Rappers, strippers and chickens: Our IFFK 2024 picks

From Palme d'Or winner 'Anora' to Hong Sang-soo's new lo-fi charmer, here are some favourites from the festival

- Uday Bhatia

The International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), held annually in Thiruvananthapuram, concluded this week. Though the full programme only arrived days before the festival's start, it was a stellar lineup of films from the state, the rest of India and around the world. These were a few of our favourites from the 29th edition:

KNEECAP
The wildest film at the festival was Rich Peppiatt's Kneecap, about the eponymous Irish hip-hop trio who burst onto the scene in 2017. Two young drug-dealers with a gift for rough poetry cross paths with a musically inclined schoolteacher with a small sound studio in the garage. They record a single and quickly gain a cult following for their sex-and-drug-fuelled lyrics and their insistence on rapping in Irish. Kneecap members Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin and JJ Ó Dochartaigh play themselves in this outrageously funny film, and Michael Fassbender lends star presence as Ó Cairealláin's dissident father, now in hiding.

ANORA
When the son of a Russian magnate turns up one night at a New York strip club, the fortunes of resident dancer Anora (Mikey Madison) take a dramatic turn. Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) falls head over heels for her, and their relationship goes from paid sex to marriage plans in the space of a few days. Vanya's parents are, unsurprisingly, horrified by the idea, and despatch a handler to pay Anora off and whisk Vanya back to Russia. Sean Baker's film, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, has the same headlong pace as his breakout feature, Tangerine (2015), but also a bittersweet quality as Anora fights to preserve her dream. Madison is a revelation as the combative Anora, and Yura Borisov is quietly compelling as a sensitive Russian henchman.

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