Tag: film festival

Our verdict of the 3rd Red Sea International Film Festival

Posted on by victorfraga

Fot the third consecutive year, DMovies attended what has quickly become a meeting point for filmmakers, industry pundits and movie enthusiasts from every corner of the planet. The Festival took place during 10 days, between November 30th and December 9th at the heart of the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In total, it screened 126 films from 77 countries, and in 47 languages. The extravagant red carpet ceremonies attracted Arab and international stars alike, including Sharon Stone, Catherine Deneuve, Amina Khalil, Diane Kruger, Ranveer Singh, Paz Vega, Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Burak Özçivit, and many others.

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Programming secrets

I asked the Director of International Programming Kaleem Aftab about their programming secrets: “We divide programming into two departments, the Arab programming department and the international one. We talk to each other all the time, and only at the highest level between myself and Antoine Khalife, who’s the director of our Arab programme. Each one of us has their own team. On my team, I have six full-time programmers. Plus, there are the film liaisons we work with who occasionally help because this year we got so many more submissions than previous years. Only African, Arab and Asian films can submit through the online system. Last year through that method we had 400 films coming. And this year we had over 1400! So the number of hours we had with the size of team was probably not enough. So it was good to have a larger support mechanism because it’s very tricky to go through so many films. Plus, we have all of the films playing the film festivals and the films that sales agents send us directly. By the start of September, we have seen everything”.

He goes on to explain how his peer works: “Antoine has a team of four people. They look at the Arab films throughout the year. The Red Sea Fund and the Red Sea Lodge do so much work with either developing Arab film or financing Arab films. We’ve been watching the Arab films cut by cut over the years, so we have a much better footing of what it is. In the field of Arab and Saudi films, there are probably around 1,200 to 1,500 movies made, including shorts”.

I also asked Kaleem what makes an Arab film, and whether a British movie could ever qualify as “Arab”. He responded: “We have 22 Arab countries. It’s on the website which we consider Arab because there’s a lot of there are some vagaries. And then we also consider anyone who has an Arab, African or Asian passport who lives in another country. But the director has to have the passport and the film has to be about the Arab and Asian world.

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Challenging orthodoxies

The programme of the Red Sea International Film Festival is surprisingly audacious and diverse. The most recurring topic is female oppression and empowerment (Amjad Al Rasheed’s Inshallah A Boy, Humaid Alsuwaidi’s Dalma, In Flames, (Zarrar Kahn), and many others). Certain films question the mechanisms of religious oppression, while others even shed a positive light portrayal of LGBT+ characters.

Kaleem and his team picked a very special British film for this year’s edition of the Red Sea. “We’re showing Copa 71 (Rachael Ramsay and James Erskine), which was the first attempt to put on a women’s football tournament. This is the story of women who are saying no to the old powers. It goes into the history of women’s football, when it was banned, and how it was extremely popular in the early 20th century. So I felt that in a country such as Saudi Arabia, a place where women’s rights and gender rights are changing a lot, it would be great not only to bring Copa 71, but also to make it a gala”. A little masterpiece indeed, and an eye-opening movie that needs to be seen in Britain and the Arab world alike.

And Copa 71 isn’t the exception. There is not shortage of female directors at the Red Sea. “This year we have 31 female-led movies”, Kaleem notes.

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Different sensibilities

The Festival boasts a large number of strong Iranian movies, such as The Last Snow (Amirhossein Asgari) and Roxana (Parviz Shahbazi). Iranian cinema has always fascinated me. And it’;s remarkably different from Saudi cinema. Iranian cinema is contemplative and reflexive, while Saudi cinema drinks from the same water as Hollywood, I opined. Kaleem disagrees: “I don’t believe that Saudi cinema drinks from the same water as Hollywood. I think it’s too early to say that. The Red Sea Film Festival has only been going for three years. This is the first time in four decades we’ve been trying to develop a Saudi film culture. Maybe in four or five years we’ll actually see the sensibility of Saudi films“.

He shares my passion for Persian movies: “We all know the values and merits of Iranian cinema, the poetic way that they deal with tricky subjects. Iranian cinema is wonderful, as everybody in the world knows. We were joking as we were watching the films that this could just have an Iranian film festival because there was so many good films submitted. We had to reject so many good films that we loved just because of the sheer weight and volume”.

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The winners and the dirty gems

The big winners were as follows:

Prizes were given a jury presided by Australian filmmaker Baz Lurhmann. He was joined by jury members Joel Kinnaman, Freida Pinto, Amina Khalil, Paz Vega, Hana Alomair and Fatih Akin.

My dirty favourites were the following four films, all awarded our five splats (a filthy genius rating):

  • The heart-ripping Jordanian social-realist drama about faking a pregnancy Inshallah a Boy;
  • The luminescent Iranian rural drama The Last Snow;
  • The sobering British documentary about erasing women’s football from history Copa 71; and
  • The equally elegant and terrifying Emirati exorcism horror Three (Nayla Al Khaja).

