2019

Bait

Something is happening in Cornwall – the emergence of a unique brand of film-making, spearheaded by the groundbreaking work of Mark Jenkin. Having served a lengthy stint in the digital medium, Jenkin rediscovered his love of film through experimentation with Super 8 and 16mm. His short film Bronco’s House (2015), shot without sound, laid the groundwork for Bait, which I have called “the defining British film of the decade”. Indeed, it is my firm belief that, in years to come, film historians will cite both Bait and its successor, Enys Men, as milestones in the evolution of British cinema – films that are fundamentally rooted in the landscape, heritage and culture of Cornwall, but that have the kind of universal appeal that comes from obsessively intimate attention to detail. In that same year, I also loved Alejandro Landes’s Monos (with its superb Mica Levi score), the documentary For Sama (plaudits to composer Nainita Desai) and writer-director Harry Wootliff’s marvellous bittersweet romance Only You.