avery-21 Reviews

Fish & Cat (2013)

A script that could have been a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and George Romero

[7/10 · 31 March 2014]

Winner of the 2013 Venice Horizons Award Special Prize, Shahram Mokri's second feature Fish & Cat (Mahi va gorbeh) is a tour de force thriller realized in a single tracking shot in collaboration with veteran cinematographer Mahmud Kalari (A Separation, The Past).

College students from a Tehran university converge on the shore of a remote lake near the Iran-Iraq border ("a place of spirits and sprites") for an annual kite-flying festival, innocent of the plans of a trio of locals to slaughter one of them to provide human meat for a derelict restaurant.

"The story I'm about to tell you seems like a fable, but it's true" -script, Fish & Cat

Though the DPC version screened at MoMA was not the best, the film left a deep impression by means of expert writing, direction, cinematography, sound design, and music, and a closely choreographed mise-en-scène realized by a large ensemble cast, with several standout performances.

In a script that could have been a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and George Romero, Shahram Mokri employs an encyclopedic knowledge of horror-film tropes to fashion a profoundly moving essay on the futility of resistance against fate in the prison-house of time. Even an angel messenger ("He does things that are like miracles") is an impotent observer while on the shore of this lake and adjoining forest where the dead and the living, ghosts and spirits, meet and meet again. We are often left wondering, "How did they do that?" Some reviewers have complained about the 2-hour-plus running time. On the contrary, I say Fish & Cat would ideally be screened on a continuous loop running at least twice, from a winter afternoon to dusk.

The film also benefits from the work of Christophe Rezai (music) among others.

Fill the Void (2012)

The ancient story of a man and a woman looking for happiness

[7/10 · 20 November 2012]

Along with NYFF pick Arat, Fill the Void introduces a new film meme of chaste eroticism, as a young woman creates love to the fierce rustle of silks in prayer.

Director Rama Burshtein was born in New York and studied at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem. In her first feature film, Burshtein tells the ancient story of a man and a woman looking for happiness.

With influences ranging from Jane Austen to David Lynch, the screenplay follows the family of Rabbi Aharon (Chaim Sharir) whose elder daughter Esther (Renana Raz) dies giving birth to infant Mordechai. Only the baby can assuage the grief of mother Rivka (Irit Sheleg), younger sister Shira (Hadas Yaron, in a luminous performance) and husband Yochay (Yiftach Klein).

In the end, the decision rests with Shira. A movie unlike any other.

Bwakaw (2012)

Another entirely original film from the Philippines

[8/10 · 7 November 2012]

Rene (in a career-topping performance by superstar Eddie Garcia) spends his days revising his last will and testament, grousing to neighbors and colleagues (at the post office where he continues to work even though he is no longer on the payroll), ever in the company of a scrawny mutt with the onomatopoeic name Bwakaw.

Rene shares his bed with a santa entiento inherited from his devout mother, which has grown miraculously over the years but is unable to deliver miracles when they are most needed.

In the film's most tender and heart-rending scenes, Rene journeys to a nursing home to visit Alicia (Armida Siguion Reyna), whose dementia lifts in a brief moment of lucidity that illuminates the years lost to both of them because of Rene's long journey to knowledge about his sexuality.

Shot in San Pablo Laguna. Dedicated to the playwright Rene O. Villanueva. Another entirely original film from the Philippines. What is in their water?

Araf/Somewhere in Between (2012)

Nothing can be the same

[7/10 · 5 November 2012]

"Every moment that we haven't seen, heard, touched or smelled before will start to reverberate in us in a very different way and take another form once we experience it. In Araf, I tried to touch upon those fleeting moments and feelings that can occur." – Yeşim Ustaoğlu

In a disintegrating town midway between Istanbul and Ankara, two teenagers search for something better. A girl (in a luminous performance by Neslihan Atagül) starts to pursue the desire awakening in her body while the boy-next-door hopes that a TV show will change his life.

Molten slag breaks forth. A windshield wiper does not stop rain. And nothing can be the same.

