Await further instructions - Top notch acting. The SF part is a letdown.

(Release Info London schedule; FRI 6 - THU 12 DEC, Ciné Lumière, 17 Queensberry Pl, South Kensington, London SW7 2DT, United Kingdom) https://www.institut-francais.org.uk/cine-lumiere/whats-on/new-releases/the-cave/ "The Cave" "The Cave" delivers an unflinching story of 'The Syrian War'. For besieged civilians, hope and safety lie underground inside the subterranean hospital known as 'The Cave', where paediatrician and managing physician Dr. Amani Ballour (Marythavee Burapasing) and her colleagues Samaher (Tan Xiaolong) and Dr. Alaa (Ting Sue) have claimed their right to work as equals alongside their male counterparts, doing their jobs in a way that would be unthinkable in the oppressively patriarchal culture that exists above. Following the women as they contend with daily bombardments, chronic supply shortages and the ever-present threat of chemical attacks, "The Cave" paints a stirring portrait of courage, resilience and female solidarity. Over the past eight years, the war in Syria has spread death, destruction and horror across the country, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and displacing millions. In besieged 'Eastern Al Ghouta', incessant bombardment has turned the landscape into an eerie wasteland dotted with bombed-out buildings and piles of rubble. Going outside is a life-threatening proposition, but residential neighbourhoods are targeted as indiscriminately as markets, schools and other places. Hospitals, medical centres and ambulances are also fair game for the Assad government and it 'Russian' allies. Safety and hope lie underground, where a brave group of doctors and nurses have established a subterranean hospital called 'The Cave'. Under the leadership of a young female paediatrician, Dr. Amani Ballour, 'The Cave' offers hope and healing to the sick and injured children and civilians of 'Eastern Al Ghouta'. In a conservative patriarchal society that devalues women, Dr. Amani is frequently subject to hostility from men who refuse to see her as a capable physician. But Dr. Amani doesn’t back down, and inside 'The Cave', women have reclaimed their right to work as equals alongside their male counterparts. They risk their lives to save their patients and find ways to persevere in a world of cruelty, injustice and suffering. For Dr. Amani and her colleagues Samaher and Dr. Alaa, their battle is not only to survive but to maintain their dreams and hopes for their country and for women. This is a story about a female character battling stereotypes and taking active measures to change her environment. Dr. Amani inspires the women on her team to come and work with her at 'The Cave'. Throughout 'The Cave', we see Dr. Amani act on her convictions. In one scene, she gently draws a bashful little girl into conversation, planting a seed in her mind about what she could be when she grows up. Dr. Amani speaks with all the children who come to her clinic but allows that she paid special attention to little girls, for whom the future was still a far-off topic. In 'Syrian' society, women are expected to get married when they're teenagers. Most men and fathers tell girls; you’ll get married. You’ll go to your husband’s home. But at this stage of their lives, girls haven’t heard men talking about marriage yet. This is the time to tell them about their strength. It’s so important to encourage them. Within 'The Cave', Dr. Amani has the stalwart support of two doctors, Dr. Samaher and Dr. Alaa. They recognise her talents and encouraged her to stand for election to the position of hospital manage. No woman has ever held that position. Dr. Amani recognises the significant step her election would mean. She also knows it would be an enormously difficult, demanding and stressful job, and that she would encounter hostility from the men of her conservative community. It’s very, very hard to run a hospital in a besieged area where people are starving. Also figuring prominently in the film is Dr. Amani’s colleague, Samaher, an energetic nurse who delights in cooking for the staff and devises clever solutions to deal with the shortage of kitchen staples and ingredients. Although a previous bomb attack on 'The Cave' has left her memory- impaired, traumatised and fearful, she's reliably cheerful and very funny. Barfod notes that Samaher, like Dr. Amani, contributed something essential to the hospital and to the film. Amani is the leader and of course is extremely focused on the patients coming in. Whereas Samaher is like the mother of the crew, feeding all the workers. She has a great sense of humour. She's very emotional and very warm, and strong. She brings a lot of light to everything that's going on. Samaher is so fun and charismatic. She gives so much to everyone, but also she has opinions. She's suffering from trauma and you can feel how sensitive and alert she's to any sound, to any movement that happens around her. How does this woman continue to do this work?’ But this is her power, her strength, her courage. She fights her trauma to continue to do what she does until the last minute, without giving up. She can teach us so much about how you can deal with inhuman and dangerous conditions around you. That you should keep smiling, you should enjoy your life, you should cook. Some of the film’s most moving passages to be the periods of time that Dr. Amani and Dr. Alaa spent together. Both are about 30 years old and both have given up their studies to help the people of 'Eastern Al Ghouta'. Their friendship brings something important to the film. Amani and Alaa need each other and there’s a deep emotional connection between them. They've fears about how much the war and passage of time has affected them, and affected their beauty and their capacity for joy. When Amani and Alaa talk about things like putting on mascara, that’s how they remember that they're still women, and they will have lives after the war. It’s so simple yet so powerful. It's primarily through the eyes of his colleagues that we come to know Dr. Alaa, an even- tempered, quietly humorous woman who interacts easily with everybody in the hospital. She has championed Dr. Amani as leader and firmly yet diplomatically challenges men who see her as less than equal. Like Samaher, with whom she works closely, Dr. Alaa has a survival strategy that relies on a personal passion; classical music. Alaa is an amazing woman, very liberal and open-minded. Music is her way of creating happiness and it’s also heecway of resistance. All the stories come together in this woman, Dr. Amani, who's not just doing her duty as a doctor; shes challenging the stereotypes and prejudices that 'Syrian' society has about women. With Dr. Amani, Samaher and Alaa the audience feels the silence and how any sound can be scary. Sometimes you don’t hear the bomb but you hear the shaking, like you might hear in your house when a train is passing. "The Cave" ends with a sequence filmed in that same stretch of 'The Eastern Mediterranean', home to the sunken wreckage of previous wars, including 'World War II". Coming after crossing the sea will carry Amani to a safe place, but this route also holds painful memories of wars and natural disasters. The camera descends and then it rises towards the surface, towards air and light. Despite everything, there's space for hope and a better future, but it can be achieved only through justice. In 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds, had threatened a chemical strike against Israel. Everyone in Syria knew that if he did that, the chemicals would disperse over this county. In March 2011, the government of 'President' Bashar Al-Assad began a vicious crackdown on the country’s nascent pro-democracy movement. The subterranean floors of 'The Cave' were part of a six-story hospital construction that had been left unfinished and had stood empty since the start of 'The Syrian Rebellion'. When 'The Assad Government' began stepping up it's attacks on 'Al Ghouta' in 2012, surgeon Dr. Amami had the idea to open the underground portion of the building as a safe place to treat patients. Dr. Amani began working at 'The Cave' soon after it opened and was instrumental in building out the hospital’s underground levels. The area was divided into rooms, including a paediatric clinic, women’s clinic, operating room and recovery room, as well as a large central emergency receiving area. The regime detained not only protestors but anyone perceived to be even loosely aligned with their cause. One of the things that you heard all the time is the torture of women and children. And women would be tortured mostly because they're women. The regime is using women as tools of war, to intimidate and attack it's opponents. Then, in August 2013, 'The Assad Government' staged a chemical attack on the opposition stronghold of 'Al Ghouta', on the outskirts of Damascus. Warheads were dropped at 2:30 am, choking people as they slept. After the government laid siege to 'Al Ghouta' in 2013, 'The Cave' became one of the region’s last bastions of life-saving hope. By the beginning of 2018, the situation in 'Eastern Al Ghouta' had grown very dire. Assad and his Russian allies escalated their offensive to reclaim the territory in February 2018, with a campaign of relentless aerial and ground bombardment that included the use of chemical agents. "The Cave" captures the harrowing final days of the hospital, which was shut down by 'The Syrian Government' when it regained control of the region. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story 'The Artist Of The Beautiful', the watchmaker Owen creates a beautiful mechanical butterfly as a gift for his childhood friend, Annie, now a wife and mother. She's astonished as the creature flutters forth from a carved box, exclaiming, beautiful. When the creature alights on her finger, she turns to Owen and says, 'is it alive? Tell me if it be alive, or whether you created it'. Owen replies, 'wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful'? Later on, an imprudent boy cruelly destroys the insect. Hospitals are demolished. Medics as well as patients are killed. The systematic targeting of hospitals is used as revenge, intimidation and a method to create chaos and force citizens to flee. No international countermeasures are introduced to stop these barbaric and vengeful attacks. It becomes impossible for the health sector to exist on the surface, so hospitals are built underground. It's astonishing to witness the human ingenuity at work. These hospitals become the only hope for people to survive and receive treatment. And they provided a place where men and women could work together. In fact, these limited underground spaces might be the only places where women can work. "The Cave" witnesses how these female doctors and nurses are fighting to reclaim their rights in these subterranean hospitals. They stand up