Tag: 75th Locarno

Fragments From Heaven

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

The desert, in its bleak, existential emptiness, offers man the chance to discover his destiny. There’s a reason Moses didn’t travel through lush vegetation and rolling hills for 40 days. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing before suddenly something. Something quite remarkable indeed. Perhaps the origin of all human life.

My opening oversells Fragments From Heaven somewhat, a poetic, if slight, documentary from Morocco with two complimentary strands: firstly, the story of Mohamed, a nomad who pursues the desert for meteorite debris, believing it has the power to change his life, and Abderrahmane, a scientist who is exploring the origin of these rocks in order to answer questions about the Big Bang itself. Combining long takes with ambient sound design, and heated discussions with Terrence Malick-style voiceover, this documentary takes you on a quest, touching on topics both scientific and existential.

There are shades of Werner Herzog’s recent geographically-minded documentaries here, such as Into The Inferno (2018) and Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020) — looking at the physical world in order to understand the man-made one. But Adnane Baraka’s film — which he shot, edited, and sound-designed himself — has no conventional talking heads and a much smaller scope and budget, keeping its perspective relatively close. It begs to be seen in a cinema, considering the experiential duration of the desert-set takes, following characters around as they look for these rare meteorite fragments. At home on a computer screen, your attention may easily wane.

We learn back in Abderrahmane’s research centre, that not only are these fragments potentially millions of years old, but they actually pre-date the sun itself. At one point, we even learn that some fragments have organic matter on them, briefly begging the question that there may be life elsewhere in the universe. In one discussion with his students, he even argues that understanding these fragments could be the key to understanding how the universe began. Given the importance of the work, someone needs to give this man more funding right away!

He is the classic scientist, speaking French, while Mohamed, speaking Amazigh, working on the ground with his wife and children, is far more religious-minded. And while the two subjects never meet, they do seem to be in dialogue with one another, creating an interesting tension between faith and science. Perhaps the final answer still resides in the stars?

Ending with a Tree Of Life-like (Terrence Malick, 2011) evocation of the sun burning and lights flaring and fire piercing the cosmos, Baraka finally aims for profundity and awe — reminding us of the infinite potential of the universe around us, small shards of which are more likely to collect in the Moroccan desert than almost anywhere else on earth. Nonetheless, these moments do come after plenty of ponderous takes. There is a lot to think about, but a lot of wading through the desert is needed to get there.

Fragments From Heaven plays as part of Concorso Cineasti del presente at the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

A Perfect Day for Caribou

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Fatherhood and failure are the subjects of Jeff Rutherford’s ambling debut feature. Jen Berrier plays Herman, a man who finds himself at the end of the road with a filched pickup truck packed with his belongings. He is recording a message for his son Nate (Charlie Plummer), explaining “I don’t want you to know me as just the father who killed himself”. A fortuitous phone call from Nate offers Herman an opportunity to meet and talk with his son face to face and meet his young grandson Ralph. However when they do meet – in a windswept cemetery – Ralph goes missing and father and son go on a meandering search for the lost boy.

Filmed in a pristine black and white, Alfonso Herrera Salcedo’s cinematography is as sharp as a pencil sketch made with a H2 pencil. The 4:3 ratio underlines the contained littleness of the story even as the characters are dwarfed beneath huge skies and epic open landscapes. There seems to be little urgency in the search for Ralph as if the characters know that his absence is more a metaphorical underscoring than an actual child in danger. Nate is seeking to reconnect with his father as a way to also understand if he is going to repeat the mistakes that Herman made. Herman in his turn finds that the ease with which he spoke to his son via the dictaphone is replaced by a shuffling inability to communicate. When Nate tells him Ralph has some behavioral problems – he only eats food on the right side of his plate – Herman keeps mistakenly wondering if Ralph has a hole in his head.

A careless hunter and a black janitor wander into the action as well as vaguely lost as the main characters but they skim off the surface of the story, making barely a ripple.

The ghosts of other films haunt Rutherford’s first feature. Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013) is an obvious influence, while in its offbeat characters and quirky dialogue there’s also the feel of early Hal Hartley. The opening of the film superbly sets up an unexpected character and a story that is going in an unexpected direction. Little flashbacks appear as silent slices of the past, memories stubbornly lurking.