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Our coverage

With a little helping hand from American journalist Joshua Bogatin and Brazilian writer Duda Leite, we published a total of 38 pieces this year. This includes five interviews (with Baloji, Rachel Ramsay, Kaouther Ben Hania, Tamer Ruggli, and the Malaysian tigress Amanda Nell Eu), as well as nine republished reviews of films that we watched earlier this year in other festivals. You can read them all by clicking here.

Picture at the top by Victor Fraga. Middle picture is a still from ‘Inshalah a Boy’. The last image is a still from ‘Copa 71’.

John is waiting for the light!

Posted on by victorfraga

Coming this far north, you feel like you’re on the curve of the Earth. Balanced and precarious. It gives you a new perspective. The sun hasn’t come up yet. It becomes a little light around eleven and by two, the light is fading, exhausted. At midday it’s already early evening. The night before I went to see the Northern Lights. It wasn’t quite the spectacular we’d been hoping. Except it was. The Green Lady didn’t dance, but she shimmered behind a bank of cloud. The lights of the city shone from behind the mountains in the distance and above the Milky Way spilt its salt across a tablecloth of night. But when we took the photographs, we could see in them that the lights were there all the time. Isn’t that what the camera does, catches the magic we rarely glimpse in real life?

So it was fitting that two of the films I watched at Tromsø have been self-conscious ‘love letters to cinema’. I imagine there might have been another one, recently, but it escapes me at the moment. Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light (2023) is best when it avoids the love letter and writes something more mundane: the kind of note you’d pass in class, or something you’d stick to the fridge with a magnet. ‘I’ve eaten the plums…’ that kind of thing.

Steve (Michael Ward) is the young black man in eighties Britain, coming of age and dealing with thwarted ambition, virulent racism and a growing affection for an older woman, Hilary – played by Olivia Coleman. What elevates Mendes’s film from mopey nostalgia is that this is a celebration more of a cinema rather than Cinema; Maltesers in boxes as much as motion pictures. On this level, you get the whiff of carpet shampoo and old cigarettes. Movies don’t get us away from the mundane, it elevates the mundane to the level of near magic. And mental illness, unhappiness, and exploitation doesn’t just disappear when the projector lights up and the curtains lisp open.

When Spielberg avatar Sam Fabelman goes to the movies, it’s first as a blue-eyed child to see The Greatest Show on Earth (Cecil B. DeMille, 1952). It’s revealing that what bowls over young Sammy in this clunky piece of Barnum-inspired fluff is a set piece train crash which looks less convincing than his own train set reenactment. In the first of many bits of cod psychology, his mum Mitzi, rhymes with ditzy, (Michelle Williams) believes he needs to film the trauma as a way of controlling it. Maybe he just likes crashing trains, but what do I know? The next time we see Sam he’s a brown-eyed teenager (Gabriel LaBelle) watching John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962). I say watching but his pals are teasing him and his interest in the movie is more connected to how much he can crib. Sam wants to shoot films and, as his work becomes more elaborate, he only belatedly registers the way his family is slipping towards disaster. Paul Dano’s Burt is a drippy bore and Mitzi an unstable, life and soul of parties whose giddy guff teeters on the verge of tears. The family moves from New Jersey to Arizona to California following Burt’s increasingly successful career, shadowed by Uncle Benny (Seth Rogan), Mitzi’s ‘friend’.

No one is nasty; everyone’s kind of right and Judd Hirsch pops over to rend his clothing and deliver a speech on art. The word ‘art’ is used a variety of times. It sounds out of place in John Ford’s mouth. The film looks more lovingly at the cameras and editing equipment. Ultimately, I’m not sure how much the film or Sam really care for his family. Dano and Williams do a lot of acting – Williams especially puts a giggle in every line – but none of the acting comes up to the level of convincing. The younger members of the cast are vastly superior. LaBelle is great and looks uncannily like Spielberg at times. Chloe East turns up late as Sam’s first real crush Monica and crushes it: funny, human and real. She’s the box of Maltesers.

As of midnight tonight, the moratorium on love letters to cinema comes into effect until 2028. Later on tomorrow the sun will get over the horizon here in Tromsø and an important step will have been taken on the long march to Summer. The light will increase every day and the Green Lady’s nights are numbered, but the truth is she’s always dancing even if we can’t see her.

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The images on this article were snapped by Kenneth Dallavara

Astrakan

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Astrakan — or, as I would call it, The 400 Woes — had me asking lots of interesting questions: where does the line between a chronicle end and a narrative start; how do diverse individual scenes actually accumulate into a final picture; and what is the line between representing something awful and genuinely exploiting the people in the story? Simply put, it had me asking lots of questions as I was never invested in the story, which ranges from slow to frustrating to ultimately sickening. There’s a lot of craft there, but the final result is really all over the place.

A thoroughly depressing picture that eschews genuine sensitivity in favour of a series of seriously unfortunate events, Astrakan is the kind of coming-of-age story that strains painfully for profundity but has such an over-abundance of ideas, images and things it wants to say, its forced pathos left me both bemused and repulsed.

