CPHPIX day 14: Rio 2096 - A Story of Love and Fury, Rio Belongs to us, Tom at the Farm

So I skipped day 13. Because I'm superstitious. And also because I had to move into a new apartment. So these are my final reviews from the festival this year. It's been a great year for me. Some masterpieces in the program, and I think I've been better at wheedling out the boring stuff, and focus on something that at least had some resemblance of interest to me. Even the stuff I didn't really like - and there's one more of those coming today - I'm still happy that I saw.

Rio 2096 - A Story of Love and Fury (Luiz Bolognesi, Brazil, 2013)

I'm impressed at how this film got made, how it got funding. Because, boy, is this an angry film. Four stories about Brazil, three from the past, one from the future. I get why it's animated, because a live-action version of this film would have been so immensely epic and expensive, that all the critique would undoubtedly have been removed.

Still, I'm impressed by the fury of this film. Granted, Brazilian history invites itself to this kind of fury. We follow an immortal warrior named Abeguar through four time periods, where he is constantly battling for the underdog, and always in love with a new woman named Janaína. He is an Indian fighting the Portuguese, a Mestizo leading an uprising against the Empire of Brazil, a student fighting the dictatorship, and finally, joining a group of terrorists in the future fighting a water-conglomerate for the right to water for everyone. We watch people being massacred and tortured, bodies being roasted and eaten, children getting raped and shot. It's all a bit much. But I don't think it's superfluous or that ahistorical. The indians were almost wiped out. The rebellion is based on the Balaida-rebellion - named because on of the main instigators made baskets or 'balaios', like the warrior in the film - which was crushed like so many other internal rebellions by Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, nicknamed both The Iron Duke and The Peacemaker. The segment set under the dictatorship is twofold, first when Abeguar fights along with other bourgoise students, and then after he is released from jail with him moving into the favelas to fight with the poor. The theme of the need to fight against opression is stated more nuanced than it often is. Because they always fight, and they always lose, and they take bystanders down with them. After being released from jail, the students, including Janaína, manage to go back into a middleclass life, while the poor become even more left out and hidden in the favelas. The sci-fi part suffers from what so many sci-fi's suffer from in being less clever than it seems to think it is - I guess it's mainly about the importance of keeping natural resources under control by the people. Like Petrobras.

So the fury is all well and good. But the part about love is a bit pat. At times, it mainly seems like Abeguar loves Janaínia because of her name, and because she whistles so prettily at him when he is disguised as a bird. Of the four stories, only the fourth really revolve around love as a major part. Here Abeguar has sorta given up, and is happy to buy the love from Janaína, who now is a high-class prostiture, I guess. But once she makes her move against the regime, he changes his mind. I like that it switches the gendered view of who is a fighter and who is fought for at the end. Also, the animation isn't really that impressive. The future society is impressively designed, but there is a dearth of really well-designed pictures, and the movements are mainly choppy. And really, I've seen reviewers talk up the amount of violence and sex in this cartoon, and while it's unusual for a cartoon, that it's all animated does serve to lessen the impact of it all. It's violent for an animated film, but for a violent film, it's pretty easy to sit through. And I'm not sure if that was the point. The film seems to want to be a call for action, but I'm uncertain if it works like that. It's a fine primer on Brazilian history, though, which I'd recommend diving into since we're all going to hear a lot about the country once the World Cup begins.

Rio Belongs to Us (Ricardo Pretti, Brazil, 2013)

After having been so pleasantly surprised by Road to Ythaca, I checked the program and found out that there was a showing of another film by one of the four directors. They're all part of a group called Alumbramento, who helps each other with making films, in an underground and independent fashion. This has really been my big surprise this festival, far from being the best films, but these two films had a sense of independence, of willing to be different, and an energy to them, which was quite frankly refreshing. I've liked most of what I've seen, but there is a sort of sameness to a lot of second-tier arthouse filmmaking, a European inspired tasteful aesthetic with long takes, but not too long, diffuse plots, but not too diffuse, pretty pictures, etc. This still had long takes, a diffuse plot and some quite pretty pictures, but it left the world of tastefulness far behind in favour of cheap and brassy pretentiousness.