However as the film goes on the dialogue becomes grating in its obvious writtenness. Berrier can handle it, suggesting a man at the end of his frayed rope, but Plummer is less convincing: a callow twenty-something with an oh-for-goodness-sake-cut-it haircut. And the lack of urgency becomes stultifying and when two characters decide to play paper-scissors-stone it feels less Jarmusch and more B roll. It also has to be said that using a suicide as a trope to give a character heft should really be stopped. It’s cheap and unhealthy.

A Perfect Day for Caribou showed at the 75th Locarno International Film Festival.

My Neighbor Adolf

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

If poetry is impossible after Auschwitz – as Theodor Adorno maybe said – what about feel good comedies? What about feel good comedies about Hitler? We’ve had Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning but deeply immoral Life Is Beautiful (1997) and the more successful black comedy of Radu Mihaileanu’s Train of Life (1998), which to be fair didn’t aim for the feel good component. If we can go way back, Ernst Lubitsch perhaps was most effective with To Be or Not to Be in 1942 – ‘we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping’ – but that was before the horrors were fully comprehended.

A Jewish family are taking a photographic portrait in the garden before the outbreak of the Second World War. They will soon be exterminated, with one exception. Now Polsky (David Hayman) lives in Columbia and it is May 1960. Adolf Eichmann has just been abducted from Argentina and flown to stand trial in Israel. At the same time, a mysterious new neighbour, Mr Herzog (Udo Kier) moves into the house next door. Polsky is soon convinced that Herzog is non other than Adolf Hitler, who he once met during a chess tournament. When the local Israeli embassy appears uninterested in his claims, Polsky sets about gathering the evidence himself, spying on his neighbour and taking surreptitious photographs. In order to get closer and by doing so get his incontrovertible proof, Polsky finds himself actually getting closer to his would be enemy and reluctantly sympathising with the old man who is as cantankerous as he is.

Like JoJo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019) before it, Leon Prudovsky’s film My Neighbour Adolf is offensive in its inoffensiveness. There are so many things wrong with this film but lets get some of the basics out of the way. The basic premise: why would someone in hiding choose a house which is overlooked by another so closely when there are plenty of options in rural Columbia? The screenplay is littered with anachronisms and the main characters speak with heavy accents. The look of the film has that dog turd brown that stands for period these days and the story plods on with a series of doorbell rings as we go from one house to the other and back. Worse still is the bromance that progresses via a series of cliched stages: the arguments, the grudging respect, the getting drunk together, the mutual admiration of a fraulein and the final revelations that draws some pretty disgraceful false equivalency between well I don’t want to spoil it. Or maybe I do.

There was some controversy about the fact that the Rabinovich Foundation – which partly funded the film – was obliging filmmakers to sign a contract agreeing that their films would not any message that denied the “existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”. Locarno was called on to deny the film a position in the competition and Locarno, rightly, declined. Ultimately though, the damage this film ought to have been more controversial for the way it isn’t controversial: for the way it turns the Holocaust into a backstory to a lame grumpy old men comedy. And that’s the problem in the end. This just isn’t funny. Not remotely. It aims for gentle laughter and the gray pound: it Exotic Marigold Hotels the Holocaust. Just think about that for a second.

My Neighbor Adolf premiered at the 75th Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It opens the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Stone Turtle

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Zahara (Asmara Abigail) explains:”I’d rather live on an island of ghosts than be a ghost among the living”. She is a stateless refugee who lives on a remote Malaysian island where she makes her living selling rare turtle eggs on the black market. But she is still a ghost on the mainland and for the bureaucracy. One gets the feeling it wouldn’t matter so much for her but she is caring for a young girl, Nika, who she is desperate to get into school. Nika, however, has no papers: her father is unknown and her mother is dead – killed by her religious parents for having Nika out of wedlock. When Samad (Bront Palarae), claiming to be a university researcher, arrives on the island, Zahara’s life descends into a spiral of violence, magic and revenge.

Ming Jin Woo’s film is a surreal melange of Elizabethan revenger’s tragedy, mixed with Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). Kong Pahurak’s cinematography makes the most of the beautiful locations even as terrible things occur throughout them. A postmodern irreverence sees Ming and his collaborators use everything from animation to folklore and dance to create a rich and layered tale.