The Woman in the Septic Tank (2011)

Ang Babae sa Septic Tank, which takes deft aim at stereotypes of Filipino film and society, was my favorite of the 2012 Berlinale.

[8/10 · 30 March 2012]

"With this film, we go to the festival in Berlin!" Written by Chris Martinez and directed by Marlon Rivera, Ang Babae sa Septic Tank (The Woman in the Septic Tank) is the most successful independent film in the history of Philippine cinema, winning best actress, best screenplay, best director and best film at Cinemalaya. Very rare for a home-grown indie, it was picked up for a commercial run by one of the country's biggest film companies and became the highest grossing independent Filipino film, the Philippines' entry for the 2011 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, and was short-listed for the Oscar.

The title may be a sly reference to Mario O'Hara's Babae sa Breakwater (Woman of Breakwater), one of a legacy of fine movies dealing with poverty in the Philippines, which rightfully garnered festival screenings and critical praise in the first decade of the 21st century, but also inspired lesser efforts dubbed as "poverty porn" and "cinema of misery". Ang Babae sa Septic Tank, which takes deft aim at these preconceptions of Filipino film and society, was my favorite of the 2012 Berlinale.

Ang Babae sa Septic Tank begins with a film-within-the-film Walang-Wala ("Have Nothing"), a stereotyped portrait of Mila, the destitute mother of seven children (or maybe nine) who dolls up her pre-teen daughter (or maybe son) to pimp her/him out to Mr. Smithberger, an elderly Western sex tourist (or maybe Asian, or Filipino).

We learn that three young film-school graduates – director Rainier de la Cuesta (Kean Cipriano), producer Bingbong (JM de Guzman) and production assistant Jocelyn (Cao Cortez) – are planning their first film, engineered as the ultimate in poverty porn, as their route to fame and fortune on the international festival circuit, and ultimately to the foreign-film Oscar.

In the course of one day, they brainstorm possible treatments of their project as a gritty no frills neo-realist film, a glossy musical, an over-the-top melodrama, and a docu-drama. On a scouting expedition, they visit the Payatas dumpsite, whose denizens expertly deconstruct their car.

Wanting a big name for the lead in their movie, the team imagines Mercedes Cabral (Serbis) and Cherry Pie Picache (Foster Child) in the role of Mila before setting their sights on the grand diva Eugene Domingo.

First-time director Marlon Rivera's crack comedic timing showcases spot-on performances by Kean Cipriano, JM de Guzman, and Cao Cortez and notable cameos by Mercedes Cabral and Cherry Pie Picache. But the film's backbone is Eugene Domingo's generous, affecting, and wildly funny performance, including a manic master class in the three acting styles of a Filipina diva. Vincent de Jesus's accordion-inflected score is perfectly at one with this brilliant farce.

The Last Friday (2011)

A Last Supper with Islamic background, where Friday has multiple meanings as holy day, protest day, strike day.

[7/10 · 30 March 2012]

A middle-aged divorced father discovers that he needs to undergo an emergency operation for a twisted testicle, which he cannot afford. Having gambled away everything he earned as a successful care salesman in Amman, Yousef (Ali Suliman) lives alone in poverty, working as a taxi driver, stealing electricity from a neighbor to brew coffee and enduring his sleazy boss's degradations and double-dealings with ironic stoicism.

Much is in motion on the eve of Yousef's surgery. A Last Supper with Islamic background, where Friday has multiple meanings as holy day, protest day, strike day.

First, his teen-age son (Fadi Arida) comes to stay with him, hiding out from Yousef's ex-wife (Yasmine Al Masri), now married to a powerful, invisible husband. Yousef discovers that his son is nearly illiterate, a habitual truant from his expensive private school.

On television and radio, we hear strange ideas about romance and love, where women have the upper hand, while Yousef has coffee on the veranda, playing solitaire backgammon, outside his pitifully empty bedroom.

The first Jordanian film screened at Berlinale, Al Juma Al Akheira first took form in Paris, where director-screenwriter Yahya Alabdallah studied at the International Film and Television School EICAR.

