Category Archives: Festivals

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Nippon Connection 2011


Heaven's Story

Nippon Connection

Frankfurt, Germany

April 24 – May 1, 2011

Nippon Connection website

With last year’s Icelandic volcano and this year’s colossal earthquake in Japan, it seems Frankfurt’s annual Nippon Connection is perennially haunted by natural disasters. It was even announced that the festival team had toyed with the idea of cancelling the event in response to the recent tragedy, yet the woe at the opening remarks was soon dissipated thanks to the festival staff’s infectious enthusiasm and glowing spirit. With an assorted programme ranging between commercial blockbusters, such as the sci-fi manga adaptation Gantz (Sato Shinsuke, 2011), congenial comedies of the likes of Permanent Nobara (Yoshida Daihachi, 2010) and voices of the independent art scene represented in the appropriately renamed section Nippon Visions, which this report will focus on, Nippon Connection had at least one film to fit our every mood.

Heaven’s Story (Takahisa Zeze, 2010)
The best feature from Japan in recent years, and the FIPRESCI award-winner at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, Zeze’s latest offering from his post-pink period clocks out at an epic four and a half hours. An intricately woven tale of revenge and redemption, trauma and forgiveness, crime and punishment, Heaven’s Story threads multiple characters into its embellished spiralling narrative. The metaphor involving monsters announced in the opening underpins the film’s meditation on the ethics of human encounters, a contemplation that is bookmarked by haunting performance-art footage of puppetry troupe Yumehine and dancer Hyakkidondoro. With stunning photography, the controlled balance of urgency and patience propels Zeze’s characters down their destined paths, which seem designed to cross, each encounter instigating new sparks.

Arrietty (Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2010)
Although on a much quieter scale, Studio Ghibli’s latest release, Arrietty, also dwells on the ethics of self-and-other relationships in its adaptation of Mary Norton’s tales, The Borrowers. The predictable winner of the festival’s Audience Award, the story paints the chance meeting of sickly youth Sho and tiny Arrietty, also a teenager, but from a different race of little people who reside underneath rural households. A child of an endangered species, Arrietty is initially wary of her neighbour’s presence, yet soon warms to his tender care and yearning for amity. Though entirely forgettable compared to Ghibli’s previous output, from which it ‘borrows’ quite heavily, Arrietty may be remembered for its serene animation that sees the directing debut of young animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi. But let us all forget the theme song.

Midori-ko (Keita Kurosaka, 2010) / Still in Cosmos (Makino Takashi, 2009)
A double bill that would be hard to come by at any other festival, Midori-ko and Still in Cosmos may at first seem an odd couple, but screened together represented the cutting edge of non-commercial filmmaking in Japan.

Midori-ko is Kurosaka’s lovechild and took 10 years to nurture, a hand-drawn parable that borrows its pale aesthetics from Yuriy Norshteyn. Midori is a young, impoverished scientist who discovers a strange vegetable that has landed in her room as if it were a fallen star. Though rather simplistic and oddly paced, the skewered fairy tale is at times thought-provoking, and the subtle shades and tonal moderations of the drawings are captivating.

One of experimental filmmaker Makino’s latest collaborations with Jim O’Rourke, which fuse sound and moving image, Still in Cosmos shatters the screen surface in a composed piece of sustained tension and controlled ambience. Words prove inefficient to describe the experience of Makino’s experiments, where he transfers film into crepitant digital layers that vibrate into each other in pulsed drones.

The Duckling (Sayaka Ono, 2005-10)
It is no surprise that Kazuo Hara, a pioneering voice of personal documentaries in Japan, is said to have overseen the production of The Duckling, for Ono’s debut feature is steeped in his style of storytelling. Ono’s autobiographical documentary feels like a therapy session as she visits each member of her family to unravel the childhood traumas that have led her to the brink of suicide. Though the film succeeds in exuding a dense intensity that pushes the boundaries of its genre, it feels too much like an uncomfortable continuation of her self-harm. One question remains – at such a young age, what will Ono do now that she has exhausted her entire life within one project?

Teto (Hiroshi Gokan, 2010)
Part of the Tokyo University of Arts special programme, Teto is a feature-length graduation piece by Hiroshi Gokan and was the surprise triumph of the festival. Utterly unique, the film weaves together different generic codes from espionage thrillers and post-apocalypse dread to period set-pieces, performed by the characters, who run a theatre troupe of orphans. Teto sustains its despondent aura and a foreboding gloom with committed control, never caving in to spell out its own mysteries. The ability to conjure intensity from its spectral narrative evokes another recent East Asian debut, End of Animal (2010), yet Teto‘s chaos is more simmering and muted.

