Category Archives: Festivals

Check it out, Features, Festivals

Alucarda: The Seed of Panic

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Ilustration by James Stringer

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 26 March 2010

Venue: Electric Cinema, Birmingham

Flatpack Festival

23-28 March 2010

Flatpack Festival website

Director: Juan López Moctezuma

Writers: Alexis Arroyo, Tita Arroyo, Juan López Moctezuma, Yolanda López Moctezuma

Original title: Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas

Based on the short story ‘Carmilla’ by: Sheridan Le Fanu

Cast: Tina Romero, Claudio Brook, Susana Kamini, David Silva, Tina French

Mexico 1978

85 mins

Electric Sheep are very proud to present Alucarda as part of two late-night special screenings at the Flatpack Festival. See also the special preview of Dogtooth.

Having produced Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s incendiary first feature Fando y Lis (1968) as well as El topo (1970), Juan López Moctezuma went behind the camera in 1971 to make The Mansion of Madness (released in 1973), which was loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. He followed it up with two vampire stories, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary, shot in the USA with John Carradine in 1975, and Alucarda in 1978. Like Fernando Méndez and Carlos Enrique Taboada, Moctezuma was one of a handful of well-read Mexican directors who were interested in making horror films infused with cultural references and artistic ambitions. In Mexico, the genre was dominated at the time by populist lucha libre movies such as the Santo series, which pitched heroic costumed wrestlers against monsters, vampires and mummies. However, Chano Urueta’s take on Frankenstein, El monstruo resucitado (1953), and Méndez’s influential El vampiro (1957) had opened the way for a richer vein of horror, and the 50s and 60s were marked by a wave of delirious visions of terror that are still lauded for their visual beauty and atmospheric qualities.

Visit illustrator James Stringer’s website.

Moctezuma was part of the Panique Theatre, which Jodorowsky had founded in Paris in 1962 with the Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal (on whose play Fando y Lis was based) and the French artist Roland Topor. The name was a reference to the god Pan, and the movement (or anti-movement, as Arrabal would have it) was defined by a combination of terror and humour. Influenced by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Panique embraced disorder, madness and excess, the grotesque and the irrational, to create an anarchic celebration of life. From Artaud they also inherited the interest in a magical and ritualistic kind of theatrical spectacle, which used violent sensory assault to open up new perspectives in the audience.

Moctezuma implemented these ideas in The Mansion of Madness, in which the patients of an insane asylum are allowed to run free as their doctor adopts an Aleister Crowley-influenced approach to their treatment. Set in the similarly confined environment of a convent, Alucarda took the director’s interest in strange cults and rituals further. Alucarda’s birth opens the film, her wretched mother, having been impregnated by the devil, delivering the baby in a crypt surrounded by diabolical, horned, half-goat statues. To protect the newborn from her terrible father, she asks a bizarre-looking gypsy to take her daughter to the convent. Fifteen years later, Justine, a young, orphaned ingénue, arrives at the convent to find herself sharing a room with the raven-haired, black-clad, wild-eyed Alucarda.

Alucarda is clearly out of place in the convent and her holy abode has not been able to suppress the devil in her blood. She draws Justine into her world, taking her to the derelict crypt of her birth where she proposes they take a blood oath, so they can be friends forever, ‘even after death’. The ritual is performed in their room at night, which, this being the 70s, involves both of them being naked as the gargoyle-like gypsy from the opening scene magically appears to make cuts on their breasts from which they drink each other’s blood. They find themselves in the forest, where a ritual performed by witches ends in an orgy. Intercut with this are images of Sister Angélica, who welcomed Justine into the convent, praying intensely until her face becomes bloodied and she levitates, apparently able to conjure up some sort of power that strikes down the gypsy witch leading the ceremony.

The clear lesbian undertones of the film come from Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’, on which Alucarda is very loosely based (the other literary reference is obviously Bram Stoker’s Dracula), but Moctezuma and his team of writers have made the story their own. The friendship between Alucarda and Justine has the devouring intensity of first love, but in the enclosed, all-female convent/hothouse, the girls’ repressed desires translate into demonic possession. The figure of Sister Angélica adds an interesting twist, turning the story into a spiritual lesbian love triangle. Her attachment to Justine is as dubiously excessive as Alucarda’s and is sublimated into a frighteningly exalted religious practice. The love triangle is complicated by Alucarda’s satanic nature and Sister Angélica’s self-sacrificial (‘angelic’) Christian figure, meaning that there is a lot more at stake than Justine’s affection: demonic Alucarda and holy Sister Angélica are battling over nothing less than Justine’s soul (the character is named after Sade’s unfortunate heroine, whose virtue is repeatedly assaulted by one group of perverted tormentors after another).

