52nd LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

15-30 October 2008

The Electric Sheep team round up their favourite films of this year’s London Film Festival.

Hunger

A gripping, powerful and hauntingly beautiful film, Hunger is artist Steve McQueen’s slow-paced dramatisation of the last months in the life of Irish Republican Bobby Sands, who starved himself to death in 1981 in protest against the British government’s refusal to treat convicted IRA members as political prisoners. Despite an arguably impressive display of physical violence, there are moments when stunning shots of artistic beauty lend the film a grim poetic atmosphere. The result is a mesmerising choreography that demands utter commitment from the actors (an extraordinary central performance from Michael Fassbender), and it is also an inventive bursting forth of McQueen the filmmaker. PAMELA JAHN

Waltz with Bashir

Ari Folman’s brilliant animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon war was one of the best films at the LFF. This is a brave and powerful movie, both stylistically and in its treatment of Folman’s involvement in one of the most controversial episodes in Israel’s history, the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The animation beautifully conveys the depth and intensity of Folman’s story as he meets with fellow friends, soldiers and journalists in his attempt to counter the collective amnesia suffered by witnesses of the event. This is an astonishing, unmissable piece of filmmaking with one of the most harrowing and moving endings seen in years. SARAH CRONIN

United Red Army

Koji Wakamatsu’s latest film is by far the most complex, stunning and utterly demanding film I’ve seen in the course of this year’s festival circuit. In 190 visually and conceptually engrossing minutes, United Red Army traces the history of the Japanese militant left from its origins in 1960 to its escalation in the early 1970s. Basing his film on comprehensive research as well as his own memories and connections to some members of the Red Army faction when it was still active, Wakamatsu not merely reveals the gruelling events that took place at the time, he once again pushes the boundaries of filmmaking in almost every take, taking the story from docu-style drama to claustrophobic chamber piece into breathtaking action thriller in the final act. What remains is a profound and painful dissection of ideology itself, rendered with an impressive clarity that is rarely seen on the big screen. PAMELA JAHN

Afterschool

I found myself utterly stunned by Antonio Campos’s feature debut Afterschool. A class video project in an upscale American prep school accidentally captures a tragedy, and we follow the reactions of the school, its pupils, and particularly of the boy, Robert (Ezra Miller), who shot the incident, an alienated and unpopular student who becomes a source of anxiety for the institution. If, as is usually the case, high school/college movies are intended as portraits of America in microcosm, then this is the most bilious, vicious picture of that nation I’ve encountered in years. It’s a tough watch from the outset, with an unsettling montage of internet clips giving way to the face of Robert as he wanks away to some unpleasant porn, and never stops being unnerving thereafter. The dark nature of the story is emphasised by visually inventive, oddly framed photography throughout; imitating both the lopsided compositions of amateur cameramen and the disaffected gaze of a sociopath, it builds its own woozy unhealthy atmosphere, a world viewed through the wrong head. It’s creepy and smart and it may just screw with your head for days. MARK STAFFORD

Home

A happily eccentric middle-class family live in the ideal, open surroundings of the French countryside, right on the edge of a long unused motorway. However, when the motorway is suddenly opened to swarms of traffic, their lives become intolerable as the noise, pollution and danger invades their lives. As the disruption to their normal routine eats away at their freedoms, they descend into semi-primordial behavioural patterns and bizarre somnambulant rituals. Beautifully filmed, with a superb, believable cast (Isabelle Huppert is outstanding), Home explores the deep ramifications of urbanisation and the impact of rampant capitalism upon the human psyche. On one level it’s a witty, modern-day environmental parable, and on another it’s a surreal descent into the subconscious fears and desires of the id. Birthed from the same otherworldly penumbra as classics like Weekend, Themroc and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Home is a unique and strange masterpiece where Kafka meets Ballard on the arid tarmac of the Motorway. JAMES DC

Hansel and Gretel

A South Korean grown-up reworking of the familiar children’s story, Yim Phil-sung’s Hansel and Gretel is a dark, surreal fairy tale weaving themes of lost innocence, dysfunctional families, revenge, trust and love. When a young man driving along a country road crashes his car, he is taken to a ravishing house in the middle of the forest by a strange, ethereal young girl. He is looked after by her family but when he tries to go back to his car the next day, and the following days too, he finds he cannot leave the forest. Forced to remain with the three children and faced with a series of bizarre occurrences, he gradually disentangles the web of mystery that surrounds the children to discover the truth about their identity. The enchanted house and forest are beautifully depicted, the children are suitably ambivalent and the film’s atmosphere is perfectly balanced between sinister and magical. A real treat. VIRGINIE Sí‰LAVY

Il Divo

Winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Il Divo sees director Paolo Sorrentino apply his trademark formal beauty to the life of one of Italy’s most notorious politicians. Seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was tried on several occasions for murder, corruption and Mafia involvement, but defended himself successfully each time. The characters accused along with Andreotti are many and difficult to distinguish – expect a re-edit before the theatrical release – but rather than try to establish the facts, Sorrentino chooses instead to focus on the aegis of ambiguity that Andreotti forges for himself. In this character study he could have no better co-conspirator than his The Consequences of Love star Tony Servillo, who is hypnotic as Andreotti. ALEXANDER PASHBY

