MIFF 2005 FILM FESTIVAL NOTEBOOK

By Joel Johnson

DAY 9

The second Saturday of the festival is always a bit melancholy for me. I know that my vacation is coming to an end. In other years, the hopes of the prior weekend with the prospect of a week of exciting film going ahead would have melted into the second weekend’s reality that the selected films contained a few out-and-out turkeys and a wide swath of mediocrity. That is much less of a problem this year. The conversation this year at Saturday night’s festivalgoers’ dinner was how difficult it was to select a favorite film for the Audience Award—there were too many worthy choices. The films seen today certainly didn’t make it any easier by eliminating themselves from contention. This was among the strongest slates of films that we had the opportunity to see during a single day of this or any other festival.

THE OVERTURE
Thailand, 2004; 104 minutes; 35mm; in Thai with English subtitles



Ittisoontorn Vichailak’s The Overture (original Thai title Hom rong) was an amazingly pleasant surprise. I had been a little leery of this film about the Thai musical hero Sorn Silapabanleng, a percussionist who played the Thai version of the xylophone. It might be interesting to hear a song or two of exotic Thai music, but a little could go a long way if the sound tends to be grating after the novelty wears off. Excellent word-of-mouth (e.g., buzz) told me that I should give The Overture a chance. It was Thailand’s entry for the 2005 Best Foreign-Language Oscar and it was immediately easy to see why. Thailand is, of course, a very photogenic country, but Vichailak chooses to open the film by focusing on a butterfly. This serves as a metaphor for the beauty and the mystery of music—its divine inspiration. Sorn as a very small child in the late 1800s follows the butterfly and becomes enchanted by the ranard-ek—the xylophone-like instrument. He starts playing and soon is “caught” by his father and some other adults. Though discovered doing something forbidden, the adults are too mesmerized by the young prodigy to be upset. We soon learn that the Thai people take their music very seriously. Sorn’s older brother is murdered, and rival musicians from other towns are suspected of eliminating a favored opponent. This leads to the first big obstacle in Sorn’s career as his grief-stricken father forbids him to continue to play lest a similar fate await Sorn. Most of the time, youthful Sorn (Anuchit Sapanpong) serves as his own biggest opponent as he either takes his talent for granted or is too overwhelmed with anxiety to perform. His biggest challenges are head-to-head showdowns with the nation’s acknowledged best player, Kun In (Narongrit Tosa-nga, a famous contemporary ranard performer)—a black-clad bear of a performer with a middle linebacker’s scowl and seemingly the backing of the storm gods. Vichailak eschews a strictly linear telling of the musician’s life. The filmmaker mixes his linear story of Sorn’s youth and rise as a talent with vignettes of the older Sorn (Adul Dulyarat) as a teacher, as a father, as a revered national treasure, and his ability to integrate his instrument into 1920s jazz music imported from the West. This serves as counterpoint to one of the film’s main themes. Thailand of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—dramatized in the popular films The King and I and Anna and the King, based on the diaries of royal tutor Anna Leonowen—has to cope with a sense of cultural inferiority to the West. In the desire to accelerate Thailand’s adoption of the many advances offered by the West, a Thai military junta repressed traditional music in the 1930s. Sorn proves that this is a foolhardy and false choice to demand of the nation. This film is thoroughly engaging as it covers its main character’s life from early childhood to his deathbed. The art direction and set design work have convincingly covered more than sixty years of Thai history from the 1880s to the 1940s, featuring settings of rural villages and royal palaces. Nattawut Kittikhun’s cinematography captures it all, and Nick Chaiyapak provides the music for a film that is—at heart—all about the music. It not only celebrates music; it also reveres it. I’m not searching for the soundtrack, but the music of the ranard-ek is powerful and expressive.

