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Sight & Sound September 2017

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Kathryn Bigelow on John Boyega and her riots thriller Detroit, plus David Lowery on A Ghost Story, Francis Lee on God’s Own Country, seven shades of Jean-Pierre Melville and the story of Cuban documentary filmmaking
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In our September issue, maverick director Kathryn Bigelow discusses Detroit, her account of the five-day riots that engulfed the Midwestern city in 1967, and an incendiary portrait of police brutality and racism. Our cover star John Boyega plays a security guard caught in the middle of the notorious Algiers Motel incident, where a group of young people were beaten and tortured by the riot task police force.

Unsurprisingly, given Bigelow’s intense and immersive style of filmmaking, she “ensures that the audience feels as much as possible as though it is staring into the barrel of a gun”, as our interviewer Ryan Gilbey describes it. In his roving interview with Bigelow, she tells Gilbey about making a film in the shadow of recent police violence against African Americans and discusses her retreat from pure fiction into quasi-journalism – Detroit is her third film to interrogate recent history after The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

Unsurprisingly, given Bigelow’s intense and immersive style of filmmaking, she “ensures that the audience feels as much as possible as though it is staring into the barrel of a gun”, as our interviewer Ryan Gilbey describes it. In his roving interview with Bigelow, she tells Gilbey about making a film in the shadow of recent police violence against African Americans and discusses her retreat from pure fiction into quasi-journalism – Detroit is her third film to interrogate recent history after The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

Also in this issue: on the eve of a BFI Southbank retrospective, we look again at the cinema of French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville, with its hard-edged Gallic poetry, morally compromised war veterans and intricately-orchestrated crime procedurals. Nick James chooses key sequences from seven films to illustrate what makes Melville’s cinema so iconic.

A Ghost Story is intimate love story with a cosmic scope and a study of grief that focuses on the odd but very convincing spectre of a ghost imagined by a white sheet with two eye-holes. Philip Concannon talks to David Lowery about his very untraditional haunted house movie.

One of the most impressive British debuts of late is actor-turned-director Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, an intense drama about the love affair between a Yorkshire farmer and his Romanian co-worker. It’s also a timely film, arriving as free movement is under attack in Brexit Britain and on the anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in the 1967 Sexual Offences. Trevor Johnston talks to Lee about this personal project (Lee grew up in rural Yorkshire), his working methods and his intense focus on authenticity.

And finally, Michael Chanan guides us through an era of high-quality experimental and iconoclastic Cuban documentary filmmaking that exploded in the country after the 1959 revolution.

We also feature reviews of all the major summer releases, including Steven Soderbergh’s heist caper Logan Lucky, Christopher Nolan’s WWII epic Dunkirk, the riotous comedy Girls Trip and US indie Patti Cake$.

Among the other highlights in this issue are a report on the historical gems unearthed by Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival; a reappraisal of the little-known but vital New York film critic and writer Annette Michelson; an interrogation of recent genre cinema, which takes itself too seriously, according to our writer Nick Pinkerton; an in-depth exploration of Suzuki Seijun’s enigmatic Taisho Trilogy and an interview with the director of forthcoming Indian indie Hotel Salvation.

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