FILMS
THAT PUT THE “I” IN MIFF
By Joel Johnson
The “I” in MIFF stands for International. So the “I”
films are the films from or about foreign lands—usually in foreign
languages—though not always. These are quite often my favorite films because
they provide such varied experiences from so many different places across
the globe. Film festivals tend to attract more adventurous filmgoers than
the typical movie audience and being willing—even eager—to see films from
other countries that require subtitles to understand is one indication of
that sense of adventure. Though there’s some arbitrariness in grouping films
together, since some may qualify in more than one category, I have
designated the following twenty-two films (twenty-one screenings) as the
2006 MIFF “international films.” There is something for everyone in this
group.
13 (Tzameti) is a thriller from France, but that may be misleading.
Director Gela Babluani and his brother Georges, the film’s lead character
Sebastien, are from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. The story is
about an immigrant surviving in France and then choosing to follow
instructions intended for someone else. What Sebastien finds down this
rabbit hole is anything but a “Wonderland.” Deborah Young’s summary of the
film in Variety stated, “Shot
like the grunge version of a ’50s noir thriller from France (or Soviet
Georgia), the black-and-white ‘13 (Tzameti)’ turns into a shocker of
Tarantino proportions in protracted sequences of explosive violence that
leave viewers quaking. Talented first-time helmer Gela Babluani will be
heard from again.” This film has won awards at the Venice Film Festival,
where it premiered, and at the Sundance Film Festival. It is being shown as
part of the Sundance Arthouse Project.
www.13themovie.com
Balloonhat is a documentary, is in English, and is an American
production. So why is it an “international film”? The film has a simple
concept. How do people all around the world respond when seeing Addi Somekh
fashion hats and other adornments from balloons? I have often talked about
the medicinal quality of certain documentaries because like medicine they
are “good for” the audience by telling us something we should know about
(and about which we should do something). Unlike such bitter pills, this is
the sweet cherry-flavored cough medicine that will amuse while it tells a
valuable lesson. This will show the simple joy that’s universal in seeing a
balloon manipulated into a fashion accessory. A. G. Vermouth’s film should
get a whole lot of votes for audience favorite.
http://balloonhatmovie.com/
Claude Chabrol’s
La demoiselle d’honneur translates into the bridesmaid, but
considering that this was the title of the Ruth Rendell novel from which the
film was adapted, no one should be too truculent about dispensing with the
French title. This is the second time that thriller veteran Chabrol has used
a story by the English crime novelist for a film. The book A Judgment
in Stone was the source for La Cérémonie. In La
demoiselle d’honneur, Philippe (Benoît Magimel) meets the mysterious and
beautiful Senta (Laura Smet) at his sister’s wedding and is immediately
smitten. As he falls ever more deeply in love, she makes ever more terrible
demands of proof of that love. The prolific Rendell (one of my favorite
writers) has provided source material for more than fifty television and
film productions. Chabrol has been making films for fifty years, and the
previous collaboration with Rendell resulted in one of his best. If you have
a taste for the darkness that lives within the human soul, The Bridesmaid
will definitely be your cup of tea.
Brothers of the Head is a faux documentary by Keith Fulton and Louis
Pepe. The Howe Twins (Luke and Harry Treadaway) just happen to get groomed
for punk rock stardom in the 1970s. The freakish hook that serves to take
them from obscurity to stardom is that they are conjoined twins. This has
all the raucous goings-on of the rock scene and the intense music of punk
rock. Fasten your seatbelts, you could be in for a wild ride. This has cult
film written all over it, but those with an aversion to punk rock (not my
favorite type of music) may want to consider this choice very carefully.
www.brothersofthehead.com
Octogenarian
French filmmaker Chris Marker is among the most original of screen voices
and therefore frequently proves to be a challenge for many filmgoers. With
The Case of the Grinning Cat, Marker provides a documentary on the
emergence of yellow grinning cats as a symbol of protest in France and
elsewhere. David Jeffers, in his SIFF(Seattle International Film
Festival)Blog, offered the following: “Marker rambles through everyday
Parisian life for a year or two using the loosest of threads, or whiskers,
tying everything together with a delightfully dry, understated and ironic
humor that could only be French.”
Dutch filmmaker Jan Kounen’s documentary Darshan—The Embrace tells
the story of the Indian mahatma (“esteemed one”—a title bestowed in India on
someone who is deeply revered for wisdom and virtue)
Mata Amritanandamayi Devi. Amma is an Indian spiritual leader who has
organized extensive charities, provides inspiration to an entire stadium of
people with her speeches and delivers comfort with her hugs. She gives hope
to those whose lives have none. This is a unique look at Indian culture and
at a woman who has very special gifts.