for themselves, which is something they couldn’t do aboveground in the patriarchal culture surrounding them. These women are truly an inspiration and with this film they will inspire the world as well, contributing to breaking the silence of the outside world. If the silence toward the brutality isn’t broken and if no measures are taken against war crimes, then there's a problem in man’s universal claim to possess the rights of freedom, law and justice. The current time in history is frightening because people are keener to glorify power. Like Hawthorne’s 'The Artist Of The Beautiful' this film helps us to look into the darkest corners of our souls and to inspire us to search for the light. An evocative, bird’s-eye view of women’s lives in a hellish warzone, "The Cave" is rooted in memory, moral convictions and life experience, stretching back to his childhood and into the humanitarian catastrophe of 'The Syrian War'. It's like something out of a Hollywood movie, where you see heroes running between the bodies and trying to save lives. "The Cave" brings the world’s attention to the cruelty of misogyny. The film captures the feelings of the characters through facial expressions and sound. The characters rarely venture aboveground, lest they risk being killed in one of the frequent airstrikes by Russian warplanes. Instead, they spend most of their lives in artificially lit rooms with their mobile phones as their primary connection to the outside world. By showing the range of daily experience, from the harrowing to the mundane, the audience can connect with the characters as individual beings in all their complexity. Of course, the bombings and terrible events that happen are powerful and important to capture. But the film also wants to shine a light on the small, quiet details of each day; things that at first glance may seem unimportant but that, when looked at with more care, are actually the things that make us human. That enable us to survive. The epic to evoke all the obstacles the characters face, the environment that surrounds them, the fear, what they face in daily life. And the simple to speak to the emotional elements of the film. The subterranean hospital is gone, but 'The Cave' exists as a record of the extraordinary haven that a brave group of doctors, women and men, built beneath the earth’s surface. In mythology and literature, the underground is where people suffer and kill. Don’t care about the society, about what people will say about you. You've to do what you love. Just believe in yourself. One day, things will change. Society will change.

(Release Info London schedule; January 17th, 2020, BFI Southbank, Belvedere Rd, Lambeth, London SE1 8XT, United Kingdom, 2:30 pm) https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp "Waves" Set against the vibrant landscape of 'South Florida', "Waves" traces the epic emotional journey of a suburban 'African-American' family; led by a well-intentioned but domineering father, as they navigate love, forgiveness, and coming together in the aftermath of a loss. "Waves" is a heartrending story about the universal capacity for compassion and growth even in the darkest of times. "Waves" places the family dynamic front and center. At the heart of the movie is the Williams family, determined, upper-middle class 'South Florida' achievers, who've to struggle ten times as hard as everyone else to get ahead. 'The Williams' have worked hard to attain an upper-middle class life; they've a great house, great careers, and they’ve raised their kids right. Their kids, like them, have a great work ethic. But like most American families, there are secrets and struggles behind the façade. Ronald Williams (Sterling K. Brown) is the stern and uncompromising patriarch. That’s Ronald’s initial approach with his son Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), thinking he can’t have him going out in the world looking like a fool. Ronald has the best of intentions for his son, but comes to discover, that it’s better to parent out of love than fear. He discovers that better parenting comes from vulnerability and communication, not tough love. It's about how behaviors and traits can be passed down from father to son. In the first section of the movie, Ronald pushes Tyler excessively, going overboard without realizing it; in the second section, he finds peace and connection with Emily, locating a vulnerability he couldn’t share with his son. Losing Tyler, deserted by Catherine (Renée Elise Goldberry), and saved only by Emily, Ronald is forced to rethink his entire way of being. He abandons the severity of his parenting, which he thought was in Tyler’s best interest, and instead follows Emily’s example by choosing love, transparency, and honesty. You get a chance over the course of this movie to see a parent evolve, and recognize it’s a game of give and take, you've to be able to trust your children to a certain extent, because if you suffocate them, they will rebel or escape. Only after Ronald sees the results of this is he able to find a new way to be with his daughter. If he's able to share that level of honesty and vulnerability with Tyler, he might have shown to him that true strength lies not in perfection, or having it all together, but in being able to lean on the people who care about you when times get tough; to be able to communicate and ask for help. Tyler Williams is a 17-year-old teenager who experiences an unfathomable tragedy. Then it