Month: December 2018

Crossing European borders without leaving your sofa!

Posted on by victorfraga

ArteKino is back this month only. Until December 31st, you can watch 10 dirty gems* of European cinema entirely for free and without budging from the comfort of your sofa, chair, desk or bed! the selection includes five films made by women directors. Film-lovers from 45 European countries will be able to explore a rich selection of films by established directors and also nascent filmmakers, along with outstanding performances by a new generation of on-screen talent.

We took the opportunity to have a word with Olivier Pere, the Artistic Director of the ArteKino Festival. He has revealed the dirty secrets of a such an exciting initiative. ArteKino’s selection is genuinely audacious and distinctive. This year’s selection includes films from countries as diverse as Austria, Greece, Poland and the Netherlands. Dirty topics include a critique of savage capitalism, growing up in a prostitution environment, abortion under extreme circumstances and much more. You can check out the full list and our exclusive reviews by clicking here.

*Only eight films are available to view in the UK, and there are restrictions in other countries, too.

Image at the top by Bertrand Noel. Images below from Flemish Heaven and L’Animale, respectively.

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DMovies – When and how did Artekino begin? Where did the idea come from? What are the aims and objectives of the initiative?

Olivier Pere – The idea behind the ArteKino Festival was born three years ago, when ARTE was looking to increase its support for European cinema in an innovative way. We came up with a completely digital festival that would be free for internet users all across Europe. Over the course of three editions, we have refined the way in which the festival operates, but the initial principle and goals remain the same: promoting the distribution and recognition of independent European cinema by selecting 10 remarkable arthouse films from major international festivals that have not found their way into theatres outside of their home country.

DM – Tell us about the curatorship. How do you view and select the films each year?

OP – I am in charge of the artistic direction of the festival. I identify films at festivals and in international sales agents’ catalogues. I see some of the films at festivals, and most of the time sales agents send me links to films that I ask for in order to make my selection.

DM – You describe your selection as “10 bold films”. What’s your definition of “bold” and of “art cinema”, and what are the selection criteria for your films?

OP – I choose films according to their quality, their originality, and of course their availability. We try to offer a balanced selection that can include films of various genres, from fiction to documentary, while remaining very attentive to the diversity of European languages and cultures represented (generally one film per country) and to the gender balance of the directors. Artistic boldness can come from a film’s aesthetics or from its subject matter, and how those things relate to contemporary themes.

DM – According to an industry player, only 37% of European films are seen outside their home market. Does this reflect your experience? And what should we do in order to improve this figure?

OP – Yes, and that is why we have developed the ArteKino Festival. We look for films that have low visibility outside of their country of origin and the festival circuit. Some of these films enjoy success in their home country but have difficulty travelling beyond national borders. This is true of comedies, but also of other films. Our festival is a way of crossing borders while staying in the comfort of one’s home.

DM – What’s your message for aspiring filmmakers everywhere who’d like to see their film on ArteKino?

OP – Young directors often need international festivals to receive critical acclaim and to enable their films to travel, as well as to be sold. With the ArteKino Festival, we offer them a way of reaching new audiences by inviting viewers who don’t have easy access to new European arthouse films.

DM – What’s your message to film lovers everywhere overwhelmed by the vast choice of VoD everywhere? Why should they watch films on ArteKino?

OP – We should specify that we are campaigning for movie lovers to continue discovering films in their original birthplace – the movie theatre. ArteKino Festival acts as a complement, not a substitution. Unfortunately, due to their location, some people do not have access to movie theatres that screen arthouse cinema. And it is no longer possible to assume that all films can be distributed in theatres – there are simply too many films being made, and there is a lack of diversity in a number of countries. That is why we invite them to discover new films free of charge in this new festival format.

Meteors (Meteorlar)

Posted on by victorfraga

How do you mix deadly politics with the wonders of nature? In Meteors, documentarist Gurcan Keltek combines a mostly unknown and obscure – yet no less tragic – political event that took place three years ago in Anatolia with a succession of superb natural phenomena. The outcome is an exquisite black and white film fusing documentary-making, lyricism and experimentalism.

