Perspectives
Dir. Frank Spano
The starting point for the
action in the film is the real extremal situation, resurrected on screen
with documentary shots of the wild outrage of nature. Streams of rain
water, sweeping away bridges, houses, streets. Unprecedented flood
happened on the North cost of Venezuela in 1999 – with 15 thousand
victims and many people disappearing without a trace. Information about
such disasters is branded upon our conscience just like that – in
illegible details and panoramic shots that all look alike. The author of
the film, famous actor Frank Spano, who’s debuting as a director,
changes wide shot for a close shot, whipping away two destinies from
this tragic whirl. He also points out the question, which is also
relevant for the audience: how do you survive, when everything is lost,
when your past has been swept away, and you are standing all alone with
your grieve.
Two protagonists: 40 year old Isabel and 17 year
old Yudeixi leave for Isabel’s native land – Spain, or to be more
precise - the Canary Islands, to start a new life and get a chance to
have some decent – maybe not future, but at least the present. They have
nothing in common, except the loss of their loved ones: Isabel has lost
her husband, and Yudeixi’s lost her child. Isabel – a medical nurse, is
a beautiful intelligent woman, filled with inner grace and unbearable
pain in the same time. That’s the way this character is portrait by the
Spanish actress Rosana Pastor. Her adolescent companion Yudeixi has
grown up on a street and was living on picking; she is daring and
rebellious. Despite the fact that Isabel perfectly recalls the face of
the girl, who has robbed her in a hotel’s hall just before the flood
happened, she is helping her to get on a plane, having presented herself
as her mother. From this moment on, their lives are tied together,
despite that they differ in just about everything – their outlooks on
life, their habits, manner and the way they talk – slang words that
Yudeixi uses is hard would be hard to find in a dictionary. And this
contrast creates the main strain of the action, centering on the
development of the heroines’ relationships, who has suddenly become
emigrants. Isabel will be telling her young friend that “thieving means
slowly dying”, and will explain who Hitchcock is and what suspense is.
Thought soon she will be forced to forget her principles and start
making money for a living by transporting illegal Peruvian workers from
the airport. And one day Yudeixi will run off with a big sum of money –
an advance received by Isabel from their employer – and tries to live
independently, working as a dancer. Fabulous Canary Islands – a
delightsome place for Russian tourists – is shown her from a different
perspective: without common landscapes, but through the eyes of those
who doesn’t relax, but works.
The final can be called a happy
ending – Yudeixi comes back to Isabel with the money, she earned. She
has now started to think about her life and not just about how to
survive, like before. Together with Isabel and a little Peruvian boy she
saved, they come back to Venezuela. And that’s how the transformation
of alienated people to a real family has finally happened – as well as
Frank Spano’s debut as director.
Tatiana Vetrova
Perspectives
Dir. Rob Nilsson
A small sketch from the life of
Ukrainian emigrant woman Miri, who – after her husband had deceased –
is trying to contrive the small hotel she owns, placed in a porch of a
house in some troubled district of San Francisco suburbs. There is an
international cacophony of sounds in the air – English, German and
French tongues are found side by side with the story about Holocaust
told by Ukrainian host on a radio and with the sounds of Russian songs,
coming from the only decent restaurant in this distinct. The community
is quite relevant. There is homeless who’s feeding Miri, when things get
too bad. A seller in a small shop, who’s come to USA from Germany. A
black man, who’s living in Miri’s hotel with his children and stealing
money from her to buy drugs. A female bartender – also and emigrant
(from Paris), who is playing solitaire and is bragging about the love
adventures of her past. Soon Miri’s niece will suddenly come with a
visit and will experience some difficulties getting used to all this
poor scenery.
Just the same thing – poor scenery, but of the
film, not the hotel – is the first thing to be noticed, even before the
main credits start. Rob Nilsson, being classic and cult figure of
American independent cinema and also one of the first authors to start
experimenting with video, has finally come to extremes in his aspiration
to move far away from traditional cinema. Image in “The Steppes”
reminds of that shot by mobile phone. The sound is recorded by
microphones hidden under the clothes, with results in awful rasp in
moments of embracement. Outside, the sound of wind is so strong, that
almost drowns the words of characters, and real citizens of
San-Francisco function as extras, seemingly having no idea they are
being pictured. But one can easily adapt to all of this: together with
respectabilities the characters start to lose their masks, which differs
them from real people. Abrupt picturing starts looking as the fragment
from someone’s private archives, and all together it turns out to be one
more proof of the common statement that it doesn’t really matter what
optics does the author use. What matters is what this optics is
picturing.