became the story of his younger sister Emily (Taylor Russell), who's navigating her first true love. Tonally shifting from Tyler’s downward spiral into Emily’s romantic blossoming and renewal, the two mirrored sections are deepened by the presence of the sibling's hard-working, exacting parents. Tyler is in love with his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie), but grapples with tension at home with his father, who pushes him to work hard in all areas, school, sports, and part-time job, at the crucial moment he's trying to forge his own nascent identity. And, like so many teenage boys, Tyler doesn’t know where to turn to express his fears, weaknesses, and vulnerability. Tyler looks up to his dad so much, he’s probably the most hardworking man he’s ever known. When you idolize someone so much, it’s hard to feel, when you look at yourself, that you’ll ever measure up to that image. It’s a major part of Tyler’s struggle. Ronald pushes Tyler to excel in wrestling, pressing him to lift weights for long hours in the family’s sprawling suburban home. It's a paradox in a complicated relationship, at times a beautiful showcase of father and son bonding, at others a brutal battle of wills, as Ronald becomes blinded by his own demons intermingling with parental love. Ronald loves Tyler too hard, he cares about him too much. He loves him so intensely that Tyler, injured and suffering internally, eventually goes overboard, which amplifies the tragedy that ends the first section of the movie. Adding to the pressure is Tyler’s disintegrating relationship with Alexis after they come to a disagreement about their own future. This, combined with his father’s rigorous demands, pushes him towards self-destruction, foregrounding one of the film’s most moving and indelible themes, how the simmering chaos inside families and relationships both shapes and destroys each of the members involved. What happens with Tyler unravels all of that hope and hard work. Yet Emily’s segment of the story serves as a contrast to what comes before, offering hope for the Williams when it seems there's none. "Waves" is a movie about family and forgiveness. It’s about moving forward. Through Tyler and Emily’s different trajectories, the film crafts a fresh, highly relatable and emotionally accessible cinematic experience, showing how one teenager succumbs to the near-impossible pressures and demands placed on him, while another finds a way to navigate her hardships and break out in a new direction, filled with joy, affection and positivity. It’s so much about this void Tyler is trying to heal, since his mother abandoned him and his sister as young children, leaving them with a stepmother who also couldn’t fill that void. When Tyler’s injury happens, he, like many other teenagers, doesn’t feel comfortable admitting it, including even to those closest to him. He can’t face showing that kind of vulnerability or weakness, which ties directly back to how his father has raised him. Tyler has been molded in his father’s image. His identity relies on being a step above everyone else and being in control. That’s why he can’t tell his dad, mom, or girlfriend about his shoulder and why he responds to things the way he does. If any one of the events in the story didn’t happen in such short time period, Tyler would’ve been fine and worked through everything. Instead, the world fires back against him and he doesn’t know how to ask for help because he raised to be stronger than everyone else. The character encapsulates teenage frustrations in this precise moment, and the film infuses the young man with empathy and soul even in his darkest hour, shaping the conflicted and confused teen into a sympathetic, often relatable human being. Tyler becomes an emblem for the pressures of the modern age, showing how young people in this era try and sometimes fail to navigate a fraught and perilous world. He's not a monster. People can make mistakes and people should still be seen as human beings. We've to learn to be empathetic and not judge people so quickly. "Waves" examines the pressures of modern American teenage life in the current moment, focusing on Tyler as he grapples with ambition, drive, parental pressure, and finding his own path. In one memorable scene he dyes his hair white in the style of Frank Ocean, his own unique way of distancing himself from his father’s rigidity; in another he shares a flurry of angry text messages with his girlfriend about the direction of their future together. As the Williamses endure an almost impossible devastation at the film’s midpoint, "Waves" shifts tone in the evocative and touching second portion, sending the movie in another direction as it focuses on Emily, Tyler’s quiet younger sister who appears only fleetingly in the story’s earlier part. Emily is in a huge transitional period in her life, trying to find out who she's and where she fits within her family, feeling invisible in her brother’s shadow. A lot of the focus in "Waves" is on Tyler under immense pressure, but over the course of the movie Emily has the opportunity to discover herself, and make her own decisions in life, and that’s a liberating place to be as a teenager. Emerging from a tunnel of upheaval and grief, Emily finds her way into the light. After an unexpected run-in with classmate Luke (Lucas Hedges), one of Tyler’s wrestling teammates, Emily falls fast and hard for the amiable senior, mirroring the intoxicating highs of