Whitewash

By Gary M. Kramer.

The 2013 Tribeca Film Festival offered attendees hundreds of films—documentaries, dramas, thrillers, comedies, and character studies—that sought to reveal some aspect of the human condition. Here is a rundown of five films from the festival.

BIG JOY: The Adventures of James Broughton

One of the best entries at the festival this year was BIG JOY: The Adventures of James Broughton (Eric Slade and Stephen Silha, 2013) an infectious documentary. The subject is the effervescent James Broughton, a poet and filmmaker who celebrated life and the body. BIG JOY nimbly weaves together images of and by the poet along with interviews by writers, and lovers, including the film critic Pauline Kael, his first wife. This documentary nicely provides a history of Broughton’s life as performance artist Keith Hennessy chronicles the subject’s development against the explosion of the San Francisco creative groups that provided the “soil” for the Beats’ growth. He struggled with sexual repression and expression as a child, and as an adult, which BIG JOY suggests fueled his creative work. In the 1950s, when being queer was dangerous and queer art was closeted, Broughton developed poetry and films as someone “outside the outsiders, under the underground.” Making films, Broughton says, “saved my life” and viewers unfamiliar with Broughton’s work will likely want to seek out his short, The Bed, which “moved the culture forward” in showing copious nudity and free love. BIG JOY also addresses Broughton’s interest in Jungian analysis and Zen, and his long-term relationship with his last lover, Joel. But the film is best when Broughton’s poetry—which “focuses on the serious by being silly”—is read or when the clips of Erogeny, a sensuous poem/film about touch, is shown. The work by this irrepressible poet and filmmaker best illustrates (to use one of Broughton’s favorite words) his jocund use of language and movement.

Reaching for the Moon

Another film about a queer poet was Reaching for the Moon (Brune Barreto, 2013). This tasteful, English language period drama—set in 1951 and based on a true story—chronicles poetess Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto) and her intense relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares (Glória Pires). The film shows how Bishop comes in to her own in Brazil, when she travels there to see her college friend Mary (Tracy Middendorf). Mary, who is estranged from her parents since they discovered she was a lesbian, is in a relationship with Lota, who dislikes the uptight Elizabeth initially. But this outsider in Brazil is soon seduced by the change of environment and learns to be herself. It’s a soggy love triangle at first, when Lota (who likes her lovers to bathe her) overthrows Mary (who cries) and embraces Elizabeth (who is caught in the rain). But once the relationship between Lota and Elizabeth takes hold, Reaching for the Moon becomes absorbing. Lota gives her lover a place to write, and Elizabeth wins a Pulitzer Prize; Elizabeth gives Lota the support she needs—until she abandons her lover temporarily to take a job teaching at NYU. Director Bruno Barreto captures the co-dependent relationship between these two women well, though the scenes of Lota admonishing Elizabeth for her drinking feel a bit clunky. The two lead actresses give strong, convincing performances. Pires, in particular, is excellent as Lota, especially when she reveals a darker pain beneath her strong exterior. Reaching for the Moon also benefits from its use of Bishop’s poems, which imbue this elegant film with extra poignancy.

Fresh Meat

In Fresh Meat (Danny Mulheron, 2013), a mild horror/comedy from New Zealand, Rina (Hanna Tevita) is an attractive young Maori with hidden same-sex desires who discovers—to her discomfort—that her family also had a lifestyle change while she was away at an all-girls’ school. The truth—that her family members are cannibals—comes out just as criminals, which include the sexy Gigi (Kate Elliott), take them hostage. While the Maoris and the gang members form alliances or betray one another, often on the basis of saving one’s skin or the chance to eat someone else’s, Fresh Meat offers some indelible images. One shot of a severed body is pretty memorable, as is a clever “boo” moment in the final reel. Alas, most of Fresh Meat, is stale, playing out as loud and violent as possible, and emphasizing the gore while making obvious or broad jokes—as when one characters asks, “Is that an ear on my plate?” And while Temuera Morrison is a vivid, engaging presence as Rina’s father, he also tends to chew the scenery—not unlike how he eats an index finger in a dinner table scene.

Whitewash

In the nifty Canadian thriller Whitewash (Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, 2012), Thomas Haden Church gives an appropriately flinty performance as Bruce, an alcoholic snowplow driver. With his craggy weather beaten face, that belies a hard life, Bruce becomes further trapped—literally and figuratively—in a bad situation following a crime he committed (perhaps accidentally). When he gets his snowplow stuck in the wilderness, he tries to survive with minimal shelter, food and clothing. However, he cannot help but reflect back on the recent events leading up to his situation. Haunted, alone, hungry and cold, Bruce tries to come to terms with his life: past, present, and future. Whitewash provides Church with a juicy role, and the actor is fantastic here. He is particularly expressive physically, conveying tremendous emotion with his excellent body language and minimal dialogue. The film, directed and co-written by Emanuel Hoss-Demarais, is also beautifully photographed; an early scene of Bruce’s snowplow disappearing into the night is as breathtaking as the shots of the empty, snow-covered wilderness that mirror the frozen emotions Bruce is feeling.

The English Teacher

Alas, another character study, The English Teacher (Craig Zisk, 2012), is less successful. The voice over (by narrator Fiona Shaw) that introduces Linda Sinclair (Julianne Moore) sets up that the title character is a single and critical spinster—meaning, by the end of the film, she will find love after experiencing some life lessons and humiliation. If this broad comedy, written by Dan and Stacy Charlton and directed by Craig Zisk, had perhaps deviated from this obvious course, The English Teacher may have been a smart comedy rather than the sophomoric one it is. One night, Linda encounters her former student, Jason Sherwood (Michael Angarano), a promising but failed playwright who is now being pressured from his father (Greg Kinnear) to go to law school. After reading Jason’s play, Linda decides she wants to stage it at her high school. As the production is mounted, Linda and Jason start (and quickly stop) a sexual relationship that causes her to feel jealous when Jason later becomes affectionate with the play’s leading actress, Halle (Lily Collins). More trouble ensues when an explicit verbal exchange between Linda and Jason is filmed and posted online, which results in her being fired. These episodes emphasize that the uptight Linda is flawed because she can read books, but not people. It is, therefore, unsatisfying that Linda never confronts Jason about the lies he tells, and that she holds onto her assumptions about Jason and his father, even after she is told the truth. As such, it is frustrating to watch the flailing Moore become flustered as her character makes a series of bad decisions; her character elicits neither pity nor laughs. Ultimately, The English Teacher is as naïve as the film’s title character, and neither quite earn their redemption.

Gary M. Kramer is the author of Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews, and co-editor of the forthcoming Directory of World Cinema: Argentina.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

By Jacob Mertens.

I have become convinced that I bring bad weather with me to Austin. For the last three years I have attended the SXSW Film Festival, and for the last three years it has rained on me. In one absurd moment in 2012, I rode a friend’s bike into downtown Austin during a severe thunderstorm, wearing two soaked through sweaters and listening to Wu-Tang Clan on my iPod, mouthing the words, feeling convinced I was the most absurd member of press to ever attend a film festival. Naturally, this year I forgot all my former troubles and thought I could avoid the bad favor of the weather gods. Early on in the festival week my prospects were promising: clouds hung gray and foreboding sure, but they would not release a drop of rain. That is, not until the third day. I leave the theater at midnight, feeling smug in my victory over unseen forces, only to find the fair city of Austin submerged in water. Deflated and alone, I stomp my way through a biblical downpour wondering where all the cab drivers in the city had gone to.

If the old adage of having to suffer for what you love plays true, then at least SXSW 2013 delivers on its end of the deal. This year, the festival lineup shines just as bright as ever, gray clouds or no, and I find it impossible to stay angry at the weather gods for long. No, truly I must concede. Give me 6^th street’s jazz musicians riffing on “Pumped Up Kicks” and tech geeks fluttering across the convention center with eyes glued to their smart phones. Give me midnight screenings of campy horror films and food trucks peddling breakfast tacos. Give me James Franco uttering “Spring Break Forever” into a microphone, all to the jubilation of a sold out Paramount Theater. SXSW, I will take you unconditionally, and the next time it rains I will simply channel my inner Gene Kelly.

 All Hail the Headliners

 For what would become a brilliant event, SXSW 2013 kicked off with a worrisome start. The official opening night picture, Don

Evil Dead

Scardino’s The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, frankly had no business being at a film festival beyond shamelessly selling badges. The film follows the burgeoning career of magicians Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), who find fame and success only to watch it slip from their fingers, eclipsed by the grotesque stunts of rival magician Steve Gray (Jim Carrey). Without committing more words than the film deserves, it can simply be said that Wonderstone underwhelms as a toothless comedy. The film has no bite, and all its attempts at humor bear the signature of a negligent rehashing of stale comedic tropes. Furthermore, the film shows a complete misunderstanding of casting. Burt Wonderstone has let fame turn him into a pompous, womanizing caricature, and perhaps in the right hands this role could have been convincing.  And yet, Carell cannot be believed as the character because he has built up his acting career as a warmhearted buffoon. All in all, after opening last year with the stellar The Cabin in the Woods (2012), SXSW takes a severe step back and trades in their opening film slot for star power and little else.

Thankfully, a more appropriate opening film screened a couple short hours after The Incredible Burt Wonderstone drew its curtains. Taking place in a cabin in the woods, much like the aforementioned Drew Goddard horror flick, Evil Dead offers the glorious return of the Necronomicon: still bound in human flesh, still immune to fire, and still waiting to unleash hell on unsuspecting teenagers. The series reboot suffers a terrible opening act of exposition, but clearly excels in its horror genre staples. Directed by Fede Alvarez, Evil Dead takes great creative liberties in generating suspense, and allowing the tension of a scene to effortlessly evolve into screaming terror and unrelenting gore. The characters may feel superficial, but if the audience cared more about them the film would quickly become an act of cruelty. As it stands, each character remains just plausible enough to make you cringe when they hack of their hand with a bone saw or attempt to peel their face off with the broken shards of a mirror. The film is irreverent, exciting, and most importantly a lot of fun to watch with a big crowd. In other words, it is the perfect film for this festival.

Much Ado About Nothing

If SXSW only sought familiar territory with its programming, Evil Dead could have been the shining crown of headliners. However, Harmony Korine’s North American premiere of Spring Breakers easily stole away with that distinction. Making excellent use of a new collaboration with  cinematographer Benoît Debie of Irreversible (2002) and Enter the Void (2009) fame, Korine crafts the  lurid and often lyrical narrative of four girls letting loose on spring vacation. While the film runs the constant danger of being misunderstood, Korine is careful to embrace the hedonism of his film’s spring break subculture while simultaneously offering critical commentary on it. Ultimately, Spring Breakers can be considered a meditation on excess, breaking ground with its depiction of society’s idolization of violence and material wealth. That said, the director’s penchant for bizarre narrative diversions give the film some of its most memorable moments. Most notably, James Franco’s white rapper turned drug dealer Alien plays a Brittany Spears ballad on his piano as “his girls,” dressed in pink bikinis and ski masks, totting machine guns like cute accessories, dance around him and harmonize on the refrain. Filmmaking cannot get more sublime than that.

