Cambridge Film Festival Review issue 3

THE 35th CAMBRIDGE FILM FESTIVAL

R E V I E W

previewed meet victor sjostrom

INSIDE:

face of the devil land grabbing schmitke palio 54

Guests from STAR*MEN

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LAND GRABBING

The plight of farmers and villagers in poor nations being displaced by their own governments in order to let European investors cash in on the rising demand for food is the subject of Kurt Langbein’s thought-provoking documentary. It is an uncomfortable watch, but then that’s the point: to shine a light on practices to which the EU have seemingly turned a blind eye, because there is no political desire to stop cheap food from being imported and fast profits being made.

The amount of territory covered in the film is astonishing: Langbein travels from Cambodia to Romania to Ethiopia to Dubai as he witnesses the process of crops being harvested, packed, transported, unloaded and finally served up at a plush hotel in the Middle East.

It’s not simply a question of the rising global population that has fuelled the demand for agricultural land; it’s the demand in the West for fresher, better looking and better tasting food. The contrast between the lavish dishes being served in Dubai (though it could just as well be London or Paris) and the meagre existence of the African and Asian farmers being forced to supply the goods is a depressing one.

The defence trotted out by some of the company representatives in the film - that they bring employment, investment and improved farming methods to these countries - looks increasingly flimsy, though some of these benefits have clearly materialised. The environmental impact is a another matter altogether; rainforest is allowed to be torn down in favour of ever larger palm oil plantations and biofuel crops in the name of ‘sustainability’ (a term with plenty of elasticity, it seems).

One European farmer points out the fallacy of cutting down trees in one country in order to reduce carbon emissions in another. Langbein’s film doesn’t offer any easy answers, but it does illuminate a subject that will become ever more pressing over the next few years.

Read the complete article at takeonecff.com, and find out more about LAND GRABBING at www. land-grabbing.com/

PALIO Anyone who buys a ticket for PALIO expecting a heroic racing tale of horse and rider (along the lines of SEABISCUIT and CHAMPIONS) is likely to emerge feeling as battered and kicked around as losing jockeys are wont to be, by an angry postPalio mob in Siena’s Piazza del Campo, if they’re seen to have let down the district they’re representing. Not that those heroic elements aren’t there; but the adversity to be overcome is largely in the shape of fellow jockeys whose tactics include striking their rivals on the head and hands with sticks (made from stretched bulls’ penises) as the horses career three times round the Piazza.

An extraordinarily well-shot and exciting documentary, PALIO cuts between interviews with past jockeys and others either directly involved or watching from the sidelines, and the build-up to the July and August 2013 races – a gift to the film-makers, as the tension in the intervening month mounts and dodgy practices in the interests of winning are openly paraded before the cameras – as a luckless owner puts it, ‘the Palio is a game of legitimate corruption’. Culminating with the race itself, as thrilling and brutal over 90 seconds as the chariot race in BEN-HUR, except that this is real, with actual non-cut-out crowds baying in the amphitheatre.

The Palio is a race which a riderless horse is allowed to win, after its jockey has been thrown off during scrimmaging on one of the Piazza’s lethal corners, but in which both the fastest and slowest horses are eliminated from preliminary selection. These deals are made by what are politely called the expensively-suited ‘captains’ of the seventeen contrada or districts of Sienna: firstly to hire the best jockey available, then to ensure he’s got enough financial backing to secure victory by obtaining a plum starting position.

PALIO gives the impression that ‘no animal was harmed in the making of this film’, the injuries confined to jockeys thrown off or bashed against the walls of the Piazza. Though animal rights protesters have been vociferous, that’s not what PALIO is about: Cosima Spender is content to record (splendidly) what is, alongside the Pamplona bull run or come to that the Grand National itself, something of a bizarre private passion.