Alucarda has been seen as anticlerical, yet the depiction of religion comes across as very ambivalent, confused even. For a start, the convent is a very unusual religious edifice, a womb-like cave carved inside the rock. The nuns are dressed in off-white, red-stained robes and tight-fitting bonnets that make them look like mummies. Initially, there are intimations that Alucarda may be an adept of a natural religion, a religion of life opposed to the Catholic worship of death. The witches’ orgy contrasts with a later display of self-flagellation among the half-naked nuns and priests. An early, sumptuously sinister, almost painterly sermon takes place against the backdrop of a multitude of crucified Christs, creating an oppressive, macabre atmosphere. This is echoed in a later scene where Alucarda and Justine, naked, are tied to crosses for an exorcism ceremony. The dark, rich colours, the high camera angle and the cruelty of the ritual again conjure a memorable vision of religious maleficence.

And yet, Dr Oszek, who interrupts the exorcism and calls the officiating priest barbaric, is soon confronted with a gruesome supernatural phenomenon that destroys his scientific certainties and validates the priest’s beliefs. In one of the film’s most striking scenes, an undead (and again naked) Justine comes out of a blood-filled coffin to attack the devoted Sister Angélica. Alucarda proves a worthy daughter to her father when she unleashes hell upon the convent, stopped only by the body of the Christic Sister Angélica carried cross-like by the other nuns. All in all, you could say the Christian characters come out of this looking fairly reasonable in the circumstances.

The truth is that Moctezuma seems much more interested in extreme rituals of all kinds than in putting across an anticlerical message. The devil here appears in the form of Pan, as seen in the statues in the crypt and later in the goat’s head that presides over the orgiastic celebration in the forest, which clearly ties in with the ideas underlying Panique Theatre. The same actor, Claudio Brook (a Buñuel regular), plays both Dr Oszek and the gypsy, so that reason’s representative is also our mischievous guide into the occult and spiritual world, further undermining the rational standpoint. The many rituals, whether Christian or satanic, the orgy and the flagellation, the blood oath and the exorcism, are all marked by excess and strangeness, violence and beauty. The contrast between the beliefs that inform them is not what matters here; rather, the overall effect of their juxtaposition as grotesque and startling spectacles may well be designed to shock the audience into a new mode of perception.

Virginie Sélavy

This article was first published in the autumn 09 issue of Electric Sheep Magazine.

Buy Alucarda [DVD] from Amazon

Festivals, Short Cuts

Short Cuts: Redmond Entwistle’s Monuments

Monuments

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 28-29 January 2010

International Rotterdam Film Festival

26 January – 6 February 2010

IRFF website

As long as art is seen as creation, it will be the same old story. Here we go again, creating objects, creating systems, building a better tomorrow. I posit that there is no tomorrow, nothing but a gap, a yawning gap. That seems sort of tragic, but what immediately relieves it is irony, which gives you a sense of humour. It is that cosmic sense of humour that makes it all bearable.
(Robert Smithson in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object)

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) is looking into the half-distance. Resurrected, having emerged from an underground car park into a 2009 suburbia and wearing an exceptionally bad wig, he contemplates post-minimalist art with his equally glacial buddies Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) and Dan Graham (b. 1942). In a landscape of greys and blues the trio slope around, deadpanning theory and journeying into a reverie of architecture and cinema.

A beguiling oddity, Redmond Entwistle’s short film Monuments stood out as a highlight at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. A thoughtful, funny, sad film. A film with a bibliography. A film about New Jersey. ‘New Jersey was where my grandparents settled and lived after moving from Poland,’ Entwistle explains. ‘It is the counterpart to the visible New York. New Jersey feeds the city with materials, construction and invisible labour. At first New Jersey was the working-class suburbs of the city, then it became the white-collar suburbs, and now it’s something else. It’s a new hinterland. It’s a corporate park.’

Overlapping in time spans, all three artists created seminal works in New Jersey: Graham’s Homes for America photographic series was largely shot there; Matta-Clark carved up suburban houses with a power saw in Splitting and Bingo; and NJ-born Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic essay was a journal of a trip he took there, creating a series of photographs along the way. ‘In it, he talks about the cinematised landscape,’ Entwistle explains. ‘The landscape in New Jersey for him is already a filmic landscape.’

Read Kate Taylor’s report on the International Rotterdam Film Festival.

Monuments echoes what Entwistle sees as an underlying structure within their work. ‘Even though it’s sculpture and exists in that kind of space, it felt like there was an underpinning of narrative to their work. The narrative I recognised was this movement out to the fringes to collect material that you bring into the centre, as a means of authenticating society again. The way they’re going out to these environments and using raw materials, I think to some level there’s a reiteration of that narrative, of modernism, where one goes and finds the authentic materials and brings them back to the centre again, and that relates to their interest in context as well.’

Formerly a projectionist at the ICA in London and currently based in New York, Entwistle cuts a serious but restless figure. He has been making moving image work for 10 years, often switching between cinema and gallery exhibition. Paterson – Lódz (winner of Best International Film On-Screen at Images 2008) is an expanded sound piece for a seated audience in a cinema and Belfast Trio (also shown at Rotterdam) consists of three short films that were originally displayed in a gallery but also screened in three cinemas simultaneously in Belfast – each one a short staged scene that doesn’t necessarily relate to the dialogue on its soundtrack. ‘None of the pieces sit comfortably in a cinema or a gallery setting. They’re always between,’ he states. ‘I’d say neither space is adequate, so it’s partly a process of trying to provoke some sort of dialogue about the alternative ways of showing and making work. The cinematic experience has not always been a fixed one, it’s been one that’s open to new possibilities of screening. But I wouldn’t say that the works I’m making are defining what that should be. They are not just critical, but they do construct a certain way of viewing.’