 The War of the Words

When writing screenplays you must have a keen ear for dialogue, otherwise your film will move with dead feet. Of course, when in doubt it does not hurt to enlist the help of some assured source material. Joss Whedon’s modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing has picked up momentum after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, and now finds the director returning to SXSW. Much Ado takes place in the director’s own house, and spins the tale of a love-hate relationship between the quick tongued and scornful Beatrice (Amy Acker) and the pompous but agile minded Benedick (Alexis Denisof). Whedon sets up this surprisingly deft retelling of the bard’s comedy with a cast handpicked from former projects, primarily showcasing his well suited pair of contentious leads. Meanwhile, a sense of playful guile pervades each scene, a few revisionist tweaks find Much Ado much more lascivious than last remembered, and actors snap off each line of dialogue with the conviction of aged theater veterans. Shot in black and white within the confines of a mansion, Much Ado has an abundance of class and style, and gives the audience a good reason to revisit the story.

Drinking Buddies

Ironically, another film that impressed with its back and forth banter never had a fully written script to begin with. Joe Swangberg created Drinking Buddies as part of a tradition of largely improvised films, attempting to hone in on an honest tenor of conversation. The film follows the friendship of two co-workers, Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson), who both find themselves in committed relationships with other people. And yet, there is a constant, nagging feeling that the two might belong together. By foregoing a written script, the conversations in Drinking Buddies easily evolve into single pivotal argument between Kate and Luke. The two have ignored their attraction to each other, but at a certain point the tension between them breaks and they must either act on their impulses or not. Thankfully, the other relationships in the film, particularly Luke’s relationship with Jill (Anna Kendrick), do not feel like side notes that merely serve as obstacles between Luke and Kate’s potential happiness. Instead, Drinking Buddies takes a step back and studies how these characters might idolize what they do not have and neglect what they do. The film might begin as an offbeat romantic comedy, but it plays out as an understated portrait of young love.

Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 goes yet another route, as characters struggle to examine the conflict lying beneath words exchanged. Taking place in a facility that offers temporary housing to displaced youths, the drama delicately illustrates the loss of innocence and the attempt to piece a life together afterward. Centered on a breakout performance by Brie Larson, who plays a staff supervisor named Grace, each conversation in the film gives the impression that the adults are walking through minefields. This feeling of caution culminates in a young girl’s illustrated story of a squid, who slowly lets a shark eat each of her eight legs in the name of friendship. As twisted reimagining of The Giving Tree, this brief tale deeply resonates with Grace, who cries at its conclusion: namely, the shark devours what is left of the octopus and swims away. Intuitively, Grace reads beneath the scrawled story lines and sees that the girl has been abused by her father. This moment, both gentle and surprisingly effecting, could go on to characterize the entire film.

Up Close and Personal: Documentaries at SXSW

First Cousin Once Removed

SXSW 2013 has no shortage of personal narratives, but this year the documentaries proved particularly moving, each sharing intimate stories with perfect filmgoing strangers. In the case of Alan Berliner’s First Cousin Once Removed, the subject was one close to the director’s heart. In the film, Berliner interviews family member Edwin Honig, naturally a first cousin once removed, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Having shared an affinity with Edwin before the disease set in, Berliner returns with his camera looking for signs of the man’s former self. However, Edwin’s mind seems more a cage these days, one that only shows the odd glimpse of his former towering intellect as a poet and a scholar. As Berliner maps Edwin’s descent into a pale-minded man prone to childish fits and yet somehow enraptured by sight of leaves rustling in the wind, he admits his own fear that he may follow in Edwin’s path. The fear is an understandable one, and little about Berliner’s film can soothe it. Instead, Alzheimer’s disease is depicted as it should be: a kind of torture that one can only vaguely be aware of. Still, First Cousin leaves viewers with the elegant notion that regardless of how we leave this world, our passing can hold the meaning of a full life lived.

Treading more friendly waters, Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet from Stardom details the plight of backup singers deserving a chance at the spotlight and rarely being able to seize it. The film largely focuses on the rise of black, soul-infused backup singers in the 1960s, and carries through to an age in which this kind of singing has become a lost art. Neville’s film benefits from subject material that any music-loving audience can relate to, but that has similarly never had a chance in the sun before now. Indeed, some of these stories feel like moments of much needed catharsis that have been building up for decades. One woman was offered a chance at a single only to have her song stolen away by the producer, who gave an established band the credit and had them lip-sync the words. Another woman sings soul with such power and subtle sweetness, it could make Aretha Franklin give up the floor to her. However, a music insider reminds the audience that Aretha came first, and recording studios felt there could be only one “great” soul singer to market at a time. However, the film’s greatest gift lies in its ability to illuminate what these backup singers gave to a song. In an arresting sequence, the film plays the backup vocals on the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter, as the singer in question tells the audience that she was pulled out of bed by the producer, sometime in the ungodly hours of morning, and showed up to sing the fabled chorus with her hair still in curlers. As her voice soars, free of instrumentation and Mick Jagger’s graveled duet, the scene cannot help but give chills.

Elena

Finally, in Petra Costa’s documentary Elena, the director tells the painful story of her sister Elena, whose life was cut short by suicide, and of her own life living under the shadow of Elena’s ghost. The film combines stock VHS footage of Elena, taken when Petra was a child, and a combination of lyrical footage and informal interviews. All these threads are tied together by Petra’s doleful voiceover, which at its best accentuates her own grief as a tangible conflict in the film. Petra has followed her sister’s footsteps to study theater in New York, acting against the wishes of her family, and now feels the weight of her sister’s tragic life always present in her own. However, if Petra’s woeful words paint an image of despair, by the end her gift at poetry helps to soothe these troubled feelings. In her closing monologue, Petra tells her audience that “little by little the pain turns to water, becomes memory,” and as she spins in circles in the middle of an empty street crossing in New York City, her relief becomes tangible as well.

Jacob Mertens is Review Editor of Film International.

The Man Who Laughs

By N. Buket Cengiz.

At the 32^nd International Istanbul Film Festival organized by İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), which ran from March 30^th to April the 14^th, outstanding examples of the art of cinema from all around the world were screened yet again this year. The film What Richard Did (2012), directed by Lenny Abrahamson and loosely based on Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock, won the international competition of the Golden Tulip award, which is granted in memory of the late Şakir Eczacıbaşı, former chairman of IKSV. The festival offered a variety of brilliant adaptations of literature both in the Golden Tulip competition and in a separate section entitled From Literature to Silver Screen. From such classics as The Man Who Laughs (L´Homme Qui Rit, 2012) by Jean-Pierre Améris and adapted from the novel by Victor Hugo to Great Expectations (2012), an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s masterpiece by Mike Newell, as well as the contemporary work Night Train to Lisbon (2013) by Bille August, which is based on Pascal Mercier’s international best-seller, the section consisted of adaptations of literary works through the language of cinema which offered viewers unforgettable moments.

The Special Jury Prize in the international section of the Golden Tulip award was granted to  Camille Claudel, 1915 (2012) by Bruno Dumont, and in the national competition the Golden Tulip Best Film Award was given to Thou Gild’st the Even (Sen Aydınlatırsın Geceyi, 2013) by Onur Ünlü. Numerous Turkish films in the Golden Tulip national competition programme garnered attention and received invitations from representatives of international film festivals worldwide.

The Film Award of the Council of Europe (FACE) was given by the Human Rights Jury to Patience Stone (Syngué Sabour, 2012), another outstanding literary adaptation at this year’s festival. In this film, which is based on his own novel, Atiq Rahimi tells the story of an Afghan woman in search of her share of pleasure and fulfilment in life, offering a striking account of the risks that strong women are willing to make against the most difficult of odds.

The People’s Choice Awards, which are sponsored by the Turkish daily Radikal and determined by votes given by the festival audience, was presented to House with a Turret (Dom s Bashenkoy, 2012) by Eva Neymann in the international competition. Yet another adaptation of literature to film, this time based on a story by Friedrich Gorenstein, House with a Turret depicts post-World War II Russia from the eyes of a an eight year-old boy who is left on his own in the middle of the vast landscape of Russia burdened by endless suffering and the emotional blunting that it brings about. Another outstanding Russian film at this year’s festival was In the Fog (V Tumane, 2012) by Sergei Loznitsa, a film which takes place in the western frontiers of Russia in 1942. Set against the background of a dauntingly wild and bitterly cold forest, the psychological battle between an army officer and a railroad worker poses questions about the limits of the life instinct when it collides with the concepts of dignity and self-respect. The abundance and authenticity of Russian films set in World War II suggests the ways that the people of Russia are still struggling with the trauma of that era.

Looking at the past through the silver screen

House with a Turret

This year, the festival was imbued with a strong sense of nostalgia, and this was reflected in the themes of several outstanding films as well as by the activism being carried out against the closing of Istanbul’s Emek Cinema, a renowned old theatre that for the fourth year running has been missed as the central venue of the festival.

The Spirit of ’45 (2012), a documentary by Ken Loach, came to the fore at the festival as a poignant look at the zeitgeist of the post-war era in Britain. Basing his film on a spirit of collectivism which brought about the Keynesian economic approach of the Labour Party, Ken Loach dwells on the memories of generations who worked hard and felt a sense of security under a welfare system. Based on oral historical accounts woven together with archive footage, the documentary explores the gradual degradation of the welfare state, and even though the film focuses on this issue from the days of social government to the age of neo-liberalism in the UK, the subject matter is global in scope and audiences from all over the world can find a lot to connect with in this film. The participants are admirable, particularly the retired workers who are endowed with such a strong sense of class consciousness, a sensibility that seems so remote today, whether in the UK or anywhere else. This documentary, which poetically documents the times before the advent of neo-liberal greed, prods viewers to ponder on the subject of the welfare state, and the film is especially relevant these days, particularly with the passing of Margaret Thatcher.

The Spirit of ’45

Shifting from the post-war era of the UK, Laurent Cantet’s Firefox: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012) takes audiences to the USA in the 1950s. Set in a working class neighbourhood in a small town in upstate New York in 1953, the adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel explores the issues of race, class and gender through a gripping story. Bolstered by the strong acting of up-and-coming actresses, particularly of dramatic arts student Katie Coseni, the film is a remarkable account of an almost instinctive resistance against machismo, a resistance which fails due to the lack of political awareness and references

Remembering the struggles of past generations

Films set in the late 60s and 70s graced this year’s festival through the inspiration of the activist soul of the ’68 Generation. In her latest film Ginger & Rosa (2012), Sally Potter focuses on the lives of two girls in their early youth who are in search for their identities as the long road to adulthood unfolds before them. In this brave film, Potter’s mastery is admirable in that it makes a sincerely sophisticated and admiringly sharp critique of the thin line between a victory over bourgeois morality and the transgression of ethics. Through its multiple layers, the film triumphantly takes up a number of quite important and difficult issues concerning parental responsibility and morals. This is a haunting meditation on how the prison of the household for a wife can become a barrier to becoming a good mother, offering a unique vantage point onto the traditionally held idea that a housewife should be solely dedicated to her children, and the film also explores what can happen when the idea of free love goes to the extreme.