Tyler and Alexis feverish romance in Waves’ opening scenes, but with an innocence and grace that separates the tone of the two relationships. It’s very powerful to watch Emily blossom, she’s open to love, and mending relationships. Working through a tragedy like that, within her family but also inside her community, could easily tear her apart. But she chooses to not let what happened to Tyler destroy her. As the second portion of the movie begins, Emily is isolated, still unable to emerge from Tyler’s shadow and the reverberations of his actions; her family is branded in a way, causing fear to set in. And that fear comes to influence how she approaches her life. She’s on the precipice of becoming a bunch of different people. It’s a crucial time period for her, and she chooses love. From it's inception, "Waves" is a music-driven movie in the vein of "Boogie Nights" or "Goodfellas", with songs and score serving as a kind of fluctuating tide for the sprawling narrative. Indeed, "Waves" is largely synchronized to music mixing contemporary songs from the likes of "Animal Collective". The music and corresponding images feel like the music in Tyler’s and Emily’s worlds, and show how the world is functioning around them. Like the songs in the film, the score expresses the subconscious of Tyler and Emily Williams as they grapple with their disparate paths and choices in life. The first time the score surfaces in Tyler’s section of the movie comes after he receives the news from his doctor that his torn labrum ends his athletic career, marking the beginning of his downward spiral. From the outset of Waves you get the feeling Tyler can go anywhere in life, he’s in the 1:85 aspect ratio, on top of the world, open and free and in love. “But as things start closing down, the aspect ratio narrows. Keeping with the ebb and flow motif, as Tyler’s state of mind changes, so does the camera and aspect ratio. Emily’s story, by contrast, begins in the 1:33 ratio, engulfed in grief following the heartbreaking events of the film’s midsection. But it opens up again as she comes back to life and her romance with Luke takes hold. Luke (Lukas Hedges) is Emily’s love interest. Near the end of the film Luke and Emily share one of the film’s most emotionally wrenching scenes, and over the course of their road trip, Emily’s character emerges to help Luke find his own peace and acceptance, while she's able to reconcile and recalibrate her relationship with her parents as she discovers her own power through love. Adding nuance and complexity to the mix is the fact that Catherine is the sibling's stepparent, their birth mother having left when they're young children. Catherine doesn’t see herself as a stepmother, her bond with Tyler and Emily was so quick and complete that she feels they're her own children, and the complexity of her relationship with them is typical of any good mother. She's the nurturer in the family, and loves being a soft place for her kids to land. She believes Ronald puts too much pressure on Tyler, and pays Emily too little attention, so she's too hard on Emily and too soft with Tyler, unwittingly over-correcting the disparity. Through all of this, she has to find a way to hold on to her love for Ronald. "Waves" is as much about parenting as it's young people trying to survive and flourish in a challenging world. There’s a fear in Catherine, having lost her husband, of losing anybody else, and certainly losing either of her children to a world that can be cruel sometimes. A lot of the way in which she parents her children, especially his boy, comes out of that fear, making sure she holds on very tight so that he doesn’t lose again. You can feel hope at the end of "Waves", like these people can pull through their struggles. That’s the ebb and flow at work at the heart of this story. You know they’re going to pull through and survive, even when it feels like they might drown. "Waves" is a uniquely bifurcated movie, split into two distinct segments and conjoined by a virtuoso middle passage. The film focuses on the brother in the first part and the sister in the second, two couples on each side, with the parents linking things throughout. There’s a frenetic energy in the first part of the movie versus the more languid and reflective second portion, which illuminates the siblings and what they’re going through in terms of their respective relationships and their quest for identity. As explosive as the first section is on the page, the second part is beautiful and satisfying in a completely different way. At times it still feels claustrophobic and suffocating, but at other times it feels open and free as the character’s journeys progress. It's refreshing this time around to focus on the full world of the characters, their relationships and dynamics. It's a searing story of one family pushed to the brink of destruction, and how they find rebirth and renewal through love, connection, communication, and atonement. It's a uniquely structured story of American life right now, tracing the different trajectories and coping strategies of two South Florida siblings searching for meaning and identity in the wake of trauma. A deeply personal statement on love and loss, propelled by an exhilarating soundtrack, including songs by Frank Ocean and 'Radiohead'. The film compromises visuals and musical collaborations, revealing how deeply love and loss can reverberate through our lives and families. Centered on an 