here & now

I rarely manage to take advantage of Berlin’s brilliant film festival Berlinale as much as I’d like to, but accidentally stumbled onto a real cinematic gem last night: Debra Granik’s independent feature Winter’s Bone was everything one could hope for when going to a screening based on the four line-description of the festival guide. A bleak, intense descent into trailer trash country in the South of the USA, the film is focused on a 17-year-old girl taking care of her younger siblings after her criminal father goes missing. With a pending law order that threatens to oust the struggling family from their home, the girl has to stir up a violent and tight-knitted community in order to force her father to turn up, dead or alive. With a mesmerizing Jennifer Lawrence as the center of this intense drama, Winter’s Bone has recently scooped the Grand Jury Prize and the award for best screenplay at the Sundance Film Festival, and rightly so.