★★★★
'This delicate, tonally complex film by Gideon Koppel is a documentary love-letter to Trefeurig, the Welsh farming community in Ceredigion where he grew up, and where his parents found refuge from Nazi Germany during the second world war. It is a rural society, outwardly placid and at one with a landscape of stunning beauty, but in fact in crisis. Koppel's film takes as its starting point the closure of the local school, a definitive, calamitous loss for a
place where shops and bus services have already vanished. The movie pays tribute to the grit of a people who may yet revive their economy, but it acknowledges a darker possibility, for which the sentimental note of an "elegy" is not appropriate. Slowly, but surely, Trefeurig appears to be dying, and Koppel's camera captures the consequent ripples of loss and regret.'
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian -
read the full review 'ENTRANCING'
Time Out
★★★★★
'This wonderful film...'
David Jenkins Time Out - read the full review
★★★★
'Here is a voice to be cherished....wonderful...'
'Images of wistful sadness are interlaced with humour and moments of skin-prickling beauty that leave the audience undone...profoundly and unexpectedly moving'
Wendy Ide, The Times
'Gideon KoppelÂ’s magnificent documentary...mixture of community portrait, pastoral fresco and musing on eternity...'
'Koppel somehow infuses the idyllic with the impassioned, the bleak with the lyrical, the inarticulate gaze with the evangelistic vision.'
'Koppel’s film transcends the pedagogic to touch the celebratory, the holistic, the mystical – if we allow that last word to include the materiality of a world fashioned for our senses but seldom, in a medium made for seeing and hearing, so fully perceived or lovingly honoured.'
Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times
★★★
'The elegiac tenderness and pictorial beauty becomes...quite compelling.'
'A film forged from a real love of place'
Antony Quinn, The Independent - read the full review
★★★★
'Riveting...extraordinary, ethereal...it looks, sounds and somehow even smells wholly new'
Sukhdev Sandhu, The Daily Telegraph - read the full review
★★★★★
‘...exotic...
miraculous...Â’
'timeless and warm...beautifully made, with a wealth of humour and humanity at its centre...Â’
‘...the most beautifully elemental documentary film to have emerged in Britain in over a decade...I canÂ’t applaud it loud enough.Â’
‘...Koppel reveals himself to be among the best listeners and watchers in the country...the beauty of his film lies in its ability to show us this truth...Â’
'A reminder of the magic of cinema'
Andrew OÂ’Hagan, The Evening Standard - read the full review 'KoppelÂ’s interest is in catching the everyday...but he does so with an extraordinary eye...'
'Sleep furiously is a portrait of a place, of a communal state of mind, and of a film-makerÂ’s idiosyncratic sensibility . ItÂ’s a thing of quiet, off-beat tender poetry, and I defy you not to warm to it'
Jonathan Romney, The Independent on Sunday - read the full review
★★★★★
‘One of the best British films I’ve seen in the las
t 12 months...Â’
Tom Charity, LoveFilm
★★★★★
'ThereÂ’s real poetry in these images...if you spent any considerable time in this island, I suspect itÂ’ll be impossible
not to connect with it in some small yet life-improving way.'
Mike McCahill, The Sunday Telegraph
★★★★
'...utterly charming....this is a compelling dissertation on human and physical geography...
Â’ Radio Times
★★★
‘...a
poetic picture of what stands to be lost through thoughtless modernisation...Â’
...astonishing, gorgeously crafted and surprisingly absorbing film – one of the stand-outs from last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival –first time film-maker Gideon Koppel delivers a dreamy and heartbreaking portrait of a Welsh farming community edging into decline.'
Alistair Harkness, The Scotsman‘...the stand-out movie of the summer so far.'
Kevin Maher, The Times Beautiful...exquisite and moving
Mark Ford, The Guardian - read the full review
‘SUBLIME...Gideon Koppel's record of life in a small Welsh community'
Jonathan Romney, The Independent on Sunday FILM OF THE MONTH
'a gorgeous, moving and deeply poetic work of art...Profound and utterly beguiling...SIMPLY, A MASTERPIECE'
'Profound and utterly beguiling...on the surface it seems no more than a series of carefully chosen moments from the a year in the life of a small rural community in Trefeurig in mid-Wales...it is simply – and it is simple in its sly way – a mutely gorgeous, moving and deeply poetic work of art...'
'Now more than ever we need films like this: grave, measured, subtly comic and beautifully wrought, free of polemic and yet offering a new way of seeing that is as old as Arcady.
Sleep Furiously is, simply, a masterpiece.'
John Banville, Sight and Sound - read the full review‘a haunting beauty... poetic, profound’
‘...the film exerts a powerful and palpable hypnotic hold...’
‘...quite unlike anything else you’ll see this year.Â’
Jason Wood, Little White Lies‘visually remarkable... infinitely beautiful ...marvellous... ‘
Alex Cox, Film Comment‘This film is pure cinema: visually alert, brilliantly musical, and moving’
Mark Cousins, author of Imagining Reality and The Story