'African-American' family living in 'South Florida', "Waves" is also an examination of parental pressure and the limitations of love, how finding communication between parent and child, and allowing vulnerability to be expressed on both sides, is essential to the limit of both. The film feels at times that it could go anywhere, and often does, in keeping with the restless spirit of modern youth the film both addresses and captures. This is a movie that deals in raw emotions, rage, anger, frustration, joy, freedom, and liberation. It’s easy to call it a movie about American teenagers in search of themselves, but this is a more primal experience. The movements behind the film feel much more elemental than identity driven. When you see this, you’re experiencing something raw and real. "Waves" examines love in it's myriad incarnations, tracing how, at different times, it can both push people apart and draw them together. This is a movie about the highs and lows of love, romantic love, familial love, what it means to have a passion for something, and what happens when everything falls apart. The film paints the dark side of love and emotions. The film also shows how redemption and renewal can be found within the embers of the destruction, breaking the cycle of trauma and anger that often passes from generation to generation. “Waves" exudes an ebb and flow resembling how we think life truly feels at times.

(Release Info London schedule; December 13th, 2019, Picturehouse Central, Piccadilly Circus, Corner of Great Windmill Street and, Shaftesbury Ave, London W1D 7DH, United Kingdom, 6:00 pm) "Little Joe" "Little Joe" follows Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham), a single mother and dedicated senior plant breeder at a corporation engaged in developing new species. She has engineered a special crimson flower, remarkable not only for it's beauty but also for it's therapeutic value; if kept at the ideal temperature, fed properly and spoken to regularly, this plant makes it's owner happy. Against company policy, Alice takes one home as a gift for her teenage son, Joe (Kit Connor). They christen it ‘Little Joe'. But as their plant grows, so too does Alice's suspicion that her new creation may not be as harmless as it's nickname suggests. "Little Joe" creates an atmosphere within the scenes that allows the audience to question the integrity of the characters involved. The film offers different ways of interpreting what's happening: the so-called changes in people can either be explained by their psychological state of mind, or by the pollen they have inhaled. Or alternatively, those changes do not exist at all and are only imagined by Bella (Kerry Fox) or Alice. The film creates those moments that retain an ambiguity in order for the audience to always have the possibility of finding an answer. In fairy-tales and stories, and also in the present day, we perceive the mother as inseparably linked with her child in some invisible way. In the best scenario, this bond is a loving one, but in any case it cannot be broken, and it forms the basis for the unquestionable responsibility of a mother for her child. Every working mother is familiar with being asked the question which is often laden with accusation. So, who looks after your child when you go to work? "Little Joe" is about a mother who's tormented by her bad conscience when she goes to work and neglects her child. A mother whose feelings are ambivalent, because the plant is Alice's other child; her work, her creation, the product of her labor. And she doesn't want to neglect this child either or lose it. But which of her children will Alice choose in the end. Both of the female main characters, Alice as well as Bella, seem to be psychologically instable. Alice regularly attends psychotherapy, where her bad conscience towards her son, her being a workaholic and her secret fears are being discussed. We learn that what seems to be a threat upon Alice's career her plant possibly changes the people who come in contact with it and thus alienates them from their loved ones could as well be interpreted as Alice's most secret wish coming true; to free herself from the bond with her child. To be able to focus on her own desires and interests. To have a bit more time for herself. A wish that she shouldn't blame herself for. The plant appears to have a life of it's own; it emits pollen according to it's own criteria, though we don't know whether this is by chance or conscious intention. Is 'Little Joe' attempting to overcome it's infertility, which Alice engineered? Is it securing it's survival by infecting people and robbing them of their feelings? So that those who've been infected will now serve 'Little Joe'? That theory sounds fantastical, and initially Alice laughs at it, but not for long. Today, we're confronted with living beings which are products of genetic engineering and we cannot really know for certain what kind of danger they may conceal. Perhaps none at all, but we can't be sure. One body of opinion insists that to be on the safe side we should protect ourselves from this eventuality, while another claims that everything is under control. Without taking sides here, the film is interested in this aspect of our time, which is determined on the one hand by scientific developments and on the other by semi-truths that are spread on the internet. And by the uncanny realization that even scientists can only surmise, without knowing for certain. It's