Ginger & Rosa

Something in the Air by Olivier Assayas (2012) is set in 1970s Paris and tells the story of youngsters at the crossroads between the soul of activism and personal ambitions. The film traces the story of a group of young bright teenagers driven by enthusiasm but who eventually drift apart as they move in different directions following the outcomes of their decisions. The underground community is crisply rendered through the vivid characters in this film, which is worthy of praise for its casting as well as costume design resulting in the naturalness of the story’s rendition.

Night Train to Lisbon (2013) by Bille August, set during Salazar’s dictatorship in 70s fascist Lisbon, is a melancholic journey into the life of Portuguese author Amadeu de Prado, tracing the stories of the leftist resistance and a love triangle. The poetry of de Prado is combined with Annette Focks’s fascinating music and Filip Zumbrunn’s strong cinematography, resulting in a touching depiction of picturesque Lisbon, and the story unfolds into an elaborate philosophical voyage into the soul. In all of these period films, the brutality of the police is a central issue, calling into question the solidness of European democracy when the system comes under critique.

Greetings from Tim Buckley (2012) by Daniel Algrat also addresses the free spirit of the 60s. Based on the real-life events of legendary musician Tim Buckley and his son Jeff Buckley, both of whom died tragically at young ages, this film with its soulful protagonists was popular particularly among young audiences and was a powerful start for the festival’s wonderful documentaries about music.

Best listens of the festival

Searching for Sugar Man

Searching for Sugar Man (2013) by Malik Bendjelloul, which was selected the best documentary at the Academy Awards this year, tells the unlikely story of Rodriguez, a musician who lived a modest life as a labourer upon the expiration of his contract with his record company due to the limited financial success of his two albums. Interestingly, he was immensely popular in another part of the world but never knew it. This film tells the story of how he became aware of this awkward situation and is embellished with Rodriguez’s exquisite songs.

At this year’s festival, film-goers had the opportunity to see Sound City (2013) by Dave Grohl. The film examines America’s legendary recording studio Sound City which was where such bands as Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, Metallica, and Nirvana recorded in 70s, 80s, and 90s until it was closed down like numerous other studios due to developments in recording techniques which worked against the human dimension of the process. Fans of the music which was produced in this legendary studio packed the venue at the screening of this bittersweet documentary.

In the documentary film Longing (Garod, 2012), Onur Günay and Burcu Yıldız follow Armenian musicians Onnik Dinkjian and Ara Dinkjian during their journey through Anatolia, a land which they always felt connected to despite their physical distance from it. We see the two musicians visiting an Armenian village in Diyarbakır  – a city in the southeast of Turkey – as they talk about the past and we follow the bridge they have been building with Anatolian culture and the people of Turkey through their collaborations with musicians in Turkey in this well made, moving film.

A World Not Ours

There was more on the agonies and hopes of the region of the Middle East with the films Bekas (2012) by Karzan Kader, a movie that tells the story of two homeless brothers as they journey to meet Superman, Gatekeepers (Shomerei Ha´Saf , 2012) by Dror Moreh, a  documentary film based on interviews with the six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel´s  internal secret service agency, and A World Not Ours (2012) by Mahdi Fleifel, a documentary about life in the refugee camp of Ein el-Helweh in southern Lebanon which brought to the fore the different dimensions and outcomes of the endless turmoil in the area.

Emek protests go international

Since 2010, the International Istanbul Film Festival organizers and audiences as well as other activists who struggle for the right to the city have been carrying out a struggle to protect the classical Emek movie theatre. Historically, Emek had been the main venue of the festival until it was closed down in 2010 to make way for a project aiming to transform the building into a shopping mall. This year, Costa Gavras, who received a lifetime achievement award and whose film Capital made its Turkey premiere during the festival, joined the ranks of protesters for the Emek theatre and wrote a letter to Prime Minister R. T. Erdoğan to support protection of the theatre. On the last day of the festival, members of unions connected to the cinema industry as well as supporters came together for the third time during this year’s festival to protest this plan which will destroy this landmark of the art of cinema in Turkey. The demonstrations were covered in the international press along with messages of solidarity from cinema circles around the world. In fact, Emek is but one victim of the aggressive project of urban transformation that has been ongoing during the last decade in Turkey, particularly in Istanbul. Offering a critique of the transgressions of city rights and an exploration of democratic resistance, this year’s festival included a section titled Am I Not a Citizen? – Barbarism, Civic Awakening and the City in collaboration with the 13th Istanbul Biennial; the section included documentaries, feature films, and video works dealing with the themes of citizenship, the public domain, democracy, and art.

Just as in previous years, the festival was enriched with side events as well: In addition to Costa Gavras, Peter Weir, who presided the Golden Tulip International Competition Jury this year and received an Honorary Award, along with Mike Figgis and Carlos Reygadas whose retrospective was screened at the festival, gave Master Classes, which were received with great interest, especially by younger audience members who are the future film-makers of Turkey.

For more information on the festival:  http://film.iksv.org/en

N. Buket Cengiz writes on popular culture for the national Turkish newspaper Radikal’s Sunday supplement, Radikal Iki, and works as a writing tutor at Kadir Has University’s Writing Center in Istanbul.

The 35^th Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, which was held from March 22 to 31, featured several special events this year. First, tributes were given to veteran filmmakers and actresses who have attended previous festivals such as Margarethe von Trotta, Suzanne Osten, Mira Nair, Ulrike Ottinger, Agnes Varda, Carmen Maura, Maria Schneider and Anna Karina. These competent directors and actresses have created beautiful imagery and powerful stories on women through image and gestalt. This can only happen at a world-class panorama such as Créteil Films de Femmes. The international event language is French and English.

Jackie Buet, founder and director of the Créteil festival

Créteil Films de Femmes celebrated its 35^th anniversary as the largest festival that promotes films made by women in the world. The festival began in 1979 to profile the work of women at film festivals and we know this does not happen very often. Just look at Cannes this past year, where only one woman’s film was chosen in one of the major sections – Catherine Corsini’s Three Worlds in Un Certain Regard. During the 65^th Cannes Film Festival a concerted protest was also made about the fact that only one woman had ever been awarded the Palme d’Or.

Today women are reluctant to have their film labeled as a “women’s film,” which is believed to limit its accessibility. However, for a generation nurtured on Créteil, there is no better festival than this one because of its focus on women. True, the place is not quite as packed as before, but at some events it still is. Créteil Films de Femmes has also had to contend with the commercial and cultural factors that shape programming at film festivals with a slimmer program this year, but the quality is still high.

The French government supports the festival, as does the Regional Council and the Créteil Mayor and Prefecture. Youth from the Créteil high schools and university are also involved in the festival, documenting the event on film. During the year, the festival creates video workshops for them with selected themes and their films are screened in the Créteil Prefecture where feedback is given by the audience.

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem

The new Minister for Women’s Rights in François Hollande’s government, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, visited the festival on Day 3 and proclaimed how important the Créteil event was. “Even the Lumière Brothers had a sister,” she declared. In the festival catalogue, she was generous in supplying ample statistics defying the myth that equality has been reached by women in France: “Five percent of classical concerts are directed by women; 90% of the national dramatic theatres are directed by men; 4% of operas are directed by women, and 13% of the technicians in the cultural arena are women. For the world of cinema, it is the same,” wrote Vallaud-Belkacem. It is with astonishment that it seems generally accepted that despite this inequality, a women’s film festival is just not that important and today is regarded as “politically incorrect” for its focus on women. Créteil nevertheless continues to devote itself to “the privileged exhibition of film directors from around the world; it has become over time the only professional event on a major international auteur cinema long discriminated against and poorly dispersed.”

Créteil has many features that are popular with veteran attendees. There is a petite salle and a grande salle – a small and a large theater – in the same building, which builds a warm and intimate environment for spectators. Nearby is a bus shuttle to Cinema La Lucarne, a small theater five minutes from the festival that initially was a youth center that opened in 1966. In 1978 the cinema opened. One of the administrators of this cinema, Corinne Turin, told me that there are over 3,000 movie theaters in France and that the government wants to keep them all open and has footed the cost to digitize the projection equipment.

In San Francisco, for example, the Lumiere, and the Bridge, the Alhambra and the Coronet all have closed because of the high costs of converting the facilities for digital projection. Well, since France is the birthplace of cinema, it is understandable that the government would want to preserve the facilities.

The opening night of the festival featured the screening of two pioneers of French cinema – Alice Guy and Germaine Dulac, and one German pioneer – Lotte Reiniger.

Alina Isabel Perez and Nadia El Fani

On Day 2, a documentary by Nadia El Fani and Alina Isabel Perez was screened, Même pas mal (2012), which deals with El Fani’s fight against cancer while making her film Laïcité Inch’Allah! (2011), a story that received great attention in the French media. Franco-Tunisian El Fani began making Laïcité, a documentary on freedom of speech in Tunisia three months before the beginning of the Tunisian Revolution against the dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and kept filming during this historical event. A film like this invited a strong political debate afterwards.

Jeanne Balibar

The guest of honor this year was Jeanne Balibar, an actress unknown outside of Europe who selects films that are noteworthy for their extraordinary themes. At Ellen’s Age (Im Alter von Ellen, 2010), by the German director Pia Marais was screened for the occasion on Day 2. It’s the story of a flight attendant (Balibar) who goes through a life crisis, suffers a panic-attack that causes her to lose her job and has a decisive encounter with a group of young animal-rights activists who do protests against the meat industry, wrapping themselves in plastic in public places and lying in huge cartons that look like packages in the meat sections of supermarkets.

A film like this is a rare treat, so you can imagine how extraordinary it was watching it. Balibar herself wondered why the film wasn’t better received. For her retrospective she had to point out that she wasn’t a “militant feminist,” which she finds “moralizing and reactionary.” Alas this is the obligatory reservation that comes when a woman points out the misogyny in the film industry as Balibar has done.

There were several sections of the festival in addition to the Balifor retrospective, including feature, documentary and short film competitions and a special competition of films about young people. The special geographical focus this year was entitled “Extreme Europe” – films by young women from the former Soviet bloc countries. Additionally there was a section entitled “Les Bonnes” (“The Maids”), that featured classics of women’s cinema and strong women’s portraits on the theme of servitude, such as The Housemaid, by the disturbingly creative Kim Ki-Young from South Korea, screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960. The eerie film is about a young woman who is employed in the house of a school music teacher to help his wife. The maid becomes increasingly diabolical. Another film was Sally Potter’s Yes (UK, 2004) about a Lebanese man and Irish woman in love in London, whose relationship is commented upon by the people who serve them as a kind of Greek chorus.

Christine Chansou and Vincent Trintignant-Corneau

On Day 4 in conjunction with Amnesty International the documentary Even a Bird Needs a Nest (Même un oiseau a besoin de son nid, 2012) by Vincent Trintignant-Corneau and Christine Chansou was presented. In an innovative style without voiceover the filmmakers show rather than tell the story of one million displaced Cambodians whose homes have been destroyed and the land sold for commercial purposes. A strong spokeswoman who has rallied together the people in protest is Tep Vanny who allowed the filmmakers to follow the protests under the condition that they got the word out to the world about the injustice of the Cambodian officials. The film is beautifully photographed and the composition has a free and independent spirit.

On Day 6 the MAC/VAL-Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (administered by the Creteil Prefecture) was invited to present a program of short experimental films. The most prominent of them, The Capsule (2012), was made by the award winning Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari together with Aleksandra Waliszewska. Dakis Joannou, a Greek Cypriot art collector, and the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, commissioned the film for the Deste Fashion Collection. The film was shot on the Greek island of Hydra with a group of seven women dressed in wearable sculpture and led by a high priestess. Her coven is engaged in various rituals including dancing, walking goats by the dock, and metamorphosing into different forms. The lead actress is Ariane Labed winner of the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress at the 2010 Venice Film Festival for her role in Tsangari’s Attenberg (Greece 2010). The brilliant cinematography and disturbing story makes it one of the best avant-garde films made in recent years.

Following the short program was an event planned by L’Étrange festival (“The Strange festival”) in Paris, featuring two films by French filmmaker Angélique Bosio. The first was the world première of a documentary about a virtually unknown French designer, Fifi Chachnil, Pretty en Rose (2013). Fifi is known for designing fashionable lingerie and attire for women and has worked with filmmakers such as the gay team of Pierre and Gilles. The doc by Bosio is a rich tapestry of interviews with a refreshing use of backdrops including a flowered coach placed in the garden or Fifi’s bedroom. The designer’s creations and achievements are so extraordinary that one is enthralled by this homage to a very creative woman and mother of three daughters, who all appear in the film. Bosio spent six years making the film, which she also partially crowdfunded.

Bosio’s second film, Llik your Idols (2007), was about the “Cinema of Transgression” underground film movement of the 1980’s, a term coined by the American Nick Zedd. The films were inexpensive and created for shock value, often with a humorous effect.

On the final evening of the festival was a special screening of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic  Hannah Arendt (Germany, 2012). Barbara Sukowa plays the German-American political theorist. Arendt wrote several important books and also covered the trial of Eichmann as a reporter for the New Yorker. She was critical about how the trial was conducted and a large part of von Trotta’s film treats this.

In a parallel screening, the experimental new work of a woman whose films always debut at Créteil was screened: Catherine Corringer’s Queens, a film that deals with the intersections of childhood, aging, and gender identity.

On Day 9 of the festival, the international jury selected Hemel, by Dutch director Sacha Polak as the best feature film of Créteil this year. This is the story of a woman who is lost in a series of relationships and whose father soon becomes seriously interested in a new woman, which shakes Hemel’s foundation.

Other prizes awarded include:

Mention special/Honorable mention: The Mirror Never Lies by Kamila Andini (Indonesia, 2011). The story of an Indonesian mother, Tayung, and her 12-year-old daughter Pakis, whose husband/father is missing at sea. The film is set in the Coral Triangle and portrays the lives of the Bajo people today.

Prix du Public: Meilleur long métrage fiction/Audience prize for best fiction feature film: Inch’Allah by Anaïs de Barbeau-Lavalette (Canada, 2012). The story of Chloe, a young Canadian obstetrician working in a makeshift clinic in a Palestinian refugee camp of the West Bank.

Prix du Public: Meilleur long métrage documentaire/Audience prize for best documentary feature film: Even a bird needs a nest, by Christine Chansou and Vincent Tritignant-Corneau (France, 2012). The film about one million Cambodians who have lost their homes to make way for commercial development, and the massive protest movement this led to.

Prix du jury Graine de Cinéphage/Jury youth prize for best feature: The Bag of Flour (Le Sac de farine, directed by Kadija Leclere, Tunisia, 2012). The story of a young girl in Belgium whose father one day arrives at her school to take her to live in Morocco. She grows up learning how to sew and knit rather than study math, science and art. One day everything changes.

Créteil is clearly up to date, but defies the protocol of rival festivals, and after 35 years remains a maverick in the arena. 35 years is a sign of longevity. Anyone attending Créteil will walk away enriched with some of the following experiences: an insight into a special genre of cinema with a special focus on films from a particular geographical area, intense political debates on the themes of the films, paying tribute to a body of work by a prominent director or actor, access to veteran and classic films and new work, and an exhilarating feeling of coming close to the French cultural politics of cinema. France is after all where cinema began and was born.

Moira Sullivan is an international scholar, lecturer, film critic, promoter and experimental filmmaker based in San Francisco. She is a member of FIPRESCI (Federation of International Film Critics) and has a PhD in cinema studies. Her graduate studies in film were conducted at San Francisco State University. Sullivan is one of the world’s experts on the work of the legendary filmmaker Maya Deren (1917-1961). Since 1995 Sullivan has been a staff writer for Movie Magazine International, and does weekly radio reports on film reviews, film events and festivals. She served on the Queer Palm Jury in Cannes 2012. Sullivan has attended the Créteil Festival since the 1990s and is the Nordic consultant for the festival.

BRFF 2013 poster

By Anthony Killick.

The success of the 2012 Bristol Radical Film Festival proved how the demand for socially and politically engaged film hasn’t dwindled, despite attempts by those in power to abstract politics away from the day-to-day lives of the public. The festival showed how film is one of the most powerful tools for education and consciousness raising. Combining screenings with events, talks, workshops and discussions over the course of one week, the main aim in 2012 was to contribute to the establishment of an alternative film network, one that sees film not only as an entertainment medium, but one that that has the ability to transform society through the act of exploring it.

After another year of privatisation of healthcare, education and public services in the UK, Bristol Radical Film Festival returned in 2013 to continue this remit. By pooling the collective knowledge and resources of students, university lecturers, activist groups and community projects, the festival expanded in length as well spatially, holding promotional nights at various venues throughout January and February. This culminated in a headline week of events, the climax of which was a weekend that included a workshop on the making of radical film followed by a session of radical shorts, which took place at Bristol’s non-profit cinema, The Cube.

Lee Salter introduces Growing Change at Cafe Kino

From the end of January until the beginning of the headline week, promotional nights saw a diverse range of films, connecting seemingly disparate issues while showcasing a history of contemporary radical cinema. From Menelik Shabazz’s 1981 drama, Burning an Illusion, the first British film to feature a black female protagonist, to Australian Simon Cunich’s 2012 documentary, Growing Change, a film about independent food production in Venezuela, the festival gained momentum through navigating across various spaces of dissent. These included café basements, community centres, even the backroom of a local bowling alley, all of which became cinemas for an evening.

Bristol’s Southbank Centre hosted the first night of the headline week, which saw the British premier of Muchedumbre 30S (Rodolpho Munez, 2012), a fast-paced documentary about the attempted coup that took place in Ecuador in 2010. The film looks at how confusion and chaos are sown by the agents of dominant power to stifle democracy and social change. This theme proved to be recurrent, when on Tuesday the festival returned to women’s refuge, the One25 Project, a community based charity that provides support for sex workers in the city. A packed screening of The Shape of Water (Kum Kum Bhavani, 2006), a documentary on the innovative forms of protest practiced by women in Third World countries, led to a discussion on feminist resistance to globalisation.

Following Israel’s Operation Pillar of Cloud, which took place in December 2012, the festival’s Wednesday screening, held at the Easton Community Centre, provided a glimpse of the harrowing impact that military barbarism has on the Palestinian people. To Shoot an Elephant (Alberto Arce, Mohammad Rujailah, 2008), filmed during the 2008 “Operation Cast Lead” provided a context to one of the most heinous and ongoing injustices in modern history. On Thursday the Malcolm X Centre in St Paul’s hosted the screening of a series of films on the black civil rights movement, including Cuban Santiago Alvarez’s dynamic musical short, Now (1965), and Finally Got the News (Stewart Bird, 1970). Introduced by the head of the Lecturers Union and radical film writer, Eamonn Kelly, the latter film was made by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers inside and outside the auto factories of Detroit.

Film discussion at women's shelter, the One25 Project

After a string of successful lead-up nights, the headline weekend opened at The Cube with a film exercise led by Al Cameron and Bridget Crone of the Arnolfini, one of Bristol’s most active cultural hubs. Screening a series of political artist films, blending the political and aesthetic avant-garde. A 2010 piece by the Otolith Group, Hydra Decapita, followed by Mathieu Abbonenc’s 9-minute film Vera Cruz, brought about a discussion on the search for new film languages, and proved a great way to kick off The Cube weekend. The headline film that evening was the Royal Television Society’s graduate documentary of the year, The Ballymurphy Massacre, introduced by the film’s editor, Jonny Lewis.

The weekend continued with a Saturday morning double screening on the situation in Greece. How much Further? (Matthias Wiessler, 2012) criticised EU laws on immigration and the global treatment of immigrants throughout history. Honing in on the policies of the Greek state, the film gave a voice to those who are forced to live in an increasingly hostile environment before veering towards the more specific focus taken up by radical newsreel organisation, Reel News, who gave the world premier of their brand new documentary Into the Fire (Reel News, 2013). Introduced by director and Reel News activist, Kate Mara, this documentary looks at the emergence of fascist organisation, Golden Dawn, and it’s ties to the Greek police force. The Q and A discussion highlighted a number of issues including the ability of fascism to exploit the misery inflicted by neo-liberal economic structures.

Resistance to these structures was the topic of the following film, The Globalisation Tapes (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2003), a documentary that exposes the role of militarism and repression in building the “global economy”. This was followed by a session dedicated to Platform Films, the longest running producers of radical feature documentary in Britain. Filmmaker Chris Reeves introduced their latest work Pulling Together (Chris Reeves, 2012) before taking part in a post-screening Q and A discussion. The next session featured another British premier, The Way To Be (Sree Krishnan, 2012), which had been sent to the festival from India, having been subtitled for the occasion. The film’s multi-temporal, multi-strand narrative and skillful navigation between documentary, fictional, theatre and animation forms made for an enthusiastic discussion among the audience, who compared it to the films of the preceding day. Saturday’s headliner, Big Boys Gone Bananas (Fredrik Gertten, 2012), showed the lengths to which multinational corporations will go to block films that expose malpractice.

Mike Wayne and Deirdre O' Neill talk about their upcoming film Condition of the English Working Class

Following a party on Saturday night in The Cube bar, Sunday began with a workshop on the making of radical film. This session was split into three sections. First to the floor was Lee Salter, writer of Secret City (Michael Chanan 2012) who spoke about the process of getting radical documentary “out there” into the public sphere, and how filmmakers can work to push radical politics into the filmic sphere. Anthony Killick of Dialectical Films followed up by focusing on the philosophy of radical filmmaking, and how his theoretical insights have influenced his editing processes in the making of short films. Finally, in a workshop dedicated to the combination of theory and practice, Mike Wayne and Deirdre O’ Neill gave a talk about the making of their upcoming film The Condition of the English Working Class based on Fredrick Engels’s book of the same name.

Having put a call out for radical shorts at the beginning of the year, the festival received an influx of films, eventually deciding on four, to be screened in the session following the workshop. The chosen films spanned a geographical spectrum from Brazil to Stoke-on-Trent, and the young filmmakers were invited to come and introduce their work before taking part in a Q and A discussion. George Allonby’s The Art of Squatting gave insight into an alternative housing culture, before Ash Morris’s Black and White provided an introduction into Britain’s class system, from an all too rare working class perspective. Anthony Killick’s A Three Fold Attack on Protest identified three areas in which the government is attacking civil liberties. The session came to a climax with Michael Seyfert’s Brazil is not Copacabana, a chaotic, surrealist take on poverty and resistance in Brazil.

These back-to-back sessions comprised a dearth of theoretical and practical knowledge, while exhibiting new and original work from all over the world. Having lost no momentum, the festival moved towards it’s last two sessions. Film lecturer, Humberto Perez-Blanco, gave an entertaining and informative introduction to Cul De Sac: A Suburban War Story, which documents the events of May 1995, when 35 year old plumber, Shawn Nelson, stole a tank from the U.S National Guard and went on a rampage through suburbia. BRFF 2013 concluded with an investigation into the corruption and mismanagement of the Berlusconi government. Draquila: Italy Trembles (Sabina Guzzanti, 2010) highlighted the almost comedic lunacy of Berlusconi’s administration, and served as a great way to end the festival, considering his recent resurgence in Italian politics.

The Bristol Radical Film Festival continues to establish an alternative film network, both by drawing on and contributing to an international corpus of radical cinema. A young festival with ambitions to expand along diverse and creative avenues, BRFF will continue it’s cross-disciplinary approach to film, drawing together those involved in production, distribution and exhibition for the collective purpose of using this powerful medium as a tool to bring about a more just society.

Anthony Killick, MA student, Film and Television Studies, Bristol University.

The Grandmaster

By Yun-hua Chen.

Against a backdrop of the Berlinale bear, the film festival opens with Wang Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster (2012), the five-year’s lavish-looking work of the president of the international jury. During the ten-day celebration of cinema, the city was honoured by the glamorous presence of international stars every night, among them three divas from the contemporary French cinema: Juliette Binoche, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Hollywood stars such as Matt Damon, Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, and stars in the German-speaking world including Nina Ross. The main categories of Berlinale are composed of official competition, panorama, forum, shorts, generation, perspective German cinema, retrospective, culinary cinema and Berlinale special. The competition category straddles between big-budget films and the tradition of arthouse cinema, as we can see Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land (2012), Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects (2013), and Fredrik Bond’s The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman (2013) side by side with Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel 1915 (2012), Danis Tanović’s An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (2013), Ulrich Seidl’s Paradies: Hoffnung (2013), Jafar Panahi’s Pardé (2013) and Cǎlin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose (2012), which won the Golden Bear of this year. Within the films of young German filmmakers, Das Merkwürdige Kätzchen (2013) is a refreshing and innovative look at the chaos and peace of a household, which was entirely shot within a Berlin flat in which a family’s everyday life shines with magic.

Rock the Casbah

A lot of war-related films can be seen in different sections: Rock the Casbah (2013), Circles (2013),  The Battle of Tabatô (2013), No Man’s Land (2012), Narco Cultura (2012), The Act of Killing (2012), What Happened to this City (1986), to name a few. Schaul Schwarz’s Narco Cultura is situated in the Mexican-US border town Ciuded Juárez, where the drug lords narcos are glamorized into heroes of popular culture. Through The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer provides an opportunity for the perpetrators to reconstruct and hence to reflect upon the paramilitaries’ killing of alleged Communists right after the Indonesian military coup of 1965. The Battle of Tabatô is the flip side of No Man’s Land. The former depicts an old man’s confrontation with the past, traumatised by the experiences during the colonial war decades earlier, in stylish black-and-white cinematography. The postcolonial reality in Tabatô contrasts to the fragmented and numbered monologue of a former soldier in an elite Portuguese commando during the colonial wars in Mozambique and Angola, documented in No Man’s Land. Yariv Horowitz’s Rock the Casbah boldly deals with the sensitive subject of the Gaza Strip in the early summer of 1989 and reveals the absurdity of armed action, which only contributes furthermore to the vicious circle of injustice. After the death of a soldier being killed by a washing machine which is dropped on him from a rooftop, a company of young Israeli soldiers have to face the local residents’ hatred and the unsettling environment around them, while they are merely naive young men who barely enter adulthood and whose pleasure in life comprises of things as simple as listening to rock music and sunbathing. Srdan Golubović’s Circles which won the prize of ecumenical jury under the category of forum interweaves narrative threads of several characters, whose life has been changed because of a tragic incident during the Serbian-Bosnian conflict, almost in the vein of 21 Grams and Babel. These people’s trajectories becomes intertwined again twelve years afterwards, with the war being over, but they still have to deal with the issues of guilt, repentance, forgiveness, responsibility and justice, which have remained unresolved during and after the war.

Tanta Agua

Tanta Agua (2012) and Coming Forth by Day (2012) are two impressive portraits of the parents and children relationship. In Tanta Agua the fourteen-year old Lucía is forced to go for a family trip which seems to be doomed from the very beginning. The role of the divorced father is brilliantly acted by Néstor Guzzini, who is at the same time unbearable with his commandeering tone and over-protective attitudes, and also amicably affectionate. As the rain keeps pouring down and the swimming pool remains closed for health and safety reasons, Lucia embarks upon a coming-of-age journey discovering love, jealousy and heartbreak. Coming Forth By Day (2012) is a touching and subtle work on the daily struggle of a woman in Cairo. Soad lives with his mother and incapacitated father. It starts with Soad’s routine of cleaning and feeding her father, which is interrupted by occasional arguments with her mother and the usual unexpected visit of her soldier cousin. When she finally goes outside on the pretext of meeting a friend at the sunset, the city presents itself as an unfriendly space full of obstacles, starting from a crazy woman and an aloof boyfriend, and ending with a potentially dangerous minibus driver and the all-encompassing darkness, which poses latent threat to women walking around alone. It is a tender debut of Hala Lotfy which beautifully captures the moments between self-sacrifice and self-realisation, individual and family, inside and outside, light and darkness, and the living and the approaching death.

To the Wolf

The recent Greek films have often been interpreted as the mirror images of the current crisis-ridden country, regardless of the filmmakers’ initial intentions. Christina Koutsospyrou and Aran Hughes’s To the Wolf (2013) documents the trajectory of Father, Mother and son of a poor shepherd family in a village in western Greece. In an ambiguous form of a docu-drama, most of the shots have been taken inside their dark and cramped dwelling which risks falling apart under adverse weather conditions, and where the cinematographer barely fits in. The camera cuts between their weary faces deeply marked by hardships and outdoor labor, and the mountainous area covered in unremitting fog. On some rare occasions when they do talk to one another, it is about cigarette prices, the debts that they owe their neighbours, and how they can find new lenders. When they talk to the cameraman, it is to let go of their complaints and profound fear of sinking down to starvation. The son’s drunken talk at a town taverna in the end of the film is the most illustrative visual rendering of how Greek working class and farmers look at the situation, as they become sacrifices of a society which almost always acts in favour of the powerful ones.

I Kori

I Kori (2012) also has explicit messages of social criticism. The fourteen-year-old Myrto kidnaps the son of her father’s business partner after her father’s disappearance, because she believes that the business partner bankrupts her father’s joiner’s workshop. She hides the kidnapped boy in the workshop between stacks of spruce, oak and ebony, and their seemingly innocently childish conversation in fact contains political metaphors. In Athens she walks through crowds of demonstrators throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, long queues of despairing people seeking social benefits, and is given piles of invoices accumulated in front of her disappeared father’s door. In a world where no one takes up responsibilities, Myrto becomes the only one trying to restore justice and order in her own way. Within the framework of a political allegory, the daughter of Elektra complex constantly wanders in the sweet memories with her father bathed in warm colours, almost like a nostalgic look at the happy past of the country. Occasionally it seems like a cinematic version of a Greek soap opera with its dose of dysfunctional families and hysterical women characters.

The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas

The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas (2013) is a promising debut feature. Also a film about kidnapping, but it is Antonis Paraskevas, a national TV celebrity hosting morning talk shows, who stages the act himself in order to regain his popularity on the media. Disturbed by his decreasing popularity, debts and personal problems, he hides in a luxury hotel, completely uninhabited during winter. To pass the time he follows news about his own disappearance and brushes up on molecular gastronomy, which has been meticulously demonstrated on the TV by a French chef. Wandering in deserted and scruffy tennis court, swimming pool, karaoke lounge, Paraskevas is like a phantom living in the glory of the past. He repeatedly watches his images from a tribute DVD included in a tabloid magazine, whereas his attempt of creating new images by filming himself reproducing molecular pasta through imitation fails miserably. Instead of returning to fame like in his calculations, he sinks further into his own desire for public attention. When Paraskevas contrasts his TV presence on the extravagant New Year party in 2001, which also celebrates the introduction of Euro in Greece, to his boredom and anonymity in the hide, the audience cannot help but comparing the Euro zone’s then and now.

After completing her PhD in Film Studies, Yun-hua Chen works for sound.platz as well as writing film festival reviews and academic articles.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints

By Jacob Mertens.

The road sweeps before me, and I watch snowcapped mountains peer through the dark like ghosts. They tower above, catch the faint light of sunrise, and I would be in awe if I were not so paranoid that any moment a truck could smash into me, obliterating my shoebox-sized rental car. Yes, Enterprise’s “economy vehicle” can barely fit me alone, and it refuses to climb up these mountains without my insistent foot slamming on the gas. I curse as other cars pass me, going faster than I feel comfortable on an unending chain of twists and turns, an interstate etched out of the terrain with all the artfulness of a child’s etch-a-sketch drawing. No matter though, because the road soon levels out, the sun rises through the hills, the sky expands blue and deep, and a cozy mountain town lies at the foot of the road. Park City, home to one of the venerated Meccas of film, awaits. And for those suffering from the bitter cold of January, somewhere in Sundance headquarters there is hot apple cider mixed with rum waiting to warm you.

Renewal in the New Year: Follow-ups and Follow-downs

The year 2013 marks an auspicious line up for the Sundance Film Festival, listing several important directorial follow-ups to the likes of Take Shelter (2011), Primer (2004), Smashed (2012), and Like Crazy (2011). All these past works offered something exciting, either as first films heralding more to come or breakthrough efforts refusing to escape notice. Among these anticipated returns to cinema, Shane Carruth’s new film Upstream Color has to be the most intriguing of the lot. Emerging from a nine year hiatus after Primer claimed Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize, Carruth’s Upstream Color finds the director in far more experimental territory. Essentially, his film revolves around the romance of Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (Shane Carruth), whose lives and minds have been irreparably harmed after exposure to a psychotropic parasite. Without any knowledge of what has happened to them, they find each other and take refuge in a life together, while slowly drawing closer to the mystery of their affliction. I will admit that Upstream Color is undoubtedly abstract, quiet throughout, and may be too introspective for a mainstream audience to appreciate. However, those willing to give their time will find the film rewards their diligence. Carruth, acting as director and cinematographer, crafts each scene with a grave attention to beauty. Meanwhile, the performances hone in on a constant state of anxiety, weathered by tenderness and care. Upstream Color rises from the festival program as a work of surreal art worthy of David Lynch, only with a more distinct poetic aesthetic. And for a festival scant on the avant-garde, the diffused narrative delivers a welcome diversion from the norm.

The Spectacular Now

Moving on to Jeff Nichols, we find a filmmaker tasked with somehow matching his tour de force Take Shelter a year after its release. Faced with such an impossible feat, it is perhaps no wonder that his new film shares with Shelter a performance from Michael Shannon and little else. Mud wisely takes a sharp left turn in the director’s oeuvre, detailing a coming of age story wrapped up tight in twangy southern mythos. Matthew McConaughey plays the titular lead, a fugitive who seeks the help of two teenage boys to reunite him with his estranged love and outlast a rabid pack of bounty hunters after his life. It is a brilliant set up, to be sure, and the characters come across well on screen. Unfortunately, the film runs a bit long, and McConaughey’s Mud feels needlessly mythologized as a man of no parentage, who comes “from the woods.” I imagine Nichols meant to make Mud a mysterious presence, but the film’s allusions to this quality strain. As a result, you walk away from the character feeling like you have been deprived of something.

Another agreeable let down this year can be found in James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now. After wowing 2012 Sundance audiences with Smashed, a depiction of alcoholism and redemption as seen through a couple’s marriage, Ponsoldt now explores similar themes within the framework of a high school comedy. In truth, Spectacular Now makes a far better go of it than one might think, but still suffers from an inability to express the gravity a seventeen-year-old alcoholic demands. I admire the director’s attempts to balance levity with the plight of addiction, but his film cannot sustain the effort. In the end, you cannot be both Pretty in Pink (1986) and Leaving Las Vegas (1995), you must choose one or the other.

Breathe In

In contrast to Spectacular Now‘s diminished returns, Drake Doremus shows significant growth with his latest feature Breathe In. Following Like Crazy, a fragmented piece on love equal parts poignant and erratic, Doremus takes on a domestic drama in which Guy Pierce plays Keith, a family man who is, unbeknownst to all, desperately unhappy. When a foreign exchange student named Sophie (Felicity Jones) comes to stay at his house, she is the only one observant enough to see his despondence. The two soon bond through a common love of music, and begin a timorous romance that threatens to destroy Keith’s home. As the tension in the film builds, Doremus guides the story with a steady hand, relishing in uncomfortable situations. This impulse is then tempered by Felicity Jones’ sensitive portrayal. Her character’s maturity and grace seem to defy the ingrained social anathema at work in the film: the differences of age, the infidelity. Consequently, their romance takes on a somber note, with both characters wishing to escape from their lives together, heedless of the wreckage they would leave behind.

Zeitgeist is a Four Letter Word

Concussion

In addition to prominent returns, new films strike the forge attempting to capture the essence of the times. Without fail, the current social landscape gives fertile ground for these films to enrage and enervate, to kindle some hope for change, or simply to revel in the chaos. In the documentary God Loves Uganda, Roger Ross Williams constructs a bitter critique of the missionary movement in Uganda, in which espoused conservative Christian ideologies have taken root in the nation to ill effect. Williams’ treatise focuses principally on the church’s repressed attitude toward sexuality, leading to a rash of homophobia in Uganda that has caused the death of innocent lives. Additionally, there has been a proposed piece of legislation that would give the government power to jail and kill homosexuals without restrictions, legislation that still waits to become a law today. Williams’ film does not work hard to make the audience angry, and it does not shy from the prospective that there is right and wrong at hand. And who could argue otherwise? In Uganda, evangelicals find fertile ground to work with and their extremist agendas take on the cruel edge of application. It is an elegant reminder that while these tirades are often confined to words alone here in the states, and may seem harmless, these words still hold an incredible amount of power. If viewers take nothing else from the film, they should at least see that if preachers sermonize hate, their congregation may just take that hate and run with it.

Moving on to an altogether different homosexuality film, Stacie Passon’s Concussion offers audiences a subtle drama involving lesbian housewife Abbie (Robin Weigert) who, after suffering a blow to the head, awakens to an insatiable sexual revival. Unfortunately, these new feelings change little in her life. At home, Abbie has two children who sap her energy and a wife who lacks intimacy. Feeling unfulfilled and without a way to satisfy her urges, she begins a secret life as a call girl. Abbie clings to her new occupation with an emotional fervor unbecoming of the job. She meets each client for coffee, confirming her desire to be with them, then subsequently forms attachments and treats each paid tryst as a microcosmic relationship. Through her clients, Abbie finds the bliss of passion missing in her own life. However, these personal connections are fraught with misunderstandings and surface emotions, and a burgeoning sense of calm soon leaves her. Using the concussion throughout, in brief cutaways of Abbie pounding back aspirin, Passon reminds the audience that this new life is a symptom of something sinister. Whether that be a product of the claustrophobic environment of domesticity, or simply an unfortunate effect of the concussion itself, remains for viewers to judge.

A River Changes Course

Family life finds a much more delicate portrayal with A River Changes Course. In Kalyanee Mam’s documentary, viewers follow the plight of several families in Cambodia, all struggling with increasing debt and economic burden. Each family has grown close, simply by weathering hardships together, but soon the parents must send their children off to find work. Sidestepping the obvious differences of fiction and nonfiction, the contrast between this depiction of family and that found in Passon’s Concussion is compelling, because it seems to suggest that affluence helps to foster distance. However, in A River, the want for affluence eventually drives the family apart as well. In the film,  children who leave their families looking for work all desire to return to the simpler life of their village. Instead, they sacrifice their place at home, knowing that poverty lies in wait to destroy their family.  Mam’s documentary takes on a vérité style so enthralling and well photographed that, barring a few simple revisions, the film could play as a minimalist narrative. The success of the film, however, predominately lies in its ability to show a life that lies out of reach for the children of Cambodia. Their land lies barren from deforestation and over-fishing, and an education seems pointless when faced with securing the well-being of their families. Faced with these overwhelming challenges, Mam’s documentary gently suggests that the growing poverty in Cambodia demands from children not only their homes but their future.

Stoker

If directors designed these films, in some way or another, as a sober consideration of the state of our lives, then Park Chan Wook’s Stoker gives us the glorious antitheses. The Korean auteur, best known for his vengeance trilogy, makes his first foray into Hollywood with a film steeped in an all too real culture of violence and dissociation. India (Mia Wasikowska) plays the daughter of a recently deceased father, who must now share her home with an estranged mother and an uncle she never knew existed. Under the pretext of mourning, India shares the space of the film in disunity with all around her. As time goes on though, India begins to suspect her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) of murder. Far from aggravating the distance maintained between them, intrigue brings her closer. From this point, Park chooses to delight in the immoral bedlam of his film rather than admonish it. He brings his characters together through vice, either violence or lust, and allows one emotional extreme to naturally lead into the other. With a practiced touch, Park renders Stoker an engrossing thriller with all the hallmarks of a demented Alfred Hitchcock. The film may savor its mysteries a little too much, leaving a final reveal that feels unmoving, but the style of the film remains inventive and the unabashed moral perversion a satisfying act of defiance.

The Reigning Champs of Sundance

Beyond all the trends to surface at this year’s Sundance, the most consistent was a fleeting glimpse of greatness. Truthfully, I cannot pretend to be the end all source for naming the best at Sundance, not when so many great films escaped my notice. However, I would be remiss if I did not uphold my favorites in their own category. To begin with, Richard Linklater marks his return to the much beloved Before Sunrise series with the trilogy-forging Before Midnight, a film that both revels in its history and completely disregards it. For those unfamiliar with the series, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset focus on the budding romance of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), as seen through one day fragments separated by nine years of time. Faced with another nine year gap, Midnight obliterates the entrenched nostalgia of its storied past, as the couple struggles to remain together and hold on to their love with desperate life. Written by Linklater and his two lead actors, Midnight mires Jesse and Celine in an argument that lasts nearly half the film’s runtime, drudging through a past that viewers learn of as a distant memory. Without giving too many details, I will say that I have never seen a film so accurately capture the tenor of an argument. For this fact alone, Before Midnight offers not only one of the standout films of the festival, but one of the most memorable films I have ever seen.

Stories We Tell

Following a film prone to dialogue is the artfully spare Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. David Lowery’s slow burn western dwells on the story of outlaw Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and his wife Ruth (Rooney Mara), a couple separated by Muldoon’s imprisonment. After several attempts to escape, Muldoon finally succeeds in shedding his captivity. Now, hell bent on reuniting with his wife and their daughter, a child he has never seen, Muldoon must avoid capture long enough to steal away with his family. The film takes its time to build to their reunion, slowly integrating the presence of a mob that, for reasons unknown, wish to kill Muldoon before he reaches home. In truth, this is a simple story, given grace and vulnerability by Ruth’s own side in it. If Muldoon’s motives are unyielding and clear,  Ruth’s are clouded by the fear that Muldoon will get himself killed by returning. She also must weigh her desire to see him again with a need to feel her daughter is safe, and so she begins to doubt whether a reunion should take place at all. The film is paced with impeccable care, the threat of conflict broods in the background, and when characters speak they do so as if they have given their words a great deal of thought. In short, the film succeeds in telling a story that surpasses its genre, emulating instead a folk song or fable worthy of its own enigmatic title.

Finally, Stories We Tell stands out as a documentary reconstructing the life and memory of director Sarah Polley’s mother. Polley interviews family and friends, attempting to honor a life through the varying accounts of those who knew her. Polley intends to discover the truth of her mother, a woman she barely knew, by focusing on the differences within the stories told. However, most accounts do not stray far from the other and so her initial proposal seems moot. Polley remains ardent that this is what her film is meant to be, an austere examination on the tenuous nature of memory, romanticizing and obscuring those now lost to us. Thankfully, her film takes on a will of its own, and instead becomes a means for Polley to examine the bonds between her and her family, as shaped by her mother’s passing. Despite clinging to a failed thesis for far too long, Polley’s film thrives. She shares a natural rapport with those on camera, and each interviewee imparts to the film the warmth and good humor of their recollections. In Stories We Tell, the memory of a loved one does not succumb to the ebb of time, all at once revealing a shadow without substance. No, the memory ascends triumphant, because it is shared within the family and is given life by their retelling. This is the power of Polley’s film, a power she effortlessly evokes because she does so by accident.

Jacob Mertens is a Film International ‘In the Field’ writer.

Typhoon Club

By James Udden.

Before attending the Festival des 3 Continents, I had only associated Nantes with a historical edict and a film festival I hoped to attend someday. Now I associate the actual film festival with an actual city, and a delightful one at that. Since very little is written about the Festival des 3 Continents in English, this is arguably one of the most underappreciated film festivals in the world. Since 1979 Nantes has been a true gateway festival, and sometimes a veritable launching pad for later world-renowned directors who would later rise to the victory podiums of Berlin, Venice and Cannes.

Unlike other festivals, Nantes possesses a clear identity based on precise programming parameters – only films from Africa, Latin America and Asia (including the Middle East) are to be screened. That being the case, it was surprising how French this festival was despite not showing a single French film: at every screening you will mostly hear only French being spoken in the audience; only French is spoken during the opening and closing ceremonies, and at the Q & A sessions in between; moreover, there is no guarantee that every film will have English subtitles. (Fortunately, all eleven entries in the competition were required to have English subtitles, and the catalogue was bilingual for the most part.) This, however, should not dissuade anyone who does not speak French from attending. If one is interested in the latest in World Cinema outside of the West, plus additional sidebars with a strong historical perspective of the same, this is a festival worth attempting. This is due to the strong and diverse programming by Jerome Baron and Charlotte Grayson, all under the careful management of Sandrine Butteau. The current organizers continue a longstanding tradition first established by the legendary Jalladeau brothers, whom you will still find in attendance.

Three Sisters

This year’s competition struck this reviewer as being unusually deep in terms of quality and talent. I do not dispute the audience prize (Prix du public), which in this case corresponded with the top prize by the jury, the Golden Montgolfiere.  Nor do I have take issue with the jury’s choices for the Silver Montgolfiere or special mention. Yet there were other films that I felt deserved equal mention.

Wang Bing, from China, won both the Montgolfiere d’Or and the Prix du public for his 150+ minute documentary, Three Sisters. Set in the mountain regions of Southwestern China, this film featured some of the most unforgettable imagery of the entire festival. It is a painful and poetic look at the harsh, quotidian existence of rural life in Yunnan. No doubt this film winning the admiration of jury and audiences alike will raise the question of whether this but a reification of the orientalist gaze of rich societies peering into the lives of poor ones. Yet in this case this would not tell the whole story: since this is China, this film is a deft political reminder of how much the impressive economic progress does not penetrate parts of Chinas hinterlands. It certainly makes the dazzle of cities like Shanghai seem more like Potemkin villages than reflecting the reality of China as a whole.  Needless to day, this is not a film to the Chinese government’s liking.

Beauty

The runner up prize (the Montgolfiere d’Argent) went to an Argentinean entry, Beauty, helmed by Daniela Seggiaro. If anything, this film is a critique of Orientalism despite its intriguing ambiguities. A young native girl lives with a white family. At times she appears to be but a house servant; however, at other times she is treated like an adopted daughter. Yet interspersed throughout are voiceovers of the young girl speaking in her native tongue laid over blurred images of flowing water. With its very different cadences almost hypnotic in effect, these inner monologues reveal how much she is not really a part of the culture she otherwise appears to be adopting. The supple shifts in rhythm give this film an added lyric quality.

The jury also gave a special mention to the Korean entry, Sleepless Night, directed by Jang Kun-jae. With its often minimal editing and minimal camera movement, this film, along with another Chinese entry in the competition, Memories Look at Me, offer further proof that a long-standing tradition of Asian minimalism is still very much alive. (The latter film was a debut feature by Song Fang, who previously appeared as the film student in Paris in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s, Flight of the Red Balloon.) However, Sleepless Night is an ingenious look at a happy married couple wondering if they will remain happy if they have kids. The narrative structure is unpredictable, including two prolonged fights that unexpectedly turn out to something else, the latter of which is a senseless domestic dispute over slightest shifts in words at a dinner party that is simply a tour de force. The very last shot of the still happy and still childless couple is elegiac: she looks over at her husband with a touch of melancholy, perhaps realizing that even such certain bliss that they currently have may not last.

Sleepless Night

I feel compelled, however, to give a special mention to two more entries in the competition. It’s a Dream, by Mahmoud Ghaffari from Iran, and I.D., by K.M. Kamal from India, were arguably the two most intense films in the entire competition. The former was snuck out of Iran in a suitcase, and no wonder given its taboo themes of a rapacious underground economy, sexual exploitation and illegal abortion. What is most notable, however, is the delayed exposition regarding the true nature of particular relationships, most of all between the main female protagonist and a man who turns out to be her brother-in-law. I.D. involves a rich, young woman with a new career in marketing in Mumbai. She feels compelled to find out the identity of a painter who had come to her apartment to work, only to suddenly have a stroke and die. This leads her to the labyrinthine underbelly of Mumbai. The style of the film ratchets up the tension to the very last shot, making her once comfortable existence now almost a permanent paranoid state as she faces head-on the dichotomy between the world she markets for and they real world she now traverses.

It's a Dream

Although the two Mexican entries in the competition were a disappointment, all the other competition films had some merit which space will not allow mention here. However, I should make mention of the one film in the competition I did not manage to see for logistical reasons. This was the nearly six-hour long documentary (of sorts) called Theatre 1/Theatre 2, made by the Japanese director, Kazuhiro Soda. Surprisingly, such extraordinary length did not prevent it from receiving the Young Jury Prize. I hope to catch this film at a future date, if only because some French youth have officially put me to shame to find the time and patience and appreciation for a film I missed.

Outside of the competition there was even more to offer. One delightful surprise was Hao Jie’s The Love Songs of Tiedan. This is a beautifully shot work set in Northern China abutting Mongolia. The film at first seems to promise a sentimental or melodramatic look at the fate of an accomplished singer of er ren tai, a form of opera banned during the Cultural Revolution. Instead it turned out to have some biting comic moments, most of all a hysterical juxtaposition of a wedding imagined in its ideal state — versus the actual wedding. I sincerely regret I could not make it to a screening of the Japanese experimental masterpiece, Page of Madness, a film I have seen many times before, but never on a big screen with live musical accompaniment as was offered in Nantes at a special screening.

Theatre 1/Theatre 2

Page of Madness is only one example of how well-versed one can become on non-Western film history by attending this festival. (I suspect Jerome Baron is the driving force behind this, since he also teaches film history at the University of Nantes.) Recent Hong Kong history was well covered in a sizeable retrospective of Milkyway films. This allowed me to see lesser-known works of Johnnie To such as Yesterday Once More (2004), a prime example of a Milkyway crowd-pleaser which can then finance the films To more desires to produce. Most surprising to me was Lawrence Ah-mon’s Gimmie Gimmie (2001).  This film had a strong ensemble cast and more compelling look aimless youth than one normally expects.

The Love Songs of Tiedan

The greatest revelation, however, was a large retrospective of a lesser-known Japanese director, Shinji Somai. Unfortunately, none of the prints delivered came with the English subtitles promised from Japan. Fortunately, being forced to follows these narrative based on pure visuals showed what an effective director Somai truly was. Typhoon Club (1985) may be an unrecognized masterpiece. The moment when young students sing and dance in the eye of a typhoon — in the buff — was both touchingly innocent yet laced with something deeper as well. An early Somai work, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (1981), seemed to constantly come completely out of left field, but in a good way. As I watched this film on purely visual/sonic terms, not understanding the dialogue or the subtitles for the most part, I suddenly realized this film was as unpredictable as a Senjin Suzuki film, yet sometimes done in the style of Hou Hsiao-hsien. It is hard to find an odder juxtaposition than that.

Then again, unexpected juxtapositions are precisely what are possible at Nantes and its Festival des 3 Continents. This is certainly not one of the largest festivals in the world today, but this is certainly one of the better focused and properly sized. I sincerely hope I will have an opportunity to return in the future.

James Udden is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Gettysburg College and the author of No Man an Island: Hou Hsiao-Hsien and the Aesthetics of Experience, published by Hong Kong University Press.

Unspooling at eight venues across Center City and West Philly, the 21^st Philadelphia Film Festival celebrated mainstream, independent, and foreign cinema from local filmmakers and world masters. The festival offered something for every film lover from its various programs, which included World Narratives, New French Films and Spanish Language Cinema; the festival also has strong offerings in the Sight and Soundtrack and Documentary showcases.

The opening night feature, The Silver Linings Playbook (Russell, 2012), was shot in and around Philadelphia and its suburbs. Philadelphia’s native son Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence play two young adults navigating their recovery from emotional trauma and mental illness. The movie vacillates between comedy and drama as it depicts their relationship. Lawrence in particular shines as a young widow who copes with her loss by preparing for a dance competition. Cooper gives a convincing performance as a damaged young man dealing with depression and anger issues as he tries to reconnect with his estranged wife. The film, a crowd-pleaser, not only gave the actors good, juicy parts, but also showed off the city to the hometown crowd.

In Barbara (Petzold, 2012), the title character (Nina Hoss) is a young doctor in 1980s East Germany who has been posted to a hospital in the countryside. Barbara shares little of herself upon arrival, but her story is revealed in seemingly unrelated shots that the viewer must assemble. The film depicts the conflicts and secrets ever-present in the security-state. Exiled to the provinces for a reason, Barbara is constantly under the watch of a Stasi (East German secret police) agent and their pas de deux is tense as it plays out over the course of the film.

The Philadelphia Film Festival also boasted a pair of strong documentaries on legal cases. Based on the book by Sarah Burns The Central Park Five (Burns, Burns and McMahon, 2012) is a fascinating documentary that recounts the story of five young African American and Hispanic men from Harlem wrongly charged and convicted of a brutal crime. On April 19, 1989, a young white woman is raped in New York’s Central Park. Fueled by the tabloid media and television, the police are under extreme pressure to find those responsible for the assault. With little evidence other than being present in the park on that evening, the five youths ranging in age from 14 to 17 were charged. Using archival film and first person interviews of the five, viewers hear the story of their arrest, the circumstances of their confessions, and the poor imitation of justice that passed for their trials. These men spent up to thirteen years in prison for this crime, which they did not commit, until another man – already incarcerated as a serial rapist – confessed to the crime. What is striking about The Central Park Five is that as these men tell their stories, and even though their lives have been horribly disrupted, they are calm, reflective, and display a dignity that is impressive considering their circumstance.

