A Film a Week - The Crystal Planet / Kristalni planet

 previously published on Cineuropa

After the death of the only Yugoslav Oscar winner, Dušan Vukotić (1927-1998), who won his statuette for the animated short The Substitute (1961), it took Croatian filmmaker Arsen Anton Ostojić a decade to ask for and acquire the rights to film Vukotić’s unfinished feature-length animated project The Crystal Planet, for which the latter also wrote the story. It was a further decade or so before Ostojić actually started making the project come to life. The modern animated feature is now completed and ready to be presented to a worldwide audience. After its world premiere at the Zlín Film Festival, it was presented to the Croatian public at the Pula Film Festival, where it won the Special Golden Arena for its contribution to Croatian animation.

After her mother’s death in an accident, 11-year-old girl Rea reluctantly moves with her engineer father, Val, to the titular crystal planet in order to start a new life. The father is about to begin a new job as the right-hand man to the robot-factory owner and ruler of the planet, Governor Mordokan. The entrepreneur’s newest inventions are (still glitchy) robotic pets, as animals are forbidden on the planet. Elections are just around the corner, and Val’s efforts are needed to secure the governor’s victory against rival candidate Sandra, who campaigns on environmental issues.

All Rea wants is to go back to Earth, which she still calls home. But things begin to change when she meets and befriends her next-door neighbour, Sandra’s son Andy. On one of their first adventures, they encounter and save the cub of a local animal species and realise that the planet has its own ecosystem that is being endangered by the pollution created by Mordokan’s factory. They try to keep their find a secret, but the revelation threatens to rewrite all of the rules on the planet. Two single-parent families, with the help of the intelligent and empathetic species, must therefore fight the establishment.

The Crystal Planet is clearly aimed at younger audiences, so one shouldn’t expect any kind of nuance in delivering its environmentally conscious message. The heroes and villains simply wear their allegiances, and often their thoughts and inner turmoil, on their sleeves. The storytelling also suffers from some deus ex machina plot devices and twists, while mimicking the US style of children’s animation and even introducing a couple of songs as transitions between the acts. However, the script written by Ostojić, Aleksandar Žiljak and Brett Shumway redeems itself with some warm-hearted humour and a good helping of sincerity.

On the technical side, the combination of model-based animation and CGI serves its purpose perfectly well, as it is blended together smoothly, so the work of the team of animators should be commended. The same goes for Tomáš Sysel’s cinematography, which creates the sense of a well-rounded world while capturing the heroes in action and the rich background textures at the same time. Arsen Anton Ostojić’s sure-handed directing might come as a surprise for an animation first-timer (although he did co-produce one such title, The Oddsockeaters, back in 2016), and the editing by Lucie Haladová helps everything flow smoothly while keeping the running time around the 90-minute mark.

The Crystal Planet is a very ambitious film. The existence of dubbed versions in several languages, including the worldwide one in English (voiced by, among others, Jeremy Irons, Vanessa Redgrave and Michael York), could help the movie cross several borders. In the context of Croatian cinema, it is a valuable addition to the recently revived tradition of feature-length animation for younger audiences.

A Film a Week - Small Things / Male stvari

 previously published on Cineuropa

Although Zvonimir Jurić’s body of work is not particularly large for a career spanning more than 30 years, with only three feature-length films helmed solely by him and six more made in collaboration with other filmmakers, he is regarded as one of the finest and most respected Croatian auteurs. The reason for this might lie in the fact that he does not seek approval, but instead picks his projects carefully and sticks to a certain realist, naturalistic style when commenting on the reality of Croatia, whether addressing hooliganism (Sex, Drink and Bloodshed, 2004), war crimes from the 1990s (The Blacks), or the gloominess of village life during the transition period (The Reaper).

Now Jurić has a new film, Small Things, an adaptation of a short story by the Croatian film critic, journalist and prose writer Jurica Pavičić, that comments on the contemporary Croatian reality and the fading of the family ties due to hastened way of life, class stratification, money and personal troubles, as well as everyday hardships. The film has just premiered at Pula Film Festival.

