Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma are renowned figures of the South African political world. The former is an intellectual leader, and the latter is a trade union representative who never received any kind of formal education. Both have, from different places, fought for the liberation of their country during more than 30 years (first from the trenches and later in exile) and helped build a non-racial State under Nelson Mandela’s Government. However, a few years ago, Mbeki and Zuma became the main characters of a political struggle of epic proportions in which the well-being of the majority was replaced by party pressures and personal differences. Fifteen years after the democratic victory over Apartheid, Jihan El-Tahri´s documentary analyzes today’s African National Congress – the party with which Mandela came to power - to portray an internal crisis that threatens to destroy everything achieved so far by the South African people.
Trailer is here (embedding disabled), and the movie's Facebook page is here.
The first thing we see is a detail shot of Antoine’s ear surrounded by his slightly tangled black hair, but not his eyes. Immediately after, we see him opening the shutters and windows of a dark room. This is how we first meet Antoine, the documentary that permanently flirts with fiction, and Antoine, the little blind Canadian boy. With the excuse of an imaginary police case, this young main character becomes a detective who explores the world in search of a certain Madame Rouski, a woman who dissolves in water and wanders around the pipes of her natal Montreal. Without being overdramatic, victimizing the main character or making him play his part with arrogant stoicism, Laura Bari portrays the daily life of a normal boy by stretching the boundaries of the game and letting imagination guide the story. Her camera dives into the universe of a small group of five-year-old children - placing itself physically at the same height and capturing in depth their forms of perception - to discover a new way of seeing the world.
In Amer, the first images, sounds and voices seem to come from an Italian horror movie of the seventies. To be more precise (and encourage those who visit these sinister regions of the catalog and festival), they seem to come from a giallo, combination of suspense and horror, in which dark directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento excelled. But Amer takes a different path, and first-timers Cattet and Forzani cleverly avoid making a movie that is a mere homage or insider’s wink. The film is more than the updating of a genre by skillfully and knowledgeably quoting its forms; the directors´ intentions and achievements are greater. Unlike classic giallos, there is no mystery to unveil, or rather, there are so many mysteries that they seem abstract, pure cinematographic form portrayed through images –probably the most fantastic images of the festival-, sounds and music (including the justified appearance of Ennio Morricone). And through the mystery of a woman in three different moments of her life, real or imagined, lived or dreamt, or everything at the same time.
Dad is dead and mom has locked herself in her bedroom to cry and sleep; she doesn’t want to see anyone. Franca and her younger brother guard the door of the room so none of the annoying relatives assembled in their house in the middle of the afternoon can interrupt her solitary mourning. Afterwards, while waiting for the funeral, they wander around the neighborhood, perhaps in search of fresh air to clear their weary heads. Their conversations seem to lack continuity, marked by a combination of innocence and cynicism, always revolving around the same subject: to believe or not to believe. From faith (and religious fear) to conspirational paranoia (and the myths and superstitions supposedly created by “the Yankees”: the landing on the moon in 1969, the bad luck of Friday the 13th, friend’s day!), agnosticism and skepticism. Almost teenagers, they are just two somewhat lost brothers trying to deal with one certainty (death) and the doubts it has brought about. Sofía Mora’s first feature film captures this limbo with a special sensitivity, portraying the quiet anxiety and silent uneasiness of a hot and grey afternoon in the middle of the week. This daily yet strange situation depicts the hard pain of growing up, announcing, with a stifled scream, nothing less than the end of childhood.
The main character of this first work – which received the Best Director Award in the Festival of Moscow – is dead. Specifically, she committed suicide. A meticulously planned suicide, partly thanks to its timing: just before the Jewish festivity of Pesaj and during the holidays of her only son, a combination which forces Kurtz, Nora’s ex-husband, to take care of the corpse, the apartment and the funeral, which has to take place 5 days after the death. But Kurtz soon understands that these were precisely the woman’s intentions and is determined to sabotage the plans of this puppeteer from the beyond. Actor Fernando Luján is Jesus Kurtz, a grumpy man played in a deadpan tone (which resembles Jacobo, the main character from Whisky) and a recalcitrant atheist intent on sabotaging the retinue of the rabbi designated by Nora with small pranks, big insults and pepperoni pizzas. Virtually all of this black comedy about religion takes place indoors, which proves not only Chenillo´s talent to make the best use of spaces but also her ability to portray the way in which some secrets and true feelings echo sustainedly every time they appear, almost inadvertently, in the film.