Oh yes, this was pretentious as hell. I think most of the theater was annoyed at that, and quite frankly, if I'd payed full price for the ticket, I'd might have been as well. But I really liked it. We begin with a black screen and clanging noises, then cut to two naked people in a post-coital embrace. Hold it a long time. Part of the film was in English for no apparant reason, and the toneless and weird delivery makes me think the actors didn't really understand what they were saying. Most of the film took place in empty rooms, mainly filled by matresses and naked lightbulbs. The barebones plot has Marina receiving some very weird messages saying 'Rio Belongs to Us', but mainly the film was a moodpiece, a collection of dreams and weird dialogues.

And I liked it a lot. It drew a lot on horror, with the weird messages and all the empty rooms. There is even a scene where Marina walks on a beach in the weird and unnerving way like the ghost from The Ring. It was quite effective at that. But mostly, I loved the space it created. All those empty rooms. In one scene Marina is in a darkened room, and removes taped-up newspaper from a window, all of a sudden creating a portal to the world outside. The film showed Rio de Janeiro in a way I've never seen it before, showing empty concrete high-rises against the treefilled mountains surrounding it, and focusing quite a lot on the river. It felt as if nature was collapsing in on the city, as if it was a concrete maze fenced in by rock, water, tree and cloudfilled sky. I've never been to Rio de Janeiro, but I'm pretty certain that is not what the city is like. However, that is one of the great thing about cinema, the way a filmmaker can turn his surroundings into a personal vision. And the city of Rio Belongs to Us was one of the best cities I'd seen at the festival.

Tom at the Farm (Xavier Dolan, 2013, Canada)

Xavier Dolan is the wunderkind of arthouse cinema. 25 years old, and his fifth feature has just been chosen for competition at Cannes. This one, his fourth, was at Venice, where it won the FIPRESCI prize. Also, he's a famous voice-actor in Quebec, haven't dubbed roles such as Ron Weasley, Brainy Smurf and Jacob from Twilight. I guess we might very well be stuck with him for a looong time, so though I don't think his films seem that interesting, I decided to check this out. And I don't get it. It isn't bad, not at all. Well made, beautiful, tense and suspenseful. But also a bit dull, and not really amounting to much.

The film is an adaptation of a play with the same name. It follows Tom as he travels to a farm for the funeral for his lover Guillaume. Guillaume's brother Francis forces him to keep it a secret that Guillaume was gay, and then it all becomes fucked up and thriller-like. There was a lot of stuff I liked: An impromptu tango-dance, an ominous shot of a dead cow being dragged behind a tractor, a scene where Tom comes running out of the stable with blood on his hand, and we think he has taken part in a slaughter of a cow, but then learns he helped a cow give birth instead. And Dolan captures the northen lights with the long shadows quite well. The first few times we see Francis, his face is hidden from us as well as Tom, and when he then violently wakes Tom up, there's a scary short shot of his head without a face on it. The film is filled with good details like that. It's the main story I don't care for.

The film is sort of a psychological thriller, but both the thriller-aspects and the psychology is a bit rubbish. Francis is shunned by the surrounding society, what horrible thing did he do? The answer migth bore you, or you might figure the gist of it out pretty early on. And what makes Francis tick, why is he like he is? Again, while it isn't explicitly stated, there are enough clues that point in a pretty boring direction. The psychology of Tom actually seems a bigger mystery to me, why on Earth does he act like he does? There is a twist concerning him I didn't see coming, and I wouldn't have guessed it in a thousand years. Because it doesn't make any sense at all, psychologically.

Also, the music. This film had one of the worst scores I heard at the festival. So boring, so intruding, so annoying. Apparantly, Dolan had considered no score, and just having the sound of leaves and wood creaking. Yeah, that would have improved the film immensely. Wouldn't have made it great, but I'd been less annoyed by it. All in all: Fine, nothing more. If this is the best he has made, then I don't get what he is doing at Cannes at all.