That Samad is not who he claims to be is apparent fairly early on but his complicity and motives are revealed gradually as Zamara enacts her revenge only to find herself having to reset her life to before the killings in order to try again. As the old saying goes: she who would have revenge first dig two graves. In this case, it will be many more than just two.

From the very first scene, when we see the original killing of Zamara’s sister, the murders are brutal without being gratuitous. Having said that there is something almost glorious in the varieties of danger Ming packs onto his island. Poisonous fish, ritual sacrifice, stabbing, drownings and even a return to quick sand. Each time though unforeseen consequences requires Zamara to have a rethink. But played with utterly fierce conviction by Abigail, she strides through the film in a red dress like a wet blade, in search of a stabbing. She is a feminist avenger who uses witchcraft against religious bigotry and patriarchy, and a righteous fury against the men who have destroyed her life. While Nika reads a Ms Marvel comic book, her guardian angel here is the real Avenger.

Stone Turtle is a striking tale of many layers which manages the handy trick of being mesmerising while retaining a basic direct simplicity. It has the depth and power of a folktale and yet feels witty and topical. When a murderer woman reveals her husband and murderer’s sexual insecurity, it is at once funny and terrifying that strong women should be destroyed by such fragility.

Stone Turtle has just premiered at the 75th Locarno International Film Festival.

What to Look Out for at the 75th Locarno Film Festival

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The Locarno Film Festival returns once again for its 75th edition, providing its characteristic and eclectic mix of arthouse cinema and crowd-pleasing fare. Whether you’re an arduous cinephile or someone just looking for a good time, the cinemas alongside the Lago Maggiore — stretching from the magical Piazza Grande to more intimate indoor theatres — have a little something for everyone.

If 2021 was testing the waters within strict coronavirus protocols, 2022 promises to be even more relaxed, fully returning to the traditional hustle and bustle that characterises the joy and discovery of in-person film festivals. Giona A. Nazzaro returns as artistic director for a second year, providing a steady hand to an event steeped in tradition but still committed to pursuing new and exciting art forms.

Consider the contrast between the opening film and my most anticipated competition inclusion. The opening ceremony is yet another American action film, David Leitch’s unavoidable Bullet Train. Starring Brad Pitt as an assassin on a high-speed Japanese rail-line, I have been subjected to the trailer at least 100 times in cinemas; so many times in fact, that it gives off the impression that it simply won’t be very good.

Meanwhile in the Concorso internazionale, legendary Russian director Alexander Sokurov returns after seven years with Skazka (Fairytale) — pictured below. It’s a mysterious hybrid effort blending archive and newly-shot material that comments on both dictators and the fate of the planet. Rejected by Cannes due to political reasons, it sounds like a fascinating experiment that is sorely needed as the Russian state is slowly collapsing.

Skazka

If Sokurov is the big name on the arthouse scene, the other directors in the competition are unknown to me, stretching from Italy to Brazil to Indonesia. All promise fascinating perspectives: there is a COVID-19 immigrant drama in the form of Mahesh Narayanan’s Ariyippu; a study of toxic masculinity in Bowling Saturne (Saturn Bowling); sea-bound drama in Human Flowers of Flesh; and a look at modern faith in the Austrian Catholic boarding school film Serviam – Ich will dienen (Serviam – I Will Serve).

More populist efforts can be found back on Piazza Grande with the Daisy Edgar-Jones starring Where the Crawdads Sing (which I’ll save for streaming) and My Neighbor Adolf, which, yes, sounds exactly like its title suggests. For those more interested in cinematic history, Douglas Sirk’s exquisite Imitation of Life (1958) plays on 35mm (as part of a wider retrospective), while New Wave-heads can get their kicks with Laurie Anderson’s 1986 Avantgarde concert movie Home of the Brave.

It’s usually around the edges that a festival truly comes to life. (Last year, my most notable experience was a Peter Greenaway film that didn’t even play officially at the festival.) For first and second-time directors, Concorso Cineasti del presente provides a chance to discover emerging talents, while the truly out there Fuori concorso section promises a zone where cinema is set free from any expectations or tradition.

I never try to read too much into what is playing, enjoying the thrill of the new upon walking into a cinema with little idea of what to expect; making the Locarno Film Festival such a unique experience. I shall be attending between 8th-12th August to report from the frontlines, providing reviews and insights from one of the best film festivals in the world.

The Locarno Film Festival runs from August 3rd to August 13th.