Claire Rushbrook and Adeel Akhtar are the middle-aged lovers defying familial prejudice and cultural barriers in Ali & Ava (arriving on major VOD platforms on Monday), but that’s only one of the romances unfolding in British director Clio Barnard’s gentle, sentimental film. More metaphorically, Ali & Ava extends Barnard’s ongoing devotion to the Yorkshire city of Bradford, not far from her own home town of Otley.
It’s her third film set in the once-booming beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution, and while she doesn’t over-romanticise Bradford’s mixture of Victorian grandeur and contemporary poverty, a palpable affection for its physical and social geography softens the edges of its realism. More so than in Barnard’s previous Bradford-set films, her exquisitely tough fable of childhood tragedy and trauma The Selfish Giant (Arrow) and her formally daring, semi-performed documentary The Arbor (BFI Player), a portrait of the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar in which the authenticity of the location threads an experimental blend of performance and archival recording. Collectively they confirm Barnard as one of Britain’s great Yorkshire film-makers.