Julian Ross

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Terracotta Festival 2011: Preview

Terracotta 2011

Terracotta Far East Film Festival

5-8 May 2011

Prince Charles Cinema, London

Terracotta website

Our friends at Terracotta Festival have put together a great selection of film treats from the Far East. They will be opening with The Lost Bladesman, an epic tale about Three Kingdoms character Guan Yu starring Donnie Yen and we’re particularly looking forward to Revenge: A Love Story, a serial killer story told from an unusual angle from Hong Kong, and Milocrorze, a Technicolor, multi-stranded, time-travelling fantasy from Japan.

Actors and directors from Asia will be attending, including Tak Sakaguchi (Versus), Clement Cheng (Gallants), Rina Takeda (Karate Girl), Sam Voutas (Red Light Revolution) and Kim Kkobbi (Breathless). There will also be masterclasses with directors, the Terracotta Cafe to chill out, and a festival party.

For more details and to book tickets, go to the Terracotta website.

Watch the promo reel:

Festivals

Flatpack 2011: Best of Birmingham

Paper Party by Sculpture

Flatpack Festival

23-27 March 2010, Birmingham, UK

Flatpack website

It’s Saturday morning at Flatpack and burbling chatter and a laden brunch table fill the festival headquarters. Lighting is provided by a cycle of overhead projector slides: a celebration of art projects from a coterie of Birmingham galleries, housed in the architectural remnants of the city’s receding industries. During the three years I’ve been attending Flatpack, the festival has brought a welcome escape from the humdrum: its setting among forgotten warehouses providing a unique backdrop; its nostalgia for early cinema bringing to life bygone times; and the personal touch of its programming creating a cosy, welcoming atmosphere. But while Flatpackers tucked into an early morning feast, back in London, a day of protests against government cuts was beginning. A few days later, the UK Arts Council released depressing details of their funding agenda and axed grants. With one of the gallery venues set to close post-Flatpack, it is to be hoped that the spending cuts do not impinge on such a rare bubble of otherworldly charm.

Still, there was a celebratory atmosphere at Flatpack – not only celebrating the Digbeth galleries that provide a home for the festival but plenty of celebrating in them too. Saturday night was Paper Party night with reams of origami, sticky note messages, paper hats and whatever else could be folded, ripped or crafted from brightly coloured sheets. Friday was a turntable-spinning, multi-screen extravaganza to commemorate the infamous cosmic jazz musician Sun Ra (he of Birmingham, Alabama, not Birmingham, West Midlands, fame).

As usual, music appeared high up on the agenda. Before the paper maché-up, a special screening hailed Birmingham as ‘Home of Metal’ – the metal of the factory line and the metal of the heavy musical variety. The television documentary In Bed with Chris Needham was chosen to celebrate die-hard fans of the genre. The result of a BBC experiment handing out video cameras to members of the public in the early 1990s, this insight into the mind of a Loughborough-living, heavy-metal-loving teenager could not have been better scripted if finely honed by Rob Reiner. Filmed by shaky adolescent hands, the documentary follows puny-limbed, hormone-filled Chris Needham as he tries to pull together his band, Manslaughter (later spelt with an ‘o’ to avoid being read as ‘Man’s Laughter’), in time for their first gig. Excruciatingly familiar, In Bed with Chris Needham is like your own teenage experience turned up to eleven. As writer Taylor Parkes puts it: ‘Unlike you or I, this 17-year-old was not a twat. He was a twat savant.’

Chris Needham’s face-to-camera candour suggests a time when people were not as savvy or self-conscious about exposing their lives to the nation. In turn, the BBC’s affectionate editing suggests a time when reality TV did not aim to exploit the public. In this sense, In Bed with Chris Needham appears to be something of a televisual time warp: evidence of a more innocent time. And then, live on stage after the screening, Flatpackers were greeted with real-life, middle-aged Chris Needham, in all his Metal Head glory. Spitting beer across the stage, declaring his undying passion (‘First track, first album by Black Sabbath – all the rest is just interpretation’), he was in equal parts hilarious and unnerving in his canny resemblance to the teenager on screen. It soon became clear that the age of the film makes no difference; in fact, perhaps age makes very little difference in life, full stop. It is Chris Needham himself – brilliant and slightly bonkers – who makes this video diary such a cringe-ridden joy.

Another television documentary, The Forgotten Irish, provided a further highlight of the weekend’s programming. Gently filmed and intensely sad in parts, the film told the plight of Irish male immigrants currently living in the Birmingham area. Leaving behind poverty and, in some cases, institutional abuse, the men had sought new homes in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Finding it difficult to adjust to a new culture, they were often isolated, remaining unmarried and relying on alcohol for comfort; a situation worsened after the IRA bombing of Birmingham created further social isolation. The documentary showed current efforts by the Digbeth Irish Centre to protect and help the men, moving them into sheltered accommodation and offering financial assistance. The tattered orange, green and white bunting fluttering in nearby pub windows took on a sombre movement after the screening.