A girl looks out the window of her apartment in Amsterdam. Her belongings are downstairs, on the street. All alone in the empty room, Anne -that’s her name- takes her ring off: this is the first scene of Nothing Personal and that’s all the information we’ll receive about Anne’s past because Antoniak´s first film focuses exclusively on Anne’s journey to faraway lands. The place chosen by Anne for her intimate exile is Connemara, an inhospitable district on the west coast of Ireland. We see her walking like an unsociable vagabond through the roads of this austere landscape, searching for food in the garbage and baring her teeth to those who try to disturb her solitude. But then she meets Martin, a widow who is much older than her but equally determined to defend his isolation. She agrees to work for him in exchange for food and something begins to change in Anne’s interior. Using very few dialogues and taking full advantage of the enigmatic beauty of the Irish landscape, Antoniak finds the precise tone and rhythm to portray Anne’s transformation and the chemistry between Rea (Neil Jordan’s fetish actor) and the fantastic actress Lotte Verbeek, the great discovery of Nothing Personal. When our contemporary world is busy with issues of unification and integration, the two characters of Nothing Personal choose a solitude they see as personal freedom and comfort. But isn’t they longing for human contact? What are the stages of coming together of two people? Nothing Personal is a cinematic experience asking and answering these questions.
Australian Simon Barker, considered one of the best drummers of contemporary jazz, embarks on the search for mythical Kim Seok-chul, the South Korean witchdoctor whose elaborate improvised percussion sets have inspired his art and greatly influenced his ideas about music. The task isn’t easy: even though the Government has awarded him the distinction of “Intangible Asset” (a distinction this Asian country awards its cultural treasures), old Kim doesn’t participate in mundane affairs, and shuts himself away while officiating his intricate liturgy for the communion between the living and the dead. In this way, Barker´s journey becomes a mystical rather than a detective-like investigation; an initiation rite in which he must win the respect of the elusive master and run a race against time to finally find him a few days before his death. A journey through a stunning landscape of mountains, fields and small villages of the Korean rural areas, and a musical tale (that also includes other elements, like when Barker´s guide talks about the difficult times of the military regime) so amazing and different from Western stories, as to contain characters that have lived behind a waterfall for seven years learning to sing.
Identical twins George and Mike Kuchar -self-taught, libertarian and ingenious- have been practicing what they preach for the last 50 years: filming with no money, with an extraterrestrial creativity and with a festively camp spirit. This documentary celebrates 50 years of happy marriage between the Kuchars and the cinema with interviews to the twins, to declared fans (John Waters, Guy Maddin, Atom Egoyan), to superstars whom the brothers created out of mud -or something worse- with their philosophy of “anybody can act”, and of course, with generous doses of films like Sins Of The Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I’m Naked and Pagan Rhapsody. While George motivates a new generation of students during the shooting of The Fury Of Frau Frankenstein in a Fellinesque classroom, Kroot, the director of It Came from Kuchar, traces the story the brothers, from their origins in the Bronx, a neighbourhood transformed into an impromptu Hollywood due to home-made remakes of classic melodramas, until their jump to the underground firmament of the seventies, together with Warhol, Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger, where they were called the “8 mm Mozarts”. In doing so, Kroot recovers a secret history which places the Kuchars where they belong: the movie screen.
Apparently the posts I've done up until now for the Mar del Plata Film Festival have all been for the Film Festival in 2007. So, um, disregard. New posts will be from this year's festival, I promise.