Momma’s Man

On paper, Momma’s Man doesn’t necessarily hold that much appeal: a thirty-something man visits his parents at their New York loft and finds himself incapable of returning home to his wife and baby in Los Angeles. But director Azazel Jacobs’ film is much more than a sum of its parts. Jacobs cast his own remarkable parents (influential experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and artist Flo Jacobs) and shot the movie in the same Manhattan apartment where they’ve lived for the last 40 years. Matt Boren puts in a great performance as their son, who’s desperate to be a little kid again. The location itself is terrific, packed with the eccentric ephemera collected over a lifetime, and while the film’s laid-back pace demands some patience, this funny and poignant film has that indefinable something that marks out the most memorable films. SARAH CRONIN

Beautiful Losers

Pulled from this year’s EIFF line-up at the very last minute, Beautiful Losers was a welcome addition to the small number of worthwhile documentaries included in the LFF programme. In an unashamedly nostalgic but extremely likeable fashion, co-director Aaron Rose looks back in affection at his own achievement, New York’s Alleged Gallery, and the loose-knit group of American artists who became involved in the creative movement that grew around the small storefront space in the early 90s. It features artists such as Barry McGee, Chris Johanson, Ed and Deanna Templeton, Jo Jackson, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills amongst others, with Harmony Korine being no doubt the most weirdly charming contributor. PAMELA JAHN

Not Quite Hollywood

Not Quite Hollywood is music promo director Mark Hartley’s affectionate no-holds-barred-pedal-to-the-metal salute to Ozploitation cinema, charting its rise in the late 60s, fall in the late 80s, and recent resurgence with the likes of Wolf Creek. It rounds up an impressive roll call of talking heads from the scene, who, in true Aussie style, are refreshingly blunt about their experiences and each other, and intercuts them with a generous helping of clips from the films. It’s great fun: Hartley seems to be terrified of boring his audience and packs out his 102 minutes with insane stunts, montages of naked Sheilas, automotive carnage and explosions, and countless outrageous stories, all edited to a zippy sprint. The archive footage of Dennis Hopper scrambling for his life from his burning stunt double would justify your time and money on its own. It’s divided into three sections, sex, horror and action, and the movies can also usefully be divided into three types: familiar late night /video library classics (The Long Weekend, Patrick, Turkey Shoot, Road Games, and of course Mad Max ); films that you can safely avoid (Oz sex comedies of the 70s look just as toe-curlingly Christ-awful as British sex comedies of the 70s, which is some kind of achievement); and, and here is where NQH really scores, the numerous neglected, lost and largely forgotten films which the film makes you desperately want to see. As well as having a high population density of insane stuntmen the country was also clearly never lacking in spectacular outback scenery or 70mm lenses to shoot it with, and from the clips included here alone, the likes of Fair Game and Dead End Drive-In all look glorious. If I must quibble, I’d say that the pacy style of the film excludes any real discussion of the social context, aesthetics or especially the grisly sexual politics of ozploitation cinema; which is sorely needed, especially when the inevitable Quentin Tarantino keeps popping up enthusing about one woman-bashing scene after another. Hartley’s default setting is breathless, shameless celebration over analysis, and NQH often seems to actively avoid deciding whether the films are actually any damn good or not (Though I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Howling 3: The Marsupials sucks koala cock). Apparently, the director has launched his own line of ozploitation DVDs so any viewers wishing to familiarise themselves with some authentic Australian sleaze will soon be able to judge for themselves. Happy hunting. MARK STAFFORD

Colombiage 08

16-19 october 2008

Riverside Studios, London

Colombiage website

With a whole weekend of talks, music, food and literature to take in, cinema was just one part of this Colombian cultural festival based at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. The event began in 2007 and aims to display the richness of contemporary Colombian arts.

The film programme reflected the growing strength of Colombian film production. Directed by Felipe Martí­nez and a massive success in its home country, Bluff was a confident comedy/thriller with an inventive plot and some neat twists. There may be a Hollywood genre at the bottom of this but the film drew life from local nuances and a colloquial flavour and in that respect recalled Nine Queens from Argentina. In Bluff we got a nice line in insouciant cruelty from the soap opera diva Alexandra (Catalina Aristizábal), plus a great performance from Luis Eduardo Arango as the petulant and impulsive detective Walter Montes.

Felipe Guerrero’s documentary, Paraí­so, demonstrated a different kind of confidence. Presenting images of Colombia stripped of context and commentary, it relied on the strength of the imagery and its abstracted soundtrack. This dislocated and poetic approach evoked overpowering aromas of pain, memory and humour, especially in its wry spoken conclusion.

Other films shown at the event included the highly recommended Wandering Shadows (La Sombra del caminante), the 2004 debut of director of Ciro Guerra, and Satanas, an exploration of morality and human behaviour based on the novel by Mario Mendez.

Certainly Columbiage was a triumph in terms of presenting film from this often-neglected, or at least misrepresented, country. It was also the perfect appetiser for the Discovering Latin America film festival which kicks off in London on November 27.

Nick Dutfield

The Discovering Latin America film festival runs from November 27 to December 11 in London. For more details, visit the DLA website.

52nd London Film Festival

15-30 October 2008

Various venues, London

Programme

The last major event on the festival circuit, the BFI London Film Festival showcases some of the best films of the year, celebrating diversity rather than big budgets and red-carpet stars, unrestrained by the high-profile awards ceremonies that dominate coverage from festivals like Cannes and Venice.

Under the umbrella of ‘history, memory and politics’, the 52nd edition of the festival kicks off with the world premiere of Ron Howard’s latest film, Frost/Nixon, an adaptation of Peter Morgan’s successful play revolving around the legendary interview granted by the disgraced Nixon to a young, ambitious David Frost. While the parallels with Bush’s own ignominious eight years in office are plainly clear, Oliver Stone’s latest tragicomedy W. hits the nail more squarely on the head. Starring Josh Brolin as George W Bush, the film charts his rather inglorious career from drunken college kid to president of the United States.