It concerns a young boy named Samuel (Mirko Giannini), a foster child living with his adopted family in rural France. Ostensibly seen as a problem child, he is berated for his silly games and the fact he cannot seem to defecate naturally, often soiling his pants. That’s the first of many uncomfortable details that Astrakan — seemingly named after a type of lamb wool as opposed to the Southern region of Russia — revels in, subjecting Samuel to more pain and torture than any French person since Joan of Arc.

He meets a girl. She shows him porn. He goes to the cinema. He gets beaten up by guys we have never seen before. He goes skiing. He watches his teacher have sex with an Olympic skier. He throws up. He has more issues with going to the toilet. He is misunderstood and beaten with a belt while thrown between families and people he really shouldn’t be trusted with. The scenes are often randomly strung together, revealing little narrative cohesion while episodically stale and un-compelling.

He’s both your average 12-year-old and an enigma, revealing nothing, a poor wretch that we watch try and find something to enjoy in his poor life. A real child actor has been put in this position to depict these actions. It made me wonder whether putting a child in such scenes — however sensitively they might’ve been handled — is ever worth it. Certainly not when the finished product feels so irredeemable.

David Depesseville, working with cinematographer Simon Beaufils, is a fine image-maker; shooting on film, his depiction of rustic, untamed France brings to mind Maurice Pialat, often contrasting Samuel against an epic landscape with little hint of regular civilisation. We get the sense this is a land with its own rules, filled with hard people, living difficult lives. And his sense of observation is both keen — from a note being passed from child to child from a birds-eye-view to close-ups of bread being cut to small items being smartly hidden — and over-laboured, spinning into the surreal through unwittingly absurd cutting.

Things then really spin into left-field with the final reveal, a fantasia shot to the sounds of Bach’s St Mathews Passion, calling to mind everything from the mass murders of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) to Andrei Tarkovsky’s poeticism to Terence Malick’s mysticism. It’s a neat calling card from the second-time director: a statement that he can also do this as opposed to merely layering on naturalist misery-porn. But once it reveals that this already sad story has an even deeper sadness behind it, like the whole thing is one sad onion with bottomlessly sad layers, this technical ability is ultimately wasted in the service of something absolutely no one needs to see. Miserable.

Astrakan has just premiered at the 75th Locarno Film Festival.

Fairytale (Skazka)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Adolf Hitler. Benito Mussolini. Winston Churchill. Joseph Stalin. Between them they were responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people, before, during and after WW2. Great men in the traditional sense, casting a wide influence over Europe that persists until this day. If you put them all through a live-action Dall-E generator and had them talk to one another, you might have something approximating Fairytale, the latest film from legendary Russian director Alexander Sokurov.

This hybrid live-action/animated film — somewhere between the compositing tricks of Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) and Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983), the uncanny valley of the deepfake WOMBO app and the foggy mysticism of Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Norstein, 1975) — is a strange, philosophical wandering through the minds of the 20th century’s most influential and evil men. Equal parts fascinating and beguiling, frustrating and ponderous, it shows Sokurov is still a director unafraid to innovate while moving into the late period of his career.

It begins with Stalin waking up in a black-and-white nether-zone, next to none other than Jesus Christ himself. God’s own son lies in a somnambulant posture, unable to get up. One suspects he took a look at the world after the Second World War and believed a long lie-down was necessary. Stalin instantly tells him to get up, making a nebulous comparison between Christianity and communism. It’s the first of many one-line statements in a film jam-packed with odd aphorisms. Don’t expect genuine insight, but a sustained mood — a universe that is uncanny and provocative, asking the viewer to bring their own feelings to the world Sokurov creates.

Using archive footage of these dictators and placing them in a composited landscape that feels equal parts William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch, we are treated to a world that moves in endless circles. Dante and the opening lines of the Inferno are invoked — as well as the deep dark wood his protagonist finds himself in — but his Purgatorio feels like the bigger influence here, a world where forward or backward movement seems impossible, characters locked in an endless stasis. These men wait and wait for God to provide judgement, seeing if they finally make it into heaven or hell. They make their case in oblique ways, often talking past each other and wearing different uniforms, realising the kind of odd “what-if” situation you never knew you wanted.

The inclusion of Winston Churchill might be puzzling to certain Brits, due to the fact that he helped win the war and is considered a legend by most in the nation, but when you actually reckon with his vile white supremacism — condemned at the time by members of his own party! — and the legacy of the Bengali famine, his inclusion in the film amongst these tyrants does feel warranted. Either way, his British stoicism and endless pining for the Queen — remarkably still alive — provide a neat and humorous counterpoint to the ramblings of his fascist and communist contemporaries. Interestingly, no Americans feature, Sokurov keeping his perspective fully on the European perspective.

Conceived before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there are echoes of modern times throughout. Boris Johnson failed to capture Churchill’s brio, while Vladimir Putin is bringing back the Stalinist era. There is always a problem when the man becomes a symbol of the nation itself, and pursues more and more depraved imperialist goals in the pursuit of endless power. It’s interesting that the masses themselves never seem to fully come into view, morphing together into shadows and waves and making lots of noise while lacking definition. It shows that dictatorial ambition, regardless of political affiliation, only works by seeing the people as a mass, never as individuals, despite the need for a god-like figurehead at the top. But there is only one God, and he has the power to decide everyone’s ultimate fate.