Nikita Kartsev
This year we have finally made a short film contest, and we made it in
the Internet. This is importaint for two reasons: first, short films
section has never been a contest before, and we are happy that this
first competition is users' choice, because viewers are usually the most
honest audience. Second thing is the Internet - partly or fully, movig
into the interactivity is a powerfull tendency among the festivals, and
like it or not, it is tomorrow.
Also, it's locigal that first
Internet competition is short films one - shorts have always been the
most flexible and fresh area of the cinema. Most of the authors are
young and independent, so their films really reflect what they wanted to
say, especially if it is something linked to videoart, formal
experiments animation - short films are very good territory for the
experiments. For this year's contest we selected films that are very
different - by genre, by language, by author's point of view - and our
only request for the audience is not to be preconcieved. We are very
interested ourselves in the results of the competition.
http://vision.rambler.ru/cinema/17223229/
Please, enjoy the films!
Perspectives
Dir. Mounir Maasri
Any director is flattered
when he turns out to be a prophet. At a meeting some two years ago a
young filmmaker was passionately insisting that the scenes with “bad
cops” had been shot in that very precinct which later became notorious
because of the major Yevsyukov’s case. He lamented that they had cut out
the sign-boards. If that is the case, then Mounir Maasri can smile
modestly without having to prove anything to anybody. His movie about
revolutionary unrest in the Middle East (events in Lebanon ten years
ago) was released perfectly on time. Including “direct hits”: Syria is
the hot news and in “Huvelin Street” the group of merry students fight
the army of that country…
There is no need to go into the
subtleties of Middle-eastern history (who occupied whom and why and what
is the pretext for the presence of foreign troops in the country) to
understand the restlessness of these youngsters for whom their not too
secret activities in the underground student organization as merely part
of their tumultuous, risky youth, their robust life. That is what is so
charming about all their gatherings, get-togethers with girls and
guitars and heated arguments about the best way to oppose the military:
by surprise or silently with stickers saying “Freedom” covering their
mouths. The night before the final face-down these nice guys
boisterously smoke at the poker table and ask each other what is going
to happen the next day. The metaphor for the message of the movie (or at
least one of the messages) could be the scene in which Joy, a
dark-haired revolutionary, can barely drag the heavy suitcase into his
room in the hostel. “Flags? Leaflets?” demands the strict janitor.
Somehow Joy manages to persuade him that it is only summer clothes.
Anything could be expected, even weapons, but instead a girl jumps out
of the suitcase in the room. It can’t be helped. In Russian just like in
Lebanon, guards in hostels are especially strict about the morals of
the students.
This does not invalidate their sincere hatred of
the occupants. In general where there is public spirit, the youthful
student racket becomes more meaningful. The youngsters are so
passionately running about the night campus, hiding Lebanese flags in
the bushes. How enthusiastically they meet an American journalist in a
café: they seem to be saying very bold things, but at the same time are
fearful lest it all should appear in the news.
But the principal
plotline seems a bit artificial. Ives, an incipient journalist, is happy
to have acquired a new camera and can now shoot everything during their
gatherings. But the sudden (!) realization of how misery his salary is,
forces him to sell the most explosive shots to the newspaper… It is
hard do say why he opens the Pandora box: the driving forces, the
conditions, the conflict are – to put it bluntly – a far cry form the
“Ascent” by Larisa Shepitko. But there is a certain fundamental truth.
It is felt in the demands of friends that Ives, a creative personality,
should fight almost with an automatic gun, but he is not at all happy
about the idea that word should be equaled to bayonet. It probably is no
accident that in one of the scenes the director makes Ives sit next to
Che Gevara’s portrait. The haircut, the beard, the moustache are all
exact copies of those in the picture. This is the message: don’t put
pressure on a creative personality, he will definitely sell everybody
out.