Shifting the spotlight to the Middle East, one of the festival’s undoubted highlights is the powerful, brilliant Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s animated documentary about the nightmare futility of Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon. This film should not be missed. The exploration of history, memory and politics continues with two highly anticipated films that delve into the radical terror groups that sprang out of Germany and Japan in the 1970s: veteran TV director Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, and Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army, a hit at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

The themes of retribution and redemption appear in Austrian director Gí¶tz Spielmann’s Revanche, about an ex-con seeking revenge for the death of his girlfriend in a bungled robbery. Matteo Rovere directs an Italian film noir in A Game for Girls, centered on a teenage femme fatale, while Denmark’s The Candidate is a taut and suspenseful thriller about a desperate man hunting down his blackmailers. Moving away from Europe, Hansel and Gretel is an eerie fairy tale-based thriller directed by South Korea’s Yim Phil-sung. More politically charged, Indonesia’s The Secret is a metaphysical thriller set on the mean streets of a brutal police state as two men hunt down a phantom killer.

Several noteworthy UK films are making an appearance at this year’s festival. Gerald McMorrow explores an intriguing (and stylish) alternate reality in his sci-fi film Franklyn, starring Ryan Phillippe and Eva Green. Two other British debuts are devoted to pop music culture: Nick Moran’s Telstar charts the rise and tragic fall of the influential music producer Joe Meek, while 1 2 3 4, directed by Giles Borg, is another pop-enthused film about an aspiring indie band that promises a great soundtrack.

The indie aesthetic is also at the heart of the documentary Beautiful Losers, which celebrates a loose collective of DIY artists who did their own thing on the fringes of the New York art scene in the early 90s. Another highly anticipated documentary is American Teen, something of a real-life Breakfast Club directed by Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture), while Not Quite Hollywood by Australian director Mark Hartley delves into the ‘ozploitation’ films of the 1970s.

The Experimenta section of the festival offers a rare opportunity to see two 35mm films by the Situationist leader Guy Debord, one a 1959 anti-documentary on the Situationists and the other Debord’s final film, an attack on both society and cinema made in 1978. For a lighter treat after such revolutionary fare there is The Good, the Bad and the Weird, a homage to Sergio Leone set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Manchuria from director Kim Ji-woon (A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life); and screening in the French Revolutions section is Louise-Michel, the follow-up to the outrageously funny, bad-taste road movie Aaltra.

There are countless other films with intriguing storylines screening at the festival and the only challenge will be finding a way to see them all. The festival starts on October 15 and public booking is now open.

Sarah Cronin

Toronto International Film Festival

4-13 September 2008

Website

Films followed by * are showing at the London Film Festival, 15-30 October 2008.

‘Returning to Toronto was like finding a Jaguar parked in front of a vicarage and the padre inside with a pitcher of vodka martinis reading Lolita.’ This quotation is from an article in Maclean’s magazine in 1959, and 49 years on, the vicarage is now a film festival, the padre a media publicist (some things never change), the martinis still flowing and Lolita has become flesh and hangs out at festival parties.

The 33rd Toronto International Film Festival held last month was a hectic, well-run film bonanza which was rather low on sparkling Hollywood fare – the lacklustre Appaloosa (dir. Ed Harris) was a sub-Fordian western that added nothing new to the genre and starred a miscast Renée Zellweger as ‘the widder’ woman’ and Jeremy Irons as a more camp than crook ‘baddie’; his American accent put me in mind of the one-octave-lower school of Yankee voice exemplified by Hugh Laurie in House. There was Spike Lee’s worthy, sometimes touching, but ultimately under-edited and slightly unfocused film, The Miracle of St Anna* along with the the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading and Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married.

More promising (and rewarding) though, was to push beyond the galas and premieres and dip into the plentiful screen space given over to other cultural players. Several programming strands – and a very well appointed and excellent army of press and publicists – provided plenty of scope for off-mainstream viewing like the Discovery programme, which highlighted ‘provocative feature films by new and emerging directors’. It offered two strong films, one a notable and clever first film from South Korean director Noh Young-seok with the irresistible title Daytime Drinking, the other a flawed but nonetheless very interesting film set in the days of Pinochet’s Chile, Tony Manero*, which was a second film by Pablo Larrain.

