sleep furiously. (2011)
Average Rating: 6.8/10
Reviews Counted: 26
Fresh: 18 | Rotten: 8
This poetic and tender portrait of a Welsh village is a slow moving yet elegantly accomplished British documentary.
Average Rating: 7.1/10
Critic Reviews: 6
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 1
This poetic and tender portrait of a Welsh village is a slow moving yet elegantly accomplished British documentary.
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Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 428
My Rating
Movie Info
Sleep Furiously is set in a small farming community in mid Wales, about 50 miles north of Dylan Thomas' fictional village of Llareggub - and there is a sense in which this is a film 'for' Dylan Thomas, if not a contemporary translation of 'Under Milk Wood'. This is a place where Koppel's parents - both refugees - found a home. It is 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.
Jul 29, 2011 Wide
Bard Entertainments
- Official Site
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All Critics (27) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (19) | Rotten (8) | DVD (1)
"Sleep Furiously" is a lovely film, but maddeningly complacent.
Top CriticUltimately, the first impression given - of a place both familiar and strange - is the only impression offered. It's not enough.
Gideon Koppel's free-form portrait of a Welsh farming community may be the most subtly poetic piece of cine-anthropology to come down the pike in eons.
A lingering, mildly lyrical look at village life.
This film is best taken as a visual ode to an all-but-forgotten way of life.
This is as fully formed and unique a debut movie as you could ever hope to see.
Lovely and comforting portrait of life in a Welsh village
Zzzzz...
Sleep Furiously returns again and again to this idea of transition: seasons change, cows go out to pasture and come in for milking, piglets are born, lambs follow their mothers as dogs herd them. Farming traditions are dynamic.
A paean to a way of life that, regardless of Dylan Thomas' furious injunction, is going gently into that good night.
Beautifully shot but more than a little sterile.
A certain polite withholding, even if it masks some firm conviction or desire, seems to be a coin of the realm in Trefeurig, so it may well be apt that Koppel often films in a register very close to this one.
If you love Dylan Thomas (who doesn't?), then you will love this film.
A paean to the dignity of ritualized traditions that aims for poetic calmness, but more often smoothes its subjects into deliberately emblematic somnambulism.
Great claims have been made for it, which I cannot endorse, Koppel's stated intentions being infinitely more arresting than the completed film.
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.
Even though it's sometimes picturesque and involving, it's also so achingly slow and indulgent that it will test even the most patient viewers.
Images of wistful sadness - lone figures with plodding dogs on rain-lashed hillsides - are interlaced with humour and moments of skin-prickling beauty that leave the audience undone.
The film has richness and an unshowy compassion, its grammar and pace adjusting to the tempo of the countryside.
Audience Reviews for sleep furiously.
Super Reviewer
This first film by Gideon Koppel charts the slow progress of modernity as it reaches a small farming community in mid Wales. Intentionally slow-paced, the film imposes no grand narrative, yet is subtle in conveying its story. From the closing of the local school, to the erection of a new road sign, the changes are small, but it is clear from the film how important and widely impacting these happenings and events are for the local community.
Portraits of the community are shown through gatherings such as the farm auction, an agricultural show and the local choir practice, where minor discussions between the townspeople reveal how change is unfolding. Between this, images of the landscape provide a backdrop that is both beautiful and wild.
The film is warm in its humour as it records meetings between the driver of the mobile-library van, that makes its way around the village, as he optimistically recommends titles to his visitors. An appreciation for the quirkiness of rural life is found in the judging of a best-garden competition and in a farmer attempting to herd sheep, whilst wearing a distracting yellow hat.
The birth of calves and piglets are captured alongside the taxidermy of a dead owl, and the visit to a gravestone of a deceased husband, as the film presents a kind of meditation on life and death, endings and beginnings.
Working with the muted poetry of the community and its story, the soundtrack by Aphex Twin, is both subdued and sensational. Perhaps one of the least conspicuous elements of the film, it is also one of the most successful.
Sleep Furiously is compelling, beautiful and affecting on a subtle level. Truly touching in places and warmly humorous in others, the at times quirky, cinematography sustains a level of brilliance throughout that makes this a very special film.
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July 29, 2011:
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Foreign Titles
- Sleep Furiously (DE)
- Sleep Furiously (UK)
