Osgood Robert “Oz” Perkins, son of the actor Antony Perkins, proved to be a wonder with his first work as a director, the horror thriller February. We have already seen him acting in Psycho II and more recently screenwriting The Girl in the Photographs.
February is undoubtedly a film that creates an atmosphere. The theater was immersed in the sharp frost of the snowy streets that were so white they gave a sense of purity. However, such sensation was not meant to last, as soon those streets were going to be spoiled by trails of blood.
The film is set in Kempville, Ontario Canada. It’s February and the students of the all girls boarding school “Kempville” are getting ready to leave for their hometown for the winter break. Kate (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton) are stuck at school because their parents have mysteriously failed to retrieve them. Rose finds herself forced to babysit Kate even if they are not friends but rather share resentment. At the same time, Joan (Emma Roberts), escaped from a mental health facility, is heading towards the school, while Kate starts to have a strange attitude.
In this feature film lingers not only tension but also teenage crisis and inner torments, especially through the characters of Rose and Kate. Its deconstructing montage might create confusion, however, at the end, all the pieces of the puzzle come together.
The film has no shades, only clear contrasts: the breaks between scenes as well as music change are clear.
Just one more thing: pay attention to the cutlery and Donnie Darko‘s bunny ears.
In aesthetic terms “Catharsis” means purifying the human passions that are understood and overcome with art. However, this word comes from Ancient Classic Greece and is connected with a sort of religious ritual that requires to purify both body and soul. Nowadays Greece is facing a cultural and social crisis: in few words it is an adrift country. Despite this, Greek cinema is constantly focusing on this national crisis and ready to supervise its flow. There is no real school of contemporary Greek cinema but there are several common artistic trends in these Greek movie makers.
Interruption is the first feature film by Yorgos Zois and without doubt follows this trend. This film starts with some out of focus lights blurring in a dark space. These lights stand for something not clear but alive that is going to bump soon into an unexpected future. This obscure element is actually an ancient man who’s completely naked. There’s a young blond and short haired woman with him. Those lights we have noticed at the very beginning of the film are actually Clitennestra and her lover Aegystus. Nonetheless the old man and the girl are Agamemnon and Cassandra. The starting events of The Oresteia are well known: the queen and her lover will kill the king who has come back to Troy after many years with another woman. The clash between Cassandra and the new masters of the palace occurs in a glass cube in the middle of the stage. According to mythology there should be then Orestes coming back from his exile and his vengeance versus his mother. Anyway the performance is suddenly stopped by a group of young people running through the stage and telling us they are the Chorus. Their leader is a black haired guy with an amused smile who takes some people from the audience as volunteers. They will introduce themselves and take active part in the show.
“What’s happening here is fiction or reality?” this is the question made by to a member of the Chorus to a girl.
“It’s the reality” replies the girl but she doesn’t look very convinced. The wonderful event this movie is trying to show is the theme of being guilty putting it aside for a while and playing it without misleading it. Now it’s high time to recollect Pirandello.
This movie is about a nowadays issue. At the end the young man kills himself while the theatre audience stands up thinking the tragedy came to its end. He’s another victim of nowadays spread indifference. It’s time that the actors and people taking part in the tragedy take off their clothes as a metaphor of their shame. But if they purified themselves and cleansed their guilty souls what about us and our Catharsis?
London, 1899. George is a brilliant inventor who developed an amazing machine enabling a person to travel in time. And with this machine, the protagonist starts to explore the future and witnesses the progress also the failure of humanity (two, even three world wars). His route will take him 800.000 years ahead, to a future where humanity is divided between angelic and naive Eloi from the external world and cruel and monstrous Morlocks, the inhabitants of the Earth.
George Pal depicts a story in his film based on amazing novel of H. G. Wells who invented an imaginary world, reflecting very well the sci-fi of that period. Colorful pop culture does not take it very seriously, and the fierce social critique of the novel which is that the Eloi represent the rich and Victorian middle class while the Marlocks represent the working class, gives a visionary image to whom made The Time Machine precious like a jewel.
By a sort of anthology of first time lapse experiment, time travel is shown us through the season changes and the changes in fashion in time. It also shows us the history of Time Machine which is the ancestor of Delorean, an armchair with commands operated by a lever with a knob in diamond (to the limits between Steam-Punk and Trash).
Perhaps one of the last examples of Cinema of Attractions in the historical sense of the term, is the film watched all over the years and still enjoyable and fun in its vintage style. We owe to George Pal fantastic 60s cinema (especially Barbarella). However, his spiritual students such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg can not be forgotten as well. By the way, a remake of the film in 2002 (which was unsuccessful at the box office) is directed by great-grandson of Wells, Simon who used a lot the original version on his remake film with Guy Pearce in the lead role and Jeremy Irons, the head of Morlocks.
“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads”, says Doc Brown in Back To The Future. We agree with you Doc. To travel, it is enough to sit on a comfortable armchair and to use healthy, vital and a lot of immagination.
Article by: Lara Vallino Translation by: Andrea Cristallini
MIA MADRE FA L’ATTRICE
Documentaries have often been overlooked or dimissed as not suitable for cinema screenings on the grounds that they are too specialized, although they bring to the big screen unknown or intentionally ignored realities. Conversely, after his succesful Noi non siamo come James Bond, which gained him the Jury Prize at TFF 30, Mario Balsamo makes his comeback in Turin with another slice of his life: the documentary Mia madre fa l’attrice, one of the four Italian movies in the main section of the festival.
No polar bears or exotic indigenous peoples then, here we are in fact presented with a typical emotional connection, the one between a mother and her son. Since the dawn of times, this indissoluble bond has always been subject to study, and this is still the case today. Either audiences are not tired of listening to the same old story, or perhaps a universally accepted definition has not been agreed upon yet.
Mario Balsamo shows us the very self of his mother: a tough character, a troublesome person, the woman he loved most in his life. He also reveals the difficulties in their relationship: they seem to have become more distant than ever, separated by a wall of mutual incomprehension.
However, sometimes something happens that teaches us how to look at life from a new perspective and after the events he related in his documentary in 2012, Mario is not the same man anymore. He wants to reconnect with the multifaceted woman and be finally able to love her not just as an actress but also as his mother. He takes the most important film in which his mother acted in the 1950s, Piero Costa’s La Barriera della legge, as an opportunity to get close to her again through their shared passion for the film art. Costa’s film is a constant remembrance for Silvana and an obsession for Mario, although neither of them has ever seen it.
They embark on the search for this cinematographic work, that appeared to be no longer available and that they will eventually find uninteresting once they get to see it.
But it’s a well-known fact that it’s the journey that counts. They go on the road in a Lancia Fulvia 810, around Pietrasanta and Versilia, visiting the very same places where Silvana would display her talent many years ago. We witness amusing and moving dialogues, halfway between reality and fantasy, gradually leading to a reconciliation which results in a long-awaited hug. A happy ending for the director, who may finally manage to see in Silvana Stefanini a mother, rather than just an actress.
Article by: Alessandro Arpa Translation by: Andrea Cristallini
Hush bye bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep little baby, when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses… Harper is only 14. She sings lullabies at night and in the morning she looks after her four brothers: Elias, a 12-year-old rebel, Arri (8 years), Ezra (5 years ) and Jonah (2 years). Being the elder sister is not necessarily a punishment but it can become something close to it if mum is away, lost in a serious struggle with her self-esteem.
A blend of the cinema verité and a cinematographic remake of Tierney Gearon’s photographs, God Bless the child is the second feature film by Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojda-Beck. The film, which premiered at SXSW Festival in 2015, is the American response to Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows. As opposed to the Japanese director’s film, where the mother is an escort, in the work of Machoian and Ojda-Beck she is a depressed woman, a ghost who leaves the house at dawn abandoning her children and comes back at night, while everyone is asleep, except Harper, who has grown up against her will. “Sorry” is her only line in the film, with neither a close-up nor a single frame showing her face. The film drowns in a fog of sadness. Several group scenes are included in the film, with delicate and innocent children songs in the background. In the epic fight between the brothers in the backyard, as they wear boxing gloves resembling Hulk’s hands, game and pain merge and pain eventually makes the loser cry. God bless the child is a vivid and realistic portrait of childhood. And for a change, children are not asked to run after the film, but it’s the film itself that surrenders to their genuine interpretation. And when the sun goes down and everyone is asleep, the door opens and there she is, back again. She gets into bed with her four children, in a shroud that envelopes lonely souls. And Harper is there, staring ruthlessly at her, as life gets harder and harder: hush bye bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep little baby, when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses.
There are movies with no soul which just try to step towards any directions without a reason. There are movies that are just empty and dreary. Well, this movie is just their opposite. “Tag” is directed by Sion Sono: it violently breaks in and manages to find a sharp conclusion both in a literal and figurative way. It confuses the feelings and perception of its audience but it doesn’t hide the fact that it has lost the sense of perception itself. This film needs to show its total dismay in order to penetrate the subconscious side of its audience and finally break through its conscious one. However, “Tag” is not addressed to an ordinary audience, for the simple reason that the movie is directed by Sion Sono. It’s a typical Japanese film with its peculiar artistic language which could by perceived as unfamiliar by a western audience, or at least by an audience not acquainted with Japanese pop culture.
This kind of audience might fail to notice the potential for social criticism hidden behind an excess of grotesque violence, which may appear then as empty divertissement: what has been defined, in jargon (particularly in the world of anime, manga and videogames enthusiasts) sa fanservice.
What exactly is fanservice? Excessive and pointless violence, schoolgirls in extra short miniskirts which are constantly lifted, eroticism, promiscuity, reification of the woman.
“Tag” contains all these elements. It’s thrown onto the screen in a shameless, exaggerated, intentionally provocative way, as if to ask: “Is this what you want?” As the film unravels, laughing at all this becomes a gesture that makes the spectator feel guilty.
