Moving into the second week of the festival; I had been more anxious about cramming my program in, because it hadn't been clear to many that many films would be rolling over into another week. Imagine my relief when I found I could space things out more than I'd originally planned.

The Country

This feels like a film that could have been made in New Zealand in the 1970s or 1980s, and I mean that in a complimentary sense; except instead of the "man alone" that was so common here at the time, this is a woman alone: a small farming village, she is trapped by debt and the death of her husband and the tyranny of conformity and the local co-op structure. It's very downbeat and very relatable.