Flatpack’s continued focus on its home city was not only apparent in The Forgotten Irish or its ‘Home of Metal’ screening; it was also evident in its choice of patron saint, the Birmingham-born film writer Iris Barry, who provided the inspiration for several events, from a panel discussion on female film critics to a screening of She Done Him Wrong (1933), her controversial choice for MOMA’s sacrosanct film archive. There was a walking tour of old cinema sites and a wonderful archival screening, A Secret History of Birmingham, which presented festival-goers with a fascinating portrait of the city. The screening included two films, fished out of a skip by an ex-projectionist, providing utopian visions from the post-war period. A strange, jauntily shot promotional film for Cadbury’s, A Day and a Half, extolled the virtues of industrial production and the Bournville workers’ community. Whirring machines and shots of twisting hepcats unleashed from factory duties were used to inspire a young farm hand to leave behind his rural life for new employment. Miracles Take a Little Longer charted the progress of the ‘city of a thousand trades’ in the period following the Second World War. Interviews with Birmingham journalists, the city mayor and a local school teacher provide testimonials about the city and attempts to battle poverty (a combination of paternal social welfare and urban redevelopment), set against a backdrop of captivating archival footage.

Flatpack’s awareness of its surroundings is one of the festival’s greatest attributes. It provides more than just a programme of disparate films; it seeks to explore its city history and present it in many different ways. It celebrates Birmingham’s alumni, it rejoices in its culture, it investigates its problems and it finds new ways of seeing the urban landscape through inventive screening settings and site-specific events. When we attend film festivals, cities often merge into one. Films are repeated across countries, across continents, in characterless cinema venues. Here, the city provides a link, throwing up interesting questions and visual results. Flatpack is not a film festival that wants to exist in a bubble, despite its otherworldly atmosphere.

Eleanor McKeown

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Berlinale 3D: Pina + Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Pina

Billed as the official Berlinale 3D-day, Sunday 13 February saw the premieres of three 3D films, screening in and out of competition. Although the films could have not been further apart in terms of style and content, surprisingly, all three turned out to be mostly enjoyable and fascinating in their own right. It started with Michel Ocelot’s beautiful animated Tales of the Night (Les contes de la nuit), but the main event (and for me the best 3D venture on offer) was Pina, Wim Wenders’s widescreen tribute to the German choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before shooting was due to start. Originally planned as a collaboration with Wenders when Bausch was still alive, the film links some hauntingly beautiful dance scenes from four of her most successful works, Café Müller, Vollmond, Kontakthof and The Rite of Spring, with brief statements by the dancers of her Wuppertal dance company. Much more effective than these snaps of interviews, however, are the sequences in which the dancers then develop their thoughts about their adamant teacher in their own personal choreographies in an imaginative range of indoor and outdoor settings. Although first and foremost a dance film in 3D, Pina is also a wonderfully rich and powerful cinematographic experience that will enthral not only hardcore Bausch enthusiasts but all audiences.

Pina is released in UK cinemas on April 22 by Artificial Eye.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

We loved Werner Herzog’s most recent feature works (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?) and his new documentary sees him on equally good form as he enters the Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche Valley in southern France to explore its astonishing and mysterious content. Herzog managed to get permission from the French government (who owns the cave) to film the oldest known cave paintings, which were sealed for over 20,000 years and are hidden from the world for fear human breath will damage them. He is accompanied by a small camera team and some of the scientists who have been analysing every scratch on the inner walls of the cave since its discovery in 1994. Although the maverick German filmmaker was at first sceptical about the use of 3D for his latest venture, it perfectly fits the dimensions and shape of the curved, uneven and shadow-casting surfaces that form the canvas for drawings of animals, including horses, bison, bears, owls, rhinos and hyenas. As the camera moves across, they seem to become almost animated through light effects. But as could be expected, Herzog goes beyond a simple visual exploration of the cave. As with all of his documentaries, the cave paintings mainly serve as the entry point into a wider reflection, and his narration and expert sources are as educational as they are eccentric and entertaining. Even if you don’t appreciate the director’s tendency to treat every subject like the plot for a grand opera, it’s his great talent to stimulate our sense of wonder that makes his work so fascinating and Cave of Forgotten Dreams is no exception.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is released in UK cinemas on March 25 by Picturehouse Entertainment.

Pamela Jahn

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Flatpack Festival 2011

The Lost Thing (Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan)

Flatpack Festival

23-27 March 2010, Birmingham, UK

Flatpack website

One of our favourite festivals, Flatpack celebrates its fifth birthday with parties, live scores, AV performances, a restored 60s mobile cinema, plus feature film previews including Self Made, Marwencol and Meek’s Cutoff, an archive renaissance and adolescent metalheads from Loughborough…

Expect the usual quirky and eccentric discoveries alongside forgotten gems and new talent + a vintage mobile cinema, live scores, experimental film and late night parties.

