Tag: Tallinn Film Festival

Her Way (Une femme du monde)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Laure Calamy is astounding in Her Way, turning in the rare kind of performance that alters the very texture and feel of a film. Appearing in almost every scene as Marie, a Strasbourg sex worker turning every single trick possible in order to help her son, this is probably the finest acting work I’ve seen at Tallinn Film Festival this year, giving great presence and potency to Cécile Ducrocq’s debut film.

The intimate yet banal nature of prostitution is quickly established in the film’s opening scene, featuring Marie letting a punter into her home, guiding him through his nervousness and giving him oral sex. It cost 45 euros. Her Way constantly reminds you of the transactional nature of the work involved in this way. Treating it as a job like any other, this scene is later paralleled with her having sex with one of her regulars, a pharmacist who also comes weekly to complain about his wife.

France has a complicated relationship with prostitution. While selling your body is not illegal, purchasing sex is, meaning that it is hard for sex workers to set reasonable prices. This causes great pain for Marie, who wants to help her son (Nissim Renard) train to become a chef. Kicked out of state training due to his poor attitude, the only option left is to find €5000 within just a couple of months to get him enrolled in a fancy private school. With little options left in France, she drives daily to a brothel across the German border in Offenburg, working every night in order to make the money in time.

Great care is laid out in explaining just how prostitution works and the ways that women can find themselves being failed through an imperfect system, whether it’s the African women in France being illegally pimped out on the streets or the squabbling between girls in the German brothel. The women share tips — usually aiming for quick and easy guys over rough, older men — and friendships, giving us a great sense of how the industry works from the inside. While there are certain scenes that have a harshness to them, it never feels exploitative, showing the obvious research and care that Ducrocq has put into depicting the industry.

Shot on handheld, but with a good sense of space and blocking, the film often cuts away from scenes in the middle of a confrontation, giving a constantly rising sense of tension. Ducrocq also has a great ability of finding the right time for a montage to move the story along and give it a rush of feeling. At the centre of all this is Calamy, playing an imperfect, tempestuous, stubborn and passionate woman with the kind of nuance rarely seen in adult (in both senses of the word) dramas. While I had some squabbles with the final third — a tightly-walked deliberate line between traditional plot resolution and more nuanced character work that doesn’t quite come off — it acts as a fine calling card for the debut director and could even be a conversation starter in the Gallic nation.

Her Ways plays in the First Feature Section of the Talinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from the 12-28th November.

Feature Film About Life (Ilgo metro filmas apie gyvenimą)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

When Dovilė (Agnė Misiūnaitė) finds out her father has died, she heads onto the rooftop of her workspace. The camera slowly zooms out like in a paranoid 70s thriller, until her tiny form is finally contrasted against a huge apartment block, each open window containing its own microcosmic world. Where many directors may have chosen a teary close-up, Lithuanian director Dovilė Šarutytė opts for alienation, expanding the auto-fictional form in fascinating ways.

A camera move repeated throughout Feature Film About Life, it’s an illustrative way of the angular approach this director takes to grief, growing-up and the relationship between daughters and fathers. While the metafictional title might suggest a whimsical exploration of life and death, and one woman’s witty way of navigating it, the actual form of the film is a far more nuanced and smart take on Dovilė’s sudden thrust into adulthood.

In a bittersweet prelude, Dovilė starts the film in Paris. One of her first trips as an adult, she reflects with her friends on the irony of spending the day sightseeing. Beloved by her parents, this was the type of activity she assumed she would never do when travelling by herself. It’s a neat reflection of the ways one can grow into adulthood without even knowing it.

An even bigger challenge awaits: organising her father’s funeral. They seem to have been invented not just to process grief, but to defer it. When caught up in the bureaucracy of organising parlours and flowers, receptions and priests, cremation or burial, it’s impossible to take a step back and remember your loved one for who they truly are. A Feature Film About Life takes us on a journey through shabby restaurants, grim offices and bleak graveyards, showing how the business of navigating death can be its own coming-of-age story.

Šarutytė intersperses the matter-of-fact story with home-footage taken by her own father in the 90s. Not only do they show that the era was a seemingly universal mood — big glasses, bad hair, multi-colour puffer jackets — but create an intimate conversation between past and present. The director finds associative ways to bring boxy home video and full-screen digital together — like match cutting between symbols or allowing one scene to comment on the other — showing us in real time Dovilė reflecting on the past. It always makes me wonder how these types of films will look twenty years from now, iPhone images containing little of the immediate nostalgia young adults of my generation will associate with home video.

