A Serbian Film

Once again, the British censors have made it clear that they believe not just children but adults too should be told what they can and cannot watch. Srdjan Spasojevic’s now notorious A Serbian Film was pulled from Film4 FrightFest at the weekend after the BBFC and Westminster Council demanded 3 minutes and 48 seconds of cuts. Our self-appointed guardians have kindly protected us from images that we may find disturbing. This infantilisation of the British public is shocking.

A Serbian Film is an angry, desperate denunciation of state-imposed violence and its utter annihilation of human values and spirit. It shows the most extreme acts of cruelty imaginable precisely so that its purpose cannot be mistaken: it aims to disgust, not to arouse or thrill. For that reason, it is actually an incredibly moral film, unlike the ‘torture porn’ movies it has been misguidedly compared to (sometimes by journalists who haven’t even seen the film – see the Guardian Guide on September 28).

The reason given by the FrightFest organisers for pulling it from the festival was that ‘a film of this nature should be shown in its entirety’. I believe they are absolutely right: to cut anything from this film is to risk misrepresenting it. If the violence was not so extreme, it could much more easily be seen as entertainment. To blunt the horror and mitigate the revulsion it means to provoke would make it more ambiguous and therefore morally more dubious. Just as Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, banned in the UK on its release in 1976, the film is a fierce reaction against the unthinkable sadistic brutality that those in power are capable of inflicting on others, and the censors’ response is equally confused and injudicious.

The nauseating scenes in A Serbian Film point to the vicious war crimes that have scarred the nation, to the abject corruption of abusive authorities who force individuals to commit horrendous acts, to the dehumanising nightmare of having no other choice but to be either victim or torturer, to the utter hopelessness such a trauma leaves, and to the impossibility of surviving it. It is also a film that feels directed at Western Europe, a Europe that watched the hellish disintegration of the former Yugoslavia on prime-time TV. It is a film that indicts real horrors packaged as entertainment, not one that offers visions of torture for fun. But the BBFC do not seem to think that the British public can be trusted to understand this.

Virginie Sélavy

Etrange Festival 2010

We’ve had our eye on L’Etrange Festival for a few years now and we are very much looking forward to the 16th edition of the event, which takes place from September 3-12 in Paris. The inventive programming of the festival gives Parisian audiences a chance to see unusual and forgotten, disturbing and enchanting images, drawn from a wide pool of B-movies, exploitation, genre and fantastic cinema. It is the occasion to savour lost gems from the past as well as to discover exciting new films.

Among the premieres, L’Etrange Festival will be presenting George A Romero’s latest addition to his zombie series, Survival of the Dead; Eli Roth’s The Last Exorcism; Pontypool, a smart low-budget take on the zombie movie from Canada; Deliver Us from Evil (Délivrez-nous du mal), the new film by Ole Bornedal, director of The Substitute and Just Another Love Story; and A Serbian Film, the most talked-about horror film of the moment, which has just been pulled from FrightFest in London after being cut by the British censors.

In the section ‘Pepites de l’etrange’ (Strange Gems), we are very much looking forward to 1979 US wheelchair exploitation movie The Amazing Mr No-Legs (L’Infernale poursuite), 1966 giallo Il terzo occhio (Le Froid baiser de la mort) and Swiss sci-fi tale L’Inconnu de Shandigor (another Swiss sci-fi movie, the recent Cargo, is also showing at the festival). There is also a special evening of Tobe Hooper films, including his rarely seen first film, Eggshells, The Funhouse (Massacre dans le train fantôme) and, of course, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

L’Etrange Festival always ask various personalities of the cinema world to put together a selection of films, and this year Alejandro Jodorowsky has programmed a strand of the festival, which includes Todd Browning’s wonderful The Unknown (L’inconnu), and Nacho Cerda’s acclaimed short film Aftermath. Other programmes have been selected by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and gay militant Lionel Soukaz. The festival also includes homages to actors Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Mimsy Farmer, as well as a musical evening and short films. And there is a Vampire all-nighter, with rock’n’roll Canadian vampire comedy Suck, Belgian mockumentary Vampires (inspired by Man Bites Dog/C’est arrivé près de chez vous), and Prowl, the new film by Manhunt director Patrick Syversen.

This year, as in previous years, the programme impresses by its diversity, intelligence and the energy and dedication that are clearly behind it. Look out for our report at the end of September!

The Man in the Blue Gordini

We are looking forward to the London International Animation Festival (LIAF), which returns for the 7th time with an exciting, intriguing, inspiring, sometimes controversial, thoroughly comprehensive collection of animation from 27 August to 5 September. This is the UK’s largest festival of its kind in the UK, screening the best, new animation from every corner of the world to London audiences with 250 films, most of them British premieres, represented in a series of amazing programmes and satellite events.

With films from 30 countries LIAF will proudly showcase the whole spectrum of creative animation, showing that animation is so much more than slick blockbusters and special effects. As well as 9 competitive programmes of the best, recently released animated shorts from every corner of the globe there are many especially curated sessions such as the technique focus (scratch animation), Felix the Cat, the Autour de Minuit (France) showcase, the British panorama, the best of Siggraph Festival, animated documentaries, guests, Q and A’s and seminars.

The whole week wraps up with the Best of the Festival on Sunday night with a collection of films chosen by panels of judges and audience votes.

The full programme is available online at the LIAF website. Tickets available from the Renoir box-office in early August.

Red White & Blue

Film4 FrightFest have announced their programme and it sounds like 2010 is a good year for horror!

The festival will open with Adam Green’s Hatchet 2 and close with Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism. Tobe Hooper is the festival’s special guest and will be interviewed onstage, and there will be a screening of his rarely seen 1969 debut Eggshells alongside The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Again this year there are two programmes, with a Discovery selection running alongside the main event. In the main selection, we can heartily recommend US sexual psycho-drama Red, White and Blue, which Electric Sheep’s Kate Taylor discovered at the Rotterdam Festival earlier this year. Here’s a shorter version of what she said in her festival report:

‘Set in Austin, Texas, Red White and Blue starts as a character study of the ravenously promiscuous Erica, whose existence consists of picking up random men in bars and trying to hold on to the cleaning job at the guest house where she stays. Punk hipster Franki, an earlier Erica conquest, is trying to get his band a European tour, giving his boss grief at his burger-flipping job, and looking after his ailing mother. On her death, Franki and Erica’s paths become entwined again in a twist that would jump out as controversy-baiting, had the preceding scenes not treated the characters in such a non-judgmental way. From then the film shifts gear, unleashing a vicious streak of inventive violence that will satisfy gore-seekers (death by gaffa tape – the ultimate indie way to go?) but still retain the less squeamish brand of cinephile.’