This collage made of absurdities, which people may have fun in, is a heaven for “nerd” teenagers and hides a cruel and dreadful hell. It reveals itself step by step, while we follow the young female protagonist Mitsuko in her absurd suffering.
Among all this violence, torture and death, her loss of identity is what mostly harms. It makes her appear to be an empty box or a mannequin identical to many others. She looks as a figure, whose not uniform nature may be compared to that of Jesus and therefore doomed to sacrifice. It is a kind of essential sacrifice, a spontaneous gesture which gets away from this torture pattern felt as a function of a sadistic pleasure. And it takes place exactly in front of a parody which blames and despises these masses of obsessive fans.
What is such a heroic sacrifice aimed at? It is understood, its aim matches the film’s one: a sabotage internal to the system so that it can penetrate deeper and, hopefully, it can be able to reach and consequently wake up consciences, in order to take them away from this grotesque circle of hell.
Article by: Alberto Morbelli Translation by: Lorenzo Matarazzo
TFFDOC section opens with a quite interesting work by director Rithy Panh, a documentarist of Cambodian origins, who has always made a point of his research on social inequities, sometimes experienced personally. The film “S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine”, presented and awarded at Cannes in 2003, is a case in point; the consequences of the regime forced him to run away from his native Cambodia to find shelter in France, where he began his film studies.
“La France est notre patrie” starts with a sequence showing an overwhelming and devastating jungle which swallows with its roots the area of a house that does not belong to such a landscape. This is probably a metaphor for the topic that the director intends to take on in this work.
The documentary narrates in a personal way the history of the French colonies in Indochina for the whole course of the “rêve”. Rithy Panh softly deals with these issues, without ever stating his anticolonial opinions. The extracts were selected from film footage (silent, black and white and in colour). They show the various aspects of the Federation of French colonial possessions in Indochina: they’re scenes of daily life with its faces, constructions of great public works, industrialisation and agriculture. They seem like beautiful scenarios made out of progress and exploration of this foreign and exotic land, the way France saw it at the time.
Skilfully, the director manages to weave a story based on the encounter and clash between two worlds. He identifies and shows throughout the narration two opposed protagonists: the colonising “white man” and the indigenous “bon sauvage”. He lets the archive footage, interspersed with his tableaux, do the talking. The captions reassure the public on the reason why it’s crucial for the colonising mission to prove successful for everyone’s sake, just like a newsreel of that time would have. It’s up to the editing and soundtrack, however, to give us the first clues about the goal that Rithy Panh wants to achieve. A message that slowly reveals itself, getting us farther and farther away from what we see and read.
It is an intimate process of awareness and discovery for the audience. Images and meanings develop as two parallel lines, only meeting as a result of personal reasoning. Thus, the self-proclaimed colonial reality becomes its very own condemnation. An acute expedient which turns the flowing of time into a weapon which acts as a boomerang.
The documentary constitutes a fascinating history lesson on the events that occurred during the colonization of Indochina, as well as a profound consideration about what we perceive in the present time. The eyes looking at those images have changed. Our society has a different take on that material now. It is a subtle social criticism on past historical events and on contemporary too. Undoubtedly, as the above-mentioned beginning sequence teaches us: nature swallows with time anything produced by white man with the alibi of progress. In conclusion, all communities should be the one and only rulers of themselves or it will be for posterity to judge.
After 27th edition’s winning film La bocca del lupo (The Wolf’s Mouth) TFF dedicated the pre-opening night to the latest laborious work by Pietro Marcello, Bella e perduta (Lost and Beautiful), the only Italian film contending for Locarno International film festival 2015. This bitter tale fuses documentary and fantastical fiction, while poetically denouncing the collapse of human-nature relationship. The film also functions as an off-key requiem for the Italian Republic, a frank protest against the apathy of an immortal caste system of defeatists. The protagonist, Tommaso Cestrone, is a humble, real-life shepherd in line with Marcello’s stock characters, the so renamed “Angel of Carditello” is the only volunteer serving the Royal Estate of Carditello which simbolises the ill-treated and forgotten beauty. Piles of debris and tyres pollute the magic atmosphere of the place that has become a dump for memories. Tommaso is the only one committed to the enhancement from the indifference of the world. Tommaso, among his last wishes, wants to save Sarchiapone, a young talking buffalo that, at times, recalls the melancholy poetry hidden in Balthazar, the donkey protagonist of Au Hasard Balthazar by Robert Bresson. At this stage of the film, Pulcinella appears from the obscure bowels of Vesuvius. He arrives in the nowadays Campania to grant Tommaso’s wish. Pulcinella and Sarchiapone embark on a journey in the forgotten territories of “the land of fire”: a sore journey without hope. Bella e Perduta is a protean film that had a difficult birth. The initial intention of the director was changed during the course of production due to the sudden cardiac death of the real Tommaso Cestrone. For this reason, the film was completed after two years of development. The only choice left to the director was to merge the hints of reality with dreamlike situations. The figure of Pulcinella connects the primordial meaning of psychopomp very intelligently for the immortals. Although the protagonists improvise around a default scenerio, it is difficult to reach the sincere expressive power of transexual Mary Monaco and Enzo Motta, who are the protagonists of “La Bocca del Lupo”. Tommaso and the interpreter of Pulcinella are suspended and suddenly crushed by the power of nature, mother and executioner at the same time. The foolishness of human being is expressed by the look and subjective shots of Sarchiapone who hopes to survive at the mercy of man. But now eveything is destined to collapse and takes attention to the tomb of Tommaso: <<Will we remember this land? >>
Probably not. Maybe yes but it will be very late, and there will remain neither your tears Sarchiapone… nor ours.
