A Film a Week - Remember My Song / Sjeti se moje pjesme

 previously published on Cineuropa

The collapse of Yugoslavia remains a subject of interest across generations in the states that succeeded it after the wars of the early 1990s. The central question is how the proclaimed ideals of “brotherhood and unity” in the former socialist regime morphed into nationalist hatred and quasi-tribal wars. Artists across different disciplines have sought to capture this transformation through metaphors drawn from a range of settings, such as ethnically mixed villages and towns, workplaces that employed large numbers of people, and communal spaces – bars, clubs, inns and taverns once widely frequented.

One such tavern that operated in the 1980s stands at the centre of the documentary Remember My Song, directed by Jelena Bosanac and Tanja Brzaković. The film has just premiered in the regional competition at ZagrebDox. The opening scene shows an ageing man reciting a poem about his village of Jugovo Polje beside its road sign. The rhymes are somewhat laboured and the worldview expressed in the poem is slightly naive, evoking the idyll before the war and portraying the war itself as a kind of demon that appeared from nowhere. The scene is followed by material from a personal archive, showing the immediate consequences of the events of the early 1990s: a bare structure too large to be a single residential unit, yet not large enough to function as an industrial building. In the ruins, completely ransacked years earlier, a woman finds an old LP record, and the time capsule opens.

It takes us to a tavern called Jablan, meaning “poplar”, which operated in a village near a busy road. Its owner, Nikola, was a capable businessman, and his wife Milena had a gift for managing staff. During the day, endless meals were prepared for passing truckers, and countless coffees from the first espresso machine in the area were served. On weekend nights, the tavern turned into a folk music disco, with live performances by aspiring singers and even established stars brought in from Belgrade. The owners and staff lived in harmony and unity, while the guests kept spending their money and “producing” countless anecdotes. Questions of nationality were never raised – until nationalism reached Jablan through its guests in the early 1990s, when politicians were stirring people up for war.

However authentic it may be, the story is quite typical, touching on all of the familiar cornerstones of idyll and nostalgia. What makes Remember My Song stand out, however, is the filmmakers’ approach. Much of the film is built entirely from found VHS footage and photographic material re-shot by Željko Felbar and edited by Hrvoslava Brkušić, using experimental forward and rewind techniques to create a psychedelic effect. This effect is further enhanced by the use of (Serbian) folk music, which taps into deeply rooted emotions and is further distorted by being sourced directly from ageing VHS recordings. Over this material, Milena, the waiters, the cooks, the musicians and the regular singer Haska narrate the stories they have collected.

The filmmakers’ decision to shift their approach once the tavern’s golden years are over, turning to a series of shots of empty spaces filmed by Boško Đorđević, proves to be another effective choice, as the stylistic contrast works very well and highlights the consequences of war and destruction. In the end, with Remember My Song, Bosanac and Brzaković may be telling a well-known, oft-told story, but they do so in a captivating manner.

A Film a Week - The Stories

 previously published on Cineuropa

When we get to see some of “big history”, such as wars, political assassinations and military coups, unfolding virtually right before our eyes, it is safe to assume that, if we come out the other side unscathed, we will have many stories to recount about said events. This is the premise of Abu Bakr Shawky’s (Yomeddine) newest feature, The Stories, which has premiered in the official competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The place is Egypt, the time between 1967 and 1984. The film is structured into five chapters, each following our hero Ahmed (Amir El-Masri) and his colourful extended family during an episode set against a historical event, such as two wars against Israel in 1967 and 1973, the street riots against the pro-market reforms in 1977, and the assassination of president Anwar Sadat in 1981. When we first meet him, Ahmed is a gifted pianist living in a cramped house with his homemaker mother Fairouz, civil-servant father Ragheb and two brothers: his twin, Russian language and Soviet politics enthusiast Hassan, and Sharaf, who is into football, particularly the unlucky Zamalek club.

Their home is often visited by uncles and neighbours, his father might have got into trouble for uttering the word “corruption” on live television, the whole family is waging a “noise war” against the neighbour upstairs, and the brothers are targeted by bullies who support another club. Hassan has been drafted into the army just in time to participate in the Six-Day War, and Ahmed has started a pen-friendship with an Austrian girl called Elizabeth.

Six years later, Ahmed is in Vienna on a scholarship, courting Elizabeth (Valerie Pachner, from A Hidden Life), trying to dodge the proverbial bullets from her family, which is as chaotic as his own, and navigating his academic life under the wing of a casually racist bohemian professor and in the shadow of his more industrious rival Shams. When he hears the news about his brother getting killed in the Yom Kippur War, he has no choice but to return home. Four years later, Elizabeth comes to join him and his family, to fall into their chaotic dynamic, to witness the turmoil, to listen to their stories and start writing her own…

The Stories is a rare animal on the festival circuit, as it is an audience-friendly form of organised chaos that operates in a heightened emotional register and speaks about troubled life experiences in a fairly light-hearted way. In order to do so, Shawky relies heavily on a number of clichés, tropes and commonplaces, such as the actors’ rapid-fire dialogue, some hectic pans in Wolfgang Thaler’s cinematography and rapid cuts in Roland Stöttinger’s editing, as well as the loud sound design and even louder music, usually consisting of nationalist anthems and marches from the TV, contrasted with the modern, virtuoso pieces that Ahmed plays.

