Nisimazine Yearbook 2014

Nisimazine Yearbook 2014

Festival coverAGE Rotterdam Berlinale Cannes Karlovy Vary Venice and many more 2014’S DEBUTS TO GET EXCITED ABOUT The year in a top 10 IN FOCUS Is the Film Industry Finally Embracing the Fact that “Disability Is No Barrier”?

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Content

page 3 Editorial 6 Göteborg International Film Festival The Quiet Roar 7 The Disciple -Trespassing Bergman 8 International Film Festival Rotterdam Working to Beat the Devil 9 Giant - Two Points of Failure 10 Village Modéle - Notre tempo 11 Interview with Adan Jodorowsky (The Voice Thief) 12 Berlinale International Film Festival Interview with George MacKay (Shooting Stars 2014) 13 Macondo - Güeros 16 Festival of Austrian Film Diagonale Music 17 High Performance - Earth’s Golden Playground 18-19 In Focus on European Short Pitch 20 Cannes Film Festival The Chicken 21 The Tribe - Party Girl 22 Leidi - Lost River 23 Interview with Thomas Cailley (Les Combattants) 26 - 29 2014’s Debuts to Get Excited About 30 Karlovy Vary Film Festival Quod erat demonstrandum 31 Corrections Class - Barbarians 32 Bota - Kebab & Horoscope 33 Interview with Marianne Tardieu (Insecure) 34 Commonwealth Film and Theatre Festival Sixteen 35 Beach Boy - I Have Your Heart

36 Venice International Film Festival Arta 37 Belluscone: Una Storia Siciliana - These Are the Rules 38 La Vita Oscena - Goodnight Mommy 39 Interview with Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala (Goodnight Mommy) 42 San Sebastian Film Festival Chrieg 43 The Lesson - Magical Girl 44 Modris - The Mother of the Lamb 45 Interview with Hermes Paralluelo (Not All Is Vigil) 46-47 Interview with Daria Blažević, president of NISI MASA 48 Avvantura Film Festival Love Steaks 49 Before Snowfall - Interview with Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurđsson (Paris of the North) 50 Viennale International Film Festival Jauja 51 El Futuro - Mr. Leos Carax 52 Black Nights Film Festival Life in a Fishbowl 53 The Man in the Orange Jacket - Violet 54 Viktoria - In the Crosswind 55 Interview with Martti Helde (In the Crosswind) 56 REC Film Festival High Pressures 57 10000 Km - For Some Inexplicable Reason 58-59 In Focus: Bucharest Experimental Workshop 62 In Focus: Is the Film Industry Finally Embracing the Fact that “Disability Is No Barrier”?

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Editorial

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nother great and hardworking year is now finally coming to a closure, and Nisimazine is increasingly finding it hard to be an exception in the film criticism universe. Yes, we have finally surrendered ourselves to this pitiless top 10 battle and came up with our very own list ourselves, focusing on the best debuts of the year.

All in all we dug in deep 13 international Film Festivals this year, watched and dissected hundreds of films, and interviewed an endless number of filmmakers. Our radar was cleansed to perfection and nothing, and I mean nothing, went unnoticed.

It was not an easy task, believe me, like everyone else we have felt the merciless weight of this crisis that is bringing Europe to a standstill. It was particularly hard when well over 60 young European writers played a part in our 2014 film odyssey. The proof of the success is there in these pages that follow and there is not much sense in pointing out any particular example. Instead I will like to bring a focus on something else drastically more important.

For over a decade now Nisimazine has been opening the path for new names to appear on the criticism scene, and as the years go by one aspect begins to become increasingly unavoidable.

How fair is it for us to stimulate young people to pursue a career in film criticism in an age where the film critic is a dying breed?

The general fear amongst established critics is palpable, everyone fighting to maintain his or hers place in the industry, and by doing so, and ignoring the problem that there are increasingly less opportunities for young writers to get paid for their work, closing a trade that needs a certain level of openness and vision to survive.

For years now I have been hearing about the importance of maintaining an educated view out in the open, as a counterbalance to the endless sea of opinions spread across the virtual world. People constantly tell me about the importance of the bridge the critic creates between the industry and the audience, and how without it film would rapidly loose its privileged spot in the collective imaginary of modern age society.

I struggle to take this seriously nowadays when increasingly more and more publications, including those who in a not so distant past where untouchable, are simply unable to afford to fully invest on a renewal of new voices. As an editor-in-chief I have no problem in recognizing the financial difficulties that all publications go through, particularly in this current climate. Hats off to those that continue to find alternatives and maintain a forward thinking attitude towards the future.

I myself, still sort of young, have always found myself in a catch-22 sort of situation, and to be accurate, most of the critics under 40 that I know are in a similar circumstance. It is becoming harder a harder to make a living in this trade we all know and love. Despite the many efforts, sacrifices and hard work, criticism is progressively returning to its original state of a rich kids game, a past time where the natural selection if made via a logic of "who can afford it" instead of "who is more able". It takes no genius to conclude that this is in itself a major threat to the general quality of the writing and analysis of film.

My first hand experience with the struggle of young writers, who desperately invest their labour, time, energy, love and passion, leaves me little space for optimism. True, this is indeed transversal to all sectors, not just the curse of a niche market. Yet, what scares me the most is that the film industry is lagging behind in making the solution to this problem one if its priorities.

I have little doubts that "fresh meat" is vital for all of us, after all what is criticism but a public dialogue on film as an artistic form of expression? What will happen to film once all its discussion is reduced to the views and interpretations of a single generation?

In the fast approaching new year Nisimazine will continue to play its part, rowing against the current, ignoring the evident signs of impending doom, stimulating new voices and "fighting" for their place and legitimacy. It would be a shame if this would not be followed by a serious and constructive debate on how to ensure this, film criticism, is not a futureless activity.

Fernando Vasquez 3

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Gothenburg International Film Festival Gothenburg (Sweden), Jan 24-Feb 3

Scandinavia's largest film event has been around for a long time, making headlines with the same voracity as when it first started. This year its opening film, Something Must Break by Ester Bergsmark, quickly became the talk of the film world, for the audacity and braveness of starting of such a key event like that. It paid off in many people’s eyes, making this fast approaching 2015 edition one of the most anticipated of the moment.

The Quiet Roar Henrik Hellström, Sweden Dragon Award Best Nordic Film Competition There is a well-known notion that memory is the essence of cinema. Indeed, what is photographed becomes the past immediately after it’s photographed, and by the time it is projected, it’s but a memory revitalised on screen. Henrik Hellström’s The Quiet Roar, competing for the Best Nordic Film prize at Gothenburg Film Festival, is another movie that uses memory as its momentum and backbone, and yet the second-time director/screenwriter’s vision is very distinctive.

The film begins when a terminally ill woman, who has no more than three months to live, arrives to a German clinic that offers its patients a mysterious serum. The potion – that could be invented by Charlie Kaufman of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – opens one’s memory, allowing those who’ve taken it to travel in time inside their heads. The heroine is carried back to the days of her youth when she was on vacation in the mountains of Norway, with her husband and children. This being a moment of crisis of her marriage and a crucial point of her whole life, she tries to revisit her own feelings and retrace the thoughts that led to the decisions she made. But it all slips away in the stream of memory; key scenes are mingled with those of little significance in regard to “moving the 6

story forward” – we see the parents playing with the children, or firing sparklers, or making love.

Hellström’s film lacks coherence, but it’s a deliberate choice – he opts for abstract and non-linear narrative to create a sense of hallucination; the ties are intuitive rather than logical. Unearthly views of the fjords and the silence of these, counterpointed by a quiet, barely audible soundtrack add to the feeling of uneasiness and slight unreality. The director cites Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries as a source of inspiration – indeed, the mood of certain scenes in that picture, also following the memory of a dying person, is not unlike that of The Quiet Roar.

The latter film’s memory scenes are largely devoid of time specificity, but certain details allow us to place them into our time, early 21st century, which leads us to think that the heroine is a projection of the director himself. Bergman was 39 when he made Wild Strawberries, and so is Hellström; perhaps it’s around forty when you start to be fully aware of death.

Andrei Kartashov

The Disciple

Trespassing Bergman

If your film is shot on only one location, it won’t hurt if this location is spectacular. The Disciple, Ulrika Bengts’ sophomore film and Finland’s Oscar candidate (it didn’t make it to the shortlist though), is, essentially, a chamber play, with only five characters on a small patch of land. They are the whole population of an island on the edge of Åland – an archipelago between Finland and Sweden – and the austere Nordic scenery predetermines the rigour of the story.

Since 1990s and until his passing in 2007 Ingmar Bergman was an honorary president of the Gothenburg Film Festival – when approached by the festival, he accepted, as the story goes, on a condition that he would never have to visit the event. By this time he’s fled continental Sweden and for several decades has been living in seclusion at Fårö, an island in the Baltic Sea, watching, in average, three films a day and having thus compiled a formidable collection of videos in his house.

In the movie’s first scene a 13-year-old Karl arrives to the island from an orphanage with a letter of recommendation in hand. He is to help the lighthouse keeper Hasselbond in his duties. Hasselbond, at first reluctant to accept the newcomer, gradually grows more and more enthusiastic towards Karl, to disadvantage of his own son Gustaf who tries hard to please his father but fails more often than not. The time is the first half of 20th century – probably 1920s or 1930s.

This year’s festival saw a national premiere of a film that used this collection as a starting point of its structure. Jane Magnusson and Hynek Pallas, two critics-turned-filmmakers who wanted to make a documentary about Bergman’s influence on world cinema, went through the VHS and DVDs on Bergman’s shelves and then interviewed directors and actors whose films the classic had; some of them were also invited to the house at Fårö.

Ulrika Bengts, Finland Nordic Light Section of the Gothenburg Film Festival

Jane Magnusson & Hynek Pallas, Sweden Gothenburg Film Festival

Three male characters form the centre of this story, the father being the apex of this triangle and an undisputed head of the island, while his wife and little daughter take the middle ground – a typical pattern of male-dominated culture of the time. Twenty or thirty minutes into the movie we may even suspect some sort of nostalgia of the times of old – Hasselbond seems harsh, but just and loving, and we may develop a kind of sympathy to him, explaining his brutality with overall savagery of his milieu.

However, as the movie progresses, patriarchal structure of this micro-society is revealed as problematic, with the father as a home tyrant blinded by the belief in his own rectitude.

The Disciple, made by a female director, works well as a critique of androcentrism, its well-sewn script providing different models of relationships within patriarchal society. However, here lies the problem: the lighthouse island is a small version of Anytown – a case study of a small community that is assumed to represent a wider society. This device is valid as a metaphor, but leads to superficiality in regard to psychology – motivations are often stretched to fit the director’s objectives – and artificiality.

Given Bergman’s cinematic pantophagy, the list is impressive and diverse – from John Landis’ Blues Brothers and Wes Craven, to Claire Denis and Zhang Yimou. With about twenty talking heads, many of whom are charismatic personae on their own, it is hard to be profound about your subject; besides, “the impact of Bergman’s films on world cinema is so enormous that it’s difficult to talk about it,” as is explained in an intertitle. And so the movie doesn’t really try to do that — however, it never seizes to be entertaining in the course of its running time of 100 minutes.

Interviewees don’t talk much from an aesthetical or professional point of view, but rather from a personal one, becoming true heroes of the movie. Scorsese and Woody Allen recall how everyone in the 1950s’ New York went to see the nude scene in Summer with Monica, Michael Haneke frowns upon seeing only four stars on the VHS of The Piano Teacher; Lars von Trier – who, with his irreverent and hilarious remarks, steals the show from everyone else – resents Bergman’s favouritism towards Thomas Vinterberg.

The latter is in contrast to ostentatious authenticity of scenery, sets and costumes that is more in harmony with the dubious notion of a “true man” developed by Hasselbond.

It is exactly this manifoldness of perspectives that confirms Bergman’s grandeur in the most effective and pictorial way. You can have film professors analysing his techniques in Wild Strawberries or the metaphors in The Seventh Seal – or you can have Claire Denis getting over-emotional upon seeing the man’s house, and von Trier telling how he, despite everything, “loved that old fucker”. The latter would work as good.

Andrei Kartashov

Andrei Kartashov

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International Film Festival Rotterdam Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Jan 22-Feb 2

Traditionally the first big burst of energy in the European film festival circuit comes out from one of Holland’s gift to the film world. The IFFR is, to many, the Mecca of Arthouse cinema, and in it’s somewhat insanely long film program you are bound to find some of the greatest gems of the year. With a strong emphasis on experimentation and world cinema, the event has a double meaning for Nisimazine: it represents a unique chance to fully focus on short films.

Working to Beat the Devil Chu-li Shewring & Adam Gutch, UK Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films The truly mesmerizing piece by British filmmakers Chu-Li Shewring and Adam Gutch was a precious catch at the Tiger Shorts program. Balancing between fiction, observation and documentary motives, this film brings focus to experimentation in its heart. Sourcing from Charles Darwin’s texts and inspired by natural phenomena, it creates a magical and charmingly rustic world of an old scientist looking for the beast.

The symphonic orchestration of sounds is excellently employed to bring the tactile sensations and meditative atmosphere to the picture of a solitary researcher that treats the microscope as a gate to the world of nature and fantasy. The touching and fragile narration voiced by Guy Shewring takes us through the daily routine of finding a proper solution to questions about the universe, as well as subconscious revelations. “I think I am superior to the common realm of men in noticing things, which can easily escape attention” he claims, and in the same way I could characterize the artists who weaved this visual journey.

By working with a non-professional actor, a close relative, the directors trespassed the borders of the fiction genre and found the perfect intonations to voice over the tiredness of age, which even the most curious mind can experience. The periods of short sleep when the character goes through vulnerable obscurity intertwine with a constant search for evidence.

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Mortality and the irreversibility of human life are opposed to the wilderness and the mystery of the creature hiding in the caves, making for a powerful leitmotif of the film.

Nowadays, at a time when we all got quite used to the scientific pictorial representations that almost each mass-produced good is labeled with, the film achieves a nearly impossible task, while it attributes a sense of charm back to the mystery of a microscopic life.

It is certainly a very personal world where one can get access to using science as a tool. The hermetic laboratory is surprisingly opening to the change of seasons and the specimens fixed with the glass are counterpointed with archive footage and family photos. Chu-Li Shewring and Adam Gutch create an impressive set full of instruments, flasks and objects that follow the vibrating editing moves, as if anticipating unknown events that might happen. The old house on the island, with deep see caves and natural landscapes, serves as a perfect stage.

Ultimately the film is a the tale of beauty embodied in a man of science, who’s struggling to meet his Beast and makes us fall in love with it.

Alina Ozerova

Giant

Two Points of Failure

Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films

Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films

Salla Tykkä, Finland

Michael Moshe Daham, USA

The world of gymnastics is not without its controversy. The beauty of the sport has been frequently overshadowed by the many leaked stories of child abuse, in particular during the Cold War period. No more so than in Romania, where notorious gymnastics schools such as Deva and Onesti have become legendary, for all the right and wrong reasons.

Two Points of Failure is a highly outstanding experimental film: an essay about the eschatology of analogue film, reflecting almost simultaneously the contemporary cultural schism and the anticipated genesis of new cinematic forms. The film begins with a credo: ”where there’s a corpse, there’s a mystery”, which slowly leads the audience to a prolific act of interpretation.

These two schools are now the subject of prominent Finnish video artist Salla Tykkä’s latest work, Giant, which through a series of short interviews, old footage and a mixture of different shots of trainings, offers us a unique perspective on two buildings somewhat lost in time. Admittedly, the film proposes itself to reveal the continuity of how the sport is visually documented. Yet, even if the beauty and the movement of the athletes is ever present and dominant over the sensorial language and rhythm of Giant, the film actually performs much more interesting tricks and skills on other levels.

This piece has an intricate background, being mainly inspired by an anecdote by Jean Luc Godard, who commissioned the development of the first portable video camera – a pocketsize 35 mm camera. As the director of the film explained during the open discussions, although the attempt failed, “Godard was just beginning to conceive the future of cinema”.

Aesthetically, Giant’s greatest triumph is in its sound work, capturing and embracing the resonances and echoes of running steps and shrieking wood, while redressing it with eerie traits, as if the building could talk and reveal many of the stories, victories and painful memories it has witnessed throughout the ages. Visually the repetition of dolly shots functions in parallel with the need for repetition in order to achieve perfection, just like the athletes training: a never-ending process of replication and improvement.

The architectural wonder of the buildings, in particular Onesti with its arresting external curves, hides what really goes on inside though. There is a ghostly quality to both structures. Their past grandeur is ever present but so is an inevitable and regretful sense of sacrifice, in all its forms and brutality.

The most striking quality of Giant is manifested in the lifeless anonymity perpetuated inside the walls of Deva and Onesti. Faces and names are absent throughout. The shots of the trainings focus exclusively on the body movements without ever revealing any traces of individuality. Even the mirrors that cover the walls of the training grounds are opaque and muddled. Communication among the girls seems to be a taboo and impossible.

Individual expression is repressed and condensed to a single format: gymnastics. The girls’ childhood, which has been put on hold in exchange for a chance of sporting glory, is remarkably present in their interview answers, in particular when one refers that her first memory as being selected for the school when she was 4 years old, an age when she could not possibly have made such a choice herself.

All this setting – conditions and limitations of self-expression, even if only as a background – creates a gloomy atmosphere that taints one of the most beautiful sports in the world, contrasting visual and aesthetical pleasure with psychological and physical pain. Salla Tykka’s Giant is therefore a multi-dimensional experience, never interested in taking sides, immensely virtuous in its technical ambitions and conveniently discreet in its social consequences.

Having this prolegomena as a diegetic premise, the short film surprises the internal fragilization of an analogue image, it’s decomposing process into particles of colour and light. The photograph, surprisingly one of the most acclaimed classic filmmakers, is slowly transformed into a fluid mosaic of versatile atoms. The effect of decomposition blends gentleness and fierceness. The melting colours resemble blood, giving a sensorial touch to the “death” of an object. With a delicate twist, the particles evade their destructive abyss and re-establish a fully different content, as in a controlled randomness.

The filmic essay is not only a memento mori, it captures an unconscious genesis as well, transforming this vertigo of objectual re-incarnation into a suspenseful work of art.

Philosophy-wise, although the first layer of understanding might lead to the death of the analogue, its profoundness can be expanded into a discourse about the complementarity between form and essence, blindness and quasi-observation, nostalgia and faith.

Shot in real time, after 50 previous takes, it reconciles pure chronology with chemistry. The fluid geometry of the colours brings a surreal effect, while bitterly illustrating a dynamic inertia. Without using any of the ingredients of classic storytelling characters, actions, dialogues, V.O. – this short succeeds to be, only through its visualness, outstandingly meaningful.

From a simple idea, the filmmaker succeeds to convey a cross-boundaries discourse, a mesmerizing contemplation of a personal history of cinema, a portal towards reevaluating the purpose of cinematic art, and a microanalysis of the cathartic changes that precede art.

The director of the film, Michael Moshe Dahan, is an ex-Hollywood producer, currently studying Fine Art and exploring new understandings of contemporary cinema. The poetic technique of slow-motion dissolved fluids might seem over-used, however, in Dahan’s hands, it starts to have probably one of the most wise and well-motivated purposes so far. It’s not just a purely aesthetic-oriented tool, but a highly profound organic and poetic discourse.

Although the philosophy of the film is clear and direct, the visual language is never explicit. It liquefies time, space and cinema into timelessness, into a perpetuum mobile of inner reconfigurations.

Ioana Mischie

Fernando Vasquez 9

Village modèle

Notre tempo

Hayoun Kwon has found an intriguingly absurd subject – a propaganda village in North Korea – and turned it into a creative and esthetically exquisite short film.

Our Tempo is a non-fictional trichotomy portraying Denis, Tabita and Geanina, three gypsies as “inhabitants” of a nomad childhood.

Hayoun Kwon, France Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films

Kwon’s complex relationship with her home country plays a leading role, and swaying from fiction to reality Kwon has this time chosen a peculiar documentary format. She uses transparent models and clean-cut surfaces in accordance to the actual faux model village of Kijong-dong to visualize the demilitarized zone inaccessible to cameras. The filmmaker successfully plays with sounds – including an audio of a tourist trip and a clip from a propaganda film – as well as light to stimulate the viewers’ imagination.

The brightly painted concrete flats in the village are actually empty shells, the choice of transparent models and the style of cinematography work perfectly, emphasizing on the fakeness of the actual village and rising a dreadful thought that the village is only a shadow. The film emphasizes the absurdness of the situation and models show the artificiality of the village.

On the one hand, the idea of the film and its realization contribute as an independent work of art, but on the other Kwon inflicts an immense craving to see the actual village, even though it is accessible and truly exists only in our minds and imagination –Kijong-dong seems so close yet so far.

After being absorbed into the fabricated black-and-white world of facades and charades, you get to see the camera and two searchlights moving through the village. The unexpected appearance of monstrous machinery, in contrast with the small-scaled model village, shakes your attention. It forces it to slowly drift away. At first it seems unnecessary and erroneous, but the constant moving of the picture and sliding through the model adds a sense of imminent threat and gloominess to the devices, showing them as metaphors for the heavy machinery behind the ghost town and mechanism of fiction. The darkness and the intimidating sound design describe the real situation. The climax of the film adds a subtle twist of psychedelic euphoria with the illusions created by shadows and light, almost seeming like the see-through models are rising from the ground.

Village modèle is a journey through a weird and mesmerizing village like a strange spot between fiction and reality; and an experience in itself, both thought-provoking and aesthetically delightful. The audio clips, playing with the light and shadows, create a loose narrative which you cling to and so the ending sneaks in without notice, like the dark taking over the land after sunset – slow and steady.

This seemingly simple short film strikes with its subtle genius – the way that all the details fall into place and how it is possible for the visual side and the story to marry each other and create such a harmonious whole.

And how non-ostentatious artifices can work so brilliantly in order to express a simple yet multiplex subject matter.

Maarja Hindoalla

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Lorena Zilleruelo, France Tiger Awards Competition for Short Films

The audio and the visual are prolonged in an oxymoronic construct: while on the screen we witness their objectification – static gazes, facial expressions, body language, silhouettes in the darkness, the voice over surprises their genuine confessions, their breaths, their rhythm. Only in the end, the two worlds collide: visual objectification and audio subjectification come along together, recreating a highly sensory experience.

The final frame reiterates one of the most revealing moments of the entire audiovisual architecture: each child moves as if this would be their only language, recreating an almost surreal choreography. Their step arrangement is not just a dance, but an anthropological pulse. Through gestures and sounds exclusively, they seem to expand the depth of their background, their future, their present and the conflictuality they face every day.

Structure-wise, the film enriches the realm of experimental documentary art by adding an almost audio-tactile dimension to the narration, through the sound editing.

By dividing the exploration into chapters, we can map the authenticity and the genuine minds of the three children. Exploring the ordinariness of their life, the film doesn’t judge any of its characters, allowing them to dream, to regret, to remember almost random fragments of memory in a fluid and playful narration.

Their confessions are augmented by almost randomly chosen personal details. The documentary tends to become what Siegfried Kracauer used to define: “film as a discoverer of the marvels of everyday life”. Relevant and loyal to the mechanics of self-projection become as well the fragments of songs the infants interpret – traditional refrains that seem to encapsulate an eclectic puzzle of happiness and sorrow.

For a public who is familiar with art-house documentaries, Our Tempo might seem impregnated with stereotypical techniques (one of them being the association of voice overs and almost still-photographic frames), however the spontaneous ending of the film reconfirms the inventiveness of the author, defining in a highly poetic manner a portrait of ordinary people who try to overcome the prejudices they are associated with.