The film takes place on a small island not far from the coastal town of Split, where three generations of an ordinary working-class family gather to finalise the deal regarding the sale of the land for a future investment project and the division of the money. The father (thespian Izudin Bajrović, in a quiet and folksy mood) is old and ailing, but, as a man of few words, he does not complain and instead tries to keep the family together. His daughter Irena (Ivana Roščić) is a recently separated sad-sack who has also brought her two children, Kate and Ivor (played by newcomers Bepina Baričeveić and Borna Mihovilović, respectively), who keep arguing and fighting. The other daughter, Anica (Marija Škaričić), also tries to carry out her father’s balancing act, but she is not ready to move on from a recent loss in her life. The son Ivan (played by actor and filmmaker Juraj Lerotić, behind the international success Safe Place) is depressed and, the family fears, potentially suicidal. The atmosphere is gloomy, and some unspoken things and resentments begin to surface over the course of a few grey winter days…

The script written by Jurić and Pavičić displays some dramaturgical excellence, both in the completely natural-sounding dialogue and in the timing of seemingly small but significant revelations, as well as much-needed moments of relief from the overwhelming gloominess. It also serves the actors perfectly, allowing them to deliver their lived-in, low-key bravura performances. The cast, consisting of Croatian A-listers, seizes this opportunity, whether in the lead roles or in the episodic parts, as is the case with Snježana Sinovčič Šiškov in the role of the neighbour.

Unlike some of his previous films, which were marked by dynamic camerawork, Jurić here opts almost exclusively for long, carefully framed static shots lensed by Marko Brdar that highlight the staleness of life, whether the reason for that staleness is old age, personal crisis, depression or simply the weather. The atmosphere is further emphasised by the absence of music, the sound design by Julij Zornik and Ognjen Popić, which is full of howling wind, and some dim lighting firmly glued to Ana Štulina’s precise editing. It all makes Small Things feel like a discreetly unpleasant, but quite necessary and highly emotional viewing experience.

A Film a Week - Pixie. The New Beginning / Skrzat. Nowy poczatek

 previously published on Cineuropa

We might pretend it’s not true, but children can be cruel and manipulative. They can inflict a lot of pain, and even torture, on peers of theirs who do not fit in with the group. Being the new kid somewhere and not meeting the unwritten “standards” of the environment can sometimes constitute an almost hopeless situation. This is the case for the protagonist of Krzysztof Komander’s feature-length directorial debut, Pixie. The New Beginning. This film, clearly targeting younger audiences, premiered in Locarno Kids, enjoyed a decent run while in domestic distribution in Poland and competed at Schlingel before playing in the Zagreb Film Festival’s KinoKino sidebar.

Despite being 11 years old, Hania (Amelia Golda) still believes in pixies, the mythical creatures that her mother (Agata Turkot, in flashbacks) taught her about, and she is more than willing to express and defend her beliefs. Unfortunately, she is the new kid in a provincial school, and her peers are way less naive than her, so she ends up at the bottom of the bullying “food chain”. To make things worse, her single father (Arkadiusz Jakubik, from I’m a Killer and Clergy) has too much work as a professional fireman to cater to his daughter’s emotional needs.

In a deal struck between the dad and the class’s teacher (Anna Smolowik), Hania is introduced to the teacher’s son and another bullied “bottom feeder”, Michał (Maksymilian Zieliński), who is a science nerd. After a bit of a rocky start, the two arrange a deal: he will “invent” a pixie detector so that she can prove herself right, and the rest of the class wrong, regarding the existence of these creatures. In a stroke of pure luck, the two stumble upon a nervous and mischievous male pixie called Sindri (voiced by Borys Szyc), who says he is willing to reveal himself to the world if the duo can complete a series of tasks…

Of course, the whole pixie thing is just a metaphor for clinging to something from a past that seems less traumatic than a present marked by grief. Even younger children, if they have some movie-watching experience, can guess this pretty early on, and this jeopardises the rest of the movie, in a way. Komander has complete creative control of the filmmaking process as the director, screenwriter and editor, with the latter being his primary profession. The trouble is that he lacks a pair of fresh eyes to trim off some of the unnecessary repetitions and reduce the running time, which comes close to 100 minutes.

The problem is that the repetitions are not fully used to develop the two leading children’s characters beyond the level of archetypes with a couple of specific characteristics each, so the talented but inexperienced actors are cornered into giving one-note performances. The adults in the cast have more leeway to vary their characters, but they are usually used for the purposes of some gentle humour or releasing the pressure, since the altercations between the children are presented in an almost naturalistic way.