Flatpack Festival 2011 Feature Films include:

Self Made – Birmingham born Turner prize-winner Gillian Wearing’s hugely-anticipated first feature has been rapturously received by critics and audiences alike. This film needs no highbrow qualifications to connect to its highly charged emotional journey, which started with the placement of a local advert ‘Do you want to be in a film? Would you play yourself or a fictional character?’

Read a short review of Self made in our coverage of the London Film Festival 2010.

Marwencol – already assuming cult status, director Jeff Malmberg’s unmissable feature documentary follows the ‘stranger-than-fiction’ story of Mark Hogancamp. After a vicious attack left him brain-damaged, Hogancamp retreated into ‘Marwencol’, a meticulously self-created world of dolls populating miniature sets which bring to life a WWII Belgian village in his backyard. Touching and mind-bending.

Read a short review of Marwencol that was part of our SXSW 2010 coverage.

Rubber – the new feature from the multitalented Quentin Dupieux (aka Mr Oizo) is a one-of-a-kind B-movie about a psychotic car tyre who goes on the rampage.

Read a short review of Rubber that was part of our coverage of L’Etrange Festival 2010.

Piercing, I – the critically acclaimed animated feature by Liu Jian was generated over three years on a WACOM graphic tablet and heralds China’s arrival at the forefront of animation.

Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then – debut feature by director and animator Brent Green. Shot entirely on the full-scale town he built in his backyard, Green combines animation, stop-motion and live-action to create an ethereal opus to lovers and tinkerers everywhere.

A Useful Life – Uruguay’s submission to the Oscars and shot in black and white at Montevideo Cinematheque, it offers a compelling insight into the struggles of running an art house cinema venue.

Music and Film

We Don’t Care About Music Anyway – documentary of Japan’s experimental music scene, accompanied by a live set by Sakamoto Hiromichi

Kinshasa Symphony, the moving story of the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra and their efforts to master Beethoven’s Ninth

Strange Powers: Stephin Merrit and the Magnetic Fields – this portrait of the inscrutable, hugely influential songwriter and his merry band was a decade in the filming

Read a short review of Strange Powers in our coverage of the London Film Festival 2010.

Other highlights:

Pram – Shadow Shows – first full UK performance of a deliciously creepy ‘experiment in surreal horror’ using projections and silhouettes to summon up nightmarish fairy tales

Every Minute, Always – immersive headphone performance in a cinema for two people, using sound, projections and a faint trace of Brief Encounter.

In Bed With Chris Needham – the trials and tribulations of an adolescent metal fan are laid out in painful detail by this legendary Video Diary, presented as a taster for this year’s Home of Metal celebrations

Paper Party – Saturday night antics include a live performance by audio-visual duo Sculpture who use video zoetrope record decks, tape loops, cassettes, samples, computer programming and lo-fi electronics

Patron Saint of Flatpack – this year’s celebration of film pioneers past focuses on Birmingham resident Iris Barry, founder of the Museum of Modern Art’s film archive – featuring a special event exploring her life & legacy, plus screenings of work she preserved – including Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Junior, to be screened at Birmingham Town Hall with live organ by Nigel Ogden.

Keystone Cut Ups – an amazing kaleidoscopic voyage through early cinema by cut-up connoiseurs People Like Us and Ergo Phizmiz, taking in everything from mannequins to hats

Vintage Mobile Cinema – the magical 22-seater cine bus, perfectly restored from its 1960s hey day, will be touring across the city throughout Flatpack with a range of shorts, home-movies and archive clips

The Invisible Cinema – following the success of 2010 tour of the original 1930s Art Deco Odeon cinemas, this year’s heritage offer will bring back to life some of the city’s ex-picturehouses and forgotten celluloid landmarks

Loft in Translation – screenings in partnership with MACE’s Full Circle project, which encourages people to retrieve home-movies from their attics

Archive Revival – Artists and filmmakers who appropriate and repurpose archive material including work by Thom Andersen, Duncan Campbell and Peter Tscherkassky

Mind Bombs – pulsing, psychedelic eye candy in the form of shorts and music videos by a host of upcoming filmmakers including ‘cell animator’ Mirai Mizue.

