Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja and Justin H. Min in Kogonada’s soulful sci-fi movie After Yang A24

Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja and Justin H. Min in Kogonada’s soulful sci-fi movie After Yang A24

Each day during the Luxembourg City Film Festival Delano’s Duncan Roberts, who is on the festival’s selection committee, suggests a choice of films to watch.

After Yang

Colin Farrell synchro-dancing with his on-screen family to a pumping techno track may just be the best opening credit sequence to a film you will see this year.

The film is After Yang by South Korean-born American filmmaker Kogonada, whose excellent Columbus that was screened at the 2018 festival. The director has made a beautiful and soulful science fiction film that is up there with Ex-Machina in the sensitive way it handles the presence of an AI robot, or techno sapien as they are called in After Yang. It is a film about love, grief and memory.

Yang (Justin H. Min) is the techno sapien whom Farrell and his wife, Jodie Turner-Smith, have purchased to be a companion to their young daughter (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). But when Yang malfunctions, Farrell, in one of his best and most thoughtful performances, sets off on a quest to find out how to get him rebooted.

After Yang is being shown in English at Kinepolis after the festival awards ceremony at 7pm. Some tickets are still available. 

Hatching

Hanna Bergholm’s Finnish coming of age horror film is being screened as this year’s Cinélunatique contribution. The story of Tinjy, a young girl on the verge of puberty growing up in an Instagramable perfect family who decides to bring home a crow’s egg after her controlling mother takes drastic action against a bird that has accidentally flown into their house.

When the egg grows at an alarming rate and then hatches, Tinja must feed and nurture the disturbing looking creature that emerges, with horrific consequences. Hatching is an enjoyable body-horror thriller with great performances.

Hatching is being screened in English at Cinémathèque at 9pm

A Vanishing Fog

Augusto Sandino’s haunting eco-drama is set in the Sumapaz Páramo ecosystem in the Altiplano Cundiboyacense mountain range in Colombia. It is one of the festival’s “outside the box” selections that the director says is a “deeply personal film, perhaps a song or a poem”.

He has deliberately created an abstract mystery that is a very cinematic and sensory experience that deserves to be viewed on the big screen.

A Vanishing Fog is being screened with English subtitles at Ciné Utopia at 7pm.