The Vanguard programme of ‘innovative filmmakers and bold films that challenge our social and cultural assumptions’ revealed its strongest works in Thomas Woschitz’s broad portmanteau Universalove, which had a significant soundtrack provided by Austrian indie band Naked Lunch, and the Filipino/French co-production Serbis (dir. Brillante Mendoza), an excellent story of a matriarchal family who own a run-down soft-core porno cinema ironically named ‘Family’, which is swarming with various misfits and characters on the societal fringe – a real discovery, this film. The Visions (‘Filmmakers who challenge our notions of mainstream cinema’), Contemporary World Cinema, Real to Reel, and Midnight Madness programmes were likewise repositories of promising and challenging films. I especially enjoyed the poetic and atmospheric black and white meditation, El Cant dels Ocells (Birdsong)* a second film from the Spanish director Albert Serra which had echoes of Tarkovsky’s work, the Cassavetes-like film of Mika Kaurismäki, Kolme viisasta miesta (Three Wise Men), and finally what was for me probably the most rewarding film of the festival, the small and wonderfully formed Goodbye Solo* (dir. Ramin Bahrani), a film set largely in a taxi cab and in which we are immersed in the character’s lives from the very outset. The film boasts a brilliant script, which the actors make seem improvised, and two fantastic performances by the leads, Red West (formerly of Elvis Presley’s Memphis Mafia) and Souleymane Sy Savane. Savane has a terrifically charismatic screen presence and easily embodies the goodness of his character Solo, in striking contrast to the darker demons and disillusionment internalised by West’s character, William. It offers an honest and accurate portrayal of the character’s stories and avoids the slick resolution that a Hollywood treatment would have required. The Real to Reel documentary programme likewise held many pleasant surprises; one notable film, which also caught my attention at the Brit Doc Festival earlier this year, was the Richard Parry film Blood Trail, which comes with the tagline ’13 Years, 3 Wars, 1 Photographer’ and follows the fortunes (and misfortunes) of war photographer Robert King. It is to these alternative strands that, I suspect, most readers of Electric Sheep would have found their cinematic radars pointed, and if there is any cultural justice in this world these festival gems will be picked up and given distribution and exhibition.

The festival was dominated by two themes this year: the much bandied about perception of a ‘New Realism’ in recent cinema (sounding very much, I recognise, like a themed issue of Granta magazine), and the triumph of screen veterans who we didn’t know we cared about in the first place, namely, Mickey Rourke and Jean-Claude Van Damme in The Wrestler and JCVD respectively. Electric Sheep bills itself as ‘a deviant view of cinema’; well, here’s one: Mickey Rourke is one of the greatest screen actors of his generation. OK, I admit to more than a bit of hyperbole there, but his performance in Aronofsky’s fine film (don’t look for the over-wrought significations that characterise the rest of the director’s work) is exquisite: it is well-paced, well-judged, well-balanced, incredibly nuanced, thoughtful, deeply committed – and I can hardly believe that I’m stating all this in print. But I am.

Of course, Rourke looks like hell – a combination of who knows what boxing blows, steroids, botox and surgery that makes him look like a walking, talking plasticination artwork by Prof Gunther von Hagens. But it’s one hell of a bravura performance that he creates and it could fit comfortably in a list of best-ever sporting performances, just narrowly eclipsed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. A bet: Oscar nomination forthcoming. Any takers? His performance notwithstanding though, the film does have flaws, with a storyline that entails the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold, the estranged daughter who all too quickly reconnects with the father figure and the near-obligatory contemporary text of masculinity in crisis.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the Belgian/French/Luxembourgian film JCVD is also a bit of a revelation. Directed by Mabrouk El Mechri, the film is an action-comedy examination of the nature of fame – particularly Van Damme’s own – in a very surprising and highly intertextual film reminiscent of Being John Malkovich. In fact, intertextual and self-reflexive narratives as well as elliptical story lines were found in many of the films shown in the festival.

It would be remiss not to mention the many films – short, documentary and feature length – that were made in the host country and are screened annually at the festival. Canadian cinema has had a bumpy history: sometimes shining, more often good rather than great, and full of sub-Hollywood, sub-European cinematic compromises. Too often worthy and aspirant, it has produced few genuine masterpieces – among which I would cite Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine, Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire and, for historical reasons, Don Shebib’s Goin’s Down the Road. The best directors, like Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, have often sought funding and facilities outside the country. The two ‘Great White North’ hopes this year were Passchendale (dir. Paul Gross – he of Due South television fame), a First World War epic, and Toronto Stories (dir. Sook-Yin Lee, Sudz Sutherland, David Weaver and Aaron Woodley), which is very reminiscent in structure of the multi-directed New York Stories (1989). Both films share some of the previously mentioned national qualities: worthy, aspirant and just short of truly major Canadian/international statements. Hold out for Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg.

There remains only one highlight of the Toronto Festival to note: the return to filmmaking after a self-imposed sabbatical of 17 years in which he developed his painterly skills, of the great Polish director, Jerzy Skolimowski, the maker of several significant international films including Deep End (1970), The Shout (1978) Moonlighting (1982) and the rarely seen Ferdydurke (1991). His new film, Four Nights with Anna, is an intense portrait of a romantic loner who becomes increasingly bold in his obsessive spying on a local nurse who he had seen raped years before. He eventually penetrates her personal space by entering her apartment, unseen and unheard, while she sleeps. The slowly unfolding, carefully framed and atmospheric filming tells a slightly sinister, deeply psychological story. Excerpts from an interview with the director will appear in a later ES issue.

James B Evans

16th Raindance Film Festival

1-12 October 2008

Festival programme

Anyone with an iota of interest in indie film, or indeed mainstream film, knows Raindance, if not as an organisation that has championed independent filmmaking for close to 20 years, then most definitely for its annual film festival. The Raindance Festival, this year held October 1-12, is widely accepted as the most important event for independent filmmaking in the UK.

Now in its 16th year, the festival has quite a reputation to uphold. We asked festival producer Jesse Vile how they manage to keep things interesting: ‘We’re not tied to any government funding so we have free rein to do what we want. Nothing is ever too out there for us. We’re looking for balls, originality and something that shakes things up. The programming does evolve through the films we receive so when you look back on it, each year has an energy and style of its own’.