Rejected by Cannes for misguided political reasons — after all, simply being Russian is not a crime — Fairytale is too bizarre to resonate with viewers around the world, but for those interested in WW2 history and the legacy of great men, as well as films that pursue unique cinematic forms, this is certainly a film worth checking out.

Fairytale plays in the Concorso Internazionale as part of the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

The 21st Transylvania Film Festival implores us to make films, not war

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

This year’s Transylvania Film Festival, the biggest film festival in Romania, comes with a challenge: “make films, not war.” Representing a country that borders both war-torn Ukraine and close-friends Moldova — also under threat from Russian aggression — TIFF is deeply committed to showing off the best of cinema in extremely troubled times.

While cinema itself cannot offer the vaccine, it might be able to offer a balm; as shown by their prior success in putting on in-person events in 2020 and 2021 while other summer festivals switched to digital-only editions. Set in Cluj-Napoca — known as Romania’s second city after Bucharest, and often touted as its creative centre and an LGBT hub — the 21st edition of the festival switches its attention to the war in Ukraine, not through furthering division but by allowing the power of cinema to show off our common humanity.

Therefore, while Ukrainian refugees and citizens are given free access to films at the festival, and Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s Ukrainian Pamfir (pictured above) is a hotly anticipated title, Russian films aren’t completely cut off either. Kirill Serebrennikov’s 2021 Cannes film Petrov’s Flu plays, as well as Lado Kvataniya’s serial killer drama The Execution. The latter plays as part of the competition series, which focuses on first and second features, and has counted films such as Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy, 2020), Oslo 31st August (Joachim Trier, 2012) and Cristian Mungiu’s debut Occident (2002) among its previous winners.

In fact, TIFF’s success has helped to put Romanian cinema on the map, often starting as a launching pad for its belated 00s New Wave, a movement that’s still going strong and situates Romanian filmmakers among some of the best in the world. It makes me particularly excited for Romanian competition entries A Higher Law (Octav Chelaru) and Mikado (Emanuel Pârvu). Over four days I’ll be digging into what the festival has to offer, providing dispatches from the front-line of cutting-edge world cinema. Follow our coverage on Dmovies

TIFF Official Competition 2022

A Higher Law (Romania, Germany, Serbia, Octav Chelaru)

Babysitter (Canada, Monia Chokri)

Beautiful Beings (Iceland, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson)

Feature Film About Life (Lithuania, Dovile Sarutyte)

Gentle (Hungary, László Csuja, Anna Nemes)

Mikado (Czech Republic, Romania, Emanuel Pârvu)

Magnetic Beats (France, Germany, Vincent Maël Cardona)

The Last Execution (Germany, Franziska Stünkel)

The Night Belongs To Lovers (France, Julien Hilmoine)

The Execution (Russia, Lado Kvantaniya)

Utama (Bolivia, Uruguay, France, Alejandro Loayza Grisi)

Pamfir (Ukraine, France, Poland, Chile, Germany, Luxemburg, Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk)

Documentary Competition

You Are Ceaușescu to Me (Romania, Sebastian Mihăilescu)

Bucolic (Poland, Karol Pałka)

Excess Will Save Us (Sweden, Morgane Dziurla-Petit)

Chanel 54 (Argentina, Lucas Larriera)

Brotherhood (Italy, Czech Republic, Francesco Montagner)

Mother Lode (Switzerland, France, Italy, Matteo Tortone)

Ostrov (Switzerland, Svetlana Rodina and Laurent Stoop)

The Plains (Australia, David Easteal)

Atlantide (Italy, Yuri Ancarani)

For A Fistful Of Fries (Belgium, France, Jean Libon and Yves Hinant)

Transilvania Film Festival runs from June 17th to the 26th, 2022.

The Munich Film Festival is leading Germany’s diversity charge

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Between March 25th and 27th, I had the privilege to attend Seeing and being seen: Representation in Film, a conference on the need for diversity in German cinema organised by the Film Festival Munich at the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing. Once again, I am reminded of how gorgeous the Bavarian countryside is, with the conference’s location, lying on the banks of the shimmering Starnberger See, offering the perfect opportunity for spirited discussions, inspiration and the possibility to find new solutions.

Having previously written an article on the topic for Exberliner, it was a pleasure to meet many of my interviewees in person, as well as see how seemingly-abstract discussions within the space of diversity can actually be translated into actionable goals. Artistic director Christoph Gröner and programmer Julia Weigl allowed for open and spirited discussion, including many disagreements and heated moments. Although everything remained civil, it showed that this is not just a one-and-done topic, but worth revisiting one again and again.

What really opened my eyes was the keynote talk by Mia Bays, director of the BFI Film Fund, who, alongside Head of Inclusion Melanie Hoyes (pictured below), reiterated the idea that diversity in cinema shouldn’t be seen as enforcing quotas, but an opportunity for better stories to be told. Their film fund, financed primarily by the national lottery, has already created a criteria which can help productions to be more inclusive, and by extension, more authentic.