Igor Saveliev
Perspectives
Dir. Lee Young-mi
A woman in her forties, a
university professor, is carrying out scientific research on a relevant
theme: “Changes in female psychology following marital unfaithfulness”.
The story of her unfortunate personal life (but that is a big “secret”)
is told by… an inanimate object, by a copier, so let us forgive a
certain straightforwardness of the narration. The copier is worried:
since the time its owner hired a new assistant for her sociological
research, her life has become all messed-up. The young man has the looks
of a super model as though he stepped down from the video supplement to
the South Korean version of “Penthouse”.
It became especially
noticeable after the professor and the student interviewed a lascivious
woman who enthusiastically cheated on her husband and had no remorse
about it.
This fateful encounter had a deep effect on the
professor. She looked at her student with different eyes and it occurred
to her academic mind to do with him what is very reluctantly indulged
in (judging by the movie) with middle-aged women in South Korea. But her
views which proved to be not so liberal prevented this lady with the
Internet nickname “Liberalcunt” from accomplishing an instant transition
from words to actions. There are a number of reasons. First of all, the
rigid morals still do not allow a South Korean woman (especially an
older one) to look upon a man (especially a youth) as a sexual “object”
(the morals, naturally, do not look the other way). Secondly, the
traditional Confucian approach denies any erotic overtones in the lofty
relations between the teacher and the disciple.
In her
feature-length debut, which caused an uproar in her native country, the
45-year-old feminist Lee Young-mi boldly challenged the obsolete taboos,
but unfortunately did no find the radical artistic means to express
these legitimate protests. Feminine sexual longing is shown with the
help of trite metaphors worthy of erotic Hollywood blockbusters like
“Wild Orchid” or “Two Moon Juncture”, intended for the same grateful
audience but shot by men. Subconsciously copying those movies, the brave
Young-mi turns her romantic hero into a voyeristic sexual object, who
is as animate as silicone sex symbols from movies directed by males.
They admire females as impotents would and possess them purely
symbolically.
Stas Tyrkin
Competition
Dir. Dragan Bjelogrlić
The characters in the film
are often wiping out their tears. One would say – isn’t it usual for a
Eastern European film about some events of the 20th century? – and would
be completely wrong. Because those are the tears of joy. Dragan
Bjelogrlić’s film is unique in its own way for contemporary cinema – it
is optimistic all the way through. The movie starts with a scene of
virtuosic football play performed by a young boy called Tirke. As it
usually goes, Tirke find it difficult to find a job, which saddens his
mother, but constantly insists that he has a strong moral core,
conscience and ethics instead. And when Tirke’s skills are noticed by
Bosko Simonovic, the feature coach of the national team… Well, the
following course of the film is easy to predict: up to a huge success of
Serbian national team in the play vs. Bulgaria.
It is
interesting to watch this almost chemical reaction, which is being built
by the director: to watch a few dashing boys create an almost sacred
fraternity and develop such “triumph of will” that it seems like they
could make almost anything. Let’s say, to get to World Cup in
Montevideo, where they didn’t even hoped to come. Or knock teeth out of a
jerky son of the Prime Minister. Or to dislocate from jail to royal
castle… It seems like they could really make anything.
The
subplot “soccer instead of war” starts to sound in the film in a subtle
way: everybody knows, what’s going to happen in Europe in a few years,
when it will be no time for sport (the action takes place in 1930). FIFA
has just been created. World Cup in Montevideo is the first one in
history. Most of the characters in the film take words “soccer” and
“Montevideo” as some kind of swearing and can’t understand how grown up
men can waste their time on this. Of how can anyone barter away a
position of apprentice at the factory “Ikarus” to be a leading forward
in the national team… Films about people who put their houses up, lie to
their relatives and risk everything, believing in nothing but their
dream, have some purgative meaning. So after “Montevideo” one would
probably want to let all the routine fly, throw away the cell phone,
right here, by the cinema hall, and run away anywhere where the real
life is.