Over the years independent filmmaking has seen a shift in trends, and this has been reflected in both UK and international entries to the festival. ‘There has been an enormous increase in documentary film production over the last five years, and each year we get more and more sent to us’, explains Vile. ‘For a while everyone wanted to be Quentin Tarantino but now it seems they all want to be Morgan Spurlock’. Whatever genre they choose to work in, however, the most important thing would-be filmmakers should remember is to make a film with what is available. In an interview on Raindance TV, Shane Meadows reminds them that he started his career thanks to video. For Vile, this is simply what independent filmmaking is all about: ‘You’re not going to make The Godfather on a cheap camcorder but you can create something amazing that all the money and 35mm film in the world couldn’t create’.

Raindance has helped launch the careers of the likes of Guy Ritchie, Matthew Vaughn, Christopher Nolan, and Paul Brooks – all of whom were Raindance workshop participants back in 1992. Since helping these talents to emerge, the festival has not changed its core values and continues to expose and assist more filmmakers each year. For Vile, it is that aspect of the festival that makes it so vital: ‘We’re not just a festival that screens independent films, but we’re an independent organisation, so we know all about the struggles of getting things done on a limited budget. We maintain personal relationships with a lot of the filmmakers that come through our festival and continue for years to help them out in any way we can. I don’t know other festivals that do that to the extent that we do’.

The Raindance programme has now been announced and can be explored here. With screen legend Faye Dunaway as a special guest and a jury that includes Nicolas Roeg and Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, it should be another top indie feast.

Siouxzi Mernagh

TOP PICKS

BLACKSPOT (New Zealand)

Two young men face darkness of an unexpected kind when their car breaks down on an isolated road during a night trip.

THE DAISY CHAIN (UK)

After the death of their baby daughter, a young couple foster a strange little girl who has lost her entire family. With Samantha Morton in the role of the grieving mother.

A LIFE IN THE DEATH OF JOE MEEK (USA)

Documentary that chronicles the rise, fall and resurrection of Joe Meek, Britain’s first independent pop record producer.

NIGHTWATCHING (UK)

Peter Greenaway’s extravagant look at Rembrandt’s romantic and professional life and the controversy he created by the identification of a murderer in the painting The Night Watch.

PVC-1 (Colombia)

A bizarre act of terrorism leaves a woman fitted with a plastic collar filled with explosives by a criminal gang who will detonate it if her family don’t pay a ransom. Shot in one continuous 84 minute steadicam take, PVC-1 is a groundbreaking thriller that has won numerous festival awards.

THE RIND (Uruguay)

Working in an advertising agency, slacker Pedro finds himself hastily promoted when his talented partner dies abruptly. Under pressure to put forward ideas, he investigates his dead colleague’s life in a desperate search for inspiration.

SEVEN SIGNS (USA)

Colonel JD Wilkes (the charismatic frontman and songwriter of the Legendary Shack Shakers) sets off to prove that the older stranger South still exists in all of its eerie, time-worn and Gothic glory.

The Compass of Mystery

Sept 26-Oct 19

Bristol

More information on the Compass website

The Compass Film Festival is not the average week-long-vaguely-film-related-piss-up audiences have come to expect from indie film festivals. On the contrary, it is a considered, annual event embracing the arts scene of Bristol in addition to screening films from the four compass points of the world, which each year are represented by four different countries. This year the festival looks at Poland as North, Somalia as South, Argentina as West, and Pakistan as East. Since 2006, the Compass Film Festival has shifted both thematically (Horror in 06, Resistance in 07 and Mystery this year) and physically, from Bristol art cinemas in 2006-07 to the Mivart St Studios, a former Victorian factory that houses over 40 resident artists and which organiser Sam King describes as ‘the perfect choice for the theme of mystery as an unknown and as yet undefined venue’.

It’s all a big nod to the richness of the Bristol arts scene: Bristol, it seems, is the Berlin of the UK right now. The festival programme aims to balance international films with those that are locally produced. Unusually, the festival is only open for submissions in one category, the ‘Five Minutes of Mystery’ short film competition: the remainder of the programme is selected by the organisers to fit the festival’s aims and theme. This year, the three-week event will also involve VJing master classes, a theatrical performance by a Bristol-based collective, an art project by local schools, exhibitions by local artists, a live poetry event and potentially some involvement from the Bristol Society of Magic!

So what motivated the choice of theme this year? ‘Mystery appealed to us as a concept that would be accessible and imaginative, but that would also allow for a broad range of creative interpretations’, says King. ‘The occult is just one element of mystery that we would like to explore through the film programme. We are also looking at representations of mythology and mysticism, science fiction and alternative realities in film. The range is very varied – from a session on film noir, through science fiction to thinking about mystery in terms of representing unknown or emerging filmmakers, and promoting the cultural production of lesser known areas in Bristol.’

It is a timely choice, and it fits well with the interest in the mystery and the occult that is currently found in mainstream filmmaking. Paradoxically for King, mystery is often a way of clarifying complex issues: ‘The increase of a mysterious element in film may come from a public demand for answers, and the sense of blindness about influences and factors that contribute directly to political decisions. Fantasy often offers a means of making sense of political conflict and war. I think the popularity of fantasy and mystery is not simply about escapism, but about dealing with social and political issues through an imaginative lens’.

Coming largely from an academic publishing background, King and the rest of the organisers are interested in bridging mainstream and scholarly film interests. They have set themselves quite a task. The rest of us can sit back and benefit from a unique and informed festival that’s all about generating a positive community spirit and encouraging new directions in the arts.