For now though Entwistle has a pressing concern, how the very-much-still-alive Dan Graham will respond to the adventures of the zombie-esque photocopy of himself in the film. ‘I was concerned how he would react to it. I didn’t want to ridicule him. I think maybe it’s slightly unavoidable. He has his persona and I’m ridiculing that persona in some ways.’ Entwistle recalls the post-screening Q&A at the IFFR premiere: ‘I think a couple of people felt that I was mocking the artists’ work. But I really feel that if there is a humour in there it’s directed rather at the industry around the artists. Their mythic status isn’t of their own making, it’s something that’s happened as a process of a cultural industry around their work. I wanted to separate their work from this hagiography that developed around it.’

Kate Taylor

Check it out, Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 4

Kanikōsen

In her final dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn reports on the Asian films in the programme, including new works by Zhang Yimou and Kôji Wakamatsu.

Kanik&#333sen
There is traditionally a strong Asian presence in the Forum section, and after last year’s inventive Korean features (including Baek Seung-bin’s debut feature Members of the Funeral) I was hoping for another batch of exciting films this year. Unfortunately, I missed the two Korean films on offer, but the most original of the four Japanese entries in the section was undoubtedly Sabu’s Kanik&#333sen. A witty, ferociously crafted screen adaptation of Takeji Kobayashi’s 1929 agitprop novel, the film mainly takes place on a battered cannery ship in imperialist Japan. The set is somewhat reminiscent of Metropolis, and the film tells a similar story, focusing on a crew of downtrodden workers who eventually rise up against their tyrannical oppressors. As one would expect from a filmmaker who is known for fast-paced action-comedies and anarchic satire, Kanik&#333sen is informed by a pitch-black sense of humour that at times turns into slapstick; yet Sabu manages to make the novel’s fundamental and still relevant critique clear by keeping the right balance between theatrical elements, brutality and idiosyncratic ingenuity. Employing an anti-realist approach to the historical context, Kanik&#333sen is a bizarre and often claustrophobic cinematic experience where Brecht meets Chaplin on the high sea.

Parade
Diving into the abyss of modern Japanese society, Isao Yukisada’s Parade is an often comical but increasingly gloomy urban tale revolving around the phenomenon of people in their mid-20s who refuse to grow up and face life. At first, the narrative is driven merely by dialogue and the infrequent actions taking place in a household of four troubled Tokyo drifters, but it sparks up the moment a homeless teenage hustler suddenly takes over the couch in the living room. The film is roughly divided into four chapters, each focusing on one of the tenants and his or her private obsession, and the dark nature of the story is emphasised by the soundtrack and sublime twists that carefully hint at the film’s surprise ending. Although Parade lacks the drive, visual subtlety and thoughtfulness that made Yukisada’s 2001 teen drama Go such a compelling watch, just following these offbeat, gentle dreamers is a pleasure, and it made this somewhat overwrought film stand out as one of the wittier and more honest works on show in the Panorama section.

Caterpillar
Excoriated as a ‘national disgrace’ in the Japanese press at the time, Kôji Wakamatsu’s Secrets Acts behind Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto) caused a stir when it premiered at the Berlinale in 1965, which ultimately helped push the pinku eiga pioneer to fame home and abroad. Forty-five years later, Wakamatsu’s eagerly awaited new feature Caterpillar – a loose follow-up to his 2007 monstrous docu-fiction drama United Red Army (Jitsuroku rengô sekigun: Asama sansô e no michi) – was screening in competition, but although it confirms Wakamatsu’s credentials as one of Japan’s most fiercely independent directors/producers to date, the style and backdrop of his latest effort are quite different from his earlier work. Set in a rural village during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1940, Caterpillar tells the story of severely disabled war veteran Lieutenant Kyuzo Kurokawa (Shima Ohnishi) who returns home disfigured and dumb, and with no arms and legs, but highly decorated, with three medals paying tribute to his heroic deeds. For his wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima), however, he is less a ‘war god’ than a burden, as rude and demanding with her as he was before he was maimed, and while carrying out her duty as the docile peasant, sacrificing herself by caring for the glorified soldier and taking him out for public display, her meek patience is thinning rapidly and eventually turns into a desire for revenge. Caterpillar uses documentary war footage, radio propaganda and excessive, brutal imagery that hint at the violently, sexually and politically provocative spirit of Wakamatsu’s previous work, but the film is strongest in its meticulous depiction of the strained relationship between Kyozu and Shigeko. Overall, it makes a fitting addition to the 73-year-old director’s remarkable oeuvre, which now stands at 100 films.