The director-cinematographer of the film, Lorena Zilleruelo, conceptualizes an audiovisual essay where rhythm, sound, body language as eikons of the non-verbal are emancipated, in order to reveal the sub-layers of a meaningful and fragile slice of a plurivalent diary.

Ioana Mischie

Interview with

Adan Jodorowsky The Voice Thief, France

Adan Jodorowsky’s fantastic genre goes well beyond echoing the footsteps of his father. He is taking it to new heights with a very personal touch and feel. We sat down with him to learn more about the ideas behind The Voice Thief.

You were a musician. How did that influence your film process?

From the beginning I wanted to be a film director. I made short movies when I was a teenager and one in 35 mm and then I wanted to make The Voice Thief, but I couldn’t find the money. I was too young. I just had a last name. So I said - what’s the way to do it? I’m going to sing and have success with music and if I have success people are going to come to me and ask me to make a film. So I started to sing. Now I think I did The Voice Thief at the right time, otherwise it would have been created with the goal of being famous. I discovered the pleasure of creating and then everything started to grow.

Gender seems very transgressed in your film. As a filmmaker do you want to add something new to the gender theme?

We are fruits of sexuality. Our parents had sex and here we are. You cannot erase sexuality in movies, it’s a part of life. And the fact that everyone is halfwoman half-man always attracted me. Because we come from a mother and a father so we are half-woman half-man. We have two parts. That’s what I’m showing. I’m not homosexual, but I accept I have a woman in me.

And men should accept they have a woman inside. And women too should accept they have a man inside.

You seem to propose a maximalist universe. Is this a reaction to minimalist cinema?

Yes because there are too many empty things around us. Everything is empty today because the people are not giving themselves to art. I didn’t have any limits, I wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do without any limits. And I was fighting on the set to do what I wanted to do. At the end of the shooting I even said - I want to die. I came to my house and I fainted, I gave everything. I couldn’t do better. With the money I had, I couldn’t do better.

How much does the Jodorowsky family background influence your way of filmmaking?

You know, I was hiding in the music at first and I even changed my name – Adanowsky. Suddenly I decided to be a director and so I put Adan Jodorowsky. It’s a heavy pressure being a Jodorowsky. If I do movies like him it’s like “oh, he’s doing exactly the same thing”, if I’m doing something different it’s like “he’s not like his father”. So I have to do what I have to do, not think about others. I have to do what I really feel. And yes, I have his influence, of course. Santa Sangre was my first introduction to the movies. My first acting scene was on top of an elephant. I saw a dwarf, I saw a tattooed woman, I saw monsters, so yes, that’s my influence but not only. I like Fellini, Buñuel, old Woody Allen, horror, Kubrick. I have a lot of influences, not only my father.

Ioana Mischie 11

International Film Festival Berlin Berlin (Germany), Feb 6-16

All paths lead to Berlin every February. The craziness of the European Film Market, or the endless gigantic film program on offer is only surpassed by its legendary party scene. If you want to work in the film industry this is the place you have to be. With a particularly provocative program, 2014 was a great year for the great German event. And the next edition is just around the corner.

Interview with

GEORGE MACKAY Shooting Stars 2014

George MacKay is unquestionably one of the most promising young actors to have come out of Great Britain in the last few years. His astonishing performances in Paul Wright’s For Those in Peril and Kevin Macdonald’s How I Live Now have put him under the spotlight. We sat down with him at the Hotel du Rome to understand how he is taking all these experiences at such an young age.

In For Those in Peril you played Aaron, a really confused and somewhat disturbed young man who provoked very aggressive reaction on most of the other characters. How demanding was it to play him?

It’s funny because it was actually the best time, we had so much fun. The best thing about it was being so involved. I find I much prefer being there all the time and feeling like you are really working. Talking with Paul Wright (director) and the other actors was very important. We rehearsed for about a week beforehand, and in particularly with Kate Dickie, who played my mom, it was helpful to hear her perception of Aaron’s character and what he was going through. It allowed me to get a real sense of who he was and why he was doing the things he was doing. In a weird way, that allowed me to be able to play the madness of whatever everyone else was watching.

That is what makes you more mental: you being convinced what you are doing is right and everyone else thinking it is not right and not based on concrete fact. All this process really helped me get a grasp of him that helped.

Being from England, how hard was it to dominate the Scottish accent so well?

I had somewhat of a grasp before and then I had a dialect coach before we started. It was also very helpful being around the Scottish voices all the time. We shot the film in Scotland and pretty much all the crew and cast was Scottish. Nichola Burley, who played my brother’s girlfriend, was from Leeds and she also had a dialect coach. The interesting thing about working on an accent is that it is kind of the best way to get into a role as you have to find a voice that is not your own.

More recently you also worked on Kevin McDonald’s How I Live Now. In there you play a much quieter character. Was it a difficult part to prepare?

I was so excited to work on that with Kevin, and also with Saoirse Ronan. It is true that the character does not say a huge amount of dialogue but what is nice about him is that Saoirse’s character falls in love with him because of his understanding of her and not what he says. Playing Eddie was impor12

tant to understand the other characters; his knowledge on other people goes beyond most people’s. If he were to meet you he would be able to pick on your mannerism and quickly figure out who you are, that is extraordinary!

You said earlier you knew you wanted to be an actor at the age of five.

How did you start?

I did not know I wanted to do it as a job at five, but I knew I liked doing it.

I was lucky because my first job came up after a casting director came to my school and picked up a bunch of boys for the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. I went along and got the part. From that point I got an agent and managed to keep working. And I have been very lucky because I have been getting lots of jobs in great films but also quite sparsely. This allowed me to take them as they were and not in a career perspective. I think that it would be unhealthy for a child to be that conscious about it. I was just very open to opportunities as they came along, and when I did not have work I would just go back to school, which I enjoyed so much. I have been lucky with how gradually it has been and that kept me nicely unaware of everything.

You are fast becoming a reference in the UK. Do you have plans to cross the Atlantic?

I would love to. This (Shooting Stars) is a wonderful chance to broaden horizons. I am very lucky to be here. I just want to work as much as I can and in good projects. But when the chance comes I want it to be the character to seduce me, then rather think too much of a career in geographical terms. There are tons of directors that I would love to work with but I don’t think I am in a position to say I want to work with this director, or that filmmaker. These last couple of years I have just been enjoying working with directors in general, so I am more interested in the experience then picking a particular director.

How are you taking all this Shooting Stars experience?

It is just kind of happening (laughs). It is wonderful: mad busy, exciting and really thrilling. It is cool to come to a place like this (press event). For instance we were all just waiting in the hotel room upstairs, and you are left there guessing which film crew is in the room next door waiting for their turn to came down here. It’s exciting to be in a place you are not exactly sure what is going on, but everyone here is involved in filmmaking, so it is so nice to be involved in the mix.

Fernando Vasquez

Macondo

Güeros

Films are always a result of a long fight wherein you don’t see the process of the battle. For a feature like Macondo it is very important to know that director Sudabeh Mortezai- who specializes in documentaries- had to make the refugees living in Vienna trust her first. Because the people acting in the film all come from the ghetto, they won’t tell you their story for a simple ice-lolly and some pats on the shoulder.

What the hell is going on? It’s the first thing that pops in our mind when the awarded best first film at the Berlinale’s Panorama Sec­tion, Güeros, begins. And believe it, this will be the most surprising film we’ll witness in a long time.

Sudabeh Mortezai, Austria Competition

Alonso Ruizpalacios, Mexico Panorama

The more than 20 nationalities who live there, have all fled from conflicts (Yugoslavian War, AfghanistanWar...) out of the several hornets’ nests that the world had- and still has- to deal with. In Macondo she focuses on Chechen people (who arrived in one of the last waves of refugees) but it could easily been Chileans who named the settlement after a fictional town out of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude after fleeing from the Pinochet regime.

The young protagonist Ramasan we see mainly footballing on dusty wouldfields, shopping in supermarkets full off too pricy tempting products, and guiding his single mother who radiates a lot of insecurity. He has be strong, be his own man. The pressure on this kid is enormous. Thus, he has a lot of difficulties on choosing which path he has to walk. The former war friend of his deceased father sprouts out interest in him, the imam wants him to go more to the mosque, and his friends support him on sneaking in forbidden work sites; the stimuli are everywhere. Meanwhile, he luckily has the change to be a child too. He gets his own knife. Performs tricks on a self-made trampoline with his friends. It gives the audience a very kaleidoscopic image of the environment.

Although the subtlety of the dramatic elements may go unnoticed for viewers who ask for more tension, the camerawork gives a lot of energy to the feature as well as the non-professional kid protagonist played by Ramasan Minkailov. Still, the competition from other kid actors such as Thomas Doret- whose character also lost his father- in Belgium The Kid with the Bike and Conner Chapman whose role also played out in the overlooked outskirts of the city- in the British The Selfish Giant are stiff competition where he loses from by a inch. That’s not to say this cleverly constructed journey into the heart of Macondo doesn’t deserve your attention.

The film has multiple insights on the world shown on the screen by gracefully prepared travelling’s and a warm feel in the shots. Macondo maybe doesn’t deserve you attention for 100 years, but not even two hours of your time will be quite worth the while.

Matthias Van Hijfte

This exciting film by Alonzo Ruizpalacios brings us Santos, a boy that just likes doing pranks, but his tired mother decides to send him to spend some time with his older brother, to cold off. Sombra is the older brother who lives in a chaotic apartment with his friend Tomás. As good brothers they don’t get along, just sharing one common love, Epigmenio Cruz’s music, the same that their father used to listen to, a musician known as the one that could have been the saviour of the national rock scene. Between the natural youth laziness and driving their neighbours crazy, they start a road trip within México city looking for their beloved icon. On their path they stop by a student strike to pick up Ana, Sombra’s sweetheart.

This film about convictions (or the lack of them) is a prodigious story of young people discovering themselves, their city, and their Icons. Ruizpalacios’s debut feature is an extraordinary, refreshing approach to coming of age films. Güeros, meaning a white-skinned blonde-haired person, is an easy going comedy made of contrasts: between brothers, between ideals, between expectations and truth.

With a well-worked mise en scène, where anything is left to chance, and every new frame has a new surprise, we could wonder if there’s space for so many things happening and if all works toge­ther. But the answer is not just obviously positive, as even humour finds its way in the film. The way Ruizpalacios decided transmit the Epigmenio Cruz music is just perfect, increasing our expectations until the moment of truth: the meeting with the artist himself. After all, what could be more powerful than our own imagination? The music is one of the most important elements and together with the black and white style, regardless of the reason for such choice, it just fits, giving to film a timeless aura. The bound between the characters is memorable, set through several details and with hu­mour notes which are right in the spot, form a touching, endearing relationships between all of them.

Güeros by Alonzo Ruizpalacios surpasses in such way the expecta­tions that, at the end, become difficult to identify with fragilities in the film. We could say that at some point in the middle, the rhythm maybe slows down a little bit, at least compared with the begin­ning, but it’s also true that it’s necessary so we can dig deeper in the characters. And it simply doesn’t matter, we just want to conti­nue following the story and wait for the next surprise, hidden in unsuspected moments.

Teresa Pereira

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Festival of Austrian Film

Graz (Austria), Mar 18-23

It is no surprise that Austria gave birth to the most influential window of Germanic cinema out there. You only need to think of its recent film history to realise the country is, in many ways, at the epicentre of European film. The Diagonale Film Festival has picked on this with great skill, creating every year the most complete overview of what is done in the area, mixing audience and talents together in a great celebration of the regions culture. As such, the event has quickly become an obligatory stop for Nisimazine, and it should also be for you.

Music

Stefan Bohun Diagonale 2014 Music is a short film about a protagonist living in passive despair and changes that affect him gradually. Andreas is an anti-hero (a corrupted state official) who hits rock-bottom in his family situation and is completely dissatisfied with his work. He is mostly passive towards what is happening to him, fantasizing that a significant change could come if he could just do “something with music”.

Defined almost as a character without “character”, Andreas reaches absurd stages of life and there seems be bottom to his sinking. As an unusual character that is defined by the situations in which he reacts bizarrely due to his ongoing life change, the absurd situations that he finds himself in (espe16

cially in the scenes at work, with the “tablo” foreigners) create an atmosphere of subtle dark humour of the everyday.

Shot with a static camera that defines the main character, with precise framing and well-written dialogues (especially between the teenagers), Music is a short study of character and the power relations in his micro-environment, as well as how small steps towards positive changes affect Andreas and the people around him. Also, Music holds enough dramaturgical potential that it could have easily been transformed into a longer feature.

Nino Kovačić

High Performance

Earth’s Golden Playground

Two brothers live lives which are worlds apart. While Daniel is an actor who performs in an off-scene theatre group and has to work part-time in a warehouse to earn enough for a living, his brother Rudi is considered to be his social anti-pod: a thriving manager in a software firm with a young family, by the standards of their environment (and family) he represents a vision of modern success. When Rudi tries to use Daniel in a deceitful manner, only to bust up his own carrier, the relations of the two world views and values clash.

Austrian director Andreas Horvath delivers with Earth's Golden Playground his seventh documentary. After having scouted for reindeers in Finnland, for animals struck by foot-and-mouth disease in northern Yorkshire, for reasons and causes of the Iraq war in the American Midwest and other things, the filmmaker’s interest was drawn by the hunt for gold in the Canadian federal territory Yukon.

Johanna Moder Diagonale 2014

Andreas Horvath, Austria/ Canada Diagonale 2014

High Performance skilfully juxtaposes our daily notions of success and competition, love, trust and interest, money and family relations, also questioning the affect of pressures in different work conditions upon the personal level. It is done with an unforced humour and a common-man realism approach to character and plot setting, embedding a specific feel of the contemporary Viennese life of the 1980s born generation. Furthermore, questions of professional ethics and personal integrity, and above all taking responsibility for you actions are unpretentiously exposed through the relationship of the brotherly “opposites”, who represent the artistic and business milieu, with their specific worldviews on, for instance, their pragmatic expectations: what is means to do the right thing and behave in a correct social manner.

Although the basic story-line is not hard to predict, one is still interested to see in what way it will evolve due to the dramaturgical and directorial decisions that play on, but go beyond stereotypes by skilfully intertwining everyday situations into the story. Camera and montage work precise in reading the characters reactions, relying on close-ups and detailing in gestures and dialogues. Due to the well-written dialogues that create situations and subsequently full-blooded characters, we are, for instance, less exposed to the “smoking-and-thinking” scenes which are standard for realistic dramas.

High Performance, written and directed by Johanna Moder, is her feature debut and to the authors’ acknowledgment the film was first imagined as a detective story, but it became an unforced and full-of-life humorous drama with an easygoing narrative flow that poses the right questions on the issues that make us rethink how we live our lives, and finally leave us without an expected happy (capitalist?) end.

Oh, and it’s got a great soundtrack!

Nino Kovačić

Mainly in the first half of the film stereotyped cinematic means are used in order to provide the audience with a feeling for place and time - from sightdisturbing maps filling the screen to time-lapses meant to make visual the idea of melting of snow and implicitly changing of seasons. The audience might also be slightly confused acoustically during the first few minutes of the film. The score is variation made by the director himself on classical music. All these elements become less disturbing as the narration starts to unfold and even suspense arises.

Two principal gold seekers are followed in Horvath’s documentary. The first one is poorer and working on his own because his legal partner is unreliable. His main tools are a shovel and a humble drilling machine. There are several means by which the director offers the audience reasons to feel sorry for this first digger. One of this means is cross-cutting. The effort (and great amount of time) he has to put into digging a modest hole is interwoven with scenes of an expert explaining that the average amount of gold one can find in the region is one gram per ton of earth. Thus the audience knows more than the character does. The film also crosscuts from the desolated sight of the first seeker to that of the second one, who gets introduced while enjoying a vacation in Polynesia with his young local girlfriend.

This second one, as opposed to the first one, has a large team working for him in Yukon and massive machinery.

Sympathy for the first gold miner is not forced upon the audience, it is merely an option, a tempting one, that naturally emerges by juxtaposing such different persons. One is poor, the other is rich. One is divorced and has to pay child support, the other has a young attractive Polynesian girlfriend.

One has to work on his own, the other has a team handling the process.

One is greedy, the other relaxed. In the end, one finds the gold and the other one does not.

Until this result is revealed, suspense is built. As both protagonists’ search is followed almost step by step near the end, the audience gets the chance to get involved and look forward to seeing the outcome. Not only the outcome, but some gold, for after so much talk about it, the audience has still not seen it. The big winner turns out to be the rich seeker.

The damage done to the beautiful area of Yukon by the constant gold mining is not bluntly and explicitly forced upon the audience although one might feel it foreshadowing the film. Overall, the great asset of the film lies in the frequent and long pauses the director sets between showing various gold miners in order to simply show the landscape and the passing of time.

Though some of his means, most notably the subtle time-lapses, might be disturbing at first, it is through the long takes of nature accompanied by the at first odd-seeming music that the film obtains a mystical quality and even becomes quite fascinating and trace-setting at times.

Nino Kovačić 17

In Focus

European Short Pitch For nine years now NISI MASA has been setting a particular and incessant focus on the art of pitching and script development, through the creation of one of its most ambitious and groundbreaking projects, the European Short Pitch. In a year where the success and impact of such an activity became increasingly evident, with major awards and selections across the globe, Nisimazine could not help but jump in on the train and investigate what the fuss was all about.

We landed in Luxembourg last March not knowing much of what to expect. Such initiatives tend to take place behind closed doors, far away from the eyes of the media. Little we knew we would find such a welloiled machine, where after much effort and discussion in an earlier script development workshop, the projects had been perfected into a seductive format. The crowd of producers from across Europe that filled the hosting theatre where treated to a hardcore series of pitching sessions, all hungry to hook up with the right project.

The activity is apparently simple, hiding much of the hard work that takes to pull it off. Unlike other similar forums, ESP is not merely a platform to pitch. Wim Vanacker, head of the Script Department of NISI MASA, told us: "ESP is the only existing platform that combines scriptwriting with pitching. I’ve participated in other similar platforms and they are great, but usually the product is already finished. They don’t include a workshop where the project is still being developed, being adapted and evolving in the right direction. That is the main added value of ESP. We connect bridges between people. Both in the pitching forum and the development workshop they spend a lot of time together discussing the projects and how to develop them. It is the best way to create a network around Europe.

In fact, that is actually something I would like to develop in the very near future, maybe even setting up a larger event to transform ESP into an even more constructive activity. Ultimately that is where NISI MASA's activities really stand out."

The event is divided in two main activities. The plan for 2015 is already in motion. Starting off with a script workshop in early January in Poznan (Poland), where the 20 selected projects will go under the microscope, and finishing in early March with a return to Luxembourg, which will hosts the co-production forum, the next following months will be intense for this elite of young filmmakers.

"I think this year will be particularly good. The general level is better, with projects that really stand out. Yet, in the end a script is just a script, the real work begins now to ensure that there is a future for these projects", said Vanacker. "It is always great to witness the progress, see them hook up with a producer, see those co-productions develop. That is what makes me happy. Now we are getting started and from our side the main job is done. The selection is finished, the logistics are in place, the forum is ready, and we’ve created a safe environment for the participants to expand. Now all we do is facilitate, and then it is up to the people to make it happen and cause an impression. It is almost out of our hands now."

The project selection process is one of the most vital and difficult parts, though Wim Vanacker is not intimidated at all by the task: "For me it is my favourite part of the process. In the end the first thing you look at is the quality of the project in the sense of the potential it holds. Sometimes it just a sequence or a particular scene, where you quickly realize the filmmaker knows what he or she is talking about, that it is personal to them. Sometimes that is good enough to select a project. You also have to be careful to not project your own interpretations. Ultimately it is about the filmmaker, the vision and the clear understanding of it. Another aspect we give great value to is the project’s capacity to be audacious and original. I prefer to take a lot of risks and end up with terrible projects but at least some great ones. It is better than ending up with a long list of mediocre films. Then you 18

also have to take into account details such as the production agencies attached to the project, the previous work of the filmmaker, all those important factors that helps us to figure out if he or she is in a position to pull it off in the end. But ultimately, the main point is the project itself, the rest are details", explained Vanacker.

In the last 3 years alone, more than 65% of the projects have been produced in the end, unquestionably an enviable accomplishment. In late 2014, Una Gunjak's short film The Chicken took away the Best Short Film award at the European Film Awards, another stand-out moment in the career of the film that gave its first steps at the ESP, passing by Cannes in May and heading now to Sundance. Alongside with other selections at festivals such as Locarno, and the success and development of past participants such as Maya Vitkova, who became one of Europe's most talked about filmmakers with her debut feature Viktoria, the year could hardly have been a greater sign of things to come. "You need to have a long term vision to see the real value of the initiative. It can be frustrating sometimes because it takes so long for things to happen, so when they do it can also very rewarding".

Despite the success Vanacker has big ideas for the future. After three years at the helm of the project he is not lacking ideas to take it even further. "ESP was already well established when I came in, so in that sense it was fairly easy to take over. The one thing that has changed in the last three years is the selection. We became more courageous and have taken more risks. It is easier to do that now because we are so established. The structure of the workshop, the type of tutors, has stayed the same. It is a formula that works very well so it is not worth undermining it". He added: "Funding wise we have more security now and it gives us a chance to add other aspects, such as including a post production pitching forum, where people will be pitching works in progress. One of the main pitfalls is the lack of post production. It is very expensive so if you can find partners that can invest, be it in kind or financially, it is very important."

The ESP machine will take centre stage once again next month, and Nisimazine will be there to catch all the details of an activity set to continue to open paths to the emergence of new names on the European films scene.

Fernando Vasquez 19

Cannes Film Festival Cannes (France), May 14-25

Does the Cannes Film Festival really need an introduction? It may be mad, tiresome and chaotic. You may spend most of the time queuing, under either the heavy rain or blistering sun. Every year you say it will be your last, but somehow you can’t help but return. It is the best, so what are you going to do? Miss it? Not a chance!

The Chicken

Una Gunjak, Croatia/Germany Critics’ Week In her 15-minute short film The Chicken, Bosnian director Una Gunjak introduces us to Selma, who is about to celebrate her 6th birthday. Untroubled and joyful, Selma dances around the flat in a pink dress and is joined by her mother (Mirela Lambic) and sister. But often nothing is what it seems.

The year is 1993 and the war weighs heavily on Bosnia’s civil population.

Leaving the house means risking your life, only inside is a safe environment.

By taking on a little girl’s perspective, Gunjak skilfully describes the feeling of what it was like to witness the war from a hide-out. As long as the family is inside, the war is something happening far away.

and runs through the house with the gun tied on her back. Subtly her play is surrounded by a brutal soundscape of gunshots. The beating wings of the chicken sound like a machine gun, every slamming door can be mistaken for an explosion. And although the every-day brutality is everywhere, Selma seems to hardly notice it. War becomes a natural part of this child’s life. The often hand-held camera reflects the characters’ emotional state of agitation. It moves hastily, struggles to focus on the playing child. The gaze remains always that of Selma’s perspective – with her we dance in the living room, we peek out of the window and we fear for our loved ones.

For Selma’s special day, a friend delivers a present from her father: a live chicken. Quickly, the little girl bonds with the animal. It is a source of life in the isolated world that war forced her into. Its brown, red, and orange hues create a strong contrast to the grey and desolate apartment building.