And in the same time Serbs would not be themselves, if
their national tragedy didn’t reflect through the football drive of the
film. The King is willing to send “the national team of Yugoslavia” to
the championship, but on a condition that there will be some Croations
in there. The Croations refuse. A local tycoon is ready to put his money
in the trip, but only if the team will be called Serbian, and not
Yugoslavian. It is the team now who says no… And so you start to shiver
unwillingly, when you hear the words: “Yugoslavia has signed a
convention with the court in Hague”.
It is not without a reason
that the film may seem simple-minded at first. The key to it lies in the
words, that are pronounced in the first minutes on screen. “It was the
best decade – after the big war… Then we didn’t yet what a real big war
means”. The times before war are always simple-minded. In fact, the 21st
of June in 1941 in Russian films is filled with sounds of “Riorita”.
The
best players of the film, Tirke and Mosa are often having fun playing
with a raw chicken egg. And a prophecy is told: ones who are able not to
break the egg by playing with it, are going to die soon. The real Mosa
(Blagoje Marjanovic) and Tirke (Aleksandar Tirnanic), the stars of
soccer, have lived a long life. But artistic world has its own laws.
And you never know, what’s waiting for these dashing boys after “the
best decade” will be over.
Igor Saveliev
Competition
Dir. Levan Tutberidze
You must be a football fan
to understand how the protagonist, a 38-year-old writer Zaza, managed to
make a large scoop. Otherwise his exclamations about sir Alex Fergusson
and Jose Alvalade, who owns a stadium in Lisbon, will be gibberish to
the viewer. Even more so because Zaza uses it in everyday life. He
welcomes the women going to the funeral with the words: “Ah, Sicilian
weepers! Let me introduce myself. Gaetano Donizetti! Gaetano, very
pleased!” Yes, Zaza won at the football pools, so don’t imagine anything
about underground lotteries in Tbilisi. As for the money for the bet,
it was borrowed from an old drug dealer, whose fridge will be the
convergence point for all the paths in this tangled story with a strong
criminal taste a la Guy Ritchie. Having clarified the point about the
football pools it would be noble to let the viewer get the pleasure of
puzzling out the rest.
We would like to focus on how the
filmmakers use the wide screen, which was rare in Georgian cinema even
in Soviet times (only Abuladze’z “The Entreaty” comes to mind), while
for the cinema of the independent Georgia this is downright
extraordinary. When in some country filmmakers start using the wide
screen, it means the cinema of this country has gained sufficient
momentum. But the pretty dilapidated Tbilisi of the present day is not a
very good setting for the wide screen and the director Tutberidze found
a witty and probably the only possible way out, using glamorous foreign
visual quotations as pieces of the puzzle. They are of such diverse
origin, that one can’t help being amazed at the director’s knowledge of
cinema. Perhaps that is the origin of the line of dialogue in the movie,
which expresses a very sane idea: “When you watch something alone, you
become wiser”. For example when during a pause in the rehearsal one of
the characters, a ballerina, records Zaza’s favourite song “Can’t Take
My Eyes Off Of You” on his cell-phone at his request, she walks across
the stage under the flashlights of different colors, which cast colorful
patches of light around her silhouette, and comes to a stop under a
box, decorated with stucco mouldings and gilt like a temple. This is a
direct quotation from the wide-screen musical “Corps-de-ballet” (the
item called “Nothing”) which Tutberidze must have surely seen in Soviet
cinemas at the time of his own film debut “Nazare’s Last Prayer”. Then
characters who do not know each other, enter one and the same house,
ring the doorbell, receive no answer and leave, walking further down the
street. The camera pans on the first person from the roof, then up
again, letting the first depart and the second approach during the same
shot, and then pans down again. This is a quotation from the newest
cinema. Gaspar Noé for example used this technique to record the
wanderings of his characters, including the departing soul, through
Tokyo in “Enter the Void”. Tutberidze, the author of the Georgian
box-office hit “Trip to Karabakh” could have seen the film in Cannes,
for example.
But even more interesting than the use of the new
scale, unfamiliar not only to himself, but to the country, was one
daring, indecent and, by consequence, immediately alluring association.