The thing is that these broad strokes usually work perfectly well, although more demanding viewers may pan the film on the grounds of exoticism exemplified by the slightly kitschy production design, the wild acting and the over-the-top sentimentality. But those things are here for a reason: they work in movies. And The Stories is just that, a fun movie that would fare better in theatres than on a festival circuit dominated by gloomy arthouse pieces. In a milieu like this, it constitutes a refreshing change.

A Film a Week - Whites Wash at Ninety / Belo se pere na devetdeset

 previously published on Cineuropa

In 2018, Slovenian writer Bronja Žakelj debuted with her autobiographical novel Whites Wash at Ninety, in which she, as a character, has to deal with a troubled childhood and youth during the 1980s and early 1990s, as she has to contend with tragedies and the passing of her loved ones. It became a bestseller in her home country and was later translated into eight more languages. Seven years later, the film adaptation of Whites Wash at Ninety by Marko Naberšnik, who also co-wrote the script with the author, has premiered at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival, in the Open Air section.

Young Bronja (Mei Rabič) is growing up in a vibrant household with her brother Rok (Jaka Mehle), mother Mita (Tjaša Železnik), father Janez (Jurij Zrnec) and grandmother Dada (Anica Dobra). Just as she is about to finish primary school, the first tragedy strikes, as she loses her mother to cancer. The second happens just as she finishes secondary school and starts her further studies, as she (with Lea Cok taking over the role) gets diagnosed with lymphoma. Shortly after she gets better, Rok (Žiga Šorli plays the part in adulthood) gets killed in a fatal climbing accident, and Dada gets ill and eventually dies. Bronja cannot count on much support from her father, who seems only to be passionate about politics and the end of communism, nor from her friends or boyfriends, who can scarcely cope with the intensity of her life. However, luckily, she always has something to live for.

As he demonstrated in his previous works, Marko Naberšnik is capable of handling multiple characters and directing actors as an ensemble (Rooster’s Breakfast), pulling off an epic story unfolding over an extended period of time (Shanghai Gypsy), and paying a lot of attention to period details, even when working on a tight budget (The Woods are Still Green). The latter is definitely the strongest point of Whites Wash at Ninety, since there are no flaws to be found in Maja Moravec’s production design, Nadja Bedjanić’s costumes or the authentic props deftly captured in Max Sušnik’s cinematography. On the level of each individual scene, Naberšnik showcases his precise execution.

The trouble, however, stems from the script, as the director and the novelist do not manage to “translate” the story or the emotions it carries from one medium to another. With the help of editor Milica Jelača, they have tried to introduce flashbacks to break up the chronological order and make the film appear more cinematic, but some more serious errors can be observed in the almost non-existent character development, as most individuals come off as borderline caricatures relegated to a single trait or emotion for a certain portion of the film, or even for the duration.

Lea Cok does her best to convince us of Bronja’s resilience and determination to go on with her life, and Tjaša Železnik channels Mita’s ethereal energy in the flashbacks, but Jurij Zrnec repeatedly hits the same notes as Janez, and Serbian star Anica Dobra seems miscast for the role of Dada. Dobra does her best, as she usually does, but the role of a caring granny does not suit the naturally glamorous thesp.

In the end, Whites Wash at Ninety might be viewed as way less than the sum of its parts, some of which are outstanding. It’s an example of something getting lost in translation between the media of literature and cinema. However, the status of its source material might make it at least a minor hit on home turf, despite the movie being so clunky.

A Film a Week - Bright Future / Viitor luminos

 previously published on Cineuropa

The abrupt fall of the long-lasting dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania seems to be a trendy topic in the realm of national cinema lately. Tudor Giurgiu dealt with it in his docudrama Freedom (2023) and Bogdan Mureşanu did so in his hyperlinked mosaic The New Year That Never Came (2024), while Vlad Petri also touched upon it in his documentary Between Revolutions (2023).

Producer-turned-filmmaker Andra MacMasters chose a different angle for her documentary and directorial debut, Bright Future, which could, for the most part, serve as a “prequel” of sorts to the aforementioned events. After its premiere at last year’s IDFA and a screening at this year’s edition of CPH:DOX, it is now playing in Beldocs’ The Battle for Reality section.

MacMasters opens the film with archival footage of Lenin’s monument being transported and placed on its pedestal in Bucharest, showcasing the conviction of Romanian communists and their dedication to the cause. She will come back home for the poignant ending, but in the meantime, the filmmaker takes us on a trip to Pyongyang, where the 13th edition of the World Youth and Student Festival took place. The large Romanian delegation had an especially honourable status there, owing to the “extraordinary friendship” between Ceauşescu and North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. It was the summer of 1989, and the collapse of the regime was just six months away.

The festival itself was organised by the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students. For the latter, it was the last edition of the gathering: it would also be declared illegal later that year owing to its ties with communist regimes. The festival itself was not ideologically strict, as it brought together 20,000 people from left-leaning youth and student organisations from 177 countries, but the fact that it took place in the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen Square exposed the divisions between the delegations from the West and those from the communist countries. However, some topics they did have in common, and those topics are still present in the global left-wing discourse: the colonial past and neo-colonial present; the fight for human, women’s and gay rights; the fight against capitalism, imperialism and climate change; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and support for the oppressed.