Working on a 100,000 euro budget, Alabdallah has turned in a well-written, well-acted, beautifully photographed film that casts a perceptive gaze on a society in crisis, with a focus on the drama and comedy of everyday life that will be recognizable to audiences worldwide.

Mirror post: http://blog.williamaveryhudson.com/?p=954

Tiens-moi droite (2012)

An audiovisual diary of the filmmaker's search to find verbal and visual expression for a life with scoliosis.

[6/10 · 30 March 2012]

An audiovisual diary of the filmmaker's search to find verbal and visual expression for a life with scoliosis.

Zoé Chantre combines words, pencil sketches of bodies and body parts, medical diagrams, and sounds to create a rich stream of linguistic, visual, and sonic associations to depict a curved spine.

Chantre's drawings are evocative of Egon Schiele and Frida Kahlo, with visual metaphors of trapeze artists, spiral staircases, tornadoes, the rack, and the stake. Her animations are also brilliantly evocative, in particular one where she is eaten by a spine-snake.

We don't see our narrator except in drawings and partial photos until halfway through the film, when we first make eye contact and gradually are introduced to a beautiful woman with a curious asymmetry, who collects hard disks from broken computers, recovering memories.

As spoken before in Forum, "None of us is perfect." Works like this teach us that perfection is irrelevant.

Mirror post: http://blog.williamaveryhudson.com/?p=957

No Man's Zone (2012)

The human and environmental fallout of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant explosions following the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011.

[7/10 · 30 March 2012]

Mujin chitai (No Man's Zone) is one of three films in this year's Forum documenting the human and environmental fallout of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant explosions following the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011.

In defiance of a 20-kilometer "security zone" established by the government, ostensibly to protect the people from radioactive contamination, filmmaker Fujiwara Toshi traveled from Tokyo to Fukushima 40 days after the initial disaster.

Toshi recalls having little knowledge or interest in the source of his electricity before the Fukushima disaster. Indeed, unlike Western countries, where nuclear plants are prominently visible icons on the landscape, Japan designs them to be unobtrusive, barely noticeable above the treetops.

Similarly, survivors seem to have been invisible in the days and weeks following the initial disaster. We learn that a month passed without earnest rescue efforts. Survival would have been much higher if the work had begun within 72 hours. Bodies were left abandoned in the open air for as long as 75 days, flouting age-old rituals of death and honor to ancestors.

Plant workers acknowledge their happiness for the prosperous life the plant gave them, while admitting a "conspiracy of silence," when fear of losing jobs and contracts muzzled reports of problems and concerns.

Farmers and fishermen have nothing to do. Some return to feed animals and check on property. We hear a mantra: "If there weren't that nuclear plant." "In the belief that nature exists just for us humans, we accepted the nuclear plants." Almost all the farmers around Fukushima Daiichi worked at least part-time for TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Now they are a people in forced exile.

In a beautiful mountain region 30 kilometers to the northwest of ground zero, residents have had no protection for weeks, even though their hourly dose of radiation is four or five times the levels detected in the "security zone." Already dangerously exposed, they learn they will have to leave paradise in the coming weeks....

The film is dedicated to refugees, survivors, evacuees of the world.

Mirror post: http://blog.williamaveryhudson.com/?p=955

Bestiaire (2012)

A masterfully composed film essay in the guise of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Bestiaire questions what we see when we look at animals.

[7/10 · 30 March 2012]

Denis Côté's latest provocation takes its title and inspiration from medieval books pairing fanciful images of beasts with moral lessons. A masterfully composed film essay in the guise of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Bestiaire questions what we see when we look at animals.

The film opens with eyes intently observing an object off-screen, which we gradually discern to be a stuffed deer, the assigned subject of a class of art students. From this glassy-eyed product of taxidermy, we are transported to a Montreal safari park in the winter off-season, where we view exotic animals in snowbound enclosures and restrictive holding pens as they return our gaze with watchful eyes.