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (San qiang pai an jing qi)
Undeniably the most colourful entry in this year’s programme was Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop – a remake of sorts of the Coen Brothers’ 1984 debut Blood Simple. Moving the action to northern China in the imperial age, the film follows Ni Dahong, the owner of a noodle shop in the middle of the desert, who pays a killer to murder both his unfaithful wife and her squeamish lover. It’s a shame that the banal slapstick and oddball jokes that Zhang decided to employ instead of the black humour of the original inevitably turn his ambitious venture into a comic farce as the plot rolls on, and it is only in the film’s showdown that he manages to get back on solid ground. There are plenty of things wrong with this film, including the wildly varied and exaggerated acting on display, but A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is nonetheless a visual treat throughout, from the luridly coloured landscapes and floral costumes to the film’s deft cinematography that are clear reminders of Zhang’s earlier work.

Golden Slumber (Goruden Suramba)
With no more major surprises to be expected after a week of enjoying an inspiring, yet patchy festival programme, my last choice turned out to be something of a lucky draw. Golden Slumber is essentially a Japanese indie man-on-the-run conspiracy thriller that follows the conventions of the genre, but the imagery of Yoshihiro Nakamura’s film is all his own. Aoyagi (Masato Sakai), a delivery-truck driver, is meeting up with his old college friend Morita (Hidetaka Yoshioka) when the new prime minister is assassinated in a bomb attack during a procession through the streets of the Japanese city of Sendai, and, through some far-fetched coincidences, Aoyagi becomes the prime suspect. Nakamura deftly hurls his unobtrusive hero from one hair’s breadth escape to another, filling in his background in comic-style fashion, and even though the story feels a bit longwinded in the middle, it lays the groundwork for the triumphant climax. A witty, refreshing genre treat, and arguably one of the most easily enjoyable films at the Berlinale this year.

Read Pamela Jahn’s first report , second report, and third report from the Berlinale.
Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 3

Jew Suss: Rise and Fall

In a third dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn reports on a new American indie talent and Oskar Roehler’s unsuccessful take on a famous case of Nazi propaganda. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Winter’s Bone
An austere, dark adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s country noir saga about a teenager’s search for her missing father, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone is a chilling, nightmarish tale of rural struggle for survival complicated by family feuds. When 17-year-old Ree (impressively played by Jennifer Lawrence) learns that her drug-dealing father has disappeared after pawning the family home and jeopardising her sick mother and young sibling’s existence, she decides to find him – dead or alive. Looking for the truth among members of his criminal circle of friends and relatives scattered in the forests of the Ozark Mountains, she is faced with a series of dangerous and violent events, but gradually disentangles the web of lies that surrounds her father’s vanishing. As the mystery is solved, however, the story becomes overly sentimental, which feels at odds with the film’s otherwise intriguing atmosphere of mistrust, threat and everyday misery. But besides this, Winter’s Bone is gripping enough to keep you interested, with Granik showing an eye for detail and a genuine talent for building a creeping sense of obscurity and despair.

Jew Suss: Rise and Fall (Jud Süß – Film Ohne Gewissen)
Boos and incredulous gasps greeted the end of the press screening of Oskar Roehler’s Jew Suss: Rise and Fall, a star-studded and slick but overall disappointingly hollow Nazi drama about one man’s Faustian pact with the Hitler regime. A confused, clunky mix of satire and melodrama, the film tells the story of Austrian actor Ferdinand Marian (Tobias Moretti), who is forced to perform the role of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer in Jew Suss, a film based on Goebbels (ridiculously overplayed by a ranting Moritz Bleibtreu) and Veit Harlan’s fraudulent adaptation of a novel by German-Jewish writer Lionel Feuchtwanger. Married to a half-Jewish woman, Marian’s initial attempts to turn down Goebbels’s offer only serve to intensify the excitement of the latter, leaving the actor no choice but to accept and perform the part of the powerful, manipulative Jewish businessman and financial adviser of the Duke of Wurttemberg, who was hanged in Stuttgart in 1738. The main problem with Roehler’s film is that he focuses merely on Marian’s tragedy, ultimately turning the attention away from the history of the notorious film that became one of the Third Reich’s most offensive and commercially successful pieces of propaganda to concentrate on an all too predictable human drama.

Read Pamela Jahn’s first report and second report from the Berlinale.
Check it out, Festivals, Trailers and Videos

Videos: Art by Chance 2009

ART BY CHANCE is the brand new “Ultra Short Film Festival” that will be aired in May 2010 all around the world. Films will meet with us unexpected, non-theatrical venues around the world on digital advertising screens located inside metros, busses, railways, public transport. We have selected three films from last year’s festival that we really like. See below for details of how to submit your short film.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection Dana Kasdorf Around the World from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection Suleyman Yilmaz No More Overlap from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection Sam Moorman Barnett Religious Experience from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ART BY CHANCE is opened to movies of all kinds; fiction, animation, documentary and video art with the exception of training and advertising films. Enthusiastic and creative international filmmakers will be preparing 30-second long films on ‘Time’. Participants can also submit online from www.artbychance.org.