The footage filmed by amateur filmmaker and educator Emilian Urse shows us the atmosphere of the festival: the theatrical ceremonies, the heated debates and the parties where we can witness oddities such as the whole hall singing and dancing to the Korean-language cover of the Modern Talking song “Brother Louie”. Through it, we can see the youthful, idealistic zeal and the high hopes for a “bright future”, as well as the political games that were being played on that level as well. Although we know that the end of the Cold War was near, the subjects remain completely unaware of it, despite some warning signs.

But in spite of the film containing some clandestinely obtained footage (the abundant use of fish-eye lenses is a dead giveaway), it is quite “creative” as a documentary. Most of its narrative material comes from printed sources, which vary from communist countries’ official press publications to Western press and archives, and it is read out by voice actors in a variety of languages off screen. It is deftly welded together by editor Andrei Gorgan, but it still remains very much Andra MacMasters’ work both in terms of the research and the overall finished product. On the surface, Bright Future might be about the past, but it challenges its viewers to reflect on their present and future.

A Film a Week - Spilt Milk

 previously published on Cineuropa

An old proverb teaches us that there is no use crying over spilt milk, but what happens when milk is not milk, but rather somebody’s own flesh and blood? Parents do not give up on their sons, no matter how “prodigal” they might be, and siblings do not abandon one another in decent families. With his debut feature, Brian Durnin takes us to 1984 Dublin to tell the story of a boy who fancies himself as a detective, his large and noisy family, his faithful friend and the quest he embarks on. Spilt Milk has just premiered in the International Youth Competition programme at the Just Film Festival, which unspools alongside Tallinn Black Nights.

The boy-detective in question is Bobby O’Brien (newcomer Cillian Sullivan), who is obsessed with the Kojak series, and considers its titular protagonist his idol and role model. He wants to become a detective and meets all of the requirements to be one, such as possessing an eye for detail, the power of deduction and the will to never give up. He even has a start-up idea for an agency of sorts, but he is not being taken seriously by his schoolmates or at home, and therefore, he can only rely on his best friend, Nell (Naoise Kelly, also a newcomer), who is willing to follow him on his adventures, even if it means she will get into trouble.

At home, the situation is somewhat dire, since there is constant quarrelling between the wise Nan (Pom Boyd), hardworking father John (Laurence O’Fuarain), brave mother Maura (Danielle Galligan) and Bobby’s older brother Oisin (Lewis Brophy). The times are uncertain, the economic crisis cannot be denied, and it seems that Oisin’s inability to find a job is something his father cannot tolerate any more, but his punkish attitude could also be covering up for something. When Oisin suddenly disappears, Bobby gets his first “case”: to find him, no matter what. One clue leads to another, and everything points in the direction of dreaded gangster Jim Kane, but the truth is actually closer to home: it involves Oisin’s buddies Paddy, Tommy and Decco, and the drug-use epidemic plaguing the town.

Spilt Milk starts in one genre key and one emotional register – as a warm, quirky comedy about an imaginative kid who plays detective games in real life – only to slowly morph into something much darker and more dramatic. Sometimes, it is a bumpy ride, especially when the child actors have to nail the stronger emotions for the first time, exposing the inexperience on their side and on the side of the helmer by extension, but in the end, it pays off. The more experienced, older actors give grounded performances, and the kids shine when they are left to play kids and act accordingly. There is also a sense of nostalgic warmth in the film that can be observed in Cathal Watters’ cinematography, bathed in warm colours with occasional lens flares, and in the music that mixes the synth-heavy detective-flick cues of the original score with different flavours of rock, punk and new wave present on the ambient side.

However, the transition to darker material and the bravery to do so in an unapologetic manner, on the part of both Durnin and scriptwriter Cara Loftus, are what makes Spilt Milk stand out among the myriad safe, heart-warming films for children and youth audiences, where there is a lot of talk about certain things, usually along didactic lines, but where the real ugliness and pain are never shown. Here, it seems genuine and heart-felt.

A Film a Week - Rita

 previously published on Cineuropa

The greatest thing that Spanish actress-turned-filmmaker Paz Vega has done with her directorial debut, Rita, is that she convinces the audience that they are watching one movie until the very end, when it turns into something quite different. Rita has just premiered on Locarno’s Piazza Grande. Given the star power of Vega, here fulfilling a four-fold role (that of writer, helmer, actress in a prominent part and executive producer), and the urgency of its topic, it could gain some more festival exposure, a theatrical release in the Spanish-speaking world, and then end up on television worldwide.

The titular protagonist is a seven-year-old girl (played by magnetic newcomer Sofía Allepuz) who lives in Seville with her family, consisting of the taxi-driver father José Manuel (Roberto Álamo, glimpsed in supporting roles in numerous Spanish films), homemaker mother Mari (the filmmaker herself) and younger brother Lolo (Alejandro Escamilla). The year is 1984, it’s late spring, and the Spanish national football team is doing well in the European Championship tournament, which seems to be the father’s main preoccupation.

In the meantime, Rita spends most of her time playing with her brother or with her neighbour of the same age, Nito (Daniel Navarro), or being taken care of by her mother or by their neighbour Chari (Paz de Alarcón) when the mother has to run errands or visit the ailing grandmother. As we watch the events unfold from her sensitive, yet playful, perspective, we observe certain things: her dad’s quick temper and negative attitude towards the world, but especially towards the mother; her mum's initially silent, but later more vocal, despair; and her brother’s fear and panic attacks whenever the parents argue. All of this leads to the notion that home is not necessarily a safe place (especially for her mother) and that Rita’s growing up is no fairy tale.