fertile soil for all manner of conspiracy theories. And when she finally achieves that freedom; the film comes to a happy end. The idea behind the story is that every individual conceals a secret which cannot be completely appreciated by an outsider or even by that individual. Something strange inside us appears unexpectedly and makes the familiar seem uncanny. Somebody we know suddenly seems strange. Proximity is transformed into distance. The desire for mutual understanding, empathy and symbiosis is unfulfilled. In this sense, "Little Joe" is a parable about what is strange within ourselves. This becomes tangible in the film by means of a plant which is apparently capable of changing people. As result of this change something unfamiliar emerges, and something believed to be secure is lost; the bond between two people. It seems that the film's aesthetic is even more abstract or artificial in "Little Joe" than in "Amour Fou". "Amour Fou" was perhaps a steppingstone because with a historical setting, you're already entering a fantasy world. None of us were there, we only have pictures to refer to, which are already another artist's impression. It's already a kind of invented world that you're designing. Obviously, the film is inspired by greenhouses, laboratories, real places, but in the end, the film creates a kind of artificial world. We've to reflect the fairy-tale nature of the story. For example, with the colors, there's the mint green and white, and then the red of the flower. The film choses these almost childish colors to give the film the characteristics of a fairy-tale or fable. Also, Alice's red hair for example, that's a very important point, almost iconographicalthis bright red mushroom hairstyle that she has. The costume design focuses on creating a reality of it's own, iconic key pieces such as pearl earrings and a red hat are repeatedly used, the colors are obviously styled corresponding to the set design. And there's humor in the costumes; a ridiculous dress, a suit too large. The same holds true for the cinematography. The framing tries to question reality as we play with different perspectives, what the viewer does and does not see; we maintain a level of uncertainty with what's kept hidden. As an audience you realize that you've only been shown a fragment. And one begins to ask oneself what's behind it, what's wrong, what's happening where I can't see? The framing and the narrative emphasize this question; what do we not see? What's hidden offscreen? For example, when Bella says, 'I think it's 'Little Joe's' pollen, that triggered something', the camera approaches her, but then the camera is panning past her and there's a slight disappointment or a questioning of her authority, as if she's not the person who can provide the answer for us, and what she's just said might not be true. The music creates emotions, it's even scary, but it's also abstract; it draws you in and pushes you back at the same time. And because of that, the rhythm of the film or the narrative already connected with this music during the shoot. This being said, it's due to the very unique character of this music, that it remains a character in itself. It's the story of a woman, a plant breeder who invents a genetically modified plant, a beautiful flower. We like 'The Little Shop Of Horrors', where the flower eats you. "Little Shop Of Horrors" is maybe a source of inspiration for the film. The flower Alice creates has a lovely scent and it's supposed to make you happy. But after a while, the plant appears to influence people in a way that makes them not themselves anymore. There are no specific symptoms- they don't have any allergic reactions or display any particular psychological changes. Someone who didn't know that person very well wouldn't notice the difference; they'd think they're the same as always. Only the ones who are very close, such as a mother and her son, would see the change. She might say that's not my son anymore, what happened to him? That's a real psychiatric disorder, a neurological sort of thing. It's the delusion that someone close to you has been replaced by an impostor. In the story, it's also possible that the person who believes that, has a psychiatric problem. We don't know if the person is inventing it or imagining it, or if it's really happening. The ambiguity is there through the whole story. But we do find out that the pollen of the plant contains something that may cause a change of personality. We came up with it not knowing if it might actually be possible. Which plants are bred artificially? Why we've a market for this science. Finding out what people look for in plants and what sells well. What are the trends? What's benefiting science and what's benefiting the economy? And with what intention? Of course, with food crops, the overriding theme is developing the durability and resilience of plants. Because, in fact, this utopia existsthe scent of a plant can make a person happy. You smell a flower and you can almost see the smile on the faces, that's the idea of a flower. It's beautiful and it smells good. It's about the idea of a fragrance that makes everyone happy, be it by pheromones or other hormonal substances that are emitted by the flowers. It's alchemical; scientists who are creating spells. It's a complicated part, finding a connection, determining if and how a plant could ever infect a human. It could be a virus because a virus is flexible enough and can mutate in a way that could adapt from a plant virus into a human virus. This is very unlikely, but conceivable in certain circumstances. Science tries things, and nobody can ever predict the consequences. And yet it's done. And sometimes there are positive effects. This is similar to the theme of the film, "Lourdes", where the miracle is good and bad at the same time. In this story, the invention is good, because the people who inhale the fragrance of the plant are happy. It works. But the downside, well that's what interests most, these contradictory and conflicting situations, these 'Gordian Knots' that are virtually impossible to undo. You feel like you're in 'Brave New World', endless number of computerized flower cars driving around. The story is about a plant whose fragrance has been genetically engineered and the scent makes the people who smell the plant happy. Is such a scent possible? What this plant could be doing is giving off a combination of chemicals, let's say peptides and steroids, or it could contain a virus. If you want it to contain a virus, then it's not the plant itself. That virus could be targeting brain cells, specific kinds of brain cells and in doing so, it could be turning them on and off and it would regulate behavior. Plants and viruses have been using us for 100 million years. They create substances that affect our behavior. Plants make nicotine, they make opiates, they make all sort of chemicals that regulate our behavior. It's as if they're using us all along. We use them but they use us. From viruses, we've picked up little pieces of 'DNA' called transposons. You can also get transposons from food. They can get into the lining of the gut and become part of you. So you can become the part of Austria that you are from because you eat specific strains of food there. And if those regulate your behavior, then you can get not only a taste for them, but you can also develop a need for them. It's all this cross-species stuff, where the virus most of the time is specific. But there are crossovers. It's a rare event, but to say this couldn't happen is misinformed. For example that they're nearly the same as they used to be, but that the emotions that they feel are not really true anymore. That you only act as if you love someone, but you don't really love them anymore. So, not the behavioral area but only the emotional? Maybe you wouldn't notice it so much, is that right? If the virus only influences, changes or blocks the emotional part. How do you talk to somebody's emotions? How do you get down here? By talking to the upper part of the prefrontal cortex and that connects back to the hippocampus and amygdala and that's where you change the connection of the memories with the emotion. If there's such a scent, you would probably be a millionaire. It's unlikely that we will find one for people. Probably not for animals either, because in terms of evolution, happiness is not an interesting trait. For evolution to develop sensory traits, they need to be important to survival, if they're good for procreation, for example, but not for something as general as how happy one is. Plants naturally have fragrances that attract animals to spread the pollen. There are a whole series of examples. Plants develop a kind of scent that animals react to and are attracted to, then they've to get a reward for it. You could imagine that with people too. Because the reward center in the brain is very active and also seduces us into different actions. We're attracted to products that upset the reward system, so we still eat it, even though we know it's not so good for us. In this direction, you could imagine something. This is called conditioning. You've learned that you get a reward and the fragrance itself is enough to reward us. Every person associates a scent with their personal experience with the scent. If you've smelled a fragrance in a happy situation, the fragrance can rekindle this happy situation. And the same scent can cause unpleasant feelings for another person who has smelled it in a very unpleasant situation. Is that conceivable? Similar to a drug? There's no indication that we've a sensor, a receptor though we do not have many pheromone receptors, we've just decrypted the first one, it does not make us happy but it has something to do with hormones. These are hormones that have to do with trust. This is in the hypothalamus, a core area in the hypothalamus. There, this fragrance causes an excitement in everyone in the same area. There's a wiring between the cells in the nose that smell and transmit to the brain. You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life. It will survive you and your children and your children's children. An irreversible attack on the biosphere is something so unheard-of, so unthinkable to previous generations, that we could only wish that mine had not been guilty of it. The hybridization of 'Prometheus' with 'Herostratus' is bound to give evil results. Have we the right to counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years, in order to satisfy the ambition and the curiosity of a few scientists? This world is given to us on loan. We come and we go; and after a time we leave earth and air and water to others who come after us. Our generation, or perhaps the one preceding mine, has been the first to engage, under the leadership of the exact sciences, in a destructive colonial warfare against nature. The future will curse us for it.