Rocks (Sarah Gavron, 2020), the scrappy British film with a cast of young girls almost completely of colour, was displayed as a case in point. Not only does the film show a part of London life often missing on screen, but the funding came with the stipulation that mentorship, shadowing and learning opportunities would be offered throughout the entire creation of the film. It shows that creating diversity in film is not just about representation, but making sure that everyone gets equal opportunities when it comes to being in front of and behind the camera.

While there’s much to complain about in the UK, especially with regards to certain aspects of our cinematic productions, our commitment to diversity in film, although imperfect, does provide a roadmap for other countries to adopt. Germans from immigration backgrounds and Germans of colour seemed impressed with the British model, hoping that German production companies can adopt similar ideas.\

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Making it happen

One notable film fund already looking towards using a checklist to get a better understanding of talent applying, and in my mind, already producing some great stuff, like FIRST TIME [The Time for All but Sunset – VIOLET] (Nicolaas Schmidt, 2021) and No Hard Feelings (Faraz Shariat, 2020; pictured at the top), is the MOIN Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, heralded by Helge Albers, who was also in attendance at the festival.

Naturally, having the so-called decision-makers in the same rooms as the talent is crucial in order to see that there are thousands of stories just begging to be told. For example, director and actor Sheri Hagen (pictured below), who has been acting in German cinema since the mid-1990s, mentioned several fascinating projects she’s currently working on that she’s still trying to get off the ground. Her immense talent was already on show in the two German films screening as great case-points: sci-fi short film I Am (Jerry Hoffmann, 2021) and Precious Ivie (Sarah Blaßkiewitz, 2021). The British counterpoint, made with BFI money, was the BAFTA-winning short Black Cop (Cherish Oteka, 2022), showing the type of bold cinematic vision that can be created with public funds.

Having somehow interviewed all three directors previously, the choice of films felt rather serendipitous; and it was wonderful to see the two shorts, previously experienced on my laptop, on the big screen. Both countries can produce fine cinematic visions when the money and the talent align, with symposiums such as this helping to bridge the gap and allowing these types of diverse representations to occur.

Of particular interest to me, was finding out about the UK Global Screen Fund, where the BFI is looking for a minority stake in co-productions with other countries. While events like the Berlinale are often dominated by French-German co-productions, British-German co-productions are pretty are. The German talent in attendance were also particularly interested in the possibility of working with the British, especially as Brexit can often make us Brits feel further away. Here’s hoping we start to see some great cross-cultural collaborations coming up in the next few years.

The weakest Berlinale I’ve ever attended announces its winners…

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Trust my luck: despite having seen 15 of the 18 entries in the Berlin Film Festival competition, I missed Alcarràs, Carla Simón’s second feature and the Golden Bear winner. Congratulations to her, although I cannot possibly pass judgement on the victory considering I have not seen the film. Having also missed Synonyms (Nadav Lapiud) in 2019, Touch me Not (Adina Pintilie) in 2018, Body or Soul (Ildiko Enyedi) in 2017 and Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi) in 2016, I am obviously cursed.

Perhaps Alcarràs is a masterpiece, but the buzz around it didn’t suggest an unequivocal five-star film. In fact, throughout my entire foray through the Competition, there was only one film that will stay with me forever: Ulrich Seidl’s Rimini, a fantastic, multifaceted, debate-provoking work that naturally went home without a single award. I thought it might at least win best performance for Michael Thomas, who remains constantly compelling and larger-than-life throughout. But he lost to a worthy winner, the fantastic Meltem Kaptan, who simply transforms Andreas Dresen’s Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush (pictured below) through sheer force of personality alone.

Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush

It’s a strange year when, despite severe dialect differences between North Tyrol and Bremen, the two best competition entries are in the German language. Carlo Chatrian, in his third year as the artistic director, and generally doing a good job shaking the Festival up while sticking to its experimental roots, promised less politics and more love stories this year.

Despite this, the politically-minded tales were invariably more interesting than the preponderance of middling to bad French and Franco-German romances — films like Claire Denis’ Both Sides of the Blade, Nicolette Krebitz’s A E I O U – A Quick Alphabet of Love and François Ozon’s Peter Von Kant (pictured at the top of this article) -that dominated the competition this year. Occasionally, these safe middle-European choices resulted in Mikhaël Hers’s lovely Passengers of the Night (no awards, pictured below), but most of these picks would have felt more comfortable for the less provocative Special Gala section.

Further afield, francophiles worldwide have had a field day, considering that Rithy Panh’s Everything Will Be Ok (the rare entirely political film that fell apart in its ponderous narration), Ursula Meier’s The Line (feature image) and Denis Côté’s That Kind of Summer were also in French while being from Cambodia, Switzerland and Quebec respectively. Honestly, what’s left for Cannes?

