20.11.2025

Darkness and its reflections

Jim Moody picks out four of the best films screened at the LFF which are now on release in the UK

Last month’s 69th London Film Festival hosted 160 feature films, 70+ shorts, episodes from three series and 11 immersive and installation games. All from 79 countries.

Most received their UK premiere at LFF; some still await British distribution, though the Festival is an unabashed marketing opportunity, of which producers and rights owners take full advantage. The process may see talented input creating cultural output, but return on investment drives most films’ onward progression toward its market, be that niche or mass.

Zionist terror

Kamal Aljafari (director) With Hasan in Gaza, 106mins

Kamal Aljafari is also credited as screenwriter, cinematographer, editor and producer of this documentary, which was shot by him in Gaza in 2001 - a generation ago.

One evening it records Israeli settlers using mortar bombs against the city of Khan Yunis, damaging buildings and terrorising families; there is only limited return rifle fire, as on that occasion “so many are attending funerals”. Firmly lodged in settlers’ minds, the Zionist racism that ideologically backs the colonial regime has come out fully in its genocidal colours, as the ideology’s ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian problem hit the world’s TV and mobile screens daily.

Clearly, the Gaza Strip will not look like this ever again. Gaza City, within this infamous concentration camp, was a tightly packed urban centre with something like a two million population. The fact that there was a university, together with hospitals, schools, churches and mosques, testifies to a long history, foreign aid … and human ingenuity, resilience and strength.

With Hasan in Gaza features clips from both Gaza City and Khan Yunis, as Aljafari accompanies Hasan Elboubou. Hasan had been searching for a friend and cellmate from when they were imprisoned by Israeli forces during the First Intifada (1987-93). He shared a cell with nearly 40 others. But Hasan’s friend was taken away and disappeared after he stood up to a guard’s brutality, and had not been heard from for over a decade. (Sadly, at present, Hasan’s current whereabouts are also unknown.)

Murder victims

Kaouther Ben Hania (director/screenwriter) The Voice of Hind Rajab, 89mins

This film focuses on a single case at West Bank Red Crescent call centre, the only one dealing with emergency calls from Gaza, including some from all of 60 kilometres away. Six-year-old Hind Rajab’s uncle in North America has alerted the centre after she contacted him by mobile phone: the West Bank staff then establish a direct line to the girl. She says she is in the bullet-riddled car along with “all my family” - their dead bodies lying next to her.

Recordings of the actual phone messages form part of the drama, which is played by actors representing the key people: Rana Hassan Faqih (played by Saja Kilani), Omar A Alqam (Motaz Malhees), Nisreen Jeries Qawas (Clara Khoury) and Mahdi M Aljamal (Amer Hlehel). The real individuals involved appear in cameos toward the end.

The powerlessness of those at the call centre obviously infuriates Omar, who responds with emotional explosions - he was the first to make contact with Hind Rajab. Her heart-rending pleas of “Come and get me!” are unbearable. Gunfire is clearly audible in the recording and she tells them that she has been injured. Omar and his colleagues have to keep her on the phone, while the last remaining Red Crescent ambulance comes to rescue her. A safe and secure route must be arranged via the International Red Cross. Its staff have to act as intermediaries with the genocidal killers of the IDF. The tension is palpable as night falls, especially after Hind Rajab reports further injury from the small-arms fire coming from an Israeli tank.

It comes to a climax, as Hind Rajab tells them that the tank is right in front of the family car. After which she is heard from no more: just like 16,000 children over the last two years whose deaths have been at the hands of the Zionist regime. Finally, the Red Crescent ambulance, speeding along its ‘safe and secure’ route toward Hind Rajab, is fired upon by the IDF, its brave staff killed. No ceasefire can bring them back.

Victimhood

Jan Komasa (director) Good boy, 100mins

Back in the UK, a 19-year-old ne’er-do-well, Tommy (Anson Boon), has no criminal record despite a lot of mobile video evidence of his brutalisation of gays and foreigners, as well as heavy abuse of alcohol and hard drugs. One night he is kidnapped, while drunkenly stumbling around outside. It soon becomes clear why.

Way out in the countryside, in a large and isolated house, a Balkan migrant, Rina (Monika Frajczyk), gets hired as a cleaner. Her employer, Chris (Stephen Graham), while taking her on a tour of the house, reminds her of her non-disclosure agreement, and for good reason. For in the cellar, kidnapped Tommy is chained up, with a secure collar round his neck. No way can Rina refuse to work there: Chris threatens her, using her precarious UK immigration status.

