TFTHE FILMREVIEW · 50K FRESH TAKES
How a Kite Flies — poster
← ALL FRESH TAKES

SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW

How a Kite Flies: decision through memory.

How a Kite Flies · 2017

A source-led reading of How a Kite Flies as comedy: memory, decision, documented consensus, and the counterpoint that shifts the conclusion.

THE FILM EDITORIAL DESKAugust 31, 2026311 WORDS
01

THEMATIC CENTER

memory
02

NARRATIVE PRESSURE

decision
03

FORM

comedy
04

RECORD ANCHORS

voices · alcoholic · down-and-out

The record for How a Kite Flies yields three coordinates specific to its premise—voices, alcoholic, and down-and-out. That vocabulary places memory at the center and gives decision its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.

How a Kite Flies brings memory into contact with decision through comedy. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A lively, generous comedy whose sharp timing and joy in performance deserve a big-screen audience.

How a Kite Flies (2017) arrives with the coordinates of a drame film situated in 2010s cinema. The record credits Ben Gough with the direction and places Nick Halilaj and Marlow Gough in the foreground. With an unusually compact form, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.

Read as comedy, the film carries the pressure of decision. Memory behaves like an edit: it selects, connects, and sometimes distorts what once appeared settled. The most precise critical test is therefore how one choice alters every option that follows. Laughter creates a deceptive intimacy. The most productive angle is to watch what humor permits people to say, what it protects, and what it suddenly makes visible in the relationships between characters.

The twist is to treat forgetting not as an absence, but as an active force organizing the present. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of memory, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. Viewed this way, the test of success changes: the durable laugh is the one that leaves a relationship slightly altered.

THE VERDICT, REFRAMED

The twist: follow what laughter releases, then what it leaves behind. Here, memory changes meaning under the pressure of decision.

THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT

Sir Ian McKellen voices an alcoholic kite. A down-and-out who prefers to hang around his dingy local strip joint rather than get out into the blue sky. But when memories of happier times come back to haunt him, he decides to take action and try one last flight.

Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.
Year
2017
Runtime
6 min
Direction
Ben Gough
Performers
Nick Halilaj · Marlow Gough · Robyn Cooper · Marat Khairoullin · Ian McKellen · Lily Lowe-Myers · Marion Burge · Austin Hardiman