CineSkinny - 25 February 2011 by Glasgow Film

THE OFFICIAL DAILY GUIDE FRIDAY 25 FEBRUARY

WHAT’S INSIDE? 2 » PICKS OF THE DAY Highlights of day eight at GFF 2011 2 » INTERVIEW: TORSTEN LAUCHSMANN The Margaret Tait Award winner discusses his specially commissioned work for the GFF 3 » REVIEWS You Instead  Battle Royale 3D  Contemporary Days  4 » WHAT’S NEW ONLINE The latest news, comments and pictures from the festival

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GUERILLA FILM-MAKER IN OUR MIDST Warm Tennents lager, tent sex and The Proclaimers singing “I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)” with 85,000 backing singers; All familiar to those who make the annual pilgrimage to Kinross for T in the Park. DAVID MACKENZIE brings this festival experience to the GFF with You Instead. Words: JAMIE DUNN David Mackenzie, the award winning director of Hallam Foe and Young Adam, cuts a rather unassuming figure. Meeting him for the first time you might guess he’s in accounting or academia – a geography professor, perhaps. What you don’t expect is a guerilla film-maker knee deep in mud amidst the hedonistic throng of T in the Park. But find him there you would, as last summer he took a crew of eighty to Kinross to film You Instead, a romantic comedy-cum-concert film that’s as energetic and riotous as Scotland’s flagship music festival itself. “I think that’s what makes the film what it is – the festival becomes part of the character of the movie. To me, anyway, that’s what I’m most proud of: it really does capture the essence of what it’s like to be at a big music festival.” How was it shooting a low-budget, independent film with enough extras to make Cecil B. DeMille blush? “In many ways it has the biggest production values I’ve ever had, but because we decided to shoot it entirely on location during the festival it was over very quickly, so we had to cram a lot into

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our four and a half days filming.” He confesses, however, that he was nervous about the undertaking: “Initially it seemed impossible. To shoot a feature in that time frame seemed completely crazy – it was a lesson in how to do it in a way. That’s what made it so much fun to make – being able to see an opportunity and just take it, to go with the flow and just take advantage of the magic that the environment gave to us.” This must have been quite a culture shock for a director who’s used to the general inertia around filmmaking – the constant waiting around for blocking, lighting, shot setup etc – particularly as his most recent film, the Ashton Kutcher-starring Spread, was made in Hollywood. “It was invigorating to have that much freedom, to be able to think on my feet that fast and almost to be operating in thinking time as opposed to the usual machinations of film-making. There’s just something incredibly jazz about it”. You Instead has its world premiere tonight at 19.30 @ Cineworld, Renfrew Street

4 » COMPETITION Win two tickets to see Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths, a documentary investigating the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the Inuit’s sled dog population, by answering this simple question courtesy of the lovely people at Quotables

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Produced by The Skinny magazine in association with the Glasgow Film Festival Editors Designer Digital

Jamie Dunn Becky Bartlett Mark Tolson David McGinty

GFF BOX OFFICE Order tickets from the box office at www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk or call 0141 332 6535 or visit Glasgow Film Theatre 12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 6RB info@glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

PICKS HOLES WHERE

TODAY’S

COMIC CAMP 11: COMICS, GAMING AND THE FILM INDUSTRY

11.00 @ CCA Ideal for anyone interested in gaming, publishing and related industries, the two-part event includes a discussion about the current blurring of the boundaries between the mediums.

LITTLE DEATHS

18.30 @ GFT FrightFest’s first film, a series of three shorts, will be introduced by directors Sean Hogan, Simon Rumley and Andrew Parkinson, who will be joined by actors Kate Braithwaite ( Waking the Dead) and Tom Sawyer ( Vinyl, Hollyoaks) for a Q&A following the screening.

GOBLIN

19.00 @ ARCHES The iconic band, best known for providing the soundtracks for many of Dario Argento’s horror classics, including Susperia and Profondo Rosso, will be performing music from these films and others.

PEARLS ON THE OCEAN FLOOR

19.00 @ CCA Director Robert Adanto will be attending the screening of his documentary about Iranian female artists and the challenges they face in their country. Adanto will be both introducing his film and staying for a Q&A session afterwards.