This metafictional approach also allows the film to sidestep the usual hallmarks of the genre — featuring several impassioned speeches reminiscing about traits of the deceased— in favour of a more subtle and tactile experience. When the waterworks finally flow, it is through a remarkably simple yet devastating gesture, all the more so thanks to the film’s earlier restraint. Sad without being depressing, funny while avoiding whimsy, compassionate but not cloying, its careful modulation of mood shows a fine command of tone from first-time feature director Dovilė Šarutytė.

A Feature Film About Life plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Other People (Inni ludzie)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The first ever album I bought was The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come From Me. Brummie Mike Skinner rapped about normal life — losing money, girlfriends, nights out — and wrapped it up into an epic story about trying to get yourself together. Rap music has always told stories, from “Children’s Story” to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day”, but there is something particularly special about stretching that conceit over a larger narrative form while telling a story basically anyone could relate to.

That’s why Other People, despite its miserablist approach, provides such a pleasurable narrative experience, using hip-hop’s potential to paint a wide tapestry of contemporary Warsaw life. Its central protagonist, Kamil (Jacek Beler) is an aspiring rapper, living in an identikit apartment block in a city constantly blanketed in grey. His daily routine (avoiding the tram fare, stealing small items from the mall, getting wasted with his friends) is recounted in minute detail by a man (Sebastian Fabjański) with Jesus thorns and baseball cap, providing a deadpan one-man Greek chorus.

And if Mike Skinner was self-effacing in the way he played himself in something like “Fit But You Know It”, Beler’s Kamil is positively self-hating, unable to process his childhood or find any kind of meaning in his life. He doesn’t even have the beats for his raps. At least he contains some kind of sexual magnetism that allows him to sleep with both trophy housewife Iwona (Sonia Bohosiewicz) and shop worker Aneta (Magdalena Kolesnik). The questions is not so much who he will end up with, but will he end up being someone, subsumed by a giant, dark city, forbidding tower blocks, a lack of economic prospects and an endless proclivity for cannabis and vodka…

The film cannot be separated from its form, which allows for quick jumps between memory and present, character and perspective without feeling messy or in a rush. Adopted from the epic rap poem by Dorota Masłowska, it has a novelistic rhythm and perspective. Not everyone is particularly accomplished with their flow. No matter. Like the bad singers in Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen, 1996), or Mike Skinner himself sometimes, hip-hop is shown here to be more about personal expression than technical mastery. Everyone joins in: no matter whether they are on the tram or in the midst of coitus. The freewheeling nature of the raps are so well-integrated into the narrative it makes me want to see Terpínska take on a Goodfellas-style (Martin Scorsese, 1990) movie. She’ll certainly be able to find the right milieu.

If Aleksandra Terpińska’s previous short The Best Fireworks Ever (2017) — which literally told the dystopian story of Poland descending into civil war — felt overly critical of the direction the country is going in, Other People seems even more damning for being set in the present day. This is a world where people console themselves with consumerism, post fake lives on social media while feeling depressed, drown in never-ending debt and use sex, drugs and alcohol as temporary respite from the void. It should feel like a slog, but spurred on by razor-sharp editing and game performances, this film contains both great vitality and compassion in amidst its characters’ ugliness.

No one comes off well, especially Kamil in a particularly troublesome rubbishing of the #metoo movement, but no one is particularly dislikable either. They’re living in a world that’s dying while trying to find something, anything to hold onto. These Other People are certainly more normal than the so-called “normal people” of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Totally unflinching in her approach, Terpińska has delivered on the banal yet beautiful promise of The Streets nearly two decades later, delivering a polyphonic drama that entices as it repels.

The Dawn (Zora)

Posted on by Paul Risker

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Set in the near future, a family has to decide whether to stay in the small rural Balkan village they’ve called their home, or like many of the other villagers, choose to leave. Aside from the communal tensions and the cryptic references of another group’s arrival that will bring trouble, the family themselves are divided. Husband Matija (Kresimir Mikic) and his wife Ika (Tihana Lazovic), are yet to overcome the grief of the loss of their son, who disappeared a long time ago. Against her wishes, he plans to sell their home and move with their two children Kaja (Lara Vladovic) and Nikola (Maks Kleoncic) to the city.

The Dawn is the second film in director Dalibor Matanić’s Sun trilogy, following High Sun (Zvizdan, 2015), that won a Jury Prize at Cannes, where it screened in the Un Certain Regard section. It spanned three love stories across three decades, with actors Lazovic and Goran Markovic appearing as different characters. This time around, the director is less playful with time, and he’s more concise, although the theme of inter-ethnic conflict and love remains intact.