The animal is a splash of colour in an otherwise greyish image. It is also a reminder of reality: with the chicken’s arrival the freedom so happily enjoyed just a moment ago is revealed fake and turns into an atmosphere of oppression and imprisonment. Suddenly the flat is not a playground any more, but a refuge.

Although centred around a little girl, the film is beautifully led by Lambic’s performance. Her character is forced to balance pure survival and providing a loving upbringing for her kids. All necessary must be done, whether it sets a chicken’s or her own life at risk. It is her maternal instinct that makes the experience portrayed in the film so tangible. When she hugs her daughter, Lambic somehow manages to unite the strongest emotions – love, relief, fear and anger – all in one moment.

While Selma gets excited about her new pet, her mother is already preparing its inevitable destiny. Convinced to save a precious life, Selma sets the chicken free - and thereby starts a dramatic chain reaction of tragedy.

Gunjak focuses on the burdensome reality of war. Selma is playing with a home-made wooden rifle, shoots at imaginary targets outside her window 20

In 2012 Gunjak’s script won a deserved award at the NISI MASA European Short Pitch and it was a long, but necessary process to make the film. By telling Selma’s story of vulnerability the director worked up her own childhood experiences during the Bosnian War and empathetically reminds us of the most helpless of all participants in war: children, who do not yet grasp the dimensions of their actions, but are fully hit by the consequences.

Kathi Kamleitner

The Tribe

Party Girl

In his first feature, The Tribe, Ukrainian filmmaker Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy tells the dark story of teenager Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), who enters a boarding school and gets caught in the criminal web of the school’s gang.

He seems an ordinary teenager, struggling to find his place and the acceptance of others. But what makes this film so exceptional is that Sergey and his classmates are not ordinary – they are deaf-mute and communicate in sign language. Slaboshpytskiy’s decision to show the film without subtitles or voice-over makes for a truly unique experience.

Three young directors portray the life of Angelique and invite us to explore the memoirs of a girl that likes to party, a girl that adores life.

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, Ukraine Critics’ Week

Even though the course of action is easy to follow, deciphering the exact happenings is pure guessing. As Sergey moves up in the gang’s hierarchy he immerses in violence. He plays a crucial role in procuring the gang’s girls, but his interest in Anna (Yana Novikova) disturbs the plan of trafficking them to Italy. Their relationship takes on surprising dimensions - especially for her. For the first time she experiences selfless physical pleasure. The Belarusian first-time screen actress delivers by far the most impressive performance of the film. Her character has to endure humiliation and excruciating pain in shockingly graphic scenes, but she convinces with great determination. One moment she embodies a confident woman hoping for a better life, in the next a fragile soul lost in naivety.

The majority of the scenes are unconventionally long. There are very few cuts, requiring the audience’s participation, but also triggering observation.

The long takes allow the story and characters to unfold naturally and the viewer to get used to the unusual cinematic experience. It is almost as if the camera rolls until even the last one got the meaning of a sequence. But it feels in no way slow for slowness’ sake – every image is laid out in exact detail. The movements of the actors, their bodies and gestures, are neatly choreographed. Their interactions are characterised by awareness for themselves and others, their body language feels exaggerated almost like in a musical. When the boys move across the playground like the Sharks of West Side Story you would almost expect them to break into song. It is a pleasure to see a crew of deaf-mute actors directed with such precision.

In its visual style, The Tribe is the perfect incarnation of “the moving image”.

Slaboshpytskiy and his DOP Vasyanovych frame every shot like a painting.

Gracefully the characters flow in and out of sight, the action is visually multilayered. The static camera in the film’s most memorable scenes creates distance and allows the viewer to take a step back and observe what is happening. There are no close-ups to facilitate empathy, the gaze remains always on the bigger picture. Without being voyeuristic, the camera’s detached perspective discloses a fatalistic idea: nothing can be done about the tragedy.

Adults, at least those who could serve as responsible role models, are completely absent. Everyone seems to be involved in the crimes committed. Their surroundings are made up of desolated houses covered in graffiti and the sparsely equipped barracks they call their school. Playing with gritty social realism Slaboshpytskiy presents a pessimistic view not only upon the Ukrainian society – for which our awareness surely increased in the previous months - but also of the universal state of forlornness this youth is in. With unusual and to the bone minimalistic means he creates a painting rather than a film, a piece of art that draws you in completely.

Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, Samuel Theis, France Un Certain Regard

When we enter her world in a seemingly “God forgotten” cabaret bar on the French-German border, inevitably the body is forced to follow the rhythms of the music – classic jazz, 80s top hits and contemporary hip hop swing down the road to signify the presence of a protagonist.

Angelique has learned to be the main character in a life full of joy, colourful nights, music, dance and love affairs. A bohemian woman, strong and selfconfident, Angelique lives for the moment and seems designed to extract every drop out of it. She spends her nights in the old cabaret where she used to perform and attract powerful and wealthy men. Her last remaining client, Michel, who has fallen in love with Angelique, proposes her a marriage and for the first time the heroine is tempted to leave her old life behind.

In this unusual social realist drama, with touches of documentary, one of the three directors, Samuel Theis, puts in frame his mother, Angelique Litzenburger, rewinding her life and creating a web of memories mixed with a certain dose of fiction. With most of the cast acting real-life, the lines between reality show, documentary and fictitious extravaganza are blurry, though this detail rapidly fades away as the story starts to unfold.

Angelique introduces her four children, her girls, her rich past, and enters the latter with strong determination to fill the gaps that have been left uncovered the first time. She failed to create a family, to be the desirable mother and to stand by anyone else but herself.

Angelique’s dilemma takes her to unknown paths, and her psychological ups and downs are closely monitored in order to transfer the emotional crash she experiences. We witness her furious outbursts in the cabaret and her clumsily covered fear when she faces her four children. But at same time she desperately seeks compassion and support, though the way of requesting it definitely eludes her.

As she tries to recover and stabilise her relationship with her younger daughter who grew up in a foster home, the tones become slower, the party stops and behind the caricature of a glamorous persona, the human character is being pulled from underneath. The three directors unite powers to harness their characters, while at the same time pursuing a cinematographic style that fits realism without deforming it. Smart close-ups and travelling cameras that speak the body language create a joyful atmosphere and the eye follows the touching hands, the sparkles, and the feelings, and move from scene to scene with the almost unnoticed transitions.

Party Girl becomes didactic by not forcing deliberate messages but allowing them to flow and take personalized forms as we identify with characters or situations. In an ephemeral and superficial reality, the story of Angelique redraws the guidelines of grown-up decisionmaking where conformities end up vague and outdated and dreams have no expiration date.

Martin I. Petrov

Kathi Kamleitner 21

Leidi

Lost River

This year’s main winner of the short film competition in Cannes is yet another brilliant example of the ever increasingly narrow line between fiction and reality. It is a trend that is progressively taking over contemporary filmmaking and the results could hardly be more exciting and mysterious.

When it was announced that Ryan Gosling would be showing his face in Cannes this year, not as an actor but as a director, the questions on everyone’s lips were A) What does he have to say as a filmmaker? and B) Will he be any good? As the credits rolled following the afternoon premiere of Lost River, it’s safe to say that we’re still none the wiser.

Simon Mesa Soto, Colombia/ UK Short Film Competition

Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto’s Leidi shows us the somewhat limited and emotionless universe of a young mother called Leidi. Fully controlled and limited by her surroundings, a Medellin slum no different than any other ghetto that dots the Latin American urban landscape, Leidi’s day is spent searching for her apparently missing boyfriend, Alexis. After a hustler tells her he saw him with a girl the previous night, she embarks on a journey through the underprivileged hills of the Colombian city, revealing much more then you would expect.

Soto’s winning short film plays an interesting trick on the audience. What at a first glance may appear to be a story about nothing, is actually a deep dissertation on the lack of expectations for the future, and the desolation that such perspective entails, by young people in Colombian slums.

There is not much excitement in Leidi’s life. The joy and innocence of youth were quickly stolen from her and replaced by the responsibility of being a mother. Her own family and neighbours seem not to offer much relief, usually unable to provide the help that would allow her to focus on other issues troubling her mind. Her relationship with Alexis, father of the child, is also everything but complete. In an identical situation, he appears to have found escape from his “prison” in his precarious work, cleaning public buses, overlooking his paternal and conjugal duties.

The main character is shown to us both as a target of sexual desire, as well as of one of neglect, giving us precious hints at how gender relations usually function in such environments. Her refusal of illegitimate propositions by other men is a sign she is resigned to her condition as an underprivileged woman in Colombia. She accepts her role in life as a mother, yet continues to crave for the affection her partner discreetly denies to offer.

This emptiness she so eagerly wants to fill in is the catalyst and cause for her expedition to desperately ensure her small and dysfunctional family survives, as if she has nothing else worth living for.

Pace is a vital factor for the success of Leidi. The character herself drags around throughout the film, as if she is carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. This slow movement reflects the absence of colour and will power in her life, forcing us to physically feel the quiet sense of desperation the haunts Leidi and those around her.

The filmmaker’s eye is both voyeuristic and discreet. It allows itself no judgement of the character’s actions, or perhaps more accurately, the absence of action. Most would fall in the trap the theme easily provides, yet Soto shows enough skills to avoid it. Instead, he preoccupies himself in presenting reality as raw as it really is. By doing so, the young Colombian filmmaker provides a sublime vision of the common struggles of a young mother.

It is no wonder that Leidi’s game between fiction and reality blew away Abbas Kiarostami and his fellow jury members, since in its perceptible simplicity it is a moving example of how voyeurism does not have to be neither exploitative nor manipulative.

Ryan Gosling, United States Un Certain Regard

Dripping with surrealism, it’s often difficult to decipher what’s real and what isn’t in this strange and somewhat sad fictional town to which we’re introduced.

A community that has long since been abandoned by all but a few, its houses are rapidly being demolished. Single mother Billy (Christina Hendricks) is desperate to hang on to her own that she grew up in with children Bones (Iain De Caestrecker) and little Franky (who gives the most adorable performance you’ll see all year) to keep up with her loan repayments, she takes on a job at a fetish club, while Bones seeks out scrap metal to sell and becomes increasingly obsessed with a sunken city at the bottom of the reservoir.

There’s a constant sense of threat throughout the film that has quite a mesmerizing effect, and one of the main contributors to this is the character of Bully (Matt Smith). He patrols the town shouting distorted and bizarre statements (“look at my muscles, look at my muscles!”) through a microphone – at once bewildering and terrifying. Violent and unhinged, he keeps the characters and the audience on edge. Sadly, the threatening atmosphere is one of the only things that is constant. The narrative is incredibly jumpy and incoherent with scenes thrown together seemingly at random, and at times it’s abstract to the point of being inaccessible, which will lose the attention of some.

We can never be sure of Gosling’s intentions or what the film is trying to comment on, despite some subtle inferences at the state of the economy, and it suffers from this lack of a solid focal point.

As to whether he’s any good as a director, there’s no denying that he knows how to make a film look beautiful. His use of colour is masterful, contrasting bright neons against the gloom and despair, and the repetitive symbol of fire is totally hypnotic. He utilizes an interesting filming style that has an almost voyeuristic feel to it, often situating a shaky camera behind the characters to make us feel in uncomfortably close proximity to the action (and therefore the threats). The sound design is also hugely impressive, expertly contributing to the atmosphere with jarring juxtapositions and music that lingers long after the end.

It’s probably fairly reasonable to propose that had this film been made by somebody less high profile, it wouldn’t have caused quite as much of a stir.

Gosling’s celebrity status, along with his recent association with Winding Refn, created a certain buzz that almost predetermined people’s expectations – good or bad.

And it’s this that has perhaps hindered the new director’s success, because it’s not a film that comes across as concerned with satisfying anyone. It’s self-indulgent and self-aware, a vision inside Gosling’s mind which lacks that concrete backbone to allow audiences to grasp onto it as well. But confusing as it may be, it’s an intoxicating trip that everyone should take at least once.

Fernando Vasquez 22

Robyn Davies

Interview with

Thomas caIlley Les Combattants, France Directors’ Fortnight

As a romantic comedy with an action twist plus a couple of charismatic lead actors to boot, Les Combattants has all it needs to be a darling to audiences far wider than film festivals. We met up with first time feature director Thomas Cailley to discuss his learning process on this project and his expectations for his future career.

How was the experience of transitioning from shorts to feature?

Before Les Combattants I made a 25-minute short film, called Paris Shanghai, with a tone that is very similar to this one. The transition from short to long came quite naturally. The biggest difference is the endurance it requires. For a feature you have to work for a longer time, so it is a matter of maintaining the energy and the desire to follow through with the project through the writing process, the financing, the shooting, the editing...

On that short film, just like on this first feature, the director of photography was your brother. How is the experience of working with a family member?

It’s actually a great thing. We have the same cultural background, we grew up together watching the same films and series on television. We can understand each other without having to talk. And that is something that on a set is very useful. Every time that he proposes a specific frame, or a specific light, it is exactly what I want. And in addition I can exploit him as much as I want, because he’s my brother so he won’t say no to anything.

Unlike Kevin Azaďs, Adele Hanele, the main actress, already had some experience. How did this help the film?

It definitely added a lot of value, because this created precisely the relation between the characters at the beginning of the story: she has experience, beliefs, and this she is sure about. He, on the other hand, is more “permeable” for the experience. So having a more experienced actress play the role of Madeleine and an unexperienced one to play Arnaud fitted very well with this. Especially because we decided to shoot the script in continous order and that also had an impact in the way the two actors interacted. So as we went, we saw the character grow just as much as Kevin did, both as an actor, as well as on a personal level.

At the first screening in the festival the audience really liked the film.

How do you appreciate the commercial appeal of Les Combattants?

I don’t have any specific expectations. I just hope that we will get a chance to meet our audience, because it is important for us not only to have them see the film, but also to discuss with them. So I’m hoping we will travel with this film in order to have the opportunity to do that.

But do you envision any specific target, in terms of age, for example?

I think it is still a bit too early to define to whom exactly the film speaks.

We have had positive feedback from people recently out of their teens, but also from adults in their fifties and sixties. They have not all seen the same things in it – some like its romance side, other appreciate its action component, or the humour. This a reaction that has to do with the fact that we play with different genres, going from a romantic comedy to an adventure movie, from a love story to anticipation. So this can appeal- or not- to a lot of different people.

Bernardo Lopes 23

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2014’S DEBUTS TO GET EXCITED ABOUT

Excitement is indeed a fit word to describe 2014 since it was a year of intense filmic experiences. It is duly reflected in our authors’ top choices all of which might help phrase the New Year’s resolution – to follow those filmmakers in the future.

There can’t be a summary of the year without a prediction towards the upcoming festival circuit. The one that left us almost unanimously speechless this year was Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy. His Tribe has supposedly even caused several fainting incidents around the world and multiple screening walk-outs. Alright, it is a tough, almost physical experience – precisely what earned it the main award at the Cannes’ Critics’ Week and the top of the Nisimazine 2014 list. As always in the case of such a widely-talked about debut the question arises – will it be a one-time flick or should we expect a beginning of the new genre which will enable a so far excluded group of viewers to attend the cinemas?

The same goes for Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler – hypnotizing for once or will the director replace the best creators of suspence in the future? The vicious and determined character of the film played by Jake Gyllenhaal would probably not be satisfied with the second position on our list, since it’s in his profession to “crawl” everywhere first.

The director himself repeated in numerous interviews that he admires the persuasion abilities of the main character, we wish him for the new year that he is as successful with milder means, to paraphrase Lou’s words – if it screens and intrigues, it leads.

Whatever the future will bring to our screens, even if Carlos Marques-Marcet happens to make a Christmas romatic comedy, the year 2014 is certainly worth raising a New Year’s glass for them. As well as crossing the fingers on the foot of the glass for their future steps. But before we all get in the festive moods, have a look at the list of 2014 films worthy to get excited about, carefully chosen by our Nisimazine friends and alumni.

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FINAL TOP 10

1. The Tribe

by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy UKRAINE Cast: Grigoriy Fesenko, Yana Novikova, Rosa Babiy It comes as no surprise that Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy’s debut feature took the top spot. It has been one of the most significant and talked about films of the year, since it blew away all competition at the Cannes’ Critics’ Week. This savage yet delicate look at the mishaps of a young girl at a deaf and mute school is unquestionably a landmark of the film year.

2. Nightcrawler

by Dan Gilroy – USA Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Bill Paxton Many will be surprised with this choice, after such a timid performance in the festival circuit, but Dan Gilroy’s debut and Jake Gyllenhaal’s eerie performance have caused quite a impression on many, making this one of the most unmissible thrillers of 2014.

3. 10.000 Km

by Carlos Marques-Marcet – SPAIN Cast: Natalia Tena, David Verdaguer Spanish editor turned filmmaker Carlos Marques Marcet hit the jackpot this year, with a romantic drama that puts the 21st-century love in the spotlight. His pessimistic vision and striking skill to turn the intimate space of a couple into a reflection of the audience’s own lives will surely not leave many indifferent. A lot is expected in the future from this young Spanish artist.

4. Goodnight Mommy

by Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz – AUSTRIA Cast Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz Another surprise crept up the list, considering this duo’s debut is perhaps one of the darkest and goriest films in recent years.

Nevertheless this stylized Austrian thriller is bound to stick in everyone’s minds, for the better or worse.

5. Party Girl

by Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, Samuel Theis – FRANCE Cast: Angélique Litzenburger, Joseph Bour, Mario Theis Shifting the age boundaries for settling down, the directors of the Party Girl make a sixty-year-old night club hostess the main and titular character. Angelique won the hearts of the Un Certain Regard jurors, as well as the voters of Nisimazine, landing on the fifth position of our list.

6. In the Crosswind

by Martti Helde – ESTONIA Cast: Einar Hillep, Ingrid Isotamm, Laura Peterson Estonian cinema took a giant leap this year with this groundbreaking exercise by Martti Helde, who has just become one of the region’s biggest hopes. Using innovative techniques and creating an uniquely emotional setting, he revisited one of Estonian darkest historical episodes with great skill.

7. Güeros

by Alonso Ruizpalacios – MEXICO Cast: Tenoch Huerta, Sebastián Aguirre, Ilse Salas Berlin, Karlovy Vary, Tallinn – Güeros was on everyone’s lips all festival year round. This blackand-white debut from Mexico is certainly worth the hype. This endearing road movie where three youngsters set on a trip of a mystical folk-rock star won the Best First Feature at 2014 Berlinale.

8. Costa da morte

by Lois Patiño – SPAIN A secluded region of northern Spain is the setting for Lois Patino’s first feature film, transforming this foggy land into a somewhat mystical location. The way the Spanish filmmaker captured the spookiness and rigidity of the land and his inhabitants is simply groundbreaking.

9. 52 Tuesdays

by Sophie Hyde – AUSTRALIA Cast: Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Del Herbert-Jane, Mario Späte This Australian portrayal of a dysfunctional family turned upside-down by a sex change is quite unforgettable indeed, showing us

another side to Australian cinema.

With strong performances and a provocative touch, Sophie Hyde’s debut is surely one to remember.

10. The Lesson

by Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov – BULGARIA/ GREECE Cast: Ivan Barnev, Ivanka Bratoeva, Stefan Denolyubov In times of the economic crisis the character of The Lesson has surely appealed to many. This naturalistic drama presents an interesting take on provincial Bulgarian reality as well as creating one of the strongest lead female characters, convincingly played by Margita Gosheva.

Bruno Guerra Cunha -PortugalNightcrawler

by Dan Gilroy – USA Dan Gilroy begins to set the tone of dark Los Angeles, where there is no hope for the misfists and the American dream seems not to reach everyone. Gyllenhall portraits a disturbing modern misfit that seeks no means for his ends with an even more disturbing finale.

Modris

by Juris Kursietis – LATVIA/ GERMANY Juris Kursietis’ first feature film shows us the panoply of feelings that there is in Modris’ life. Kristers Piksa tops the main character and does it in such a brilliant way. Modris is, by all means, a great movie that shows that there is quality artists everywhere.

Ewa Wildner -Poland1. The Babadook

by Jennifer Kent – AUSTRALIA This skillfully made horror verges on the psychological level, showing how easy it is to lose control of one’s skeletons, or in this case Babadooks, in the closet.

2. Goodnight Mommy

by Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz – AUSTRIA This Austrian thriller which twists and turns our notion of feeling safe in front of people closest to us. Beware – it cannot end on the usual mother-child confrontation when you’re not sure who you’re dealing with on the other side.

3. The Tribe

by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy – UKRAINE We all knew the power of the

unsaid in the movies, but Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy has brought it to an even more forceful level, presenting the story of the deaf by engaging all senses from the audience.

4. In the Crosswind

by Martti Helde – ESTONIA Martti Helde manages to capture the subtleties of longing in this still painting of the Soviet holocaust frozen in time. Number four for making it scream louder than blasting war movies.

5. Nightcrawler

by Dan Gilroy – USA Nightcrawler is a well-paced debut whose skillful construction will gradually chill your bones.

Sinisterly good perfomance of sunken-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal will help achieve that effect.

Lilla Puskas -Hungary1. Güeros

by Alonso Ruispalacios – SPAIN Because of its great script, unusual rythm, clever and complex way it deals with image and sound. In every single frame of the movie you feel that it was made by a couple of friends who have been in perfect synchro for many years.

2. The Tribe

by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy – UKRAINE I highly appreciated its risky experiment in storytelling with the limitation of understanding for the viewer, the way the story develops, the heavy but important topics the movie refletcs on.

This movie took as much risk as I can’t do else but love it. It is just perfect.

3. For Some Inexplicable Reason

by Gábor Reisz – HUNGARY The movie that gave back the passion for watching Hungarian movies for moviegoers of Budapest after 10 years. Because of the low budget, it had to be made with a lot of creative ideas of young non-professional passionate people. The result is a bit raw, very unusual movie with a great atmosphere.

4. The Lesson

by Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov – BULGARIA/ GREECE The script is great, I liked the main character’s developement very much. It deals with important topics. I think the way of directing shows a great talent.

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The Tribe

5. Party Girl

by Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, Samuel Theis – FRANCE It’s an unusual topic told in a very entertaining way. It raises important issues one might not like to think about anyway. Also, the acting is excellent.

1. Costa da morte

by Lois Patiño – SPAIN Lois Patiño films is a mysterious and beautiful portrait of the Galician region considered the end of the world during the Middle Age. The wide shots show us very tiny human figures lost in the immensity of the Galician landscape and the magic behind it.

2. 10.000 Km

by Carlos Marques-Marcet – SPAIN Sensitive, well-scripted and with a powerful 20-minute shot, 10.000 Km is a realistic portrait on longdistance relationships in times of exile and new technologies. It lets the audience take sides without judging any of its characters, portrayed by two amazing actors.

Nightcrawler

Lucia Ros -Spain-

10.000 km

3. Nightcrawler

by Dan Gilroy – USA Although the film is nothing special, its plot is interesting and gives us a new and eerie portrayal of Jake Gyllenhaal, who never ceases to prove that he is one of the greatest actors of his generation.

4. Appropiate Behaviour

by Desiree Akhavan – USA/ GREAT BRITAIN Born in American but with Iranian roots, Desiree Akhavan achieved with her first film Appropiate Behaviour the return to the origins of American indie film from the 90’s talking about bisexuality, relationships and cultural identity.

1. In the Crosswind

by Martti Helde – ESTONIA Artistic, yet dignified and tasteful visual journey to the hidden world of pain and grief in Estonians past.

2. The Tribe

by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy – UKRAINE Film experience re-imagined.

Ironically the film is hard to explain in words, you just have to see it.