And that concludes my reviews from this year of PIX. 38 films. Check out the archive, by clicking on PIX14. Hope you might find something that interests you.

CPHPIX day 10: Norte the End of History, Praia do Futuro, The Man of the Crowd, Moebius

Boy was I tired saturday. Many films, many writeups. Also, beer on friday. But if you can't drink beer on friday, then you should reevaluate what you're doing, is my opinion. So I probably missed quite a lot about the films saturday, but yeah.

Norte, the End of History (Lav Diaz, Philippines, 2013)

I'd really been looking forward to this one. Lav Diaz has made films since 1998, low-budget, underground, often punishingly long. This film was one of his shorter ones, at only four hours and a bit. It metwith rapturous reviews in 2013, and so I hoped for the discovery of a major voice I didn't know before. I think I'm a bit underwhelmed. It was good, very good. But I think I wanted more.

The film is an adaptation of Crime and Punishment, and for the first hour, which was sorta faithful to the novel, I couldn't really see the point. The story is so iconic, but also so elemental that I wanted something added to it. And the main character, Fabian, wasn't such a good Raskolnikov. He drunkenly discussed Philipino history with his friends, and it's been done. I was worried what the rest the characters from the novel would be like, as there's some pretty tough characters in that book, if you play it straight. And the film sorta botches the Crime-part, one of the most chilling chapters of prose ever written.

But then the film took a detour, and all became much better. An invented character, a poor and saintly family-man, takes the punishment for the crime, and for about two hours the film is more about his struggles in prison, and his family left behind. The prison-part is quite melodramatic, but the extended run-time helps with allowing us to settle into the hardships of the situation. I loved this.

Once Fabian re-enters the film, his story becomes much better as well. He goes from being a bad Raskolnikov to being more like a subversion of the figure. While religion serves as the lackluster universal solution in so much of Dostoevsky - a revolutionary writer who sometimes seem to want to be a reactionary one - in Norte, Fabian becomes Born Again for a moment, then gives up on it. And his true colours become clear later on.

The film seems to have a political dimension. Fabian and his friends switch easily between English and Philipino, and talks about helping from their exalted position. The poor are abused and punished. Apparantly, Fabian is very much based on the young Ferdinand Marcos, former dictator of the Philipines, and from the same part of the country as Fabian. There might be a brave and explicit politcal position at the end. Or it might be a car-crash.

The fim might be a bit too subtle for it's own good. The long takes with slow zooms are always beautiful. But I was surprised at how slick the film was, I'd thought it would be more raw. Good film, but I guess I'd prefer his earlier ones.

Praia do Futuro (Karim Ainouz, Brazil, 2014)

At the end of a festival, films might suffer from a sense of deja-vu. Praia do Futuro was fine, with beautiful images and a nice story. But I've seen it all done so much better this year. Praia is Portuguese for beach - I learned something! - it's a gay film, so the first third of two men cavorting on a beach really reminded me of Stranger by the Lake. But with less specificity, and much less beautiful. Also, so tired of people drowning or talking about seamonsters, the weirdest trope of 2014. Not Ainouz' fault, but still.

It got better once the central couple got to Berlin. The film had points about rootlessness, and the grey German city-scape supported them quite well. Rooftops, snow in spring, northern beaches, foggy roads. And a single stunning sequence, set inside an elevator in the middle of a circular aquarium. Great but too little. A fine film, but firmly second tier art-house, of what I've seen this year. I've got nothing more to say.

The Man of the Crowd (Marcelo Gomes & Cao Guimarães, Brazil, 2013)

At this point I was almost falling asleep, so this is very short. Yet another Brazilian film, this time a sloooow film about lonely people. And the 'saudade' they feel, as underlined by the melancholic bossa nova tunes strategically used. What was most striking about this film was the very narrow aspect ratio used, the screen was completely squared. This made the wall almost crumple in on the characters. A scene of two people standing in an appartment, which in a more normal ratio could have been caught in a single setup, has to pan slowly from person to person. It created quite a striking and unusual effect, but unfortunately also one I was too tired to really apreciate.