Passengers of the Night

Along with an overall ARTE-sanctioned, EU-friendly aesthetic, whiteness, middle-age and heterosexuality was the name of the game: over and over again. I’m not usually the one to care too much about film festivals being diverse just for the sake of it, but I felt the lack of worldwide perspectives here in favour of a particularly played-out white, straight sexuality. Films that tried to do something a bit different like Isaki Lacuesta’s One Year, One Night, looking at the after-effects of the Bataclan attacks, barely interrogated the current political situation in Europe, aiming instead at pop-psychology and banal romantic drama.

In this respect, Rimini, which actively confronted the ugliness at the heart of the continent, or Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush, which forthrightly criticised the issues of American imperialism across the world and how that can even be felt in Europe, felt far more honest, and heartfelt.

The few Asian exceptions, like Indonesia’s Before, Now & Then (Kamila Andini), China’s Return to Dust (Li Ruijun) and Korea’s The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sangsoo, pictured below) were often more psychologically fascinating and aesthetically innovative than their European counterparts, but I can’t claim to even truly love those films either. Then from North and Central America was Natalia López Gallard’s indecipherable Robe of Gems and Phyllis Nagy’s Call Jane (which I missed), neither of which dominated critical conversation at the festival. Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, Africa and Australasia were completely absent.

It’s sad to say, considering how much I love the Berlinale, and how I actually consider myself to be rather generous, but this year was probably the worst I’ve attended. Perhaps the pandemic has made it difficult, perhaps the Franco-German alliance is a little too strong, perhaps I am particularly cynical this time round, but the festival might do well to ditch the love stories next year. Failing that, maybe they can just find better ones instead.

Hong Sangsoo

Full List of Awards:

Golden Bear

Alcarràs (Carla Simón)

Silver Bear: Grand Jury Prize

The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sang-soo)

Silver Bear: Jury Prize

Robe of Gems (Natalia Lopez Gallardo)

Silver Bear for Best Director

Claire Denis (Both Sides of the Blade)

Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance

Meltem Kaptan (Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush)

Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance

Laura Basuki (Before, Now & Then)

Silver Bear for Best Screenplay

Laila Stieler (Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush)

Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution

Rithy Panh (Everything Will Be Ok)

Silver Bear: Special Mention

A Piece of Sky (Michael Koch)

The Line (La Ligne)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The distance between mother and daughter is represented quite literally in The Line, with a 100 metre painted border separating Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud) from her mother Cristina (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). The line, created by her younger sister Marion (Elli Spagnolo), is a last-ditch resort to stop the perennially angry Margaret from hurting her mother again.

It’s a film that starts in exaggerated fury, women chasing each other across a room in slow-motion to opera music. It doesn’t matter what set Margaret off: everything sets her off, with physical violence her first resort when she feels she can’t win an argument. She is given a restraining order. She repeatedly ignores it. Hence the line, both physical necessity and apt metaphor.

While the premise might seem absurd, it never stretches the bounds of plausibility. This is because, to paraphrase Tolstoy, every family is absurd in its own way. Ursula Meier’s Swiss-French drama is highly attuned to the neuroses and internal logic every family abides by in order to survive, crafting a touching exploration of mother-daughter relationships and the difficulty of seeing eye-to-eye.

The focal point is Marion. She might be the youngest in the family, but she possesses a steely resolve, aided by God, that makes her the ultimate go-between, standing on the line outside their house like a friendly border guard. Untouched by the neuroses that make up adult life, including Christina’s melodramatic, selfish nature, Margaret’s stress and their other sister Louise’s (India Hair) bad brokering skills, Marion has the kind of conviction only afforded by youth. Credit must go to Spagnolo, who holds her nerve excellently against veteran actors.

Using music as a through-line, whether it’s ex-concert pianist Cristina’s impending deafness, Margaret’s guitar skills or Marion’s choir-practice, the family bound together by both deafening highs and almighty lows, all in search of some kind of settled harmony. While the cinematography by regular Denis-collaborator Agnes Godard is mostly unshowy, the clean blocking and the occasional flourish help to elevate the material from being a mere actor’s showcase. So do the fine Swiss locations, adding mountain grandeur and rustic charm to the kind of story that could be set anywhere in the world.

But great music lingers not only in their harmonies and melodies, but also their cadences. The Line fails to wrap up its music and distance metaphor in a satisfying way; cross-cutting between different events and ending on a cliff-hanger just when they should finding a neat way to converge. Cliffhangers work best when you can resolve the chord yourself, but this diminished ending left me wanting a more satisfying and pleasing conclusion.

With that said, family isn’t a battle, it’s a war. Once the lines are drawn, it’s hard to put them away again. The Line shows this conflict in all its messy glory.

The Line just premiered in competition at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival, running from 10-20th February!

Estonian Dispatch: The First Feature Competition Round-Up

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

There are few greater pleasures than watching new visions by debut directors: offering rough and ready versions of ideas that they simply couldn’t wait to get off the page and onto the big screen. The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival — celebrating its 25th year — offered all of this and more with its First Feature Competition, with 20 films from first-time filmmakers that have little in common besides a desire to make a strong mark upon the cinema stage.

