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sleep furiously (U)
Dir: Gideon Koppel
94 mins, 2008, UK
Please note: this is an old screening, first shown in July 2009
This riveting directorial debut draws a lyrical portrait of a year in the life of the tiny hamlet of Trefeurig, the small farming community in Wales where Koppel’s parents, refugees from Nazi Germany, settled down and where he grew up. With sublime imagery and an understated, harmonious soundtrack from Aphex Twin, sleep furiously chronicles a landscape and population that is changing rapidly as small-scale agriculture is disappearing and the generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out. Koppel’s camera very quietly observes this world of slow routines, mobile libraries and Dylan Thomas, suspended in a moment between endings and beginnings, to create a documentary that writer Mark Cousins calls “pure cinema”.
sleep furiously may be the most beautifully elemental documentary film to have emerged in Britain in over a decade and I can't applaud it loudly enough. This is London
This is as fully formed and unique a debut movie as you could ever hope to see. Time Out
sleep furiously is a film whose lower-case title is in perfect keeping with the understated but tremulous mood it manages, with rare skill, to create and to maintain. Daily Telegraph
Here is a voice to be cherished. Times