Allepuz is a perfect choice for the role of Rita because of her natural energy that easily transforms into an organic chemistry with her acting partners, both the children and the adults. Álamo does a great job of hiding José Manuel’s menace behind a façade of the typical blue-collar blues, while Vega offers a master class in playing Mari’s sadness – that of a woman unable to do a single thing about her misfortune.

Apart from her acting talent, which we have also witnessed in more than 70 previous roles, in Rita, Vega also demonstrates a knack for storytelling, both as a writer and as a director. Her script is cleverly written and masterfully controlled by her directing, with a good sense of visual narration. She uses simple tricks such as the levitating camera movements in Eva Díaz Iglesias’s cinematography and an abundant use of lower angles to mimic the perspective of a child. The editing by Ana Álvarez-Ossorio keeps the pace at a moderate level, while the score on piano with some orchestration by Pablo Cervantes further accentuates the dreaminess and the gentleness associated with a carefree childhood.

The end result is something akin to a collection of detailed, yet diffuse, memories constructed around a series of events that the child protagonist could only see as low-intensity ones. However, darker tones are always subtly hinted at, and gradually introduced and amplified. By the end of the film, those innuendos converge into a striking, harrowing picture of abuse, making Rita an unpleasant, yet necessary, wake-up call.

A Film a Week - In Old Augustin's House / Im Haus der alten Augustin

 previously published on Cineuropa

It is the year 1986 in rural Austria, and our protagonist, Albin (played by the filmmaker himself), is basically a ne’er-do-well slacker who poses as a local artist, spending most of his time drinking and provoking reactions from his friends on the “scene”, as well as the regular people he sees as the audience. The first blow he is about to receive is the fact that his princess-like girlfriend Ida (Lisa-Carolin Nemec, glimpsed in Katharina Mückstein’s L’Animale [+]) cannot tolerate his shenanigans any more and is about to leave him. The second is the realisation that his preferred genre of naturalism has been considered dead for almost a century.

That is the point when a fellow naturalist, a mysterious man named Herbert (Thomas Erlmoser), briefly appears in his life and scares him both with his authentic “artistic craziness” and with a comment about Ida: apparently, he remembers her coming to piano lessons as a child, which took place in a house on the edge of town where he used to live. Unfortunately, Herbert is soon killed in a railway accident, leaving Albin with two tasks: to try to make up with Ida, which might not be so easy, given that her influential father and avid hunter Dr Hampapa (Clemens Aap Lindenberg) could never stand him; and to try to investigate Herbert’s past and his connection to her family. The secrets once buried deep down surface, and the key to understanding them may lie in the titular house…

Im Haus der alten Augustin starts off as a breezy mix of romantic comedy, and family and relationship drama, but progressively turns into a neo-noir and mystery-thriller. The resolution might seem a bit of a stretch, but the journey leading up to it is more than satisfying. Fuelled by secrets, which are the staple of the genres the film dabbles in, it also says a thing or two about Austrian society in general. The devil is in the detail, and the choice to set the movie during the year of Kurt Waldheim’s election as chancellor is no coincidence.

Filming a period piece on a modest budget is no easy task, but Pribek manages this in a creative manner by playing multiple roles. Apart from writing, directing and starring in the film, he also serves as its co-editor and production and costume designer, channelling the punkish, DIY energy further highlighted by the sound design and music choices of his friend and collaborator David Hebenstreit. Cinematographer Dymtro Yamkovyi is often under pressure to perform in terms of channelling the 1980s style, which sometimes plays out in an uneven manner, but the gripping story full of curveballs, the smooth transition through the genres, the natural chemistry among the cast members and Pribek’s steady-handed control over the whole thing make Im Haus der alten Augustin a raw gemstone that might just need a little bit of polishing to qualify as an impressive debut.

A Film a Week - Patient No. 1 / Patsient #1

 previously published on Cineuropa

The early-to-mid 80s in the former Soviet Union were known as “the time of state funerals,” given that party leaders and heads of state were dying in quick succession one after another. They were old when they “inherited” power and were basically the tools of a system that was running on fumes and powered by inertia. Georgian filmmaker Rezo Gigineishvili takes us back to that period of time with his newest feature Patient #1, which has just opened the official competition of this year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

When we meet our protagonist, a nurse named Sasha (Olga Makeeva), her primary concern is to prepare her singing act for the nurses’ ball that is about to take place in the hospital. Out of the blue, she is selected, interviewed by a high-ranking party member (Igor Chernevich) and approved to become the primary nurse who discreetly takes care of a very special patient. That patient is none other than the Secretary General (Aleksandr Filipenko), a man in such ill health that he can barely support his vital functions, but one who still believes that he has real power.

At first, it seems like a job like any other, for which Sasha’s special skills of being discreet, polite and unobtrusive come in handy. But the situation is way more complex for her, for the hospital, for the Party and for the whole state. Simply put, different players have different requests, political and personal, for the Secretary General whose mind is not quite sound, and most of them see Sasha as the designated channel of communication. She has no other option than to try to balance different powers greater than herself, and she cannot take any rest. The questions are “why?” and “for how long?”, and the answer may lie in the motto that power is never to be given, but always to be taken.

