Cambridge Film Festival Review 2014

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INSIDE

Ballard meets Beckett in Tamar Van Den Dop’s SUPERNOVA, a witty coming-of-age story with a weird and wonderful Western style.

28th August at 16.00 @ APH

Set Fire To The Stars with Dylan Thomas

Leah Meyerhoff believes in unicorns

REVIEW

Supernova

Meis yearns for new life to come crashing into her dilapidated, flyblown limbo. But is her family saving lives, or waiting to be saved?

SUPERNOVA is based on the prize-winning young adult novel Mijn vader zegt dat wij levens redden (We save lives, my father says) by Flemish author Bo van Ranst. Tamar van den Dop follows up her debut film BLIND (2007) with this adaptation which enjoyed its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Tamar van den Dop is not afraid to stray from traditional narrative. Her talent for dialogue-free exposition, her way with sexual tension and her sense of humour all share the style of Pasolini – who brought bathos to Bach in ACCATONE just as van den Dop mingles the majestic and the mundane in SUPERNOVA. Teenager Meis lives with her slob father (Bob Schwarze) her distrait, controlling mother (van den Dop), and her trembling grandmother (Helga Boettiger) who is mutely mourning for her husband. Their isolated country house sits next to an accident blackspot: a sharp turn in the country road which regularly sends cars hurtling helplessly towards the house. The conceit is at once Beckettian and Ballardian – Meis actively wishes for the concrete twist to send new life crashing into her dilapidated, fly-blown limbo. But is the family saving lives or waiting to be saved?

The charismatic and versatile new Dutch actor Gaite Jansen (THE PRICE OF SUGAR) transcends her character’s adolescent cynicism and ennui, evincing an existential vulnerability in her voice-over which bears the narrative aloft and allows it to breathe. Van den Dop juxtaposes the turmoil of the teenager with the mid-life crises of the parents and the tragic decrepitude of the grandmother – each one facing the futility of their own existence. At times, though, van den Dop seems to rely too heavily on her young lead, and even to take her strength for granted.

For a film which is so preoccupied with scientific allegory and Newtonian notions of inertia and acceleration, it’s a shame that co-editor Katarina Turler did not quite bring the portentious momentum needed in post-production.

Cinematographer Gregor Meerman brings a sense of Wild West isolation to the little house in the verdant Dutch flatlands, and the Western flavour is augmented by sound designer Giel van Geloven who creates a Sergio Leone style soundscape of lazy flies and creaking fences, against a blues-infused soundtrack. The takeaway scene of the film finds Meis listless on a riverbank, from where she spies a young man on a passing containership. He could be any Tom, Dick or Harry… or “Brad”, Meis’ shorthand for a dream lover. He sprints down the deck, trying to cheat the laws of physics and prolong the encounter. Finally, Meis has glimpsed and been glimpsed by the outside world, and tasted the promise of escape.

- Faust Lerner

See SUPERNOVA 28th August at 16.00 at the Picturehouse. read the full review at takeonecff.com

#TakeOneRecommends I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS, 30th and 31st Aug at APH

INTERVIEW

Leah Meyerhoff & Joe Stillwater I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS tells the story of a teenage girl named Davina, who runs away from home with an older boy named Sterling - and their new life together is not the fairytale adventure they hoped for. Jack Toye spoke to filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff and sound mixer Joe Stillwater about their project.

Jack Toye: This film has a distinct feeling of escapism. It’s lighthearted, which makes certain scenes all the more drastic when the mood flips around.

Leah Meyerhoff: That was intentional. I wanted to find the balance between the more serious, harsh, gritty elements to her reality - the more socially realistic moments to the film - balancing that with the moments of magical realism. I think you get a different audience to see a heavy-handed, highly socially realistic film, gritty drama about abuse, versus something that’s light and fantastical and a bit of a magical journey that also still subtly addresses those darker topics.

JT: How did you decide on what a unicorn sounded like? What’s the creative process behind that?

LM: Joe followed around a horse and got those sounds, and then we added elements of wind chimes and magical effects. It was a combination of the real world sounds and purely magical sounds created in post-production.

Joe Stillwater: When they used to hunt narwhales, the whalers would go up to them in their boats and when they got close, it sounded like they were singing to them. You can see from that how some of these mystical creatures came about in the public consciousness.

JT: Can we talk about the film format? I loved films like this where you have 16mm, Super 16mm, Super 8mm. Did you use any VHS? LM: No, it’s all film, no VHS. It’s Super 16mm, regular 16mm, and Super 8mm. Within that there was multiple film stocks. We purchased old expired film stock online. So in a lot of the sequences, there are a lot of colours that are organic to the film because of the expiring film. It’s all how it came back from the lab.

JT: Is it the Super 16mm that has the look of the 1990s era?