Although Wojciech Frycz’s score highlights the predictability of the plot and the points Komander wants to make, the rest of the technical aspects serve as a glue, of sorts. This is especially true for Natalia Anna Matejka’s lively production design and Dzvinka Kukul’s costumes, as captured by cinematographer Piotr Dudak’s kinetic camerawork. All things considered, Pixie. The New Beginning might fall apart under the scrutiny of an analytical adult viewer, but it possesses enough warmth and emotion to please its primary target audience and to convey a positive message.

A Film a Week - Greetings from Mars / Grüsse vom Mars

 previously published on Cineuropa

Much like Marc Rothemund’s Weekend Rebels, which played last year at the Zagreb Film Festival, in the KinoKino sidebar dedicated to younger audiences, Sarah Winkenstette’s Greetings from Mars, which is being shown in that same sidebar this year, takes its core subject of autism quite seriously. It is not used as a gimmick to propel comedy or drama around the young protagonist, but it is an integral part of his personality. Judging by its festival track record so far – a prolonged tour sprinkled with a handful of awards – the approach has paid off.

Our ten-year-old hero named Tom (Theo Kretschmer) is growing up with two siblings in a single-parent household. Since their father passed away recently, the mother, Vera (Eva Löbau, recently glimpsed in The Teachers’ Lounge, has little choice but to agree to a four-week business trip to China. For Tom, his daredevil brother Elmar (Anton Noltensmeter) and their teenage sister Nina (Lilli Lacher, glimpsed in last year’s Berlinale title Ivo), it means that they will have to spend that part of the summer holidays with their paternal grandparents, Horst (Michael Wittenborn, a character actor seen in Toni Erdmann and All Quiet on the Western Front) and Hanna (Hedi Kriegeskotte, mostly active on television), who are still coming to terms with their son’s passing.

Tom is interested in space exploration, and his dream is to become an astronaut and visit Mars. He can flood anyone who’ll listen with a ton of facts off the top of his head, on this and other topics, but he has a hard time managing everyday challenges, like seeing the colour red, hearing loud noises and enduring unwanted physical contact from anyone other than his mother. Tom sees staying with his hippie-like grandparents in their house with a red front door and no rules as a training mission for his future career as a space explorer. He has even found some ideal mission-related roles for his siblings, while the mystery surrounding the disappearance of an asteroid keeps his mind occupied. As is usually the case, adventures and new challenges will ensue…

Although it is pretty clear from the get-go that Tom is different from his (neuro-)typical siblings, the diagnosis is not uttered until the third-act climactic scene. That decision shows a certain seriousness and respect for the topic that Sebastian Grusnick and Thomas Möller dealt with in their book, which Winkenstette tries to adapt for the screen. Theo Kretschmer’s lived-in, but also measured, acting helps the cause as well, while the rest of the cast have no trouble striking up their own chemistry with the young lead and with each other.

However, some of the solutions that Winkenstette opts for are quite run-of-the-mill, such as Jakob Berger’s hand-held camerawork, while the on-the-nose score by André Feldhouse gets overbearing in its attempts to constantly spell out the desired emotional tone. But the film is actually saved by Nicole Kortlüke’s editing: not just because the animated material is deftly blended with the live-action shots, but also thanks to the roughness of the montage sequences when Tom gets agitated: in this way, the movie presents what is happening in his head in a compelling fashion.

In the end, Greetings from Mars accomplishes its mission of exploring and presenting “foreign inner universes” to neurotypical audiences with great empathy and warmth. Both children and their parents could learn a thing or two from Sarah Winkenstette’s film.

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 - Weekend Rebels / Wochenendrebellen

 previously published on Cineuropa

According to the statistics printed on a textual info-card during the ending of Marc Rothemund’s Weekend Rebels, one in every 100 children is autistic. Since autism is a spectrum, the manifestation of it and the needs of autistic people are diverse, so they very much depend on the response from their immediate environment – especially its understanding, acceptance and support.

Rothemund’s film is based on the true story of Mirco and Jason von Juterczenka, which was previously published as a blog and a book by Mirco himself. The Zagreb Film Festival has screened it in the Kino Kino competition, which showcases children’s flicks.

