Archivi tag: TFF – 25 novembre 2014

English version, Film

ACTRESS: DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE

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Article by: Ilaria Frare

Translation by: Paola Pupella

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.

 

 

English version, Film

FELIX ET MEIRA: A PURE AND SILENT LOVE

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Article by: Karima Vinti

Translation by: Giulia Magazzù

Felix and Meira are completely different. He leads a life without responsibilities and family ties. His only concern is to squander the legacy of his father. She is a young Jewish woman, married and mother of a child that lives bored inside of her community. There is no strange connection between them, yet they meet by chance and fall in love.

Although set in a present-day Montreal, this romance unfolds like an episode set in another century. From the first shots, you notice the strange dresses in this Jewish community that recall the costumes of the past century. The women wear clothes that do not emphasize their femininity and their task within the community and their family is very narrow: they must ensure procreation, sometimes giving birth to six, eight or even fourteen children.

However, all these things fit Meira snugly. She loves listening to contemporary music, drawing and living like a normal person, but her husband forbid all these activities. When she meets Felix, his extravagance manages to conquer her heart, while undermining all the certainties of the woman.

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‘Felix et Meira’ is the third work of the director Maxime Giroux, who has already participated at the Turin Film Festival in 2008 with his first full-length film ‘Demain’.

The director states to have shot this film taking into account the vulnerability and restlessness of the characters, trying to follow with the camera all their movements and trying to seize their humanity. He portraits a love story that seems difficult, and yet stronger than any social restriction. Within the film nothing is emphasized, not gestures, not words nor their love. It is a pure and silent love that looks for a way out to get in with the long-awaited happy conclusion.

English version, Film

Qui

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Article by: Elisa Carbone

Translation by: Licia Ficulle

 

“Qui” (“Here”): a simple word composed of only three letters.

Anyone hearing this word gets confused, with an unconscious question mark impressed on their forehead, because that single word doesn’t explain the theme of the film. However, since the first scenes we understand that this adverb, “qui”, is related to a place, a specific location in Piedmont: Val di Susa. Everyone knows at least something about the thorny matter of TAV, or rather NO TAV. Sincerely, I expected grouches and quite irascible characters, but I made a mistake. In fact, the first protagonist chosen by Daniele Gaglianone (the director of La mia classe, I nostri anni and La ferita, his lasts film) is a middle-aged woman, a smiling pilgrim who goes every day to Chiomonte because of religious reasons. Unfortunately, since the construction site for the Turin-Lyon high-speed train started, part of her itinerary has been closed with an unusual barbed wire fence used only in Israel, so the woman is forced to walk.

Gaglianone introduces ten Val di Susa’s people, who suddenly have been surrounded by building sites, new insurmountable boundaries, and the commitment to exhibit their ID’s many times to functionaries; no matter if their houses are close and previous to those new fences. We don’t know the names or something else about the characters; we know just what they narrate during the interview. There is the Radio Blackout speaker who recalls the tragic moments during a police’s riot attack: he wanted to describe what happened but he couldn’t speak with the gas mask, so he removed it and tried to breath in spite of tear-gas. The mayor of Venaus says: «I was on my citizens’ side, knowing to be on the State side: on the other side (with reference to the police during the attacks) there was something more».

And there is even an old nice lady, a farm owner in this area “NO TAV”; she recalls her protest against the demolition of a house: she chained herself, with handcuffs bought in a sex shop, and she didn’t even know how to open them.

“Qui”, narrates histories of “normal” people, citizens that demand justice to a State who never asked them anything about the TAV project, a State who destroys their land and puts in danger the health of everyone (everything written in the official project), and moreover, a State who «deletes the human dignity linked to everyday life».

This documentary is surely “biased” but it would be helpful and educational to broadcast it on network at national level, where the NO TAV supporters are usually presented like violent and irrational people.

Maybe we can understand why these people rise up against TAV. This problem does not concern, only, Val di Susa’s area because, as Gaglianone explains: «the stories reveal, behind the urgency of the event and the modernity, a dimension that goes beyond the triggering causes of the conflict. So, “qui”-“here” is not elsewhere: it is everywhere».

And that is why everyone should be interested in it.

English version, Film

YOUNG BODIES HEAL QUICKLY, AN ATYPICAL ON THE ROAD FILM

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Article by: Matteo Merlano

Translation by: Giulia Magazzù

 American experiments ride along familiar roads. Filmmakers play with pre-existing genres, distorting, shrivelling and demolishing them. It is the case of this bizarre film by New Yorker director Andrew T. Betzer, which already been presented at the Tribeca Film Festival and has now landed in Turin in the Waves section. The film portraits the flight of two brothers (Gabriel Croft and Hale Lytle), guilty of the murder of a girl, through a disorienting and lost America, inhabited by freaks, nostalgic for the Reich and the war in Vietnam (as the bizarre character of an old “freak”).

Betzer depicts an unforgiving portrait of his country shot in a quite handcrafted way. ‘Young Bodies Heal Quickly’ shows us a lost and crazy version of the US, just like the two young protagonists who are running around the country without an existential reason. So far, the idea is interesting and the dirty and blurred photography conveys this alienating effect. Eventually, this style weighs and after the first hour, the story goes completely off the visual and editing rails. Experimenting does not mean raving and the impression we had leaving the cinema is that in several parts Young Bodies Heal Quickly got lost, dragging the viewer in this disorientation. The final climax is too long and dispersive and putting an explicit sex scene (cameo by Josephine Decker that, after the short film Violent Madonna Mia seems to take taste in expression of sexuality explicit) does not help the audience in finding his soothed attention.

Generally, the film is an interesting experiment and visual exploration of a possible new language of American independent cinema. It is always of Seventh Art, which requires implementing every available form. Maybe a little storytelling would not hurt, in a time when the real experiment is perhaps the tale. “But that’s another story”, quote.