THE HEART IS

Winner of the inaugural Margaret Tait Award in 2010, TORSTEN LAUSCHMANN invited JAC MANTLE to his studio for an insight into his forthcoming screening at Glasgow Film Festival 2011. Words: JAC MANTLE With less than a month to go before the premiere and only screening of his site-specific commission at Glasgow Film Festival, Torsten Lauschmann is deep in the making process. At the Heart of Everything a Row of Holes is a continuation of his interest in the origins of modern technologies. It began, he says, as a logical progression from making video projections that are more like paintings than traditional rectangular, single-screen films, to using a massive £30,000 projector with a moving head – “it looks like something from a Terminator film” – that will make use of the whole auditorium at Glasgow Film Theatre. At the centre of the film is the selfplaying piano – the late nineteenth century innovation that, for writer William Gaddis, American novelist and essayist, epitomised all that was evil about the rapid mechanisation of society. After a lifelong obsession he eventually published a book, which Lauschmann shows to me now. “It’s about how you don’t have to learn to play the piano. You can just buy a piano roll that’s playing perfectly – that kind of instant gratification,” he explains of Gaddis’ theory. “He wrote it the year before he died, so it’s like he’s losing his mind within it, which I quite like. He is a bit of a grumpy old man.” There will be a player piano in the GFT along with the projection, the keys playing to coincide with what’s happening on the screen. An untrained but enthusiastic pianist – the artist’s seven year-old son – may also perform for the film, “if he’s up for it.” Lauschmann has been down to the GFT and marked out the areas and architectural features that he wants to project onto. “It’s going to be interesting to see how it works because it’s such a formal environment. If you do it in a gallery, people have less rigid expectations about what’s going to happen. It’s funny, when you enter the cinema the lights go off and the curtains open, and that signals the beginning.” In fact, the interior, design, and warmth have already signalled the start of

the cinematic experience, an effect that Lauschmann wants to extend in a soundscape. “Maybe when you enter the cinema, there’s already sound playing,” he muses. “Maybe it continues at the end, and you leave while it’s still on.” Known for work that exists in different forms and on multiple platforms, screening the film at Glasgow Film Festival is hardly a prospect to unnerve Lauschmann. But how strongly do the audience figure in his thoughts when he’s making work? “I usually don’t think about the audience, really. Not in an obvious kind of way. I guess I’m the audience. I dunno if I’m a good audience; I have a short attention span.” He reflects on this. “That’s probably quite a good thing.” Perhaps the art audience in general has a short attention span, I suggest. “It gets shorter all the time!” He laughs. “What I said about the sound and walking into the cinema, it is quite a selfish thing because I want to work out for myself, how does it feel? And I

hope that somebody else will say, ‘oh yeah, what does that do?’ Obviously, on a subconscious level, you do think about what something can mean.” Maybe it’s the grasp of a work that has only a few weeks before airing, but Lauschmann seems to be constantly probing, thinking about what things might mean. He passes me a DVD that inspires him, First Contact, about 1930s explorers trekking to Papua New Guinea to look for gold. In his favourite scene, a native tribesman sports a Kellogg’s Shredded Wheat packet left by the visitors on his head as a symbol of power. “Suddenly the meaning is totally lost and reversed,” he explains. “It’s an illusion that you can fix meaning. Discourse is only possible if you limit it through language and culture, but art doesn’t really work that way… It doesn’t let you off the hook from making meaningful work, though. It just says you can only do what you feel is right in this particular moment, and hope that it resonates – now, or later, or at all.”

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REVIEWS YOU INSTEAD

Director: Dave Mackenzie Starring: Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena & Gavin Mitchell

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You Instead attempts to capture the sights, sounds, and smells of Britain’s most rambunctious music festival, T in the Park. For the most part, it’s successful. The film centres on a will they, won’t they, (of course they will), relationship between Adam ( Treadaway), the cocksure, skinny jeans-wearing frontman of electronic two-piece The Make, and Morello ( Tena), keyboard player for punchy, punky girl band The Dirty Pinks. There’s a palpable chemistry between the pair, on screen and on stage – both more than convince as rock

stars. Embracing the chaos of the festival, the direction is loose and inventive as we follow the two bands and their entourage through 48hrs of flirting, fighting, partying and performing. Mackenzie’s film is not perfect – one performance is so broad and big that it almost unbalances the second act – but when it works it’s electric: an improvised mashup of Tainted Love, a mud-caked shower and a murky sunrise with a choir of seagulls being three of the film’s many transcendent moments. [Jamie Dunn]

BATTLE ROYALE 3D

Director: Kinji Fukasaku Starring: ‘Beat’ Takeshi, Tatsuya Fujiwara & Aki Maeda

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K i n j i F u k u s a k u ’s b l o o d thirsty teen killers classic, Battle Royale, is back, but this time the splatter and gore will be flying out of the screen as well as across it, as it comes to the GFF in retrofitted 3D to celebrate its tenth ann i v e r s a r y. S e t i n t h e n e a r future, after Japan has gone through some form of societal collapse, a class of teenagers find that their school trip has taken a drastic turn for the worse. They are informed by their embittered former teache r ( Ta k e s h i K i t a n o) t h a t “t o d a y ’s l e s s o n i s y o u k i l l e a c h o t h e r o f f ”. They have entered the world of Battle Royale, a government-organised fight to the death on a deserted island, from which the last sur vivor will emerge to a h e r o’s w e l c o m e f r o m a n expectant nation. What follows is a unsettling mix of shocking violence, inapp r o p r i ate c o m e d y, a d o lescent romance and pulp p h i l o s o p hy, a l l s e t to a l u s h score of popular classics. Baffling and unforgettable. [Keir Roper- Caldbeck]