Jan
Dunn’s Gypo has the distinction of being the first British “Dogme”
film. The “Dogme95” manifesto developed by Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg,
and a few other Danish directors imposes strict guidelines for making a film
“real” and not making it a product of Hollywood filmmaking tricks. This is a
filmmaking style that can be very successful with stories that need intimacy
and realism, but it can severely hamstring a story that has a large canvas
and needs a more florid filmmaking style. This film is a story about
families and outsiders. There are gypsies who are subject to discrimination
and abuse as outsiders, but the film also features a neglected and abused
wife falling in love with a young gypsy woman. Paul McGann, Pauline McLynn,
and Chloe Sirene head the cast and may be familiar faces—especially for
those who have watched a fair amount of British television. Winner of a
British Independent Film Award for Best Achievement in Production, this may
be a major revelation for festivalgoers.
www.creativestudio.net/medbfilms/mainmenu.htm
Heading South is a special film to the festival organizers. Shadow
Distribution, the film’s U.S. distributor, is made up of many of the same
people who work on the festival. This is also one of the films that festival
guest actress Karen Young has worked on and that she will be introducing.
She plays the “everywoman” with whom the audience will most readily identify
and from whose perspective much of the film is told. She will be one corner
of a triangle with Charlotte Rampling’s Ellen and Ménothy Cesar’s Legba. The
film is set at a Haitian resort in the late 1970s where middle-aged white
women receive the attentions of young black men in exchange for various
gifts. Legba is the most desired of these young black men. This may seem to
be the ingredients of a sex romp, but the film has much more than that to
tell. We learn about the society of sun-swept resorts and then we see what
Legba’s life is like in the Haiti of “Baby Doc” Duvallier outside the
resorts. Director Laurent Cantet and his coscreenwriter Robin Campillo have
adapted the film from stories by Dany Laferrière, a guest at last year’s
MIFF. Cantet and Cesar both took home awards at the Venice Film Festival. It
is likely to be a special film to those who see it at the festival.
www.shadowdistribution.com/headingsouth/index.html
The House of Sand is a three-generation story set in the deserts of
northern Brazil written by Elena Soarez for
real-life mother and daughter Fernanda Montenegro (1999 Best Actress Oscar
nominee for Central Station) and Fernanda Torres (Four Days in
September). They play mother, daughter, and granddaughter at different
stages of their lives (the film is set in three stages from 1910 to 1969).
Director Andrucha Waddington (Me, You, Them) is not just telling us
about the repeated story motifs in families, he is also telling us about the
haunting power places can have for us. A deliberately paced family epic set
in a desert sounds like it could be dry, and that isn’t just referring to
the absence of moisture, but Robert Koehler in Variety says the film
“magnificently renders a fresh view of life on planet Earth” with its
“masterful pace, structure and dramatic payoff.” This is another film from
the Sundance Arthouse Project.
www.sonyclassics.com/houseofsand
Jim
Finn’s Interkosmos is definitely a unique film. It tells us about a
heretofore hidden history of man’s attempt to reach beyond the bounds of
Earth into the cosmos—this is the East German’s history of its program to
explore and colonize the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Yet this documentary
(or mockumentary, if you prefer) is go-for-broke cinematic storytelling that
starts with a wild premise and then uses recreated, aged newsreel footage,
miniature models, narration, dialogue, letters, and period songs to tell its
story. It tries to capture the zeitgeist of Communism’s glorious People’s
Revolution while mixing artistic sensibilities from at least a couple
different eras. This is the kind of film that has the potential to produce
explosions of howling laughter but may require an adventurous spirit to be
fully appreciated. The challenges for a film like this are the same ones
that faced a similar film that played during the New (now defunct) Montreal
Filmfest last September. Aleksey Fedorchenko’s First on the Moon told
the secret story of the Soviet Space Program’s success in landing a man on
the moon decades before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got there in Apollo
11. The challenge is to determine how long to keep the charade going and
then how to finish the film. It’s easy to go too long and then, instead
having an ending, simply stop. It may help that the film—made in the U.S.
though set in East Germany—has German and English dialogue instead of being
just in Russian.
www.interkosmosmovie.com
This film is also about German history, but you will definitely not want to
confuse British television documentarian Rex Bloomstein’s Kz for
Interkosmos. Kz is about the Austrian community of Mauthausen’s
legacy as the site of a Nazi concentration camp. The community has the mixed
blessing of the camp as a destination for “Holocaust tourism” that keeps
reminding people of the community’s culpability in this horrible genocide.