Showing at the 2009 Mar del Plata Film Festival: Stay the Same Never Change, directed by Laurel Nakadate
Visual artist Laurel Nakadate didn’t need a story line or a plot or anything similar to make her first film one of the biggest surprises of the last edition of the Sundance Festival. Instead, she filmed a group of girls from the suburbs of Kansas City in their real homes, dressed in the clothes they usually wear and living (so to speak, unless you think boys in the Middle West have a black digital rectangle over their eyes) the lives they live. The result is like an absorbing and odd photo album; a harsh look on adolescence, its long days full of boredom, awkwardness, loneliness and hard and contradictory romances. “I hate myself…I am an optimist person”, says one of these girls who, accompanied by Owen Ashworth´s lo-fi music (whose alias, “Casiotone for the Painfully Alone”, is very significant), act as themselves in the sometimes languid and sometimes horrifying beautiful vignettes in Stay The Same Never Change. Like The Virgin Suicides without a story, left only with the rarefied mood of Eugenides´ novel (with a sometimes innocent and sometimes perversely voyeuristic viewpoint), Nakadate captures the dramatic banality and vague anguish of the teenage hearts at the core of the United States.
Viola is a beautiful woman. Angela is ashamed of Viola. The communication between them has become almost impossible. They both have habits bordering on obsession. They only meet to watch their favorite TV series; they never miss an episode. Viola works where nobody else wants to and is looking for a true man. Angela wants to be a designer. They want to escape their monotonous lives and find something new, a change of scenery.
I think this video is related in some way, but... you know... Hungarian.
Single mother Esma lives with her 12-year-old daughter Sara in Sarajevo’s Grbavica neighborhood, where life is still being reconstructed after the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Unable to make ends meet with the meager government aid she receives, Esma takes a job as a cocktail waitress in a nightclub. Working all night is difficult for Esma physically and it also forces her to reluctantly spend less time with her daughter. Still haunted by violent events in her past, Esma attends group therapy sessions at the local Women’s Center. In addition to relying on her best friend Sabina, Esma also finds a kindred spirit in Pelda, a compassionate male co-worker from the nightclub.
Feisty tomboy Sara begins to put soccer aside as she develops a close friendship with classmate Samir. The two sensitive young teenagers feel a strong bond because both lost their fathers in the war. But Samir is surprised to hear Sara doesn’t know the details of her father’s noble death.
Sara’s father becomes an issue when she requires the certificate proving he died a shaheed, a war martyr, so that she can receive a discount for an upcoming school trip. Esma claims acquiring the certificate is difficult since his body has yet to be found. Meanwhile, Esma searches desperately to borrow money to pay for Sara’s trip.
Confused Sara becomes violently upset when some classmates tease her for not being on the list of martyrs’ children. Realizing her mother has paid full price for the school trip, Sara aggressively demands the truth. Esma breaks down and brutally explains how the girl was conceived through rape in a POW camp. As painful as their confrontation is, it is Esma’s first real step toward overcoming her deep trauma. Despite Sara’s hurt, there is still an opening for a renewed relationship between mother and daughter.
In a documentary mode, the filmmaker tries to recover and rebuild the story of the relationship between Jacqueline, her mother who lost her memory over a year ago after a diabetic deterioration, and Reinalda del Carmen, her best college friend, detained and disappeared during the Chilean dictatorship and repression. Testimonies and a visit to that friendship's different scenes reveal the traces of the relation between Jacqueline and Reinalda, who was expecting a child at the time of her detention. A destiny we know not, a faulty act in the recovery of memory; a reflection on friendship, motherhood and loss.