More details at Flatpack Festival.
Festivals, Short Cuts

Butterfly Women and Cursed Cassettes: Music and Video Shorts at LSFF 2011

Calculus

London Short Film Festival

7-16 January 2011

LSFF website

On a grim mid-January Saturday afternoon, the Roxy Bar and Screen was packed to the rafters with a lively audience waiting for the LSFF programme of music and video shorts. It was impossible to move for the people sitting on the floor, and still they kept coming. Their eagerness was justified: once more, LSFF delivered the goods in a selection of shorts that innovatively combined sound and image. The programme was bookended by Max Hattler’s Heaven and Hell, two films inspired by the visionary paintings of Augustin Lesage. They are constructed as loops, with patterns of coloured circles moving in a circular movement to repetitive percussive sounds in Heaven, while in Hell, dark grey machine imagery opens like the wings of an eagle to the noise of a sinister drone. Hypnotic and immersive, with complex variations on visual and aural patterns, they perfectly framed the programme.

Check out Max Hattler’s contribution to The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, out in March (Strange Attractor Press).

One of the most impressive films was Franck Trebillac’s Calculus, the video to an electronic track by Stretta (scroll down to watch the film). Images of organic matter and insects are set to the throbbing music, with a beetle and a praying mantis moving in time to slower and faster rhythms, before a woman comes out of a chrysalis with a butterfly covering her eyes and nose. The pulsation of the music and the emphasis on the texture and palpitation of the insects’ bodies work together superbly to create a heightened sense of life’s matter, culminating in the creation of this beautiful, deeply alien creature. Another of Franck Trebillac’s videos was included in the programme, for Tricil’s ‘The Emancipation’. This time, the focus was on mechanisms and automata, with a ballerina in an old-fashioned music box dancing to a dark, heavy complex electronic beat. Her movements were jerky like a doll’s, and as the music progressed, her image was multiplied and superimposed, creating wonderful abstract patterns that fitted the music perfectly and underlined its dark, oppressive feel.

In Alex Harrison’s video for Aspirin’s electronic instrumental ‘Cutter’, a gloved hand tests brightly coloured 80s plastic toys in a white lab-like environment. As the music becomes more discordant, the toys spin out of control, until the lab tester sets fire to them. The Day-Glo 80s imagery was a perfect fit for the music, and the movement of the toys precisely matched the rhythm of the music. In a completely different style, Friends was a video directed by Edwin Mingard for François and the Atlas Mountains. François is introduced as the ‘curator’ of the ‘Atlas Mountains’ Memory Archive’ and he sings the song with an old Super8 projector behind him. This is intercut with images of a young man in various settings, who wipes words such as ‘Kissed a Girl’ and ‘Got Scared’ off his face. This is filmed backwards, the words appearing as the wiping is reversed. This temporal trick emphasises the melancholy of the song.

Among the films that were not music videos, one of the most interesting was Paul Cheshire’s The Cursed Cassette, which established a convincingly strange world in just one minute. A man receives a mysterious cassette in an envelope on which is drawn a moustache; when he plays it, high-pitched electronic noises and what sounds like a bassoon or a tuba are heard, while a moustache appears on his face. Weird electrical impulses are triggered and the man goes through a number of transfigurations; he multiplies and is transformed into a sinister masked figure. The Cursed Cassette brilliantly uses simple visual and musical elements to create an intriguing and evocative story in a remarkably short time.

Not all of the films were as successful, but in a programme that included 26 shorts, that was to be expected. Some of the music videos were not particularly interesting, and the two fashion films included seemed entirely unnecessary: Leaving Dreamland (Ivana Bobic and Rain Li) told the silly, clichéd story of a girl who looked like a model and whose only purpose seemed to show off hip clothes, while Cassia (Zaiba Jabbar) seemed like a self-indulgent portrait of Hoxtonites. But despite these bum notes, the screening was hugely enjoyable and interesting overall, and the audience certainly agreed, enthusiastically applauding every single film.

The Music and Video programme screened on Saturday 15 January 2011 at the Roxy Bar and Screen.

Virginie Sélavy

Watch Calculus:

Festivals

Czech Films at the Berlinale

Eighty Letters

61st Berlin International Film Festival

10-20 February 2011, Berlin, Germany

Berlinale website

Matchmaking Mayor (Erika Hníková, 2010)

The original Czech title of this documentary, Nesvatbov, means ‘a place with no weddings’. The mayor of the village in question is none too happy about the situation, which poses a serious problem for villages across Europe: they are dying out as residents leave or, in the case of this particular village, the younger generation fails to have children. For a film treating a sad topic, it was incredibly funny: I haven’t heard such uproarious audience responses since Borat (Larry Charles, 2006). At first, you feel guilty for laughing at the backward villagers, but very quickly you perceive their intelligence and humour, and start laughing with them.

The real inadvertent comedian is the village’s ‘matchmaking’ mayor: he is firmly convinced that it is everyone’s natural and civic duty to marry and procreate. He shares his contentious opinions with his constituents in daily addresses delivered over a loud-speaker system audible throughout the village. He organises a party for local singletons, a social engineering project reminiscent of the factory dance in A Blonde in Love (Miloš Forman, 1965). While the communist manager genuinely had his employees’ welfare at heart, the mayor’s motivation is less philanthropic, more abstract.