OCCUPATION: DREAMLAND
U.S.A., 2005; 78 minutes; video; in English

1/2

There has been lots of criticism of those who have protested and opposed the war in Iraq because doing so is being unsupportive of our troops. Ian Olds and Garrett Scott’s Occupation: Dreamland shows that the soldiers who are on the front-line are asking the very same questions that protesters at home are asking: Why are we there? What are we trying to do there? Are we being successful? Can we be successful? The film is the footage that was taken by filmmakers embedded with the 82nd Airborne during 2003 and early 2004. They were stationed in Fallujah before most Americans learned about it. Fallujah first hit the American news media in a big way during confrontations between the U.S. Marines that relieved the 82nd Airborne and the insurgents in April 2004. This name recognition for Fallujah was solidified during the offensive by the Marines to dislodge the insurgents from that community in October, 2004. However, that is getting ahead of the story this film is telling. We see the soldiers going through the daily grind of patrols, firefights, roadside bombs, and raids to capture would-be insurgents in the early days of the American occupation of Iraq. The soldiers are frustrated with the cultural barriers and the lack of trust between the U.S. troops and the Iraqi civilians. The soldiers show a range of attitudes. Some voice support for the war effort, and others question it. Some have open disdain for the Iraqis and voice enthusiasm for armed confrontations. Others empathize with the Iraqi populace living under the rule of a foreign invader who brandishes automatic weapons and who breaks into their homes in the middle of the night. We see Iraqi prisoners bound and hooded being loaded into trucks. Abu Ghraib is the likely destination for these men captured in the months before that scandal broke. The film also shows us the military’s desperation to retain recruits and the soldiers’ frustration with the lengths to which the military is going to keep these young men in uniform. Ultimately, what we see are young men not much different from any other young American men of today except that they have been placed in the very difficult situation of fighting a war against a shadowy enemy in an inhospitable place. This is a very powerful film and a very depressing film—at least for me. I don’t have any good answers for their questions. I suspect that we may provide better support for our troops if we wrestle with their questions than if we ignore them.

SEEDS
U.S.A., 2004; 92 minutes; video; in English



Joseph Boyle and Marjan Safinia’s Seeds is a very special film. It celebrates not just the Seeds of Peace Camp in Otisfield, Maine, which has tried and largely succeeded in taking young people from war-torn and strife-ridden areas to help them to overcome years of training for enmity. Nor does it simply celebrate the wonderful vision of camp founder John Wallach, whose poor health and then death during the filming made him solely a spiritual presence. This film celebrates the difficult process of building understanding and trust one person at a time and one day at a time. We are there witnessing that slow, painstaking process at work. Ultimately, the film celebrates the hopes and dreams of the individual young people that we meet. Despite all the harm and hate that exist in the world and, particularly, in the dispute between the Palestinians and Israelis, these wonderful young people provide us with hope. We hear a lot these days about young people becoming martyrs as suicide bombers. We learn of the lesser known but more authentic martyrdom achieved for the cause of peace. It is truly inspiring to know that there are young people for whom making peace was so important that they would put themselves in danger as much as it is devastating that such young people have paid the ultimate price for trying to achieve it. The only discouraging thing about the film is that we see how hard it is to build the bridges that nurture those seeds of peace for a group of young people who have come to the camp certainly much more predisposed to seek peace than many of their peers back home. This can only underscore the enormous challenge for anyone seeking to further the cause of peace wherever conflict exists and, particularly, where it has existed for generations. An additional treat was that the screening was attended by a group of campers from the Seeds of Peace Camp. Each one was individually introduced to the audience. God bless them and the work of their magnificent camp.

OVERLORD
United Kingdom, 1975; 85 minutes; 35mm; in English

A qualified

Stuart Cooper’s Overlord (1975) is a unique film that successfully integrates WWII documentary footage from Britain’s Imperial War Museum with new footage shot by cinematographer John Alcott. The 1970-vintage footage was shot with the expressed intention of duplicating the look of film shot in the 1940s. Director Cooper tells us that 26 percent of the film is archival footage, and, while most of it would probably be accurately identified as such because of the subject matter, the effect is seamless. It’s likely that a few segments could fool the filmgoers. The film tells the story of one young man, Tom Beddoes (Brian Stirner), among thousands of young men training for D-Day—code-named Operation Overlord that provides the film with its title. We see this young man dealing with the rigors of training, partaking of the diversions from camp life, and contemplating the all too real possibility of his impending death. A soldier sensing that he would not survive the war was one of the most common themes in soldiers’ letters and diaries found at the Imperial War Museum. Unlike most war films that focus on the intense action of combat that achieves some combination of thrills and horror, this film is more an elegy of war than anything else. This was a difficult film for the fourth film of the day and the ninth day of the festival. This is not a film that allows its actors to be broadly expressive. Tom and his mates are bravely soldiering on, doing their duty despite their fears. The mask of the ordinary in the face of the extraordinary events and fears means the filmgoer has to work harder to comprehend the subtleties of the acting. Likewise, its digressions into the wider story of the war with footage of elaborate training activities, of weapons trials, and of the bomb devastation both in Britain and in Germany do challenge the fatigued filmgoer to keep it all straight. I must confess that I struggled—less successfully than I’d like to admit—to stay awake. I did, however, manage to capture a second wind for the interesting and insightful question-and-answer session with director Stuart Cooper. The session lasted for about forty minutes, which would have been a nightmare for the venue manager and staff had it not been the last film of the evening. With its slow pace and dark foreshadowing, this is certainly not a film that will be embraced by all audiences, but it does provide a thoughtful examination of what soldiers have to do and how they must cope with it.
 

 

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