We’ve also checked out the very entertaining Monsters. A cross between District 9 and In Search of a Midnight Kiss, it’s a romance with a sci-fi twist, charting the relationship that develops between a war photographer and a rich heiress as they try to make their way back to the USA through a Mexico infected by an alien invasion. The vision of Fortress USA protected by a wall from South American intruders – alien or human – has a certain resonance, although this is not really a film for deep political commentary. While the focus is more on the romance than on the action, it is witty, well written and engaging.

In the other British films on offer, we’ve seen Outcast but we didn’t like that one: we’re just not quite convinced by the mix of hocus-pocus and grim council estate realities that seems to be developing into a sub-genre of British fantastic cinema (see Heartless and The Disappeared).

However, we’re looking forward to Mexican cannibal tale We Are What We Are, Kaboom, by American enfant terrible Gregg Araki, whose Mysterious Skin we loved, African-set zombie movie The Dead, and the controversial and much-talked-about A Serbian Film. In the Discovery selection, giallo-inspired Amer and Finale also sound worth checking out. And we’re planning to attend Jake West’s documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape, which will be followed by a panel discussion. Aside from the two programmes of feature films, there’s also short films, special guest appearances, Q&As with filmmakers, and Andy Nyman’s Quiz from Hell!

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

The 2010 edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival opened with Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, an animated film based on a script written by offbeat French comic genius Jacques Tati, which had never made it to the screen. This remarkable pairing did not quite produce the exciting result one could expect, and although the animation was beautiful, the story was somewhat insipid and lacked the oddball humour of Chomet’s earlier Belleville Rendezvous.

It was an unchallenging opening but this was corrected to some degree the next day with the screening of Kôji Wakamatsu’s Caterpillar (Kyatapirâ), an angry account of the relationship between a soldier, who comes back terribly maimed after fighting in the Second World War, and his wife. It was great that Edinburgh offered British audiences their first chance to see this subversive exploration of duty, heroism, and the cruel ties that bind a husband and wife. Caterpillar had already screened at the Berlinale in February, together with another of the Edinburgh Festival’s stand-outs, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, a remarkably assured hillbilly tale about a young girl forced to face violent relatives to save her family from ruin.

There were few established directors on view and among them Werner Herzog gave us one of the most enigmatic and provocative films of the selection. Similar in style to his bizarrely brilliant Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and with an equally star-studded cast – this time including Willem Dafoe, Michael Shannon, Chloe Sevigny, Udo Kier and Grace Zabrisky – My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is, at heart, a Greek tragedy set in a contemporary San Diego suburb. Inspired by the true story of a son who killed his mother, seemingly at random, the film is told from the perspective of the investigating detective (Dafoe), who is trying to piece together the murderer’s story with the help of his fiancée (Sevigny) and an old mentor and friend (Kier). Although the film was produced by David Lynch and borrows deftly (and unashamedly) from his creepily surreal fare, Herzog insists in deploying his own wonderfully outlandish cinematic tropes – a scene in which Kier visits an ostrich farm is one particular highlight. But what makes My Son, My Son a singularly mesmerising treat is the sense of persistent delirium and delight at play here, and the impression that actors and audience are led through events and flashbacks by some mischievous puppet master.

While it seems that Herzog has found great pleasure in unconventional ‘genre’ movie-making, director Steven Soderbergh’s latest offering And Everything Is Going Fine is arguably his most modest work to date, one in which his directorial hand is barely evident. So complacent and burbling is this low-budget biopic about the writer-actor Spalding Gray that after watching 90 minutes of snippets of performances, TV interviews and home movies of the man in question, both his personality and the necessity for this documentary were still, unfortunately, unclear.

The fourth major work by Filipino director Brillante Mendoza (Kinatay, Slingshot, Serbis) had bigger ambitions. In Lola, Philippine cinema icons Anita Linda and Rustica Carpio portray two elderly grandmothers who face the consequences of a robbery-homicide involving their beloved grandsons: one the victim, the other the accused. Frail and destitute as they are, both women seek money in the aftermath of the killing – for a burial and a bail bond, respectively. Everything in this touching tragedy of right and wrong, acceptance and forgiveness, is adroitly done, but it feels so stretched and overlong that any sympathy you may have for the characters is in danger of vanishing even before reaching the half point.

Monsters

This year, the Night Moves and Under the Radar sections were disappointing: they were vaguely defined and almost interchangeable, their identity and aims too hazy and muddled to produce coherent, meaty selections. Launched two years ago to showcase ‘raw, risk-taking work’, Under the Radar was no more than a hotchpotch of vacant kitsch. We had high hopes for Zach Clark’s Vacation!, the follow-up to Modern Love Is Automatic, which had impressed us last year. It had a similar mix of retro world and female-focused melodrama, but where Modern Love was surprisingly moving and visually stylish, Vacation! offered only ugly 80s Day-Glo as a background to the underwhelming story of a girly holiday that goes badly wrong. Mike McCarthy’s Cigarette Girl was of no higher standard than a student film, and a badly misjudged one at that. Demonstrating a disastrous lack of skill in all areas of filmmaking, it featured over-stylised, cartoonish characters, wooden acting, awful dialogue and an inexistent plot, and was striving pathetically hard for a coolness that entirely eluded it. The Black Panther (La pantera negra) was an instantly forgettable, nonsensical noir pastiche from Mexico; filming in black and white, having God and Death as characters and dropping references to Kiss Me Deadly does not a good film make.