PALIO screens on the 13th at 17.00 at the Light Cinema.

victor sjostrom Sweden’s Victor Sjöström will always be remembered for his quietly devastating performance as the ageing professor in Ingmar Bergman’s WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957), but his career as a filmmaker deserves equal praise and recognition. Like D.W. Griffith in America and F.W. Murnau in Germany, Sjöström was an adventurous pioneer, a technical innovator and a great artist in the early days of the medium. Sjöström’s unique body of work is a cinema of indelible human faces, beautiful but treacherous natural landscapes, doomed romances, relentless struggles for moral redemption, and brutal conflicts between independent, courageous women and violent, self-deluded men.

Victor Sjöström was born in 1879 in Varmland County, Sweden, to a businessman father and an actress mother. After his timber trade failed, Sjöström’s father Olaf moved the family to Brooklyn, New York, and started a shady remittance company. At the age of seven, Sjöström experienced a tragic loss when his mother died during childbirth. His father, an alcoholic, gambler, and womaniser, married the nursemaid and sent Victor back to Sweden to live with his aunt and uncle. The latter were both very supportive and helped to shape the boy’s growing artistic sensibilities. As a teenager, Sjöström became enamoured of the theatrical world and eventually left home to make a living as an actor and stage director.

Still in its infancy, the cinematic medium captured Sjöström’s attention. In 1912, he made his directorial debut with THE GARDENER, a sordid melodrama about rape, prostitution and suicide, which became the first film banned in Sweden. Censorship, however, did not stop Sjöström. Between 1912 and 1923, he directed over forty films in his home country.

As a filmmaker, Sjöström sought to liberate his chosen medium from its theatrical roots by moving away from the confines of the studio and the city and instead shooting in nature.

In 1917, Sjöström directed A MAN THERE WAS, based on a poem by Henrik Ibsen about a tragic sailor during the Napoleonic Wars.

It was the first Swedish film of its kind – a feature shot entirely on location in wild nature, over the course of both a spring and autumn, in order to faithfully render the changing seasons and harsh weather of the coast.

Read the full version of this article, including reviews of several of Sjöström’s films, at takeonecff.com

WILD STRAWBERRIES screens on 9th September at 20.30 at the Arts Picturehouse.

SCHMITKE Deep in the Czech Republic’s Ore Mountains, a wind turbine screeches and groans, its ceaseless noise rumbling through the streets of the surrounding town and into the forest.

A German engineer, Julius Schmitke, is sent to repair it, along with his obnoxious colleague Thomas. However, not long after their arrival Thomas disappears, forcing Julius to search through the town and the looming mountains.

In simple terms SCHMITKE is a fairytale, a fable of a wood that both warns and welcomes you. Julius Schmitke, played by Peter Kurth, has a face that seems to be etched with a permanent sigh. His life is noisy, and he seems to be haunted by the rumble of machinery.

As we accompany Julius on his search for his lost comrade it’s not hard to see how the crisp mountains and the unknown perils underfoot act as the perfect trap for Julius. The ground beneath him could give way any moment, but in doing so it eliminates the noise: Thomas, the turbine, his sat­nav. All is quiet when deep in the forest.

The antagonist of the film, the rust­bucket turbine that refuses to die, torments Julius, and also demonstrates director Stepan Altrichter’s strongest skill. The film perfectly uses sound to show Julius’ disturbed mindset. In the distance the turbine sounds like a wailing, injured beast that needs to be put to sleep.

Like much recent European cinema, SCHMITKE demonstrates skill in finding the light balance between dark mystery and comedy. Its moments of humour come from the colourful locals living deep in the forest: a gaggle of eccentrics, they could have been plucked out of David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS. Whether delivered with wide eyes or indifference, their casual offerings of advice to Julius perfectly embody what is both humorous and frustrating about his situation. They give plenty of answers, just not to the questions he’s asking. Towards the end of the film when he finally surrenders to his predicament one can’t help but speculate if he has stumbled across a Czech Hotel California; a place devoid of both time and the need for it.

SCHMITKE certainly captures the draw of the forest as a sanctuary but also has no intention of suggesting it is one free of perils. Still, after staring at those endless mist-draped mountains one can’t help but feel the urge to don a bearskin hat and take a wander.

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face of the devil Choose LA CARA DEL DIABLO for some of the cosiest horror you will ever enjoy.