The House (Zuzana Liová, 2011)

Where Matchmaking Mayor starred a local official who wanted to organise his constituents’ lives, The House is about a father who tries too hard to control his family. To give his two daughters a good start in life, Imrich has decided to build them each a house on the same land as their family home. Having abandoned the house for his elder daughter Jana, who married an unsuitable man, Imrich is now focused on completing a house for Eva, his younger daughter. Eva dreams of going to London to work as an au pair, but her father forbids it. Desperate for a means of escape, Eva begins an affair with her English teacher.

Although slow at times, The House is engaging as a character study. Eva is defiant but vulnerable. Imrich’s stubbornness causes great unhappiness: he refuses to acknowledge Jana, her husband or her children, even when they lose their home. But there is a lot of love behind his gruff façade, and this is portrayed with great skill and realism by lead actor Miroslav Krobot: the film’s happy ending is the result of a change in Imrich’s attitude, but his demeanour remains the same.

Eighty Letters (Václav Kadrnka, 2011)

In communist Czechoslovakia, a boy named Vacek accompanies his mother as she collects documents to apply for travel abroad: his father is in England, and they would like to join him. That is about all there is to the storyline and as a result, even at just 75 minutes, this film feels very long. With the exception of one scene, the audience consistently shares the boy’s perspective on this boring administrative trip: sitting in the porter’s lodge or the doctor’s waiting room until his mother comes back with the required letter, then heading off with her on the next errand.

Although its slowness makes this film a challenge to sit through, the viewer comes away with an experience that the director has carefully engineered. What Eighty Letters lacks in events, it makes up for with atmosphere, giving a well-rounded impression of everyday life under communism. The camera lingers on the drab streets, buildings and interiors that the characters move through, emphasising their oppressive familiarity. Sounds, too, are insistent: the tapping of high heels, the rattle of sheets of paper, and the opening and closing of doors all seem amplified, almost to the point of irritation.

Alison Frank

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Shibuya Minoru at the Berlinale

A Good Man, A Good Day

For me, film festivals are all about new films, so I normally shun retrospectives honouring classic films or deceased directors. The Berlinale’s presentation of eight Shibuya Minoru films was a special case: while all of the films were from the 1950s and 60s, they will have been a new discovery for most audience members, since Shibuya’s work has never been available on DVD outside Japan. A retrospective of Shibuya Minoru was screened at last November’s Tokyo FILMeX and picked up by Ulrich Gregor for the Berlinale’s Forum section. At the Berlinale, it seemed that audiences shared my prejudice against old films: the three Shibuya screenings I went to attracted a respectable showing, but the cinema was far from packed. It was a testament to the quality of Shibuya’s work that the screening ended with applause, even though the director had passed away some 30 years ago.

Shibuya’s 1960s films share some features with the work of Ozu Yasujiro, a more familiar name from this period. The characteristically low camera height would have felt normal to domestic audiences who sit, eat and sleep close to the floor; for Western viewers, this lower-level perspective on the action is unusual. Similar to Ozu, too, is Shibuya’s recurring theme of family relationships in a changed, and still changing, post-war Japan. The similarities end here, though: while Ozu tended to focus on quietly pleasing aesthetics, and tenderly moving portrayals of parent-child and husband-wife dynamics, Shibuya’s films are a livelier affair. They are marked by their humour, from light comic banter to satire. Yet because Shibuya’s films treat relevant topics, they are more than just entertainment: they complete the portrait of 1950s and 60s Japan, rounding out Ozu’s lyricism with silliness, sexuality, and even despair.

Yopparai tengoku (Drunkard’s Paradise, 1962)

This was the first Shibuya film I saw, and the one with the most sobering conclusion. At first, Drunkard’s Paradise portrays drinking as a minor (and entertaining) vice: its worst effects are embarrassing behaviour, a diminished bank account and an overnight stay in a prison cell. But the film also explores more serious potential consequences of drinking, through a believable scenario involving four central characters: a father and son, the son’s fiancée and a famous baseball player. When one of these characters becomes violent after drinking, it brings about a dramatic change in the lives of all four. One of the problems explicitly addressed is that at that time in Japan, drunk people were not held responsible for their actions.

Drunkard’s Paradise can become oppressive at times, as its characters are crushed by needless tragedy. The audience is rewarded, though, first by the film’s opening comic scenes, and later by complex character development. Although the film’s premise seems designed to show that alcoholics bring unhappiness on themselves, the film is not so simple or moralising as this. All four characters are sympathetic, inviting the audience’s compassion: their justifications can always be understood, if not accepted.