Jason was born with Asperger’s, which prevents him from functioning as neurotypical kids do. As the specialist informs his parents, Mirco (Florian David Fitz) and Fatime (Aylin Tezel), he can develop special interests and thrive by pursuing knowledge about them, but he needs a strict set of rules to abide by as well as their constant love and support. Jason (newcomer Cecilio Andersen) grows up to be a smart, curious boy interested in space, advanced physics and the preservation of the environment, but is also attached to some of his routines and rituals that make little sense to others.

At school, he is not accepted by his peers, and he sometimes reacts to their provocations with violence. One thing he gets from them, however, is the notion that he needs to pick a football club to support. Since his parents support different teams, he forges a system to test all of the German professional clubs against his set of rules so as to find the one he should support. Mirco volunteers to take him to games across Germany, which comes as a relief to Fatime, who is exhausted from caring for Jason and his needs.

Insights from Grandpa (Joachim Król) and from other football fans might come in handy, but Jason has to learn how to put up with a world that irritates him with loud noises, vivid colours, involuntary touches and situations that bring his rules into conflict with one another. Can Jason learn how to stand this outside world that he cannot control in order to fulfil his goal?

Weekend Rebels is clearly a film with a positive message of patience, tolerance and understanding to convey, which it does through the simple, but efficient, script by Richard Kropf. Marc Rothemund, best known for his acclaimed 2005 Berlinale title Sophie Scholl: The Final Days [+], directs it in a fitting, not overly obtrusive, way that is still dynamic enough to hold the attention of the target audiences – kids and their parents – even in the slightly repetitive scenes and sequences. The dynamic camerawork by Philip Peschlow in bright and vivid colours certainly helps, and so do the striking sound design by Lena Beck and the rapid editing by Hans Horn and Chris Mühlbauer. The omnipresent, gentle music by Johnny Klimek and Hans Hafner is, on the other hand, a bit too on the nose in its attempts to dictate the viewer’s feelings.

The acting is also solid throughout. Cecilio Andersen is bubbly and believable in the role of Jason, while Florian David Fitz imbues Mirco’s character with the gentle energy of a father willing to go the extra mile to please his son. On the other hand, Aylin Tezel does not have that much work to do as Fatime, but veteran thesp Joachim Król steals a few scenes as the football-loving Grandpa. In the end, Weekend Rebels overflows with warmth and empathy.

A Film a Week - Valentina and the MUOSters / Valentina e i MUOStri

 previously published on Cineuropa

In her previous three mid- and feature-length documentaries, all of which were co-directed with other collaborators, Francesca Scalisi tackled a number of topics, such as microcosms disappearing in our ever-changing world (Bath People, 2015), staying in your home even when it’s falling apart (Half Life in Fukushima, 2018) and a young woman torn between tradition and modernity and between an imperative to obey the rules and an urge to break free (Digitalkarma, 2019). Her newest feature-length documentary Valentina and the MUOSters, world-premiered in this year’s Visions du Réel’s National Competition where it won a Special Jury Prize and now screened in DOK Leipzig’s International Competition Documentary Film section, is a synthesis of the various motifs explored in her previous three works. Interestingly, it’s also Scalisi’s first solo work in feature-length format.

Our titular protagonist is a 26-year-old woman living with her parents in her native village of Niscemi in Sicily. She has never moved out of her home, never had a job nor a driver’s licence to travel from her family’s farmhouse to the centre of the village. She still has her hobbies, like crocheting woollen flowers and walking to the woods to her favourite ancient oak tree, and she still dreams of moving away and finding a job as a cook. But she has put them on hold in order to be close to her ageing parents, by whom she’s constantly scolded, either for being too unrealistic in her desires, or too lacking in ambition.

The second part of the film’s title is a play on an acronym. MUOS is a satellite communication system established, operated and guarded by American soldiers, which serves the military purpose of spying on other armies’ movements in the Mediterranean and Central Asian regions, and, more recently, on a spy-drone launching base. The locals, however, see it as a health hazard, mainly because of the strong electromagnetic waves its antennas transmit. The antennas themselves can constantly be heard, since their humming is louder than natural sounds, which leads the few remaining locals to suspect they might just be responsible for all the droughts and forest fires. Their protests, however, bear little fruit, regardless of the political “colours” the protesters wear. Will Valentina ever free herself from this place and from the role of an eternally clumsy child, imposed on her by her parents?