3. Nightcrawler

by Dan Gilroy – USA 28

Goodnight Mommy

Maarja Hindoalla -Estonia-

Subtly, yet strongly gripping and creepy set-up to vividly illustrate the growing frenzy of media, power and fame of our world.

4. 52 Tuesdays

by Sophie Hyde – AUSTRALIA This seemingly yet another free and wild coming of age story is sincere and not pretentious; it succeeds in sowing some doubts and questions into the viewer’s soul.

5. Obvious Child

by Gillian Robespierre – USA An elegant take-on such a complex subject. The setting and humour themselves are note- and praiseworthy.

Raluca Petre -Romania1. The Tribe

by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy – UKRAINE: For its original means of telling its story and for the intensity of that story.

2. Nightcrawler

by Dan Gilroy – USA: For its statement and for trying to build up on Winding Refn’s aesthetics (though not always succeeding).

3. Bota

by Iris Elezi, Thomas Logoreci – ALBANIA: For bringing to life in a heartfelt way a region that has been ignored culturally.

Thomas Humphrey -UK1. Goodnight Mommy

by Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz – AUSTRIA A film that makes any parental figure seem this uncanny deserves praise though! Goodnight Mommy will make you concurrently recoil and marvel at how much you’re recoiling – it’s fantastic!

2. 10.000 Km

by Carlos Marques-Marcet – SPAIN Can’t speak highly enough of this film. Alongside El Cinco de Talleres, this film also makes yet another irresistibly convincing argument that people who know how to speak Spanish just do relationships right.

3. Güeros

by Alonso Ruizpalacios – SPAIN Güeros was yet another welcome reminder this year of how good South American cinema is right now. Palacios resists the seriousness which his black and

white style suggests, using lots of excellent, self-mocking South American humour.

4. Somebody

by Miranda July – USA An incisive social message: We are literally reaching a stage where we download apps which antagonistically enable us to communicate impersonally, but in a more humanised forms. July is one to watch.

5. Two Dosas

by Sarmad Masud – UK Not since Goodness Gracious Me has Anglo-Indian comedy been this good. The scripting of this short is priceless, with unforgettable lines like, “I just wanted secret India out of my mouth;” and it’s a wonderful look a Britain’s cultural crossovers today.

Vassilis Economou -Greece1. Blind

by Eskil Vogt – NORWAY/ NETHERLANDS Despite the fact that Vogt has been a skillful scriptwriter, in Blind he also proves that he is capable to direct a dreamlike experience. He expands his tour de force which this time is a daedal abstract scenario by blending real actual facts with the imagination of his blind heroine.

2. No One’s Child

by Vuk Ršumović – SERBIA The way Ršumović achieves to balance his story between the radical human nature of his hero and his overexposed wild animal instinct transforms the film into a hybrid where fiction drama almost touches the plausibility of a documentary.

3. Theeb

by Naji Abu Nowar – GREAT BRITAIN/ QATAR/ JORDAN/ UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Nowar’s story has a multilayered perspective and moves along different genres, from adventure to western and then to thriller, without losing his connection with realism. This makes Theeb a brave debut feature film and Nowar a director to follow.

4. Land of Storms by Ádám Császi – GERMANY/ HUNGARY By giving a strong religious parallel approach and interpretation to his film, Császi tries to set a clear discussion on the topic of homosexuality and depicts the dangerous environment where Hungarian homosexuals are

forced to live in.

by Dan Gilroy – USA

5. Brides

by Tinatin Kajrishvili – GEORGIA/ FRANCE Without melodramatizing her life, the director depicts her struggle for six years as she is trying to keep a connection with her imprisoned husband – as she can rarely see him during the year.

5. Party Girl

by Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, Samuel Theis – FRANCE

Bernardo Lopes -Portugal1. A Girl at My Door

by Joo-ri Jeong – SOUTH KOREA 2. The Tribe

by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy – UKRAINE 3. Party Girl

by Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, Samuel Theis – FRANCE

Wim Vanacker -BelgiumNightcrawler

by Dan Gilroy – USA Yes, I like it dark and daunting, but Nightcrawler is one of those few films that rings home in a very personal way. Made me feel less alone in this world, made me feel like I found myself a perfectly suitable alter-ego. Very reassuring to say the least.

The Tribe

by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy – UKRAINE Rough, gloomy and everything but sensational, Cinema as Cinema should be, a slap in the face and a kick in the gut. Still recovering.

4. Catch Me Daddy

by Matthew Wolfe, Daniel Wolfe – GREAT BRITAIN 5. The Dissapearence of Eleanor Rigby

by Ned Benson – SPAIN/ USA

Andrei Sendrea -Romania1. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour – USA 2. Mauro by Hernán Rosselli – ARGENTINA 3. 52 Tuesdays by Sophie Hyde – AUSTRALIA 4. Catch Me Daddy by Matthew Wolfe, Daniel Wolfe – GREAT BRITAIN 5. Gente de bien by Franco Lolli – FRANCE/ COLOMBIA

Mirona Nicola -Romania1. 10.000 Km

by Carlos Marques-Marcet – SPAIN

Fernando Vasquez -Portugal1. The Tribe

by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy – UKRAINE: For its beautiful choreography and its capacity to reverse the roles and truly make the audience understand how it is to live in a reality where your senses are limited.

2. 10.000 Km

by Carlos Marques-Marcet – SPAIN: For being one of the most genuine and relentless portrayals of love in the 21st century.

3. Costa da morte

by Lois Patiño – SPAIN: Breathtaking visuals in a vision of one of Europe’s most desolate and mysterious regions.

4. Goodnight Mommy

by Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz – AUSTRIA: An unexpectedly vicious and uncompromising thriller that is bound for greatness.

5. Viktoria

by Maya Vitkova – ROMANIA/ BULGARIA: An ambitious and courageous effort from one of Europe’s most promising artists.

2. The Tribe

by Myroslav Slaboshpitskiy – UKRAINE 3. Goodnight Mommy

by Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz – AUSTRIA 4. Nightcrawler 29

Karlovy Vary Film Festival Karlovy Vary (Czech Republic), July 4-12

The summer becomes more intense once this small Czech spa town becomes the centre of the film world for just over a week. Eastern European cinema is put under the spotlight, with more than enough space to get a healthy taste of what is being done in the rest of the world. For some the best film festival in Europe at the moment, for all the rest, simply one of the most pleasant.

Quod erat demonstrandum

Andrei Gruzsniczki, Romania EFP/ Variety Critics’ Choice Section In focusing on the draconian tools employed by the Communist state to control society, Andrei Gruzsniczki’s second feature Quod Erat Demonstrandum (QED) may appear to be a rehashed Romanian version of The Lives of Others. Indeed, its 1984 setting can be both an Orwellian allusion as well as a hint to the German cult film. It is as if to assure us that Gruzsniczki, as both writer and director, knows that the subject has been tackled before and that he wants to delve deeper into a similar political context, showing a rather different aspect of it.

The film explores the destructive impact that state surveillance had upon Romanian society in the 1980s, with an emphasis on the nature of the relationships amongst citizens whose state encouraged informing upon one another. Each character’s actions gain a complex dimension because their motivations are revealed, as Gruzsniczki is not concerned with pointing fingers and finding scapegoats. Instead, he intends to show the nuance that humans feel when pushed in a certain direction by a political system.

Sorin is a mathematician, who- frustrated by the lack of recognition and professional mobility in Romania- publishes his innovative theory in an American journal. He does this with the help of a university friend, who fled to the West and whose wife, Elena, and child are waiting for permission from Romanian authorities to join him abroad. Therefore, Elena has much to lose should she be caught engaging in anything the state deems to be subversive.The Romanian secret police assigns an agent to spy on Sorin and to prevent him from further publishing abroad. Instead of physical coercion, the agent prefers more psychological methods that strain friendships and moral integrities, ultimately leaving individuals feeling isolated, resentful and ashamed.

QED is subtly self-aware, with nods and double entendres to both our contemporary political climate as well as the film world. Early on, the agent is convinced that every “civilized state” spies on its people, using the CIA as an example, a comment that is particularly relevant today, given the NSA scandals. Gruzsniczki is concerned with Romanians leaving the country for the West, as the context of Elena’s husband having fled to France leads to conversations revealing idealised visions of Western society and the difficult realities confronted once one does leave, an issue that is very much alive in today’s Romania.

When Sorin’s mother hints that she would want a colour TV, Sorin replies that there’s no difference between a coloured and a black and white image, “all you need is some extra imagination.” However, the same cannot be said for the film’s cinematography, as the fact that it’s shot in black and white is a stylistic element that most obviously sets it apart from previous Romanian films set in that era. Its beautifully contrasted cinematography fuels a narrative that thrives on mystery, where the unsaid matters as much as the said and, therefore, where powerful images gain extra weight. Close-ups of gestures,of a lit candle in a room that sees daily power cuts do not only offer an insight into daily life in Communist Romania, but are also reminiscent of a film noir, in which tension relies on images of shadows and expectations of deceit. The film could have benefited from more tension by revealing less until the final scene or revealing a surprising trait exhibited by a character, as, at times, it feels like the film is hoping to be more suspenseful than it is.

Ultimately, the pleasure of reading the film on several levels, of thinking about the ironies of the title and of different comments made by characters throughout is QED’s greatest asset.

Raluca Petre

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Corrections Class

Barbarians

Apparently it’s neither serial killers nor dangerous psychopaths who appear as the most treacherous creatures of the cinematic universe. If spending numerous hours in the darkness of film theatres has taught me anything it is that the teenagers can be much more cruel that all the Leatherfaces of this imaginative world.

Barbarians is another well pointed addition to what some call The Yugoslav Black Wave, a movement that doesn’t shy away from harsh and agitating subjects. With three films in different sections of the festival, Serbian cinema is well represented. Not that the film is evenly grim as Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film, but the protagonist’s behaviour is definitely provoking.

The title actually says it all, and it could easily be extended with a few synonyms such as Brutes, Beasts, and Vandals.

Ivan I. Tverdovsky, Russia/Germany East of the West Competition

Ivan Tverdovsky’s school drama gets off to a punching start – right in the first scene we are exposed to a corpse of a youngster who has just been run over by a train. Later in the movie we learn that it had to happen sooner or later since in the greyish setting of the Russian suburbs this is how boys impress girls, by lying flat between the railway tracks as a great mass of steel passes above them while they remain untouched. But it’s not just for the sake of showing off. Supposedly when their hearts are exploding with adrenaline they can see which of their wishes will come true. That precarious activity provides the audience with a key characteristic to have a full portrait of the teenagers in Corrections Class painted – it’s all about the idealistic ideas. And girls.

The film is a fit and recommendable choice for this year’s Karlovy Vary programme, alongside thematically similar Class Enemy and The Tribe. It’s almost a battle between the good and the evil in Tverdovsky’s movie. We see a thematically black-and-white movie where the main protagonist is a doe-eyed no-make-up innocent. Mothers and female teachers on the other hand (no men though) are a bunch of witches who gasp at the thought that teenagers might have sex. No wonder, however, that the movie is told from a one-sided perspective, since the director seems to match the subjective point of view of the youngsters he portrays. Thus the camera moves in fluid and fast shots, as if it was another teenager with restless and fidgety way of observing the world around. The sound is exaggerated to imitate the commotion youngsters tend to create wherever they appear.

As loud as the movie is, it is meant to be a sonorous voice in a debate about tolerance for disability that is currently taking place in Russia. The main character suffers from a condition that forces her to move on a wheelchair, but it’s the ignorance of society impersonated by the school staff and class peers that is incurable. What makes it even more striking is that although fictional, the story has a string of realism to it – the director admitted after the screening that he visited several Russian corrections classes before making the movie. Even though all students in these classes are disabled in one way or the other and went off with a similar start having their education neglected because of that, we can see how easy it is for them to take their frustrations on each other. The serious tone of the film, however, is broken by rare but desirable comical situations that make the audience guffaw as if they themselves were teenagers in the classroom. Nevertheless, the main message remains pessimistic, although it may comfort some viewers leaving them full of gratitude and relief that their school days are over.

Ivan Ikić, Serbia East of the West Competition

Our main character, Luka, is one of these hooligans. He cannot handle the forlorn condition of contemporary Serbian society, where value seems to be in pieces. He does not only belong to a lost generation but also belongs to a lost society. From the president of the small local football team to the rich owner of a bar, they are all part of a system that breeds toughness and macho-like behaviour. Moreover, there is an unwillingness to give the people in the poor suburbs a real chance in life. The Kosovars, the majority of the inhabitants living in the neighbourhoods, are simple just not important; if the herd of young football fans don’t cause anyone too much problems, nobody really cares about, they are almost non-existing.

You see that this fact weighs on Luca, he leaves his traces in the streets in the form of empty bottles of alcohol and infuriated people. He tries to avoid problems but his best friend Flash is not really helping him, pushing him towards hooliganism and jealousy. Henceforth, the girl he fancies- and with whom he goes a bit further than flirting- is dating with the star of the football team. This obviously creates tension that has to burst out in one way or another. Yet, this is not the main issue of Luka. In the patriarchal style society that Serbia is still immersed in, the absence of his father really seems to leave him in fragments that neither his mother nor the social worker following him can glue back together.

All this despair that Luka has to carry with himself can be identified in the eyes of Zeljko Markovic, non-professional actor that stars in Barbarians, born and raised Kosovar and whose simultaneously firm, raw, and yet vulnerable presence in the film is impossible to go unnoticed. Director Ivan Ikic really found the perfect actor to approach such issues. Equally important is the fact that the filmmaker also deserves a lot of praise for the choice of giving a local gang of the suburbs of Belgrade a chance to put all their frustrations on film. Using a sober way of filming in the industrial setting of Serbia’s messy wasteland, he follows his characters from behind. Despite the fact that such a restrained style is unquestionably effective, the narrative is not fully working at all levels, leaving us with a lot to ponder about but also longing for more emotional cues. Such a phenomenon misses out on creating a forceful tension.

Still, I am curious to see more from Ikic in the future because Barbarians is nuanced and shows a window to a world we don’t often see. And all this through the eyes of the young people who are often depicted in the news as just “the scum of the earth”.

Ewa Wildner Matthias Van Hijfte

31

Bota

Kebab & Horoscope

An Italian outsider, who stops by a remote community in Albania, comments that its people are “damaged yet alive.” In their charismatic Albanian-Italian-Kosovan coproduction, the Albanian-born American-educated directors Iris Elezi and Thomas Logoreci remind us how we, as viewers, come to love characters whose wounds open up their universes to us.

Two lost souls find each other in a Kebab food bar. One man who has just quit his job there, because of the message in his horoscope of a magazine called “The Secret World of Animals”, the other is his client who actually wrote the astrological forecast. A new couple of aficionados is born: meet young Polish director Grzegorz Jaroszuk.

Bota (Albanian for “world”) is a restaurant plonked in the middle of a swampland, catering to a handful of decrepit Communist-era concrete blocks. Its quirkiness reflects that of those whose lives revolve around the restaurant, contrasting with the laden, inescapable presence of the grey buildings and their muted history.

Not that the man needs a lot of introducing, definitely not for his Polish countrymen, because with his short Frozen Stories- that won several prizes at respected festivals throughout Europe- he has set expectations high. A standard he meets with an opening scene that draws you in immediately and pulls out loud laughs in the audience. The mood is instantly set on Samuel Beckett temperature, thus an extremely random vibe goes along with it.

Iris Elezi & Thomas Logoreci, Albania East of the West Competition

What could have been an Emir Kusturica-style comedy about a region in the Balkans (and as much as I love Kusturica), Bota gains a tender and more contemplative tone by looking at the collective trauma of the past that impinges on the characters’ lives. The Communist regime had designed this forlorn community for its opponents and their families, killing off and burying its main dissidents there. The family that runs Bota had inevitably been amongst those persecuted, although twenty-something year old Juli, the youngest, knows nothing of it. Her remaining family, a sclerotic grandmother and her older cousin, Beni, who owns the restaurant, have not told her.

When Juli asks Beni’s girlfriend if she ever thinks about the past, she responds, “No, I have too much on my mind.” This restraint in talking about history has meant that the younger generation is trapped, not knowing how to perceive its place in this microcosm and how to get out of it. They fantasize about their past and dream of leaving the swampland, without taking any concrete measures towards it. This collective silence manifests itself in Juli through her cynicism and hopelessness – she does not act upon her attraction to the Italian outsider and does not have a mobile phone because “nothing ever happens” there. However, once she finds out that her family’s past is closely connected to the traumatic history of the place, coincidentally or not, something does happen and she seeks out her happiness by leaving the swampland.

Despite the desolation of the setting and its historical context, the film conveys the beauty of the people inhabiting it. The love the directors show for traits that might normally be looked down on is what makes Bota powerful.

It has a humorous dimension that works as such because we are shown what makes them different, gently poking fun at that difference, as opposed to criticising it. Beni’s small-time attempts at growing Bota’s business merely involve changing numbers on a road sign, yet his naivety is strongly endearing.

Bota’s accessibility for audiences, with cleverly shaped characters and an unpretentious story, is what will draw many in. This is an unfamiliar topic and setting; it is refreshing to see a film that easily makes you fall in love with its characters while also acting as a vignette of painful, marginalized socio-political issues that could hit a vulnerable spot amongst Balkan audiences.

32

Raluca Petre

Grzegorz Jaroszuk, Poland East of the West Competition

After their unusual encounter, we follow our “kebab” duo start off a partnership in marketing. They try to save a carpet store where work is at most a four letter word. We are introduced to a set of workers that could find its equals with the staff of classic British sitcom Fawlty Towers. A young woman who needs to help her mom find a long lost love, a boss who has a couple of gold fish named after the Beatles, a handyman who keeps things handy by breaking stuff when things get out of hand, a secretary helping a suicidal man actually get the job done, and a grandpa who hasn’t lost his mojo. The least you can say of this team is that they forecast a certain degree of eccentric.

Henceforth, this film has a rare sense of Polish offbeat humor to it, rather than the witty sharp written dialogues of some Hollywood comedies. You could diagnose it with extreme levels of situational absurdness. This works throughout the whole film but the framework that holds it up collapses, thus leaving you lost in relation to the lives we should really stay invested on. You never quite have the feeling that the relationship between our two self-declared marketing specials is a strong core for a dramatic feature.

Although, the ensemble cast gives the best of themselves.

Nonetheless, the sincere heart keeps on beating all the way through the picture. And we really do think that Roy Anderson and Aki Kaurismäki could benefit for another companion in the circle of oddball and dry humorists.

People who like these auteurs will find interesting stuff in Kebab and Horoscope. Of course, Jaroszuk is definitely not on that hot list yet but with the couple more frozen stories he will maybe one day pull that off.

Matthias Van Hijfte

Interview with

Marianne Tardieu Insecure, France EFP/ Variety Critics’ Choice

Meeting Marianne Tardieu was just like watching her film – subtle and intelligent, never too loud but confident to talk about currently painful social issues in France. Listening to the flow of French tasting words I have realised two things: it takes a philosopher to make a good politically charged yet not obviously political film, and second – our insecurities must be more or less universal. How else could the film be so tenderly convincing?

The director who first starts working with camera, then – cinematography, followed by writing scripts and teaching in the film school must know her job inside out. It all was a natural process?

A bit schizophrenic. Imagine: you work as a camera assistant so you are small in the team, thus hours later you stand up to speak about your movie to the producers... Being in different places at the same time is tiring, but this is how I met a lot of people. Reda Kateb is one of them.

Every creative work is transmitting some message. In your first feature-lenght film you chose to speak it through a dark social realism drama. What triggered that topic? Did you see similar things happening around you?

Two things. First – it was really around me, I lived in a poor area in France too. Those suburbs are very isolated and I think lives of young people there go to waste. Also, the big revolts that happened in 2005 – it lasted for almost one month then. Now I would feel bad not to talk about it. There are many clichés and stereotypes about those suburbs – I want to avoid it.

Also making a portrait of the man struggling to find his place in the society was no less important in my film. It is hard for all of us, but for him it is harder just because he is from that suburb.

Is it difficult to shoot in a suburb?

No, we chose very calm and safe suburb – they actually exist. We also explained the local people the story we were shooting and everyone was like, “ah, it is about my cousin, neighbour and etc.” Because a security guard is the easiest job to find if you haven’t done any studies. We worked with security agencies and with young people. They were very happy and excited “are you really shooting a movie here?” I am looking forward to show them the film.

Insecurity seems very personal and intimate topic. Do you have any insecurities as a director?

Yes. If you want to make a film you never know if you are going to finish it.

If you make one you are not sure if you will make a second one. And it is always like this, never being sure how you will make your living, but this is good, because total security would be horrible. This kind of insecurity I carry within. Some days I was working as camera assistant and teaching the same day, the next day I’m in front of the commission to speak... Madam the teacher, the trainee, all those different roles in life...

The main role of Reda Kateb seemed as a symbolic resurrection of an actor, who previously played bad roles only. What made you choose him?

It is true. Also this is how French people see second generation immigrants from Algeria. Usually you let them play bad boy roles only. As soon as I met Reda Kateb in one shooting I noticed his personality, his smile – very sunny, just as later he acted on the bus with children in my film. I saw the luminous part of Reda and I knew he could do it very well. Now other people discover him as a good character too.

How do you think French people will react to the film? How you’d like them to react?

I would like them to come, first of all. I had really different reactions depending where the screening was. In Paris people might ask me why I’m not tougher, because they will know what I talk about. But for instance people in La Rochelle are distant from this life –thus I just want them to perceive suburban as normal people, just like us.

Why you think there are so few films on this topic?

Things are changing. It is almost a genre these suburbs movies now, but it is also easy to fall in to cliché. I was trying to avoid the cliché, concentrating on the portrait instead. I think racism is there because of the crisis.

One important thing to note – suburban cannot to vote, so no one cares about them.

Vaiva Rykštaite 33

Commonwealth Film and Theatre Festival Glasgow (UK), July 17-27

Every year hundreds of film festivals take their first steps across the continent. The one that caught our eye this year was the Commonwealth Film and Theatre Festival in Glasgow. With quite an impressive program, the great Scottish city came alive thanks to a small group of dedicated film lovers. After a first visit we can’t help but express our curiosity of what will happen in 2015.

Sixteen

Rob Brown, UK Commonwealth Film & Theatre Festival Rob Brown’s feature debut is a deft and immersive portrayal of young asylum seekers living in Britain, with solid performances from lead actors Roger Nsengiyumva, Rachael Stirling and the rest of the ensemble cast.

The film’s greatest strength lies in its deployment of realism through suppressed, naturalistic characterisation and its deliberate, well considered dialogue. Brown’s story is tense and compelling, he succeeds in gaining a thrilling atmosphere, and an impending sense of danger without sacrificing the believability of the dilemmas in the film. I felt that in particular, Brown handled Jumah’s backstory with subtlety and care, creating dramatic tension without patronising the audience.

The film tells the story of Jumah, an adolescent Congolese refugee living with an adoptive carer in an inner-city London housing estate. Jumah has aspirations of becoming a barber, and more fundamentally, dreams of earning a safer future in London and escaping his horrific past. This future is jeopardised after he witnesses a murder near his flat and must confront those seeking to silence him, as well as confronting his own brutal childhood in Congo.

The photography is beautiful, especially in quiet contemplative moments, and long shots of warm sunsets and cool dusk around Jumah’s estate convey a sense of the relative calm of his new life. Brown’s usage of hand-held camera conveys the rawness of the subject without feeling overtly contrived. He skilfully uses close shots of his characters to involve his audience in the events, and to help instil a sense of dread and claustrophobia in the film’s more intense scenes.