This is a brooding film that nestles itself in communal and family anxieties, cultivating a tension that denies communication between its characters. The Dawn is the type of filmmaking that resists centralising themes and ideas, to the point that the aim becomes their development to communicate with the audience. Instead, Matanić clouds them in abstraction, in which moments of interaction between characters, a look or words exchanged, offers us deeper insight into his intent.

With a lack of interest in exposing his characters inner most thoughts and feelings, the filmmakers feeling is that we only need to have a sense, from which we can grow our connection with the family. He appreciates that if his characters are struggling to understand their thoughts and feelings, then he must honour this. He leans us towards comprehending these emotions and not explaining them to us, or helping us to understand.

We watch as they sink in the quicksand, unable to be still. Their emotional angst places them in peril, whether it’s a literal death, or a metaphysical one – the break up of the family, or deepening of tensions that threatens to end this chapter of their lives, and spark the uncertainty of a new one.

There’s a side to these characters that remains private, contrasting to the opening images of the naked Ika. Her breasts are bared not only to her husband who’s offscreen, but to the camera which is our eye. We’re not the only ones who watch their emotionally intense sexual intercourse – Kaja and Nikola watch through the slit of the open door. A tear has left a streak below Ika’s eye, and we realise their sexual act is not a simple expression of lust or love, but is borne out of a shared pain. What’s striking about this film is that the characters are never truly naked because they’re not emotionally laid bare. The director challenges nakedness as a physical concept, and if we cannot understand someone’s feelings, then does witnessing them perform intimate acts render them nude?

Matanić appears to have little interest in definitive ideas, and he either abandons the black and the white meaning for the shades of grey, or juxtaposes one thing with another, such as the family home falling apart, and the neighbour’s house under construction. In one scene this is symbolised by night and dawn – the darkness of the grieving couple and their contentious marriage, opposite the sun rising on a new beginning.

The Dawn has the feel of a nightmare, constructed around the concept of an imaginative fantasy that would form a dystopian dream. Underpinning this nightmarish impression, the cinematographic framing of the characters and the observations of the space conveys the horresque.

We could be forgiven for thinking the spatial is haunted by their memories of their son who went missing, and who they continue to search for. Unlike Matija who is willing to leave the country for the city, the son’s disappearance ties Ika to the place. Emotion and space are intertwined, the setting an emotional graveyard. But it’s also haunted by a feeling less personal, of the human propensity for violence and inter-ethnic conflict that overshadows the couple’s personal trauma.

Matanić’s film is a dystopian vision, not of totalitarianism, but of the divides between people who cannot or will not be healed. By its close, The Dawn offers no answers and amidst this uncertainty begins a haunting experience that will continue long after the last image.

The Dawn has just had its premiere at the 24th PÖFF Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where it’s showing in the Official Competition.

Love Song 1980

Posted on by Paul Risker

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In the early 1980s Beijing, sophomore college student Liang Zhengwen (Xian Li) once again meets Mao Zhen (Jessie Li), the young woman he has secretly fallen in love with. She was the girlfriend of his older brother who died when he accidentally drowned in a lake one night. This mysteriously elusive woman will be a haunting figure in his life. An unrequited love, she enters relationships with other men, while he engages in love triangles, and yet the pair remain emotionally inseparable.

Mei Feng’s adaptation of Yu Xiaodan’s novel, ’80s Lovers, is deliberately slow-paced, following the character of Zhengwen through much of the decade. The driving theme of the film is an echo of the sentiment that “no man is an island.” It positions the life story of the person as being defined by the people who come and go throughout his or her life – permanent and impermanent departures.

The bond the pair share is of someone they were both close to that has permanently left their lives. Zhen disappears, only to reappear into Zhengwen’s life. She frequently communicates with him by letter, her heartfelt words lending a deeper intimacy to their relationship. It’s a touching reflection on the emotions that bind two people together.

Sadly by the 75-minute mark, the film begins to feel laborious. Feng positions the young man as the main character, but the soul or the heart of the film is Zhen. By its conclusion we feel we have spent time observing the period in the life of a ghostlike figure, a spectre that never feels fully developed. He’s lost in the shadows cast by absent themes and ideas that compromise the depth of his character. Even Zhen, who in the earlier scenes has her layers peeled away to reveal a sad but captivating story, struggles to command our continued interest.

We feel the desire to want to be captivated by the characters, to feel more deeply for them, but the story does not put down the necessary roots. Love Song 1980 is in a state of perpetual cardiac arrest. Outside of the momentary pulses of promise, it continually flatlines. The scene in which Zhengwen’s brother’s body is found is viscerally unsettling, as Feng conveys the aching pain of loss in a way that’s rarely captured this profoundly in cinema. It’s brief, but it’s impactful.

