Write Club Day 10: Sleep, Furiously

Last Friday I saw one of my favourite films of 2009. It's called 'Sleep Furiously' (a quote from Chomsky, where words are put in a sentence so that they are grammatically correct but make little semantic sense). The film is by Gerald Koppel and charts a year or so in the lives of a number of villagers in a rural area of Wales. The residents (including the director's mother Sian) are well served by an old gentleman and his little yellow library van. The community speak both Welsh and English and all the usual examples of glorified country life are present, country fairs, haybale making and the birth of new livestock. What makes the film unique is the lack of any narrative structure and the usage of music by Aphex Twin to add to the surreal visuals. My take on it is that the story itself, like in Chomsky's phrase, has all the elements of a normal rural existence, but it's stuck in a charming timeless timewarp, where the aging population carry on their lives in blissful ignorance of man's technological meglomania a few hundred miles away. I could go on forever about this non-documentary, telling you stories of flashing light panels, beautiful countryside, eerie machinery and a stuffed owl, but it wouldn't do justice to such a funny, moving and ethereal movie. Go and see it, it's miraculous. I want to see it again, and I very rarely say that.

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