Chris’s wife, Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), embraces Tommy’s forced rehabilitation: he is, after all, to be their ‘good boy’. Their 10-year-old son, Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), sees little wrong either: he has experienced nothing but home schooling in complete isolation, and interacts weirdly well with Tommy.

Eventually Tommy stops ranting and raving, so Chris instals an overhead trackway throughout the house, so that still-shackled Tommy can move around. He becomes a (chained!) member of the family. Tommy then plays the hero and gets beaten badly by invading people traffickers who recapture Rina. His efforts go down well with Chris.

But one night Tommy manages to free himself and flees, though he fails to tell police anything about his experience. His mother lets slip that she did not even report him missing - it was his one-time girlfriend who did. So Tommy finds his ex-girlfriend, she bizarrely lets him chloroform her, and he takes her ‘home’ to Chris’s and Kathryn’s house!

Sub-Clockwork Orange territory, perhaps. Any ‘moral’ cheering at Tommy’s well-deserved incarceration or, in contradistinction, relief at his plucky escape, is certainly premature. Instead of escaping, he adds another victim to his own acquired victimhood. Inculcated dependency produces individuals as property in all but name to those who would exploit them - or are he and his girlfriend willing slaves in their own captivity, and thus enslaved free agents? We are in oxymoron territory. Bourgeois society produces some weird outcomes, and its punishment/reward setup seems to have worked well for the newly extended ‘family’ and its satisfactory conclusion: ‘You are mine … my good boy.’

Barbarism

Jonatan Etzler (director) Bad apples, 100mins

Maria (Saoirse Ronan) is an overwhelmed teacher of 10-year-olds. Her ex-partner, deputy head Sam (Jacob Anderson), is no more help than the head teacher, Sylvia (Rakie Ayola), who tells her that dealing with disruptive kids is part of the job. In actual fact, of course, that is exactly the role of a deputy head in most schools, which would these days suspend or even expel children who were as disruptive as Danny (Eddie Waller). In present-day Britain, this takes more suspension of disbelief than is normal in film fiction.

Unsurprisingly, Maria is not a happy bunny, personally and professionally. Danny scars his desktop and verbally abuses a fellow pupil in a foul way. Maria intervenes - but not, of course, to haul the little scrote to the head’s office for a beating 1950s/60s style; instead she bleats ineffectually to the boy to stop. All the time he knows full well she cannot physically restrain him. Evidently the rest of the class is failing to learn well in this nasty atmosphere.

One dark night Maria stops her car near Danny, who is vandalising a parked car. When he sees her, he attacks her car, too, and then her. She tries to stop him, but accidentally knocks him unconscious, so drives him to a hospital. But he regains consciousness, saying he will claim she attacked him - so she drives home, where she bundles him into the cellar and locks the door. No-one knows where he is. Danny’s lone-parent father is distraught, but also ineffectual and overworked, and neglecting Danny.

Turning practical, Maria orders a restraint harness and chains him up below stairs. Stockholm syndrome kicks in, while police searches prove fruitless. Danny’s unpopularity means his disappearance is hardly registered by anyone but his father. Meanwhile, Maria gets him a bunk bed and a wardrobe, but keeps him restrained.

Teachers and parents can maybe understand (if not approve!) Maria’s extreme reaction - the numbness and powerlessness in being unable to rectify a child’s problems and the overall situation: the lack of support and overwork for teachers and parents (heaven forefend if one were both).

All starts to go south when a fellow pupil discovers the imprisoned Danny, but then she only uses it as leverage to gain advantage at school. However, she cannot contain herself and exposes Maria dramatically at a closed parents’ and teachers’ evening. Most of the parents and the deputy head are adamant in protecting the school’s name - unsurprisingly, given how difficult it can be to get kids into a reasonably ‘good’ school. They also welcome all the positive changes wrought by Maria, thanks to her keeping Danny out of circulation, and refuse to make this a matter for the police. Moral suasion, if not the mild threat of their child being sent elsewhere, wins over the doubters. Danny stays chained up … for a long time.

Some years later and subsequent to the head’s resignation, the deputy head has become head teacher, while Maria has taken on the deputy headship. However, an older and bolder Danny breaches his dungeon one day and is on the run to freedom … and likely exposure of his captors.

Behind the absurdist satirical approach that Bad apples shares with Good boy are some questions, of course. Has punishment ever been absent in how infringement of rules and laws are envisioned and applied? Pretty obviously not. It is, then, only a matter of degree, concerning how much punishment and what it is to consist of, that is at issue. At Maria’s school, we get a form of corruption covering up serious crime ‘for the good of the majority’. That way is moral bankruptcy, erosion of society, and a depraved collective humanity.