I cannot speak directly to the merits of the adaptation, having no familiarity with Xiaodan’s novel. My suspicion however is that the film has the feel of a literary story, suited to that medium. Words on the page that can make the reader more implicit in the thoughts and feelings of the characters is lacking in the film, and where literature can hone in on details, the cinematic brushstrokes are broader. Throughout the film, detail is missing, or rather the premise and plot is in place, but it’s not threaded together. Yes, there are scenes that make us feel something for the characters, provoking momentary pulses of interest. However, without richer themes and ideas that are tenaciously explored, these are disparate and fail to satisfactorily coalesce.

Love Song 1980 has just had its European premiere at the 24th PÖFF Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where it’s showing in the Official Competition.

Sanremo

Posted on by Paul Risker

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In Miroslav Mandić’s touching Slovenian drama, set in a nursing home for the elderly, Bruno (Sandi Pavlin) is in love with his co-resident, Duša (Silva Cusin). She too cares for him, but after each encounter he forgets her. Lost time and again in the past, he often wanders astray, trying to return home to his wife, and his dog – who are no longer there.

Sanremo is the type of storytelling that asks of us the simplest of things. It does not ask us to critique, to plough its depths to discern why it is aesthetically and emotionally pleasing, nor does it ask for us to discuss it with fevered passion. All it asks is to be heard – for us to give up 85 minutes of our lives and to hand ourselves over emotionally. We should nonetheless seek to preserve the simple and delicate emotional experience Mandić has crafted.

The use of sound to emphasise the movement and touch is striking. We not only see and hear, but are aware of the weight or gentleness, and it’s through sound that we feel the fabric of the film. The crispness of scissors cutting paper as the group create their collages, or the sound of Bruno’s footsteps, the sound is natural and not manipulated for dramatic effect. The lack of reliance on a soundtrack to drown out the diegetic noise enhances our ability to go beyond seeing, and to instead genuinely feel a world that sounds true to life. But when music is used, it does not detract because Mandić wisely uses it sparingly to maximise its effect. In one scene it’s orchestrated to the rhythm of Bruno’s movement, and in other moments music is used when it can be a voice to express feelings, or to heighten the emotion.

In our encounter with Sanremo, we should be willing to momentarily forget about the aesthetic – even if deserving of our attention. Similarly to the moments the couple shares, we must allow the story to emotionally move us, and carry us out to sea on the tide, and only every now and again take a moment to marvel at the simple and subtle beauty of the work. What we should do is restrain ourselves – unconsciously critique and consciously feel.

If cinema is known for its manipulation of time, then the story of a love that is forgotten, only to be rekindled when Bruno returns from past memories, is a fitting marriage. Sanremo builds itself around this simple idea of connections forged through memories, whether they’re shared together, or not. The pair remember in their youth, before they’d met in the nursing home, hearing Gigliola Cinquetti’s song, Non ho l’età at the 1964 Sanremo Festival. In their later years, Bruno’s declining memory means that their love can only be a series of first encounters for him, even if not for Duša. Their experience of the song at the festival is a touching way to signal that their relationship will always be fated to an inescapable distance.

The film asks us whether we take our memory for granted? It’s done with simplicity, by leaning into a scenario and nestling itself there. Sparing and repetitively stagnant, it will effectively touch a nerve for the audience, because it’s not difficult to empathise with its contemplation of the fragile nature of love and affection, that the filmmaker lays bare.

This idea is complimented by the change of seasons, from the sunshine to the rain and the snow, that represent the passage of time. Just as Bruno forgets Duša and slips into the past, remembering his wife and dog, the seasons are reminiscent of their fleeting moments. But Mandić’s success is that he forgoes the melodramatic, instead internalising the emotion. He conveys an ache of sadness and pain that we are asked to acknowledge, and not through melodramatic tropes.

Sanremo has just premiered at the 24th PÖFF Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where it’s showing in the Official Competition.

Longing Souls (El Alma Quiere Volar)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The coming-of-age story is mixed with the old wives tale to excellent effect in Diana Montenegro’s debut feature Longing Souls. A slow, quiet and assured effort from Colombia, it expertly examines superstitious women’s lives through careful and clever composition and a great eye for the tiny accretion of detail.

Longing Souls starts with the 10-year-old Camilla witnessing a truly horrific event: her mother being beaten with a belt up by her father. As a result, she is sent to live with her 79-year-old grandmother. She lives with Camilla’s aunts, all of whom seem afflicted one way or another. Soon, the young girl realises that these women are living with a so-called curse, inflicted upon them by their neighbour Felicia.