It's a film worth seeing, I think, more so than Praia do Futuro. It has some fine fantasy-scenes, and an extremely well-developed mood. Just not the right time and place for me to be put in that mood.

Moebius (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea, 2013)

Ah, coffee, such a great invention. Don't know why I didn't drink more coffee yesterday, it really saved me at this point. Also, the film was quite a bit more energetic than the stuff I'd seen before. Kim Ki-duk is one of the most famous South Korean directors, maker of The Isle, Spring Summer Autumn Winter... and Spring, and his Pieta won the Golden Lion from Venice in 2012. I saw it last year at PIX, and hated it. It's just awful, complete pathetic rubbish. So I wasn't expecting much, and was therefore quite positively surprised by this one. Which is stupid, ugly nonsense, but with self-awareness. Which really helps a lot.

Castrations, rape, people getting off on pain, incest. This was dumb. But what is most striking about the film - other than the mutilated genitals - is that there is no dialogue. It's not silent, but people are only laughing, screaming and gasping. Which they do quite a lot. Also, the film looks like the cheapest digital, like a soap-opera or a film by Hong Sang-soo. These two things are brilliant. There is none of the pathetic ruminations of violence, which brought down Pieta, and while that film used a klichéd and boring scheme of greys and primary colours, in this one the handheld camera just catches blurs and splotches and nothing seems coordinated. I had an idea, that the film seemed like something found in a scrapbook by an insecure teenager, and then converted into a film in a few weeks. There is nothing done to hide the fact, that it's immensely stupid, and small, and nonsensical. And that is quite nice. I'd even think I'd recommend this film, and am considering if I misread Pieta, if it actually knew that it was nonsensical rubbish as well.

CPHPIX day 9: Hard to be a God, Road to Ythaca, Stranger by the Lake

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CPHPIX day 8: History of Fear, Casa Grande, The Zero Theorem, Heli

So the jury is out: Blind won the PIX-award. Called it. I'd sorta hoped that Small Homeland could have won, that one is a bigger film, somehow, though also more flawed. The jury also cited Luton and Casa Grande as their favourites, I liked the first one, and reviews the second one further down. But first, another competition-film, History of Fear from Argentina.

History of Fear (Benjamin Naishtat, Argentina, 2014)

Argentina's has been booming as an artfilm nation so far this century. Lisandro Alonso, Celina Murga, Lucretia Martel. Last year Leonardo Brzezicki's Night was one of my favorites at the festival. This year, there were two Argentinian films at Berlin, Celina Murga's The Third Side of the River and this one. It's rare to have a debut-feature at one of the big festivals, so that made me give notice. But while the film is quite good, especially in the second half, it wouldn't be my favourite to win.

The film is pretty similar to Luton. Once again, we have snapshots from the lives of loosely connected people. This time it's centered on a large wealthy family, living in gated communities, and their servants and the boyfriend of one of the servants. The opening scene, filmed from a helicopter flying over makeshift shanties bordering the gates and calling for their eviction was pretty striking. But I preferred the aerial shots in Small Homeland. As a series of weird vignettes followed, I couldn't escape the feeling that something was missing. The film does not have the exhuberant filmic qualities of Luton. But I think the main problem is in the actors themselves. Or it might be in the staging of the actors. Either way, they did not give me what I needed. There is an early scene at a fastfood joint, where one of the customers all of a sudden starts bending down, and then twisting around in a sort of slow-motion dance. It could be really beautiful, poetic, or perhaps surreally weird. As it was, I didn't get what the point was. Perhaps the vagueness was intended, but when it happens over and over again, it's hard not to take it as a failure in the filmmaking.

