We are family
The Topp Twins : Untouchable Girls
La robe du soir
The Topp Twins : Untouchable Girls
New Zealand, 2009
Direction: Leanne Pooley
Production: Diva Productions, New Zealand Film Commission
Starring: Jools Topp, Linda Topp
Genre: Comedy/Musical
Documentary
84’
Audience award for Best Documentary in the Hamburg Queer Festival
Best documentary award in the Chicago International Film Festival
Best documentary award in the Toronto Film Festival
Première in Spain
Can it be possible to be at the same time a New Zealander woman, lesbian, farmer, country singer, clown, TV series actress, National Treasure of her country, and have a twin sister that is also all this? Sisters Jools and Linda Topp prove it, with an energy and sense of humour that you will never forget.
Born in 1958 in a farmer's family, a job that they had later on together with their respective girlfriends, they started singing country music in the street until becoming incredibly famous. They have been performing for 25 years in all stages of their country and they have their own TV programme. Openly lesbian and literally considered “National Treasures” by New Zealand, they have also started fighting against breast cancer since Jools was diagnosed with this disease. Their TV characters such as Ken and Ken, Camp Mother and Camp Leader or The Bowling Ladies, are today very funny references for the New Zealander audience.
A sensational documentary, illustrated with excellent interviews with their parents and partners that has been audience and box office record in New Zealand.
* * *
La robe du soir
France, 2009
Direction: Myriam Aziza
Production: Mille et Une Productions
Starring: Alba Gaïa Kraghede Bellugi, Lio, Sophie Mounicot
Genre: Drama/Childhood
Feature film fiction
95’
Première in Spain
Juliette is a 12-year-old girl, bright and hard-working whose emotional world turns around her French teacher, Madame Solenska interpreted by the French singer Lio, a relationship that gradually becomes obsessive. Who has not fallen in love sometime with a male or female teacher? Who has not felt sometime the emptiness of incomprehension and the silence of a secret desire?
Myriam Aziza accomplishes with this film about loss of innocence, education and learning a gifted movie with brilliant outlines about school conflicts, allowing us to closely gaze at Juliette's inner world and being able to capture, without condescension or unnecessary tenderness, from the nuances of an imminent sexual awakening to altered emotional states. By doing so, from another perspective, French cinema follows the tribulations, emphasized in the last decade, of the contemporary manners of formal education.
A sincere and necessary movie to understand the inner mechanisms of desire and the identification of the most difficult ages of human kind, the transition from infancy to puberty.