The Night Moves section for late-night screenings was equally marred by pastiche and déjà vu. Particularly depressing was The Last Rites of Ransom Pride, another ludicrous attempt at making a ‘cool’ film, this time in the Western genre. The rapid-fire MTV-style editing and overbearing soundtrack frantically tried to hide the lack of substance and the preposterousness of both plot and characters, which included a gun-toting hot chick, a witchy woman prone to pompous mystical statements, and villainous outlaw caricatures aplenty. Dutch horror movie Two Eyes Staring (Zwart water) had obvious echoes of The Orphanage and was too hackneyed to offer any real scares. British supernatural story Outcast was a mishmash of hocus-pocus and grim council estate realities, a mix previously attempted in Philip Ridley’s Heartless and Johnny Kevorkian’s The Disappeared. It was sad to see such excellent actors as Kate Dickie and James Nesbitt mislaid in this silly mess. The other British offering in the selection, Monsters, was much better, although not entirely original. A cross between District 9 and In Search of a Midnight Kiss, it was a romance with a sci-fi twist, charting the relationship that develops between a war photographer and a rich heiress as they try to make their way back to the USA through a Mexico infected by an alien invasion. Although the focus was more on the romance than on the action, it was well written and engaging, albeit in an undemanding, Saturday-night-entertainment kind of way.

Other British films of note included stop-motion animation Jackboots on Whitehall, which presented an alternative version of the Second World War that saw the Germans invading England and Churchill escaping to Scotland. It was a hilarious, witty, satirical romp featuring brilliant caricatures of all the nationalities involved (the weaselly Goebbels, the politically-confused American pilot and the Scots were special highlights) and was one of the most enjoyable films of the festival. In an entirely different style, Amy Hardie’s documentary The Edge of Dreaming also proved a crowd-pleaser. After dreaming she was going to die, Hardie set about to investigate dreams and their relationship to reality and conscious life. Although the scenes of perfect family life are fairly dull and somewhat indulgent, and the film could have gone further in its exploration of the human mind, Hardie, an open-minded woman with a scientific background, was a congenial guide through an uncharted and fascinating territory.

Another interesting British film was Viv Fongenie’s Ollie Kepler’s Expanding Purple World, starring Edward Hogg (White Lightnin’) as a smart, young web designer with an obsessive passion for astrophysics, who experiences a schizophrenic breakdown after the death of his girlfriend. This charming yet at times unsettling portrait of mental illness is unlikely to set the world alight, but it is involving and altogether adult, and Hogg once again lends his character a psychological depth, charisma and soft-eyed madness that is hard to resist. By contrast, Karl Golden’s Pelican Blood was another example of a film that tries too hard in all respects, although it did boast strong performances. Harry Treadaway plays the gloomy antihero Nikko, a birdwatcher who plans to kill himself after ticking off 500 rare birds on his list. He has tried to commit suicide before and failed; now he’d like to do it properly, in a Romeo-and-Juliet way with his unpredictable, animal rights activist, trouble-making girlfriend, whom he met in a suicide chat room. Golden’s film tries hard to position itself as an ‘edgy’ British film, and on the surface it ticks all the boxes, but it never quite pulls it off, partly because the characters are simply too handsome and angelically lit in their misery.

What became obvious as the festival unfolded was that the most accomplished works came from German-speaking filmmaking. Herzog’s outlandish crime comedy was accompanied by a couple of gems from Germany and Austria, both clearly deserving of a UK release. Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber (Der Räuber), which also screened in Berlin, is a smart psychological thriller about a bank robber who is also a talented and passionate amateur marathon runner. Just as impressive was Maximilian Erlenwein’s Gravity (Schwerkraft), starring emerging actor Fabian Hinrichs as Frederik, a seemingly mild-mannered young banker, who, after witnessing a customer shoot himself, plunges into an early mid-life crisis that sees him get dangerously involved with a former schoolmate and ex-convict Vince (Jürgen Vogel). Although the story is heavy-handed in places, and at times a little clichéd, overall it is a witty, dark and thoroughly entertaining film, and it was one of the unquestionable highlights of the festival.

Pamela Jahn and Virginie Sélavy

Istanbul at Night - Photograph by Mitesh Parmar

Nestled between Europe and Asia, Istanbul is undoubtedly one of most fascinating cities in the world – combining the sensibilities of both continents, it’s an exciting and constantly surprising cosmopolitan city with a rich vein of history. Istanbul is also a very vibrant arts capital: the city is awash with festivals, exhibitions, concerts and plays all year round – and perhaps the crowning event is the International Istanbul Film Festival.

The festival showcases the best of both mainstream and independent cinema for an intense and very exciting two weeks every April. It provides an excellent opportunity for foreign visitors to explore Turkish cinema with a selection of the best new productions, as well as restorations of classic (and sometimes thought to be lost) Turkish films. It also introduces audiences to important directors and actors/actresses and gives the prestigious Golden Tulip Award every year to one international and one national production, alongside the FIPRESCI Prize and the Council of Europe Award.

Here are some of the stand-out films from the festival, including the award winners:

The Misfortunates (De helaasheid der dingen)

(Winner of the international Golden Tulip)

Set in a small town in the middle of nowhere, Belgium’s entry for the Oscars last year follows the story of young Gunther Strobbe, who lives with his father, three uncles and his grandmother. While the male members of the house waste their days away drinking heavy quantities of alcohol, chasing loose women and getting into bar fights, Gunther tries to find his own role within this eccentric and decidedly odd household. Director Felix van Groeningen captures the stark brutality of growing up in what can only be described as unusually appalling conditions. The Strobbe Clan are like overblown, grotesque versions of characters from a Mike Leigh film. Their aspirations are inexistent, and it seems that Gunther might be destined to follow into the same kind of dead-end life. The film is exceptionally simple and yet walks a thin line between pathos and humour as it paints a portrait of an extremely dysfunctional, yet endearing family. The performances are stellar and Kenneth Vanbaeden, Valentijn Dhaenens, Wouter Hendrickx and Johan Heldenbergh shine as older members of the Strobbe family. Although there is no distribution deal for the film in the UK so far, one can only hope that it won’t be long before this small and charming masterpiece arrives on our screens.