Kojin kojitsu (A Good Man, A Good Day, 1961)

After the bleak black and white images of Drunkard’s Paradise, the saturated colour of A Good Man, A Good Day was a welcome surprise. This was a film more uniformly comic in tone, although it too addressed important social issues, this time of class. The good man in question is an eccentric mathematics professor who wears his shoes on the wrong feet and ignores people who don’t interest him. This doesn’t help his daughter’s marriage prospects: her fiancé’s family is none too sure about hers.

The film’s even tone is more reminiscent of Ozu than Drunkard’s Paradise, but with Shibuya’s characteristic dash of comedy: the professor is unimpressed by his daughter’s fiancé until the young man has the nerve to call him an ‘old fart’. This points to the film’s satire on status: although the professor is venerated at the university, he only gains wider respect when he wins a prize from the Ministry of Culture. In a nod to contemporary reality, the professor’s daughter is adopted, having been orphaned by WWII bombings: this too is a source of prejudice against the family. Unlike Drunkard’s Paradise, though, A Good Man, A Good Day ends happily.

Daikon to ninjin (The Radish and the Carrot, 1964)

All three films that I saw happened to include the prolific actor Ryu Chishu in the role of the father. His acting capabilities were showcased beautifully, as the fathers are quite different in each film: a drunk, a scholar, and an ordinary man with a secret. Ryu also appeared in almost every one of Ozu’s films, but The Radish and the Carrot has an even stronger link to this director: it is based on an unfinished script that Ozu was working on just before he died. It is the story of a family man who disappears, leaving his wife and four daughters wondering whether he has run away or been kidnapped. Only in his absence does the man’s family really start to think about him, considering their relationship to him, and what secrets he might have. The film’s title stems from his daughter’s comment after he leaves: they think of him as ‘a radish or a carrot on the kitchen floor’ – necessary, then, but unremarkable. The film teaches us not to take our family for granted, certainly, but it also recognises that family can be a burden on us as individuals.

Alison Frank

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Berlinale 2011: Dispatch 1

The Devil's Double

Pamela Jahn and Alison Frank send their first report from the Berlinale. Check this section for more on the festival in the coming days.

Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman, 2010)
The title of Monte Hellman’s feature comeback after 20 odd years could serve as a tag line for the 61st edition of the Berlinale. The official programme is patchy as ever and relies on a number of high-profile American headliners in the competition, with the Coen brothers’ True Grit leading the way, while Hellman’s Road to Nowhere sadly only screened at the European Film Market. Deftly blurring the line between cinema and reality, the film depicts a young director shooting a crime drama based on a true story, using the actual locations as a source of inspiration. During the shoot, he falls in love with his lead actress, who uncannily resembles the real-life crime’s femme fatale, and soon things get alarmingly tangled up, especially in the mind of one imaginative member of the crew. Although there is no denying that its decidedly artificial touch and wooden dialogue make this a flawed film, the director’s approach feels way more complex, intriguing and worthy of attention than the equally film-focused Silver Bullets/Art History, Joe Swanberg’s latest Mumblecore outing, about a troubled filmmaker sabotaging his own work out of jealousy and creative frustration, which screened in the Forum strand. Ultimately, Road to Nowhere amounts to a series of bravura noir scenes in which the tension and emotion sometimes build up too slowly, but a great meta-B-movie feel and fitting cinematography make it an enjoyable watch. PJ

The Devil’s Double (Lee Tamahori, 2011)
A more rigorous yet not necessarily more rewarding genre treat was Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double. The film pulls us headlong into the hubris, immorality, waywardness and brutality that dominated the life of Uday Hussein, the elder son of Saddam, in his heyday before and after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Tamahori focuses on Uday’s efforts to recruit a body double to protect him at public appearances, following his father’s example. Uday finds the perfect match in Latif, an army lieutenant and former school mate, who has no choice but to consort with the devil. Latif has a hard time watching Uday’s brutal and humiliating actions, and matters become complicated when he gets off with one of his boss’s favourite lovers. Based on a book by the real Latif Yahia, the film paints an uncompromising picture of Uday, and recounts events that may or may not have happened. Dominic Cooper plays both Uday and Latif, a double role that is used as much for cheap comic effects as to create an air of captivating, effortless cool. This is backed up by a punchy soundtrack and top-notch production design, which cover up the flaws in the narrative and characters. For what it’s worth, The Devil’s Double shows that a different view of the Iraq war is possible, from a different end of the aesthetic spectrum. PJ

Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011)

