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Reviews
Screen One: The Mountain and the Molehill (1989)
Based on true events - ish
This drama echoes the true story of Leonard Dawe, a Surrey schoolmaster who compiled cross words for the Daily Telegraph and unwittingly used codewords such as Juno and Overlord as answers in the run up to D-Day, unsurprisingly attracting the attentions of MI5. Telling the fictionalised story from the point of view of the schoolboys, the film evokes the period wonderfully and the denouement is fantastically poignant and has stayed with me for the past fifteen years - surely the mark of a good production (though admittedly I couldn't remember what it was called and only found this entry today after a concerted web search - hence I came to write the entry by way of celebration!)
Performance: The Trials of Oz (1991)
Good ensemble cast recreate british watershed
Following the rather highbrow legal dispute over Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1963, the Oz trials legitimised the 60s counter-culture in the UK, with representatives of Swinging London, from cult DJ John Peel (still going, bless him) to jazz-man and art collector George Melly, called upon to give evidence in defense of the Oz editors, who, perhaps naively, had given over control of the magazine to some schoolboys - who of course produced and printed some of the most hilariously and/or disturbingly obscene material to be found on the shelves of a UK newsagent. The great cast make the most of their cameos as real people, while the court transcripts and re-enactments meant that those of us who never got hold of the offending copy of Oz can see what all the fuss was about: and it still provokes laughter, horror and a deep unease about the British school system.
Le dernier rêve (2000)
Dreams, reality & death
A groovy little film about a projectionist in a run-down cinema who puts on a reel and falls asleep. From then on it's up to the audience to guess what's real, what's on the reel and what's a dream. Inventive and, like a lot of short (low-budget) films, it uses a documentary-style set-up to make the fantasy more acute and crams a lot into a few minutes. It won the Shine! Award for short films at Bradford Film Festival 2001.