With minimal sleep but plenty of company and even more coffee, I managed to see all 20 films in this debut stage in the small yet bustling city at the heart of Northern Europe. Braving the cold, rain, snow, sleet and slippery streets, and catching a mixture of cinema screenings and screeners — two experienced while waiting in airports — I can safely say that the programme featured a strong combination of crowdpleasers and arthouse experiences, showing off the next generation of filmmakers in style. As Festival Director Tiina Lokk told us in our podcast interview: “There could be mistakes, but you see the talent.“

Other Cannibals

Perhaps the best example of combining both broad appeal with an intense personal vision is the First Feature Competition winner Other Cannibals (Francesco Sossai, pictured above). Beloved by basically every British person I met in the festival, this German-produced, South Tyrol-shot black-and-white tragicomedy is a loopy journey exploring an unusual friendship with shades of the oddball humour of Ben Wheatley. It wouldn’t have been my first choice for the winner — that would’ve been the touching German drama Precious Ivie (Sarah Blaßkiewitz), exploring racism in Germany with great nuance and humanity — but its a deserved winner nonetheless with the potential to be a breakout hit.

The biggest commercial success is probably destined for Immersion (Nicolás Postiglione), a taut Chilean thriller that uses a simple conceit — man stuck on a boat with two strangers and his obstinate daughters — that could easily be remade on Michigan’s Lake Superior. Expect a streaming pick up for this one, which shared the Jury Special Prize with the French Her Way (Cécile Ducrocq), which boasted a brilliant, pick-of-the-fest performance from Call My Agent’s Laure Calamy as a sex worker raising funds for her son’s cooking education.

Often the most interesting visions win the critic’s awards, with the FIPRESCI prize going to Aleksandra Terpińska’s Other People (pictured below),which adapted the unusually-written rap novel by Dorota Maslowska to excellent effect; providing a panoramic portrait of Polish society which doesn’t shy away from its savage critique of unfettered consumerism. A perfect movie to catch just ahead of the Christmas holidays. Using a great array of cinematic tricks, it deserved to be joined by Lithuania’s Feature Film About Life (Dovilė Šarutytė) for its affecting blend of narrative fiction of home-video, but which failed to win any awards.

Other People

I’m broadly happy with the awards, but it is a shame that Asian efforts — from the incredibly well-shot black-and-white, dream-like vision of Chinese film Who Is Sleeping in Silver Grey (Liao Zihao, pictured in header) to the dour, depressing yet truly original Dozens of Norths (Koji Yamamura) from Japan to India’s whimsical The Cloud & The Man (Abhinandan Banerjee)— missed out on any awards. In fact, Immersion was the only non-European film to win an award in this section, making it a more insular, Euro-centric ceremony than it needed to be.

As a British critic, I’m often harshest on my own country’s efforts, which is why it was a shame that The Score (Malachi Smyth) failed to live up to the hype of its ‘heist-musical’ designation. A more un-categorisable entry was Adam Donen’s deeply idiosyncratic Alice, Through the Looking: À la recherche d’un lapin perdu (pictured below), a phantasmagorical journey through space, time, memory, filmmaking, philosophy and almost everything else you can think of. It was a film that didn’t really succeed, but it was deeply interesting nonetheless. Equally entertaining was our conversation with the filmmaker, which you can listen to over on Mixcloud.

Watching movies themselves is only one part of the pleasures involved in a film festival, especially one as egalitarian as Tallinn Film Festival. Where in Berlinale and Cannes access to talent is moderated through PRs, regulated meeting slots, and the dreaded roundtable, Tallinn allows you to easily share drinks, conversations and good times with the talent themselves, especially the debut directors and actors who are just as glad to be there as you. This kind of direct communication allows for the free transfer of ideas and debates about cinema and national character types, giving one the sense of truly being at the centre of the film world, if only for ten days.

Alice, Through the Looking

An excursion to Estonian’s second largest city of Tartu — which will be a European Capital City of Culture in 2024 — was also included as part of the festival’s hospitality package, expanding my understanding of the Baltic nation’s make-up. And whether it was the innovative, digital-first national museum, the melancholic ruins and bridges above the town, the bohemian river-side cafés and bars, or the pink-pastel buildings that suggest Wes Anderson’s next movie, it’s these types of small journeys that definitely expand what a film festival can provide: not just watching one film after another, but the opportunity to engage with a larger cultural context. Estonians don’t just provide cinema, they provide a true sense of unforced community. I simply can’t wait to visit my Baltic friends again this time next year.

First-time directors: the nascent talent set to shine next month in Tallinn!

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

A much-needed cultural reprieve during the year’s darkest and bleakest month, The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival returns for its 25th edition between the 12th and 28th. I am very excited to revisit the small and cosy city to check out the First Feature Competition once more as it represents one of the best ways to discover new talent across the Baltics, Europe and the world.

Last year was particularly inspired, spanning from the bittersweet Chinese epic Great Happiness (Wang Yiao) to the claustrophobic, micro-budget horror hybrid Model Olimpia (Frédéric Hambalek). As everyone is housed in the same hotel, last year gave me a great chance to get up-and-close with the directors, hearing directly from them about their influences and visions for cinema, making it one of the most simulating and exciting film festivals around.

