Tastefully unromanticised and beautiful memoir

Rating: 9/10 (1 February 2017)

Unalike memoirs such as Mask, Lion never seeks to romanticise its characters beyond their real life counterparts in order for us to see them as worth while. Sheru is not remarkable for his intelligence (or if he is, we never see it). Instead he is remarkable in that after everything he goes through, he smiles.
The emotions he is going going through and the strength required not to rise above them but simply survive them are shown in a style mid way between Tarkovskys "The Mirror" and Lynchs "The Elephant Man". The lynchian ambivalent details such as a room of children singing in the night remind me of my own memoirs of childhood by their particular and incredibly human emotion. Not grandiose, but human and all the better for it.
It is very restrained in some details though, at one point a young Sheru is chased through a tunnel; we don't know who by or why, because neither did he. It reminds me of when a WWII survivor told me of Kristallnacht, ignorance grounds these moments in reality, it is this reality that makes each moment endlessly enthralling.
One moment that sticks out is the simple shot of an approaching bridge from a train and many many voices calling out. The actors speaking the native language, the genuine child actor and the aforementioned reality makes this simple shot one of the most ominous I've seen for a very long time. All in one movie we see absolute horrors of the worlds in which some live and the genuine love and beauty in life, all in the unforgettable, bittersweet and yet unromanticised reality of a memoir.
We see fear in the eyes of people, in handfuls of city dust. We see love in the eyes of others and in handfuls of beach sand. All on a journey, a long way away from home.