Bloomstein does not use archival footage in his Holocaust film but instead
focuses on the people who today live in Mauthausen, those who work as tour
guides at the camp, and those who visit. Although this approach is lower key
than the typical film on this subject, the film gradually builds a
disturbing power. This is a very important—if not altogether enjoyable—film
about how both this specific community and how we, humanity, continue to
deal with this dark chapter in human history. This is another film from the
Sundance Arthouse Project.
www.kzthefilm.com/
Director Onir’s My Brother Nikhil is groundbreaking for Indian
cinema. It tells the story of what happens when a young man is found to be
HIV-positive. High-gloss Indian filmmaking that typically is used in rousing
Bollywood musicals shows how Indian families and society fail to support
those with HIV infection and those with AIDS. The moral implications for the
behavior that has led to the infection and the lack of knowledge about
health risks cast a dark shadow. Nikhil is the seeming golden boy whose life
falls apart after he is discovered to be HIV-positive. Though he has a few
close friends—one with whom it is very subtly suggested that he has a
homosexual relationship—his strongest support comes from his sister Anamika.
Although there is a legal battle for the rights of those who are
HIV-positive, the focus of the film is dealing with the devastating and very
personal humiliations associated with having the disease. Though this may
seem like an old story for American audiences who have seen films addressing
AIDS since the mid-80s, the AIDS pandemic is in full swing worldwide, and
knowledge about the disease and the moral connotations about its
transmission addressed in the film are current issues for societies all
across the globe. The challenge will be whether the Indian approach that is
very restrained in its treatment of sexuality and yet excessive in its
portrayal of family and societal rejection will strike a nerve for MIFF
audiences. This is part of the MIFF’s focus on Indian and Pakistani cinema.
www.mybrothernikhil.com
For
those interested in a more typical Bollywood experience, there is Pradeep
Sarkar’s Parineeta. This film revisits traditional Indian themes of
personal desires filtered through family loyalty and romance confounded by
the stark realities of the Indian class system. The film is based on a 1914
novel by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay that has been set in 1962 Calcutta and
deals with a family with two beautiful daughters trying to survive
economically and find suitable husbands. There are a rich businessman to
whom the first family is deeply in debt and his musician son who is
attracted to one of the daughters. The rich man disapproves of both his
son’s career choice and the girl that he loves. Mix in another older suitor
and another potential bride. Add lots of songs and you have “high-end
Bollywood near its best” (Derek Elley, Variety). This is another film
from MIFF’s focus on Indian and Pakistani cinema,
www.parineetathefilm.com
Improbably as it may be, The Passion of the Mao could have been
included in my article about films with Maine connections. Writer turned
filmmaker Lee Feigon is a former Colby College professor. His film is about
Chinese leader Mao Zedong and his legacy. Mao’s Cultural Revolution from the
mid-60s to the mid-70s is frequently looked at as a Medieval Dark Age. Last
year’s MIFF film Yang Ban Xi celebrated the energy and entertainment
value of the film musicals created in conformance with the artistic
constraints imposed by the Cultural Revolution, but even those who became
famous because of the Yang Ban Xi films did not recall the era with
great fondness and reverence. Feigon’s film interviews individuals who
praise Mao and call his Cultural Revolution the best thing that happened to
them. Feigon suggests that the image of the demigod of Chinese Communism has
been deliberately tarnished by the Communist Party that he once led, and
that we need to reexamine what we thought we knew about Mao. This would seem
to be the premise of a serious documentary, but there’s an incongruously
wild impish glee in the film that Dennis Harvey of Variety described
as “bewildering.” The film’s own website
http://thepassionofthemao.com
provides Christ-like imagery for Mao and states that Mao mocks Mel
Gibson’s recent religious film. This might incite great curiosity to see the
film, but I wonder if one may be still be baffled afterward.
The
MIFF programmers have had a long relationship with Hungarian films and
filmmakers, dating back at least as far as their inaugural distribution
effort with Ildekó Enyedi’s Magic Hunter. Director and screenwriter
Péter Gárdos’s The Porcelain Doll
is the latest Hungarian film to
catch their fancy. They describe the filmmaker as a fabulist. My dictionary
provides two definitions for this word. One is a writer of fables, and the
other is someone who tells fanciful lies instead of just telling banal
untruths. This is a film for filmgoers who are looking for something
different. This is highly visual storytelling with a magic-laden reality
that should not be construed as providing a safe Disney fantasy. There’s
definitely a haunting quality to these fables. If you prefer a more mundane
reality for your film viewing, beware. If you are game for something truly
different, this is the film for you.
www.aporcelanbaba.hu
Film festivals
serve a number of purposes. One is to draw attention to a film to set up its
commercial theatrical run. They also provide a place where original and
sometimes quite experimental films can be seen. Another is to allow
underseen and underappreciated films to be seen by new audiences.
Pont de
Varsòvia (Warsaw Bridge) may fall into one or more of these categories.