DEADLINE: Friday 26 March
Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 2

Exit through the Shop

In her second dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn tells us about Banksy’s first directorial effort as well as a German crime thriller based on the real-life story of an Austrian robber-cum-marathon runner. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Exit through the Gift Shop
Given all you know, or rather don’t know about Banksy, it comes as quite a surprise that for his first foray into filmmaking the clandestine street artist has made a documentary that to a certain extent features his secretive self. Billed as ‘the world’s first street art disaster movie’, Exit through the Gift Shop gives an exclusive insight into the street art scene of recent years as seen through the eyes of an over-excited French second-hand-clothing dealer, Thierry Guetta, who became obsessed with videotaping street artists and graffitists at work in Los Angeles and abroad, and ultimately plunged into the art scene himself. Both Guetta’s life and Banksy’s film take a dramatic turn as the illustrious Frenchman and the street artist become friends. Encouraged by Banksy to mount his own show, Guetta conquers the art world as Mr Brainwash and in return entrusts his enormous tape collection to Banksky who knows how to use the material to good effect. What follows has to be seen to be believed – or not. For entertaining as Exit through the Gift Shop is, it is not quite clear whether what we see is real or just another hoax, or as Bansky himself prudently claims in a video message that precedes the screening: ‘As it turns out, some of the people don’t believe it anyway and they think the film is some kind of spoof. This is ironic because Exit through the Gift Shop is one of the most honest films you’ll ever see.’

Exit through the Gift Shop is released in UK cinemas by Revolver Entertainment on March 5.

The Robber (Der Räuber)
Based on the real-life case of the Austrian serial bank robber who became known as ‘Pump-gun Ronnie’ in the late 80s, Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber was a welcome discovery in a competition section that so far has been rather dreary. The film tells the story of Johann Rettenberger (Andreas Lust), both a successful marathon runner and confirmed criminal, who is driven by a constant, uncontrollable need for speed and adrenalin rushes. Shortly after he is once more released from jail, Rettenberger inevitably falls back into his old habits, raiding and running, and soberly measuring his heart rate after any physical strain. He even breaks records as an athlete at local competitions, but neither the sport nor the unconditional love he receives from his girlfriend Erika (Franziska Weisz) can bring his troubled mind to rest. Following a man permanently on the move, Heisenberg succeeds in capturing the inner turmoil of Rettenberger’s animal-like spirit with the same meticulous precision and steely determination that his character puts into his strict training scheme. And although some might argue that with its bleak, cold visual style and sparse narrative The Robber doesn’t add anything new to the gangster genre, the film is well done and has an unsettling intensity and unfaltering energy from start to finish.

Read Pamela Jahn’s first report from the Berlinale.
Festivals

Himalaya Film and Cultural Festival

Himalaya Film and Cultural Festival

From 28 January to 12 February 2010, the Himalaya Film and Cultural Festival celebrated the rich and varied cultures of the world’s mightiest mountain range with film, music, art and photography. Eleanor McKeown sums up the aims and achievements of this unique event.

The UK’s first Himalayan Film & Cultural Festival came to an end on Friday, after two weeks of screenings embracing a broad sweep of cinematic culture, from Afghanistan to Szechuan. A mixture of documentary, shorts and fiction film (complemented by musical acts and an art exhibition), the programme allowed audiences to experience many works that would not normally reach London cinemas.

A case in point was the feature film Kagbeni (2007), a Nepali adaptation of WW Jacobs’s 1902 short story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. After the screening, I caught up with director Bhusan Dahal for a chat about the Nepali film industry. It was fascinating to talk with Dahal about the novelty of the industry in Nepal. The first Nepali film was made only 50 years ago and production has been inconsistent during the industry’s short history, interrupted by insurgency within the country. With Kagbeni, Dahal hoped to reignite a struggling industry and encourage others within Nepal to start making films again. He and his crew created a buzz around the film by employing unknown actors and using new technology. The film was the first ever Nepali feature to be shot on digital video: ‘We were criticised. A lot of people said digital cinema is not cinema. Film has to be on film. It has to be celluloid.’

This may sound strange to UK filmgoers, but surprises like this was what the Himalayan Film & Cultural Festival was all about. The cinema programming aimed to expose UK audiences to film industries from remote cultures that they might not otherwise engage with. This aim was nicely echoed in a special educational strand, which arranged video exchanges between children from Hackney schools and the Tibetan Children’s Village in the foothills of the Indian Himalaya. With lively and packed-out screenings, live musical performances and a specially-curated art exhibition, it is to be hoped that the festival goes from strength to strength in creating a dialogue between Himalayan cinema and London audiences in the years to come.

More information at www.himalayafest.org.uk.

