With shades of The Imposter (NZIFF 2012) and Three Identical Strangers (NZIFF 2018) this wildly entertaining Scottish documentary delves into the outrageous deception that shook a Glasgow high school back in the 1990s.
Exceedingly creative and endlessly clever… We won’t reveal what the mystery at the center of this WTF tale is. We will say that how it unfolds onscreen is, in its own way, low-key brilliant.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2022
My Old School 2022
| Aug 08 | | ||
| Aug 14 | |
“Debuting feature director Jono McLeod offers a deliciously compelling look back in bemusement at the story around Brandon Lee, a young man with whom McLeod himself went to school – at Bearsden Academy, a much sought-out secondary school in a posh suburb of Glasgow, Scotland – in 1993. Lee turned out, to put it mildly, to be not exactly who he said he was. So there’s a poetic justice to having him ‘played’ onscreen by Scottish actor-writer-singer Alan Cumming who lip-syncs immaculately to audio recordings of the real Lee.
It’s a wacky, rarely used technique, notably deployed in Clio Bernard’s equally off-kilter doc The Arbor (NZIFF 2010). Here it makes sense in a story about performance and deception. Simply designed animation, modelled on the look of cool cartoons of the time such as Daria, adds an extra comic jauntiness…
These quirky comic devices also help to vary the texture throughout, given that the story is essentially told through interviews with other classmates from the same year and the few teachers who remember what happened. We’ll be coy about what happened in the end so as to not spoil the fun… It created quite the mini news-media scandal back in the 90s when Lee’s true identity broke.” — Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter