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London Film Festival 2012 Part 2 (Oct 10th-21st 2012)
Hola, bonjour, guten tag, g’day and welcome to the second part of DVDfever‘s London Film Festival retrospective. In part one we looked at the US and UK. In this part we’re looking in just about every other corner of the world. Need some tips on European cool, Asian style, and fresh talent from everywhere? You’ve come to the right place. And we’ll also tip you off on the very best documentaries heading your way.
South America and Africa had some particularly strong movies on offer this time – though each also had at least one pretty dreadful embarrassment of film. But let’s not hang about. Let’s get on with the rundown – starting with the best film of the festival, and arguably the entire year, in my not-so-humble opinion…
France
Previously best known for award-magnets like Hidden and The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke has surpassed himself with Amour. The subject matter is timely, but in other hands could be mawkish and sentimental. For this is an intense, no-holds-barred, close-up study of a loving elderly couple from the moment that one of them starts to go downhill. Jean-Louis Trintignant is the devoted, dogged husband, and Emmanuelle Riva is the wife, who has spent her life immersed in a world of music, teaching piano, and suddenly cannot do the simplest thing for herself. One or two carers and friends appear, and the couple’s property-obsessed daughter Isabelle Huppert doesn’t quite know what to do when she visits. But this is all about Trintignant and Riva, who put in immaculate, quietly effective, and utterly heartbreaking performances. Haneke can’t resist a couple of tricks, revealing the ending at the very beginning of the film, and including one particularly vivid dream sequence, but otherwise he directs the duo unflinchingly. Oh, and though set in Paris, the film was made jointly with Germany and Austria.
Rejoice, all Kristin Scott Thomas fans, for she’s the co-star of In The House, another of her French language triumphs. Directed by Francois Ozon in typically detached, yet dramatic style, this is the story of a gifted, precocious teenage pupil, Claude (the brilliant Ernst Umhauer) whose inventive prose intrigues his bored literature teacher, Germain (Fabrice Luchini on top form). Encouraged by Germain, who takes the stories home to read to his wife (Scott Thomas), Claude gets more daring with his voyeuristic narrative. In each episode of his story he worms his way further into a targeted schoolfriend’s perfect home and family, and ends up making not only Germain, but also ourselves as an audience, complicit in his deceit. But is he writing fact or fiction? Has Germain’s interest spawned a monster? Clever, witty and playful, Ozon’s film is based on a play by Juan Moyoraga, but transforms it into something fresh. And along the way he also manages to satirise modern art and skewer bourgeois, middle-class marriage. Lots of fun.
Punk is a nihilistic, 21st Century voyage of the damned within a French sub-culture. They may call themselves punks, but in truth the kids in Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s dark drama feel like look-alikes. And even as they’re trying to recreate the original punk ethos, the same old factions and splinter groups divide and rule. On the plus side, there’s a great lead performance from Paul Bartel, with the divine Beatrice Dalle as his mum.
Tango Libre, from Frederic Fonteyne, was made along with Belgium and Luxembourg, and offers a wonderful mix of cultures and regimes. Prisoner Fernand (Sergi Lopez, aka Kristin Scott Thomas’ love interest in previous festival drama, Leaving) is only too aware that he’s losing touch with his wife, Alice (Anne Paulicevich, who co-wrote the film), while he’s locked up. As for their son, Antonio (Zacharie Chasseriaud, one of our stars to watch in 2011’s The Giants), well, he’s drifting apart from both of them. What transforms the film – and the characters – is the use of dance, specifically the tango. Alice has been partnering her husband’s prison guard, JC, in dance class; Fernand asks the macho Argentine prisoners to teach him how to tango to win her back; and fights break out when big, burly prisoners start dancing all over the place, from the exercise yard to the corridors. The tango sequences are electrifying, passions run high, the moments of violence are brutal, yet the whole film is uplifting.
Directed by Ursula Meier, Sister is set in an upmarket Swiss ski resort towards the end of the season. 12-year-old Simon (the superb Kacey Mottet Klein) is a cheeky artful dodger, just about keeping himself and his sister solvent by stealing skiing equipment to order. He gets caught by a resort chef (the equally cheeky Martin Compston), who chooses to help his criminal endeavours rather than inform on him. And Simon is also charmed by Gillian Anderson and her skiing family, but always needs to focus on getting enough gear to sell… until he does one robbery too many, gets beaten up and even finds his central relationship with his sister under threat. A very promising drama.
Romania
Based on actual events, Beyond The Hills is also Cristian Mungiu’s eagerly awaited follow-up to 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. Like its predecessor, this is never an easy watch, but is all the more compelling for that. We are taken into an isolated, orthodox religious community, almost primitive in its beliefs and practices, along with Alina, who is visiting her dearly beloved young friend, Voichita, who is now a nun there. Alina is desperate for her friend to leave with her, but Voichita is now passionate about her own vocation in the church. Meanwhile her fellow nuns scurry around them and the priest like a flock of black crows, following his every word to the letter. They feel threatened by Alina’s godlessness, and believe that her sickness, sins and confessions as intertwined. And when Easter approaches and the nuns don’t want the visiting congregation to witness anything troubling, their actions show there is a thin line between salvation and persecution. Strong stuff, but strongly recommended.
Denmark
Those who saw Thomas Vinterberg’s previous masterpiece, Festen, will have justifiably high expectations of The Hunt. It stars Mads Mikkelsen as Lucas, everyone’s favourite kindergarten teacher, and focuses on how quickly his life unravels when an incriminating accusation is made against him by one of the children, Klara, who also happens to be the daughter of his best friend. All the jovial bonhomie of his hunting friends, the closeness of his neighbourhood, his supportive colleagues – once the accusation is made, these ebb away, only to be replaced by suspicion, hysteria, rising panic and finger-pointing. Mikkelsen is fantastic, the film is a devastatingly good thriller, and fans of The Killing will be pleased to hear that there’s some fantastic knitwear on display, and that Bjarne Henriksen (better known as Theis Birk Larsen) plays the child psychologist. Highly recommended.
The co-writer of The Hunt, Tobias Lindholm, is also the writer/director of another Danish thriller, A Hijacking, which stars a mixture of actors from The Killing and Borgen. So, amongst others, Soren Malling (Sarah Lund’s sidekick Jan Meyer in The Killing 1) plays the CEO and Pilou Asbaek (Borgen’s spin doctor, Kasper Juul) is the cook on the captured ship. So the meticulous detail of Borgen (which Lindholm also writes) is underpinned by the immediacy of The Killing throughout – with authenticity guaranteed by using confiscated guns, hijacked ships, and casting someone who used to work in hostage negotiation. Cutting back and forth from the sweaty ship and ailing crew, hijacked by Somali pirates, to the sterile offices of the company HQ back in Copenhagen, the tension and sense of fear escalates, and the viewer gets sucked into the moral dilemma. Emphasising the togetherness of the cast and crew, actor Dar Salim (another Borgen star) says: “It’s just like a little jazz band and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
Spain
If you like your comedy dramas dark, then let me recommend Telmo Esnal’s Happy New Year, Grandma! Made in the Basque language, it stars Monserrat Carulla (from The Orphanage) as manipulative, scheming granny, Mari. She is wearing out her long-suffering daughter, Maritxu, who is also her carer, not to mention driving her son-in-law, Joxemari to distraction. When the couple finally go on holiday to Majorca, they leave Mari with their granddaughter and her husband, who put her in a home, unbeknownst to Marixtu, but with Joxemari’s blessing. And the plan looks good until granny escapes and they are forced to actually look after her – and she causes mayhem. The plot and tone veers wildly, but the performers always make it feel entirely credible… just.
Italy
From the cinematographer of Vincere, Daniele Cipri, comes his first feature film as director, It Was The Son. Beautifully shot, using Hitchcock-style music when imagination and dreaminess kick in, this is a tragic family drama based on a famous novel. A family in Palermo, Sicily (also Cipri’s native town), is trying to keep afloat, but is drowning in mounting debt, not helped by the well-meaning patriarch, Nicola (the ever-lugubrious Toni Servillo), accompanied by constant domestic strife, and punctuated by operatic violence. Cipri also shot DORMANT BEAUTY, directed by Vincere’s Marco Bellochio and based on a real-life, emotive event: should a woman who has been on life support for 17 years finally be allowed to die? Stars include Toni Servillo (again) and Isabelle Huppert (again), with intersecting stories and characters – from protesters and parents to politicians and patients – plus a little romance to lighten matters.
Then again, if you really want to see a masterclass in filmmaking, you won’t go far wrong watching the restored, 1954 black and white classic from Roberto Rossellini, Viaggio In Italia. Starring Rossellini’s wife, Ingrid Bergman, and George Sanders as her buttoned-down English husband, this is seamlessly, gorgeously directed and acted. Despite their love, the marriage is on the rocks, and you can feel them moving inexorably apart even as they drive around the tourist spots of Europe.
Go to page 2 for more films in the look at the London Film Festival 2012 Part 2.
Czech Rep
When banker Libor loses his job and is threatened after financial indiscretions and irregularities, he must go on the run with his wife and their two precocious, wise-cracking kids. In Robert Sedlacek’s Long Live The Family (right) we sense their desperation, watching them fleeing for their lives, meanwhile getting closer as a family, and more quirky and endearing to the viewers. The tone is far bleaker in a co-production with Slovakia, MADE IN ASH, the first feature from writer-director Iveta Grofova. Slovakian Roma girl Dorota is happily working in a factory on the Czech-German border when she and her fellow immigrant workers are suddenly made redundant. She can’t go back home, her boyfriend has melted away, and her money is running out. Her friends are turning tricks or lap-dancing. But can she bear an alternative future with a keen, lonely German man who is older than her father? Bleak, gritty, yet never judgmental, this intersperses the harsh reality of the New European economy with animated renditions of Dorota’s dreams.
Hungary
Bleaker still is Bence Fliegauf’s Just The Wind, based on the grim, true acts of violence against Romanies just a few years ago, in which many people were attacked, and six died. Fliegauf’s drama explores their persecution, which happens despite their hard-working, ordinary existence. A mother and her two children live as outsiders, cowed by racial tensions and lawless policemen, with danger, dread and menace constantly hanging in the air. Naturalistic performances from these non-actors make it all the more shocking when the tension builds to a dramatic climax.
Germany
Filmed in Germany and Argentina, My German Friend also stretches across decades, but starts crucially in the post-war period, with a young Jewish girl, Sulamit, falling for her German neighbour, Friedrich, in their swish Buenos Aires suburb. As they grow up, he finds out more about his father’s Nazi past, while she is set upon by German youths. We follow them as they both get scholarships to study in sixties Germany, where he becomes increasingly politicised, before returning to Argentina as people start to be “disappeared” by the junta. Theirs is a love story, carnal and spiritual, played out across a huge canvas, and the main two actors, Celeste Cid and Max Riemelt somehow manage to be convincing from youth through to their middle years.
Made by Australian director, Cate Shortland (best known for Somersault), Lore also foregrounds a prominent Nazi’s family, when they try to find safe haven as the war ends. Abandoned by their parents, the four younger children are led by their resourceful teenage sibling, Lore, who is forced to barter for their lives on their hellish journey. And even as she is confronted by the horrific photographic evidence of what her SS father has done, she remains conflicted by her attraction to a Jewish youth who is also on the run. Wonderfully shot by Adam Arkapaw, of Animal Kingdom fame, sensitively directed by Shortland, this is very much Saskia Rosendahl’s film in the title role.
Austria
Starring Martina Gedeck (of The Lives of Others and Baader Meinhof Complex), The Wall is a psychological, almost supernatural, study of one woman who cannot escape from her remote country chalet and its surroundings. There is an invisible wall physically stopping her, forcing her to confront internal truths as she documents her daily life in a diary. Adrift in utter isolation, with only a dog and cow for company, we also wonder if she can survive or if she is perhaps already dead… Based on a fifty-year-old novel, Julian Roman Polsler’s film and Gedeck’s performance leave you thinking long after it’s ended.
Ireland
If it’s isolation you want, then Pat Collins’ uncategorisable Silence is for you. An obsessive soundman (aren’t they all?) moves from bustling Berlin to the silence of wild, rural Ireland, drawn in particular to Tory Island. He meets locals, strolls around, communing with nature in a sort of spiritual homecoming. The isolation is less welcome in Gerard Barrett’s debut feature, PILGRIM HILL, focusing on a lonely, unmarried farmer, Jimmy, tenderly played by Joe Mullins. Never bitter, he’s forced to work the farm alone while looking after his bed-ridden father. The repetitive toil of his labours is poignant, especially when contrasted with his one shiftless friend, and at any time Jimmy could be overwhelmed by financial disaster.
Deliberately made as a slice of life fiction rather than a documentary, this is Barrett’s tribute to the uncles and aunts across Ireland who are struggling on, farming solo in an unchanged world – and he admits that the film has been too close to home for some Irish audiences. As with Garage, director Lenny Abrahamson has focused on a very particular Irish crowd for What Richard Did. This time it’s middle class youths on the cusp of higher education, living in a bubble, with summer parties and bucolic fun stretching before them. It starts as an unassuming, quietly romantic film, reflecting young Richard’s easygoing character. He’s besotted by Lara, hanging out with chums, when suddenly one drunken fight erupts into something terrible. Will those few seconds of madness ruin Richard’s entire future? Should he and his friends pretend it never happened, or will the guilt consume him?
Saudi Arabia
On the surface, Wadjda is the story of a young girl determined to get enough cash to buy herself a bicycle. But when you bear in mind that it’s set and filmed in Saudi Arabia, where cinemas themselves are banned, and that it’s made by a female, first-time director, Haifaa Al Mansour, who often had to instruct her stars by walkie-talkie while hidden behind vans, then it’s remarkable that it was made at all. The larger story is of this bright girl, Wadjda (the extraordinary Waad Mohammed) who cannot be constrained by her Islamic school’s strict rules, who has an endearing sense of humour, and a good role model in her own mum. There is fear lurking around the edges of their lives, but nevertheless Wadjda sees that she can achieve her dream if she wins a Spellbound-style school competition about the Koran. This is the first feature film made in Saudi Arabia, and Al Mansour says that she wants to inspire girls to follow their dreams, and she’s also hoping that Wadjda might just open some doors as the country changes. But it’s worth seeing as a brilliant coming-of-age film in its own right.
Egypt
Ibrahim El-Batout’s tense political thriller, Winter Of Discontent, shows what happened in the years leading up to events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring of 2011. Through different points of view, but principally through the eyes of an activist (Amr Waked), we see the torture, the police state and the control of the media, with the brutality of January 25 2011 as the tipping point, when the crowds started swelling in the final days of President Hosni Mubarak.
Morocco
Horses of God, directed by Nabil Ayouch, is set in Casablanca and based on the real terrorist attacks in 2003. It shows how two ordinary brothers grow up and gradually become radicalised, turning into suicide bombers – or martyrs. And it’s all shot in such a normal, matter-of-fact, credible fashion that it seems all the more shocking.
Senegal
Underpinned by a terrific musical soundtrack, played on the kora, Jeremy Teicher’s Tall as the Baobab Tree is based on true stories about a poor farming family who need to pay the medical costs for their son’s broken leg. The father decides that their only option is to sell his younger daughter into marriage, but the older daughter looks for an alternative solution, saving up any money she earns. The ending may not be quite what we expect, but this is a lovely, lyrical film that doesn’t prettify poverty. TEY is an even more dramatic, imaginative film, from Alain Gomis, who shows one man, Satche (Saul Williams) reliving the key moments of his life when he knows it is his last day on earth.
Mozambique
Set in 1975, when Mozambique is emerging from colonial rule, Licinio Azevedo’s Virgin Margarida shows how many women were arbitrarily rounded up – mainly prostitutes, but also ordinary girls like Margarida – and taken into the forests to be “reeducated”. Which basically meant being systematically abused and brutally disciplined with hard labour, here ironically under a female commander. A few moments of humanity shine through in the midst of oppression and homogenisation, but Azevedo’s documentary background means that we never go far from the grim truth of this largely untold story.
South Africa
Of course, there has to be the odd stinker in the festival, and Barry Berk’s Sleeper’s Wake is a film I cannot recommend in any way. Nominally covering the subject of a survivor’s guilt after a tragic accident, this is unpleasant and unconvincing, with psychological and physical violence, unbelievable relationships and some rather poor acting. Tonally it’s also uneven and jarring, with a sense of impending doom broken up by misfiring comic moments – and from the overall subject matter right down to the music cues, it’s one to avoid.
Canada
Museum House is a little gem from film essayist Jem Cohen, focusing on middle-aged museum guard, Johann (Bobby Sommer) and set in the impressive Kunsthistorisches Art Museum in Vienna. Every day seems much the same for him until a visitor, Anne, played by one-of-a-kind Canadian singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara, comes into the gallery and starts asking him questions. She’s visiting while her cousin is in hospital, is a stranger in a strange land, and Johann helps her navigate her way around the museum, the city, the language, and even this juncture in her life. And as he reveals his own past to her in measured observations, they connect as friends, mulling over the Brueghels and other paintings, sipping coffee in what feels like a cultural exchange. Part improvised and based on their own experiences, this is a rare study of friendship, perfectly played by two movie novices, who clearly relished discussing life and art. Fans will already know that O’Hara has good pedigree as the sister of comic actress Catherine O’Hara, and will enjoy her breaking into song a couple of times.
Australia
Loosely based on a rather incredible true story, The Sapphires proves that it is Chris O’Dowd’s moment right now, and there is no use fighting it. A gifted trio of young and feisty Aboriginal singing sisters – later joined by their snooty cousin – unjustly lose a talent competition, but are spotted by the sozzled DJ Dave (O’Dowd), who offers to manage them. To be honest, it’s every rags to riches, overcoming prejudice, musical biopic movie you’ve ever seen. But that doesn’t stop it being fun, featuring rock-solid sixties soul songs, ticking all the feelgood boxes, and emerging as a kind of Aboriginal Commitments on tour in the midst of the Vietnam War.
Another side of Australia emerges in Underground, director Robert (Balibo) Connolly’s biopic of the teenage Julian Assange in his pre-Wikileaks life. Set just before the first Gulf War, and with Rachel Griffiths playing his free-spirited, politically motivated, activist mum, you begin to see where the junior hacker got his motivation. Basically a cool, smart TV movie, it paints Assange (Alex Williams) as a somewhat saintly young James Bond/Alex Rider-type with his own gang of subversives. And it’s lifted from being merely humdrum by the acting not only of Griffiths, but also Anthony LaPaglia as the hapless investigating cop who is always one step behind.
Go to page 3 for more films in the look at the London Film Festival 2012 Part 2.
Korea
If you have read any of our previous film festival reviews, you’ll know that Korean movies often rock our world, cinematically speaking. And Helpless is another thriller that grabs you from the opening sequence and simply won’t let go. Director Byun Youngjoo is better known for documentaries, but she’s here chosen to adapt a modern Japanese novel and transport it to Korea. The twisty-turny narrative starts with a city vet, Munho, and his fiancée, Seonyeong, on their way to tell his parents they’re about to get married. Then she suddenly disappears. Totally. But he’s soon not only asking where she’s gone, but who she really was. Was it really just a simple scam? Nothing is what it seemed, Munho feels like he’s part of a much bigger deception, and the viewers are also constantly forced to review their own attitude to Seonyeong and her motivation.
More typical Korean fare comes from the huge box-office smash, Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time, writer/director Yoon Jongbin’s eighties-set, all-action story of corruption. With Old Boy’s Choi Minsik in the ‘title’ role, and with inept but connected individuals and chaotic racketeering accompanying every bit of business, it’s inevitable that it’s all going to end badly – and it’s all done in broad comic strokes.
Perhaps the only slightly disappointing Korean movie this time is In Another Country, in that expectations are always high for Hong Sangsoo’s comedies of manners (like last year’s The Day He Arrives), and his star this time is current festival favourite, Isabelle Huppert. Though entirely in Hong’s style, it’s reminiscent of something rather French and arty, but without real purpose. Huppert is the innocent abroad – in a Korean resort – and she plays three characters invented by a young screenwriter with a vivid imagination, to tell three different stories, as she interacts with the same characters in the same location, but with different outcomes. There is a kind of intellectual delight in the symmetry and repetition, but there’s also the nagging feeling that Hong can stretch himself more.
Thailand
Another really promising debut, this one from Tongpong Chantarangkul, with the poignant I Carried You Home. Two estranged daughters are forced back together when their mother dies suddenly while singing karaoke. They must accompany the body back from Bangkok to their mother’s remote birthplace, and as they travel back to their past – driven there by a comical but well-meaning chauffeur – they become variously wistful, emotional and pragmatic. Ancient and modern rub shoulders on their journey and in their rituals, and the acting and directing is suitably delicate.
Japan
You need to suspend your belief and, more importantly, your moral compass when watching Miwa Nishikawa’s comedy drama, Dreams For Sale. For if the roles were reversed this might seem a tad distasteful (even though the director is female). A young married couple see their restaurant business go up in smoke and need another plan to claw their way back from destitution. The languorous pace somehow works, reflecting their frustration; he is defeatist, while she is endlessly resourceful. And when one night he gets drunk, is picked up by a rich woman and given a generous payment, the wife decides that he will make money by becoming a serial gigolo, while she is his pimp. Heck, she even writes his lines for him as they construct a gigantic scam. But you’ll laugh even as you’re questioning the premise…
Taiwan
Gosh, 10 + 10 is a really mixed bag. Comprising twenty short films, all five-minutes in length, made by some of the best Taiwanese directors around, you’ll find yourself absorbed by some, but shrugging your shoulders at others. Worth seeing though, if only for the short, sharp shock of Chung Mong-Hong’s film about bullying, Reverberation, plus Shen Ko-Shang’s Bus Odyssey, set on a superficially simple journey.
Brazil
Another one to watch is Kleber Mendonca Filho, the writer and debut director of Neighbouring Sounds. Divided into equally paranoid sections, this drama boasts a big cast with intertwining characters, spread over a middle-class suburb in the city of Recife, yet it feels claustrophobic throughout. Dogs bark in the night, the people in the neighbourhood pay for protection from private security guards, an elderly gent seems in control, the buildings feel structured and safe, the outside dark and possibly dangerous, but nothing is quite as straightforward as it seems. The Rear Window-type atmosphere builds as Filho’s seductively powerful debut reflects all these tensions. Oh, and I guarantee you’ll never be able to look at your washing machine’s spin cycle in the same way again after part one!
Uruguay
3 is a kind of coming-of-age(s) drama from Pablo Stoll Ward, the co-director of previous festival favourite, Whisky. It’s set in the centre of a triangle of an estranged OCD dentist father, a mother who spends all her spare time caring for her sick aunt, and their neglected, rebellious teenage daughter, Ana. Dad wants them back together and sneaks into the apartment to carry out DIY and chores for them. Mum wants romance from somebody else. Ana wants a dangerous boyfriend and to play the odd handball match. All three actors excel across the film, and have a ball in the nostalgic final sequence.
Argentina
I’ve loved Viggo Mortensen in pretty much everything he’s done. But that has now ended rather abruptly with Everybody Has A Plan. Overwrought, torturously slow, with no clear direction, it stars Mortensen as two identical brothers with very different lives, and when one needs a way out of his current plight, it’s very tempting to swap identities. I apologise if I’ve inadvertently made it sound interesting, because it isn’t. And I have to confess that I didn’t make it to the final conclusion of the film. And that’s rare for me. Sorry in every way.
Chile
From writer-director Dominga Sotomayor comes another commendable debut, Thursday Till Sunday, which is her way of retelling those old, half-remembered, epic family trips captured on fading photos. The entire road trip comes from the point of view of the ten-year-old daughter, Lucia (Santi Ahumada acting her socks off), as she witnesses her parents’ marriage crumbling en route. She grows up as they grow apart, meeting strangers and having adventures as they go. Great stuff.
Russia
New Russian cinema is possibly in the rudest health of all, if this year’s crop is anything to go by. In The Fog is based on the novel from Vassil Bykov, and is the latest film from Sergei Loznitsa, who previously wowed everyone with My Joy. And helping Loznitsa make another classic is Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu of Beyond The Hills and 4 Months fame. At first the plot seems to be about simple betrayal and revenge, after the Nazis execute a group of Belarus resistance fighters. But with its generous use of flashbacks, muted colours and action, and minimal dialogue, it evolves into something more morally and psychologically complex.
The quite brilliant Short Stories (above-right), from director Mikhail Segal, consists of four very different films. The premise is that a publisher has rejected a book of short stories, and every single person who picks up this collection is drawn into a particular narrative, finding something relevant and gripping. At times surreal, often very funny, and always original, one story focuses on a psychic librarian recruited by the police to find a missing child, and another tracks the trail of bribery and corruption, deal by deal, to the very top. A slightly cheesy affair between two mismatched, but lusting individuals closes the film, but it’s the opening story that really excels: a young couple’s pre-marital meeting with a wedding organiser who not only plans their big day, but also their future offspring’s education, and even the couple’s own extra-marital affairs in the years to come, letting them pick their partners-in-sin from pre-selected line-ups. Each story is cutely connected and Segal’s satire on modern life is richly rewarding.