This year promises to be a feast of new and exciting talent, with ten world premieres. Sorely lacking in British talent last year — apart from the excellent, still slept-on, Kindred (Joe Marcantonio) — the Competition boasts both “heist musical” The Score (Malachi Smyth) and “post-Brexit satire” Alice, Through the Looking (Adam Donen). Otherwise, we see some Baltic talent in the form of Lithuania’s Feature Film About Life (Dovile Šartytė; pictured below) and Latvia’s Troubled Minds (Raitis Ābele, Lauris Ābele). While the majority of features come from Europe, I’m looking forward to see some world-offerings in the form of Moroccan, Colombian, Japanese, Chilean, Mexican and Kenyan films, showing that great talent certainly can come from anywhere.

A Feature Film About Life

With great hospitality and perhaps a few helpings of local liquor Vana Tallinn, I can’t wait to return and dive into what this festival has to offer. Check our website during 17th and 26th November for up-to-date dispatches from the Black Nights.

Here’s the full list of the films in the First Feature Competition:

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World premieres:

The Score (UK, Malachi Smyth);

The Cloud & The Man / Manikbabur Megh (India, Abhinandan Banerjee);

Alice, Through the Looking (UK, Adam Donen);

Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey (China, Liao Zihao);

Feature Film About Life (Lithuania, Dovilė Šarutytė);

Troubled Minds (Latvia/Poland, Directors: Raitis Ābele, Lauris Ābele);

The Red Tree (Colombia/Panama/France, Joan Gómez Endara);

Other Cannibals (Germany, Italy, Francesco Sossai);

Life Suits Me Well (Morocco, Al Hadi Ulad-Mohand); and

Tenzin (Canada, Michael LeBlanc and Joshua Reichmann).

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International premieres

Her Way (France, Cécile Ducrocq);

Immersion (Chile/Mexico, Nicolás Postiglione);

Precious Ivie (Germany, Sarah Blaßkiewitz);

Dark Heart of the Forest (Belgium/France, Serge Mirzabekiantz);

Dozen of Norths (Japan, Koji Yamamura);

The Radio Amateur (Spain, Iker Elorrieta);

;Zuhal (Turkey, Nazli Elif Durlu);

Occupation (Czech Republic, Michal Nohejl; pictured at the top of this article); and

Other People (Poland/France, Aleksandra Terpińska).

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European premiere

Blind Love (Kenya/Switzerland, Damien Hauser).

Mostro

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Mostro is a couple of different ideas mashed together — an experimental light show and a slice-of-life drama. The light show is interesting to a certain formal extent while the realism eventually strains the viewer’s patience. Even at a fleet seventy-seven minutes, this Mexican portrait of wayward and forgotten youths, albeit ambitious at its most visually expressive, didn’t do much for me at all.

Lucas (Salvador de la Garza) has lost his girlfriend. They were hanging out in a little shack, taking drugs, then the police arrived and she was apparently taken. He works in a factory and balances the difficulty of doing his day job with trying to figure out where she has actually gone. Her disappearance is the animating absence behind the film, an arthouse conceit that brings to mind L’Aventurra (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) and the work of Abbas Kiarostami.

Mostro takes a kitchen-sink stylistic approach, combining low-light nighttime shaky-cam scenes with impressive tracking shots and expressive portraits of memories, lights and colour melding together to create a vivid conception of memory, identity and relationships. But as the film moves from a contemplative and picturesque mode into a character study, we rarely understand what make Lucas tick besides his humdrum work lifting things on a factory floor.

Lucas doesn’t fundamentally change throughout the movie. He is the same depressed and unresponsive person whether he is in the throes of love with his girl or whether he is frantically searching for her. This lack of development makes it hard to sympathise with his plight. While de la Garza provides fine work, especially in the more frantic scenes, it would’ve helped to get more under his skin other than through vague voiceover and cryptic flashbacks. More interesting is his confrontation with the police, who seem particularly blasé about where his girlfriend has gone or the manner of her disappearance. If the film dug deeper into the indifference of bureaucracy, it could’ve been a piercing critique, but this is quickly passed over in favour of more deeply held close ups and thinly light portraits.

Nonetheless, the wider context of teenage disappearance — a national issue in Mexico — doesn’t seem to interest first-time director José Pablo Escamilla that much, who has a keen eye for striking mise-en-scène, but few ideas to keep the thematic clock ticking. The aforementioned experimental moments seem to vanish by the later half of the film, creating a secondary stylistic absence that make one wonder why they existed in the first place – either the two styles blend by the end, or they create a strange dichotomy; here they seem to barely relate to each other.

Lucas must return to his job, suffering the inequities of oppressive managers while worried sick, creating a vivid critique about how capitalism at its most acute cannot let people rest. Sadly, whether shot in the dark or caught on headache-inducing shaky-cam, Lucas’ strife becomes difficult to genuinely care about. With little closure and a whispy finale, Mostro’s formally ambitious conceits amount to a lot of style about nothing much at all.

Mostro plays in the Concorso Cineasti del presente at Locarno Film Festival, running from August 4-15th .