About August 22, This Year

By Léo Soesanto

August truly is a delectable month for cinema (Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st and Miguel Gomes’s Our Beloved Month of August) and Graham Foy adds yet another beautiful day, starting from the most unnerving idea there is: the end of the world. A pseudo-documentary on earnest pre-apocalyptic melancholy, August 22, This Year unfolds as a soothed symphony of micro-moments one has come to cherish. The main colours are blue, the main chords are bluesy; this collective portrait strikes a new tone in the midst of the current pandemic: "A film that shows what is happening now, not what will happen next."

At La Semaine de La Critique