In 2015, the Turkish army conducted a major offensive operation to kill off the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, thereby silencing their independence bid. The event received no media coverage whatsoever. Not a single international correspondent was present at the time. Locals collected images mostly on their mobile phones, which Keltek when converted to the silver screen.

Meteors is a dark film, in both the connotative and the denotative sense of the adjective. Almost the entire film takes place at nighttime. The photography is gloomy and the dark shades of grey prevail above everything else. The political conjecture is also dark. People have died in the town of Cizre. There are ruins everywhere. Walls covered in bullet holes. Electricity, telephone and the internet are scarce. The Turkish army hopes that their actions will remain in the dark, entirely invisible and immune to international criticism. “We were silenced and annihilated by an invisible hand”, a local puts it succinctly.

Local hunters shooting down gazelles open the movie. But soon it’s people who are being gunned down. The similarity between the gazelles and of the people running in panic will not go unnoticed. In these long shots, the humans and quadrupedal animals are hardly discernible. The gazelles lock horns, while humans point weapons at each other.

The symbolism of fire is also used abundantly. There are torches, arson, bombs, fireworks and the eclipse of the sun. The might of fire, however, is subdued by the stern black and white photography. The military conflict becomes strangely and disturbingly serene. Some might argue that Meteors is a little exploitative, some type of “war porn”. I beg to differ. I think that this is a sensory and meditative experience with an unusual political twist.

The technical wizardry is plain and effective. The audio is particularly expressive. You will feel like you are outdoors with the wind blowing fiercely, rushing through the leaves and making slurping sounds inside your ear. The instrumental music score blends in seamlessly. There’s also plenty of throat-singing (a practice common amongst Kurds). The images of the meteor shower and solar eclipse are urgent in their simplicity. The statues of Mount Nemrut (pictured above) are featured at the very end of the film perhaps suggesting that nature and mankind, plus the ancient and the modern should finally meet.

Meteors was out in selected cinemas across the UK On December 7th, 2018, when this piece was originally published.

Watch Meteors right here with DMovies and Eyelet:

Tides

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This is one of those films that barely has a narrative (it does have one, but it’s very slender). That’s often a recipe for disaster, but not so in this case. The story, such as it is, is this: a group of four fortysomething friends rent a barge for three days’ holiday on the waterways of Southern England.

From its opening where he sits on the side of a canal staring at images on his mobile phone, Jon (Jon Foster) is struggling to cope with personal loss. He and Zooby (Jamie Zubairi) sign the barge hire contract, go through the basics of safety and cancel rules and regulations, stock up with supplies of booze and food then pick up Red (Robyn Isaac) who can only stay one night as she must attend a wedding. Later, they are joined by Simon (Simon Meacock).

The weather is good and the four (or three, after Red leaves just over an hour in to the 90-odd minute running length) traverse canals, visit pubs, hang out both inside and outside the barge, consume copious amounts of alcohol and other substances and generally chill out with one another, take it easy and have an enjoyable, relaxing time.

Although Felber scripted the whole thing, the helmer got his cast to improvise heavily over the one weekend shoot and the results feel very natural, like you’re watching a bunch of mates spending time together rather than actors acting (although, to be fair, at least some of the characters are scripted as actors). And his pre-scripting has locked down what each of the four characters is about, so that when the cast come to improvise, they know what has to underpin whatever they do. An editor himself with considerable experience in 90 second commercials and the occasional documentary, Felber edited the thing down from a mammoth 15 hours and somewhere in the course of that process has arrived at this remarkable and beautifully paced little movie.

It’s helped no end by superb black and white cinematography by seasoned cameraman Paul O’Callaghan. Actually, black and white isn’t the most appropriate phrase to describe Tides. There is no real deep, dark black. Instead, you will see an incredible range of greys and white, dark greys, light greys and everything in between. Many of the film’s best moments (and there are lots of them) are perfectly captured by his eye… two people talking on deck at night outside a lighted cabin interior, their darkened faces outlined by wisps of backlight… the sudden ducking for an oncoming low bridge… numerous moving boat point of view vistas travelling along waterways between trees on either side.

