Displacement Film Fund review Cate Blanchett masterminds short film collection that brims with life and intensity

"With considerable chutzpah and elan, and in her capacity as producer and UNHCR Goodwill ambassador, Cate Blanchett has achieved a geopolitical film-making coup. In concert with festival authorities in Rotterdam, she has secured cash and commissioned short films on the subject of displacement from five directors including Mohammad Rasoulof, now in exile from his native Iran due to his pro-democracy activism, in effect making his first public statement since the recent massacres and apparently expressing his fears that he may never go home again."

"The films are far from solemnly earnest this is an anthology of five brilliant miniature artworks. By turns shocking, funny, confessional and deeply mysterious, this is a tremendous collection; the constituent films of which benefit in some enigmatic way from being shown together. What Ealing Studios's Dead of Night did for scariness, these films may have done for 21st-century exile."

"Ukrainian film-maker Maryna Er Gorbach shows us, in her film Rotation, a young Ukrainian woman eerily alone in a wheat field shot in saturated colour, answering questions from a disembodied voice about her former life in uniform. A flashback gives us a sense of her experience in combat, displaced from her civilian existence into the stress and fear of warfare. Then, in the present tense, she appears to succumb to a disturbing, apocalyptic vision."

Cate Blanchett, as producer and UNHCR Goodwill ambassador, commissioned an anthology of five short films addressing displacement, securing funding in Rotterdam. The collection includes exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose contribution functions as a public statement and expresses fears of never returning home. The films range from shocking and confessional to funny and mysterious and gain resonance when screened together. Maryna Er Gorbach's Rotation depicts a young Ukrainian woman alone in a saturated wheat field answering a disembodied voice, with flashbacks to combat and a subsequent apocalyptic vision. Shahrbanoo Sadat's Super Afghan Gym is a likable comedy about fully clothed women exercising semi-secretly in a Kabul gym and confronting bodily estrangement.

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