Vavien

(Winner of the national Golden Tulip)

At once idiosyncratically Turkish and yet marvellously accessible to any foreign audience, the Taylan brothers’ third film delivers on the promises made in their previous feature. Borrowing heavily from the films and tone of the Coen Brothers, they create the darkest of comedies in a quintessentially Turkish setting. Engin Günaydin, who also wrote the film, stars as Celal, a hapless electrician whose business and marriage are not going so well. In love with a cheap ‘pavyon’ singer from Samsun, Celal decides the solution to his problems lies with his wife Sevilay’s secret stash of money, sent by her father from Germany. A devious plan slowly hatches in Celal’s mind whereby he can solve both his problems with one single act. Reminiscent of Fargo in mood and action, Vavien is a pitch-black comedy. The growing desperation of Celal, his attempts at wooing Sibel, and Sevilay’s abrupt conversations with her dad in Germany, are all played straight, and yet the humour never gets lost, thanks to an intelligent and well-written script. Special mention must also go to Serra Yilmaz, who, in spite of her short screen time, manages to steal every scene she is in. A must-see for any lover of intelligent and unique cinema, Vavien is also an indication of the new standards established within Turkish cinema.

Ajami

(Council of Europe Film Award)

Already screened at the London Film Festival to great success, Ajami holds the unique honour of being the result of a collaborative effort between Scandar Copti, a Palestinian, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli director. The film is set in Ajami, a tough neighbourhood in Jaffa populated by Jews, Arabs and Christians, and tells five different but interconnected stories using a daring narrative structure reminiscent of Amores Perros. The fact that the film was made using a largely non-professional cast also serves as a testament to the raw power the directors manage to extract from their material. At once a tough crime drama and a powerful statement about life in the multi-ethnic neighbourhoods of Israel, Ajami is an admirable effort using exceptional cinematographic language to tell an exceptional story.

I Killed My Mother

(People’s Choice Awards)

Canada’s bid for the Oscars in 2010, Xavier Dolan’s semi-autobiographical film is one of the most emotionally honest and refreshing stories to emerge in years. Focusing on gay teenager Hubert and his tempestuous relationship with his mother, for whom he feels both guilt and contempt, Dolan’s feature debut explores the myths and mysteries of adolescence in an unexpectedly direct, amusing and emotional way.

Gainsbourg (Vie Héroïque)

Almost as creative and outrageous as its subject matter, cartoonist Joann Sfar’s debut film based on his graphic novel covers the entire gamut of Serge Gainsbourg’s life, from growing up in 1940s Nazi-occupied Paris through to his death in 1996. Filled to the brim with Gainsbourg’s unique compositions, the film easily sidesteps the usual traps a biopic can fall into, instead creating an amusing and breathtaking ride through its never-felt 140 minutes. Eric Elmosnino’s performance as the titular character is exemplary, effortlessly bringing Gainsbourg’s charm and cool to the screen.

Phobidilia

A daring and unusual effort from Israeli directing duo Yoav Paz and Doron Paz, Phobidilia is a modern take on the horrors of the everyday world. After suffering an emotional breakdown in a public place, an unnamed young man vows never to leave his apartment: much to his delight, he quickly discovers that in today’s world all his needs can be met easily within the four walls of his apartment. But four years later, his idyllic existence comes under attack from two figures: Daniela, a free-spirited girl who barges into his life, and Grumps, the building’s real estate agent. But the young man is not willing to let anyone take his comfortable existence away from him. Both claustrophobic and visually inventive, the debut feature from the duo behind a number of exceptional music videos shows real talent. Add to this a script that dares to ask some very unusual, some might say controversial, questions and you have the makings of a genuinely transgressive film.

Kosmos Gala - Photograph by Mitesh Parmar

Kosmos

Following on from the success of My Only Sunshine, which played to great acclaim in the London Film Festival last year, Reha Erdem moves further into more inexplicable and fascinating territory. His new film tells the story of a thief who can work miracles. He arrives in an unnamed, snow-covered border town weeping and immediately rescues a boy from drowning. The townspeople look upon the thief as a wise man, but a sudden rash of robberies and his honest declaration that he is looking for love make them suspicious: in a short time the atmosphere becomes electrically charged. Erdem’s film explores the mystical and the unexplainable through a universal story set in one small town. Magnificent visuals aided by an intriguing story, and what is perhaps the best sound design of any film in the last 20 years, elevate Kosmos to a new level of filmmaking. Bound to create as much hatred as love and fuel many discussions, Kosmos represents the sort of European cinema that we seldom get to see.

Space Tourists

Christian Frei’s new documentary takes the audience into a fascinating world full of wonder and surprise. Using breathtaking imagery as well as magnificent music by Jan Garbarek, Christian Frei tells the story of Anousheh Ansari, who was the first tourist in space after paying $20 million for the privilege. Her story is juxtaposed with the many other intriguing people who revolve around space travel, from Kazakh rocket debris collectors to photographers exploring abandoned Russian cosmonaut villages. The film is constantly surprising, unexpected and a delight to watch. Christian Frei was awarded the well-deserved Sundance World Cinema Directing Award in the documentary category this year.

Deliver Us from Evil (Fri os fra det onde)

Ole Bornedal returns to the big screen with another re-imagining of the genre film, just as he as done before with science fiction in The Substitute and film noir in Just Another Love Story. Taking the basic idea behind Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Ole Bornedal twists and reshapes the story into something surreal, disturbing and very, very unique. The film opens with Lars, a drunken failure, running over the town’s saintly figure, Ingvar. Although he is racked with guilt, he finds an easy solution in blaming the crime on the local Bosnian refugee Alain. Ingvar’s partner Frederik is furious – Ingvar was his only connection to the real world and the only person who could control and subdue his violent rage. The one person who stands up for Alain is Lars’s brother Johannes, who has recently moved back to town with his family. When he rescues Alain from being lynched by the mob and retreats to his place, an angry and vicious group lays siege to the only home he now knows. The results are both deadly and tragic. Featuring a blistering final 20 minutes, this film confirms Ole Bornedal’s credentials as a major filmmaking talent.

A Town Called Panic (Panique au village)

Based on the Belgian animated cult TV series, A Town Called Panic is perhaps the wackiest, most surreal comedy anyone can hope to see this year.
When Cowboy and Indian want to make a surprise homemade gift for Horse’s birthday, little do they know that their efforts will result in the destruction of their entire home and all their belongings. What is even stranger is that the events bring them face to face with an alien race who lives in the centre of the world and whose aim is to steal anything precious. A surreal, mad, hilarious and completely irreverent adventure ends up engulfing not only Cowboy, Indian and Horse, but also their neighbours, the postman and even the local police. With basic stop-motion animation and some of the most charmingly insane characterisations ever seen on the screen, this is the kind of film that reminds you of the power of comedy. It’s no surprise that the film won the Audience Award at Austin’s prestigious Fantastic Fest last year, as well as the Best Animated Feature award at Sitges 2009.