Siouxzi Mernagh

Film4 FrightFest

21-25 August 2008

Odeon West End, London

Programme

Survival in the wilderness was a big theme of this year’s Film4 FrightFest, with British thriller Eden Lake, Spanish offering King of the Hill (El Rey de la montaña, a last-minute substitute for The Substitute), and the straightforward chase movie Manhunt from Norway all re-treading the familiar backwoods path of this particular horror sub-genre. The much-anticipated Eden Lake, which opened the festival, was the most disappointing of the three. The tale of a young couple who come to harm at the hands of a group of local thugs while on a weekend away in the country, Eden Lake crassly played on tabloid fears of delinquent youths in the most unsubtle way. The middle-class lovebirds played by Kelly Reilly and Michael Fassbender were attractive and decent and had enough of a back story to ensure that we would care about them. The working-class youths and their families were caricatured as rude, violent, ugly white trash. The depiction of the group’s dynamics was simplistic and unconvincing and the escalation of violence ludicrously over the top. The film provided no insights into class conflict or youth violence, but simply further demonised an already beleaguered social category. Much less hyped and much superior was Julian Richards’s as yet unreleased Summer Scars (shown at Cine-Excess last May), which offered an infinitely more nuanced, intelligent and credible approach to a similar subject matter.

Criminal youths certainly seem to be the bogeymen of the moment and King of the Hill also focused on murderous children. The first part was reminiscent of Duel, as protagonist Quim, derailed from his journey by a chance encounter with pretty kleptomaniac Bea, became the target of an invisible gunman while driving down an isolated mountain road. Soon Quim was re-united with Bea and they were forced to try and trust each other to escape from their hunters. Although the film had many familiar elements there were enough unpredictable twists to keep the audience interested. The hunt was finally revealed to be a cruel children’s game and the minimal motivations and characterisation gave the film a certain existential edge. The chilling dénouement in an abandoned village was all the more unnerving for the beautiful light that bathed it.

Manhunt was another pared down human hunt movie in which four gorgeous young people were chased through the forest by a bunch of hairy rednecks. Although it was nothing new, it was a very tight, well-made, gripping survival thriller. As in Eden Lake and King of the Hill – although for different reasons in the latter – the conclusion was entirely pessimistic, which made it marginally more interesting.

Doppelgängers also featured prominently, in Mirrors (Alexandre Aja’s remake of the excellent South Korean movie Into the Mirror), From Within, Time Crimes and The Broken. In the brilliant Time Crimes, the apparition of doubles was caused by the inadvertent time travelling of its hapless everyman hero, which gave rise to increasingly complicated and paradoxical situations. Sean Ellis’s The Broken was a tight, classy, intelligent psychological thriller in which doppelgängers entered human reality by breaking through mirrors. Bathed in a cold blue light throughout, it was a visually accomplished and chillingly convincing piece of work.

The Broken demonstrated the strength of British horror filmmaking, together with The Dead Outside. Produced on a micro-budget, the latter made great use of its gloomy Scottish location. The central idea of an epidemic that turns people into zombified aggressors owed something to 28 Days Later, but the film was more interested in psychological tension than in straight horror thrills. As two survivors separately took refuge in an isolated house occupied by a moody young woman, the film focused on the relationships that developed between the characters while they tried to fend off the infected.

Fear(s) of the Dark, a black and white animated film directed by renowned illustrators such as Charles Burns and Butch, and Let The Right One In, a Swedish teen vampire movie that has already wowed audiences at the Tribeca and Edinburgh festivals, were the two most original offerings of the festival. Fear(s) of the Dark offered a multi-faceted approach to our phobias and superbly demonstrated inventive visual and thematic uses of animation. Let the Right One In was a beautiful film that combined a slow pace and hushed atmosphere with a poignant exploration of love and a sensitive depiction of children intensified by rare moments of violence.

The prize for most extreme film has to go to Martyrs, which was described as ‘2008’s most unforgettable and controversial horror experience’ in the festival programme, and certainly didn’t disappoint. The story of two young women, one of whom attempts to take revenge on the family she believes abused her as a child, it developed in an entirely unpredictable way, taking the audience into uncharted territory. The extreme physical violence rarely felt gratuitous and the film’s exploration of human suffering and of the idea of martyrdom was fascinating. It was a film of excess, of excessive darkness and excessive violence, and as such it will repulse and captivate audiences in equal measures. But beyond the more explicitly brutal scenes, the film was really about existential despair, which made it deeply affecting. Martyrs was not without flaws, but there is no denying that French director Pascal Laugier’s vision is powerful, ambitious and unique.

Laugier was there to introduce the film and take questions from the audience, as were many other filmmakers, which is one of the great perks of FrightFest. The audience itself was as much the star of the festival as any of the guests, however, and was cheering, whooping and clapping throughout. Such enthusiasm and dedication (the pass holders were in the Odeon West End roughly from 11am to 11pm), not only from the audience but also from the organisers, make FrightFest a supremely enjoyable event and single it out as a very special occasion in the festival calendar.

Virginie Sélavy

Eden Lake is released in the UK on Sept 12 by Optimum, Fear(s) of the Dark (Metrodome) and Mirrors (Universal) on Oct 3. Read our review of Fear(s) of the Dark and our interview with Charles Burns in our autumn print issue, out now.