The film was still pretty interesting, and I always love it when filmmakers try to make their point through filmmaking instead of plot or dialogue. But it still felt a bit below the bar set by so much of what I've seen at the festival. However, it nailed the ending, where so many other films have stumbled. Once Luton got to it's ending, it did sort of go for something a bit obvious, and it flailed a bit. History of Fear did something more interesting. It takes it's disparate plot-strands and plays them out over an extended sequence on New Years. Nearly all of the characters come together in a long sequence, which is striking without being melodramatic, and plays out the thematic in a non-obvious way. That isn't easy to do. But I'd still put the film in the second tier of competition, after Small Homeland, Luton and Blind.

Casa Grande or The Ballad of Poor Jean (Fellipe Barbosa, Brazil, 2014)

Casa Grande is sorta second tier as well. It's once again really self-assured filmmaking, but it's also a bit safe. Brazilian cinema might also be in a boom, or there might just be a concerted effort to push Brazilian culture in the year of the world-cup. The brilliant Brazilian film Neighbouring Sounds won the competition here two years ago, with a collection of themes quite similar to History of Fear and a bit like this one. That film is far superior to this one, though.

This film follows the downward spiral of a wealthy family, living in the titular big house. The film especially follows the young son, who in all this is also involved with his first girlfriend. It's all well and good, and very filmic. The titles play out over a long static shot of the father going from the jacuzzi up through the garden and into the house, shutting down the music - which thereby surprisingly turns out to have been diegetic - and thereafter turning down the lights in the house. That music is one of many fun details in the house, unceasing cello-music is heard everywhere through a smart stereo system. A repeated scene shows the downward spiral, from one maid picking up a driver and another maid, to the father himself having to pick up the one remaining maid. The film is full of visual flourishes like that, and as such I liked it. There is nothing wrong with this film. But there's just nothing especially good about it either.

I wish I could have stayed for the Q&A afterwards. The director seemed like the most sympathetic guy ever, as he told us he loved presenting this film in Denmark, as his first love and first kiss was with a Danish girl. And the film was so incredibly sympathetic to. All the characters were kinda nice, even the shortsighted boorish ones. The story of young love was cuddly and swooning. And sexy. But all this makes the film seem a bit insular. There is some bite in the discussions of a quota system for minorities, which comes to the fore as the son and daughter realize they might not be as privileged as they thought they were. But with stories to tell about all the inhabitants in the big house, and a love story as well, the film becomes crowded and fails to say much about broader issues. It becomes a pretty typical indie-film, and I was not surprised to see it having been involved with Sundance. Perhaps that style is just not to my taste. But I still thought it ended up being a bit toothless. Only in the final stretch, with a trip into the favela, do we get an understanding of just how Grande this Casa has been in relation to the rest of society. Those scenes were good. The whole film was very nice. Neighbouring Sounds is loads better, though, and I can't imagine the prize going to two Brazilian films in three years.

The Zero Theorem (Terry Gilliam, UK, 2013)

At times I feel like Denmark doesn't deserve CPHPIX, which sorta makes it one of the best film-festivals in the world. It consistently has the cream of the crop of modern film-art, offering the chance to see the best of Taiwan, Iran, Romania, all in two weeks. And many people, including many of the gate-keepers, treats it as a genre-festival, where William Friedkin is the most important director in the world. That just keeps people out of the theaters where the good films are showing, which I'm most of the time fine with, as it makes more room for me. But then I go to a completely packed screening of the latest from Terry Gilliam, in the huge room 3 at Grand, and I feel a bit alienated and slightly sad.

Terry Gilliam? Who in the world has cared about him for like, the last 20 years? Well, I sorta did, I saw The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, and liked it. And truth be told, this film is billed as the last in a trilogy of dystopies beginning with the two Gilliam-films most people prefer: Brazil and 12 Monkeys. Unfortunately, that just means that we've seen all of this before. This dystopia was just sad, a confused missive from an old man. It's a world where the tv-channel is called DuMBC (ba-dum-tjij) and the Big Brother-like corporation is called ManCom (get it? Otherwise, the strategically places logos on the life-size posters of Management will spell it out for you) It's also extremely inconsistent: The main dystopic thing about the world seems to be that commercials are allowed to speak to you, creating a hellish soundscape, and apparantly nobody has ever thought of inventing headphones. But then the main characters goes to a party, where the satire is that everyone is dancing to their own music on headphones. But there's still insanely loud dancemusic, because Gilliam has to have the mood seem hellish, and the creepy view of people dancing in silence apparantly would be too subtle. It's just sad, really.