The Trotsky

Actor Jacob Tierney’s second directorial effort focuses on high-school student Leon Bronstein, who believes himself to be Leon Trotsky. After starting a strike at his father’s factory during a summer job, Leon finds himself quickly exiled to public school by his father. However, Leon’s instinct for revolution is not easily thwarted: this move gives him an even bigger cause than before – to prove that his fellow students matter to his arch-nemesis, the Stalin-like Principal Berkhoff. Witty, warm and exceptionally acted, The Trotsky comes across as a beautiful and thoughtful combination of Election and Rushmore. Hiding a serious message under its surface, this might be the best teen comedy to come out of Canada in years.

Evrim Ersoy

Accident

The Electric Sheep team reviews the highlights of the 2010 Terracotta Far East Film Festival.

Accident (Soi Cheang, 2009)
The term ‘high-concept’ was coined to describe Hollywood blockbusters that can be summarised in a single sentence; however, it could also be applied to Accident, a Hong Kong thriller about a team of assassins led by the intensely disciplined Brain (Louis Koo), who disguise their hits as ‘accidents’ so that nobody realises that a crime has actually been committed. Produced by the prolific Johnnie To, Accident exhibits an icy aesthetic that keeps the audience at an emotional distance but serves to maintain suspense during the sustained set-pieces. The unexpectedly romantic score by French composer Xavier Jamaux, who previously collaborated with To on Mad Detective (2007) and Sparrow (2008), aims for a tragic resonance that is undermined by the comparatively one-note characterisations of Brain’s crew, but Cheang’s psychological approach towards pulp material ensures that Accident has a meditative quality that is rarely found in upscale action cinema. JOHN BERRA

Vengeance (Fuk sau, 2009)
Vengeance marks a return to what Johnnie To does best – stripped down gangster stories with a hard-boiled edge and slickly executed stand-offs. The plot is simple – a woman barely survives the assassination of her family and demands that her father Costello (Johnny Hallyday), a French chef, take revenge on those responsible. Costello employs a trio of hitmen (played by To favourites Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gordon Lam and Lam Suet) to track them down, but there are a number of twists and turns as the group make their way to Simon Yam’s unrepentant crime lord. As usual, To provides some memorable set-pieces that are both playful and fraught with tension. It’s their simple poetry that gives To’s films a distinctive mark, with a touch of the bizarre and the humorous that sets his work out from the crowd. RICHARD BADLEY

Antique (Min kyu-dong, 2008)
When arrogant yuppie Kim decides to open a cake shop, assuming that such establishments will offer plenty of opportunities to meet available women, his search for a pastry chef leads him to former high school classmate Min, who has become known as ‘The Gay of Demonic Charm’ after being sacked from numerous bakeries following flings with co-workers who find him irresistible. Somehow, this simple set-up serves as the springboard for multiple narrative strands to the point that there are three films competing for audience attention; Antique is ostensibly a comedy about the unusual professional relationship between Kim and Min, but it also takes a darker detour into thriller territory and flirts with the form of the musical through dizzying montages. There are some hilarious moments scattered throughout this adaptation of Fumi Yoshinaga’s popular manga, and the themes of friendship and forgiveness are effectively conveyed amid the colourful chaos. JOHN BERRA

Cow

Cow (Dou niu, 2009)
In Chinese director Guan Hu’s Cow, set in 1940, a village simpleton emerges from hiding to discover that his fortress home has been destroyed by Japanese soldiers. The narrow lanes are eerily quiet; the dirt in the square stained with blood. Confused and terrified, he discovers that the only other survivor is a ‘foreign’ cow that he’s promised to care for. Cow unfolds in a series of flashbacks, mixing humorous scenes of village life with the simpleton’s harrowing struggles to keep himself and the cow alive as his home is overrun by returning Japanese soldiers, the Kuomintang, and fellow refugees. The result is a tragic black comedy about the futility of war, told from a unique point of view in an already crowded genre. Initially curious and captivating, it’s a shame that the film starts to drift in the second half once the novelty of the plot and set-up start to wear thin. SARAH CRONIN

Summer Wars (Samâ wôzu, 2009)
This new animé from director Mamoru Hosada is more satisfying than his previous offering, The Girl Who Leapt through Time, although its promising beginning and beautiful animation are equally marred by a fairly simplistic message. The story revolves around a young boy, Kenji, who, while staying with the family of a classmate he has a crush on for the summer, accidentally helps a hacker crack the code to the ‘OZ’ network, a Second Life type of virtual world used by everyone, from private users to government and military institutions. As the mysterious attacker wreaks havoc in OZ with potentially disastrous consequences in the real world, Kenji has to find a way to stop him. The animation is excellent, with two contrasting styles used to represent real and virtual worlds, and the tone is charming and humorous. But while the story is initially captivating, it quickly descends into a basic good versus evil battle underpinned by an unsophisticated, conservative belief in traditional values. VIRGINIE SĖLAVY

Phobia (See prang, 2008)
As with most horror anthologies, Phobia is a mixed bag. A quartet of ghost stories from Thailand that vary in stylistic tricks and genre clichés, they seem like extended 10-minute shorts hastily jammed together with no particular format. Some of the stories are linked by references to other characters but there’s no common theme or central thread, and the title itself is misleading: this isn’t an exploration of different phobias, just a straightforward play on people’s understandable and natural fear of ghosts. Last Fright is the most technically accomplished of the bunch, a slow-burning chiller that doesn’t rely on ropey effects, just old-fashioned storytelling. But the anthology’s stand-out is In the Middle, not because it’s particularly scary but because it keeps a tight, coherent plot, revolving around a group of lads on a camping holiday who are haunted by a friend after he’s drowned. RICHARD BADLEY

Mock Up on Mu

‘You can’t have a city without a library. You can’t have film culture without an archive.’ Craig Baldwin

A biennial beacon of eclectic audiovisual programming that spans Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough, the 2010 AV Festival took up the timely theme of ‘energy’. This was channelled through the form of its Recycled Film programme, an exploration of artists’ use of found footage and archive materials. Including a series of contextual screenings, a day-long symposium and an evening of live performance, the strand opened up an increasingly significant area of moving image practice.