LM: No, that’s the Super 8mm. It has this nostalgic feel. We shot not only on multiple formats but on multiple cameras often. One cinematographer might be operating the Super 16mm camera, and I would be on the Super 8mm camera.

It was a real collage approach to filmmaking.

- Full interview at takeonecff.com

INTERVIEW

“...the music is definitely folk and the attitude is punk!”

A Curious Life

We spoke to musician and filmmaker Dunstan Bruce about his documentary A CURIOUS LIFE, which looks at the history of Cambridge Folk Festival favourites The Levellers.

Rosy Hunt: The blurb for A CURIOUS LIFE mentions “battling demons” and “struggle”… but substance abuse aside, it primarily comes across as a great music doc/buddy movie. Was this because of the focus on jolly Jeremy Cunningham, rather than those band members who were reluctant to appear?

Dunstan Bruce: We had a few issues with band members talking openly about their pasts. Jeremy expresses a kind of tired resignation to me bringing the subject up. Other members of the band hadn’t actually discussed their sordid pasts with their children yet, and so weren’t necessarily ready to deal with it, and some were still dealing with their own demons! These are some of the reasons why it feels like an implicit problem within the band rather than a huge issue, and why Jeremy is the most vocal.

RH: The section on “Battle of the Beanfield” was very powerful – what is your memory of that period?

DB: I was in Chumbawamba at the time of all the Stonehenge, Beanfield, Convoy and Glastonbury goings on. We had just come out of the miners’ strike which we had been heavily involved in. We were very much focussed on class politics at the time and Thatcher’s attempts to redefine the state and society. It was impossible not to draw the links between what she had done to the miners, and what she was trying to do to the travelling community. It felt like we were starting to live in a police state. it was essential that we all worked together at that time, and formed bonds and links with different protest groups and movements to present some sort of united front. I think of that period as the end of single issue politics, and the start of mass resistance. Depressing and exciting all at the same time.

RH: What do you hope non-Levellers fans will get out of the doc?

DB: When we screened the film at East End Film Festival in June I took along a friend of mine who had no interest in the Levellers whatsoever. I took her in part as a guinea pig to gauge her response to the film as an outsider. Luckily for us both, she loved it! She didn’t necessarily love the music but found Jeremy engaging, amusing and very loveable.

She also said that she was fascinated in their machinations as well, because they operate differently to most bands. It sounds like I’m making this up, I know. I’m not, honestly!

A CURIOUS LIFE screens on 30th Aug at 18.00 at the Picturehouse; Meet Dunstan at the 2nd screening at St Philip’s Church on 5th Sept at 20.30.

INTERVIEW

Kris Swanberg talks about her film

BABY MARY

Kris Swanberg’s short film BABY MARY is the story of an eight-year-old girl who finds an unsupervised toddler on her way home from school, and decides to take the child home. The story is inspired by Swanberg’s time teaching at a high school on the west side of Chicago, near the neighbourhood in which the film was shot. “I had always wanted to make a film set in the neighbourhood”, says Swanberg, “and this story came to me”.

The neighbourhood in question is portrayed in a muted palette of faded colours one can imagine were once glorious; remnants sapped of joy and prosperity by the mundane struggles of the everyday. Doors, gateways, fences seem to feature a lot, suggesting a crossing of barriers, a ‘taking of chances’, an ‘overcoming of obstacles’ which only our young protagonist, Kiara, in her own quiet way, dares to make.

Takiyah, the little girl who plays Kiara, stood out from the crowd in a similar way during the casting process. She and the other actors seem very natural, and one feels, watching them, that they really know what it is like to live in a neighbourhood such as this, to live in the attitudes and environment which must so grind its inhabitants down. “We tried some traditional means of casting at first,” says Swanberg, “but we didn’t have much luck finding a young girl that seemed authentic. We ended up putting up fliers in the neighbourhood we shot in. Posted things in community centres, churches, walked around and talked to people hanging out on stoops. We found Takiyah from an open audition. She was just a little girl who lived in the neighbourhood, she had never acted before. She seems a bit older, but she was only 8 years old when we shot. All of the other actors were found the same way”.

Kiara’s action of taking home Baby Mary is one which comes from love and care, yet it is received with such hostility by the adults concerned. The theme of innocence is a pertinent one. “Kiara is innocent, so is the baby,” says Swanberg.

“The film, and indeed Kiara’s actions, come from the feeling of wanting to take care of someone or something and being ill equipped to do so. Although Kiara is a child, she seems to be an almost better mother than the woman she took the baby from”.

Is it circumstance or attitude which determines the seeming inevitability of the quality of life offered in the estates of west Chicago? The fact that Swansberg’s thought-provoking film was inspired by the very real experiences of the people she came across whilst teaching there, makes the viewing all the more touching indeed.

- Hannah Clarkson

See BABY MARY on 28 Aug and 5 Sep as part of the “CONNECTION” short film strand.

