"Sleep Furiously" by Gideon Koppel

I watched 'Sleep Furiously' and admired the way it cut across geographic boundaries. There was an elegance in the rhythm of what was recorded that appealed to me.





Peter Bradshaw writing in The Guardian 29 May 2009 says:  

"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. 

Between these melancholy tableaux, the visual palate is cleaned with single-colour panels, and with weird speeded-up sequences. One repeated image was a real madeleine for me: the sight of the mobile library trundling around the winding roads, a vital source of reading, thought, ideas ... everything. Trefeurig is full of people who love books. I couldn't help remembering the mobile library that used to appear in the village of my own childhood (Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire): a purple bus, shaped like an elongated tallboy wardrobe on wheels, which, Tardis-like, had a miraculous stock of books, far more than appeared possible from the outside. It gave you the feeling, when you effortfully climbed the big steps to get in and stood in its narrow aisle between the two great walls of books, that its centre of gravity was that little bit too high and that the whole vehicle would topple over if it took a corner at anything over 15 mph - and might well do so at rest, if you moved around inside too quickly."

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