The results are very different from (and looser than) this year’s earlier, equally impressive Anchor And Hope (Carlos Marques-Marcet) making you wonder if there’s room for a whole new subgenre of independent UK/Irish canal movies because not only are both films terrific and very, very different, but also suggest there are an awful lot more stories to be told and feelings to be conveyed in the milieu of barges and canals. Both feel like they’ve been made by people just getting out there, not worrying about the rules and simply making movies on a wing and a prayer. Both have a freshness to them, so if a ‘canal’ subgenre does emerge it bodes well for independent British and Irish film. Barges and canals can clearly deliver high production values at minimal cost using a wonderful British/Irish natural resource we never realised we possessed. For the time being, though, Tides will do very nicely. Like its subject matter, the film is cool and refreshing. Something of a gem.

Tides is out in the UK on Friday, December 7th, and then on VoD on Monday, December 10th. Watch the film trailer below:

Old Boys

Posted on by victorfraga

Who is this desperate young man with a look of anguish on his face, wearing a head-shaped hat with loose straps, rather like the ones victims of the Holocaust wore when the concentration camps were liberated, combined with a stripy top rather like those of the same camps, wading up a river? Is he fleeing from Auschwitz before the guards catch up? No, he is actually a boy at a British public school, participating in an idiotic game called “Streamers” (obviously modelled on the Eton Wall Game), which involves wading up and down a river and spending the afternoon being crushed against a wall. He is not about to become another statistic of the Holocaust. Instead, he is in danger of ruining the game for his school, which according to its macho ethos is probably worse than getting caught up in the Holocaust – hence the look of anguish.

Caldermount is the dreadful school in question (motto: “Viriliter Age” – “Act Like a Man”) and the poor boy is Amberson (Alex Lawther), the school runt, much put upon because he is a scholarship boy (and therefore not quite upper class). Caldermount is a mad, uber-macho establishment, where the boys are expected to stand up and rumble their feet in the chapel when the founder of the school’s name is mentioned. Pathetic boys like Amberson get their heads stuck down the lavatory. None of the boys or staff have any sensitivity.

Poor Amberson has got to try to survive all this and is forced to go on something called the “bucket run”, where he is woken up in bed by having a bucket of water thrown over him, has to jump out of bed in his pyjamas, run all over the countryside still in his pyjamas and refill the bucket and bring it home again. During one of these exercises he falls down in a farm yard and encounters a mysterious young French woman who lives with her father in the farm house. Her father is Monsieur Babinot (Denis Menochet). The French teacher at Caldermount imagines himself to be a French intellectual, and he is impossible to live with. His daughter Agnes (Pauline Etienne) is the femme fatale figure, or perhaps the Roxane character (the film is a retelling of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac). Agnes does a little bit of cruising in the school grounds, sailing mysteriously past the class windows and espies the gorgeous Winchester (Jonah Hauer-King), who is entirely devoid of emotional intelligence.

She commissions Amberson to deliver a videotape (this is the 1980s) to Winchester in order to to tell him how much she is interested in him. Agnes is all arty and intellectual and the tape totally stumps Winchester. Amberson, who is emotional intelligence on two legs, helps Winchester to make equally pretentious tapes. She falls in love with Winchester through the good offices of Amberson. So far, so very Cyrano de Bergerac and this is where my plot and spoiler information should come to an end.

This film sets out to be an enjoyable farce, yet it fails the rules of good farce. Farce (think of Fawlty Towers and Feydeau) thrives on situations and characters that are recognisably true and yet exaggerated. The exaggerations of the characters bump into one another and the hilarity and farcical situations are produced. Old Boys abounds in stereotypes and yet it is so exaggerated that the credibility that sustains farce is lost. There stereotypes include the mad English, the arty farty, sexy French, manic schoolteachers, and so on. Basil Fawlty is a recognisable sort of neurotic Englishman, Feydeau is based on old-fashioned adultery. Everyone in “Old Boys” is so mad that farce is replaced by the merely frantic. Only Mr. Huggins (Joshua McGuire) is a recognisably desperate teacher.