Despite its raw beauty, the film can suffer at times from sacrificing realism for the sake of its narrative, and Brown’s use of certain unsubtle dialogue choices. A particularly annoying moment is a phone call hinting to a vital plot point in the middle of the street, a moment which felt tacked on, and

out of place when later revealed the full context of what had happened.

This was irritating as I was concerned for the safety of the characters involved at the time, rather than wanting to accept a plot marker leading to a dramatic payoff later on.

Despite this however, the adoptive mother/ son dynamic between Jumah and his guardian is performed exceptionally well, the relationship is superbly acted, with a palpable onscreen relationship between Nsengiyumva and Rachael Stirling. A particular highlight of this relationship is in the story’s more traumatic moments where Jumah’s vulnerability is portrayed and his adoptive mother’s convincing care and consolation in such scenes is powerful and sincere.

However, this relationship can be frustrating at times, when it feels like this dynamic too, is being ignored for the continuation of the plot. The convenience of certain plot devices, another being the relentlessness with which the director reminds of Jumah’s dream, can also inhibit the realism and immersion of the film. It was in these instances, that I was reminded that I was watching a film. And in a story that relies upon, and thrives in realism and naturalistic writing, I think more care should have been taken to avoid such formulaic signposting. This could have been helped by a longer run time, and inclusion of scenes where the introduction of such plot points feels more naturalistic in the context.

Ultimately though, the sacrifices pay off, and any weaker moments are outshone by the tense, captivating atmosphere and beautiful photography of the film. Rob Brown creates an intense and hostile world for his richly drawn characters in a plot that is fraught with danger and suspense. The film is an intense and immersive urban drama, and while not without is hiccups, is far richer than the standard thriller.

Liam McGarry

34

Beach Boy

I Have Your Heart

With his striking short film Beach Boy Danish filmmaker Emil Langballe shines a light onto the unveiled reality of sex tourism in contemporary Kenya.

The story he tells is similar to Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love which one year earlier competed for the Palme d’Or in Cannes. What sets it apart however is that it is a documentary investigating the processes of co-dependence between male companions and female benefactors.

A heart transplant, a fair lady and a cantankerous, scheming family comprise this witty and whimsical short by Crabapple, Boekbinder and Batt.

Since brevity is the soul of wit, this four-minute short should be a clever and entertaining little tale, and indeed it succeeds in this with its wry charm and infectious enthusiasm.

Emil Langballe, UK/ Kenya Jimm Batt, Australia Commonwealth Film & Theatre Festival Commonwealth Film & Theatre Festival

The film follows unemployed Juma, whose pregnant girlfriend left to work in Qatar. Roaming the beach of Mombasa he joins the league of young men vying for the attention of middle-aged European women who spend their holidays in the local beach resorts. When Juma meets British tourist Lynn and an alleged romance begins to kindle, his dream of a better life in Europe seems to come within reach. He hopes for a British visa or at least some money to get by and Lynn, although aware of his intentions, longs so badly for love and desire that she tunes out the artificiality of their relationship.

Despite of her turning a blind eye on it, Langballe – director, producer and cinematographer – makes sure that the audience does not fall for the false sense of romance. His images show a couple enjoying playful times in the pool and romantic dinners, but never let us be part of the intimacy.

We remain observers of something thoroughly unreal, forced to see the uncomfortable bigger picture – the repetitive pattern of black men surrounding white women at the beach, the contrast of life inside and outside of the resort, the dishonesty hidden in both his and her eyes.

The film is told with beautifully detailed paper doll puppets, shot with stop motion against detailed paper houses and cobbled streets. Set in a fanciful Victorian port, the attention to detail is marvellous, and so too is the creativity and flair with which the characters move and interact. The story is sprightly yet light, a young girl locked in her aristocratic and restrictive trappings, finds a shot at liberty and adventure after an operation gone awry. This lightness of plot can make the film feel somewhat vague and twee at times due mainly to the under explained events and shortness of the video. However, I think that it could not have been longer without sacrificing the energy and flow of the film, and so certain vagueness is to be expected.

With no dialogue in the film, the story is narrated through an original song

by Kim Boekbinder which spans the video’s four minute length. This can give the impression that the film is a merely a music video for the song, but due to the collaborative nature of the production, the song serves as a narrative and not the most important feature. As a soundtrack, it is a sweet and lively maritime ditty, and is an integral and catchy part of the story.

Langballe’s choice to include the voices of Juma’s family and fellow beach boys adds to the self-awareness for the intentions, benefits and issues of the practice of “romance tourism”. He makes clear that the exploitation works in two ways but somehow the film’s message feels constructed at times. Maybe a longer running time would have given it more space to unfold naturally. Instead Lynn’s self-reflection and Juma’s conversations with his absent girlfriend seem a little forced. In this sense, Seidl’s Paradise: Love exceeded Beach Boy in conveying an authentic perspective although it was fiction.

The film’s success has been made possible thanks to donations made via Kickstarter, which has allowed the creators freedom of time and autonomy.

This flexibility clearly paid off, seen in the meticulous detail of the models and set design, and seamlessness of the scenes and transitions.

These stylistic issues aside, Langballe’s film adds a layer to the common discourses of post-colonialism and sex tourism. Watching Beach Boy creates unease, a feeling of shame and a feeling of guilt – without slapping these in our faces, they unfold gradually and stick with us long after the credits rolled.

Liam McGarry

An imaginative and clever little alternative animation made with precision and care. The creators mix beautiful, intricate models with seamless stop motion effects and a playful, memorable score to create a charming and engaging story of love and freedom.

Kathi Kamleitner

35

Venice International Film Festival Venice (Italy), Aug 27-Sept 6

The old lady of the festival world has seen many stars come and go. Some repeatedly proclaim its imminent death, yet comes August, and everyone is talking about it. The island of Lido’s magnetism is contagious, making it the place to be. Surviving some fierce competition the first film festival in history is still showing huge loads of vitality and energy for the years to come.

Art

Adrian Sitaru, Romania Orizzonti Adrian Sitaru is one of the prominent members of the Romanian New Wave.

During his career he has been mainly focused towards short films, his most successful being Waves (2007). His first appearance in Venice was with his first feature Hooked (2008) which participated in Venice Days. Sitaru now returns to Venice with a short film entitled Art (Artă).

The film opens with a casting interview where the director Emi (Emanuel Parvu) and his casting director Andrei (Andrei Rus) are watching Anca (Iulia Crisan), a 13-year-old girl, performing the role of an underage prostitute.

Along with them sits her mother (Ioana Steam) who has strong objections towards the nature of the film and her daughter’s role in it. Emi and Andrei must use any possible way in order to persuade her that her concerns are totally wrong since their film is art and “where there’s art, there’s no obscenity”.

Sitaru created one sublimely sharp almost personal film that could be slightly considered as a reenacted mockumentary. Being also the scriptwriter, he based his story on his own discussions for his upcoming film Fixeur which is dealing with trafficking and prostitution of minors. During these discussions the director questioned where art ends and where the real abuse starts. He also tried to find what are the limits between filming the reality and the real pornography and if the moral issues should be placed beneath the artistic creation. In Art he still has the same serious concerns but his approach is quite amusingly lightweight.

Emi and Andrei are using the most provocative and even unconventional methods to persuade the mother. On one hand they mention films like Nymphomaniac, Taxi Driver, or even Empire of the Senses as innocent examples where pornography is considered art. On the other hand they

use the vanity’s power – Anca could become immortal – of a possible Cannes or Oscar award as a way to get a positive answer. Their methods clearly prove that even in art-house cinema you can still be the same ruthless person as in any other job. The theory that art could sanctify everything it is once again proven a myth. There are no moral rules when you need to do your business and Sitaru is just depicting that. Everybody seems innocent and guilty at the same time and equally responsible for each decision. Emi is just trying to do his artistic social awareness job, the mother wants to protect her daughter and Anca thinks of her future career. You can’t really blame anyone.

Since Art is a highly self-referential film it creates unavoidably a peculiar and humorous subconscious vicious cycle of manipulation. The audience is manipulated by Sitaru in order to watch how the fictional artists manipulate their fictional heroes who in their case are just illustrating how manipulating the reality could theoretically be. What is more interesting is that this whole procedure is carried along with simple and natural dialogues that with no exaggerations are presenting this provoking and disturbing truth in the most ordinary almost theatrical way. With that in mind Sitaru is balancing between reality and fantasy as he usually does in his films. He will go even further by touching the edges of surrealism with his finale.

Adrian Sitaru has the talent to encapsulate in a short film all the behindthe-scenes ethical issues that could evoke in a director’s mind. Also by exposing his own concerns and fears he also exposes how counterfeit is the innocence that protects his cinema. Art is not trying to solve the existing problems and evidently the initial question on the rightfulness to abuse people for your art remains unanswered.

Vassilis Economou

36

Belluscone: A Sicilian Story These Are the Rules Franco Maresco, Italy - Orizzonti

Ognjen Sviličić, Croatia - Orizzonti

Venice goes yellow as a mystery engulfs the Serenissima: Franco Maresco, satirical director from Sicily, has suddenly disappeared and apparently no one knows where he is. Interviews were never confirmed, the press conference was cancelled at the eleventh hour, and, what is worse, he left his movie, Belluscone: A Sicilian Story apparently unfinished. The title itself suggests that the director, known to the Italian public for CinicoTV, a satirical TV program aired in the 90s, has touched too many raw nerves to come out in the sunlight, as if nothing happened.

Ognjen Svilicic’s latest feature film explores some important aspects of a collapsing world and a brutal society where ordinary people have to face the reality of redefining their personal values. Based on the true story of Luka Ritz, who died in 2008 after he was attacked in the street, this film makes a caustic remark on how society brutally ignores the people it is supposed to protect.

Maresco’s purpose was to shoot a documentary that explained how come Silvio Berlusconi was so deeply attached to Palermo and its suburb, Brancaccio, where he always gains a multitude of votes at every election. Here he is perceived as a mythological figure, even capable of miracles, but yet, there is something wrong around this blind, unconditioned love and usually, in Sicily, exaggeration goes hand in hand with the mafia.

In tracing the origin of the relationship between the so-called Knight of Labor and the Island, Maresco goes back in time to explain the rise of Berlusconi’s political empire and how it is linked to mafia men and bosses. In doing so, he creates a harsh but still tragicomic X-ray of Italy, so far known. His analysis does raise a large amount of doubts and questions on the longstanding issue regarding the negotiation between Nation and Mafia. Although Sicilians unwittingly nod at it with silence and denial, the whole editing, built up on a combination of fragments from newscasts, interviews, newspapers, archival footages and TV programs, lets the truth speak for itself.

The story is told by Tatti Sanguineti, film critic and big friend of Maresco’s, who here investigates on his disappearance. The journey starts from the outskirts of Palermo: Brancaccio is still strongly imbued with traditional folklore. Festivals take place in the streets and neomelodical singers bow in the presence of Mafia bosses living there. But who exactly are neomelodicals and what they have to do with Mafia and Berlusconi? They are an undefined group of Neapolitan singers whose lyrics deal with low popular culture issues. One of their songs, that ironically became the soundtrack of the movie, is a tribute to Berlusconi. Moreover, during their performances, the singers are asked – or rather forced - to bring a kind greeting to their dear inmates.

A song becomes the starting point for the director to a deeper research.

Every piece of information is ultimately put together to draw an audiovisual jigsaw puzzle, reassembled piece by piece in front of the viewer’s eyes.

The hardest part, if not the most dangerous one, must have been involving the bigwigs in this process: repentant mafia men, famous politicians and journalists: People who know but are not always that willing to stand up for it. Their involvement seems to be enough to raise a fuss and discourage Maresco from finishing the movie.

Yet, is an end really necessary? Maresco asks the audience a rhetorical question. But the answer, if needed to solve the enigma, is quite clear, as it flashes out of every spoken word and footage. In rebuilding a piece of contemporary Italian history, Franco Maresco gives not only a true example of the brilliant Sicilian humour, but also a huge stock of food for thought. It makes it an absolute must-see, if you are eager to know more about two of the most trending Italian topics.

Marta Tudisco

Maja (Jasna Zalica) and Ivo (Emir Hadzihafizbegovic) are an ordinary couple living in Zagreb. Their daily routine is fractured when their 18-year old son, Tomica (Hrvoje Vladisavljevic), comes home late one night after being beaten in the street. After a visit to the hospital and a couple of x-rays, they confront a system that completely ignores human existence. While Tomica is suffering from headaches, Maja and Ivo are struggling to deal with the fact that their son wants nothing to do with them.

Everything collapses when Tomica is found unconscious by his mother in the bathroom and eventually dies in the hospital. The sudden change in their life accompanies the realization that the rules they eagerly follow all those years were not made for them. The bureaucracy of the system, either in the hospital or at the police station, keeps breaking them apart. Soon they will know that in this life nothing is given to you unless you claim it.

Ivo is the father who has always followed the rules and obeyed the conventions of the world he lives in. When he finds out his son participated in a fight he feels pride, considering he always urged him to fight back, while the mother expresses her worry about how the life of her son had turned out. Maja is the type of strong mother figure who despite the fact that she knows more about her son than Ivo, she does not really share a real connection with him.

They are both trying to live their lives, even despite the fact that the obstacles ahead keep multiplying. As long as they obey the rules, they believe everything will find its own way, even if the death of their child was the outcome of this behaviour. They trust society and its people, they believe in the world they live in. But until when? Everyone they meet shares a disturbing unconcern for their situation. Grief gradually roots inside them, exposing real anger and rage. It is time to act.

The minimalism in Svilicic’s images is shown through a slow burning procedure which scars those people who are trying to heal. By showing their everyday small habits, he intensifies the fact that they are just ordinary, small and unable to deal with such injustice. The social extensions of this film are its core. Those people are just numbers to a world that was built on rotten foundations, swallowing every single bit of humanity and throwing up violence.

The insignificance of Maja and Ivo’s existence becomes evident through the strong narrative form that is being used. More and more they come to realize that those “barbaric” rules, as Svilicic himself named them, have no meaning at all. Justice should be served in order to release some of the grief and regain power in life. This is what goes around Ivo’s mind until he decides to take the law into his own hands.

These Are the Rules can be read as a statement towards parenting, but mostly as strong criticism towards the hollowness of society and how people stopped caring about each other. Pointing out the importance of family bonds, Svilicic managed to bring to the screen the deep dissatisfaction he feels about the cruel world we are bound to live in.

Vicky Griva 37

The Obscene Life

Goodnight Mommy

Common knowledge: teenagers hate their life, the world and the planet.

They want to experiment, to try drugs, to have sex. This is all good as long as you don’t interfere in their zone of freedom and their illusionistic dreamland. If you decide to do so and you don’t know how to decipher their psychology and their view of life, you’ve lost the battle.

Two kids, two twin brothers. A big beautiful house in the middle of the Austrian countryside. A young mother who has just undergone plastic surgery and should come home to find her children waiting for her with open arms. But there’s something wrong with her attitudes: the bandages covering her face seem to have absorbed and replaced her sweetness with an unexpected and unrecognizable bitterness. A horrible thought torments the two brothers: what if that woman was not their mother, but a different person?

Renato De Maria, Italy Orizzonti

Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala, Austria Orizzonti

Italian director Renato De Maria finds inspiration in the autobiographical book by the Italian poet and writer Aldo Nove, a story focusing on his turbulent teenage years and early adulthood. After losing both his parents at the age of 17, Andrea (Clément Métayer) cannot find the purpose of life within his everyday routine. His sense of reality and his ability to draw lines between past, present and future is suddenly gone, replaced by a constant entrapment into the delirium of depression and ignorance. Determined to end his life, he buys 17 grams of cocaine – each for every year of his life, perhaps – and takes his position into a marathon with death, desperately trying to terminate second. But for some reason, the universe tries to keep him alive.

Starting with an original approach and making clear from the beginning that surrealism will have the upper hand in his aesthetic choices, De Maria picks up French teen Clément Métayer to incarnate his vision of Andrea, whose thoughts and memories we follow within the lines of his continuous narration in past and present. Future is never an option for obvious reasons. The camera is constantly observing him as an alienated version of human being that is lost somewhere in the societal chaos. Métayer tries really hard to bring out his inner teen spirit but no matter how much coke he smirks, his part remains lifeless and the narrative has a rather descending climax.

De Maria seems determined to give full potential to his character’s teen obscenity, spending almost one third of the film on Andrew’s sexual experimentation, shown in ways that reminds us so much of Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza. Bizarrely superficial and awkward, this eroticism seems like a clumsy mishmash directed by Sorrentino’s rich, poshy dolls – as we can recall them from Jep Gambardella’s furious parties – who would change their career orientation in split second, becoming poets from actresses or directors from poets, obviously incapable of performing any real task.

For a director like De Maria, who’s worked both in television and cinema, it is unavoidable to integrate some stylistic habits from the one to the other and vice versa. The long and monotonous scenes are not really helpful when constructing a biopic. Slightly balanced by De Maria’s interesting cinematographic approach, the film ends up being a colourful, psychedelic journey on a teenager’s skateboard, but sadly it stays there. Filtered, well polished images give a great start, but then they give way to a stiff, rigid and overly surreal 80 minutes, where the director’s interpretation of a teen’s life never achieves its goal.

Hard to tell if it’s the limited flexibility of the plot, the rather spasmodic acting or the adaptation of the particular biography itself, but certainly The Obscene Life doesn’t reach the high standard that De Maria had initially designed in his mind.

The Orizzonti section bows with a shiver to a perfect example of a hybrid movie that skilfully blends horror, thriller and psychological drama features without ever losing the thread or falling into the predictable. Goodnight Mommy dares you to solve the riddle hidden in a Rubik’s cube, where every possible combination is both the right and wrong one. The viewer takes part in a game apparently led by three characters: two kids who act as one, and their mother, who could be someone else. Identities get twisted in the search for redefinition, within a new balance where the characters deny to accept the terrible truth, revealed only at the end of the movie.

Directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala took inspiration from a reality show about stories of Austrian women almost unrecognizable after plastic surgery, and developed a complex script, taking the basic idea to its extreme consequences. The film wonders about the broad and universal concept of identity, calling upon the viewer to reflect on the importance of appearance over content. Would we be the same people if we changed our physical appearance or are we just the masks that we wear? Not surprisingly, the movie tells the story from the point of view of two young children, leading a macabre role-playing game made of doubles, masks, bandages that cover – and rather reveal – the alleged identities: the brothers strive to look exactly alike, while the mother is still processing her new look. The narrative is driven by small fragments of doubt that hook the viewer to his seat until the final plot twist, when each piece will be put together to assemble the final puzzle.

The editing reassembles the footages in a chronological order, as if it was a fairy tale. And this is how the two directors worked with the 9-year-old twins, Lukas and Elyas: “Every day we told them something more about the plot, so as to drag them into the story deeper and deeper” said Fiala. This explains the incredible reality effect emerging from the spontaneous interpretation of the two children, absolute protagonists of the story.

Set design and photography are punctual and detailed. The interior of the house leaves nothing to chance: every object - like the picture of the blurred woman towering over the living room – is conceived to tell a story, to suggest more clues towards the solution of the riddle. But be careful and make sure that you have enough guts to stand some of the scenes with a high level of violence. Although one might say that they were not necessary and somehow splatter, they are unquestionably consistent with the logic of the entire film. Probably without their visual presence, Goodnight Mommy would have just been an average movie, but yet it remains one of the most interesting and surprising movies of this year’s Mostra.

Marta Tudisco

Martin I. Petrov 38

Interview with

Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala Goodnight Mommy, Austria Orizzonti

The Austrian psychological thriller Goodnight Mommy stood out from the rest of the Orizzonti competition for presenting a different proposal. The directos Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz sat down with our reporter Marta Tudisco, to explain the difficulties and meanings behind such a production.

How did you come up with the idea for the film?

Severin Fiala: In Austria and Germany there is this sort of documentary, a TV program about women who come home completely changed after plastic surgery. They are supposed to look very beautiful to their close ones, but frequently they are rather scared than happy!

Veronika Franz: Yes, everyone smiles, but children hardly recognize their mothers, so we thought: what can happen if you take this idea and go along with it? And so that’s how it started!

Can it be considered a critic towards such TV programs?

SF: Not really. Actually it starts from there, but the movie raises questions about identity. Who are you? Are you the way you look? What would happen if you changed it? Will you always be the same person?

VF: Yes, and also how important is the surface? It is also a film about masks and surfaces, bandages, appearances. She is a television hostess, of course it is important how she looks, but also what is behind it, what are the basics of a person, is important too. You can be another person in another situation, it depends on the context, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible, in our times, that an ordinary man becomes a monster. We all have a monster within. It always depends on what you show, on what mask you wear.

There is a strong sense that the whole story is like a game held by these two young kids: how was directing them into this story?

SF: Working with children is easier; they are a lot more spontaneous. We gave them the script and told them few things about it, and then we shot chronologically, so as to get them deeper and deeper into the story.

VF: It was like reading a fairy tale: every day we told them a bit more about the script, to keep them interested. It is real fun to work with children; they are not that serious! But they worked very hard; they were almost in every scene. We were lucky to have them! Some elements recall the features of traditional fairy tales: the isolated house in the woods, the Doppelganger, for instance.

Did you get inspiration from that world?

SF: I think that it comes from the children’s perspective. Children live in a fairy tale world. We wanted to be fair to them and tell the story from their point of view.

VF: We thought about the tale of the Wolf and the Seven Little Goats, with reference to the part when the mother leaves and the wolf comes back in disguise. We thought about it but then we said: “No, it’s too much!”

Your style is figuratively very punctual: everything is exactly where it should be. Can you tell us more about the meaning of photography in your movie?

VF: The set design was based upon contrasts. The house was real and had a real owner, but we had it redecorated completely, to create the contrast between light and dark, since it had no blinds at all. There is also the blurred picture of the woman, but mostly every object in the house tried to fit as much as it could, to suggest something more about the characters. We wanted the house to be somehow a protagonist of the story.

Marta Tudisco 39

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San Sebastian Film Festival San Sebastian (Spain), Sept 19-27

Who said anything about crisis? Spain’s treasury main be facing hard days, and its film industry has been turned upside down, but you would not notice it by visiting its largest film festival. The town of San Sebastian comes alive every September, with its film starved population that embraces the event like no other in Europe.

Chrieg

Simon Jaquemet, Switzerland New Directors Whatever the question, violence is the answer in Simon Jacquemet’s confrontational feature debut. Matteo (Benjamin Lutzke, 16 at the time of shooting and, like the rest of the cast, an unprofessional plucked from the streets) is uplifted from his dysfunctional urban home and dispatched to the Swiss countryside for a period of “rehabilitation”. When he’s roughly chained at the neck and caged in an outdoor kennel by his young coresidents (Ella Rumpf, Sascha Gisler, John Leuppi), Jaquemet seems to be setting himself up for a film more perverse and sadistic than the one that follows.

Instead, the film takes a laudable about turn. Almost imperceptibly, after a series of tasks (milking, boxing and high-wire walking) that serve to reinforce his latent masculinity, Matteo moves from the status of prisoner to peer, and forges a new family - one still founded around blood, but not their own. This band of frustrated youths turn violently against the world that has wronged them with anarchic, hedonistic abandon in Jacquemet’s chilling revision of the “coming of age” framework.

Across a number of ambitious, if not always entirely effective sequences, the unifying principle is violence, Jacquemet is careful to not indicate too overtly where this violence comes from. The context he establishes for Matteo in his intro, and a scene where one character therapeutically

lays ruin to her old home, suggests that the violent tendencies come from external pressures. But there is plenty in the film to suggest that firstly, violence is a state present in us all, and also that there is an implicit seductiveness to it, which when awakened is impossible to suppress.

