We got some lovely feedback on ‘Leaving Limbo’ including reviews in the Sunday Times, Independent and Irish Examiner. Watch this space as the film will be shown at ‘Half Moon Film Fest’ in Cork in April, and will also be re-shown on RTE in the coming months
From the Examiner:
Amidst reruns of Mrs Brown’s Boys, recaps of a TV presenter’s career, and tributes to deceased entertainers, Christmas television seemed sorted. The unwanted chocolates, more than likely the strawberry ones, remained untouched at the end of the box as the channel hopping between the terrestrial and the streaming threw up the same predictable options.
Until it didn’t.
An unexpected documentary on RTÉ One on New Year’s night gave us the stories of Natasha Maimba and Minahil Sarfraz.
With a showdown between Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin being predicted as the defining moment for the decade ahead, it can be hard to locate leadership.
And then you meet Natasha Maimba and Minahil Sarfraz — two 18-year-olds who arrived in Ireland as young children, their mothers fleeing persecution in Zimbabwe and Pakistan respectively.
The friends met in a direct provision centre in Athlone, both seeing education as their way out of this life in limbo.
And so they put their heads down and focused on the books — the documentary Leaving Limbo follows the girls’ preparation for the Leaving Cert in Our Lady’s Bower school.
From the Indo:
“Co-directed by Maurice O’Brien and Cara Holmes, Leaving Limbo is a sympathetic and considered exploration of a complex situation that seems to provoke the worst in people….
What’s most striking about Natasha and Minahil is how good-natured they are, how optimistic and positive.
They’re quick to laugh, they’re engaged and engaging, curious about the world and their place in it as “new Irish”.
It sounds like a syrupy cliché, but things like that matter a lot.
So does serious-minded television, made with sincerity — as an example of that, Leaving Limbo wasn’t half-bad at all.
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/television/tv-reviews/leaving-limbo-review-a-sympathetic-and-considered-exploration-of-a-complex-situation-38826637.html