Rezo Gigineishvili has made a career directing commercials, music videos and Russian-language repertoire romantic comedies before achieving notoriety on the film festival circuit with the based-on-true-events Georgian-language film Hostages in 2017. That film was similarly set in the 1980s and likewise dealt with a system running on its own inertia, through the story of a futile attempt by a group of young, West-leaning intellectuals to escape by hatching a plan to hijack a plane. With Patient #1, the period is the same, but the mood is even gloomier. There is no youthful enthusiasm or dreams of escape, and even when Sasha manages to sneak away for the night to blow off some steam at a dance party, the Party has no trouble finding her.

Gigineishvili masterfully commands the sombre mood. The narrow aspect ratio, the desaturated colours of the interiors and the brutalist angular buildings in the rare exterior shots make the point on their own, as do the contrasts between the usually static shots that depict the reality and the hand-held ones that show the darkly dreamy, almost nightmarish insights into the mind of a person who thinks that he still has power. The mood is further coloured by Giya Kancheli’s score which moves from a minimalist, almost atonal palette at the beginning, towards the neoclassical, before finally ending in the rock realm.

The performances are also inspired throughout. There is more than a drop of Jessica Chastain in Olga Makeeva’s interpretation of Sasha, which comes handy for the interplay with the rest of the ensemble. Veteran actor Aleksandr Filipenko proves to be a perfect choice to portray both the fragility and the conviction of a dying party leader, while one scene is enough for Inna Churikova, playing his wife, to deliver an acting masterclass in her final big screen role.

Deliberately slow-paced to communicate a sense of gravity, Patient #1 serves as an evocative reminder of bygone times. As such, it is also a potent comment of our current times which also run on fumes and inertia.

A Film a Week - Imago / Stale niestala

 previously published on Cineuropa

When it comes to natural-born outsiders, their time seemingly never comes, even if the stars align so that they are at their very peak when times are changing. One such outsider is the heroine of Olga Chajdas’ second feature, Imago, which has just premiered in the Proxima competition of the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Ela (Lena Góra, an up-and-coming actress and screenwriter) is a young woman, an aspiring artist living in the Tricity area on the Baltic coast of Poland in the revolutionary late 1980s. Solidarność is about to overthrow the communist government and take the country in a new, democratic direction, but this is not one of Ela’s concerns. Misunderstood by her family, led by her simple-minded mother (the great Bogusława Schubert, of The Double Life of Véronique and Europa Europa fame), Ela tries to carve out a niche for herself in life through art and meditation. Prone to fits, a situation which leads to a stint in a psychiatric hospital, Ela actually has a bipolar personality disorder that drives her inner demons to torment her.

In this environment, she can only count on her on-again-off-again boyfriend Tomek, who does not always understand her, but is more than willing to play along with her madness. But it is actually Stach, a tough-looking, self-taught painter, who ignites her flame of passion in the romantic sense, while the band whose club gig she interrupts by coming up on stage and starting to improvise the lyrics and singing sparks her flame of artistic inspiration. When she joins them, Ela is on the way to becoming a national, or at least a regional, post-punk heroine, Malwina The Cosmic Mother, until she realises that she is pregnant, which leads to an attempt to adjust to the norms of a whole other type of horror, known as parenthood.

Co-written by Chajdas (best known for her award-winning 2018 effort) and lead actress Lena Góra, Imago actually tells the story of Góra’s own mother, Ela, an artist who never got the recognition she had hoped for. She has the thankless task of playing a character so painfully close to her, but she dives into it head first, relying on her perfect instincts to create one of the most memorable arthouse film characters of late. Chajdas’s directing is also intuitive and energetic, using the striking cinematography of Tomasz Naumik (known for his work on Claire Denis’ High Life and Agnieszka Holland’s Mr. Jones), which captures that late-1980s shift in culture, Pavel Hrdlička’s rhythmic editing and the fitting music composed by Andrzej Smolik to recreate the dark and gloomy, but still very much alive-and-kicking, atmosphere of post-punk music.

Finally, Imago serves well as a compilation of horrors, both personal and societal, in its classical, three-act structure. The first act, dealing with the terror of being young and misunderstood in a grey, hopeless place, and the third one, broaching the horrors of not being ready for caring for a baby, work perfectly thanks to their manic energy, while a lull in the tempo is sensed somewhere in the middle of the film, when its protagonist unsuccessfully tries to fit in as a “normal” person. Nevertheless, the slower pace is not so dramatic as to seriously hinder the film as a whole. Imago is as impressive as a killer song lurking somewhere on the B-side of a record by a semi-obscure but still great band from the 1980s.

A Film a Week - Seoul Vibe / Seouldaejakjeon

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

“Seoul Vibe”, the newest film directed by Moon Hyun-sung (whose previous works include 2012 period sports drama “As One” and 2017 even more period crime-mystery “The King’s Case Note”), certainly promises a lot of fun. It is a period piece set in the politically interesting times in recent history, and an action comedy with a lot of car chases. Regarding those things, it is a bit of pity that it came to us via Netflix, meaning only on the small screens, since a movie theatre feels like a natural setting for watching such a flick.

