Zeresenay berhane mehari biography of martin

Issue 73

Debut films are often about youth, and about living on the edge. From The Blows to Breathless, from Badlands to Kids, first features repeatedly channel the freedoms and frustrations of being young, via an array of outcasts, outlaws and hedonists. For a first-time director, making a film about middle-age, middle-class concerns only seems to make sense if you want to emphasise complacency, hypocrisy and devastating dullness (at least if you’re Michael Haneke, that is: see The Seventh Continent).

Still, in surveying the 12 films in the First Feature Competition of this year’s London Film Festival, the sheer prevalence of youthful and marginalised protagonists was striking. Here were tales of kids roaming urban estates and trekking through the desert, teenagers drinking and dodging bullets, and twenty-somethings getting lost in the woods. Many of the young characters in these films are victims of br