Young, lively, dynamic and, I would add, confident.
These are the adjectives that were most frequently heard during the dynamic and cheerful press conference for the second biggest Italian movie event of the year. This 33rd edition of TFF was opened by the Saxophone Ensemble of Conservatoire G. Verdi in hall 2 of Cinema Massimo playing the famous Indiana Jones theme song, which was enthusiastically cheered by journalists and representatives of the most important Turin institutions.
Esibizione dell’Ensable di sassofoni
Young is probably the most appropriate word to describe the TFF, since the work presented are often the first, second, or at most third of their directors, who are usually independent. The section “Onde”, in particular, with its co-curator Roberto Manassero, has always dealt with extreme innovation, both thematic and technical. As usual, this year “Onde” selected 15 films among different formats, Super 8 mm film, Super 16, VHS, digital films and videoart contaminations. The search for innovation has also been confirmed by TFF Doc’s curator, Davide Oberto, who explained that “all sections are based of new independent talents to be explored”.
Maurizio Braccialarghe, Emanuela Martini e Paolo Damilano
Enthusiasm marked every speech during the press conference, included that of Director Emanuela Martini, who started by pointing out TFF’s several partnerships with important institutions of Turin, which had been established in the past or in recent years and will be part of the event this year too.
Among them, she underlined the collaboration with Circolo dei Lettori and RAI. The local cultural centre wil host a two-day pre-festival event focusing on science fiction readings. (Pincio racconta Dick and 1984) whereas the Italian public television broadcaster RAI will welcome TFF staff within its historical buildings and will be promoting the event during the festival by broadcasting a self-produced spot on its channels. The new director of RAI headquarter in Turin, Pietro Grignani, confirmed how essential such a concrete collaboration is, being both partners cultural companies and sharing a common identity. Paolo Damilano talked about a “metropolitan” festival, in the sense that it wil get the whole city talking about cinema” and, speaking of that, Maurizio Braccialarghe, Councillor for Culture of the city of Turin, confirmed the constant tendency to make Turin a city of arts and evolution of techniques. particularly when it comes to cinema. As usual, the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, represented by its President, Patrizia Sandretto, is also on the front line amongst collaborations with TFF and this year it will even curate and host a subsection of the “Onde” section, ARTRUM: short films of a phantasmatic nature set in post-apocalyptic landscapes, all relating to contemporary art.
Patrizia Sandretto, Emanuela Martini, Pietro Grignani
After introducing TFF’s several important partners, the press conference came to the heart of the matter: a short review of the festival movies and their connected events.
Aside from what had already been publicly disclosed, such as the homage to Orson Welles , the pre-opening film by Pietro Marcello and the opening film Suffragette, both the Director and the two curators of the film festival revealed a lot of information about this edition. There will be 15 films competing this year, 4 of which are Italian. For the section Festa Mobile, the Gran Premio Torino will be assigned to the English director and screenwriter Terence Davies for his Sunset Song. In the same section the artistic director made special mention of the movie by Gianni Zanasi La felicità è un sistema complesso (Happiness is a difficult system) and the main actress Hadas Yaron, awarded as best leading actress in Venezia film festival and Torino film festival 32 playing in Felix et Meirà.
There will also be the Cipputi Prize, celebrating 20 years from its foundation, and this will go to Francesca Comencini for her short feature movie In fabbrica (In a factory). The Maria Adriana Polo Lifetime Achievement Award will go to Lorena Mazzetti. Two of her films, K and Together will be played during the festival. This year the guest director will be Julian Temple, who loves Torino film festival and used his latest movie The ecstasy of Wilko Johnson (guitarist of the band Dr. Feelgood, terminally ill with cancer, saved at the eleventh hour by an operation) as a starting point to regroup seven movies, all linked together by a macro theme: Questioni di vita e di morte, where the protagonists are exactly these two unavoidable presences, which make human beings just what they are. “About dystopia and surreal” are the words that best define the retrospective, which is starting in this edition and will be continuing in the next one: Cose che verranno. La terra vista dal cinema, under the direction of Emanuela Martini, is the section dedicated to science fiction and to impossible or catastrophically future worlds, where in the battle between utopia and antiutopia, is the second one which unluckily wins. Davide Oberto, the curator of TFF doc, then talked in detail about the themes of the films proposed for the Festival. In addition to the usual subdivision between International.doc and Italian.doc, the will be a focus on Mediterranean, seen not only as tragic and a protagonist in the current affairs, but also as a source of creativity (9 films in this subsection). In addition, there will be several special events such as screening of Fondo Mossina Miss Cinema shot on 16mm that shows us unexpected portraits of hopeful young people from 1942 to 1952 and the screening of two Chantal Ackerman’s films.
