Andrea Arnold
Andrea Arnold’s poignant documentary Cow is doused in transparency and truth – the hardest pill to swallow.
Emily Wheeler’s coverage of the 2021 Heartland Film Festival continues with looks at The Humans, Cow, What Josiah Saw, and No Straight Lines.
We tap into fond memories of summer and feel-good vibes to come up with a list of some of the best summertime films of all time.
Andrea Arnold is without a doubt cinema’s leading creator of stories depicting the trials and tribulations of working class women, with an entirely non-judgemental eye. Translating her social realist style across the Atlantic, keeping the inherent themes relevant to the lower classes intact, would seem close to impossible, although due to an unfortunate stroke of luck, the Presidential election has made the general idea of class in an overwhelmingly middle class country relevant yet again. Many audiences have been so transfixed by the way Arnold and her long-term cinematographer Robbie Ryan have captured the sweeping vistas of America, a world completely alien to the council estates of earlier films Red Road and Fish Tank, that they have seemed to ignore the fact this is unmistakably a distinctive piece of work.
Class consciousnes and its oft-contingent condemnation of wealth was a theme at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival that one would be hard-pressed to overlook. The most obvious reason for this is the fact that Ken Loach’s poignant portrait of one man’s struggle to navigate Britain’s welfare system, I, Daniel Blake, took home the Palme d’Or. But this topic was also prominent in part because films about wealth, or lack thereof, pervaded the entire festival, spanning its various sections.
The wide world of films have long held a place for the meandering soul-searcher. They’re characters that move aimlessly through the world with no end goal in sight. Perhaps they’ve become disillusioned with the world as it is, or perhaps, like in American Honey, they are too young to know all the directions they could go.
There aren’t many people who can claim that the woman they watched larking about on children’s morning television when they were a toddler also became of one of their favourite film directors as an adult. But that’s exactly what Andrea Arnold turned out to be, for me. For those of you who have never heard of her I can guarantee that you’ll be impressed.