KEY DOCUMENTARIES
Finally, a quick round-up of some of the best documentary features from this year’s festival – with quite a diverse bunch involved, from complete novices to the tried and trusted.
Village at the End of the World(right), from director Sarah (Brick Lane) Gavron, with cinematography by her Danish husband David Katznelson, shows us the reality of living in one of the most remote villages in Northern Greenland, Niaqornat, which has a population of just 59 – most of whom seem to be related to each other. Filmed over a year in this beautiful location, it shows how despite seeing icebergs through the windows of their homes and having plenty of fish and the odd reindeer to eat, life here can be lonely, harsh and isolated, particularly for teenagers. The reality is that the village is slowly dying, and unless the people take action and address their own fate, their idyllic existence there will be over and they’ll be relocated to an urban environment. A lovely, loving film.
The Central Park Fiveis the always reliable Ken Burns’ take on the media-fuelled criminal injustice meted out to five innocent young African American teenage boys after a woman was beaten, raped and left for dead in New York’s iconic Central Park in 1989. Justice needed to be seen to be done, the park needed to be seen as safe again, and though the NYPD had no evidence, they forced coerced confessions, and the youths talked themselves into court and then prison. Through forensic film-making, revealing that nothing added up – including DNA evidence and the basic timeline – the Burns unit has also located all the protagonists and re-interviewed them, including Mayor Ed Koch. And even 13 years after the original crime, when another inmate confesses to the crime, and his DNA is found to match, the police and the media are still in denial about the innocence of the five. Chilling.
Canned Dreams from Finland is Katja Gauriloff’s measured, matter-of-fact look at the journey of foodstuffs from all over the world into the final cans of ravioli itself. Some of the processes are automated and mesmeric, as huge Cold War type computers take control, and yet there is a profundity and deep sadness in the mundanity. Reminiscent of Our Daily Bread in tone, this is unfiltered by narration, has ambient noise and very little music, but adds straightforward first person testimonies from those involved. So we hear of modest hopes and dreams from Portuguese tomato gatherers, while a Polish cattle butcher talks of betrayal and revenge while spattered with blood. And some sections might make you consider vegetarianism.
The Road: A Story of Life and Death from Marc Isaacs is the story of the A5, the route from Holyhead in Wales which takes you down to north-west and finally central London, told through the narratives of the people who live and work alongside the road. On The Road’s surface it’s about a specific diaspora, but Isaacs carefully unearths a multitude of immigrants’ stories, interviewing them to discover they’re all different, yet all similarly bound by their desire to come to the UK. Some pushed, some pulled; Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, all these faiths have faith in their destination. This gentle meditation on modern immigration, love and loneliness, bars and bingo halls is recommended.
Solar Eclipse, from Martin Marecek, shows how a couple of experts, Tomas and Milan, travel down from the Czech Republic to Zambia to help with the local solar power and electricity supply. There are inevitable culture clashes when the charitable chaps find that all their hard work from their previous visit has been trashed and misused. Good will starts to plummet and they wonder if their trust has been misplaced. Yes, they have a common goal, but perhaps there are different ways of getting there.
The Ethnographer is Ulises Rosell’s film about an English anthropologist, John Hillary Palmer, immersed in the Wichi community in northern Argentina. Palmer gets involved, even as he documents them, now with a local Wichi wife and kids there, having crossed the line and gone native. Crucially, though, he’s fighting for their rights, and Rosell’s documentary is an authentic, eye-opening window on another world.
Beware of Mr Baker is Jay Bulger’s study of Ginger Baker, the unstable, 73-year-old ex-Cream drumming genius, as everyone lines up to confirm, from John Lydon to Stewart Copeland. Propelled and punctuated by his drumming, it’s also the story of the director’s ability to persuade the “red-headed mad man” to let him come and stay with him in his South African home, surrounded by dogs. Fun, especially for fans.
Bayou Blue covers the story of a serial rapist and killer, Ronald Dominique, who murdered 23 men in Louisiana. Shockingly, his decade of crime was ignored by the national and international media, because Hurricane Katrina meant everyone was preoccupied by this, and more incredibly, because it was viewed as a local story. Filmmakers Alix Lambert and David McMahon not only revisit the scenes of the crimes and interview the cops and the families of the victims, but also feature the audio of Dominique’s confessions. Candid and compelling.
Coming next: part three of the festival review, including the DVDfever Awards…