There are sections that bring to mind Debra Granik’s masterful Leave No Trace (2018), when that film’s forest-dwelling father and daughter are grudgingly brought to work on a Christmas tree farm. In one dreamlike sequence, a tree cutter seems to float amongst a dark forest like a vengeful spirit. In elliptical scenes we are shown agricultural machinery, immigrant Polish workers new to the region, young boys playing a farming video game. Ridge, Skoog’s feature-length debut, is built around poetic vignettes of life in his home village, a rural community in southern Sweden. In an age of climate anxiety and global political tensions, many films tap into current conversation around nature: our place in it and our ability to control it.Īlejandro Landes, Monos, 2019, film still. While it’s unwise to draw too tight a circle around such a broad festival, having spent enough time in dark screening rooms to make a spelunker blush, there were noticeable echoes to be found across the programme in the attention paid to animals: as adversaries, as icons for unknowable forces and as cyphers for authentic experiences inaccessible to human characters. There is an uncertain, estranged wildness – by turns, alienating and seductive – at the heart of many of the films at this year’s London Film Festival. ‘People say they keep getting wilder,’ a voice tells us in the film’s opening moments. They’ve escaped the farm and stand at odds amongst the ferns out of place, away from the herd. There’s a scene in John Skoog’s Ridge (2019) when a teenage boy finds two dairy cows in a lush forest.
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