And, oh yeah, the main character. This is the kind of film where the main character is named Qohen Leth, after the Hebrew word Qoheleth, meaning Gatherer, Teacher or Preacher (thanks wiki) Qohen is an 'entity cruncher', meaning that he solves mathematical problems through playing a 3D-simulation that looks like something from fifteen years ago. He is hired by 'Management' to solve the Zero Theorem, and I'm just going to spoil it to you: He's trying to prove that the universe will one day contract and end up in a spot with Zero width and breadth. Apparantly, if this theory - which I know of as the Big Crunch theory - is true, then life has no meaning. I fail to see why that is. As far as I know, the alternative to the Big Crunch is that the universe keeps on expanding, until every star goes out and all matter and energy is so far from each other that nothing ever happens anymore. That to me seems more depressing than the Big Crunch, which at least offers the possibility of rebirth. That might be completely off, but I like that theory. Also, the fact that the world will someday end, the Sun will go out, the Earth will become inhabitable, isn't that something that kids learn by a really young age? That isn't something that takes extremely complex calculations to figure out (the outcome of which anyhow depends on the gravitational pull of the mysterious Dark Matter and Energy, right? So wouldn't the way to go be to sponsor more cosmological research?)

Boy, I've drifted off course, but nonsense like this invites that. The good news is that Gilliam pretty much drifts away as well. The film drifts away from it's rubbish cod-metaphysical questions and into vignette-like stories about the supporting characters, including a virtual reality sex-worker and Managements unruly son. Also, a digital shrink, who's one of the most annoying characters I've ever seen. In the end, when the pieces of the puzzle should fall into place, we might be in Qohen's head and it might all be bullshit. Even Management asks 'Does it matter?' No, it does not. Nothing matters in this deeply stupid film. As such, I liked that the film ends with a focus on visuals. That is the only thing that sorta works. This is the worst thing I've seen at the festival, and though it's bad it wasn't even that bad. Didn't hate it, just felt tired. It's competent. There are a few funny moments and ideas. But only a few.

Heli (Amat Escalante, Mexico, 2013)

Mexican art-film is at this point probably mainly Carlos Reygadas, director of successes like Silent Light and Post Tenebras Lux. I'm ambivalent on Reygadas, but really liked PTL. Amat Escalante has been described as Reygadas' 'protegé', and there was suspicion that that was the main reason Heli was invited to Cannes, where it surprisingly won the Best Director Award. No need for conspiracy theories, though, this film is plenty strong on it's own.

It's more visually normal than Reygadas though. There's no denying that Reygadas has developed an unique sense of style and plot, which Heli doesn't quite have. The film considers the effects of the Drug Trade on Northern Mexico, and it has unflinching violence and an extreme sense of dread. The first shot starts on two bloodied bodies in the back of a pickup truck, and then slowly moves to look out the front window. It is beautiful but still dreadful. Also, Escalante might actually be a better director of actors than Reygadas is, there is never the sense of the actors being used as models, that I sometimes get from Reygadas. A short clips has a young boy going up behind the podium where an official held a pointless klichéfilled speech a while before, on the governments strong response to the Drug problem. The kid just acts goofy, grinning from ear to ear, without saying anything. And yet, the shot says so much about Mexico, its politicians and populace. This is the kind of shot that History of Fear needed more of.