Finally, the Director of TorinoFilmLab Savina Neirotti presented the 8 selected films and clearly restated the importance of the didactic aim that lies at the basis of this creative community. Pride of place was also enjoyed by the restored versions of Terrore nello spazio and Tragica Alba a Dongo, a short film that was once banned and thought lost, which portrays the final hours of Mussolini in Dongo, in a quick overview presented by Emanuela Martini.
Liveliness and dynamism are the adjectives that best describe the sponsor of the event, Chiara Francini. The actress was specially appointed taking into consideration the image this festival aims to convey for its 33rd edition. The awareness of last year’s big success (which made it possible to have 11 theaters available this year) gives the organizers of this festival the right confidence and the possibility to rely on a widespread public approval.
Forget about the perfect family, the one in which a child grows up without problems, where both mum and dad have a job and nobody suffers from some kind of disease, whether it is physiological or pathological. The world of Cam (Mark Ruffalo) is that of a man, father and husband, who had a nervous breakdown. After this event, he was diagnosed with maniac depression, in other words a bipolar disorder. It is 1978, and the Stuart family is left alone dealing with this illness. Maggie (Zoe Saldana), Cam’s wife, has all the responsibility on her shoulders, as she has to work hard and take care of their two little girls. However, the family will have to face more problems.
In 1974, two years later the unexpected success of ‘Duel’, Spielberg creates the most intimate and undervalued film he has ever produced. ‘The Sugarland Express’ is not a simple “on the road” film like those of that period but, as stated by the director from Cincinnati, it is a journey through love, the States and Cinema itself.
The story talks about two drifters who escape the law to retrieve their daughter, who is in the care of an elderly couple in Sugarland, Texas. After having sequestrated a police car and a police officer, they start a ruthless chase throughout the dusted and savage States
The actors Goldie Hawn and William Atherton play the role of the two drifters. The latter is known for the role of the troublesome character of Walter Peck in “Ghostbusters” and some little roles in “Die Hard” and “Die Hard 2” in the 80’s.
Spielberg pays homage to most of the cinematography he loves: from Ford’s Westerns to Peckinpah’s New Hollywood. He also takes inspiration from his first short film “Amblin”.
This ‘on the road’ journey becomes the metaphor of an inner journey (like that of “Easy Rider”), which is shown here through the eyes of two parents who are willing to risk their lives just to find the thing they love the most: their daughter. Do we need to escape in order to find happiness? Do we need to have the whole world against us to find what we love? The answer is… yes. We need to accept the consequences of our choices and we have to fight and flee in order to find what we really are and want. The main characters know it, and they will accept their role in the world. Are they damned people or criminals? Of course not. They are simply human beings.
Vilmos Zsigmond’ photography is beautiful, while John Williams, composer of the country soundtrack, became Steven Spielberg’s friend and composer from this film on.
When it was first released, this film did not meet great public success. However, it was rediscovered later. Here is a final anecdote: in “The Blues Brothers”, the popular scene of the chase with dozens of police cars is an ironical reference to “The Sugarland Express”.
Can you imagine a Manet painted by prisoners? This is “Anuncian Sismos”, the first film by Rocio Caliri and Melina Marcow, two young Argentinean directors. This film, produced by Hulot Cine, draws inspiration from a real story. A small town located in the north of Argentina has been affected by several juvenile suicides, and the town decides to adopt a solution to solve this problem.
The film doesn’t explain why these suicides happen, but it stresses the consequences of these events on a group of youngsters. The final result is a 68-minute film without a specific aim. Its fragmentary narration is interrupted by inserts of petty philosophy. Although interesting, the film seems to be unclear and full of random elements. Furthermore, this situation doesn’t disconcert the main character, Mariano, who has a girlfriend with whom he spends some romantic and pathetic moments and he also has fun with his school friends.
It reminds us of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema, but it hasn’t its same poetic charge. This time the Turin Film Festival has chosen a nerve-racking film. “Anuncian Sismos” is not a film for an old people’s home, as someone would risk to drop dead.
After playing for years the role of Theresa D’Agostino in the HBO series The Wire, the actress Brandy Burre decides to abandon her acting career, in order to devote herself to her two children and her partner Tim Reinke. She moves to Bancon, in the suburbs of New York, and she ends up in a world that catches her totally unprepared; nappies, bills and meals to be cooked do not seem being made for her.
Over the years, the woman starts feeling the pressing need to come back in the limelight; and the director Robert Green decides to go along with her, with his camera, through the re-integration in the frivolous world of show business. Without interfering with or criticizing, Robert Green glances carefully at the protagonist’s clear frustrations arising from the restrictions of a home-centered life, which Brandy can forget just when she meets her fellow actors for a cocktail in a pub in Manhattan.
