Eye For Film >> Movies >> Love You, Joseff Hughes (2005) Film Review
Love You, Joseff Hughes
Reviewed by: Amber Wilkinson
Proving simple is effective comes this delicately told love story with a twist.
Anna (Sioned Jones) and Joseff (Steffan Donnelly) are young pals. They play tag and other childhood games but there is a deeper resonance to their relationship.
Director Dan Hartley, who has been busily cutting his teeth as a video operator on the Harry Potter films over the past few years, elicits wonderful performances from both Jones and Donnelly – let's hope we see an awful lot more of them in future.
Although ostensibly about children, writer Catrin Cooper’s screenplay has gossamer strands of philosophy shooting right through it, yet the children never seem out of their depth, with Hartley cleverly capturing the subtleties in their acting. There is something of the past about this film – think Tom’s Midnight Garden, not Grange Hill – as childhood fun and games gives way to something far more profound.
It’s hard enough for directors to catch the nuances of adult emotion on camera, but Hartley – helped by a lovely score from Tandis Jenhudson - goes one step further and captures them in the face of a child. There is more heart in this 10 minutes than in the full runtime of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone.
Reviewed on: 04 Jan 2007