Directed by Pere Portabella, Warsaw Bridge was first released in
Spain in 1990. It is not well known outside of Europe, but it is expected to
be released in the U.S. later this year. The descriptions of the film
suggest a “funny thing happened” to traditional cinematic storytelling, and
the result is more an experience than a conventional film narrative. It will
be up to filmgoers to determine if the bewilderment that may ensue is
emotionally moving or just plain bewildering. Again this is not for
“business as usual” filmgoers but for those who want something completely
different.
Rakesh Omprakash Mehra’s
Rang de Basanti
melds the East/West that is an integral part of India’s history, providing
an opportunity for Bollywood films to expand to wider audiences. A young
Englishwoman filmmaker (Alice Patten) decides to come to India to make a
film about the Indian Independence movement during the 1920s and 1930s. She
has been inspired by diaries written by her grandfather about the courage of
young freedom fighters. She recruits a group of young people to portray
characters in her docudrama. They are Indian “slackers” who are more
interested in materialism, consumerism, and the global economy than the
ideals of freedom and nationalism that motivated their forebears. The
transformative nature of a visit to India has a fairly well-established
tradition in literature and film. The Merchant-Ivory film Heat and
Dust had Julie Christie in India retracing the life of her rebellious
romantic great-aunt Olivia (Greta Scacchi). Yet here the emphasis is not so
much on how the visitor is changed by India as how the visitor is a catalyst
for awaking her cast to an appreciation for the ideals that changed their
history. Highly praised by critics, this should garner more than a few votes
as audience favorite, This film is part of the focus on Indian and Pakistani
cinema.
www.rangdebasanti.net
What do you know
about Kazakhstan? Could you find it on a map? Does it matter to you? Film
festivals provide an opportunity to visit exotic lands and sample its
culture. Director Bolat Kalymbetov will be
present to introduce his film Sardar. This is an epic blending
history and folktales. Inspired by tales of Sardars (heroic warriors), three
young men decide to defend Kazakh nomads and free a Kazakh princess. Who can
resist romance and swashbuckling set among glorious natural beauty? Director
Sabit Kurmanbekov will introduce his short The Highway (Trassa) that
will play in the same screening. This film without dialogue will show how
even in the middle of a desert one encounters the rest of the world. You
still might not be able to find Kazakhstan on a map, but you may now find
that you want to.
The Spirit of
the Beehive is a 1973 film by Victor Erice that is considered a classic
in Europe but is virtually unknown here in the U.S. I did come across it a
few years ago in a catalogue for an esoteric video company specializing in
Spanish cinema. It will be released later this year by Criterion on DVD.
Criterion does an excellent job of releasing classic films on DVD with
restored prints and lots of extras. However, there is no true substitute for
seeing a film in a theater. Set in Castile in the aftermath of the Spanish
Civil War, this film focuses on a community coping with the new reality that
Franco’s victory brought. Specifically, the film views it though the eyes of
children, using the 1931 film Frankenstein as a catalyst. Although
children are central characters in the film, this is not one of the
family-oriented films that will be featured in this year’s festival., The
buzz you hear about this film won’t just be about the bees.
Bill Kern’s
documentary Top of the World is his own record of his trip to Mount
Everest in the Himalayas. Along the way, Kern meets a variety of other
mountain wayfarers to give a unique perspective on how the world’s highest
peak fits into the imagination of people across the globe. While other films
about Mount Everest expeditions may focus on the dangers faced and the
techniques needed to master this demanding climb, Kern is clearly interested
in smelling the roses along the way.
Director Paul Morrison’s Wondrous Oblivion will no
doubt be called “the cricket movie.” Don’t let this stop you from seeing it.
His previous movie was Solomon and Gaenor, a “Romeo and Juliet” story
that was a finalist for the 2000 Foreign-Language Film Academy Award. Here
he focuses on the experience of the outsider and the struggle for
acceptance. The time is 1960 and David Wiseman (Sam Smith) is a young boy
growing up in London as the son of Jewish immigrants. They are outsiders in
their neighborhood, and he is an outsider at his school. The fact that he’s
a disaster on the cricket pitch is no help at all. When a Jamaican family
moves next door, the neighbors have people even more different than the
Jewish family to despise. When David discovers that Jamaican Dennis (Delroy
Lindo) loves cricket as he does and is willing to coach him, the entire
family has a moral dilemma. Although racism doesn’t become the center of the
film, “one of the film’s strengths, and what
sets it apart from similarly themed pictures, is that it conveys a real
sense of the wonder and discovery as David and (Dennis’ daughter) Judy learn
about each other’s cultures—their music, food, religion and, most
importantly, their mutual love of cricket.”—Wendy Ide, The Times
