For 10 years now, the august London film festival – the vast compendium of world cinema that consumes the capital’s cinephiles every autumn – has had an overall best film prize. If this young award isn’t exactly on a par with the Palme d’Or or Golden Lion for international prestige, a glance at the names of past winners makes it hard to argue with its credentials. Andrey Zvyagintsev has won it twice, as has Jacques Audiard; Lynne Ramsay nabbed it for We Need to Talk About Kevin, Kelly Reichardt for Certain Women, while Pawel Pawlikowski was honoured for Ida over a year before the Oscars did the same.
So it was a surprise when last year’s award went to a film, and film-maker, well off the radar of even most arthouse-inclined filmgoers. Joy, by Austrian-Iranian director Sudabeh Mortezai, beat the Cannes-lauded likes of Happy As Lazzaro and Birds of Passage to the laurels, adding to a trophy shelf that also includes honours from Venice, Chicago and Les Arc. You might expect this kind of tailwind on the festival circuit to ensure cinema distribution for this small standout, but this is 2019: instead, it was scooped up by Netflix, where it’s been streaming since Friday.
It’s another smart, unexpected addition to their books, in need of a nudge for adventurous Netflixers to find it amid slicker offerings in the platform’s endless content mill. Any one-line description might have many swiping to sunnier-sounding options: a Nigerian migrant prostitute in Vienna tries to free herself from the sex-trafficking ring to which she is enslaved by debt and superstition. But Mortezai’s film deserves a closer look. It’s sobering, yes, but no one-note slab of misery porn. As a window into a world most of us are lucky not to know, it’s clear-eyed and galvanising, shot through with dark wit in unexpected places, and as tensely nerve-knotting as any standard tick-tock thriller. It also has one hell of a performance by first-time actress Anwulika Alphonsus as the eponymous, ironically named Joy, who’s determined not to be a victim even if it means a few moral compromises along the way.
Mortezai is an exciting film-maker, her documentary background evident in her narrative films’ merging of tight, no-nonsense storytelling with topical, politically conscious cinéma vérité. Beyond the festival circuit, she never found much of an audience for her impressive 2014 fiction debut Macondo, which took a similarly earthy, realist technique to its portrait of an in-limbo Chechnyan child refugee in Austria. It was never released in the UK, and is unavailable to stream locally, though reasonable import DVDs can be dug up on Amazon for the curious. With any luck, Netflix will bring her latest the intrepid following it deserves.
Finally, if you want some more shimmery gorgeousness as a chaser to that grit, the most welcome streaming novelty of the last few weeks is I Am Easy to Find: an achingly melancholic 24-minute short film made by Mike Mills to accompany baritone-quivery art-rock band the National’s new album of the same name, it’s free to stream on its own website. As you might expect from the wry, wistful director of Beginners and 20th Century Women, it’s more than just a tie-in. Calling on the dance training of actress Alicia Vikander (in, frankly, her best part since Ex Machina), it’s a choreographed summation of one woman’s lifespan in around 150 brief moments, and an eerily moving feat of video art on its own terms – though it also distils the emotional tremor of the band’s music in a way few standard music videos could.
As the advent of the “visual album” expands the possibilities of melding cinema and popular music, Mills improbably joins Beyoncé at its forefront.
Also on DVD and streaming this week
Burning
(Thunderbird, 15)
In his first film in eight years, South Korean master Lee Chang-dong brilliantly adapts a Haruki Murakami short story into an expansive, shivery neo-noir, with a pointed critique of toxic masculinity folded into its mysteries.
Destroyer
(Lionsgate, 15)
Cast against type to jolting effect as a bombed-out LAPD detective off on her own investigative beam, Nicole Kidman brings ferocious commitment to Karyn Kusama’s niftily knotted, time-shifting thriller.
Demonlover
(Arrow, 18)
Olivier Assayas’s elegant vinyl sheen 2002 technothriller has long been underrated, but is ageing beautifully; now given a sleek Blu-ray re-release, its tangled tale of corporate warfare over anime pornography looks rather prescient.
Free Solo
(All 4)
The exhilarating, Oscar-winning rock-climbing spectacle is free to stream on the Channel4 catch-up service for the next six months, with Kevin Macdonald’s still bone-chilling docudrama Touching the Void also there as complementary viewing.