Un día cualquiera cinco mujeres quiteñas, amigas en la adolescencia, deciden volver a verse al cabo de catorce años. Elena está esperando a su segundo hijo, Marina vive los avatares de la infidelidad, Diana, tempranamente viuda, comparte su soledad junto a su hija quinceañera y Tamara no ha abandonado su alocada vida en los clubes, entre chicos y drogas. Esa noche visitarán a Alejandra, consumida por una enfermedad. ESAS NO SON PENAS es un retrato de grupo, en el que cada quien aporta las luces y sombras de su paradójica condición de clase media, en una ciudad enclavada en los Andes. En ese encuentro, fortuito y desacostumbrado, estas mujeres tejerán –en un vaivén entre la culpa y la esperanza, la soledad y la fraternidad- un tapiz de emotividades que estallan en mitad de la aparente rutina de lo cotidiano.
In other words (i.e. English words, from the festival's website):
Esas no son penas recounts a day in the life of five thirty-year-old women who were school friends and haven't seen each other for fourteen years. Elena is expecting her second child. Marina is going through the ups and downs of infidelity. Diana is a widow and shares her loneliness with her teenage daughter. Tamara spends her life between drugs and too brief relationships. That night, the four of them will visit Alejandra, who has been seriously ill. A film in which each character shows the shadows and lights of their paradoxical middle-class lives. During this unusual encounter, the five women will build, with guilt and desire, loneliness and solidarity, the tapestry of emotions weaved by the apparent monotony of their lives.
4 Elements consists of four chapters that each show the struggle of mankind with the different elements.
FIRE shows the "smoke-jumpers" of Siberia that control the fire but also shows how they paradoxically make a fire in the base camp to cook their dinner.
WATER tells the story of the King crab fishers in Alaska and shows the men during the season of four days and nights.
In EARTH two mineworkers crawl like ants between the gigantic machines and it is shown how they scrub each others back after a long and exhausting day.
In AIR astronauts are followed during their heavy physical trainings till the point where they are being launched into space.
4 Elements shows, in a poetic way, the struggle of mankind with the four elements. Four places on earth where companionship and mutual trust are still of vital importance.
A bored Italian travel agent agrees to take in the cousin of a handsome Ukrainian teacher she has recently become acquainted with, only to find her generosity propelling her into a dark mystery in director Marina Spada's sophisticated sophomore outing as a director. Claudia (Anita Kravos) spends her days working and her weekends visiting her sister and parents. In her spare time Claudia has taken to studying Russian. When Claudia catches the eye of charming Ukrainian professor of languages Boris (Paolo Pierobon), who has only recently arrived in Italy and has taken to offering language lesson as a means of making ends meet, the pair immediately make a connection and their relationship gradually begins to grow deeper. Their bond seemingly solidified, Boris soon approaches his newfound friend with the prospect of putting up his Ukrainian cousin Olga (Karolina Dafne Porcari). Though Claudia readily agrees under the stipulation that the arrangement only be for a few days, the bond between the lonely Italian and the amiable language teacher soon expands to include the newly arrived, beautiful blonde until one day Olga goes mysteriously missing. Now determined to find out just what fate befell her amiable temporary roommate, Claudia sets out to discover the truth behind Olga's perplexing disappearance.
Set in the frozen steppes of Mongolia, Khadak tells the epic story of Bagi, a young nomad confronted with his destiny to become a shaman. A plague strikes the animals and the nomads are forcibly relocated to desolate mining towns. Bagi saves the life of a beautiful coal thief, Zolzaya, and together they reveal the plague was a lie fabricated to eradicate nomadism. A sublime revolution ensues.
Rita is determined not to let her existence be guided by conventional morality. Giving birth to her children implies exercising her right to say "no": no to a mother who has never behaved like one; no to a father who has never recognized himself as such; no to the idea -let alone the possibility- of a family life. However, there is an attempt. Rita is unpredictable and that is why it is impossible to know if the attempt will succeed.
As you may know, the percentage of women directors hovers around 9%, which is a ridiculous statistic in 2009 (or ever). It's not (just) that Hollywood is sexist—-if female directors brought in the big bucks on opening weekend, studio heads would certainly sit up and take notice, as might Oscar voters. But how to find out when these films are showing? Well... come here! (Update: Hmm, the same year I start this blog, the Academy nominates TWO female-directed movies for Best Picture! Coincidence?)