Ten-year-old Laure moves to a new flat with her parents and little sister. When the neighbourhood kids assume from her clothes and haircut that she is a boy, she doesn’t correct them, and introduces herself as Mika&#235l. In its aesthetics, this film is primarily about childhood, and the instinctively tactile, visual and direct way that children interact with the world: cuddling with their parents or tumbling about together in physical play, sensitive to the shapes, colours and textures of their stuffed animals, dress-up clothes, markers and modelling clay. Outside the apartment, when Laure plays with children of her own age, adult concerns of gender begin to intervene: the boys playing football look like miniature men, with their shirtless swagger and high-fives. While Laure does her best to adopt these mannish mannerisms, the point is not that she is a garçon manqué. It is that society focuses on the unimportant trappings of gender, like make-up and dresses, forgetting that more important human qualities are not unique to either gender. Laure’s father, for instance, is kinder and gentler than her mother. In Sciamma’s world, everyone should have the opportunity to play, be creative and show affection, whatever their sex. AF

Dance Town (Jeon Kyu-hwan, 2010)

Jung-Nim and her husband live in Pyongyang, and the little we see of their life together seems happy, unusually affectionate even. The husband’s job allows him to travel and bring home foreign products unavailable in North Korea, like pornographic DVDs, which they watch together. When a neighbour snitches on them, Jung-Nim’s husband is arrested: his last words to her come in a phone call, instructing her to escape to South Korea, where he hopes to join her later. When she arrives in Seoul, the South Korean government gives Jung-Nim a fresh start, but she can’t stop thinking about her husband.

Some of Jung-Nim’s new friends are curious about the difference between the two Koreas. Foreign audiences may also choose this film out of curiosity, and it does offer an engaging portrait of daily life in Seoul. But this film will resonate most for its universal themes about urban life and immigration. Some locals are jealous that refugees seem to have it easy, with a free apartment and stipend from the government. Jung-Nim, while grateful, seems underwhelmed by the advantages of life in the South. If you are lonely (as many urban dwellers are), nothing else matters. AF

Check it out, Festivals, Short Cuts

London Short Film Festival 2011: Leftfield and Luscious

Until the River Runs Red

London Short Film Festival 2011

7-16 January 2011, various venues, London

LSFF website

With details of LSFF’s 2011 programme still under wraps, I ventured forth to an icy Soho street, buzzing with the Christmas rush, to collect a bundle of DVDs from festival programmer Philip Ilson. Home-burnt screeners whirring on my precariously balanced laptop may be a far cry from this month’s forthcoming screenings at the ICA but they provided a lovely taster of things to come: a preview of the festival’s most experimental new shorts selection, Leftfield and Luscious. Films are brought together for this programme under a fairly loose premise – namely that they lean towards a more abstract approach – and, as a result, it’s a varied assortment of discs. First to make it into my computer is the strange, poetic Sea Swallow’d, a collaboration between the filmmaker Andrew Kötting and artists Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, working under the name Curious. A work with clear surrealist influences, the film is at times madcap and lively; and at others, ominous and lilting. Divided into sporadic, episodic chapters, the film slowly builds to reveal its themes. The sea appears, disappears and reappears as a mysterious force. Guts figure in several forms: the camera trails the texture of a human stomach; a female voice declares her love in terms of digestive organs (she loves his insides, the darkness of his liver); and a fish is de-boned. Sea and guts represent the powerful, primeval aspects of life, ones which we do not often consider in our day-to-day humdrum. Sea Swallow’d is a beautifully made film and one that gently reveals some poetic lines and interesting questions about how far such primitive forces might influence human behaviour. The other stand-out example of filmmaking from the collection of discs was Paul Wright’s Until the River Runs Red. This film has some extraordinarily sumptuous cinematography – close-up shots of open meadow, wet skin and long tresses of hair, glimpses of sun and road snatched through a car boot. The film follows a girl who was kidnapped from a shopping centre and the couple who abducted her but, unfortunately, it felt as though the content itself had been underdeveloped; the subject matter was treated slightly melodramatically and the dialogue a little unoriginally. But director Paul Wright is clearly a very talented filmmaker; his step into features is an exciting prospect.

Wright’s film is nominated for the festival’s Best British Short Film Award, alongside two other shorts in the Leftfield & Luscious category. One of these, Murmuration, by Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, perfectly encapsulates the other side to this programme; a lighter, more playful side, which popped up across the selection. The film tracks a river canoe trip paddling underneath a murmuration of starlings: an acrobatic display put on by thousands of synchronised, flocking birds. With camera work aimed at emphasising their DIY-approach and a soundtrack by Beirut, there is a vivacious, carefree appeal to the film. This lightness and playfulness also struck me in Dominique Bongers’s Gallop, a visual experiment with a nod to Eadweard Muybridge’s flying horse, and Ruth Lingford’s Little Deaths, an animated representation of interviewees discussing their experience of sex. The content and tone of the Luscious and Leftfield films might vary enormously but the films’ abstract leanings mean that there is common ground: a shared love for the visual side of filmmaking. It is encouraging to see such strong work in this category. If this treat of DVDs is a hint of what the festival is offering, it should be another interesting year for LSFF audiences.

Eleanor McKeown