A maverick figure in this area, Rick Prelinger premiered his new film The Lives of Energy, plus a collage of thematic works from his collection. He also kicked off the symposium with a mind-bending keynote speech. As an archivist with a collection of mainly industrial and educational films, Prelinger has taken the radical move of putting over 2,000 films online at archive.org for people to access, download and use with a Creative Commons Public Domain license.

Prelinger isn’t pioneering simply in his embrace of new business models though. He also disseminates ideas, as crystallised in his manifesto ‘On the Virtues of Preexisting Material’. Acknowledging a US-centric position to his rhetoric, Prelinger explained in his speech that American archives are often the preserve of private entrepreneurs, rather than attached to larger bureaucracies, as in Europe. Copyright law is vastly different too. Prelinger estimates 500,000 films are out of copyright in the US, compared to a fraction of that amount in the UK.

Thereafter talk of copyright ceased for fear of leading the symposium down a rabbit hole, and it was only referred to as the C word by all save artist Vicki Bennett who stated: ‘It would cost me £200,000 to clear copyright within the clip of the film you are about to see.’

‘Fans will save the media.’ Rick Prelinger

Much of the appeal of Prelinger’s talk concerned the real-life nuances his experience with the archive provides. It’s handled around 50,000-60,000 downloads, but he said that while many people will download for free on a Creative Commons license, others want to pay for paper indemnification. Prelinger has felt the tangible effects of the gift economy, but reminded us that you need to encourage people to knock on the door.

In this context, he cited Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans theory (if an artist can encourage a thousand true fans to spend a small amount per year, they can earn a living). While it’s been proven flawed by many, including Kelly himself, extended to archives, it demonstrates an optimism and openness that doesn’t clash with Prelinger’s respect and enthusiasm for the people carrying out the core responsibility to preserve collections. ‘We need to applaud guardianship while criticising excessive deference to rights holders,’ he stated.

The keynote was a tough act to follow, and while it wasn’t a call to arms to place all collections online, it fell to Rebecca Cleman of Electronic Arts Intermix to express the nervousness many collections, gallerists and artists feel about opening up access, particularly when operating within the scarcity model of selling limited editions, or coveting particular types of exposure.

However, Cleman cited several contemporary artists in the EAI collection who are pushing things forward. Ryan Trecarthin, Cory Arcangel and Seth Price all have commercial galleries as well as a strong online presence, and Cleman suggested looking to such artists on strategies moving forward.

Drawing a distinction between the work of public archives and that of distributors’ collections, Mike Sperlinger of Lux put forward a critique of the levelling effect of the internet. ‘In contemporary art, context is a key element,’ he stated. ‘This is less charged for filmmakers. It’s not just about scarcity but cultural value and artists’ ways of framing their own work.’

Indeed, the contextual benefit that collections have when they place materials online can be found in the framing offered, with services such as Luxonline and CRAMI (Curatorial Resource for Artists Moving Image) contributing to moving image discourse and expanding the conversation around the works.

Mock Up on Mu

‘Found footage is a folk art.’ Craig Baldwin

An answer to another question raised by Prelinger – a danger of artists’ interactions with archives developing into a uniform aesthetic or style – was provided as several artists spoke about their experiences using found footage and archive material.

The best known UK proponent is Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us), whose collage films have been making the most of online archives for over 10 years. Bennett is pragmatic about sustaining her practice and puts all her films online, making money from live AV sets, including her storming AV Festival premiere of Genre Collage.

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead presented their new film A Short Film about War. This is a split-screen work that uses stills from Flickr and actors reading blog fragments as written by people in war zones – soldiers and civilians. With the exact source annotated in real time opposite the images, the film places the origin of the material with laser precision.

Meanwhile a presentation from David Lawson on the work of the Black Audio Collective in the 1980s and 1990s gave further evidence of the political agency archive material can engender. Lawson ended with a short clip from fellow BAC member John Akomfrah’s latest film Mnemosyne. A tone poem premiering at the Public in West Bromwich, it’s the result of a residency managed by another inspirational speaker at the symposium, Dr Paul Gerhardt of Archives for Creativity.

‘Are we enabling people to speak truth to powers?’ Craig Baldwin

‘There is a temptation to look at these films as psycho-cultural documents or as aesthetics kitsch. But these films contributed to filmmaking and the techniques of information-giving,’ Prelinger argued passionately. Dealing with this warning against cultural commodification was Craig Baldwin, artist, archivist, filmmaker and founder of the Other Cinema in San Francisco.

As well as speaking at the symposium and screening his latest feature Mock Up on Mu, Baldwin hauled a suitcase full of 16mm over to Newcastle to lead a workshop at the Star and Shadow for four days during the festival. ‘There’s no disposable film footage in Europe. Every time I run a workshop I have to ship stuff over from the US. For a lot of reasons; one, because there’s overproduction in the US; also we still have 16mm over there; thirdly, because of the war a lot of your archives were destroyed. So for a lot of reasons you can walk down the street in San Francisco, or any city, and find Super8 and 8 track tapes. So that’s my whole theory about overproduction or surfing the wave of obsolescence: in a way we have to recycle and redeem it – redeem the value of film that’s used for the worst kind of commercial purposes.’ And with this magpie-like tendency Baldwin constructs compelling counterculture narratives from the remnants of cinema history.

It’s an exciting time for the engagement of archives and artists, with plenty of opportunity for experimentation and new thinking. For example, there have been a slew of recent projects across the UK funded by the Digital Film Archive Fund (DFAF) in response to the screen heritage policy, which can be viewed alongside work by organisations such as Archives for Creativity.

The Recycled Film symposium provided a comprehensive and diverse introduction to the challenges faced, and suggested that if artists can continue to push the possibilities and institutions are open and entrepreneurial enough, then archive material will continue to offer revolutionary potential.