Winchester is so emotionally challenged that, when he does get into Agnes’s bedroom, he has to be prompted to hold hands and kiss her. Even Agnes is a bit strange. Does she really think that the man who sends her fascinating videos is the same man who has to be prompted to kiss her? One is left wondering about Amberson as well. Where did this willowy teenager, who seems so decent and virginal, gain all his knowledge about the females? He even knows the advice to “treat ‘em a bit rough”, which he passes on to Winchester when she sends him a cake.

The Cyrano de Bergerac story is time honoured and popular because it is about a permanent human dilemma. How does honest and heartfelt love match with the dictates of attraction and human status? Cyrano de Bergerac is a good man. He helps out a friend with wooing a beautiful and fascinating woman, whom he also loves, and in the process sacrifices himself. The problem is his dreadful nose. Quasimodo loves Esmeralda, yet he is misshapen and very ugly. Watch Charles Laughton in the Hunchback of Notre Dame (Gary Trousdale/ Kirk Wise, 1939) declare his love and I challenge you not to be very moved. Amberson is not ugly yet he looks like jailbait. Lawther is in reality 23 years of age, but keeps getting teeny roles, a bit like Leonardo de Caprio in his early days.

Alex Lawther is a seriously talented actor. You only have to look at him as he sees Agnes for the first time to know that he can deliver the goods in sensitivity and depth. He has to carry the weight of a film which does not really match his talents. I felt this was also the case in British television show The End of the F**king World, where he just wanders around looking like a teenage waif and certainly not an imaginary psychopath. It’s time he rang up the RSC. I am sure they can give him something to do.

Old Boys is out in UK cinemas on February 22nd, 2019. On VoD on Monday, June 24th.

The Black Nights have never been this bright before!

Posted on by victorfraga

The latest edition of the 22nd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival drew to a close this weekend, after two weeks of a very intense programme showcasing films from literally every corner of the planet. DMovies followed the action live. Our editor Victor Fraga attended the event and wrote 20 dirty reviews exclusively for you. You can check out the full list on our review archive right here.

Victor’s two favourite gems (to which he gave the maximum score of five splats, a rating reserved exclusively for films described as “filthy genious”) were the Hungarian very personal and lyrical Bad Poems (by Gabor Reisz) incendiary anti-racist Australian film Slam (Partho Sen-Gupta, pictured below). The describes the latter as “film of the year”.

The big winners of the event were the tender and feminine Colombian coming-of-age drama Wandering Girl (by Ruben Mendoza; it snatched the Festival’s Grand Prix), the superb Korean drama about a couple’s realisation that the spark in their relationship has died Winter’s Night (Jang Woo-jing; it won both the Best Director and the Best Actress prizes), the Canadian grief story A Place to Live (Bernard Emond; for Best Cinematography) and the Indian caper/black comedy Kadakh (Rajat Kapoor; for best script). All prizes were very well deserved, even if Victor’s favourite films left empty-handed.

Our editor also took the opportunity to chat to the Festival director Tiina Lokk (both are pictured together on the “black carpet) and find out the dirty secrets of an incredibly well-organised, diverse and large event. She explained how it all began in the 1990s after the demise of the Soviet Union nearly killed all cinemas in the country. She also talked about the symbolism of the black nights (there was no shortage films dealing with cold weather, including A Place to Live, Winter’s Night and Angelos Frantzis’s Still River), of the (in)famous “black carpet” (instead of red), how the wolf became both the Festival’s and the country’s mascot, and also why is it that Brits and other Europeans should visit Estonia!

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Victor Fraga – You started the Festival 22 years ago, in the 1990s. Was it the demise of the Soviet Union that enabled the event?