Film4 FrightFest

21-25 August 2008

Odeon West End, London

Programme

2008 is promising to be a vintage year for Film4 FrightFest, with what is possibly their strongest line-up to date. The festival has always endeavoured to represent the full spectrum of the horror genre, from trashy gore to arty, poetic fantasy and this year the mix is exquisitely calibrated, from the cerebral time travel thriller Time Crimes (set to be remade by David Cronenberg) and smart Korean serial killer tale The Chaser, to teenage zombie comedy Dance of the Dead and splatter fest Tokyo Gore Police. Some of the films showing are particular favourites of ours, including Fear(s) of the Dark, a collection of short animated films by leading graphic artists which explore our deepest phobias (look out for our interview with Charles Burns in the autumn print issue!) and Let The Right One In, a subtle, moving evocation of the world of childhood through a pre-teen vampire tale.

The festival opens on Thursday 21 August with the British film Eden Lake. ‘They don’t want me to use the word controversial but I think I’m going to have to because it does tap into the zeitgeist’, says Alan Jones, FrightFest co-director and programmer. ‘Every day you read about hoodie horror knife crime in the newspapers and it is a reflection of that. It’s James Watkins’s first time as a director and I think he really shows great promise. It’s a very tough film to watch, it’s very bleak, but the acting is superb. I’m very pleased with the British strand of the festival. If FrightFest has any sort of mandate at all it is to showcase upcoming British talent; we’re in London, it’s an important part of what the festival does, and we’ve got seven movies this year that are all pretty good.’

At the other end, FrightFest will close with the Roger Corman-produced Death Race, which is loosely based on the 1975 also Corman-produced Death Race 2000 (which we’ll be covering in our autumn print issue). ‘You have to be careful with your closing film, it can’t be something too downbeat, you want to send the audience off on a high’, explains Jones. ‘We were originally thinking of closing with Martyrs, but we thought, god no, they’re gonna come out of that like zombies wanting to slit their wrists; whereas Death Race is action-packed, it’s fun, it’s silly. It’s very well done, it’s got a massive budget and it’s got Jason Statham in it.’

With Death Race being such a big-budget film, can it really retain the element of political satire of the 1975 film? ‘Very much so’, was Jones’s response. ‘I think that’s one of the reasons why the genre is surviving. I still think horror and fantasy is the best way to put across contemporary concerns. Most of our films do that this year. They’re all pretty strong on the allegory side and Death Race keys into that as much as the other films.’

The highlight of this year’s line-up for Jones is Martyrs, a seriously disturbing-sounding French torture film. ‘When we saw Martyrs in Cannes I just knew it was the fantasy film of the year. It is very daring, it’s so uncompromising that we bent backwards to make sure we got it. I know the audience is going to react to that. They might not like it but they’ll definitely say they’ve never seen anything like it before. For me it’s the best film of the year in how it approaches a very very provocative subject matter.’

But when I say I’m really looking forward to seeing the film, Jones warns me, albeit jokingly: ‘Be careful! I’m a bit worried about that film. There was a time when we used to give people warnings. We had a situation last year when one of our films, The Girl Next Door, caused two people to get very upset, because of the child abuse subject matter. But I’m wary of doing that because the moment you say this is the most shocking film you’ve ever seen, the audience is going to come back to you and say, “it wasn’t as shocking as you said it was going to be”. And if I go on stage and say, “I didn’t like this but you might do”, they all come out and say, “it was really good, why didn’t you like it?” So if you set the audience up to react one way or the other, you’re on a hiding to nothing… It’s best to shut up and let them watch the film! (laughs)‘

So do FrightFest organisers actually worry about how people might react to some of the most shocking fare on offer? ‘Not really, they’re horror fans. I mean, if a horror film is too horrifying, what are they expecting? (laughs) The audience knows what to expect going in, they want to be horrified, I do! I go to virtually every single horror film because I want to be frightened, I want to be scared, I want to jump, and if I don’t get that I’m disappointed. But I can guarantee there’s gonna be a lot of that going on at FrightFest!’

Virginie Sélavy

Asia House Festival of Asian Film

22-28 August 2008

Renoir Cinema, London

Programme

And your starter for ten? Define ‘Asian cinema’ using just five films. Struggling? Not an easy one, is it? Well, it’s no problem for Heng Khoo from Asia House. As the programmer for a new festival taking place at Curzon Cinemas this month, Heng has made a fascinatingly diverse selection: an Iranian anti-war film, a South Korean thriller, a Chinese action epic, an Indonesian art-house film and a musical from Singapore. So what’s the thinking behind this refreshingly eclectic programming? When I meet Heng in the beautiful surroundings of Asia House, he tells me that his initial aim was to provide a platform for films that probably won’t get recognition here in Britain. Indeed, all five films will be receiving their UK premieres during the festival. Despite domestic success and festival favour (the Iranian film, Night Bus, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Asia Pacific Film Awards 2007), theatrical release looks doubtful for most of them.

Asia’s dominance in the film world is clear to see in the recent glut of Hollywood remakes, and yet, there are still works which are very difficult to see here in the UK. 881, the Singaporean musical, for example, was a huge hit at home and in South East Asia but is perhaps not considered profitable enough over here by UK distributors. Likewise, The Photograph, may be seen as too culturally specific for a commercial marketing campaign. And yet, the film, which follows the relationship between Sita, a karaoke bar hostess, and her photographer landlord, Johan, is a fine example of emerging filmmaking talent from Indonesia. Night Bus is another interesting choice for the festival and reflects Asia House’s wide geographical scope, from the Gulf in the West to the Far East. The film takes place on a single night during the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s and its critical view of war should strike a chord with British audiences.