Kate Taylor

Island of Dreams

Nippon Connection is now firmly established as the biggest festival of Japanese cinema held annually outside of Japan, and 2010 marked the 10th anniversary of the event with a diverse programme that ranged from major studio releases to independent films and digital video productions; the line-up included Toshiaki Toyoda’s psychedelic jidaigeki The Blood of Rebirth (2009) and Shûichi Okita’s warmly received documentary The Chef of South Polar (2009), while Momoko Ando’s Kakera: A Piece of Our Life (2009) maintained its festival profile en route to potential crossover success. Appropriately enough for a festival in its 10th year, the Nippon Retro strand revisited some of the highlights of the past nine years, such as Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls (2002), Shinya Tsukamoto’s Vital (2004) and Michael Arias’s Tekkon Kinkreet (2006). Festivities were sadly undermined by the eruption of a certain Icelandic volcano, although the variety of films and other events (workshops devoted to voicing animé and shiatsu massage, lectures about Japanese television drama and Haruki Murakami’s latest literary opus), not to mention the generous hospitality of the Nippon Connection team, meant that few were particularly concerned about their flight arrangements until the festival was winding down. Hopefully, some of the following films will make the move from the festival circuit to general release in the next 12 months.

A Big Gun (Hajime Ohata, 2008)
When their ironworks is threatened with closure due to a lack of clients, the owner and his brother accept a proposition from a local gangster: to manufacture 10 copies of a revolver and to deliver the weapons by a strict deadline. When they are then expected to make more guns despite not receiving payment, they take matters into their own hands. For the most part, A Big Gun is a sparse, intense examination of the financial difficulties facing businesses in small communities, and the desperate measures that some resort to in order to stay afloat, although the realism is somewhat undermined by a climactic lurch into ‘splatter film’ territory. A Big Gun was programmed alongside the altogether less focused Schneider (Yusuke Koroyasu, 2009), which explores how tensions in a small town community are accelerated when the owner of a restaurant goes missing. Schneider also features some shocking violence in its third act, and once again questions the effectiveness of law enforcement in rural areas.

Crows Zero II (Takashi Miike, 2009)
Crows Zero focused on a cast of teenage thugs whose ability to miraculously heal from even the most savage beating made it inevitable that they would all be back for a sequel that would up the ante in the brutality stakes. Genji (Shun Oguri) is now the top dog at Suzuran High School, but he has yet to fully unite all the factions, and must now face challenges from outside the institution. Takashi Miike delivers a testosterone-fuelled, youth-orientated action movie, which fully subscribes to the rule that sequels must be bigger, longer and louder – but not necessarily better – than their predecessors. With one particular fight sequence running for 27 minutes, there is little time for character development, and nominal hero Genji only manages three scenes with his love interest, the club singer played by Meisa Kuroki, between hyper-kinetic punch-ups and the navigation of plot machinations, which may not be entirely clear to those not familiar with the original manga.

Island of Dreams (Tetsuichiro Tsuta, 2008)
A young man works on Dream Island, an artificial wasteland in Tokyo made entirely of trash, and becomes a terrorist bomber. A police detective is assigned the task of tracking him down, and struggles to grasp the motivations for his crimes. Clearly influenced by the thrillers that Seijun Suzuki churned out in an almost unbelievably prolific manner in the 1960s, Island of Dreams is a rare Pia film that works as a genre exercise rather than as a social statement. The police procedural dialogue is leaden, and this is yet another thriller where the detective cracks the case by using Google and proceeds to provide exposition by reading from his laptop screen, but Island of Dreams excels when it is on the move; a foot chase through crowded city streets that takes in an underground club and the climactic race against time are both superbly handled.

Kaiji (Toya Sato, 2009)
Kaiji is a noncommittal job-hopper who lives month-to-month with little concern for his long-term financial security. When he suddenly finds himself burdened with a debt of two million yen due to the non-payment of a loan that he casually co-signed for a friend, Kaiji is forced to play a high-risk game onboard a cruise ship to try and clear it. It’s an ingenious premise, one that recalls the sinister escapism of David Fincher circa The Game (1997) and comments on current economic conditions in recession-hit countries where people are paying the price for taking out ‘easy’ credit. Unfortunately, Kaiji is undermined by an irritating central performance by Tatsuya Fujiwara, which makes the titular protagonist pathetic rather than emphatic, while Yuki Amani is merely window-dressing as the initially icy, ultimately sympathetic credit collector. An over-reliance on fast edits and swirling camera movements makes Kaiji an unfortunate case of a neat idea undermined by erratic execution.

Miyoko

Miyoko (Yoshifumi Tsubota, 2009)
Shinichi Abe became a well-known manga artist in the early 1970s due to his stories in Garo magazine, expressionistic portraits of doomed relationships that mirrored his own partnership with Miyoko, his regular model and later girlfriend and wife. This quasi-biopic of Abe represents the continuation of two trends in Japanese cinema: films about artists, either real or fictionalised, and films about long-suffering wives who stay with men who leave them unfulfilled. Miyoko moves at the same measured pace as Takeshi Kitano’s superficially similar Achilles and the Tortoise (2008), but is more lurid in tone and, by the time that Abe has acknowledged his schizophrenia, the audience probably feels as far removed from him as his strangely devoted spouse. The hermetically sealed world of Miyoko may not be particularly easy to engage with, but the film effectively blurs the real with the imagined as comic book panels fade in and out and the dual identities of Abe and Miyoko are emphasised through graphic re-enactments of the narratives that were published in Garo.

Oh, My Buddha! (Tomorowo Taguchi, 2008)
Jun is a first-year student at an all-boys Buddhist high school, who is more interested in listening to Bob Dylan and writing songs than he is in studying. He travels with two friends to the island of ‘free love’ for his summer vacation, hoping to lose his virginity, but things do not quite go to plan, and on his return to school he still struggles to break free of his middle-class constraints. Tomorowo Taguchi’s second feature is ostensibly a teen sex comedy, but Oh, My Buddha! is actually a much more culturally acute coming-of-age movie, mainly due to its copious references to pop culture; there are comparisons to Dylan ‘going electric’ as Jun listens backstage as a raucous rock ’n’ roll group excite the crowd gathered in the high school gym, and realises that his heartfelt folk songs need more of an edge if he is going to compete. It is not clear whether the title refers to the three men who mentor Jun at various stages (his hippie tutor, the proprietor of the youth hostel, his father) or the counter-culture figure of Dylan that he worships, but Oh, My Buddha! is a genuine crowd-pleaser that blends brisk pacing with warm nostalgia.

