The Ceremony (15) |Close-Up Film Review
Dir: Jack King , UK, 2024, 92 mins, Kurdish/English/Romanian/Arabic with subtitles
Cast: Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu, Erdal Yildiz
Review by Carol Allen
It’s a fraught and racist environment. When a customer complains that a valuable watch has been stolen from his car, suspicion falls on Mustafa (Mustafa Husseini), who refuses to own up and Cristi throws him out of the communal house, where they all doss down. Later however he finds the man has committed suicide.
He can’t call the police because of everyone’s illegal immigrant status, so with the help of Kurdish worker Yusuf (Erdal Yildiz) he hides the dead man in the firm’s van and drives out onto the Yorkshire moors looking for somewhere to dump the body.
Yusuf, who like the deceased is a Muslim, has other ideas however. He is determined to give the dead man a decent burial, a ceremony. And as the two of them drive around looking for a solution to the dilemma, conflicts arise between them and the stories of both men are revealed.
A story about illegal immigrants currently has an unfortunate topicality, though I doubt the film will gain much sympathy from the anti-immigration lobby. They won’t of course see it or even be aware of it. The two main actors are both very good, though the story inside its classic structure is somewhat predictable. It’s well directed and shot in an appropriately gloomy black and white, which fits the mood of the story, though it makes the sequences taking place at night sometimes difficult to follow
It’s the sort of film which wins praise and prizes at festivals. King, himself mixed race and native to Bradford, won the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Film-making Excellence with it at last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. But it’s not the sort of film which is going to draw a large audience at your local cinema. More likely to show up late one night on Channel 4 or one of the streaming channels.
