Cargo is the remarkably confident and moving debut of Belgian writer/director Gilles Coulier. With a natural gift for dramatic realism, Coulier puts the viewer in the centre of a battered, but not beaten family of 3 brothers trying to keep their trawling business alive off the Northern European coast. When their father has a stroke during a particularly rough voyage, the brothers are confronted with the harsh reality that the business is overwhelmed by debt. The oldest brother puts the trawler up for sale and starts to drive a freight truck. The younger brother is barely staying ahead of some loan sharks who want their money back and the middle brother is a closeted gay man in love with a refugee seeking a better life in England.
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Pickups is the third collaboration between actor Aiden Gillen and writer/director Jamie Thraves. Back in 2000, Thraves give Gillen one of his first big roles in the indie Low Down and the two have kept in touch between the former’s work in commercials and music videos and the latter’s perfor-mances in TV series like The Wire and Peaky Blinders.
Pickups is a frustrating mix of meta-fiction and character study where Gillen plays a variation on himself – Aiden, a famous actor preparing for his next challenging role as a serial killer. The film is keen to de-glamorise the world of the jobbing thespian by showing Aiden shuttling between a dreary flat in Dublin, a home in London he hasn’t been able to sell and a cottage where he clumsily tries to be the cool dad with his teenage son from a failed marriage.
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Gemini makes the most of its low budget and largely unknown cast thanks to its Los Angeles setting and neo-noir storyline. This is Aaron Katz’s fifth feature and it deserves to be the film that breaks him out of the film festival ghetto his work has largely circulated in.
Lola Kirk is Jill, the wise, long suffering assistant to Zoe Kravitz’ Heather Anderson, a young star whose mercurial temperament makes the life of her agent, lawyers and directors hell. She needs some “Me” time with her secret girlfriend, Tracy, played by Greta Lee and has turned down a juicy film role. Something goes horribly wrong during this critical moment and Jill finds Heather gunned down in her cooler than thou Riad-style house in the Hollywood hills. Jill is now the prime suspect of the investigating detective, portrayed with urbane calm by John Cho.
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