Actress is a documentary without any interviews or any cumbersome statements, where the tones of fiction and the features typical of melodrama alternate, by creating a HBO-style hybrid. Everything is harmonized by a continuous and spontaneous stream of consciousness, that sounds a lot like an admission of guilt: “I know what I did, because I’m clumsy. Perhaps not very graceful. “, states Brandy herself.
In little more than a half-hour documentary, the public participate in the parable of Brandy’s life, a woman apparently changeable and ungrateful, but who, finally, reveals herself as a person fragile and overcome by the inability to deal with the consequences of her choices, with the missed relationship with her partner and with a continuous sense of frustration, as she never feels up to her own duties as a mother, as a partner and as a professional.
Brandy’s choice was not easy; it was probably the hardest one in her life, but, to some extent, we can understand how her decision has led to the greatest happiness as well as the main pains, by leaving us the sensation of a dazed woman, who does all out to keep her life going, though clumsily.
Zachary Orfman (Dane DeeHan) is a rich middle-class boy, who lives in the wealthy district of Brian Grove. He lost his beloved girlfriend Bethany (Aubrey Plaza) due to a snakebite. The Slocums, Beth’s parents Maury (John C. Reilly) and Geenie (Molly Shannon), try to develop a filial relationship with Zac in order to keep Beth’s memory alive. They grieve, they chatter about the puddings that she liked to eat in her childhood and play chess until three in the morning.
However, Beth will soon literally get in touch with them, as nothing ever happened or as it was all just a trick. It seems like somebody in heaven decided that it was not her moment to push up the daisies. She is then ready to restart her life without having memory of what happened. With the help of her parents, Zach and Beth can live again their love story where they interrupted it; he seems to love his girlfriend if possible more than before. Then many strange things start happening in the neighborhoods, arousing Zach’s worries. At first, he was skeptic and joked around the fact of having a zombie girlfriend, but he will soon realize that it is the truth. It is only a matter of time before many departed ones decide to revive in order to hug again their beloved relatives… and possibly give them a bite.
Forget Joe Dante. Leave John Landis. Forget the first Ruben Fleischer as well. Jeff Baena, a brilliant first timer, sets George Romero’s revenants free in the streets of a smiling Suburbia, where Jewish Cabala clashes with Haitian voodoo, and the Yankees more Yankees than ever always keeps up with his stereotype: holding a Bible in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other, feeding himself of B-movies and paranoia.
Dead people no longer rest in peace, as they have awakened in a bad mood, claiming rights that died out together with them. Love wins over death, but not over hunger, (there are many two-ways in the background playing on physical and sexual hunger). This politically incorrect comedy also denounces the absurdity of the US wealthy middle class, spiced up with a marvelous soundtrack provided by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.
“I’m a zombie. How the fuck am I supposed to behave?” yells the amazing Aubrey Plaza to her boyfriend Dane DeHaan (another big revelation of the underrated fanta-mockumentary Chronicle by Josh Trank [2012]) while eating avidly his Saab’s seats. Exactly. How? Human nature, alive or not, is the central theme of this beautiful, yet wacky fairy tale, which mixes horror and drama. It is disturbing, but funny at the same time, it also cleverly speaks about human feelings, and relationships, making the audience reflect upon an issue: do we really wish our relatives departed for a better place, to return?
Who said that a remake is a less important film than the original? Certainly, if in the new product does not provide anything more – or even less – of what was suggested in the model, then the answer is “yes, it is just an unnecessary duplication”. Many recent operations of this kind prove that this theory is true (Carrie by Kimberly Pierce, for example). However, if starting from the original product we decide to take a completely different way, working on elements that become peculiar of the new feature, then we have something more: think of The Departed by Martin Scorsese and of the relationship with Andrew Lau’s Infernal Affairs. These two films are completely autonomous. Jim Mickle’s We areWhat We are belongs to this category.
We are What We are is a re-imaging of the Mexican film Somo the que hay by Jorge Michel Grau (2010). If the “prototype” (if we can define it so) is set in the streets of Mexico City, Mickle sets his work in the province of Castkills, the poorest area of the state of New York, anguished by floods. The floods bring out numerous buried human bones, not far from the home of the Parker family, which is mourning the death of the mother. The family is dominated by authoritarian father figure of Frank, who obliges the three children (two teenagers, Iris and Rose, and little Rory) to a period of forced fasting in view of an important ritual of which, since the mother has died, the eldest daughter Iris becomes the main celebrant. It consists of killing young women and then feeding themselves with their flesh.
Especially in this part, Mickle’s film differs widely from the original: eating human flesh is not something related only to a routine or to something ancestrally necessary, but it is much more: it consists in literally taking into account the evangelical concept of feeding oneself with the body of the Lord (as a matter of fact, the story unfolds between Friday and Sunday). It is also something atavistic, primitive, which survives in the tribal cultures, where the body of the defeated enemy is both a source of food and of the power of the winner. The victims are girls, and the story revolves mainly around the two older daughters: they are a little more than teenagers, with a irrepressible and longing sexuality that the father-master nips in the bud. Feeding on the sexually active (or immature) bodies of the victims gives them the power to get along without the carnal impulse. The temptation of the flesh with the flesh.