Portrait of Wally (Shea, 2012), articulately unwinds the restitution of a painting after 70 years. The Wally of the title is Walburga Neuzil, the flame-haired mistress of artist Egon Schiele. Her portrait is one of a pair by the artist of his lover and himself. Lea Bondi Jaray, a Jewish Vienna gallery owner, acquired the painting for her personal collection at a time when Schiele’s work was not well known. Along with the commercial contents of the gallery, the painting was confiscated by the Nazis following the Anschluss. The film recounts the series of events after World War II that resulted in the portrait’s coming into the possession of Rudolf Leopold, an Austrian collector and owner of the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Whether that acquisition was legal is a point explored in depth in the film. What sets the film in motion is the hanging of Wally as part of a Schiele retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1997. Descendants of Lea Bondi Jaray enlisted U.S. government officials to secure return of the work to the family and prevent its return to Austria following the exhibit. In what could have been a dry and dull examination, the filmmaker presents the minutia of international property law clearly and compellingly. The sense of urgency displayed by the attorneys and prosecutors is palpable as each judicial decision is rendered as to whether to release the painting back to Leopold. Adding intrigue to the story is the role of the Museum of Modern Art, a story on National Public Radio (NPR) about the controversy, and the interference of a U.S. Senator. This is an extremely satisfying film about how the operation of law overrides the venality of some men who feel entitled to have things their way due to their station in life.

Lastly, one of the highlights of the festival was the provocative offering, Paradise: Love (Seidl, 2012), which follows Teresa a middle-aged Austrian woman seeking love and affection at a seaside resort in Kenya. She travels there with a female friend and is introduced to sex tourism. At first insecure and a little prudish, she recoils at her friend’s bawdy behavior. As the film opens, we see how empty Teresa’s life is at home with her self-involved teenaged daughter and soul-crushing job attending to special needs children. While not necessarily likable, we have sympathy with her predicament. Coming out of her shell, she has encounters with the young men who offer various wares (and unspoken companionship) from the periphery of the resort. We see another side of her. Needy and insecure, we watch as she mistakes attention for love from a series of afternoon escorts, who all request money from her. That the audience is one step ahead of Teresa in seeing how an encounter develops is part of what makes this film noteworthy; the viewer’s opinion of Teresa devolves with her behavior. Audiences come away with a vivid picture of human nature that is equal parts infuriating and unsettling.

Looking forward to 2013, the Philadelphia Film Society, presenter of the Philadelphia Film Festival, also announced its multi-year lease of the Roxy Theater in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Center City. The existing two-screen venue will be renovated as funds are raised and become a year-round film center offering independent and art house titles that have struggled to find a screen in the city.

Michael Miller is an independent scholar and frequent film festival contributor to Film International.

Malaventura

By Yun-hua Chen.

This year Viennale celebrates its 50^th anniversary. After the opening gala, Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012), Viennale offers two weeks’ feast of feature films, short film programs, In Focus programme, and retrospectives. Especially striking in its selection of documentaries are those documenting musicians of different gender, generations, geopolitical backgrounds and artistic interests: Marcelo Machado’s Tropicália (2012), Bertrand Bonello’s Ingrid Cavern: Musique et Voix (2012), Bernd Schoch’s Aber Das Wort Hund Bellt Ja Nicht (2011), Charles Bradley: Soul of America (2012), Mirjam Unger’s Oh Yeah, She Performs! (2012), Amir Bar-Lev’s Re: Generation Music Project (2012) and Malik Bendjellou’s Searching for Sugar Man (2011). In terms of short film programs, there are films of Jean-Claude Rousseau, Rosa von Praunheim, and Werner Schroeter. A tribute to Michael Caine, graced by his presence, includes ten films from his long filmography. In Focus program is dedicated to the Portuguese filmmaker Manuel Mozos and the Italian filmmaker Alberto Grifi, whereas an important part of special programs is dedicated to five female filmmakers: Coleen Fitzgibbon, Narcisa Hirsch, Mati Diop, Kurdwin Ayub, and Amy Seimetz. Some impressive Austrian films include Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, 2012), and Grenzgänger (Florian Flicker, 2012), the latter being adapted from Karl Schönherr’s “Der Weibsteufel” and set on the Austrian borderland right before the opening up of the border under Schengen regulations.

Après mai

The concerns in the air such as social unrest, Europe-wide demonstration, continuation of the Occupy movement, and revisit of the past can be seen in films such as Après Mai (Olivier Assayas, 2012), Vers Madrid (Silvain George, 2012), Zima, Uhodi! (Elena Khoreva et al., 2012), and No (Pablo Larraín, 2012). These politically engaged films range from post May ’68 in Paris, 1988 in Chile, to the contemporary 2012 in Moscow under fiction and documentary forms. Après Mai, reminiscent of Assayas’ previous TV mini-series Carlos (2010), stems from his own experience as a teenager in the aftermath of Paris 1968. Looking back at his vibrant youth as a revolutionary, Assayas recreates the zealous and fiery energy and hope for an alternative, characteristic of that time. The main character Gilles in his teens enters adulthood through collaboration with political activists, artistic self-discovery in painting and romantic encounters, balance between pursuit and doubt of idealism, and loss of the loved ones. No successfully recreates the colour and grain of archival footage by using a 4:3 aspect ratio and analog films, which allow the harmonious combination between old and new footage. The title “No” refers to the “no” campaign to the Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet who attempts to extend his presidency for another eight years. The “no” campaign spearheaded by a young advertising executive René Saavedra, which was convincingly played by Gael García Bernal, works against odds and under threat of the ruling party. Other social issues can be seen in The Central Park Five (Ken Burns, David McMahon, Sarah Burns, 2012), O Som Ao Redor (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012), Rengaine (Rachid Djaidani, 2012), and Csak a Szél (Bence Fliegauf, 2011), which portray tension and conflicts resulted from racial and sociopolitical divides, as well as Death Row (Werner Herzog, 2012) and Wo Hai Yo Hua Yao Shuo (Ying Liang, 2012), which touch upon the sensitive issues of death penalty and the judicial system in the U.S. and China. The debut feature O Som Ao Redor, with the English title Neighbouring Sounds, stands out with its strong audial track infused with urban noises of all kinds in the middle-class neighbourhood in Recife, ranging from dog barks to washing machines’ vibration.

Walker

We see aging as well as the struggle coming with it in La Demora (Rodrigo Plá, 2012), Malaventura (Michel Lipkes, 2011), Pincus (David Fenster, 2012), and the documentary Age Is (Stephen Dwoskin, 2012). The beginning of Malaventura is also a beautiful portrayal of time. The window at the centre of the frame right in front of the camera goes from dark to bright. We see the shadow of a human figure gradually turning into clear silhouette of a somewhat aged body through the intensity of light. The quietness of the night is replaced by slowly intensifying street sounds. From the trivial moments of medicine taking and shoe wearing, or placing an autumn leaf on a wrinkled hand, we start the day with the marginal and somewhat abandoned elderly man’s daily routine, which reveals ultimate sublimity with the change of day light. Each take takes its time to contemplate on the poetic and philosophical meanings of being, aging, loneliness, poverty, exploitation and the struggle for dignity.

San zimei

Several beautiful Asian films have been showcased at this year’s Viennale. Tsai Ming-liang’s short film Walker (2012), filmed in the city centre of Hong Kong, contemplates upon speed, cityscape, gaze, perception, crowd and life. We see Tsai’s long-term collaborator Lee Kang-sheng dressed in red monk costumes walking at an extremely slow pace. The whole city swirls around the slowly moving body, with each step moving millimeter by millimeter, which does not return the gaze of curious passers-by crowding on narrow streets in the densely populated and fast-paced metropolitan. The world passes by the red-clothed monk at a speed which almost seems like fast-forwarding, and the monk keeps on his slow motion march. The monk’s wordless low speed “walking” is an undisguised and unpretentious image of time and existence. Wang Bing’s documentary San Zimei (2012) observes the day to day life in a remote mountain village in Yunnan, China. The camera is situated at the height of the children, whose survival depends on raising livestock and cultivating potatoes at an altitude of 3,200 metres. It takes us to intimately participate in their daily existence with modesty and honesty. Without self-exoticization from exposing poverty and unfamiliarity to the Western cinema-goers, Wang’s observational look allows life to unfold without manipulating the three sisters’ tempo of life. In an almost poetic aesthetic, the images are mostly tinted with earthly colours, as seasons come and go, in rain, in coldness or in stubbornly fierce wind. Brillante Mendoza’s Sinapupunan (2012), which focuses on the childless aging Muslim couple, Bangas-An and Shaleha, is the dramatisation of a true story in the southern Philippines. They live on fish, crafted bright-coloured tapestries and occasional jobs as midwife. After some failed attempts to adopt a child, Shaleha decided to find Bangas-An a second wife. Beautifully portrayed by one of Philippines’ most loved stars, Naura Aunor, Shaleha sacrifices everything, from the engine of their fish boat to her loving marital relationship, in order for her husband to have offspring. The film is at the same time an ethnographic gaze at various rituals and practices, and a touching depiction of life enwrapped by blue sky and sea.

Da-Reun Na-ra-e-suh

Hong Sangsoo’s Da-Reun Na-Ra-E-Suh (2012) is an impressive film interwoven by three forking paths. The film starts with the two shots of a young film student who has just moved to the countryside with her mother in order to evade creditors. Out of boredom in the seaside town of Mohang, she drafts her script which composes of a charming French woman named Anne, a middle-aged filmmaker, a young woman working at the family-run hotel, and a local lifeguard living in an orange tent in a public park. Each segment starts with Anne’s arrival in the same hotel for different reasons and as different characters, yet always welcomed by the young woman and at some point using an umbrella. These characters, in three respective segments, encounter one another under different circumstances and develop different relationships. They are like chess pieces of the filmmaker who rearranges their trajectories, dialogues, and interpersonal dynamism each time. Or, the three segments are like three reincarnations of these characters, who cross the paths of one another within cinematic time. They thus create labyrinthine effects foregrounding cinematic artificiality, arbitrariness and indeterminacy.

The “In Focus” program composes of retrospectives of the Italian filmmaker Alberto Grifi and the Portuguese filmmaker Manuel Mozos, as well as the carte blanche for Manuel Mozos. Grifi’s three short film programs and the two most celebrated films Anna (1972-75) and La Doppia Vita di Anna (1972-75), directed on videos and recently restored by the Cineteca de Bologna, take the audience to review his versatility and continuous zeal in experimental cinema and political movements. At the same time that Grifi rebels against the socio-political norms, he revolutionizes film language aesthetically through experiments with images and refusal of structure and unison. In the short film La Verifica Incerta (1964), co-directed with Franco Baruchello, he worked with found footage from classic Hollywood film materials and detached the images from their narrative connections in the vein of Dadaism. By rewinding, repeating and reinventing the images, he recreates meanings, and reflects upon the nature of the film medium. The free, fun and flowing Il Grande Freddo (1971), another short film of Grifi, on the other hand, works with dream logic and wanders between hallucination, flickering light, doubling butterflies and multiplying tropes.

Yun-hua Chen recently completed her PhD in Film Studies, and is currently working on several academic articles.