One Million Yen Girl (Yuki Tanada, 2008)
Lightweight but likable, One Million Yen Girl finds writer-director Yuki Tanada following previous festival successes Moon and Cherry (2004) and Ain’t No Tomorrows (2008) with the story of Suzuko, a 21-year-old who moves from town to town, trying to conceal the fact that she has served a short jail sentence for a minor offence. Suzuko lives and works in each town until she has saved up one million yen (the amount needed for rent, deposit and fees in her next temporary home), and tries to avoid forming attachments to those she encounters. The irony of One Million Yen Girl is that, for all her moving around, Suzuko finds much the same experience in each town; a mundane job, the discovery of some ‘hidden’ talent, and a potential boyfriend. Tanada’s humour is mostly of an observational nature, although there is a hysterical scene in which a town council demands that Suzuko become their ‘peach girl’ and represent the community in an advertising campaign. Yû Aoi is almost defiantly low-key in the title role, building on her turn as a pizza-girl-turned-recluse in Bong Joon-ho’s segment of Tokyo (2008), and convincingly conveying the burden of a young woman who feels that she has brought shame to her immediate family.

Toad’s Oil (Kôji Yakusho, 2009)
Kôji Yakusho directs himself as Takuro, a private trader who takes great delight in earning – and even in losing – vast sums of money on the stock exchange, but has become somewhat disconnected from his family. When his son Takuya falls into a coma due to a collision with a van, Takuro learns about his offspring’s life through the history in his mobile phone. Making contact with his son’s girlfriend, Takuro keeps the youthful romance alive through a series of conversations and deceptions. Just as the film seems to be playing as an extended advert for the benefits of cellular technology, Toad’s Oil embarks on a wayward road trip when Takuya passes away and Takuro and his son’s best friend Saburo make the journey to Mount Fear to lay his remains to rest. There is a great running joke about the amount of money that Takuro pays in taxes, and the patriarch’s encounter with a black bear is also fitfully amusing. The more contemplative moments do cause pacing problems, but Toad’s Oil is a heartfelt directorial debut that offers some rich insight into Japanese familial life amid the occasional indulgences.

Zero Focus (Isshin Inudo, 2009)
In 1957, the naïve Teiko (Ryoko Hirosue) enters into an arranged marriage with Kenichi, a Tokyo-based employee of an advertising agency. Seven days after their wedding, Kenichi takes a business trip to Kanazawa, his previous posting, but when he does not return, Teiko becomes suspicious and launches her own investigation. Upon arrival in Kanazawa, Teiko encounters two other women who may hold the key to her husband’s disappearance; Sachiko (Miki Nakatani), the socially prominent supporter of a female candidate for the role of mayor, and Hisako (Tae Kimura), a company receptionist who was appointed despite lacking the required qualifications. It is debatable as to whether this second adaptation of Seicho Matsumoto’s novel (following the 1969 film by Yoshitaro Nomura) is entirely necessary, although this latest cinematic incarnation of Zero Focus is impeccably crafted; the story may deal with a particular period in Japanese history, but its cinematic reference points are Douglas Sirk and Hollywood dramas aimed at a largely female audience. The lead actresses are uniformly excellent, with Nakatani offering a chilling portrait of rural royalty and Hirosue subtly conveying Teiko’s shift from optimism to disillusionment.

John Berra

Vengeance

Following the first Terracotta last year, festival director Joey Leung has once again been scouring the Far East for his second mixtape of Asian blockbusters and mysterious oddities. As before, his MO is to provide a short, yet eclectic program that demonstrates the wonders of Eastern cinema, one accessible to both film geeks and casual viewers.

Terracotta will open with Asia’s biggest name – Jackie Chan. Little Big Soldier (2010) is his latest action movie, and although it’s another buddy movie of sorts, this time set in ancient China, it’s an assured return to form for the veteran martial artist. The festival will close with another spectacular period piece, Bodyguards and Assassins (2009), a lavish crowd-pleaser that follows an assassination attempt in 1905 Hong Kong. For those tired of headache-inducing 3-D cartoons, the Far East proves there’s nothing wrong with the old-fashioned way of delivering thrills.

While Chan is a household name, Leung is keen to highlight emerging talents such as Huang Bo, star of Cow (2009), a Chinese black comedy about a peasant tasked with saving a cow’s life during World War II. ‘This little-known film has won some major awards and is set to take off internationally – we were glad we got to it early!’ explains Leung. He also uncovered Japan’s Fish Story (2009), a sci-fi comedy set in several different time frames about punk rock and meteorites: ‘These two films are must-sees for people out to discover something different.’

Leung has also acted on feedback from last year’s festival and added late-night horror screenings and documentaries to the Terracotta programme. The Thai film Meat Grinder (2009) is an Asian take on Sweeney Todd, retelling the gruesome fable with a noodle-seller who starts harvesting human meat for her legendary soup stock, while Phobia (2008), also from Thailand, is a collection of four supernatural tales. But Terracotta is also set to educate, not just entertain, with a double bill of documentaries profiling In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle and exploring the impact of the yakuza on Asian cinema. Director Yves Montmayeur will be on hand to talk about these films as Leung is hoping to get behind the scenes of Asian cinema: ‘The awareness of who’s who helps those new to the genre navigate the vast offering of films. What’s important to us is that we bring in the next generation of film fans and students.’

Those who have fond memories of Johnnie To’s Sparrow from last year’s festival will be pleased to hear that the director returns with another French-inflected crime tale. In Vengeance (2009), a French chef (played by musician/actor Johnny Hallyday) jumps between Macau and Hong Kong in a tough, near-wordless quest for revenge. It’s To back to his hard-boiled best, revisiting the starkness of Exiled and Election while mixing in shades of Memento.

Manga fans will be able to catch the spectacular conclusion of the 20th-Century Boys trilogy based on the award-winning series by Naoki Urasawa as well as the entertaining family adventure K-20: Legend of the Mask (2008). There’s also animé in the form of Summer Wars (2009) and the usual strangeness from South Korea with the light-hearted musical Antique (2008), so somewhere within the 15 handpicked films is a movie guaranteed to pull you into the weird and wonderful world of the Far East.

Richard Badley