Genre films, and especially horror films, have always fielded the uncertainties and fears of the times in which they were filmed. Jim Mickle, who has always loved horror movies (his favourite movies are The Evil Dead by Raimi and Suspiria by Argento), uses them as a tool for a strong polemic against the institutions, a second level running parallel to the horror theme, as he had already done in Mulberry Street (2006) and Stake Land (2010).
Here, with a gothic film style setting, he focuses on religion, its madness, its most hidden side. Taking quite literally Stephen King, who argues that “in order to scare the others, we need to talk about something that scares us”, he sketched a dark film that speaks of faith that, in real life, can be terrifying. And the fear of the unknown that religion gives us is more frightening than anything else.
After Pude ver a puma, Eduardo Williams comes back to the TFF with another short film, Tôi quên rôi – I forgot!, which preceded the screening of The huella en la niebla.
With Tôi quên rôi – I forgot!, the young Argentine director proposes a longer film (maybe too long, since it had to precede the next film). It is a twenty-six minute movie that discontinuously portraits the anonymous lives of some guys who spend their days between work, hanging out and parkour. He portraits a fragmented generation, ready to jump from one roof to another, who lives in a suspended reality.
In the director’s words, «This film came to me as an opportunity to locate myself in the hypothetical place that I prefer when I direct or watch a movie, or far from any certainty. I always try to get lost in these experiences, in order to generate a vacuum that gives me the opportunity to exceed my limits». The picture that emerges is that of an unnerved and unnerving everyday life, exasperated by the use of hand-held cameras. The plot is too incomplete and the photography annoying, except for the last shot that clarifies to the viewer the sense of the fragmentary nature of the scenes.
La huella en la niebla is certainly a more pleasant movie. Directed by another Argentine director, Emiliano Grieco, it tells the story of Elias, a wounded man who returns to his island in order to rebuild his life. The wound, however, does not heal, and despite his efforts the fog ends up swallowing him.
Grieco does not employ a real actor, but a fisherman. He uses no dialogues at all, but water looks like the real star of the film. Considered as the conclusion of the documentary The Son of the River, the first work of the young director, this film lies somewhere between the great stories of Dickens and Conrad and documentary, making a good use of photography. The contrast between in focus and out of focus images serves as a narrative liaison, allowing the director to take advantage of the suggestions offered by the landscape to describe the emotions of a man trying (to no avail) to find traces of the past through the river. Overall, though, the narrative results are extremely “confusing” and the goal of placing the character in an interior limbo, unfortunately, leaves the viewer in that limbo too.
Mange tes morts is the worst insult one can ever say to a gipsy, and it is also the title of the new work by Jean-Charles Hue. This director took part in the 2009 Torino Film Festival with Carne Viva, a portrait of Tijuana reality.
This full-length film by Hue is a story of formation that in the end becomes a road movie with existentialism features. At the beginning, the film is a documentary set in the Jenisch gipsy community. The story, which may seem too simple, consists in a journey among the “gadjo” (not gipsy people) to steal a load of copper.
The French director shot a film based on the Hamletic doubt spread among Jenisch people: the choice between baptism and the consequent submission to the atavistic Christian morals or the choice to take up a career as a master thief.
The main character Jason Dorkel – a 21st century Hamlet in Nikes – chooses the first option. But Fred, Jason’s stepbrother, compromises the calm of the community. After fifteen years of jail he comes back into the Jenisch community without changing his behaviour: he is still a criminal.
Zvyagintsev was right: the return is the most ferocious butchery of the conscience. Fred is like evil that sodomises the weakest people and leads Jason to his ruin. Until then, he was depicted as a lamb doomed to hellfire.
From now on, the film becomes less united than the first part. There are a number of surreal scenes, like the one in which Fred bravely challenges police officers that seem bored psychologists ready to listen to their patients’ troubles. Actors pretend a solemnity that does not pertain to them and often improvise in an unexpected way. Mange tes morts is a nice film but it is also defective, it is interesting but also far from being a masterpiece.
“This is not a story about a disease, but the story of a human relationship”, said Eddie Redmayne yesterday at the press conference of the Turin Film Festival. He is the protagonist of ‘The Theory of Everything’, in which he plays the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. Actually, that is what the film is all about: it is a love story. Between whom though? Between Stephen and his first wife, Jane, or between Stephen and physics?
The film is the adaptation of the autobiographical book ‘Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen Hawking’, written by his first wife. It starts right from the first meeting between them, and then proceeds along the years, when they were in love and supported each other, when they created a family and when finally got separated.
Despite the serious tones, it manages to be funny in some moments. The two references to the famous British series ‘Doctor Who’ were particularly interesting and gave it a decisive British print.
Playing the role of Stephen Hawking has not been easy, but the charming interpretation of charismatic Eddie Redmayne convinced everyone right away – maybe also earning him an Oscar nominee for best actor this year. For the time being, however, he has received the Maserati award last night in Turin.