Every write-up I've read on this film mentions a certain moment of chilling, avert-your-eyes, how-did-they-do-that-and-what-sick-mind-thought-that-up violence. And yeah, it's there, awful and gut-churning. But knowing that it was there, I was surprised at how early into the film it arrives. Knowing this is a film on Drug Violence, with hard-to-take scenes, I expected it to just be a downward spiral into more and more awful sadism. That isn't quite it, though. The latter half of the film is a powerful depiction of trauma and uncertainty, a feeling of loss after a catastrophy, and a constant fear that the bad things could pick up at any moment. Escalante never makes exactly clear the structures of crime in the area, so we never know what will trigger the next plunge into despair. As a result, I've rarely been wishing so strongly for a - good - film to end, as I did with this one. Oh, please, no more. Also, this restraint actually makes the film that much more awful. There is a twisted kind of mercy in the film. Even the ruthless, mercyless killers aren't completely sadistic. This makes it such a chilling statement on the Drug War, because it's not evil. It's not sadism. It's not even quite chaos or anarchy. It's logical. Cold, mercyless logic, carried to it's dehumanizing conclusion. Awful.

CPHPIX day 4: Manuscripts Don't Burn, Éden, Der Samurai

This festival ebbs and flows. Yesterday I saw two films I've been wanting to see for a long time, one of which was a massive masterpiece. Today I saw three films I'd just sorta thought seemed okay. They were, all of them. I don't think I have a lot to say on any of them.

Manuscripts Don't Burn (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, 2013)

Iranian cinema is insanely good. At this point, everybody probably knows this. Lately, however, it's changed. The Green Revolution in 2009 led to more repression, leading to censorship, exile, and an unmooring of style. Mohammad Rasoulof was apparantly arrested at the same time as the more famous Jafar Panahi, and both were given bans on filmmaking, but while Panahi responded by making a brilliant diptych of allegorical films on art/non-art, freedom, et al, Rasoulof chose to make a much more direct film, a thriller on the crimes of the Iranian police state. I aplaud this film, it's brave and 'important'. I was fairly bored by a large part of it, I must admit.

The first half was pretty dull. To begin with, it just seems as if we follow different sides in the war on art, the henchmen, the boss, and the artists themselves. A plotpoint regarding an old - apparantly real-life - case on the attempted murder of a busload of dissidents keep popping up. So far, so good. I was settling in to this being a multi-plot film, with only slight connective tissue between the stories. Everyone in this film deals with sickness in some way, a sick child here, an old and infirm man there, some unspecified pills being taken there. Which paints a picture of a sick society, which is, well, meh, but fair enough. If only the style wasn't so extremely one-note and dull, mainly made up of handheld fly-on-the-wall shots. I got really bored. But then, a few things changed.

Some stylistic flourishes crept into the film. Voiceovers over poetic pictures. People talking while their mouths remained shot. Beautiful shots of snowfilled landscapes, roads, Teheran by night, creating a sense of dread and despair. At least once, this sense of style fell over into drab symbolism, but still, it created some energy. But more importantly, it turned out that the plot was actually extremely well constructed. I don't want to spoil it, but there's a temporal twist to it, which is revealed in a side-plot that earlier seemed like non-sequiturs, but once their implications for the plot became clear, my stomach sank. As the screws are fastened at the end, Rasoulof turns to a few long-takes without mercy, some of whom will stay with me for a long time.

In the end though, this still wasn't really a great film. It is a bit boring, and a bit simplistic. If that seems like a dumb way to critisize such a brave and angry movie then consider this: In the film, a piece of art upsets the the system so much that they take extreme measures to bury it. What is so damaging about this piece of art? The film makes explicitly clear, that it is it's documentary features that the regime wants to supress. It tells a true story, naming names. Well, now, I ask you: If Rasoulof then wanted to hit the regime where it hurts why didn't he make a documentary? Why all the made up stuff about henchmen, and sick kids, and nagging caretakers? It doesn't really add that much, and it takes away from the accusations. All in all it's a bit of a weird film: A piece of Iranian art on the impossibility to make art in Iran, it does sort of invalidate itself. But that might be sophistery. The main problem with the film remains that it is too dull to fully connect, especially in the beginning.

Éden (Bruno Safadi, Brazil, 2012)

This was fun. Someone sent the wrong copy to the festival, so there was no subtitles. That's the second time one of my screenings has gone wrong, that's twice too many. As there was nothing else on that I wanted to catch, and as the film was very visual, I decided to stay. I did not get all of the plot, though.

