NZ IFF 2020 Day 11

Well, today was another day of extremes: an absolute dud at one end of the day, and one of the highlights of the festival at the other.

Yummy

A waste of the part of my life that I spent watching it. Ninety six minutes of "zombie film as social commentary" if the social commentary is "I don't like women".

The Long Walk/Bor Mi Vanh Chark

The key differentiator of cyberpunk as a movement within sci-fi writing was the idea that it would be a great deal more interesting to look at the shiny futures on offer from the point of view of the people making a go of them in everyday life: we don't need to think about the world from the point of view of the starship captains or captains of industry or whatever, but the people who are us, or who we will become.

The Long Walk is an application of that ethos to Laos of a near future where our main character is brushed by high tech that only interacts with his everyday life to the extent that he makes a living brushing up against it; into that it blends touches of time distortion and horror, and tells a very human story of loss and trauma and coping in an everyday future setting.

This is a wonderful gem of a film, and I'd love for it to be widely seen.