Wednesday May 25
10am, 2:30pm, 5pm, 7:30pm
Director: Ben Sharrock
Drama/Comedy
Scotland
103 minutes
Following a group of asylum seekers awaiting their fate in a remote corner of Scotland, Sharrock’s tale uses dark comedy to fight a stubborn undercurrent of melodrama, with neither sensibility winning out.
The setting is an impossibly bleak and starkly beautiful Scottish island – here a number of refugees from Syria and elsewhere – single men with no families – have been relocated in grimly functional hostels with a bare-minimum subsistence allowance. Forbidden to do any paid work, they must simply wait for the official word on whether they can stay.
Most dramatically there is Omar – a hugely gentle and intelligent performance from Amir El-Masry – he is (or was) a brilliant musician, a soloist on the oud, a stringed instrument. He can’t play at the moment, supposedly because of a wrist injury, but this is just an excuse: he is creatively and spiritually blocked. El-Masry superbly conveys Omar’s fear that to play the oud under these wretched circumstances would be an act of futility and disloyalty.
This is superlative film-making from Sharrock. – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
A wonderful comedy that savours its remote environment while keeping its subjects at the centre of the story. – Donald Clarke, Irish Times
For a film that is so infused with sadness… Limbo is remarkably funny – a gentle, empathic kind of humour that is derived from the men’s bleak existences, without mocking them. – Wendy Ide, Observer UK