Eventually we meet very strange and noisy animals, the humans who keep watch over the beasts, feed them, and clean up after them. A symphony of images and sound ensues, building to a climax of noise worthy of San Quentin (1937).

Faded pinup girls and animal heads segue to an interlude in a taxidermy workshop, where we witness a grisly transformative craft by which a duck carcass is crushed, skinned, stuffed and posed into a simulacrum of the living animal.

The safari park in summer is a Babel of wordless voices and clumsy interactions of tourist families with animals, in which the beasts display a dignity somehow lacking in their human observers. A baby elephant takes a stroll alone, and credits roll over the sound of sketching.

While good to see in Forum, Bestiaire must have been a blast to see at Le Festival International du Film pour Enfants de Montréal. A film to see with the eyes of a child, or an animal.

Mirror post: http://blog.williamaveryhudson.com/?p=1059

Espoir voyage (2012)

Families don't understand. Parents don't receive letters. Life is hard.

[7/10 · 30 March 2012]

Michel Zongo sets out on a reconnaissance mission to the Ivory Coast where his brother Joanny was headed long ago, never to return.

A mother's message: "If you don't have any affection for me, I have affection for you… When life is a dead end, one must turn around." Zongo boards a bus packed with goods without even a photo of his brother. Just his fate. He learns that Joanny was a good looking man, very elegant, who walked like a Hindi. Brave, strong. Very clean and fond of women. A man who worked hard and died alone at his place after a sudden illness.

Families don't understand. Parents don't receive letters. Life is hard.

"We're not like Europeans, who remember a hundred years. Here people die and we move on." Mirror post: http://blog.williamaveryhudson.com/?p=961

Children of Srikandi (2012)

An original and important collaborative anthology on contemporary gender politics.

[8/10 · 30 March 2012]

Billed as the first film about queer women in Indonesia – "the country with the world's largest Muslim population" – Anak-Anak Srikandi is an original and important collaborative anthology on contemporary gender politics interweaving eight women's stories with a shadow-theater rendition of the story of Srikandi, a hero of the Mahābhārata who, born a girl, grows into a mighty warrior with an undying, passionate love for a noblewoman.

"This story reminds us that same-sex love and gender variety were not imported from the west but in fact form a deep and ancient aspect of Indonesian society." The film makers (Laura Coppens, Hera Danish, Yulia Dwi Andriyanti, Dian Eggie, Oji Ijo, Angelika Levi, Stea Lim, Afank Mariani, Imelda Taurinamandala, Winnie Wibowo) transform a scholarly concept into a marvelously watchable, even transcendent, movie with great heart and no sentimentality – breaking borders of documentary, fiction, performance and experimental film as deftly as those of gender and culture.

Mirror post: http://blog.williamaveryhudson.com/?p=966

Revision (2012)

The circumstances that led to the deaths of Grigore Velcu and Eudache Calderar on the German-Polish border in 1992 have not been explained even today.

[7/10 · 30 March 2012]

Between 1988 and 2009, nearly 15,000 people died attempting to cross European borders.

The circumstances that led to the deaths of Grigore Velcu and Eudache Calderar on the German-Polish border in 1992 have not been explained even today. According to official reports, they were victims of a hunting accident. A trial failed to pursue the most decisive questions and eventually ended in an acquittal. Their families never even got to know that a trial had been held.

Twenty years later, Philip Scheffner (Day of the Sparrow) carries out the investigation that never took place back then, seeking out the dead men's families in Romania and recording the statements they were unable to give until now.

Revision is a crime story with multiple beginnings.

Scheffner interviews the German pastor of the church where Neo-Nazis desecrated the grave of Grigore Velcu's grandmother. Velcu was shot after getting papers to retrieve her body. A photographer tells us of his shock when he witnessed German police allowing a Neo-Nazi mob to petrol bomb and destroy a Roma sanctuary.

We hear from the first responders to the shootings, who were never examined by the police or the court. We learn it took police five hours to investigate. By then, the field was in flames. The next day, the field was ploughed, destroying all evidence. There was never a crime scene investigation.