But perhaps the curse isn’t really from Felicia, but from the men in these women’s lives: who are either unavailable, abusive or literally infirm. Together these women must band together and find a way to live despite their difficulties. Longing Souls really looks at these ladies, providing a feminist portrait that stays true to itself throughout.

While looking on the outset like a kitchen sink drama, this is not your run-of-the-mill arthouse film. Instead director Diana Montenegro imbues the film with a quirky eye for composition; often employing planimetric shots and horizontal pans to give the old house an immersive feel. Yet she is not slavishly devoted to her style, knowing when to cut to a close or medium shot in order to enhance a particular scene. Still we rarely leave this expertly constructed-space, Montenegro draping the entire film in a Beguiled-like atmosphere; filled with white, flowing clothes, billowing curtains and natural candlelight.

This old-timey aesthetic compliments the many superstitious rituals we see throughout the film: from covering your face with oatmeal, rubbing yourself with stones while repeating mantras, saying the name of Jesus Christ 1000 times, and cracking an egg into a glass of water. Montenegro views these strange liturgic moments without judgement, providing a fascinating insight into how Catholicism and superstition can often be so easily interlinked.

Using a mostly amateur cast, the film balances this stylised approach with fine naturalistic and lived-in performances. Montenegro is not afraid to simply let domestic scenes play out, focusing on the bodies of these women and their relation to the space around them. With moments that are alternately sad, funny and often downright strange, we really get a sense of who these people are; leading up to a pitch-perfect final scene that doesn’t betray the carefully laid groundwork of the film’s previous moments.

Scored to a variety of old-school Colombian pop songs, Longing Souls manages to stay dreamy and touching despite its dark subject matter. It’s affirming to see Argentinean legend Lucrecia Martel as one of the film advisors; with her stewardship, there is a real hope that this film asserts Montenegro as a fresh new voice in South American cinema.

Longing Souls plays as part the First Feature Competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

The Body Fights Back

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

There’s one image in The Body Fights Back that seems to encapsulate Western society’s paradoxical relationship with food. On the tube station, a fitness advert is directly juxtaposed with a fast food one, asking consumers to engage in both. But this is standard in today’s society: after all, McDonald’s is one of the key sponsors of none other than the Olympic Games. Can you eat McDonald’s and run a triathlon? You can try, but it’s probably not advised.

Documentary The Body Fights Back looks at a group of people who live within our paradoxical and shame-based food culture, offering an alternative to the dieting advice found in women’s magazines, mainstream media and aspirational Instagram pages. From a disabled woman with stretch marks, to a Black woman overcoming trauma, to a white man previously obsessed with getting ripped at the gym, the film provides a fascinating perspective into how eating disorders are rarely about food, but stem from a variety of complex and interlinking factors.

While the style of the movie is a little dry — with few montages that feel really inspired — its intellectual rigour is to be applauded, especially the way it keenly threads the needle between dieting culture and wider systemic issues, including fatphobia, patriarchy and even white supremacy. With the third idea, the film does falter a little. This idea that diet culture and fatphobia is exclusively a product of White Supremacy may be true in the UK or the USA, but these issues are also a huge part of East Asian culture too, something that isn’t really explored or interrogated in any meaningful way.

In the end, bodies, in whatever form are to be celebrated. We see footage of the Notting Hill Carnival — rooted in Caribbean culture, where curvier bodies receive much higher levels of praise. It would have been fascinating for the film to branch out and see other historical and cultural attitudes to bodies, upending Western clichés and providing a broader perspective.

Nonetheless, perhaps the Western focus makes sense, as the countries with some of the worst obesity in the world are Australia, UK and USA, mainly because they have the largest economic disparity. In a city like London, for example, chicken shops can offer chicken and chips for £1.50 while a fancy restaurant bill for two can easily go over £100. Conversely, in smaller, medium income countries, which don’t have as large a population, mass chain infrastructure or much importation of food, weight levels are far down — suggesting that its not really the individual that’s responsible but society as a whole. For one thing, it makes you pray that we never make that trade deal with the Americans.

Ultimately, as someone who has been blessed with a great metabolism and never thinks too hard about what they eat on a regular basis, this is a really eye-opening look at the double standards that people face. And they also seem to end on a note similar to my own eating philosophy, named intuitive eating: eating what you want when you want and respecting the needs of your own body. Sounds good by me, now what’s for lunch?

The Body Fights Back opens the #PÖFFTrending programme at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.