The gleeful abandon with which the cast of Chrieg smash precious artworks and set fire to a Mercedes suggests a pleasure in destruction from both character and actor, something emphasised by Lorenz Merz’ functional handheld photography that follows the characters mostly in circling facial closeup. Indeed in a lacklustre script that Jacquemet wrote himself, more than a few scenes seem to be present largely for the fun of shooting them.

Jaquemet brings his narratively disparate scenes together through the suggestion that a father-son sexual battle is the core of Matteo’s anger, the boys’ most explosive outbreak coming out of his father’s seizing of a love interest. Indeed, Chrieg translates as “war”, and attempting to identify what sort of war (class? identity? state? gender?) Jacquemet is gunning for, is a rewarding if elusive endeavour in this unfocused but bold debut. Ultimately, his main message seems to be that violence is not only inevitable, but also inherently seductive. Troublingly, in Chrieg, the lesson learnt is that it also goes unpunished.

Matthew Turner

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The Lesson

Magical Girl

Murphy’s Law is the principal player in The Lesson, a simple low-budget film directed and penned by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov. The film deals with the financial tribulations of rural Bulgaria and the daily struggle that the population has to undergo in order to live safely in their homes and off the streets.

I just can imagine one thing more personal-style than Carlos Vermut’s Magical Girl: Carlos Vermut himself. There is something magical around a group of thirty-something highly audiovisual guys that have been scratching at the side door of Spanish cinema for the last few years, trying to blow the dust with fresh air. The surprising but deserved Golden Shell, unusually walking hand in hand with the Best Director’s Silver one, comes to allow an invisible flow from the underground to the surface, much like Truffaut did in Cannes half a century ago. Far away from claiming histrionic similes between films and filmmakers that have little in common, the triumph of Vermut’s second feature, first one in terms of traditional way of filmmaking, means indeed a golden opportunity for a smaller cinema, living on the edge, to become visible for huge audiences.

Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov, Bulgaria/Greece - New Directors

Indeed, anything that CAN, WILL go wrong. That is the axiom for tragedy when it strikes on an apparently perpetual basis. And it’s also what actually happens in The Lesson with Bulgaria slowly, subtly and simply overcoming the aforementioned witticism here. Beginning and ending in her classroom, the film follows Nade, an English teacher, who is trying to catch the culprit of a wallet theft between classmates. She is determined to find the thief and teach them a lesson, fearing that this petty criminal behavior will have further consequences on the guilty child’s adult life.

Carlos Vermut, Spain Official Selection

Nade is honest, principled and has a deep-rooted moral and ethical compass, with a mild OCD. Moreover, times are difficult for her, her drunken and useless husband, and their daughter. Barely able to afford the bus fare and being owed a considerable amount of money for her translations, she arrives home one day to discover that the money that should have served to pay off a bank debt has been used to repair a trailer her husband has repeatedly failed to sell. Nade sets aside her better judgment and gets into business with some very shady individuals in order to try to pay the money back, hoping to return order to her life in the process.

More than film directors, these, Vermut included, are 21st-Century artists.

An intellectual blend of film, literature, painting, music, design, comics, videogames or just random homemade clips makes them masters in mixing high culture with popular references, under their peculiar sarcastic point of view. They are out of the box, so they don’t care about what they are not supposed to say or do. They conquered the internet and made it their ally.

Apart from some random screenings of his post-humour Catalonian colleagues Carlo Padial or Venga Monjas, to whom Carlos Vermut is unavoidably linked to by their particular harsh-nonsense low cost (as they say) halo, it was impossible to imagine that the special black, ironic and completely absurd Youtube humour would one day reach the big screen.

The Lesson is a strong, focused, yet overly long film, with an interesting premise, but a rather slow and settled pace, shot in a documentary-like manner. The film’s strongest feature is the writers’ ability to create a strong female character who does not need a cape or supernatural elements to convey meaning. Nade is the mater familias in a family where the roles have seemingly been reversed all along. Still, family comes first even if it implies that you sometimes cannot count on it.

That’s the hypnotism of Magical Girl. Apart from its accurate technical mise en scène, in which the director himself takes an important part as art director, the irreverently funny spirit of his short Don Pepe Popi, feels comfortable along this almost thriller about the lack of limits to reach human desires. As calm announces the storm, Vermut stages the narrative in peace, plain and clear, simply beautiful, waiting for the strength of the complicated characters to destroy everything in a sudden perverse spiral.

Moreover, the writers put forward concepts of responsibility, morality, principles, and ethics, making Nade question hers; at some point she would rather consider becoming a hooker in order to pay her debt, than asking her father for money and apologizing to his girlfriend. Ultimately, The Lesson does teach a lesson: tell the truth, be honest, be nice and don’t steal.

The story of an unemployed father trying to please his badly ill daughter, by buying a scandalously expensive original outfit of her manga heroine, Yukiko, little by little turns into a dirty network of blackmail, obligated favours, wickedness and death around the real magical girl, the enchanting Bárbara. The first introduction of the 12-years-old manga fan, twists soon into a flamingo style intense femme-fatal story, leaded as a leit motiv by Manolo Caracol’s Niña de fuego, in a subtle trick where Vermut, the illusionist, blows up that first kitsch colourful pop layer in a brilliant demonstration of handling McGuffin without leaving a trace.

The Lesson is held together by a terrific Margita Gosheva who plays Nade in a calm and collected manner. Even though she never breaks down in tears, her subtle trembling body is enough to convey the emotional toll the situation is taking on her character. The directors take their time to tell the story while the DoP opts for wide shots, lensed in light tones. Nade’s inner emotional breakdown is heightened by the lack of music and the mere presence of natural sounds and dialogues.

All in all, The Lesson, is a calm and collected film with a resounding moral message, a strong account of the real-life tragedy that could easily plague anyone in a world of economic uncertainty. Indeed, the lesson at hand transforms Nade’s quest for clarity into a much greater journey of understanding, self-discovery and compassion. After all, it is a lesson...

Tara Karajica

Magical Girl is a deconstructed thriller where the Spanish filmmaker and comic illustrator (also designer of his film’s poster) stays faithful to these features that make us recognize his work. Led by his nonsense rules, and still adding a touch of unjustified magic, far away from looking pointless he also reaches to finger the critical points of the social context where the film is built upon. Economic, social and political crisis, educational budget cuts, unemployment, sensationalizing in the media and other taboos all show up behind this clever and funny drama which proves that, paradoxically, fun and drama can be matched in the same sentence with a unique result.

Sounds like a new wave to explore an alternative path, parallel to the main usual road, has finally appeared in Spain.

Sara Martínez Ruíz 43

Modris

The Mother of the Lamb

When shooting a “based on true events” story, you can follow two paths.

The first consists in “just” compiling facts into a fiction movie. Although the most “right” thing to do, directors often take the second path: pick up a story, keep its backbone (Hollywood kind of misses here frequently), but embellish the rest structuraly. There is nothing wrong with this method, and sometimes, it’s the best way to adapt a story, giving the director room to explore some unfinished or unproved subjects.

Rebellion is something most commonly associated with teenagers, not ladies nearing fifty. There’s something about the idea of a middle-aged woman pushing against the constraints of her elderly mother that’s oddly compelling, and clearly Chilean directors Rosario Espinosa and Enrique Farías thought so too, because that’s exactly what The Mother of the Lamb is about. It’s a film that explores family ties and suggests that it’s never too late to assert your independence – but at what cost?

Modris is a 17-year-old boy in Latvia. A normal teenager in some ways- he has a girlfriend, he goes to school- Modris has a game addiction and is constantly being reminded by his mother that he is like his unknown father, who is supposedly in jail, whose bad genes he has inherited.The trigger to this story is when Modris, to support his game addiction, sells his mother’s heater. Attempting to teach him a lesson, she files a complaint, which will get Modris a two-year probation, leaving him no space for mistakes – a quite difficult task.

49-year-old Cristina’s life very much revolves around the needs of her widowed mother. Without a proper job or any peers, she spends her days caring for Carmen, never able to stray too far from the house and with her only form of social interaction coming from her mother’s friendship group. That is until she crosses paths with old classmate Sandra, a funloving and liberal woman who’s determined to teach Cristina to loosen up.

As they spend more time together, the more she realises that her life needs to change. But with her mother as demanding as ever, achieving this looks increasingly difficult.

Juris Kursietis - Latvia,Germany New Directors

Rosario Espinosa, Enrique Farias - Chile New Directors

This is the first feature of Juris Kursietis, a Latvian director engaged in the growing local film industry. He started his career as a journalist and, therefore, was firstly drawn to documentaries. Kursietis started to make a statement in Latvia and, in three years (2010 to 2013), was able to produce and direct Modris. Despite it being his first film, we can already see the style that the director might adopt in his future movies.

Kursietis is preoccupied with showing a political and cultural message that is present in Latvia. Modris is clearly an affirmation of a director worried with education in his country. “It all starts with the family”, he said before.

Modris is preoccupied with showing life through a personal view, what it’s like to be in Modris’ skin. The movie also adds his quest to find out who is his father, if he is really in prison and, if so, where. It clearly adds up to the concerns, the troubles and all the changes in life that can completely change a person.

Technically speaking, Modris is a complicated movie. It has two layers. The first one presents the character, performed beautifully by the non-actor Kristers Piksa, who got the role in a school casting, and is the focus of all the attention. There are no wide shots (except the beautiful opening scene), just a long close-up of Modris, so that the viewer clearly understands who to empathise with. The stirring camera acts on purpose, so you can notice all the agitation behind the marvellously displayed calm and pale face. After this layer, there is everything else. It runs unnoticed to Modris, life is constantly punching him, physically and emotionally, and yet, he remains the same.

In essence, Modris was a great start for Kursietis. It warns us about his concerns about youth problems in Latvia. The message that this movie transpires is quite relevant to nowadays society – it’s a cold yet real portrait of a teenager.

While the title may focus on her mother, the film is all about Cristina – and rightfully so. María Olga Matte is captivating in her vulnerability, and it almost feels inaccurate to call it a “performance” due to how grounded in reality the character is. It’s interesting that a film so concerned with aging and lost youth should be made by two directors who are barely out of school; in fact, The Mother of the Lamb is their graduation project. It’s perhaps this that contributes so much to the success of Cristina’s character - they’re able to inject vitality and a perspective that makes her resonate with all ages.

It’s a film that very much calls on the senses in order to express its themes, contrasting sights and sounds to showcase both Cristina’s desires and her reality. The absence of any real music until Sandra comes along is very telling, and the same applies visually: everyday life is devoid of colour, except when hinting at the things she longs for the most (the bright lights of a casino, her friend’s daring wardrobe, a child’s bike). The implications are subtle, but it makes identifying them all the more rewarding.

The denouement occurs at a slow and steady pace, with enough small but compelling plot points to prevent the film from becoming too dull. At only 79 minutes it’s far from lengthy, though anymore and it would become a bit of a chore. The conclusion can be foreseen fairly easily, but it’s an ending that feels absolutely necessary; without it, there’d be no pay-off after getting emotionally attached to the characters. For some, its predictability might diminish its overall impact, but personally it feels like a vindicating and satisfying send off.

The Mother of the Lamb is a reserved and mature piece of filmmaking, so much so that it doesn’t necessarily make for easy/casual viewing. But if you’re willing to dedicate the required attention, it’s a rewarding experience.

Bruno Guerra Robyn Davies

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Interview with

Hermes Paralluelo Not All Is Vigil, Spain New Directors

Hermes Paralluelo is one of Spain’s most promising rising stars. He landed at the San Sebastian Film Festival with a daring look at the fear of death, called Not All Is Vigil. Casting his own grandparents is only one of many signs that his youthful approach can easily assume a more classic structure.

You used your own grandparents for the lead roles in the film. How did that decision come about?

Well, the whole idea for the film started because I missed my grandparents. I had been living in Argentina, and then in Spain, and the long distance made me think that I wanted to make a film about them to feel closer to them. At first I thought about using actors, so I started writing the script and constructing the characters. But during this process, I realised that my grandparents had all the characteristics I wanted, so surely they can do a better job than any actors! I also realised that they both had a very good, very weird quality for cinema: they don’t put on a show. All of us are so used to showing ourselves to others in a way that we want to be seen, but Felisa and Antonio have no need for that anymore. They are what they are, and that’s it. Filming that is very relaxing for me.

Was it challenging working with them?

My grandparents had no experience whatsoever. The first acting they ever did was on day 1 of rehearsals! We began rehearsals 6 months previous to shooting and that’s when we started with the dialogue, but my grandmother doesn’t have a good memory so it ended up being useless trying to do things too early. That’s why it was very important to repeat, repeat, repeat! Obviously, there were a lot of takes and a lot of things we needed to reshoot.

Well, everything is real – they are real. But the things I see in them, their feelings and the way they make me feel, I view as a kind of fiction because it’s so intense. So I constructed fiction that is rooted in reality. My last film was a documentary, so that definitely affected the way I shot this one, and is why it looks like one. The most important thing to me is the person on screen, and trying to understand the complexity of that human being, and shooting in a documentary style allows you to be close enough to do that.

Was there a particular moral message you wanted to get across in terms of how society treats the elderly? At times I found myself very frustrated with them, then felt guilty! Is this what you wanted?

It’s not just about older people, it’s about society in general – we have a lack of attention. We don’t focus on anything, and I made sure that the movie had very few elements to it so that the audience would have to pay attention all the time. I remember when I was staying with my grandparents, and they were telling me stories, and I wasn’t listening! And I thought: “why didn’t I listen? Now that story is lost!” So in the movie, you’ll find several stories that can no longer be lost – because you’ll be forced to concentrate. Staying for a long time in the same place (with the same person) is a revolutionary idea to me, and I wanted the film to show that.

What was the process of getting the film funded?

I met the Colombian co-producers at a workshop in Venezuela, and it was there that they became interested. Financing was actually a matter of urgency for me. Obviously my grandparents are very old now, so I couldn’t really wait for the funding – I started shooting without it. This actually turned out to be a good thing. I feel much more comfortable dealing with images than with text, so being able to actually show what the film looks like helped convince them to fund it, I think.

Is the film fictional, or is it essentially a documentary?

Robyn Davies 45

Interview with

Daria Blažević President of NISI MASA

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At the end of the first full year of her NISI MASA presidency, Daria Blažević sat with us to discuss her take on 2014 and plans for the future.

When did you first hear about NISI MASA? I used to attend NISI MASA general assemblies as a representative of my local organization, Kinoklub Zagreb, which became a member in 2006. That’s when I got interested in NM activities. Going to all the assemblies and workshops, I had a lot of fun, made some great friends but most importantly, the NISI MASA events have really helped develop my selfesteem as a filmmaker and it was because of them that I stopped defining myself as an introvert (really).

So when the time came to give back to NISI MASA, I couldn’t say no. Some time later I became a board member, vice president and then – a president.

At the end of your first full year as the head of NISI MASA, how was 2014 for you?

Not an ideal time to be president, as the crisis left us dealing with decreasing cultural budgets and ever changing criteria and focal points of the EU funds.

But aside from that, we have truly had amazing accomplishments, and I was proud to be a small part of that. The feeling of pride when seeing a Nisimazine Yearbook or the European Short Pitch project winning the European Film Academy award is amazing [The Chicken by Una Gunjak]. We rock!

How did your presidency change NISI MASA? From my point of view, the president is not as crucial for NISI MASA as the word may suggest. The crucial people are the heads of departments and office managers. I don’t think that me being president has shaped NISI MASA more than the team that makes projects happen. I am simply a part of the team, always there to offer my opinion on matters that are too tricky to decide, and of course to help the team come up with a strategy for the future of NISI MASA. What is on the NISI MASA wishlist for 2015?

We hope that 2015 will bring us a better, more concentrated NISI MASA. The vision the team which I share is: more quality for a smaller number of projects, developing in depth rather than in quantity.

My one big hope for 2015 is for NISI MASA to stay a place where young people can be empowered, just like I was way back. And when I look back on the publications, festivals, awards, all the things our alumni have achieved, I have a feeling we're indeed on the right track.

Ewa Wildner

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Avvantura Film Festival Zadar (Croatia), Aug 23-29

When you think of the Croatian Adriatic coast you think of sunny rocky beaches, bikinis and beer. The truth is that there is much more, and this glorious event that mixes an unquestionable love for film and filmmaking alike, includes one of the most complete training series of activities.

Our first visit to the event was enough to raise a few eyebrows and we can’t wait for another chance to check out what is happening in this corner of Europe.

Love Steaks

Jakob Lass, Germany Avvantura Film Festival The original title of the German film Love Steaks is in English due to a humorous wordplay that works as a good punch line for the main situation in the film which is a classic “boy meets girl” scheme. But this couple is certainly not the classic boy and girl that you are so used to watching on screen: the trick of Love Steaks is that the gender expectations are turned upside down and given “flesh” in an unpretentious and playful manner. A love encounter between timid and naive physiotherapist Clemens and aggressive kitchen assistant Lara who has a drinking problem sounds like a starting point for an end-tragedy to happen, but it is also a good way to create tension between the two by simply following the “opposites attract“ recipe.

Shot mostly inside one location, a wellness hotel (with a few exteriors of, probably, the nearby beach), and filmed predominantly with a handheld camera and in natural light, the film seems to stylistically play along with the couple’s romantic (miss-) happenings. Their relationship’s dynamic is further enhanced with jump cut montage as well as with a lot of on-set improvisation, especially in the scenes with only the two protagonists.

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Actually, the majority of the acting crew are non-professionals working in the very same hotel where the film was shot and this fact is quite invisible for the unknowing audience, which cannot be a thing of simple directors’ luck with the “naturals” but certainly deserves a compliment for directing actors. Also, the combination of “street-wise” dialogues, playfulness with the viewers’ expectation but without snobbish pretentions to it and overall good rhythm that patches up the film, allows us to easily get into the characters’ inter and inner worlds.

As already said, Clemens and Lara are worlds apart, so their on-screen charm comes mostly out of not knowing what to expect from the clash of his “holistic” and her compulsive nature, but unexpected hilarious moments. And those, spiced up with their honest desire for one another, make Love Steaks a fun love-at-stake film fantasy.

Nino Kovačić

pean adventure and flashback scenes of the events back home in Iraq that lead to his going away. The scenes from the past function as a memory lane describing the social environment of Sayiar’s village (in which fixed marriages are a common thing) and are a constant reminder of the social values which add up to the motivational complexity of the main character. The flashback scenes also serve as the viewer’s paths into Sayiar’s emotional neurosis, him being under constant psychological pressure and struggling to manage the torment between duty and love for his family.

Before Snowfall

Hisham Zaman - Germany, Norway, Iraq Avvantura Film Festival A young Kurd gets fully wrapped up in cellophane tape and put into a tank full of oil to be smuggled across the Iraqi-Turkish border. Once in Turkey he finds himself on a dust road in the middle of nowhere asking a passingby old man for directions to Istanbul. When asked back why he is going there, he bluntly replies: I have to find and kill my sister.

As it is specific for road-trip films, Sayiar encounters a variety of characters; one of them being Evin, a girl from the streets of Istanbul, whom he falls in love with and who becomes his fellow traveller. With this number of genuinely believable and not caricatured side-characters we are given an insight into specific pockets of immigrant social space in Europe, but by which the main story is not fully burdened. Although the film constantly carries a strong political context it basically doesn’t overwhelm Sayiar’s intimate story and, in the second half, the love story between him and Evin. By the way, very good performances by the two non-professionals are definitely one of the film’s strong-points.

Seldom do we come across such horrific and gripping opening scenes as in Before Snowfall, where the journey takes young Sayiar not only to Istanbul, but also across Berlin and all the way to Norway. His heavily burdened and dangerous voyage is plot-wise constantly going forward, thus quite dynamic and making the over a 100-minute film endeavour pass by quickly.

Furthermore, the constant inherent danger of their situations just adds more to the viewer’s sympathy towards them as the end approaches; however one might have been unsure from the beginning on whether Sayiar’s mission is in any way justifiable. But this also makes a crucial point of the importance of his character to us: through Sayiar’s case the notion of justice is revealed as a socially negotiated construct that varies culturally, and by default works repressively towards certain individuals. Although Before Snowfall avoids cultural clichés quite successfully, the film is nevertheless set for “western eyes”, as it finally does present a strong critique of the unjust rules of the “Other” society.

The film’s narration exhibits two parallel directions: the protagonist’s Euro-

Nino Kovačić

Interview with

HAFSTEINN GUNNaR SIGURĐSSON director of Paris of the North & Either Way

How did Paris of the North start of?

I had a core idea of a father-son relationship story and my friend, screenwriter Huldar Breidfjord has a house in a small village which I was visually fascinated by, so I though it could be set there. I pitched this idea to him; he picked it up and came up with a script. I like those kind of stories, I like to work with few characters and invest a lot of time in them; explore a few relationships instead of spreading them all over. Then the audiences also have more time to connect with them.

Do you consider isolation a specific theme in your films? Also, would you say that there almost a brand of Icelandic film in terms of melancholic humour, relationships between characters in isolation...

It's definitely a theme for me, having an experience of living in the far north Iceland, in the middle of nowhere, so we are of course isolated but this has lately changed a lot with modern communication technology. But it is something you still experience there. It's difficult for me to talk about the “brand of Icelandic film” because I'm a big part of it, but it probably does work that way. There is definitely a certain kind of humour to it.

In terms of the story and narration, both your films are very atmospheric. Do you basically deploy narration in creating a certain atmosphere?

Yes, I'm very drawn to minimal narration, circumstances and characters.

For instance, I enjoy Raymond Carver's short stories. They are not big in plot, but are more about people. I'm very curious about people and that's why I make films.

Do you then often cut the dialogues in the script when filming?

I try to keep them down, although I have very heavy dialogue scenes. There also has to be a clear progression of the story, although it's not a big story, but something new has to be happening and sometimes details are enough.

Your first feature Either Way even got an American version, Prince Avalanche, directed by David Gordon Green...

At first I thought it was a joke when they approached us and said they would like to make a remake. It's been very popular to remake Scandinavian crime films in Hollywood and Either Way was definitely not that kind of film. Then I heard that David Gordon Green was the director and though why not; I knew and liked his work, so it would be interesting to see what he will do with it.

How did it feel to watch Green’s version of your own film?

It was like seeing an ex-girlfriend with a new boyfriend. Seeing the material that you knew so well in a different context is difficult to describe. I wasn't really with the film but was having a dialogue with myself about what was going on. When watching it the second time the self-dialogue was over and a I went with the film like normal audience.

Paris of the North premiered this year at Karlovy Vary film festival. Is it already playing in Iceland?

We are going to pre-premiere the film in Iceland in the small town where it was shot, to show it to the locals first. Those people helped us out and we're inviting the whole town for the screening. And in September it will premiere in Reykjavik and has already been invited to a number of festivals.

What are your future projects?

I have two scripts. One I'm developing with the actors from Either Way and it is a comedy drama about the fear of flying. The other one is again a script

by Huldar Breidfjord and is a thriller about a dispute over a tree between two neighbours in a quiet and boring suburban neighbourhood in Reykjavik. Hopefully I will shoot one of them next year.

Nino Kovačić 49

Vienna International Film Festival Vienna (Austria), Oct 23-Nov 6

Gorgeous Austria again! Yes, one of the great classics of the festival circuit still reserves much of its classical style.