Eddie Redmayne received the Maserati award
Yesterday morning, at the press conference, the British actor told us that he was eager to participate in the film project but, as soon as he obtained the part of Hawking, he realized the difficulties this role could entail. In fact, dancer and choreographer Alexandra Reynolds followed him in the preparation of his role by teaching him how to move his body properly and to use only certain muscles. Moreover, the actor went to a specialized clinic where he could study the physical and emotional troubles caused by ALS illness.
Eddie Redmayne at the press conference
Interpreting this role certainly involved a very hard work, both physical and psychological. However, Eddie Redmayne stated that it was primarily the meeting with Stephen Hawking that helped him immerse adequately in the role and make him understand even the smallest aspects of this wonderful, iconic man, who wants to reveal us something more than the mysteries of the Universe.
The film focuses precisely on this point. It does not say much about physics, black holes or Hawking radiations, but it rather concentrates on human relationships. The difficulties encountered along the way can only be overcome with a tremendous force of will and with the affection of caring people. It is a study on love and on different ways of loving. That is what the “theory of everything” is really about.
Bacau – Turin: a distance that keeps seven children apart from their mother, who works as a caregiver in Piedmont and will go back to Romania only in summer.
Georgiana is the oldest daughter, who takes care of her younger siblings and does the housework. Their days pass in a typical way for children their age: they wake up, get dressed, and someone always cooks dinner for them. However, a fifteen-year-old girl forced to grow up too soon is the one doing all of his. The mother’s phone call is punctual and she wants to talk to all of her children, from the youngest to the oldest, but she cannot stay long on the line because she needs to go back to work. She tries to fix this by sending them the awaited package from Italy, and the children wonder if their mum remembered to buy that desired toy. However, since she did not receive her pay slip, it contains only candies, snacks, and a present for Georgiana’s fifteenth birthday. “The next package will be for your birthday, this time is for Georgiana”, says their mother. It is a life of games for the youngest children and of washing machines, dinners and lunches for the oldest. When a baby tooth is lost, when the candles are blown, with a word on the phone, the wish is always the same “I hope that mum will come back soon
Even if the first shots are cold and snowy, the air you breathe in that house is positive and warm. Georgiana’s figure is the most relevant, as she immediately gets into the role of the homemaker and the mother, though ironically she says, “I will never have children”. She is able to keep some moments for herself, from the Argentine soap opera to a night with friends, even though every time weeping or caprices interrupt her. The viewer gets used to the idea of considering Georgiana a grown-up woman, but then realizes, almost with a smile, that she is a teenager worried about her first date, (for example, when she is looking for her foundation and bobby pins). You forget you are watching a documentary and that someone else is in that house. The film director, Teodora Ana Mihai, is accompanied by four Belgian operators, who enter tiptoe in the social housing condo in the outskirts of Bacau. Only the film director knows Romanian and whispers to the camera operators, explaining the various scenarios. Sometimes the international language of games and feelings is the one that overcomes: the languages are not an obstacle anymore. Five moments of shooting in nine months and more than 150 hours of shot film. They could have filmed more, dug deeper, but the respect for this young family’s privacy is huge.
The question is instinctive at the interview after the show: “where is the male figure?” As you can see in the documentary, in the Romanian domestic hierarchy the woman is in charge. In-fact, Ionut, the 17-year-old brother, is invisible, as he spends his days playing video games. The father has vanished after an ugly divorce, not sharing family moments anymore and it is not even named. The film director does not care about the life of this man: his absence demonstrates how alone the children are.
It is an intimate and delicate work, which speaks for itself and acquires even more weight after the confession made by the film director during the presentation of the film: “I was born in Romania during the communist period; when I was seven and a half, my parents left and found asylum in Belgium. To ensure the secret services that they would go back to their homeland, they left me in Romania”. Even though they came back after just one year, this experience marked Teodora Ana Mihai. History repeats itself and with this work, she wants to give voice not only to those who emigrate from their homeland, but also to those who are forced, like her, to remain in their homeland suffering the consequences.
Among the films setting up Torino Film Lab, one is especially interesting: ‘In Jouw Naam‘ — in English ‘In Your Name’ — by Marco Van Geffen.
It talks about some dramatic events in the lives of a couple, Ton and Els, who have lost their newborn girl due to a rare disease. This leads them to struggle in order to restart their life.
Els is the first to recover: she takes comfort in throwing away all the furniture in the room of their baby girl. However, Ton is not able to overcome his loss and he gets upset about his partner’s apparent peace of mind, so much that he does not want to touch her, not even in bed. Even when Els got pregnant again, Ton cannot set free from the pain he is suffering, until tragic consequences arouse.
The director is able to transmit the sorrow and the agony of the characters without using conversation. Dialogues are minimal and useful only in terms of the development of the main plot. The scenes follow one another without any of the characters saying a word, but still the message clearly.
‘In Your Name’ is Van Geffen’s second work, awarded with the ‘Prix Art des Relations Internationales’ at the Festival of Cannes. It can be considered one of the most prestigious products obtained with the help of Torino Film Lab this year.
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