We hear from witnesses, the men in the field with Grigore Velcu and Eudache Calderar when the shooting started. "We stood up and screamed… Police came with gun and a scope… More shots fired… His head was cut like a melon… How terrible to see how the blood spurt from him… The police car disappeared… Cars came to pick us up." And we hear from the families of Grigore Velcu and Eudache Calderar, by all accounts upstanding men. Today they would be citizens of the EU, free to enter Germany or any other European country. But in 1992 they were just two illegal immigrants, hunted and killed in a cornfield like wild boar.

Insurance claims – which would have been payable under the landowner's policy – were never filed, because their families were never informed of their eligibility.

Mirror post: http://blog.williamaveryhudson.com/?p=1067

Escuela normal (2012)

"It used to be a sanctuary for learning and now it's a lot more than that and a lot less."

[7/10 · 30 March 2012]

Opening with urban students' pre-dawn journey to a 19th century school building, first-time documentarian Celina Murga sets the stage for a very Fred Wiseman institutional portrait, capturing an historic Argentine high school in transition with an "observational camera subtly attuned to the traces of the political in the everyday." We follow an indefatigable principal as she tracks down absentee teachers, teaches a new custodian how to fill the soap dispensers, and locks down a classroom to quarantine a biting dog.

We observe – surprise – that Argentinian kids are good looking. Morning assembly is like a room full of soon-to-be-discovered supermodels. But as classes begin, we learn that these students are also motivated and engaged. A civics class is enlivened by the objections of an atheist girl who objects to the term "God" in the Argentine constitution and organizes a "Fifth-year party" to oppose the incumbent "Centennial party" in the upcoming student council elections, with the goals of salvaging the school library and improving school lunches.

Murga takes us to a reunion party of the class of 1928, a room of beautiful, spirited women who provide essential historical context. The Normal School of Parana was founded to train teachers who would be sent out to the provinces to "normalize" the mix of immigrants coming to Argentina from around the world to create an officially sanctioned Argentine society. Built for 800 students, the school is now responsible for more than twice that number, and the change from dictatorship to democracy has created enormous changes in education policy.

"It used to be a sanctuary for learning and now it's a lot more than that…and a lot less." I don't know, but from what I can see, these kids are all right. With luck, their voices will inform the next stage of American education.

Murga is shooting her third feature film, La tercera orilla (The Third Side of the River), with Martin Scorsese as executive producer.

Mirror post: http://blog.williamaveryhudson.com/?p=968

Friends After 3.11 (2011)

We should take this work at face value.

[5/10 · 30 March 2012]

We should take this work at face value, as not so much a film as an introduction to a group of newly discovered friends, to promote collaborations that extend beyond education and entertainment, to survival.

After the 3/11/11 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster, film maker and Sendai native Iwai Shunji (Swallowtail Butterfly, New York I Love You) traveled Japan with actress Miyuki Matsuda, junior idol Kokoro Fujinami, and actor Tarô Yamamoto to witness the unprecedented devastation of Fukushima and interview a diverse group of anti-nuclear activists in wide-ranging conversations around science, politics, economics, and personal responsibility for both the local tragedy and our global future.

Masashi Gotô, a former nuclear plant architect, details how government-corporate nuclear policy focused narrowly on probable occurrences, leaving exceptional events such as powerful earthquakes and tsunamis out of plant design and contingency plans.

Decrying the lack of courage to release information that will cause embarrassment, journalist Takashi Uesugi relates how the news media do not challenge claims of government and industry that Japan is safely free from radiation, even though the Fukushima disaster released more radiation than the Chernobyl meltdown, which itself released more radiation than the Hiroshima attack.

Reached by Skype, film maker Tan Chui Mui tells of Malaysia's full-court press to develop nuclear power on the island nation and open a huge rare-earth refinery near the village of Gebeng, Pahang, claiming that both are safe while forbidding media access to the construction sites.

