Rafaela Sales Ross

The television goes from an old tape of a gymnast graciously contorting her body to the raspy, instantly recognisable voice of Bob Dylan as he soulfully sings “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”. “To keep it in your mind and not forget, that it is not he, or she, or them, or it that you belong to”. Dylan’s raging anti-capitalism anthem, a bold, eloquent critique to the failed politics of the 70s finds its home in the two young women sitting in front of the old television set.
Anna (Mina Wa...

Easily standing on top of a tall tree, playfully swinging a chainsaw in one hand, Zoe (Rose Matafeo) looks effortlessly cool – and clearly fearless. As she banters with two male colleagues, whose expressions are one of horror from the safety of the ground – it becomes clear that her position is one of leadership in a trade commonly dominated by men: professional arboriculture.
At a state of limbo between the benders of youth and commitments of adulthood, Zoe can’t quite place herself. When sh...

Throughout the delirious beats of its climax, Bacurau demands the viewer to both abandon and embrace their humanity. As the underdog marches to victory, the joy of cruel, uncensored death blends into shameless satisfaction. There’s a numbing sense of ecstasy as rusty old knifes cut through the white, arrogant skin of the foreign villains, bullets ricocheting to the rhythm of its own glorious orchestra – the lives of the hunters ceased by the calloused hands of their prey.

Buckets of water are...

With the holiday season comes an invitation to rediscover what makes us happiest – something that can often start and finish with a particularly comfortable, or colourful, outfit. This Christmas, we’re revisiting Natalie Krinsky’s The Broken Hearts Gallery with Rafaela Sales Ross, who finds a sense of self in repeated outfits, ready to take on the world.

“Humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit.”
-Marie Curie
There are pivotal moments in time where history has its course drastically altered by a mix of perseverance and sheer curiosity. At the end of the 19th century, the Curies, Marie and Pierre, did precisely that as they discovered the existence of radium, a chemical element that drew a precis...

Rafaela Sales Ross
Rafaela Sales Ross is a proud Brazilian currently living in Scotland. She has a Masters in Film and Visual Culture, and has been diving deep into the portrait of suicide on film for a few years now. Rafa, as she likes to be called, loves Harold and Maude, The Before Trilogy, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Kleber Mendonça Filho and pretty much anything with either Ruth Gordon or Javier Bardem in it. You can find her on both Twitter and Letterboxd @rafiews

With his lifelong dream close enough to taste, jazz musician Joe (Jamie Foxx) suddenly finds himself moving towards the gates of Heaven. Following an accident, the man’s body lies in a hospital bed while his soul makes its way into the afterlife. Blindsided by his sudden death moments before the gig of a lifetime, the musician decides to fight for his right to return to Earth and finally enjoy the career he so desperately yearns for.
Instead of a swift U-turn, however, Joe ends up in a sort o...

Told almost entirely from the point of view of strays roaming the crowded streets of Istanbul, Elizabeth Lo’s first feature film Stray seeks to challenge notions of exclusion amongst the chaos of overcrowded urban settings. Through the very fitting lenses of strayness, Lo poignantly explores the contemporary epidemic of non-belonging, threading cautiously whilst reflecting on the many faces of marginalisation.
In contrast to the loudness of city life, the quiet dogs roam the streets in search...

Lav Díaz is a master in finding beauty in the organic poetry of slowness. From the 625 minutes of 2006’s Evolution Of A Filipino Family to the mere 80 of 2011’s Elegy to the Visitor From the Revolution, the filmmaker bends the intrinsic correlation between pace and running time in his exhaustive studies of the human condition. Díaz’s latest venture, Genus Pan, is yet another comprehensive take on the blurry threshold that divides animals from men. Following a trio of miners attempting to esca...

Among the forests of the small town of Piedmont, Italy, men and their dogs roam the muddy woods in search of a very particular treasure: the white Alba truffle. Proven impossible to cultivate, the extremely rare delicacy is intrinsically related to climate and requires a traditional form of expertise when it comes to its hunting. The Truffle Hunters follows a group of elderly men as they reflect on the hunting practice and the many changes brought by the overwhelming demand.
At the core of Th...

After reaching critical acclaim with works such as A Private War and Oscar-nominated Cartel Land, director Matthew Heineman takes somewhat of a left turn to document the homecoming of Colombia’s biggest reggae superstar, J Balvín. The Boy From Medellín follows the singer as he prepares to play the biggest concert of his life to a sold-out stadium in his hometown. As he spends sleepless nights fighting against the pre-concert jitters, Balvín reflects on his fifteen-year career and the mental h...

It’s hard to discuss Shadow in the Cloud without giving it all away. On the surface, this is the story of a female WWII pilot who mysteriously embarks a plane seconds before its take off, with nothing but a heavy briefcase containing top-secret documents that are not to be opened under any circumstances. From this apparently simple premise, director Roseanne Liang creates a frantic action wonder so confident in its style that it makes ninety minutes feel like ten.
Moretz delivers a career-bes...

In a year of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director went to Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, an intimate look into a WASP family slowly disintegrating under the heavy blanket of loss. Forty years after its initial release, there is still much to be appreciated in Redford’s somewhat radical portrait of mental illness.
“Why do things have to happen to people? It isn’t fair,” complains Conrad (Timothy Hutton), the 1...

“Cultural Awareness 101,” says the scrappy chalkboard as two eccentric figures dance their way through a sex lesson that widely resembles a Discovery Channel documentary on wild animal mating rituals. Their audience is a group of bewildered foreigners who have been bundled together into a classroom in the middle of the Scottish Outer Hebrides, the place they now unexpectedly call home.
A story through layers
Following his 2015 quirky festival-hit comedy Pikadero, Scottish director Ben Sharroc...

After becoming paraplegic following an accident during a family holiday in Thailand, adventurous Sam Bloom (Naomi Watts) struggles to grasp what the future will look like for herself, her husband and their three kids. Fluctuating between violent fits of anger and tortuous displays of despair, the former nurse dwells on memories of past joys while her family carefully tiptoes around words unsaid. When the children bring home an injured magpie, fondly named Penguin, the matriarch rapidly develo...