Film Picks: Girlhood (NC16)

French writer-director Celine Sciamma is today celebrated for the Golden Globe-nominated period drama Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019), but Girlhood (2014, above) is arguably more ambitious. It is a portrait of an African-French girl on the cusp of womanhood, living on the margins of Parisian society and dealing with violence and crime.

Sciamma's third feature and the last of a trilogy of coming-of-age movies bears the film-maker's trademark theme of women finding their path in a culture that has pigeonholed them from an early age.

WHERE: The Projector, Level 5 Golden Mile Tower, 6001 Beach Road WHEN: Sunday, 5.30pm ADMISSION: $10 INFO: theprojector.sg

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HUMBA DREAMS (NC16)

Part road-trip, part coming-of-age story, this drama follows Martin (J. S. Khairen), a film student in Jakarta who returns home to the island of Sumba in eastern Indonesia, to settle affairs after his father's death.

It is a journey to a quiet, parched landscape different from that of packed, tropical Java. Martin's people speak their own language and practise a mix of Christianity and animism. Spirits speak to the living through shamans and in dreams, reminding them of debts unpaid.

The student's quest takes him around the island's towns and villages, where he meets a range of locals, including those whose daughters and husbands joined the tide of Sumbanese seeking jobs in Malaysia, only to disappear.

Writer-director Riri Riza's back-to-hometown setup lets audiences see an older world through the eyes of someone who has a foot both in the modern and the ancient.

It is not the freshest idea, but in this heartfelt story about a young man coming to terms with his father's legacy, it works.

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VIVARIUM (M18)

The science-fiction horror work stars Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as Tom and Gemma, an average couple looking for a starter home, when they chance upon Yonder, a development the agent promises will be their "forever home".

In this surreal satire of the property ladder, Yonder does become their forever home - just not in the way they expect. This mostly Irish production, selected for last year's Cannes Film Festival, borrows ideas from animal biology to depict the burdens of home ownership.

The South Korean drama Parasite (2019), winner of the Best Picture Oscar, makes a point about one social class feeding on another in a mansion on a hill. In this bleak, unsettling story, parasitism is simply Mother Nature taking its course.

Vivarium also raises some dark questions about parenthood. If you thought We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) - a psychological thriller about a mother coming to terms with having a monstrous child - painted a discomfiting picture of parenthood, then this story might put you off having children altogether.