REVIEW

Take One’s Hiu Chan recommends

HOUSE OF WAX For 3-D movies, it is clear that the third dimension exists in our perception; our brains interpret the images projected onto a flat screen into a 3D image. There’s no need to make it obvious with scenes designed solely to show off the 3D effect, as that can detract from the story the film is trying to tell. I think horror operates in a similar way: horror is only truly effective when it plays with our psychology and fully engages our minds; things are much less scary when they are too apparent and too visible. The space of imagination is better to be left wild and free.

A classic film like HOUSE OF WAX (1953) still manages to grip the viewer and give them the chills better than many modern horror films. Originally the film was released as a 3D production - it was the first colour 3D film by a major studio. The film was a remake of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933) with extra three-dimensional effects to entice a new audience, starring Vincent Price as Professor Henry Jarrod. Its popularity was such that it was regularly re-released in cinemas during the 1970s and 1980s. Warner Brothers remade the film again in 2005, under the same title; but as with so many recent Hollywood remakes, they failed to recapture the magic of the source material, and the 1950s classic remains the definitive version.

We see a few things in the classic HOUSE OF WAX that we hardly see in contemporary horror films nowadays. Professor Henry Jarrod works as a sculpture artist, and he uses wax. All the props we see are real wax figures. The first horror scene that the audience experiences is when Professor Jarrod’s first museum gets burnt down: it is a terrifying and vivid experience to see the lifelike human figures melting. Their faces get more and more rotten, until you cannot see their features. Later on, we learn that Professor Jarrod’s face is also burnt from the accident. Here, we begin to imagine the pain that Professor Jarrod suffered in the fire; it combines with the images of the melting wax. The real horror always lies in the darkest space of human imagination.

In some contemporary horror films, a scene like the melting waxworks would probably be produced with CGI to save on budget. But in my opinion, the use of real sets, real props and materials, things that are solid and tangible and not constructed from binary digits, are crucial to horror films. The use of real elements and objects - this is what wakes our senses, and triggers our imagination. Horror should be sensed and felt in more ways than just by seeing. A lot of the Hollywood horror films we see nowadays only produce horror for the sake of shocking visual effect. It will be a unique experience to see this classic film on a big screen again, but do not expect it to be an AVATAR type of 3D. This is something far more classy and subtle.

- Hiu Chan

HOUSE OF WAX 3D screens at 13.30&23.00 on 29 August at the Arts Picturehouse

REVIEW

Set Fire To The Stars

screens 7th Sep 17.30 at the Arts Picturehouse

SET FIRE TO THE STARS, starring Elijah Wood and Celyn Jones, takes its inspiration from Dylan Thomas’ poem Love in the Asylum, and the catalytic effect this has on the poet. We seem to be going through a lovely B&W renaissance at the moment (THE ARTIST, BLANCANIEVES, A FIELD IN ENGLAND, NEBRASKA… the list goes on) and here the monochrome goes quite some way to masking the fact that the film, set in New York City and surrounding provinces, is in fact shot in Swansea and its surrounding provinces.

SET FIRE TO THE STARS A stranger has come To share my room in the house not right in the head, A girl mad as birds Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.

Strait in the mazed bed She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room, At large as the dead, Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall, Possessed by the skies She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust Yet raves at her will On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last I may without fail Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

- Dylan Thomas

We are used to seeing Elijah Wood as a Hobbit or a hooligan, but a professor of poetry is quite something else.

All credit to his gene pool – the guy just doesn’t age. It’s over twelve years ago that we saw him ride off through the Shire and beyond as Frodo Baggins, and he doesn’t seem to have aged a day. Here, he pulls in a convincing performance as John Malcolm Brinnin, the academic responsible for bringing Dylan Thomas over to the USA for a series of poetry-reading tours.

Thomas himself is played ably and engagingly by Celyn Jones, an actor whose work few of us have seen so far – for instance, he played a minor role in Stephen Poliakoff’s JOE’S PALACE in 2007. His acting style is reminiscent of Colin “Dr Who” Baker: the ability to switch emotionally in a scene from clowning to earnestness either end of a set of lines is no easy task, and he pulls it off effortlessly. Whilst this can be attributed in part to playing the role of Dylan Thomas, drunken mumbo jumbo, BoBo Grand High Wizard of English and Welsh language that he was, credit is also due to Jones’ skill at drawing out of thin air a quite remarkable performance.

The icing on the cake comes in the form of the soundtrack to the film – scored by none other than the Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, whose harmonium/woozy accordion lends auditory delight to SET FIRE TO THE STARS, a great addition to Wales’ burgeoning film sector.

- Jack Toye

©TAKE ONE 2014 Editor/Design: Rosy Hunt Managing Editor: Jim Ross Deputy Editor: Edd Elliott