We meet our protagonists, Dong-wook (Yoo Ah-in, the star of Lee Chang-dong’s masterpiece “Burning”) and Joon-gi (Ong Seong-wu) at the end of their mission in Saudi Arabia where they were tasked by their Korean boss with transporting guns and ammo across the desert in the back of a pick-up truck. After the job accomplished and paid, they return back to Seoul with a dream of taking a part in the famous Daytona race in the United States. Back in Seoul, the landscape they used to know does not exist anymore: it’s 1988, the military dictatorship is overthrown and the Summer Olympics are about to get underway. Unfortunately for them, it also means that their neighbourhood has been demolished in the process of the preparations for the biggest sporting event in the country and in the world. Luckily, their garage hideout is intact, so the dream can go on.

However, the ambitious prosecutor Ahn (Oh Jung-se, glimpsed in “The Call” and “Swing Kids”) has plans of his own for the extended crew that also includes the aspiring DJ Woo-sam (Go Kyung-pyo, “Decision to Leave”), the cabbie Bok-nam (Lee Kyoo-hyung) and Don-wook’s motorbike-riding kid sister Yoon-hee (Park Ju-hyun) and knows enough about their illegal activities to lock them up or to get their US visas denied. So he enlists them to infiltrate into a loan-sharking criminal clan lead by Director Lee (Kim Seong-gyoon, recently glimpsed in “Sinkhole”), but the goal of their investigation is the dictatorship’s slash fund, while the general’s wife Kang In-sook (Moon So-ri of “The Handmaiden” fame) is the missing link (and the film’s main villain) herself. But first, the crew has to pass the driving test…

To say that “Seoul Vibe” is a loud film would be an understatement. It actually screams on the most of the fields: the action is breath-taking, the twists are sharp, the comedy is broad, the visual design is striking, so are the visual effects and practical stunts, and, on top of that, the whole thing is dipped in funk and hip-hop soundtrack by Nene Kang and DJ Soulscape. Actually, it could serve as the Korean mainstream cinema answer to the contemporary Hollywood car-chase action franchises like “Fast and Furious” and “Need for Speed”, with an addition of retro-styling, retro-cars and 80s pastel colour scheme.

However, the trouble is that it contains too much of everything. The presence of too many characters hampers their development and sentences the actors to broad-stroke acting, resulting in only the villainess Kang being the memorable one. Too many twists and turns result in convoluted plot and, combined with overly elaborate action sequences, in the runtime of 140 minutes that certainly takes its toll. Although Moon’s directing is pretty sure-handed and the craft components are solid throughout, there is only that much that could be done with Shin Sua’s script, and it is especially obvious without the packed movie theatre magic.

There were two ways out of it. One could be streamlining of the plot in order for the runtime to be kept under or around two-hour-mark. The second is a further development of the material for another format, namely the mini-series that would actually suit the distribution channel. Still, “Seoul Vibe” is far from a bad effort, but it is also far from a perfect one.

A Film a Week - So Long Daddy, See You in Hell / Servus Papa - See You in Hell

 previously published on Cineuropa

 For various reasons, ideals and ideologies struggle to withstand reality, so they must adapt to new circumstances. Religious cults, colonies and hippie communes of the 20^th century might serve as a faithful illustration of this claim. One such commune, along with its leader and a bright, rebellious teen, stands at the centre of Servus Papa – See You in Hell, which is the latest film co-written and directed by seasoned German director Christopher Roth. The film had its world premiere on home turf at the Munich Film Festival, while its first international premiere took place within Black Nights’ Official Competition in Tallinn.

It's Austria in the late ‘80s. The Cold War is coming to an end, but news from the outside world has little effect on a commune located on a river island (or is it a peninsula?) somewhere near the Hungarian border. This commune is a central part of a wider system of similar establishments located in or around various European cities, such as Frankfurt, Munich, Amsterdam and Zurich. It’s led by its chief ideologist, the self-appointed “King” and “Daddy” Otto (Clemens Schick), who employs a mixture of brainwashing, menace and manipulation. His ideology blends counter-culture with Marxism: sex is encouraged, but romantic relationships and nuclear families are forbidden as bourgeois inventions. The kids grow up and go to school together under the auspices of Otto and his predominantly female aides, while their parents are only allowed to visit them every once in a while.

Jeanne (Jana McKinnon) has lived and grown up in this commune since she was two years old. As an adolescent, however, she starts to feel more than just physical attraction for the commune’s horse handler Jean (Leo Altaras), which is against the rules and noticed by Otto, who also takes an uncomfortably perverse interest in the young woman. Jeanne is perceptive and smart enough to fend off the leader’s advances, but she might need to find a more permanent solution. On the other hand, the commune, its ideology and its way of life are the only things she knows.

Co-written by Roth and Jeanne Tremsal, the script is based on the latter’s own experience of growing up in such a commune, whose leader was eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1991, for various crimes including sex offenses against minors. At the beginning of the film, Roth opts for a style which simulates an observational documentary, with shaky, hand-held camerawork by Lydia Richter, faux-VHS shots blended into the wider footage, and occasional jump cuts in the editing, which is taken in hand by the director himself. The film’s exposition is also prolonged, taking up almost half of the film’s nigh-on two-hour runtime, with Roth and Tremsal seeming more interested in exposing the commune’s functioning than in exploring the plot and characters. Meanwhile, the framing technique which sees the whole first half of the film reduced to a flashback seems a little stale.