Repeatedly it comes up with some of the biggest surprises of the year, and 2014 was no exception.

Jauja

Lisandro Alonso - Argentina, France, Netherlands, Germany, Mexico, Denmark Viennale 2014 has been a year abundant in films which represent some sort of change in the way their makers approach cinema. Various film-festivalconsacrated directors have managed to surprise by providing us with films which are more or less different from their previous work. Among them are Bruno Dumont (a wonderfully brutal director beforehand, who, in doing a TV comedy miniseries P’tit Quinquin, has actually managed to keep on staying the same), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (whose Palme d’Or awarded Winter’s Sleep might come as a surprise, among many other reasons due to its neverending dialogues and shot-countershots) and Olivier Assayas (who now blends instead of cutting fervently and overall manages to keep the pace of Clouds of Sils Maria much more tempered than that of many of his previous films).

Lisandro Alonso is also among them, for with his latest, Jauja, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, he manages to create a film which seems to differ considerably from his previous ones. New to Alonso are employing a renowned actor for the leading role, working with a quite steady script (co-written by Argentine novelist and poet Fabián Casas) and working with a considerable amount of dialogues. He also sets the story in a quite remote past, in the 19th century.

Still, it feels as if the core of Jauja is very similar to that of some of his previous films, such as Los Muertos and La Libertad. For one because Alonso lets once again the surrounding in which man struggles be as important as the man himself. And still, neither man nor surrounding dominate the film, but the quest for what film itself can do with them, the quest for the mysterious ways in which fiction functions.

The action takes place in 1882 Patagonia, perhaps soon after the place had been ridden of its indigenous people. Few soldiers and Danish engineer 50

Gunnar Dienesen (Viggo Mortensen), assigned perhaps with making the territory fit for future European settlers, wander through the barren land.

Dienesen is accompanied by his 15-year-old daughter Ingeborg, a porcelain-doll-esque virgin beauty who arouses the interest, greeds and needs of the company and ultimately runs off with one of the soldiers, thus determinating her father to go out in search of her. His quest turns into a solitary, desolating, futile, heroic and decadent, beautiful endeavor.

Shot on 35mm by Aki Kaurismäki’s cinematographer Timo Salminen, Jauja faces us with images of vibrant, hypnotic beauty. We enter a realm of illusions (as opting for the 4:3 aspect ratio and the rounded edges of the film’s image also suggest) and disillusions, of distorted perception and solitude. Stars turn into an aura surrounding a broken solitary man, seas appear where no one would expect them to, a toy soldier gives one solace and all might have been dreamed. Some of the most mesmerizing shots of the film show us Dienesen during his solitary quest, nearly motionless underneath the stars, either kneeling or laying, accompanied by music composed by Viggo Mortensen himself.

Alonso ends the film jumping in time to nowadays Denmark, where we eventually find Ingeborg that we had lost in the 19th century awaking, returned after a long trip. One of her dogs has gotten sick because he missed her so much.

By choosing to let arificiallity (which has always been present in his films) become this visible, Lisandro Alonso makes a brave step, managing to prove that he can freely dispose of a wider range of cinema’s possibilities without altering either core or quality of his films, on the contrary, enriching his means of expression.

Ioana Florescu

El Futuro

Mr. Leos Carax

An experimental film with political hints, El Futuro is Luis López Carrasco’s first feature. Shot on 16mm, the film imitates and makes use of archival material, attepting to fill a gap by recreating a situation and a moment in time that have evaded cinema. López Carrasco recreates and imagines a party taking place 1982 in Spain, a turning point for the country’s history.

It is the year in which the socialist working party won the general election.

We learn that right at the beginning. While the screen is still black, we hear Felipe González, General Secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, holding a speech after the party had won the election. The film shows the youth at a house party, unconcerned, politically uninvolved, not trying to make sure that the situation in Spain will keep improving after the end of the Franco regime.

You will undoubteldy have understood what, or rather whom, this documentary is about while reading the title. Mr. Leos Carax is Tessa LouiseSalomé’s second attempt to get us nearer to the work of the French filmmaker after having directed 2013 the forty-five minute long making-off Drive in Holy Motors.

Luis López Carrasco Viennale

The house party is one of three moments in time that the film portrays. El Futuro also jumps further away in time, to the end of the 50s/ beginning of the 60s by showing us portraits of people from the former generation. It also takes a look at the present time. As the film approaches its end, we are left to see exteriors of buildings in Madrid nowadays, not a human soul in sight, an ending reminescent of that of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse.

For most of the film’s lenght we are witnessing the party. Youngsters drink, talk and dance, get a nosebleed after abusing cocaine. A supposedly newby mother invites people to taste her breastmilk. The means of showing the party are as exuberant, decadent and tiring as the party itself. The film material is intentionally altered, the sound in several ways toyed with. Every cut is abrupt, meant to be visible, so that the viewer can mentain a critical attitude towards that, which he seeing.

Paradoxically, El Futuro manages to induce both a feeling of immersing into the world of the party and a certain distance. A feeling of overwhelmness emerges and it is in accordance with the sensation one experiences at such an event. Images are unfocused all of the sudden, we see people speaking, yet we are unable to concentrate on what they are saying. López Carrasco recreates not only what a party looks like, but also what it sounds like and how one perceives it while attending it.

The sound is in numerous ways played with. At times, we are not allowed to hear the people we see talking, yet we hear the ambient noise of the party. Other times we see people talking, yet the movent of their lips does not correspond with what we hear. Does he dub, or does he simply use delay devices? The music we are left to hear is also loaded with political meaning. The ways in which the director plays with music are primarily a mean of criticizing, as are most of the tricks he employs.

Luis López Carrasco harrasses his party people, questions them, presents their superificiality. He criticizes by putting the event in context, he does not criticize people enjoying themselves in itself. Near the end, he even lets black holes swallow them.

Though El Futuro is an achievement in means of what can be done with film material and sound, thus a technical achievement, there is some clumsiness attached to the fact that every element is meant to deliver the same quite clear political idea, depriving the viewer of the chance to misunderstand. For a film that claims to allow the spectator to maintain his distance, it is quite invasive.

Ioana Florescu

Tessa Luoise-Salomè, France Viennale

Fortunately enough, Mr. Leos Carax does not manage to extiguish the aura of mystery surrounding Carax, nor to put an end to the rumor that he carries a dreadful curse. On the contrary, Tessa Louise-Salomé’s documentary makes the layer of mystery enclosing Carax even thicker.

The film almost chronologically tries to reconstruct Carax’s filmmaking career and to give glimpses into whatever might have motivated him to make a certain project at a certain time or into what might have caused the long time gaps beween the making of some of his films. Mr. Leos Carax compiles interviews with several film critics, actors and actresses, as well as directors which have worked with Carax or claim to have been influenced by his work.

Of all, the one who provides with the most enjoyable and probably least abstract remarks is Lavant, who verbally shares with us the awkwardness of working multiple times with current, past or future girlfirends of Carax, as well as his thoughts when reading the script of Mauvais Sang for the first time. Lavant humorously recounts that, among others things, the part asked of him to ride a motorbike, run and jump from a plane, none of which he was joyfully willing to do. He accepted, of course.

Pehaps more surprinsing than the interviews is the archival material the documentary gives us access to. We see Denis Lavant’s screen test for Boy Meets Girl, an interview with Juliette Binoche taken on the set of Mauvais Sang, as well as television news announcing that Les amants du Pont-Neuf is being made and, surprisingly, footage of Carax in his youth, not wearing his nowadays indispensable sunglasses and expressing opinions about cinema a little more willingly than he does now.

An aspect of Mr. Leos Carax that creates quite a peciuliar effect is Tessa Louise-Salomé’s decision to let scenes from the films of Carax run over the shot interviews. Though this may give her documentary a mysterious vibe resembling that sourrounding Carax and his films, it does at the same time lead to hilarious images. So it happens that we see one of the interviewees in her chair and at the same time Juliette Binoche waterskiing in Les amants du Pont-Neuf. For a few moments it looks as if the interviewee is waterskiing in her armchair instead of Binoche. The hilariousness of it shatters the trancey tone of Mr. Leos Carax for a while.

Ultimately, Mr. Leos Carax fulfills the generous gesture of bringing scenes from the films of the French director back on the cinema screen, where they belong. Apart from that it has a not completely unvirtuous tranceinducing tone and delivers the audience with a few enjoyable insights into the work of Leos Carax. One can hardly restrain herself from running home and rewatching the films of Carax after the closing credit.

Ioana Florescu

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Black Nights Film Festival Tallinn (Estonia), Nov 14-30

By the end of the year you would think there is little left to discover, but there is a small dedicated group of people in Estonia who think otherwise. The Tallinn Black Nights is what they have to show for it: an enormous film program, side by side with an endless long list of parallel initiatives, making this the largest festival in the Baltic region and yet another stop we at Nisimazine refuse to ever ignore.

Life in a Fishbowl

Baldvin Zophoníasson, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Czech Republic Tridens Competition Could you imagine a fishbowl with only one fish inside? Even if it was a gold fish, it would be a completely miserable view, wouldn’t it? The loneliness and helplessness of that fish is pretty easy to notice. It seems to be a trap, a place where you are imprisoned and can do nothing to change the situation.

The characters of Life in a Fishbowl by Baldvin Zophoníasson are in a bowl too. They carry a heavy luggage of experiences. Those people are confused by being lost in their past, dreams, fears, aspirations and emotions. Eik, Solvi and Mori live in the same city but they don’t know each other. They lead their daily lives, overwhelmed by the routine. One day, in result of weird circumstances, they meet – how strangers could accidentaly became an important part of each others’ stories is the most amazing thing in this film.

Eik is a young single mother. She tries to manage, so above working as an educator in the kindergarden, she takes an extra job in the evenings as a call girl. Solvi, having dreamt about football career before, sits at the desk in a bank instead running on the football pitch. It’s a typical corporation where each employee has a place in the hierarchy. There is one character left. It’s Mori – the hero of a pen and a bottle filled up with whisky. The man who looks as if he was homeless spends all days walking around the city. His thoughts often come back to the dramatic events from the past.

Sometimes he writes poetry and drinks. To be honest, mainly drinks. He is typical hermit outstanding from the rest of the society, which is influenced by his loneliness.

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What do those three people have in common? All of them go in circles of their current life situation. According to the title, the corporation where Solvi works could also be some kind of a fishbowl – not only because of the way it is run, but also the way it looks. All those sterile, modern interiors full of glass furniture, closed spaces with huge windows which are a border between the “corpoland” and the rest of the world. Officialy, everything looks pure and secure, but under the surface there is something completely different. And it’s not as innocent as it appears to be. Similar thing can be said about the characters’ feelings – they hide them under the coat made of propriety and silence.

While watching Life in a Fishbowl, we can observe how characters carry on the neverending struggles for a brighter future. At least, for a different one. It’s a valuable story about the relationships and feelings. Every viewer can find something interesting in it. I was mostly moved by the situations taken from the daily life – problems with communication, embarrassing meetings which we would prefer to avoid, solitude even if we are surrounded by plenty of people. What is most important, however, is that the movie shows how difficult it is to break glazed cloche made of the unspoken words and emotions not spilled out. So maybe, it’s a warning that we shouldn’t even try to construct these traps. Maybe the best place for the fish to live is the ocean.

Monika Martyniuk

The Man in the Orange Jacket

Violet

There come times when you just have to say fuck the system and those who control it. In fact, many of us will recognise the mood of Aik Karapetian’s The Man in the Orange Jacket. How we strike back at those who trespass against us therefore becomes an important question.

How to show hopelessness in the situation of mourning combined with trauma after the death of a friend? How to create a world of solitude in the struggle for inner peace? Is it possible at all? The answer to this questions can be found in the feature debut of Bas Devos, who not only directed Violet but also wrote the script.

Aik Karapetian, Latvia Tridens Competition

Do you take on the institutionalised powers-that-be with an Occupyesque stand against injustice? Or do you head out to your shed, grab a toolbox, and take whatever tools you fancy to your employer’s head? The latter is the plot of The Man in the Orange Jacket. Except the titular man does then occupy his boss’ house once the murderous deed is done. And quite a house it is too: imagine an oligarch’s grotesque mansion.

Certainly the man’s actions are extreme (and there’s a gorgeous irony to him doing them in a health-and-safety high-visibility jacket). But it’s all for the greater good, right? Well, not exactly. Following the protagonist’s redistribution of wealth (to himself), he simply repulsively envelopes himself in gluttony and prostitutes. It’s real antihero stuff, except Karapetian perhaps doesn’t quite do the directorial leg work necessary to make us really associate with the usurper.

This is an important problem, because it stops the film’s hedonistic romp from being as thrilling as it could be. Karapetian is clearly hell bent on creating a fog of ambiguity in his film though, and I suspect his key goal is to defer judgement to us. If you haven’t guessed, then, Karapetian has been rather clever with the slasher genre (something you don’t get to say very often).

Indeed The Man in the Orange Jacket always seems to be commenting on the post-Recession world, suggesting that nowhere is now safe from the social discord left behind. The dark, powerful events irresistibly connote Marxist thought. And the morose, stuttering, jolting filming style (particularly of the feature’s brilliant opening scene) makes The Man in the Orange Jacket an assured first step for Latvian horror. Nevertheless, Karapetian has clearly kept his finger firmly on the global pulse of horror too. He has perceptively placed himself into the middle of a debate about what horror should be. A debate which is taking place across PÖFF right now.

As Maarja Hindoalla has discussed, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows strives to take horror away from buckets of mindless blood and gore towards a more immersive, suspenseful experience. Whereas Takashi Miike is grafting blood and gore to the most artistic frame possible (in this case a preexisting Japanese ghost story). There are particularly strong parallels between the latter and The Man in the Orange Jacket too, because both flit between dreams, illusions and visions to such an extent that we end up highly uncertain as to what is and isn’t happening.

Whilst it is exciting to see horror move towards this aesthetic of psychological confusion, the comparison of these two works is also revealing. Miike’s film has a brilliance of intensity which The Man in the Orange Jacket lacks. But maybe this is just an effect which a superior production budget buys. Either way Karapetian’s new film, like People Out There, once again suggests Karapetian’s great future potential.

Bas Devos, Belgium/ Netherlands Just Film

The 15-year-old Jesse (very convincing performance of Cesar De Sutter) became the silent witness of a violent act whose victim was Jonas – his friend. Frightened by what was happening, he did nothing to help the other boy, who didn’t survive the encounter. Now he has to cope with the unusual situation: on one hand, nobody really knows how to speak to him, on the other hand, there are a lot of questions which inquisitive people try to ask in the most unexpected situations. Therefore, whoever he sees, wherever he goes, the atmosphere around him is full of awkwardness, silence and inconvenient gazes. Even his friends, with whom he rides on BMX bikes quite frequently, refer to him with reserve. It is truly not helpful at the moment, when the young boy is struggling with his memories.

The singularity of the movie is ensured by three main factors: the images, the way of leading narration, and the sound. By slow, and really long shots, the atmosphere of intimacy is formed. Both close-ups and full length shots last long enough to let spectators notice absolutely everything that appears on the screen and focus on every significant detail. Without additional light everything looks more realistic and gives the impression of watching a documentary report from authentic events.

At the beginning we are posed in the position of a guard, who is watching CCTV monitors inside the security room. We observe the whole accident on four screens and can do nothing to help the injured guy. This is how the rest of the film will look like. A non-feature way of leading the plot shows scenes, not much related with each other, which are focused on the relation between Jesse and his family and friends after the tragedy.

Only diegetic sound is present. Without additional music from the outside, which could remind us that the story we are watching is fictive, it’s easy to feel more connected to the main character. As if with this movie the protagonist himself was trying to show to the viewers the misery of his position – a silent and lonely journey from returned images to oblivion.

Nothing could disturb you from getting profoundly into the storyline, but at the same time, you need to be very focused all the time.

Although this combination of minimalist means fulfills its task, it requires from the viewer a maximum of devotion and patience. But this kind of engagement can be worth it. The magical shots, especially the ones taken after the sunset- including chiaroscuro experimentsinduce the feeling of an impressional, subjective view. This is not a typical story about an adolescent boy with a traumatic experience. Through its experimental form it fits into the emerging (after van Groeningen’s Broken Circle Breakdown) new wave in Flemish cinema. The word ‘experimental’ is the most essential and everyone should consider whether they are ready to face that kind of work.

Otherwise, it will be just the triumph of form over substance.

Zuzanna Kwiatkowska

Thomas Humphrey 53

Viktoria

In the Crosswind

Boryana is a young woman living in communist Bulgaria. And she hates it.

She dreams of America, drinks Coca-Cola and lights her cigarettes with a Statue of Liberty-shaped lighter as an act of rebellion against the regime.

Her only dream is to escape, that’s why she refuses to start a family with her husband and practices self-abortion to avoid pregnancy. However, something goes wrong, she gets pregnant and so long goodbye dreams of glory. Obliged to stay in her country, she introjects a deep sense of rejection and resentment towards her daughter. This and her total lack of maternal instinct causes the baby, Viktoria, be born without a belly-button. A miracle, for the Communist Party, which hails her as the embodiment of all the glorious values of revolutionary politics and the symbol for future progress and modernity.

“Where should one go after being robbed of everything they believed in and loved?” – asks herself Erna, the protagonist of Martti Helde’s first feature film. This stylish black and white picture, undertaking a difficult historical topic, is one of the most artistically outstanding and mature films of the year – hard to believe it’s the director’s full-length debut.

Maya Vitkova, Romania/ Bulgaria Off the Wall Section

Maya Vitkova, in her first semi-autobiographical feature film deals with the theme of motherhood and unwanted pregnancies under a perspective both surreal and extremely allegorical. Imagining that a child can be born without a belly-button, in a time when people strongly felt the need to find someone that physically embodied illusory values otherwise meaningless, is definitely effective especially in the first part of the movie, where Vitkova ironically recreates the Bulgarian Communist environment in a way that is perfectly consistent with the unique situation.

The concept of motherhood is here conceived in an extreme political sense, through a strong emphasis on that sense of protection the party is giving the girl as a special member of the community. Remarkable in this sense is the use of music: a compilation of solemn anthems follows through the story of the 9-year-old girl, replacing motherly lullabies and childish ditties. Along with the music, the staging is absolutely astonishing, it definitely captures your attention for the ways the director plays with colors, especially with the different shades - and meanings – of red, with some very good subtle references, while many others - such as red as the symbol for Communism - are yet too predictable.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall, or the dawning of communist dream, documented by Vitkova with a mix of live shootings and archival footages, should mark a turning point in the protagonists’ lives, but actually it doesn’t, since they find themselves still stuck in an emotional inertia that prevents them from finding peace of mind. In the second and third part of the movie the rhythm slackens, the tone becomes harsher, the scene darker and more room is given to the archaic side of the relationship between a coldhearted mother and her now teenage daughter, through beautifully shot scenes where the contact between the two of them takes place in a dreamy atmosphere, and music finally turns into sweet and gentle melodies, suggesting a future peace.

The strength of the film lies certainly not in the effectiveness of the dialogues, or in its slow pace, but in that of images, as they are powerful enough to express a primeval beauty - both on visual and contents side – that manages to communicate what is impossible to say in words. Portraying the story of a mother and her unwanted child is not easy indeed, but the soft, delicate, intimate Vitkova’s manners are definitely breathtaking.

Martti Helde, Estonia International Official Competition

The action is set in 1941 in Estonia, recently annexed to Russia. The plot revolves around massive deportation of the Baltic nations to Siberia and is illustrated by the off-camera voice. The narration is led by the letters, written by Erna from a Siberian kolkhoz to her husband, staying most likely in a prison camp. Hoping to see her beloved again, the woman believes in his soon comeback. She writes deeply touching and poignantly honest letters, describing her life in exile.

“The loveliest years of my life passed as if standing still” – Erna writes, and her emotions have direct reflection in the construction of the movie: images stiffen in time as soon as the Red Army knocks on the door of a calm Estonian homestead. The camera slithers amidst the characters who are frozen in fear, solitude and pain, circling around and observing their faces from very close. An exceedingly detailed staging makes us follow its moves with involvement and curiosity. Sometimes, among those carefully arranged scenes, we can observe the curtain waving on the wind, a stem of cereal moved by air or a subtle blink of an eye. When the lens turn back, people seem to move again. The sounds of daily life, heard against the background of Erna’s voice, push the action forward and stay as a quiet testimony of the unseen suffering. This audacious experiment creates a feeling of the unavoidable Fate and the lyrical realism of hard times, synchronizing movie’s shape and content. Black and white cinematography expresses the world despoiled of colours and is a sentimental comeback to the early forties.

“We’re living here in darkness, and lots of things look different at night than they do in daylight” – daily life is put into simple words, and maybe that’s a hidden secret of this movie’s influential power. The offscreen voice of Erna sounds unusually true and unpretentious: life and death struggles, draining work, famine and lethal diseases are presented as daily occurrences. Even the acting – although it sounds absurd in a half-still movie – stands out with authenticity and commitment. Erna, played by incredible Laura Peterson, expresses a wide range of emotions on her face, even though she’s just a statue for most of the time.

“What is freedom worth if you have to pay for it with solitude?” – the picture of a blooming apple tree, a ribbon tied up around the waist and sounds of a happy family life frequently return in letters, presenting the homeland as a mythological land of eternal happiness. These make contrasts even more painful. Erna survives due to hope, which is finally taken away from her. The movie tells the story about unbreakable power of faith which survives wars and brings the nations back on the political map of freedom.

“What evil have we, simple people, have done to enormous Russia?” – in the year of Crimea annexation Erna’s question still sounds remarkably actual.

Marta Tudisco Patrycja Calińska 54

Interview with

Martti Helde director of In the Crosswind International Official Competition

In the Crosswind, the first feature film by Martti Helde, is the latest hypnotizing discovery of the Estonian cinematography. Film premiered at Toronto International Film Festival 2014 and from then on doesn’t stop to collect well-deserved awards on many international festivals. However, Martti Helde stays away from the red carpets, camera flashes and all the glamour. For him it’s the people who are most important – their stories and the form of expression. He is only 27 and interested in cinema since 16. He graduated from the Baltic Film and Media School at Tallinn University and made many short films and commercials. In the Crosswind is a blackand-white, still and in some way poetic drama about a woman who among thousands of Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians was deported to Siberia in 1941.

Why did you decide to make a film about such a difficult subject?

I was interested in history since I was very young. My grandfather was imprisoned in a camp so I grew up with his stories – he told me about the war, about the 1940s reality, I knew all about it. When the Estonian Film Institute organized the competition, at first I wanted to make a documentary. Then I decided to use tableaux vivants to make a still film. After a year, I thought it might be too good for the documentary so I re-decided and now it’s a feature film.

The form of In the Crosswind is amazing. However, it was a brave decision – it’s masterpiece, but it could also have been a complete disaster. Where did the idea for a still film come from?

I like challenges, difficult things are a great motivation to work harder. I wrote the story mostly at nights because the deadline was approaching. I found a letter for my relatives written by a lady. There was a line “I feel like the time has stopped with my body, which has been taken to Siberia, but my soul is still in the homeland”. After reading this I decided that I want to make a film where I can create a feeling of stillness, freeze the time. Usually when you watch action films you have freedom to decide where to look, where is the focus point. I wanted to change that. Why? Because in the Soviet system people didn’t have a chance to choose what to do, the system made the decisions for them. My idea was to recreate the feeling of this kind of an open prison. Of course, I didn’t have any idea, if it would work or not. For three and half of the year I hoped it would.

What did the process of shooting look like?