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CONTEMPORARY DAYS Director: Murray Grigor

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Long before Ikea broke down and flat- packed modernism for the masses, Robin and Lucienne Day were hard at work designing the foundations of what now seems commonplace. M u r r a y G r i g o r ’s C o n t e m p o rar y Days takes a gorgeous look at the iconic husband a n d w i f e t e a m ’s i n n o v a t i v e furniture and textiles with a minimalism that, like the

couple, is mutually comp l i m e n t a r y. L u c i e n n e w i t h her gift for pattern, wanted to bring colour back to post-war textiles and saw her work as fine art. Robin demonstrably excelled in problem-solving, bringing a new beauty within functional, affordable 3D form. As much as we love getting lost in the aesthetics of shows like Mad Men, it really does

feel special looking back at the real thing, especially when visually told with the simplistic elegance and lack of pretence of its s o f t l y m u t e d s u b j e c t m a t t e r. Contemporar y Days reso nates most emotively in its representation of a family enterprise, which brings goosebumps to the skin and a prickle to the eye. [ Juliet B uchan]

FRIDAY 25 FEBRUARY THE CINESKINNY 3

WHAT’S NEW ONLINE? FRIGHTFEST Check out FrightFest’s website for listings of what’s showing today and tomorrow. http://bit.ly/FrightFestGFF INCENDIES Festival blogger Yasmin Ali takes a look at Oscar nominated, Incendies showing tonight @ 20.45 and Saturday @ 13.15. http://bit.ly/GFFIncendies

MALCOLM RENNIE IN BALIBO The Daily Record have conducted an interview with Margaret Wilson and Sue Andel, cousins of Scottish journalist Malcolm Rennie on whom Robert Connolly’s Balibo is based. (Saturday, 18.00 at GFT )

director Joanna Hogg ahead of its GFF screening. (Sunday, 18.15)

http://bit.ly/RecordBalibo

http://bit.ly/RouteLoach

REINVENTING THE RULES The Herald’s Alison Rowat interviews Archipelago

Search ‘SkinnyFilm’ to find us on Facebook and tweet us your thoughts @ SkinnyFilm

Here’s the GFF daily quotable:

http://bit.ly/HoggGFF ROUTE LOACH Michael MacLennan doesn’t like Ken Loach’s Route Irish , read why at ST V.tv.

QUIZ TIME

PIC OF THE DAY

GIVEAWAY:

— M ar k M illar ht tp: //qtbl.e s /fns M X H

V i s it Q uotabl e s to s e e many more G FF quote s as the fe sti val goe s on: ht tp: //qtbl.e s /glasgow f i lm

Photo: Stuart Crawford

“A ll it take s is one ide a the r ight ide a - to change eve r y thing.”

Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths Feb 26, 13.00 - CCA Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths explores the mystery of how and why sled dogs disappeared from Inuit culture, a mystery that has left deep wounds across Canada’s Arctic. To win tickets to see it at GFF, simply answer the question following our quotable clue: “Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.” — Robert J. Flaherty Complete the name of this 1922 silent documentary about a family in the Canadian Arctic: “______ of the North”. Email jamie@theskinny.co.uk by 10am on Friday 25 Feb to enter.

DID ❝ WHAT ❞ YOU THINK?

Alan McGee arrives at the red carpet for Upside Down.

We collected six of the best tweets from Twitter

@WESTENDTHEBEST Personal faves so far @ glasgowfilmfest Point Blank & Little White Lies. Gilles Lellouche brilliant in both. Off to Balibo tonight

@TALLYYHO Got the (crap) Disney channel on TV and am planning to go to Asda. What I want to do is get on that train to Glasgow. #gff11 Bum.

@QUIETTRICKSTER Route Irish: Grim and typically unflinching, masterful work from Ken Loach. @ glasgowfilmfest

@DOBOWORTH Shouldn’t really be looking forward to Battle Royale 3D as much as I am #gff11

@PHOTOHILL Mark Millar was amazing today at cca #Glasgowfilmfestival. if you get a chance see him. he is very funny and inspirational

@YOISHO56 RT @just_56 13 assassins was @glasgowfilmfest surprise film tonight. Damn good viewing, cheers!

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NOW INCLUDING WHAT’S ON LISTINGS 4 THE CINESKINNY FRIDAY 25 FEBRUARY