The real plot kicks off with a change of style - calmer camerawork and cleaner cutting - but it turns out to be a little too late for developing all of the film’s important ideas on totalitarian practice and how it contradicts ideals of freedom, and the need for a revolution against the tyrannical powers that be. Luckily, the spot-on casting and eclectic musical choices, which range from pop to punk tunes, help this ambitious near-miss to go down smoother than expected.

A Film a Week - The Land Within

 previously published on Cineuropa

Kosovar-born, Swiss-based filmmaker Fisnik Maxville (also known as Fisnik Maxhuni) has forged a career in shorts and in documentaries of various lengths and styles. His two feature-length works Zvicra (2018) and Fin de Partie (2020) explored the relations between his two countries through the lenses of Kosovar-Albanian immigrants living in Switzerland and the Swiss coach taking the lead of the Kosovar national football team, respectively. After taking a break from such topics and exploring an intriguing reversed-colonialism scenario in Nostromo (2021), Maxville comes back to his homeland with his feature-length fiction debut, The Land Within, which has just premiered in Tallinn Black Nights’ First Feature Competition.

After fleeing Kosovo during the 1998/99 war and spending the ten subsequent years in Geneva, Remo (Florist Bajgora, very active in different cinematic contexts of late) gets a call from his cousin Una (Kosovar-French actress Luàna Bajrami, of Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Final Cut fame) to ask him to go back to his native village, which is now in ruins. The family patriarch, Skender, is dying, and as the only male offspring of the clan, Remo has to be there at the time of Skender’s death. Most of the inhabitants of the village were killed during the war, so the team of international scientists is excavating the mass graves, trying to identify the victims, for which they need the help of Una, Remo and the rest of the surviving villagers. Other than that, the roads to the village have been closed owing to signs of wolves being present in a nearby forest, and the frequent power cuts put Skender’s life in danger.

But as the bodies are exhumed, family secrets also surface, starting with the fact that Remo was not just the adopted son of the family, and that Skender ruled the clan with an iron fist, fuelling the ethnic tensions and mixing personal conflicts with ethnic ones in a highly combustible cocktail. How can the surviving extended family members live with one another and with themselves now that these buried secrets are coming to light?

Maxville takes his time in plotting and revealing the mystery, relying on several flashbacks all set in the 1980s, with each bearing its own title. However, the plot seems a little too convoluted, even by the standards of the topics dealt with here: family secrets, the 1990s Balkan wars, ethnic tensions and coping with guilt. The dialogue, written by Maxville in collaboration with Mathilde Henzelin, is at times a tad too cryptic and at others very poetic, while sometimes it sounds like political slogans, so it serves more as a distraction than as a way to prove a point.

However, Maxville is better at being a visual storyteller than a verbal one, and he is more than capable of channelling the atmosphere of hopelessness and being stuck in a state of limbo between a traumatising past and an uncertain future. He utilises the cinematography by Yann Maritaud, with its muddy-grey colours and different lighting and granulation for different timelines, to paint a picture of his characters’ emotions, while the cues in Nicolas Rabales’ score elicit emotions within the viewer, sometimes too directly, but never in an obviously manipulative way. Maxville should also be praised for his work with the actors, especially with the leading duo tasked with channelling complex emotions. Both Bajgora and Bajrami have arguably offered up their best acting performances to date in The Land Within.

A Film a Week - The Uncle / Stric

 previously published on Cineuropa

Ah, Christmas… An endless amount of effort and constant anxiety attacks for all members of the household, all for the sake of fitting in with the socially imposed ideals of celebration and “holiday spirit”. The work and the anxiety are doubled if it’s a larger gathering, and you can triple it if a rich relative from abroad is coming, as a real show must be put on. This particular Christmas gathering with an uncle coming from Germany to socialist Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia) in the 1980s, as envisioned by Andrija Mardešić and David Kapac in their feature debut, The Uncle, which has opened the new Proxima competition at Karlovy Vary, is something that will not be easily forgotten.

The family, consisting of the father (Goran Bogdan, very active recently in Croatian, regional and even global cinema), the mother (Ivana Roščić, of Mare and Tereza37 fame) and their twenty-something son (the young and talented Roko Sikavica), are awaiting the titular uncle (star actor Predrag Miki Manojlović, best known for his collaborations with Emir Kusturica on the filmmaker’s earlier works). Once he arrives in his blue Mercedes, the spectacle incorporating religious overtones and nationalist undertones begins. Not everything is perfect: the turkey is undercooked and the cookies are burnt, the son is acting like a teenager for some reason, and the authoritative uncle is too condescending towards the family and visibly displeased with some of their questions. Other strange “glitches” do appear in that 1980s reality, which cast doubt on whether anything in this constructed setting is real.

As it turns out, it is not. It is a show “written and directed” by the uncle, who knows exactly what he wants, but doesn’t have the skills to make it happen. Repeating itself in circles day after day, this show conceals a far more sinister plot of emotional and mental, and sometimes even physical, abuse.

The duo’s filmmaking influences are pretty obvious, from the works of Michael Haneke (especially Funny Games) to Yorgos Lanthimos (most notably Dogtooth, but The Uncle sometimes ends up in darker, less well-charted territory that we have not yet seen in Croatian cinema. Their attention to detail, constructing the reality of the late-1980s and early-1990s Croatian emigrant workers posing as dissidents while flying a nationalistic and hyper-religious flag, is commendable, as it is obvious from the production and costume design, the fitting choice of synth musical score composed by Miro Manojlović and the VHS segments masterfully edited into the largely digitally shot material. The crisp cinematography by Miloš Jaćimović (Ivan Ikić’s Barbarians and Oasis) adds a layer or two of coldness to this atmospheric piece.

