Festival of slow films

The status of a debutant is not very obliging, the requirements for novice are less strict than those for the mature masters. Nevertheless, in recent years the policy of leniency was put aside: the most important contest of feature films is a truly interesting race of worthy candidates for receiving “Golden Scythian Deer.”

This year’s competition was not an exception in terms of diversity, however, at the same time it was also more leveled. There was no obvious straightforward leader and, instead, there were a few films that totally deserved attention and awards.

Outsiders in the competition did pretty well too, in every film there were some interesting or important moments. Czech film Poupata (directed by Zdenek Jirasky) is a rather monotonous social gruesome story about hard life of people who live in a small town near rail road. Guys smoke marijuana, party, and fall in love with strippers, while girls are fighting over boys or worry because of unexpected pregnancy from who knows which guy, fathers hang out in bars and waste all their money gambling, and mothers overstrain themselves at work and find joy in an amateur ensemble Poupata. All of this is filmed as if the 1990s never ended. But there are funny scenes and dialogues, and there is also a certain final gleam of hope for the future.

Danish film director Mads Matthiesen had a rather predictable plot in his film 10 timer til Paradis. The main character is a professional, skilled bodybuilder, a tattooed sturdy fellow (Kim Kold), who lives with an authoritarian mother and is very shy around girls. Eventually, he sets off in search of love to Thailand, where losers from Europe go to have cheap sex and obedient wives. And of course he finds his love and finally goes on with his life without his tyrannical mother. Matthiesen made a typical melodrama, but the mere presence of the fragile giant Kold compensates for many of the film’s shortcomings.

Film Kuma (directed by Umut Dag, Austria) is also somewhat straightforward. It is dedicated to the always topical issue of inequality of women in traditional Muslim families. Here everything is clear from the very beginning: Ayse, a young girl from a small village has to go to Vienna to get married into a Turkish family. Characters and situations are presented a bit rough without any semitones that are mandatory in such stories. However, the acting work of Begum Akkaya in the role of Ayse deserves the highest praise and jury honored her with a special award.

Ty Hickson was recognized the best actor for his role in the film Gimme the Loot (directed by Adam Leon, USA). This dashing film also won the first prize in the competition of feature films. The story in this film is, in a sense, typical for New York: two young graffiti artists from Bronx – a guy (Hickson plays this role with utmost vigor and charm) and a girl are trying by hook or by crook to find a big sum of money to paint (bombard in their language) a well-known New York memorial. Lots of slang and obscene words, tight and steep plot, colorful character types, the general atmosphere of semi-criminal street freemen represent a youth film in the best sense of the notion.

Dutch filmmaker Sacha Polak also tells a story about youth, more precisely, about a young lady in his film Hemel (Netherlands-Spain, diploma of Ecumenical Jury). Rebel beauty Hemel lives with her father Gijs after the untimely death of her mother. Gijs is always dating young women, but Hemel does not see a threat to her close relationship with her father in them. Hemel, in her turn, views relationships with men with a certain cynicism. Everything changes when Gijs meets Sophie – talented young auction worker. It, in a sense, is a drama of bringing up a child and a drama of growing up. Film director managed to find an interesting structural method: he breaks the story into separate chapters marked with titles and by doing so turns the film into some novelistic form. A rather banal story benefits from it.

Film Ji Yi Wang Zhe Wo (China) did not win any prize because it already received an award for best feature film debut at this year’s festival in Locarno. Film director Fang Song is going from Beijing to Nanjing to his family. The exaggeratedly static manner of recording life, combined with the visual quality of the frame, makes the movie strangely ambiguous, when it is impossible to say with certainty whether it is fiction or a documentary. One can trace here the influence of Jia Zhang-Ke, a film producer, one of the most famous Chinese directors today. Fang Song, however, is a very talented student. All the pain and personal drama of the characters are pictured here as if on a sly, at the same time such muted tone makes the film special. It is really a case of specific filmmaking and yet it deserves to have its fans.

The Jury of the International Federation of Film Critics – FIPRESCI awarded its prize to the film A Beautiful Valley by Hadar Friedlich (Israel-France). The film absolutely deserved this award. A Beautiful Valley is both an instructive and masterly story about the collapse of utopia. Friedlich shows the life of Israeli kibbutz in The Days of its gradual decline. Slow disaster is presented through the eyes of the oldest resident of the village, an old lady, a pensioner, who was one of the founders of the settlement. She spends her days in a desperate effort to once again become needed, watching with the pain how everything she fought for is collapsing. Conversations under the portraits of Lenin and Marx, watching confessions and sharing memories of the kibbutz residents about the good old days – such details do not only cause almost reflex response in anyone who lived in the times of the USSR, but also are really touching. Humankind has not managed to build a communist paradise on Earth neither on the one-sixth of the land, nor voluntarily in a single beautiful valley. And it seems that in this sense the film by Friedlich is no less important than pretentious historical films about the darn past.

Finally, I have come to the most mysterious and the best film of the contest. The jury made an absolutely right decision to give the Grand Prix to the film L directed by a Greek filmmaker Babis Makridis. This film cannot be interpreted in a single way. The main character of this film is a divorced man who works as a driver. Two of his children live with his authoritative ex-wife. The main job of the driver is to take honey to the same place on the same time telling the same words to the same person who is narcoleptic. The whole world of the main character is his car and the road, he practically lives in the car. When he has some time for rest, he drives in circles and listens to a bad recording of Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. His best friend considers himself to be a bear. One day, the driver rises and joins a gang of motorcyclists, who think that cars are absolute evil. The total nonsense only increases with this.

This incredibly slow, full of black humor and crazy characters film is practically a flawless directing work. Makridis perfectly maintains the rhythm from the first to the last scene. In the surreal world he created everything is funny and mysterious, and yet every moment of this quiet madness is filled with refined, sophisticated poetry. There is no doubt that L became the biggest discovery and the biggest pleasant surprise of the festival.

Thus, at least in regard to the most interesting contestants, Molodist-42 was a festival of slow films. Young film directors slow down the course of life to take a closer look at it and do not often see pleasant things, sometimes it is all just crazy, but in any case very poetic.