Having sex with a prostitute in the sauna the gangster Mamuka almost at
the moment of orgasm looks at his groin and remembers that the automatic
gun which was used to shoot his friend to death today, had a red
handle, bent like a banana (there is an immediate cross-cut to the
automatic gun, which is currently store in the fridge). When the
director’s logic can baffle you to that extent, it is worthwhile to say
after the screening that while we were all having a good time, somewhere
out there in the world cinema a great original was born!
Alexey Vasiliev
Competition
Dir. Feliks Falk
The fascist occupation of Krakow.
Another anti-Jewish raid catches little Róza and her mother in a café,
where she is enjoying cakes on the occasion of her sixth birthday.
Mother tells her to run to the church and wait for her there. Róza’s
mother never comes but Joanna, a young average woman her mother’s age
will take the girl to live with her in a sturdy old house. On the chest
of drawers there is a photo of Joanna and a young man, both wearing ski
suits. They are herself and Zbyshek on the snow-covered range in Tatry
during their holiday in Zakopane, when he proposed to her. Joanna waits
for Zbyshek to comeback from the front and in the meantime hides Róza
from the concierge’s curious gaze and reads her fairy tales in the
evenings.
As a director Feliks Falk became known with his late
1970s movie “Wodzirej”, which our old-time moviegoers are likely to
remember. It was the time when Zanussi very closely approached the
formula of Polish Catholic melodrama, which will be exemplified in its
purest form by his films based on events in the rear during the second
world war («Rok spokojnego slonca», «Wherever You Are...»), and
Kieslowski, who purified the genre in “Dekalog”, was getting ready to
direct his feature-film debut. The essence of Polish Catholic melodrama
is to show the world and the people surrounding the protagonist as walls
which are gradually closing in and pushing the character out of this
world (suicide or madness is the usual outcome for characters in these
movies) which can be discerned in the light imperceptibly falling on
the forehead of the heroine like a gloomy halo, or sometimes
illuminating inanimate objects (like a boiling kettle in the hospital in
Zanussi’s “Bilans kwartalny”). The same light barely touches Joanna’s
curls, while the events of the movie, the retelling of which will deny
you the pleasure of discovering the plot while watching the film, are
nothing else but her gradual ousting from life. The claustrophobic
effect is achieved by deadly blush hues of the flat and nearby streets,
by frequents shots of the front door hall with the fateful figure of the
postman in the shade and incessant ringing of the door bells, vigorous
knocks, rattle of door chains on the soundtrack which the Russian
mentality immediately associates with Mandelshtam’s poem about Leningrad
reworked by Pugacheva.
Falk’s new film is conceived in such
lofty traditions that even the almost total lack of originality can’t be
called a drawback or a miscalculation: we don’t blame the organist for
being faithful to Bach’s original. But there are a couple of surprise
after all. One of them is the paradoxical, unusual, but fairly
legitimate interpretation of one of the liveliest and most relevant
French novels of the 19th century - Stendhal’s “Le Rouge et le Noir” -
by the German officer. The second is the finale (which can be safely
disclosed in the films of this genre because it is part of the formula).
Instead of Polish classic filmmakers it calls to mind a German classic:
Joanna walks away along the snow-covered range of the Tatry holding
that very photo from the chest of drawers just like Anselm does in the
closing lines of Hermann Hesse’s tale, when he completed the transition
from this world to the spiritual world by retreating into an iris bud,
which opened like a cave. In his youth it was the focus of his fantasies
about invisible universes.
Alexey Vasiliev
Perspectives
Dir. Fabien Gaillard
This is a movie about the
guy who went too far in the direct and (as many would say) indirect
sense of the word. Paul from Limoges is a young man of about 30. He has
been living in Shanghai for a long time now, he speaks Chinese fluently
and introduces himself as Da Bao, although his round European peasant
face won’t cheat anyone as far as his origins are concerned, especially
when he rides his bike among steaming pots with fragrant foods in his
woolen cap pulled over his ears and a tight jacket like some character
from the early videos of “Pet Shop Boys”. He has accepted China as his
new motherland but he is not bent on Eastern practices and even his
first falling-out with his new girlfriend arises because, in his
opinion, the food she cooks for him is too spicy and too Eastern.