Electric Sheep liked Frozen (Shivajee Chandrabhushan)
A graceful, elegant film, both visually and thematically, Frozen is a slow-paced evocation of a rebellious young girl’s life with her father and brother in the remote Himalayan mountains. When one day the Army disrupts the desolate peace of their surroundings and erects a camp opposite their house in order to fight some vague terrorist enemy, it is the first sign that the family will be forced to change their way of life. Elliptical and subtly suggestive, infused with thoughtful spirituality, filled with memorable images, it is a deeply affecting, soulful film. VIRGINIE SELAVY

Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 1

Metropolis

The 2010 edition of the Berlinale has just started and in her first dispatch from Berlin Pamela Jahn tells us about the highlights of the first few days. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Metropolis
This year’s Berlinale opened on Thursday 11 February, but the real standout event was the gala screening of the newly restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at the Friedrichstadtpalast on Friday 12, with live accompaniment from the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Part of the myth surrounding Fritz Lang’s best known work comes from the fact that the original was cut shortly after the premiere of the film at the Ufa-Palast in Berlin on 10 January 1927. Although the restored version is 30 minutes longer than the print released in 2001, it still doesn’t completely recreate the original version. One sequence of the 16 mm negative of the film that was miraculously found in Buenos Aires in 2008 was simply too damaged and had to be narrated in intertitles. The newly added scenes not only help to better understand the fragmentary plot of Lang’s futuristic epic about the struggle between workers and bosses in a capitalist dystopia, but they also ensure an entirely unique and captivating cinematic experience. In addition to sequences depicting the conflict between industrialist Joh Fredersen and scientist Rotwang, creator of the machine woman, and extended scenes at the end of the film, when Maria is pursued by the masses of uprising workers, stunningly mounted images of Metropolis‘s red-light district Yoshiwara and inserted biblical references intensify the fantastical portrait of a time and place that feel both strangely affecting and disturbingly familiar. This reconstructed classic was the perfect – if ‘unofficial’ – opening to the 60th Berlinale.

Eureka Entertainment have just announced that they will release the newly restored version of Metropolis in UK cinemas later in the year, before making it available in a new DVD and Blu-ray edition in The Masters of Cinema Series.

Howl
Also worthy of note in the first few days of the festival was Howl, one of the American films in competition, which dramatises the landmark 1957 obscenity trial revolving around Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name. Combining animated sequences, dramatic narration and documentary style, the film offers a captivating, yet partly unsatisfying, insight into the creative process and personal struggle that Ginsberg was going through while writing poetry. The dark Kafkaesque animation – which is reminiscent of the visual style of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir – creates a vibrant and fascinating imagery that brilliantly evokes the poem, complementing the dramatic courtroom scenes and fragments of a re-imagined interview with Ginsberg (played by James Franco), given to an unseen interviewer and interspersed with flashbacks from his past. Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman aim high both aesthetically and conceptually, but they only really dazzle on the former level. Yet, despite a slightly artificial, long-winded feel, Howl is a vivid, engaging and lovingly made film.

Check it out, Festivals

Feb 26-27: FrightFest at Glasgow Film Festival 2010

Amer

FrightFest returns to the Glasgow Film Festival for 5th year and we like the sound of Belgian giallo homage Amer (Bitter), and to stay with the genre, the re-mastered, uncut version of the classic Lucio Fulci movie, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. Also definitely worth checking out is the new film by Vincenzo Cube Natali, Splice. And if we were in Glasgow we wouldn’t miss the first Icelandic exploitation film, Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre…

More info on these films from the press release:

AMER (BITTER) – UK Premiere
Gialli fans will not want to miss co-directors Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s immaculately executed and flawless valentine to the 70s thriller genre popularized by Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Recreating the motifs, clichés and visual codes from the vintage Italian back catalogue (including A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Suspiria and Deep Red), the Belgian duo unfold a virtually dialogue free tale of frightening obsession, sexual sensation and stunning black-gloved murder. Scored to recycled Italian soundtrack selections in the Tarantino tradition, the hypnotic and ethereal allure of the classic gialli lives again in this boldly imaginative cult phenomenon.

A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN – World Premiere
Enjoy this re-mastered, restored and never-before-seen fully uncut version of Italian gore-meister Lucio Fulci’s hippy, trippy 1971 giallo classic. Did rich socialite Carol Hammond (gialli goddess Florinda Bolkan) kill her nymphomaniac neighbour during a depraved orgy of LSD-induced sadistic sex? Or is she just being framed by her philandering husband? Swinging London decadence, scandalous blackmail, neurotic visions and gory throat slashing all wrapped up in one of Ennio Morricone’s finest scores. Quirky touches of Fulci fantasy horror make this stylish psycho thriller a quintessential masterpiece of the giallo genre.

SPLICE – UK Premiere
From Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube and Cypher, and visionary producer Guillermo del Toro, comes a new kind of monster movie. Rebellious scientists Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley defy legal and ethical boundaries and forge ahead with a dangerous experiment: splicing together human and animal DNA to create a new organism. Named ‘Dren’ the creature rapidly develops from a deformed female infant into a beautiful chimera, who forges a bond with both of her creators. But then that bond turns deadly in a Frankenstein fable for the modern era…

REYKJAVIK WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE – World Premiere
A group of tourists embark on a sightseeing trip aboard a whaling vessel with none other than Captain Gunnar (Leatherface) Hansen himself. It’s when the ship breaks down the terror starts because the day-trippers come under attack from a crew of deranged Fishbillies hellbent on mayhem and slaughter. Let the bloody sea battle begin in director Julius Kemp’s horror comedy hybrid with a strong surreal flavour, the first exploitation film ever made by the Icelandic Film Industry.