Professor Hiroaki Koide, of Kyoto University's Research Reactor Institute, offers a heart-felt apology to the Japanese people for his role in the lead-up to the disaster, while earnestly seeking a generation of new nuclear researchers, not to develop the industry further, but because "we will need people to clean up the trash." Professor Koide expresses perhaps the most representative statement of this important conversation: "I'd choose to live again to do that work." They call them bodhisattvas.

Mirror post: http://blog.williamaveryhudson.com/?p=970

White Dog (1982)

3 actors and a fantastic director tackle racism

[8/10 · 22 October 2010]

Kristy McNichol, Paul Winfield, and Burl Ives lead an inspired cast under the direction of Sam Fuller to investigate America's history of racism, following the tragic story of a "white dog", trained to kill black people.

Worth watching for the Ennio Morricone score alone.

But stay on for the story.

Sam Fuller's final American film. A must-see, voted one of the best of the decade in Film Comment. See it.

Look for more film work from Kristy McNichol, a fine actress.

Cast: Kristy McNichol - Julie Sawyer; Christa Lang - Nurse; Vernon Weddle - Vet; Jameson Parker - Roland Gray; Karl Lewis Miller - Attacker; Karrie Emerson - Sun Bather; Helen Siff - Pound Operator; Glen Garner - Pound Worker; Terrence Beasor - Pound Driver; Tony Brubakern - Sweeper Driver; Samuel Fuller - Charlie Felton; Marshall Thompson - Director; Paul Bartel - Cameraman; Richard Monahan - Assistant director; Neyle Morrow - Soundman

Paltadacho munis (2009)

A widowed forest ranger strikes up a relationship with a madwoman he finds lost and alone in the woods.

[8/10 · 13 March 2010]

One of eight Forum films nominated for the Best First Feature prize at this year's Berlin Film Festival.

A widowed forest ranger in the Western Ghats of India's Goa district strikes up an unlikely relationship with a madwoman he finds lost and alone in the woods. Ignoring the gossip of the nearby village, Vinayak (Chitranjan Giri) takes the woman (Veena Jomkar) into his home. But when she becomes pregnant, the family is brutally cast out.

Told in the native tongue of Konkani, a language otherwise hardly used in Indian cinema, Paltadacho Munis is a beautiful film of loneliness, compassion and the eternal struggle against bigotry. One for the ages.

It (1927)

Don't miss this original

[9/10 · 25 February 2007]

So what is "It"? "It… that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes… entirely unself-conscious… full of self-confidence… indifferent to the effect… she is producing and uninfluenced by others." The film begins with a Cosmo extract of a novella by Elinor Glyn, and picks up speed with a newspaper story by an uncredited, luminous Gary Cooper. So it is about writing, but ultimately about the stunning comedic talent of Clara Bow and the anthropologic eye of Clarence Badger, Josef von Sternberg (uncredited) and H. Kinley Martin. Macy's (Waltham's), Coney Island & a 1920's steam-powered yacht.

Clara Bow acts with subtlety, light élan and small, powerful gestures that would set the choreography for women in film for the next century. Don't miss the original. Her final scene on the yacht's anchor with Antonio Moreno is the funniest, sexiest, most artful thing I've seen since I don't know when.

Pity the people who won't hear Maud Nelissen's piano composition behind this brilliant film.

Fay Grim (2006)

In the best Billy Wilder tradition

[8/10 · 25 February 2007]

Fay, the sister of the notorious Nobel prize-winning smut poet Simon Grim, still loves Henry Fool. Their son receives an ingenious orgy-in-a-box from an undisclosed sender and a chase across three continents ensues, involving a supremely sad-sack collection of government agents, terrorists, flight attendants, and bellhops.

Parker Posey delivers a perfectly timed comic performance, including some brilliant physical work. With strong contributions by Jasmin Tabatabai and Saffron Burrows, Fay Grim proves in the best Billy Wilder tradition that nothing is funnier than a beautiful woman in trouble.

Another good score by Hartley (and thanks in the credits to the American Academy in Berlin, where Hartley served as a fellow in Fall 2004).