Actually, it is the familiar story about the love of the Brave Tin
Soldier. He makes his living offering computer assistance, but
exclusively as a freelancer. When his former sweetheart invites him to a
party in the hope of introducing him to an over-dressed lady boss of a
big company and talking about his permanent job, he will get drunk, bawl
out songs, fall asleep and turn the job interview into an ugly farce.
When another company fails to transfer the money to his credit card on
time he will turn up at the office and kick up another brawl shoving
business papers to the floor. It is right, work must be paid for and he
is not going to work.
In this movie nobody cares for the
everyday routine, neither the camera, nor he, nor his girlfriend Mei
played by Dan Tong Han whose striking model appearance is enough to make
everyone forgive her hysterics and bouts of depression facing the wall
and for whose smile one is ready to pay a million. But instead it is
very important to observe what exercises the aged from the health group
are doing in the park today, what pensioners are playing backgammon in
the yard and to see the expression on the faces of working guys coming
home on the ferry across Yangtze this evening. The latter episode will
take place when the action shifts to Wǔhàn, deeper into the mainland,
where Mei's family home is and where she will escape having suspected
her bridegroom of unfaithfulness. His watch by the princess’s palace
will come down to his daily appearances in Wǔhàn 's street karaoke with
his own songs.
It is a movie in which the denial of present-day
corporate and social priorities in favor of non-violent but stubborn
pursuit of one’s own immediate interests is the way to achieve the very
basic and fundamental priority – the real noisy family dinner party
where everyone is at one with everyone else. And besides it is a film
where we hear the phrase: “To gain something you must first lose it, to
get something first let it go; just like smoking a cigarette: when I
smoke it, look, I let it go”. Cigarette smoke floats over the sleepy
Yangtze and the utterance liners in thin air as a worthy object of deep
meditation: after all, despite the director’s French name it is an
utterly Chinese film.
AlexeY Vasiliev
Perspectives
Dir. Gaziz Nasyrov
Certain year of the 2000s. A
journalist of some big paper, Tamerlan finds himself tied to a battery
in some basement premise, after he was taken and kept hostage by
mysterious group of men in black masks with eye holes. Tamerlan is
instinctively preparing himself to lie about anything that he can be
asked about. He tries to recall of the biased articles he has written
recently, but can’t remember anything that could possible lead to this
situation. Meanwhile, his capturers come to him and, using knocks and
pastes, motivate him to make a virtual trip in time, going back to the
eve of 2000 – the days, when Tamerlan and four other students of the
philosophy department have just graduated and have been thinking what to
next with their lives.
Two of these characters decide to move
forward (one, focusing on his career, and the other – on his family),
the only girl in the company also makes an ultimate decision – but in
another direction – and commits suicide. And there are only Tamerlan and
Kostya Paniotis who literally get stuck at some point of time and
space. Having stayed in students’ dormitory, empty at summer days, they
decide to rent a free room by the hour. Their clients, who altogether
symbolize the sum of all human misfortunes and loneliness, are often
paying with valuable effects, which young philosophers call “adequations
of time”. Time here is really the protagonist of the film, that submits
the whole aesthetics of it – starting from specific, slate-grey colors
of the film and ending with the voice-over, which – in a style of Julio
Cortázar – is read from the second person and in future tense. Time is
also the general theme of young philosophers’ conversations (in one
episode Kostya manages to explain the theory of the forth dimension
while getting drunk with his friend). And they are philosophers for a
reason, which is to show their double revery: not only they represent
the generation lost between two epochs, between the past and the present
of the country, but they are also graduated in such rare and
unfortunate specialty, which never occurs to be profession – only the
state of mind. And non-linear structure of the film finally builds up to
be universal model of human memory that always functions like that –
with random pieces of memories suddenly coming up in mind. And all of
the film’s “magical realism”, that subtly suggests that student
dormitory can symbolize a kind of a limbo, turns out be quite natural in
the system given. All of the important events have already taken place
in the past. Time is ruthlessly sweeping away everything that stands in
its way, and a person can sometimes find himself at the point of
crossing of two time lines. In Stephen King’s novel creates called
Langoliers came in such cases, literally swallowing yesterday away; it
is not a hard job to believe that sometimes this function can be easily
performed by a few man in black masks.
Olga Artemieva