The Eye And The Wall Review: Sci-Fi-London Day Five

The 2023 Sci-Fi-London film festival is taking place from 31 May – 6 June 2023  at four cinemas in central London: the Prince Charles Cinema, the Picturehouse Central, the Garden Cinema and Rich Mix.

Sci-Fi-London has always showcased the very best of independent science fiction and this year is no different with a brilliant programme for everyone to enjoy.

It’s day five of the festival and today’s showing is the UK Premiere of Javier del Cid’s The Eye And The Wall. Our review…

The Eye and the Wall (2021) UK Première, 4 June, 6pm, Prince Charles Cinema

Elite fascist authorities use violence and fear to rule over Gabbahn City, an immured urban slum that is also a surveillance state and a closed system, while its inmates, amid constant shortages and poverty, struggle to survive and occasionally to resist. Alba (Cecilia Porras) wishes to stay with her family and continue helping the sick, but both her rebel boyfriend Abdel (Alexandre Alzate) and her aunt Lucre (Yolanda Coronado) are making separate deals to have her smuggled outside to an unknown freedom. As the authorities come down hard in pursuit of a stolen MacGuffin, a bleak drama plays out involving endless negotiation, exploitation and sacrifice, with the very faintest glimmer of hope on the other side.

Text that opens Javier del Cid’s feature debut states that the film is “in honour of all Latin-American immigrants”. This ensures that what we are watching, though clearly influenced by the dystopias of Orwellian allegorical fiction, is always grounded in, and extrapolated from, contemporary structures of oppression that are entirely real.

Sci-Fi-London will be taking place between 31 May and 6 June. Keep it with SciFiNow as we review the movies on each day of the festival.