Gideon Koppel: Sleep Furiously

I do consider the film of Gideon Koppel as one of the most important in the last couple of years. It has been written about on filmkommentaren.dk several times (use the “search” button). I saw it on dvd in Lisbon and Copenhagen, and on a big screen with 1500 spectators at the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade last January. With great joy I discover that the film has been released in UK cinemas with a (what else?) brilliant and positive review in The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw (May 29). Here is an excerpt:

This delicate, tonally complex film by Gideon Koppel is a documentary ove-letter to Trefeurig, the Welsh farming community in Ceredigion where he grew up, and where his parents found refuge from Nazi Germany during the second world war. It is a rural society, outwardly placid and at one with a landscape of stunning beauty, but in fact in crisis. Koppel’s film takes as its starting point the closure of the local school, a definitive, calamitous loss for a place where shops and bus services have already vanished. The movie pays tribute to the grit of a people who may yet revive their economy, but it acknowledges a darker possibility, for which the sentimental note of an “elegy” is not appropriate. Slowly, but surely, Trefeurig appears to be dying, and Koppel’s camera captures the consequent ripples of loss and regret.

The film has richness and an unshowy compassion, its grammar and pace adjusting to the tempo of the countryside. It reminds me of work by French film-makers such as Nicolas Philibert and Raymond Depardon, and the weird dance of the fork-lifts and farm machinery has something of Our Daily Bread, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s documentary about food production. But Sleep Furiously has its own distinctive quality…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/29/sleep-furiously-film-review