With her own feature doc, Johnson has assembled unused but indelible images from those films she’s shot – she calls them “the images that have marked me” – to create a deeply personal and moving document of her career. But this isn’t just a cinematographer’s showreel. The precise editing and ordering of these mini narratives from across the globe – some whimsical, many harrowing – builds into a compelling tapestry of human existence. Johnson doesn’t appear on camera, and rarely speaks, but we feel her presence in every shot, from the slight tremble of the camera to her worried breathing. Seeing life through her eyes, in all its joy and heartbreak, proves thrilling.
From Afar
Dir. Lorenzo Vigas
As the title suggests, this debut by Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas is about the anguish of desire held at a remove. Its star, Alfredo Castro, the ghostly actor known for his work with Pablo Larrain, adds to this alienation; his deadpan visage holds us at an emotional arm's length and keeps us guessing throughout this study of an autumn-spring romance that shifts imperceptibly into Hitchcockian thriller. The film’s emotional kick comes from street tough Elder, the young blade with whom Armando makes an exception and begins a tentative relationship. His moments of violent outbursts and tender yearning seem to take the actor (impressive newcomer Luis Silva) by surprise as much as the audience. The ending of this intelligent and dark chamber piece is quietly shattering. It justly beat films from the likes of Charlie Kaufman, Alexander Sokurov and Luca Guadagnino to the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival last year.
Read our interview with Lorenzo Vigas
Goodnight Mommy
Dirs. Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
This mysterious horror from Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala takes some of the genre’s familiar tropes – creepy twins, bandaged woman à la Eyes Without a Face – and drops them in a sleek, modernist house within an idyllic rural setting. There’s an impressive formal rigger here and a flair for suspense as we follow prepubescent twin brothers who suspect the woman covered in surgical bandages claiming to be their mother is an imposter. Films tend to sentimentalise the power of children’s imagination; Goodnight Mommy shows it’s to be feared.
Mustang
Dir. Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Mustang plays as a pint-sized prison break movie. It follows five teen sisters who’ve been put under house arrest by their grandmother and uncle. The sisters’ crime? Innocently frollicking at the beach with some boys of a similar age. Their imprisonment will only end when they enter into another form of confinement: marriage. Thrillingly, the girls are having none of it, staging a couple of breakouts, including a joyous trip to a football match. Crushingly, the walls around their home keep getting higher and the mood in the house gets more oppressive as the girls are married off one by one. The film finds a feminist hero in the youngest of the sisters, a strong-willed tomboy determined to disrupt the house’s bride factory assembly line.
Read our interview with Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Remainder
Dir. Omer Fast
Berlin-based video artist Omer Fast is obsessed with trauma, memory and authenticity. He found the perfect subject for his debut feature with Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder, which follows a young man with amnesia, caused by a freak accident, whose solution to his memory loss is to obsessively recreate the few shards of the past he’s retained. His fastidious reenactments call to mind the elaborate theatrical facsimiles of Charlie Kaufman's first film Synecdoche, New York, and this is an equally fascinating debut. What makes Remainder so pleasing is that as well as bringing the philosophical sophistication of his artistic practice to the big screen, Fast's feature also contains his video work's same playful wit.
Read our interview with Omer Fast
Where You’re Meant to Be
Dir. Paul Fegan
Director Paul Fegan creates a hilarious and ultimately moving cine-poem on the nature of folk music. Arab Strap frontman Aidan Moffat is our contemporary guide into a culture that used to ring out from smoke-filled pubs and village halls across Scotland, but now has all but died out. Moffat clearly starts out hoping to revivify the practice, updating the traditional folk songs with vivid verses telling of fighting neds and puking drunks on the rain-gleaming streets of Glasgow.
The film takes a glorious turn, however, when Moffat meets legendary balladeer Sheila Stewart, a 79-year-old force of nature who’s having none of Moffat’s nonsense. The result is a picaresque journey through Scotland, with Fagan’s dreamy visuals complimenting Moffat’s mischievous voiceover. While we love Moffat’s bawdy take on these songs, Stewart’s scratchy, emotion-filled versions in the concert at the Barrowlands Ballroom that ends the film proves infinitely richer. The plaintive lyrics of Stewart’s signature tune The Parting Song (“...for we might or might never, meet here again”) are all the more poignant as she died shortly after Where You’re Meant to Be filming was complete.
Read our interview with Aiden Moffat
The Witch
Dir. Robert Eggers
This meticulously crafted horror centres on a family that has been cast out by a Puritan community – immoderate piety seems to be their affront – who find themselves eking out a hardscrabble existence in a creepy forest clearing. When their youngest, only months old, is snatched by something (or someone), the family turn in on themselves and it becomes clear that the parents' hysterical attitudes to sin and temptation are as dangerous to the family as any terrors in the forest. Despite being set in 1630s New England, the themes of intolerance caused by isolation and zealotry seem as relevant as ever. Writer-director Robert Eggers creates a foreboding mood, and knows how to deliver a scare.
The Childhood of a Leader is released 19 Aug by Metrodome