Alongside these lesser-known works, there are two slightly more populist choices, both recently acquired by Icon Film Distribution UK. The Korean thriller Seven Days is billed as a cross between 24 and Se7en and stars Yunjim Kim from Lost while the Chinese epic Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon brings together the balletic martial arts of Hero and the melodrama of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As Heng tells me, ‘even in this international world of DVDs and downloads, the best place to see films is always in the cinema’; these action-packed features will most certainly prove his point. And which film is Heng most looking forward to? It’s a toss-up between the hyperkinetic Seven Days and the idiosyncratic 881, which manages to incorporate very loud techno music and a quacking duck in one of its opening dance routines. Definitions of Asian Cinema might not be easy but who could resist a techno-loving duck!

As Heng plans to expand the festival in coming years, with more titles and an even wider choice of genres and national cinemas, this annual festival looks set to become the highlight of Asia House’s already successful film programme.

Eleanor McKeown

Edinburgh International Film Festival

18-29 June 2008

EIFF website

2008 was a year of innovations for the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Not only did it move from its usual August date to an earlier June slot, but it also unveiled a brand new section entitled ‘Under the Radar’, described by the festival organisers as ‘celebrating the true spirit of “cult” film’. Oddly, ‘cult’ seems to have become the buzz word of the moment in the film world and everyone wants a piece of it. Equally bizarrely, cult seems to have become a genre in itself. But if it means getting more oddball, unconventional and challenging films on the screen, all this excitable bandying about of the word might be worthwhile.

One of the most pleasurable entries in the Under the Radar selection was Blood Car, a black comedy satirising America’s insatiable need for oil and its readiness to do whatever it takes to carry on running its gas-guzzlers. With fuel prices having shot through the roof, a mild-mannered green-minded vegan primary school teacher (complete with elbow patches on his cord jacket) accidentally invents an engine that runs on human blood. Although initially appalled by his discovery, he abandons his principles to keep his car running so he can obtain sexual favours from naughty carnivorous sexpot Denise, all the time while being watched by the FBI.

Bigga Than Ben: A Russians’ Guide to Ripping Off London was another satire, this time of the various absurdities and Catch-22 situations that await immigrants trying to get a job, open a bank account and find a place to live in the British capital. Gleefully rude and offensive to all, it follows the tribulations of two naive, albeit unscrupulous, Russian thugs, Cobakka and Spiker, recently arrived in the UK. Key to the success of the film is Cobakka’s strongly-accented, authentic-sounding narration, which fully immerses the audience in their skewed worldview and makes us see London from a new perspective.

Strange Girls was quite a nice little oddity that centred on two disturbing-looking red-haired twins, Giorgia and Virginia, who refuse to communicate with the outside world and have spent most of their lives in a psychiatric hospital. In private, however, they reveal literary ambitions, wit and a natural penchant for cruelty and murder. When Virginia falls for Oyo, a boy from the neighbourhood they have just moved into after their – clearly misguided – release from hospital, the sisters’ dysfunctional relationship is stretched to breaking point and the hate and jealousy underlying their exclusive relationship is revealed. Although none of this is exactly original, the film was enjoyably bizarre and created a convincingly strange world.

We weren’t able to see the sixth film in the section, Crack Willow, but the remaining two were serious let-downs. With its Beauty and the Beast storyline and laboured literary tone, not to mention the seriously limited plot, Spike was nothing more than a high school kid’s clichéd Goth fantasy. The Third Pint, from Argentina, revolved around a man who becomes invisible after drinking three pints. This was the pretext for a lengthy, self-indulgent disquisition on anything and everything as the narrator travels around the world. Moving at a lethargic pace, the film had very little to say and its trite ‘insights’ into modern life certainly don’t justify its existence.

All in all, while some of the Under the Radar films were enjoyable, none of them were as audacious, original or subversive as could have been hoped for and the whole exercise felt quite safe and tame. We also checked out the Night Moves section of the festival for more late-night type thrills (the distinction between Night Moves and Under the Radar is not entirely clear to us). But that section contained some even poorer works, which seemed to have been included solely on the basis of their ability to deliver some very cheap shocks, whether it was the nasty, pointless torture of Mum and Dad, set among a sort of psychotic Royle Family, or the autopsy horror of the predictable, generic Cadaver from South Korea. The Spanish thriller Shiver was another major disappointment; marred by an incoherent, muddled script that felt like a first draft, that film had no place at an international festival. It wasn’t all bad though and the section was rescued by two remarkable films. Time Crimes was a labyrinthine Spanish thriller revolving around brilliantly confusing temporal paradoxes while Just Another Love Story was a sleek, modern noir thriller from Denmark that combined an intense, brutal character study with a brilliantly vicious diagnosis of the country’s moral state.

While it is great to see more unconventional, low-budget types of filmmaking given some space at a major festival, it is a real shame that some of the works seemed to have been selected simply because they superficially ticked the boxes of what has become associated with midnight movies/cult films – rude humour, grossly funny gore, bizarre-looking actors, pointy-headed aliens, body horror and/or monsters. The real night-time thrills were to be found elsewhere this year, with the speculative futuristic thriller Sleep Dealer from Mexico and a superb, moving take on the vampire from Sweden in Let the Right One In. Both films used fantastical elements intelligently to explore, respectively, Mexico’s exploitation by US corporations, and tender and dangerous love between two outsider children. For lovers of the dark stuff (and for the general critics too), Let the Right One In was the true star of the festival.

Virginie Sélavy

For more Edinburgh Festival coverage see: EIFF 08: Best of the Fest, Standard Operating Procedureand Interview with Olly Blackburn, Jay Taylor and Rob Boulter (Donkey Punch).