Tiina Lokk – Under the Soviet Union, there was only one international film festival, which was located in Moscow. The other festivals, genre-specific or documentary, were exclusively for films made in the Soviet Union, plus they were always held in different cities. Estonia did not have a festival culture then. The first film festival in the Baltics was in Riga (Latvia), in the late 1980s, very close to the reforms [the transition to capitalism]. It was a revolutionary, very broad and interesting festival, but sadly it no longer exists.

When we started, our Festival was a protest act. Because the situation was very tough. At Soviet times, we had 600 cinema screens in Estonia. The Soviet regime encouraged our culture. These cinemas were open 7 ways a week and located in every city of the country, and even in the countryside. The film industry altogether had been financed directly by Moscow. When the reforms started in the early 1990s, the cinemas began to become privatised and to collapse. They became lucrative property business.

VF – How many cinemas were left?

TL – Only a few. In the late 1990s, there were only two cinemas in Tallin, one in Narva and one in Tartu. That was the time when we only had Hollywood films, plus Chinese b-movies about Kung-Fu. And nothing else. I was a film critic and a script doctor. I had many proposals to work as a journalist. But I decided to create the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival instead. That was 1997.

At first, we didn’t believe that the Festival would survive. The atmosphere was hostile, the government didn’t want to give us money. We no longer had cinemas across the country, and so we had to build temporary cinemas in our first 15 editions. We wanted to raise three questions: “Why do we no longer have cinemas?”; “Why do we only get American movies?”; and “Why is Estonian cinema doing so bad, its very existence being threatened?”.

The first Festival was very successful, with a very positive response from the audience. Then we developed so quickly, it was incredible. There was a huge hunger from both the industry and audiences. In the first seven years it was very difficult to keep the horse running. I felt like a cowboy. Or like a teenager growing so fast that their clothes no longer fit them.

VF – Where do the “Black Nights” on the Festival name come from?

TL – We began to create a brand immediately. Back then, nobody knew where Estonia was. We decided to hold the Festival at the most disgusting time of the year, the dark nights, when there are only two things to do: to make children and to watch movies.

So we turned things around, and said: “let’s celebrate the black nights”. “Black nights” sounds much better than “dark nights”. November in Estonia is the month of the lonely souls. The souls come back to Earth and visit their relatives.

VF – Is this a pagan belief?

TL – I think so. I don’t know the exact origin, but that’s the same in all Nordic countries. All of November. We think that film auteurs are also lonely souls wandering around.

VF – What about your mascot, the wolf?

TL – Because wolves are lonely creatures, lone hunters. There’s nothing more lonely than a wold howling at the moon. At the same time, in all of our fairy tales the wolf is a very clever animal, a good team member and leader. They know how to survive, and so on. Plus, the wolf is a symbol of green nature, and we are the people of the nature. The atmosphere of the Festival must be honest and clean, just like nature.

Last year, Estonians voted the wolf as the national animal. So now our mascot is also the national animal. We have two large sculptures of the wolf, one is standing in front of the Cinema Artis, and the second one is standing in front of the hotel [Tiina, who is also pictured below, points to the large metal sculpture which is visible from the hotel lounge].

VF – Tell us some anecdotes about your black carpet!

TL – The anecdote is the black carpet itself! We didn’t have a red carpet because red is connected to glamour. There’s a touch of self-irony. The black carpet is made to honour the filmmakers who are coming here for international premieres. We are trying our best to treat them kind!

VF – There may be no glamour. But you certainly are a big Festival. Your catalogue has more than 230 pages. Please share some key figures with us.

TL – There are two competitions, plus many side programmes. We are showing around 200 movies. There’s also the children and youth festival, with another 60 movies. So we are showing about 260 feature movies. Plus there are nearly 300 animation and short films. And we now have an industry section. We are a meeting point for both the Estonian and the international film industry. Last year we had 1,200 international guests from a total of 80 countries. We are covered in 70 countries and in 40 languages. There are 850 screenings and 80,000 admissions.

VF – Why should British people come to Tallinn?

TL – We have a very beautiful old town and excellent food. You can catch films before they are out in Britain, including many world premieres. And industry people will meet professionals from all over the world!!!