Mardešić and Kapac are also pretty good at working with the actors. Miki Manojlović still has the star power of an actor in his prime and can now dive headfirst into playing the malevolent figure. Bogdan and Roščić have some convincing chemistry together as a cowardly father and a mother on the verge of a breakdown, respectively, while Sikavica channels weirdness and helplessness convincingly.

However, there is a problem with the circular structure and the number of repetitions, which results in complications when it comes to the drip-feeding of the information revealed, the twists and turns, and the gradual changes in the atmosphere. Indeed, the entire middle part of the film, from the end of the first repetition to the last couple, drags on and feels a tad repetitive. Nevertheless, The Uncle is an intriguing debut that showcases the talents of its two creators, and which will surely surprise domestic and international audiences.

A Film a Week - Minari

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

The biography and the filmmaking career path of the American auteur Lee Isaac Chung is a bit peculiar. Born to the first-generation Korean immigrant parents, he grew up in rural Arkansas, studied ecology at Yale and planned to go to a medical school before giving it up for his filmmaking dream. After a number of shorts realized during his studies at the University of Utah, his shot his first feature “Munyurangabo” (2007) in Rwanda and in Kinyarwanda language (as the first ever narrative feature film). It premiered at Cannes to a great critical reception, signalling a significant talent on the rise. His next two features, “Lucky Life” (2010) and “Abigail Harm” (2012) were more to the typical American indie side, while he went back to Rwanda to co-direct a documentary called “I Have Seen My Last Born” (2015).

For his last one, “Minari”, premiering cum laudae at last year’s Sundance, he went back to his personal history. It paid off, awards- and reviews-wise, bringing the significant amount of buzz in the pre-Oscars season. Some of the reporters hurried to draw a parallel to the last year’s Oscars sensation, Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite”, but aside from the nominations prospects and the label “Korean” attached to them, there are no significant similarities between the two. Chung’s film is actually a quiet, deeply personal indie account of a Korean-American family moving from the city in California to a farm in Arkansas in the 80s in order to pursue their own piece of the elusive American Dream.

“Minari” opens with gentle music, a sunny day and a family travelling in the car to their new “home”, a long defunct trailer in the middle of the field. Pater familias Jacob (Steven Yeun, magnificent as always) has a dream of self-made success with a farm specialized in Korean vegetables to be sold to the ever-growing Korean community in the American heartland. The mother Monica (Han Ye-ri, giving a heartful performance) is not a firm believer in the idea, but she is willing to give it a go as a sign of support to her husband. They have two children, the older daughter Annie (the newcomer Noel Kate Cho) and the younger son David (Alan Kim) who has some heart problem and who is our focal point and the director’s alter-ego of sorts.

The parents work long hours at the nearby hatchery and spend most of their time at home arguing, while the children, especially David, are exciting about the prospects of the life on the farm and are willing to help out. The arrival of their grandmother, Monica’s mother Soon-ja (Yun Yuh-ying, glimpsed as the protagonist’s demented mother in last year’s “Beasts Clawing at Straws”) is supposed to be a game changer, but the elderly Korean woman hardly fits into the children’s vision of what a grandmother is supposed to be like. While every modest success seems to be overshadowed with a greater failure, the real question is can the family stay together in the seemingly never-ending times of crisis?

Demonstrating a considerable script economy skill, Chung manages to touch a number of serious topics like immigration, fitting into a community while being a standout, the outdatedness of the American Dream concept, war trauma and post-war poverty in Korea, as well as the family dynamics driven by success and failure. He also spices things up with some subtle and also not so subtle humorous moments based on the generational differences. The title after an Asian wild herb often used as spice in Korean cuisine is being used as a clear and potent metaphor.

Chung’s directing style is soft, which is reflected in all of the technical aspects of the film. The camerawork of Lachlan Milne, most notable for lensing Taika Waititi’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople”, stresses all the differences between the wide open spaces and the cramped indoors ones. Harry Yoon, who edited the fast-moving Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit”, now had to work in a different gear, but the sense of rhythm is clear even in pretty slow pacing. The gentle music composed by Emile Mosseri fits the movie well to the point it is rarely noticeable. It is evident that Chung takes his precious time and space to let the characters breathe and develop and to let the situations play out in a naturalistic fashion.

Being a character-driven piece of cinema, “Minari” demands a lot from the actors. Steven Yeun clearly has the star power, but here he is quite subdued as a man who has to find a balance between his obsession with the success of his project and the (sometimes stern) love for his family. Han Ye-ri is equally marvellous as a woman tired of her husband’s escapades, but devoted to the sense of the family sticking together. While Annie is slightly under-developed as a character, David and the granny are the primary source of the film’s humour with their banter. Playing a card of a sweet boy with a rebellious side to it, Alan Kim quickly wins the hearts of the audience, while Yun Yuh-ying makes her character’s fish-out-of-water quirkiness work perfectly.

Serious, but warm, gentle, but not too loose, dramatic, but not melodramatic, “Minari” is a lovely piece of cinema that hits on an emotional level. As such, it might serve as a dark horse in the awards season.