Lola

Odd little found footage film. These kinds of films tend to be a mixed bag, to put it mildly, but this one is a little bit inventive taking place in the past with two women who invent a mechanism that can see into the future and at first it's great fun. However, they then see a war coming and they interfere and it changes events as is usually the case when one plays around with time. While this is a little unusual and well acted, it's also extremely illogical, but you can have some fun with it if you don't take it too seriously. This is an ultra low budget film that has two very good female leads in Stefanie Martini & Emma Appleton who are both new to me. I also thought Rory Fleck Byrne. This is super short!

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Lola: A cautionary tale about Time Travel; even if it just involved intercepting future Radio and TV broadcasts. Sisters Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and Martha (Stefanie Martini) have always been precocious, fiddling around with valves and electrical components since they were toddlers. Martha is the ideas person/inventor, Thomasina is the engineer who creates the devices. In October 1938 they build Lola, a chronovisor, they view and listen to future TV signals. They first see Bowie playing Space Oddity but go on to view rhe future Grand Nationals and other events to make money from betting. When World War 2 begins they intercept future news to warn people about bombing raids. Eventually tracked down by Military Intelligence they aid the War effort but when you interfere with the future yiu end up with unexpected consequences and no good deed goes unpunished.

The conceit is that is found footage, a film put together by Martha from newsreels, old home films and film shot by Martha on 16 mm stock. It is wonderful in black and white, blurry at times, blacking/whiting out. Changes made to actual 1930s/40s cinenews are seamless and transforms history. Bowie references provide many in jokes and cultural references, as the girls sing and dance in the future music. An Anti-Bowie. Reggie Watson (Shaun Boylan) delivers sinister tunes in a Bowiesque style. The sisters are delightfully eccentric, even keeping a horse indoors, they live in an old crumbling manor house where they basucally raised themselves as "wild childen". Great performances by Appleton and Martini with Rory Fleck Byrne as an Intelligemce officer who falls for Martha and Aaron Monaghan as his manipulative superior. Neil Hannon provides the original soundtrack with Watson's authoritarian songs. Directed and written by Andrew Legge. 8.5/10,

Caught this at the 75th EIFF, very clever and inventive piece of micro-budget SF, presented almost as documentary using footage discovered in old movie reel tins in a deserted house in England, purporting to document a pair of eccentric sisters created Lola, a machine which can intercept. Broadcasts from the future. It starts as fun, but as the war comes to Britain, Lola's trajectory changes radically.

Some of the film was shot on period cameras, developed in a rougher way to give the impression of damaged old film reels, while other footage uses newsreels, edited to include characters (a la Forrest Gump) or events, while the story also brings into play the nature of personal responsibility and the potential consequences of interfering with history. In many ways it reminded me of Primer, now a cult film, which I first saw at the same film festival years ago.

I'll pass on all the comments both positive and negative about this film and address just one sci-fi issue that some reviewers either scoff at or enjoy, receiving future broadcasts.

Off air broadcasting seems to be deemed a thing of the past early television, given cable delivery streaming and the now almost defunct vcr, dvd etc.

But original tv broadcasting went out into the airwaves on a variety of variable a frequency transmissions. Any signal sent out theoretically would enter the atmosphere and conceivably pass into space.

Given travel at the speed required to "catch" those signals in space, any original broadcast from any time sent to air could be received in the future creating the ability to look back in time, not forward.

Mind boggle. Love sci-fi as it becomes reality more and more.

Love a good time conundrum, though most are a bit of a letdown.

This, however, was a bit of fun, and I did appreciate the obvious effort put into both the genuine Newsreel edits and the prop-builds.

Not surprisingly, there's a bit of "It's the 40's" pomposity, but that seems to be a common denominator of many period films.

A few anachronisms (namely using a camera which was not released until 1952, and which was as noisy as a chaff-cutter!), but overall, a bit of fun.

Annoying as they were, the characters fit the found-footage stage play feel quite convincingly, particularly the character of the soldier who discovers where they are.

Clever, and not reliant on grandiose effects (which tend to put me off...).

Worth a look, when you have a free hour or two.