It took six months. We prepared one scene, then we shot it and later we had a couple of days off. Next, we started to prepare the next – every single scene you can see in the movie was shot in one day, because we didn’t have money to do second takes.

To make such a visually sophisticated film you must have a great imagination and many ideas. What was your source of inspiration?

Actually, when I was young I attended the art school, studying painting and composition. When preparing the film we didn’t use other films as a reference – we used photographs, paintings and sculptures. I bought all the available books about the history of art, sculptures, human body and movement. During my meetings with costume and set designers we were sitting around the table and watching all those pictures. We talked about the light and how the body is positioned on those paintings or photos. We wanted to find the essence, we were trying to capture the way artists before us used the human body to express certain feelings. Our goal was to understand what is going on in the pictures.

The film is based on letters written by Erna Eliide. Was it just her or a compilation of different correspondence?

Sixty percent of letters you can hear in the film is written by the same person. Of course the name was changed. The other part is a mix of archive materials and other letters. Landscapes in your movie play an important role in the story.

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How did you find those shooting places?

Our intention was to find landscapes possibly similar to those from Siberia.

We took reference pictures from the Internet or from the archives and later tried to find similar in Estonia. Obviously, nature in Estonia and Siberia is quite different, so all the process took about three years. My favourite location was Tapa. It is located in eastern Estonia and it is a place for military resources, an old cut-down forest. Can you imagine a huge field full of pieces of wood? It was an open space that didn’t look like Estonia – it was exactly Siberia. I remember when we made the first black and white photo of this location – we saw that there is something special, something really interesting to capture.

It works. Are there many films talking about similar subjects?

No, it’s the first film because Estonia gained its independence in 1991. Before that it was not allowed to talk about those topics, so making a film was impossible. In 1991 we couldn’t afford to make movie like that, it was too expensive. What’s more, it was too delicate a subject. I think that if something tragic happens to a nation, the next generations need time to rethink it. As a result, there is a 20-year gap in the Estonian cinematography. After all, making of In the Crosswind was coincidental, it started as a documentary.

I heard that Latvia is doing the feature film about the same topic.

The film was released in Estonian cinemas not so long ago. What were the reactions after the premiere?

To be honest, it is really hard for me to talk about it, because I can’t evaluate my own child. What is more, we had two premiere ceremonies at the same time. I was present at the first of them, I opened the film and went to the other cinema to welcome the audience there. When the audience came to the party after the screening, they started to congratulate me. After several weeks I understood that I made something important which people were waiting for. Of course, first they were worried if In the Crosswind isn’t too experimental. But after all, the audience’s reactions were very positive. I even secretly went to watch my last screening in the cinema and I saw that grandparents came with their grandchildren to see the movie together. I was really moved. I think it’s very important that young generations watch this film, maybe thanks to that they will remember those events.

Actually In the Crosswind has visited many international film festivals and got several prizes. How do you feel when your film is awarded?

Of course, prizes are nice but I’m not really into them. I like when people come to me and say “the film really moved me, it was something special”.

For example, after the premiere, one of the elderly men came to me and said that he was deported when he was a child. He was about 8 years old, but he remembered those events in a similar way it was shown in the film.

It was a huge compliment which gave me more than any prize. I made this film into some kind of a monument. I want to make films which will last longer than me.

After such an unusual debut, I am very curious about your following film. What will be next?

That’s a good question. Certainly, I’m not planning to do a still film again.

I want to make a live action. So I think my first film is still coming... I like to experiment with form. For me the filmmaking is finding the right form to express the feeling. I hope that I will find an inspiring way to tell the story, because just capturing the action is a bit boring for me. I would like to explore the mountains of cinema, that’s my goal.

So actually you are looking for...?

Always for a good story.

Monika Martyniuk

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REC International Film Festival Tarragona (Spain), Dec 3-8

Lying in the historical corner of eastern Spain, we found REC Tarragona Film Festival this year - a weeklong celebration of first and second features that compiled a short yet thoughtful program, which included some of the best films of the year. The vent itself goes way beyond the screening of films, spending much of its energy in a series of side activities focused on developing film production in particular. One of the most exciting festivals of the year.

High Pressures Angel Santos, Spain The current financial crisis has transformed the lives of millions of young people all across southern Europe. The stereotypical joyfulness has given way to a general sense of pessimism regarding the future. This overwhelming feeling has discretely found its way in current youth cinema of the region, with Spain heading the current to a great extent.

One of the most interesting examples is Angel Santos second feature film High Pressures. The film tells us the story of Miguel, a young film professional living in Madrid, who is given the task of returning to his home region of Galicia, in north-western Spain, on a scouting assignment. Dug deep in a personal crisis of his own, his mood is unequivocally sombre and introverted, feeling out of place wherever he goes. While visiting old friends he begins to re-examine his position and attitude, progressively becoming attached to a beautiful local nurse who seems to bring a much needed light into his dark existence.

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a somewhat dull protagonist, who has very little to offer. His friends, on the other hand, feel more genuine and multilayered, unafraid to expose themselves and, by doing so, being the main engine of action. In contrast, Miguel is much more effective as an observer and interpreter.

Most noticeable of all is the environments on which these characters exist, which are exquisitely captured by Santos. Of these it is a local youth centre that stands out, filled with youg people playing music, enjoying each other's company or simply hanging out. The conversations may ignore the current situation, nevertheless they all appear to be collectively ready for the hardships that await them.

Despite many limitations the film flows with great ease. No doubt much to the credits of the increasingly influential Fernando Franco, editor of films such as Blancanieves, and now also a director himself, after last year’s debut hit The Wound.

High Pressures is a simple yet effective journey of self discovery. As such it brings very little new nuances to the style, if any at all. What is perhaps most interesting about this film is the fact that deep beneath the narrative, and its limitations, there are many rays of optimism towards the future, a rarity considering the circumstances.

It may be discreet and subtle, nevertheless Angel Santos’ latest work is an interesting and powerful look at modern youth culture, through an optimistic filter that refuses to look at Spain’s future simply with a sense of desperation.

A vastly more interesting series of secondary characters cohabitate with

Fernando Vasquez

10.000 Km

Carlos Marques-Marcet, Spain Beware everyone currently dealing with the pleasures and hardships of a long distance relationship. Your intimate and private love life has just been adapted to the big screen, and what is perhaps most striking and insidious of all is the fact that it will probably feel more genuine than your very own experience.

Spanish new comer Carlos Marques-Marcet’s debut feature, 10.000 Km, is the story of Alexandra (Natalia Tena) and Sergio (David Verdaguer), a young couple faced with a difficult yet inevitable decision. Following her professional dreams, Alexandra leaves Barcelona to Los Angeles, where she has been offered a yearlong photography residency. At first the couple’s needs seem to be effectively satisfied with frequent Skype chats, but as time moves on and the availability to continue their incessant internet connection wares out, tensions arise and love inescapably turns sour.

Those who have tried such experiences themselves will quickly recognize the common rituals: Dinners in front of a webcam, that piercing sensation when an unexpected photo is posted on Facebook, those moments of awkwardness when you have to pretend to be delighted by your partners exciting new conquests, those fights and misunderstandings impossible to solve without physical contact. It is all there like a stab to the heart (or is it to the back?).

Told almost entirely through Skype conversations, text messages, Google Earth and emails, Marcet captured the true essence of love in the 21st century with intimidating accuracy and almost unforgiving invasiveness. It is no surprise that despite the limitations of such techniques the editing work is discretely extraordinary. Marcet himself has been working as an editor for many years now, and without doubt has mastered the art to perfection, creating a film that should not flow in theory, yet each stroke feels perfectly in rhythm. The result is a work lacking a single dull moment despite the fact it only has two quite ordinary characters on screen.

Marcet is skilful no doubt, but the greatest triumph of the film is in its performances. The unavoidable chemistry between Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer is all too obvious from the get go. The opening sequence, an almost 20-minute-long sex and breakfast scene, is charged with enough tension and genuinity to make you cringe and drown in someone else’s intimacy. There is a magnetic quality to both characters, capable of seducing and repulsing you in equal measure.

For Some Inexplicable Reason Gábor Reisz, Hungary

For Some Inexplicable Reason (FSIR) is a surprisingly unique film. Surprisingly, because its synopsis may, at first, lead one to believe that Zach Braff has moved to Hungary.

Aron is an unemployed 29-year-old whose girlfriend has just left him.

He’s quirky, anxious and perpetually melancholic. We gauge his character through his voice-over, as he narrates his feelings and presents the other characters in his life. He buys a ticket to Lisbon in the spur of the moment, a trip that he imagines will change his life, except that it doesn’t.

This is s a coming of age film with a focus on growing down as opposed to growing up, much in the fashion of a male-centred Frances Ha; by the end of the film, Aron’s life hasn’t miraculously changed and he’s still struggling to figure things out.

What makes it unique is that Gabor Reisz’s film school graduation piece was made with young Hungarian audiences in mind. The jokes seem quite intimate and were effective with the hip Hungarian audience present at FSIR’s Karlovy Vary screening. It is as if Reisz has gathered quips from his circle of friends as well as typologies and put them on screen ironically.

Indeed, it may even be somewhat unfair for me, as a non-Hungarian, to write a review on the film; while I did not laugh at many of the jokes, the Hungarian girls next to me were roaring with laughter. One simply needs to be aware of the cultural connotations of the dialogue- for example, the protagonist is a film studies graduate from a certain university and when a potential employer reads that out on his CV and looks unimpressed, many laughed. I could have only imagined that the university had a dubious reputation in Hungary and the girls next to me confirmed this after the screening. However, the spontaneity of the dialogue had been lost in translation.

The director’s friend, Aron Ferenczik, also a director in real life, plays the lead convincingly and consistenly, especially given that it took more than a year to shoot the film in episodic bursts.

Overall, FSIR is clean-cut, hip entertainment that promises Reisz much success among Hungarian audiences. Despite having been picked up by Parisian sales agents Alpha Violet, the film is unlikely to reach its full potential among international viewers.

Raluca Petre

You would be forgiven for thinking such a film could easily fall into cheesy and over romantic paths, but you would also be wrong as Marcet avoids such traps with apparent ease. The hyper realism and pessimistic nature of 10.000 Km is the only set of rules the film chooses to follow. As such, love does not always conquer, yet it does not die either. It is simply present, in a continuous metamorphosis, assuming lighter and darker tones and flavours as the mood changes. In other words, this is one of the most realistic and vital portrayals of love in recent years.

10.000 Km will most likely play with your emotions more then you usually are prepared to allow. It does so in relentless and unforgiving fashion, forcing you to either experience or relive much of the pain and joy of love and distance. It will hurt no doubt, but the final trick of Marcet’s debut is the rewarding sense you’ll surely feel by the end, making this an obligatory watch.

Fernando Vasquez 57

Bucharest Experimental Workshop One of NISI MASA’s fastest growing initiative, the Experimental Film Workshop, has given young European people the chance to take experimentation on film a step further. The success of the activity has led us to call on Sorina Diaconu to write a report on the last edition.

The 3rd Experimental Film Workshop was organized in Bucharest by NISI MASA European Network of Young Cinema, in association with The CAN and Refresh Vision, between the 5th and 14th of December 2014, during the 5th edition of Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF). Coordinators: independent producer Dóra Nedeczky (HU/UK) NISI MASA Head of Film Lab, copywriter Andra Gheorghiu (RO) - alumna of the workshop and co-founder of The CAN and scriptwriter kino mermaid Sorina Diaconu (RO) – NISI MASA Advisory Board Member.

During the 10-day workshop, 20 young international filmmakers: directors, cinematographers, editors, set and sound designers, visual artists, musicians, composers and performing artists1, came together and created several spontaneous experimental happenings that culminated with 13 short cinematic experiments, premiered on the very last day of the festival at Cinema Elvire Popesco at the French Institute.

The working method of the workshop is a combo of the principles of the international kino movement and film school exam frenzy, minus the stress of getting (bad) marks or not fulfilling a (rigid/specific) task. It is a workshop

of maximum freedom, which aims to form daring and ambitious clusters of pluridisciplinary skilled creators.

This year we encouraged the relationship between film, music, mapping and live performance. On the very first evening, everyone was invited to participate in a freestyle music jam session at Carol 53, an event hosted by the avant-garde local band Poetrip and a trio of architects who are currently reconditioning the squat-looking mansion, home to many alternative and underground happenings. In the bohemian atmosphere, creative sparks fired and soon one couldn’t tell apart the local artists from the international guests, from the tutors or the public – as everybody wholeheartedly contributed to making an audio-video jam fusion session to remember.

After the intense warm up, it was time for a laidback production meeting at The CAN. A coquette villa dating back to the first half of the 20th century, with its historical armchairs, bookcases, chandeliers and antique photo cameras and other curious little things, The CAN presents itself as an inspiring and eclectic environment for artistic creation – and so it became our home for most of the specialized seminars with our tutors: composer and photographer Sabina Ulubeanu, the co-artistic director of InnerSound New Arts Festival, director/writer/editor/VFX artist and video performer Adrian Manolescu – the director and curator of the itinerant psychedelic film & art festival Tripoteca, multimedia artist Adela Muntean, researcher of the intermedia and interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art and the

1. Lucille Caballero (FR/AG), Kevin Pedersen (DK), Axel Johanssen (SWE), Ruxandra Maria Pintilie (RO), Andreea Gheorghe (RO), Maria Spivak (RU/GR/ CY), Panagiotis Mina (CY), Vlad Ghinea (RO), Aga Paulina Młyńczak (PL/DK), Petra Belc (CRO/YUG), Gwendoline Descamps (FR), Ioana Gabriela Dobroiu (RO), Vik Laschenov (RU), Zoe Aiano (UK), Razvan Dima (RO), Francesco Berta (IT/UK), Dagmara Kucińska (PL), Tiberiu Iorga (RO), Leonardo Franke (DE), Summer Wood (NL/USA/RO), Marina Ungureanu (RO), Cezar Somitca (RO), Cezara Munteanu (RO), Luisa Riviere (COL/FR), Dorin Moldoveanu (RO), Gabriel Durlan (RO) 58

sciences, electronic music pioneer and animation teacher Adrian Budritan aka Kubikmilk and AV performer, director and producer Monica Vlad aka MonoStereo.

The teams formed naturally and shooting schedules took over, so for the next 3 days we only met in divisions, until the opening gala of the festival brought us all back together in full formation, on Dec 10th. This is when all activities became even more complex, as we all pulled hard to advance with our projects, but also tried to enjoy as many festival screenings as possible, while testing for ways to recharge our creative batteries without wasting time for sleep. The luckiest bunch were the ones living at Doors Hostel, our cozy den and editing laboratory, thanks to their amazing crew, delicious teahouse specialties and super comfy pillows, blankets and purring felines, making everything seem like any filmmaker’s paradise retreat.

Energy fully restored and mostly (re)generating on good vibes, we carried on with a crazy back to back on Saturday, Dec 13th, when two major selfemerged events gathered the mapping and architecture cinema enthusiasts at Elisabeta vs. the eclectic exhibition, installation and performance freaks at Carol 53. So, in parallel, one house hosted Adela Muntean’s longterm intermedia project Trans Cinema Express, an exploration of spatial juxtapositions of cinema buildings in Bucharest, projected on a large scale video-installation in experimental sequences, while the other house hosted “What you can’t completely see” - a collaborative exhibition initia-

ted by three participants, Leo, Maria and Pan, featuring interpretations of their previous and current material as well as from the other participants – an event which was graced with live performances by Axel, who recited his Bucharest emotions in a candlelit dungeon, and Francesco, who seized our senses with his intense piano concerto. The only regret is that we didn’t livestream each other, or that we didn’t have a teleportation device (but we’ll make sure to add that to our budgeting proposal for 2015).

Still mindblown with the creative and collaborative potential stirred at the workshop, we’d like to thank our friends Artidava, J’ai Bistrot, Carol 53, Elisabeta, Control Club, DelaHaze FM and Doors Hostel, the bands Poetrip, Abator Industries and Robin and the Backstabbers, and the festival, BIEFF, for its generous support and encouraging continuity of our collaboration.

Looking forward to the 4th NISI MASA Experimental Film Workshop at BIEFF, in 2015! Until then, we invite you to indulge in a research of our collaboration here and on the official Nisi Masa experimental Vimeo channels.

Sorina Diaconu

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Is the Film Industry Finally Embracing the Fact that “Disability Is No Barrier”?

2014 had many notable films about disabled people. The Theory of Everything may see Eddie Redmayne win an Oscar for his performance as a young Stephen Hawking. The Tribe triggered intrigue by winning the Critics’ Week at Cannes, and has since won 14 awards at 12 film festivals. Blind Massage took an impressive 6 Golden Horses, and then won a Silver Bear for cameraman Jian Zeng’s “Outstanding Artistic Contribution.” Further awards also went to Margarita, with a Straw at Toronto and Tallinn Black Nights, and to X+Y at the Rome International Film Festival and at the British Independent Film Awards.

So is the film industry changing? Well, this wave of awards certainly suggests films about disabled people are being critically well received. But many of these films have gained major distribution deals too, attesting to their commercial potential. The film industry seems to be embracing disabled characters and lessening their underrepresentation.

However, these films also showed that, for better or worse, disabled people’s lives do not differ greatly from those of others. The stories told were universal, placing emphasis on the protagonists’ humanity, not their disabilities. In Shonali Bose’s Margarita, with a Straw for example, Laila, the protagonist, has cerebral palsy, but the focus is on her experiencing two of the most universal of hurdles imaginable: exploring her sexuality and dealing with death. And Laila’s condition never prevents her from negotiating these.

In Martin Edralin’s short Hole, the protagonist Billy also experiments sexually despite his physical barriers. And Martin hoped his film would express a similar message to Margarita: “[Hole] is a universal story. It's about people who don't, or can't have normal life experiences, disabled or not.” So whilst Edralin’s documentary style may be the polar opposite to Bose’s, by documenting Ken Harrower’s daily routine (the disabled actor who plays Billy), he too wanted to show Ken’s ability to live “a very independent life.” These films make clear that “disability is no barrier,” as Stephen Hawking put it to Will Gompertz in an interview about The Theory of Everything.

What is striking, though, is the maturity with which these films depict disability: In Edralin’s words, “I wanted to portray the harsh reality of the protagonist's life,” whilst “tell[ing] the story gracefully with a sense of hope.”

Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe is a great example of this unglamourised approach. This film explosively follows Deaf teenagers in a specialised Ukrainian boarding school, making the reality of disabled people’s lives in modernday Ukraine seem fraught with violence and exploitation. But the Deaf characters are equally perpetrators of the crimes we see, making the film highly dystopian. In his article No More Savages, deaf writer Raymond Luczak said that “Deaf people are naturally concerned about whether something on the screen will reflect badly on us.”

Luczak did commend Slaboshpytskiy for “not showing Deaf characters in social isolation,” and for incorporating the Ukrainian Deaf community’s experiences, but he was evidently displeased. He argued The Tribe’s dystopian take amounted to an “audist” perspective, where life without hearing 62

becomes seen as “futile and miserable.” He felt the story exploited its “novelty” to pull in viewers rather than realistically portray Deaf people. And The Tribe’s abrupt filming of signing was also cited as evidence of a disregard for Deaf viewers. Luczak even finally asks: would we have responded positively if African American or gay characters had been portrayed in such a detached, dystopian way?

Deaf director Ted Evans disagreed. He described The Tribe as “a big deal,” and felt the film not only, “shows us that (hearing) people can watch a film in sign language,” but that it would, “open the door for many others [wanting to make such films].” Ted agreed The Tribe, “was a dystopian film and nothing about it was about Deaf pride,” but he added, “if you know the Deaf world, there are people and places that are like that. Google the Deaf Mexicans who became slaves at the hands of other deaf people.” He objected that “Western Deaf people can be critical about the portrayal of Deaf people from overseas, when we have no idea what it is like to live in the environment being portrayed. Ukrainian people will be the best ones to say whether it was authentic or not.”

Ted further stressed that he, “loved how the visuals and sound were used,” something worth noting. Many of these films had very interesting aesthetics which strove to covey qualities of the disabilities discussed. The Tribe, for example, contains only very sparse diegetic noises, foregrounding at least some impression of being hard of hearing. X+Y recreates the experience of synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon where sensory or emotional stimuli cause people to see colours; so Matthews floods the screen with colours whenever the protagonist experiences emotions.

Blind Massage ingeniously gives some sense of blindness through a visual medium. It utilises disorientating close-ups and well-measured blurring to give an intensely myopic experience. One characters also miraculously regains partial sight, so the film adopts his perspective, switching to obscure, twitching images where the peripheries are lost in a thick, fuzzy blackness.

All these films therefore seek to express disabled people’s underrepresented perspectives.

Sadly, not every film on disability is step forward, though. Gregory Go Boom (starring Michael Cera) won an award at Sundance in 2014, but its depiction of disabled people is abhorrent. The titular Gregory again seeks sex and companionship, but he is told he means nothing, is defenestrated, and even horrifically takes his own life. This short seems intended only to shock; and it shows how critical and popular acclaim is not necessarily progressive.

So let us hope disabled filmmakers will receive more backing in 2015 (none of the films discussed were directed by disabled people); that more awards will go to disabled actors (Zhang Lei’s Golden Horse being a notable example this year); and that disabled audiences will be taken into account more, so we can build on the progress and mistakes of 2014.

Thomas Humphrey

Nisimazine 2015 Calendar Rotterdam January Istanbul April Cannes May Karlovy Vary July Venice August 63

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Credits Editor in Chief Fernando Vasquez (Portugal) Assistant Editor Ewa Wildner (Poland), Mirona Nicola (Romania) Designer Francesca Merlo (Italy) Photography and Video Alina Ozerova (Russia), Catherine Pouyeto (France), Alexandra Aristizabal (Romania), Alexandra Corte-Real Almeida (Portugal), Francesca Merlo (Italy), Elena Aya Bountouraki (Greece), Liisi Molder (Estonia), Emilia Haukka (Finland), Daniel Allen (UK), Edina Csüllög (Estonia), Mariana Mendes (Portugal), Marc Bhatti (Germany) Writers Fernando Vasquez (Portugal), Andrei Kartashov (Russia), Alina Ozerova (Russia), Ioana Mischie (Romania), Maarja Hindoalla (Estonia), Matthias Van Hijfte (Belgium), Teresa Pereira (Portugal), Nino Kovačić (Croatia), Kathi Kamleitner (UK), Martin I. Petrov (UK), Robyn Davies (UK), Bernardo Lopes (Portugal), Raluca Petre (Romania), Ewa Wildner (Poland), Vaiva Rykštaite (Lithuania), Liam McGarry (UK), Vassilis Economou (Greece), Marta Tudisco (Italy), Vicky Griva (Greece), Matthew Turner (UK), Tara Karajica (Serbia), Sara Martinez Ruiz (Spain), Bruno Guerra (Portugal), Monika Martyniuk (Poland), Thomas Humphrey (UK), Zuzanna Kwiatkowska (Poland), Patrycja Calińska (Poland), Sorina Diaconu (Romania), Mirona Nicola (Romania), Ioana Florescu (Romania), Lilla Puskas (Hungary), Lucia Ros Serra (Spain), Andrei Sendrea (Romania), Wim Vanacker (Belgium) Special thanks to everyone who helped make Nisimazine Yearbook 2014 possible Publication by NISI MASA - European Network for Young Cinema 99 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis 75010 Paris, France +33 (0)1 48 01 65 31 europe@nisimasa.com www.nisimasa.com www.nisimazine.eu

With the support of the Youth in Action of the European Union. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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