First-gig response [European premiere] to Roobha (2018)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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First-gig response [European premiere] to Roobha (2018)
Caveat : Not absolutely everything in this film might be how, on a first viewing, one thought that it might have worked best – but it has so much going for it that, as they could or should say, those reservations fade into irrelevance in the face of so much that is daring, and bold, and strong.
And one needs to be all such things when the commonality that we could and really should have, as human-beings, with one another can or does dissolve and decay into judgement, hatred, and ostracism : this film is political, in the sense of showing what we are missing when we separate ourselves from others and deem them Other.
Preaching apart for seeing others apart from the prejudices that one – if one had a family – imbibed under its eaves, because one almost instinctively and disruptively hears the parental responses that ring in one’s ears, Roobha (2018) is beautifully inventive and visually alert. Asked in the Q&A after the European premiere about the scene that is witnessed through a car windscreen, director Lenin M. Sivam credited it to Arsenij Gusev, his cinematographer, when it came to the shoot : alongside, for example, the permeable and impermeable membranes, and reflections / doubled images, with which the film is populated one gets a sense of the known but unspoken that Henrik Ibsen gave us on the stage, the truths that we dare not confront or confess until we have to, and the hardnesses in our hearts in extremis that, in some other extremity, can soften into love and acceptance.
This is meant as an appreciative and totally unspoilery reaction to the film : if you want to know what ‘it is about’, there are other accounts that will provide that. In conclusion, what one suggests that one might better look out for in terms of cinematic qualities is given in the Tweets that follow.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