Full programme at www.frightfest.co.uk.

Festivals

53rd London Film Festival Round Up

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

53nd LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

14-29 October 2009

LFF website

As always, the London Film Festival acted as an advance preview for some of the big releases coming out in the next few months – including Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, John Hillcoat’s The Road and Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. We will have full-length reviews of those films on their release, so here we have to chosen to concentrate on the surprises and unknown pleasures of this year’s festival.

Mother

Following his success with monster movie The Host, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho returns to less commercial territory in his fourth and possibly best film to date, pouring his genre-defying talent into a dazzling psychological thriller that is both a disturbing family drama and witty detective story of sorts. Mother features a striking central performance from Korean TV actress Kim Hye-ja as the vigilant mother who will stop at nothing to protect her grown-up, mentally impaired son. When the emotionally fragile Do-joon is accused of murdering a high school girl and lazy policemen squeeze a questionable confession out of him just so they can close the case, the feisty widow sets out to prove his innocence, investigating the mysterious crime herself. Pushing past the bounds of conventional film noir, Bong elegantly wraps his superbly twisted narrative in stylistically assured, smartly composed scenes while creating an atmosphere that is somewhat ironic and wonderfully sinister at the same time. A festival favourite worldwide. PAMELA JAHN

Showing as part of the Bong Joon-ho retrospective at the BFI Southbank, London, on November 14.

Metropia

Blending the acute paranoia of the best dystopian science fiction with the noir futurism of Blade Runner and Dark City, Metropia is a brilliant little gem. In a permanently dark Europe where life is mostly confined to the underground and cycling has become an extreme sport, an everyman named Roger starts following a beautiful and inevitably mysterious blonde woman who may be able to explain why he’s started hearing voices. The stunning, innovative animation creates a richly detailed world that is both fascinatingly strange and disturbingly familiar. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

45365

Winner of the audience award at the SXSW festival, 45365 is a surprising discovery. A low-key but moving documentary, it weaves together the storylines of the inhabitants of Sidney, Ohio – from the high school kids on the all-important football team to the police in their patrol cars, the judge running for re-election and the local troublemaker and his damaged mother. Created by local filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross, the result is a subtle, intimate look at both the highs and lows of life in a small town. The film’s cinéma vérité aesthetic is brilliantly rendered; refreshingly, the young brothers reject the traditional narrative voice-overs and talking heads that so many documentaries rely on, instead letting the often lyrical visuals speak for themselves. It’s a tender, loving, and utterly captivating film. SARAH CRONIN

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

When I saw an ad for this last year, I was mystified. Now I’ve seen it, I still am, in a good way. How Werner Herzog ended up helming a kind of remake of Ferarra’s film, starring Nicholas Cage I don’t know, and don’t really want to. I prefer to think of it as a product from an alternate universe where Herzog does this kind of thing all the time. What you need to know: it’s a blast, and funny as hell, with Ferrrara’s gritty tortured Catholicism tossed in favour of wilful absurdity and a plethora of lizards. Cage is terrific, with a lopsided gait and a crackpipe laugh, torturing grannies and shaking down football stars, screaming one quotable line after another. I watched the whole thing grinning like a loon. It’s every cop show cliché reflected in a hall of mirrors – wholly indecent fun. MARK STAFFORD

Dogtooth (Kynodontas)

The well-deserved recipient of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes festival, Giorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth is an inventive and riveting film that blurs the line between the real and the utterly grotesque and is infused with a science fiction feel. The story (the less you know, the better) takes place almost entirely within the confines of a spacious family house, inhabited by a married couple and their three grown-up children, who have never set foot outside and are confined to the ludicrous universe created by their parents’ cruel games and peculiar educational methods. Opting for fixed, meticulously framed shots and a dazzling, yet unhurried visual style, Lanthimos gradually reveals the details of this twisted, self-enclosed world while crafting a consistently troubling atmosphere of hilarious otherworldliness and lurking evil. Full of amazing twists, dark, silly humour and irreverent spirit, Dogtooth is an obscure mini-marvel not to be missed. PAMELA JAHN

Planned UK release.

44 Inch Chest

Colin (Ray Winstone), is lying, drunk as a lord, on the floor of his trashed house, listening to Nilsson’s ‘Without You’, on repeat. His wife (Joanne Whalley) has revealed that she loves someone else and he isn’t taking it well. His crew of dodgy old geezers (John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane, Ian McShane) decide something must be done, so they kidnap the young loverboy and arrange for Colin to administer justice. Malcolm Venville’s 44 Inch Chest has much going for it, a great cast on cracking form, crisp photography, a meaty script by the writers of Sexy Beast, a bravura cinematic opening, and… and I really wish it didn’t all feel like an unsuccessfully retooled stage play, mainly confined to a single room, full of unreal speechifying, and with an unsatisfying conclusion to boot. Still, just hearing these actors delivering this biblically profane dialogue is a pleasure, and the thing gets pretty damned trippy and intense as we go further into Colin’s fractured mind. MARK STAFFORD

UK theatrical release: 22 January 2010.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot)

The long-lost raw footage of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished 1964 big-budget psycho-thriller L’Enfer is still intriguing and dazzling to look at, infused with swirling lights and blue-lipped, cigarette-puffing fantasy temptresses. A real shame, however, that although director Serge Bromberg has managed to speak to quite a few members of the original crew, this behind-the-scenes investigation has so little to say about the reasons behind Clouzot’s failure to complete the film. PAMELA JAHN

UK theatrical release: 6 November 2009.