There was a woman, Karine, and she was pregnant. And sad. Then she went to a church. Then she talked to another pregnant woman in a weird yellow robe. Then she returned to the church, and apparantly became part of it, and began wearing her own kind of weird robe. A couple of flashbacks revealed the father of the child, and the man who killed him. Then the woman in the yellow robe gave birth. Then Karine went to see the newborn in the night, and heard a noise, and hid, and then the leader of the church, and the woman in yellow, and the guy who killed Karine's lover talked about something which I did not get. Then Karine left the church. I was told afterwards, after asking someone to explain the plot, that she was angry the pastor would leave it to the murderer to decide whether he would turn himself into the police or not. That whole plot-strand seemed pretty coincidental to me.

I did get the visuals, though. The film began with Karine laying in an empty, boat-shaped pool, with a look of despair. These pools played a large symbolic role. Karine saw three births in these pools: Of her love with her father-to-be, as they cavorted in swimsuits in a night-time, neon-lit intermezzo which reminded me a bit of Michael Mann. Her baptism into the church, and in the end, the birth of her child, which more importantly for the film seemed to mean her birth into motherhood. The birthing scene was long and intercut with scenes of an eclipse, and in the end Karine held her baby and smiled into the camera. I think I got the point.

I like the graininess.

It was a beautiful film, with the look of analog - though obviously it was a digital copy - and an impressive soundtrack. The whole experience was bewildering, though. How did the festival not notice that they had a copy without subtitles? Well, maybe it was KDM-coded and they couldn't watch it before the screening, but what kind of imbecile distribution company sends a wrong copy with KDM-coding? That's a sure way to get festivals to stop dealing with you.

Der Samurai (Till Kleinert, Germany, 2014)

There are way too many genre-films at the festival. There is the section called Thrills and Kills, there is a focus on War Films, another theme called We Made It, filled with fanmade versions of Robocop, Rambo etc, a retro on William Friedkin, and several of the directors called Lone Stars seems to have gotten the term from how much violence they put into their films. And even then, this lo-fi, apparantly crowdfunded queer-horror film sneaks into the catch-all World Views section. Why isn't this in Thrills and Kills? I suspect it's due to it's obvious filmic and thematic qualities, but then why do they curate a section where the films has to lack depth and flair to fit in? I don't get it.

Nevertheless, this is a fine film. It's not horror, though. It's a guy in a dress with a sword. The Samurai of the title. A young cop, Jacob Wolski, who is obviously a closeted guy man, tries to stop him. You can all guess how it goes. Blood, shocks, shadows. It's beautifully filmed, the colours pop, and there's some touching stuff in it. The Samurai tries to seduce Jacob, and tells him a story of how they could have met and danced at a party. But the story we see, what Jacob is able of imagining, is him flirting with a guy and the whole town laughing at him. Where Horror normally is the abnormal, the unexplainable, in this small-town setting it is simply what is different. I.e. queer-ness. 

I don't think I get the subtext: Jacob feeds a wolf, and his surname sounds like wolf, and a woman calls him Lonely Wolf. And the Samurai at times seems like a wolf. Did Jacob's queerness call down the terror on the town? That doesn't seem that progressive? Or was it his repression of his sexuality which caused it to explode? The Samurai keeps wanting Jacob to follow his lead, and Jacob seems immensely fascinated, but always pulls back. In the end, The Ark's It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane plays on the soundtrack, and it's used thrillingly. It feels like a smart point. I can't explain it, though. Lacan wrote about Le Non-Dupes Errent, those who aren't duped are wrong. Jacob isn't duped. He knows he is gay, but he also knows it wont be accepted by his surroundings. And he lives with that. Perhaps his unwillingness to transgress creates this ultimate transgression. In the end, he is cured of his non-foolishness. Or something.

I couldn't get the trailer to work, so here is the music video to The Ark's It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane

It's a very fine little film, which deserves to become a cult-curiosity. It's hardly more than that. Glad to have seen it, can't wait to see something more substantial today, when Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin screens.