Team this welcome Spanish slasher with knock-off Cookie Dough, friends you wouldn’t mind snogging, and your most insulated pyjamas. Whilst the film’s narrative and aesthetic foundations admittedly do more to open-heartedly espouse the conventions of the teen-horror genre than to push beyond them, there is something importantly likeable at work here, which is not something you can often say about tales of woodland bloodshed. Prepare to be unexpectedly seduced.

The film follows the quiet, nervous Lucero as she goes on holiday into the Peruvian rainforest with her friends and boyfriend.

Arriving at their lodge by boat, they discover – no surprises here – that they will be staying in entirely isolated accommodation, devoid of Wifi and phone signal, and complete with foreboding hotel manager and gruesome local myths.

Before long, the group of friends excitedly learn of the legend of “el tunche”, a malevolent forest entity that picks off unsuspecting travellers in a variety of gruesome manners. When members of the group begin to disappear in mysterious and unsettling circumstances, the question of this folkloric creature’s presence becomes of very real concern. Demons from the characters’ troubled pasts are reawakened by the escalating terror of their immediate surroundings, and the randy teen getaway

quickly becomes a slalom of survival as physical as it is psychological.

Whilst inhabiting common territory, the film nevertheless picks as its core matter an inexhaustibly subversive favourite of the genre: the seemingly robust, carefree teen body and its secret hauntings. Manifesting both internally and externally, threats and monsters undermine and pick holes (often quite literally) in these glistening, heteronormative skins, eroding socialised facades and detecting within all human desire strains of the inhuman and the murderous. The density of the forest serves as an ingenious setting for these undoings and transformations, hiding places for both personal and supernatural ills provided by an Edenic screen of greenery that holds open the question of what is and isn’t organic in human terror. At its best, this is the energetic new face of a genre wellrehearsed in using campy jumps to explore the cracks in the human mask. Above all, LA CARA DEL DIABLO is an entertaining, kinetic and unexpectedly human romp.

FACE OF THE DEVIL screens on 8th September at 21.00 at the Light Cinema

54: the director’s cut This film exists in a narcissistic world where characters cavort about in a blizzard of

cocaine and champagne; a pill popping swamp where everyone sleeps with everyone, in whatever configuration they choose. Originally made in 1998, the original producer Harvey Weinstein was apparently worried that audiences would not connect with such morally bereft, bisexual characters, and so set about sanitising it.

A third of the films 100 minutes was cut and the director was sent to reshoot whole scenes, promoting Neve Campbell then flushed with success from SCREAM, to the central love interest. The film was ruined, the director furious, the critics bemused and the film sunk without trace.

Now, somewhat amazingly, the director has managed to restore the film as originally intended, bringing back the beautifully bittersweet coming of age tale it had always intended to tell. It is your basic rags

to riches and back again story, Shane (Ryan Phillipe) want to get into studio 54 to check out the girls. “Not in that Shirt”, they smirk at the door. He takes it off to reveal a body beautiful. He’s in, and so begins his odyssey in to the self-obsessed epicurean, drug fuelled and sexually ambivalent world of the New York elite.

Salma Hayek is funny and gorgeous as the wannabe singer ready to perform at the drop of a hat. Sela Ward plays Billie, the self-centred, cocaine fuelled hedonist who tells everyone how they will be in for a treat with Shane: “he f*cked me unconscious”, which indeed he did, only to check himself in the mirror and carry on regardless. A great moment that sums the Machiavellian heart at the centre of this film is when Billie says, “ What would you be prepared to do to get to where you want to go?”

During the restoration, a handful of shots were rescued from videotape, their degraded texture only helping to enhance the sense of foreboding and melancholy that the film elicits. It is this that reminds you throughout what an improvement this is on the original. It deserves a second chance, and the film stays with you well after the credits have slipped away. It makes you think how many other directors out there are waiting for the chance Mark Christopher has had. How many hidden gems are there waiting to be unearthed?

Because, make no mistake, this is a hidden gem.

54: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT screens again on the 9th September at 16.15