Paper Heart

If you can put up with that whole lo-fi home-made cutesy indie scene (Demetri Martin, check, Gondryesque cardboard puppet sequences, check, naïve acoustic pop songs, check) More to the point, if you can put up with whiny-voiced scrunch-faced munchkin Charlyne Yi, then the neat central conceit of director Nicholas Jasenovic making a documentary about the search for true love destroying any hope of true love occurring by swamping a budding potential romance with his desire to film fake love clichés (kooky montages, walks on the beach, trips to Paris) will work for you. And a whole series of games with reality and illusion will open up. I can appreciate it’s a stretch. Aside from the ‘fake’ romance with Michael Cera (check) stuff, the ‘real’ documentary throws up some singular characters and amusing stories. Up to you. MARK STAFFORD

UK theatrical release: 6 November 2009.

Hollis Frampton: Hapax Legomena

The LFF offered a rare chance to see Hollis Frampton’s Hapax Legomena series of seven films in its entirety. A central figure of American avant-garde cinema of the 60s and 70s, Frampton was a supremely sharp film theorist and a witty, cerebral filmmaker. Together with Zorns Lemma, Hapax Legomena is Frampton’s most well-known work. The first film, (nostalgia), from 1971, is one of his most accessible and pleasurable, presenting a series of photographs that are burned as a narrator recounts memories and anecdotes relating to each image. The twist is that the photographs and the narration are out of sync, allowing the film to explore the relationship between image and sound as well as the nature of memory. The following six films take as their point of departure a similarly formal set-up to investigate image, space, perception, consciousness and ultimately, life. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

Lebanon

The one-line sell for this claustrophobic little war movie runs ‘Das Boot in a tank’, and for once that’s pretty damn accurate. Based on writer-director Samuel Maoz’s experiences, it’s about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (as seen in Waltz with Bashir), and we the audience are trapped with four ill-prepared and uneasy crew inside an armoured box dripping with sweat, muck, dog ends and soup croutons (don’t ask). We only know what they know, which is precious little, only see what they can see through their sights, and apart from the opening and closing shots of the film, we are very much inside the tank for the tight 92-minute running time. Tempers fray and victims mount, unwelcome guests are received and everything falls apart. It’s heavy-handed in places, and a little clichéd, but it feels authentic: grimy, stinky, delirious and chaotic. It works. MARK STAFFORD

Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue)

After a disappointing venture into romantic costume drama in her previous film, The Last Mistress, Catherine Breillat returns to the festival this year with a gentler and more personal work than before – a younger sister herself, she focuses on sibling rivalry. Originally scripted and produced for French television, Bluebeard is a subtly suggestive retelling of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about an ugly and extremely wealthy lord whose wives disappear after a year under mysterious circumstances until he falls for the much younger Marie-Catherine who agrees to marry him in order to escape the shadow of her beautiful, talented older sister. What makes this understated, low-budget film a pure pleasure is the bold, teasing dialogue between the two sisters in the film’s framing plot, set in modern time, in which Catherine, the younger girl, thoroughly enjoys terrifying her older sister Anne by reading her the infamous tale from a book in the attic. Playfully grim and increasingly disturbing, with a wonderfully cruel narrative that hints at the fiercely, sexually provocative spirit of Breillat’s previous work, Bluebeard slowly inveigles you before hitting you hard. PAMELA JAHN

Planned UK release.

Samson and Delilah

In a decidedly Third World aboriginal community in central Australia, we watch gas huffing ne’er-do-well Samson and dutiful Delilah start an awkward, almost wordless teenage relationship. Warwick Thornton’s fine film sets up a world out of repeating daily rhythms and rituals (a chugging ska band, ants, solvent abuse, an unanswered telephone, taking wheelchair-bound Nana to the health clinic), and then upsets it to devastating effect. Our young couple go on the run and end up on the streets of a nameless suburban sprawl, where bad things happen. Samson and Delilah is visually accomplished, funny and moving, putting the audience through tension, fear, and despair before delivering a moment of sweet heart-tugging release. And then it carries on for another half an hour. Ah well. MARK STAFFORD

Kinatay

If it hadn’t been for Antichrist, Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s second feature Kinatay might well have been the most controversial Cannes entry this year. To a large extent filmed in real time and adopting a detached, observational style, Kinatay depicts the kidnapping, rape, murder and dismemberment of a drug-addicted stripper as seen through the eyes of a participating police academy student. This is certainly not a film for everyone, but it is a bewildering and uncompromising screen experience that explores very murky moral territory. PAMELA JAHN