Valentina and the MUOSters echoes the work of two great contemporary masters of Italian documentary filmmaking: Gianfranco Rossi (the portrait of a small community caught up in the turmoil of global events brings Fire at Sea to mind) and Roberto Minervini, especially his opus about people on the margins of society in the American South. But Francesca Scalisi opts for a more intimate approach, centred on her protagonist and her immediate surroundings. In this respect, the cinematography of the director’s regular collaborator Stefania Bona, who adopts a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, foregrounds Valentina to the fullest, whilst also getting the most out of the usually barren landscape. But the real “MVP” among the film crew is composer and sound designer Olga Kokcharova, whose work in both departments creates the perfect synergy of droning noise, reminding us that Valentina and her family feel constantly threatened by a situation which far exceeds their ability to change it.

A Film a Week - Our Children / Naša djeca

 previously published on Cineuropa

Parenthood is certainly not a walk in the park. To make things more complicated, whether we are successful at raising children is not measurable, and there are no firm criteria to rely on when defining what good parenting means. Croatian cinematographer, filmmaker and father of three Silvestar Kolbas tries to figure this all out in his newest documentary Our Children. It premiered earlier this year at ZagrebDox and won the Golden Arena Award for Best Directing at Pula, and just had its international premiere in the documentary competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival.

A cinematographer by trade (he collaborated with Igor Mirković on most of his feature-length projects), Kolbas turned to documentary filmmaking more than 20 years ago. Throughout his feature-length body of work, his approach is highly personal and self-reflective. With his debut All About Eva (2003), he chronicled the effort and the pain his second wife Nataša went through in order to conceive a child through artificial insemination. In his subsequent one, War Reporter (2011), Kolbas dealt with his childhood memories, his first marriage with Irena and his career as a war reporter during the 1990s in an uncompromisingly autobiographical way. Our Children serves as a sort of spiritual sequel to both of those films, thematically more aligned with the first, but stylistically with the second, given that his inner thoughts and fears are communicated through his own voice-over.

Kolbas opens the film with a scene establishing the primary setting, namely the house in the town of Samobor, near Zagreb, where he lives with his family: his wife, their three children, a dog and a cat. But that family is not quite a typical one and each of the three children, whom we might remember from his previous documentaries, has a different background story. Jakov is his son from his first marriage, who grew up living with his mother and moved to live with his father and the new family in adulthood; Eva is Silvestar's and Nataša's only biological child; and Ante was adopted. 

Given the differences between them regarding age (Jakov is much older than his younger siblings) and character (Jakov is depressed about stepping into adulthood, Ante starts behaving problematically in adolescence, and Eva, as the calmest and most centred one, cannot wait to leave the house for her studies abroad), the challenges get greater and greater for the whole family. Silvestar questions himself constantly, debating whether his delayed emotions could be read as cold distance driving the rift between him and the rest of the family, while Nataša is not too supportive of the idea that the whole thing should be shot as a documentary that would expose them all.

Apart from being a filmmaker, Kolbas here also serves as his own director of photography (there is some additional cinematography from other family members) and sound recordist. The material he brings to the film can be entirely defined as a load of home videos from different periods and of various technical qualities such as aspect ratio, resolution and lighting. Editor Denis Golenjak does heroic work to arrange all of that same-sourced but stylistically different material in a way that does not bother the viewer who gets involved with the story.

Telling his story in a frank manner (highlighted by expressing the wish for the film to be taken as an expression of love by his family), Kolbas manages to find the right balance between clarity and excitement, structuring his presentation in a unique way so that every child, every problem and preoccupation and every challenge for the parents gets its deserved time. Our Children becomes and remains a very sincere, emotionally charged documentary.

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 - My Darling Family / Ma famille chérie

 previously published on Cineuropa

Families can be complicated to navigate, and this is usually best observed at gatherings. One such situation is at the centre of Isild Le Besco’s new film My Darling Family, which has just premiered out of competition at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. One initial positive thing going for it could be the fact that Le Besco probably knows a thing or two about the topic of large, chaotic families, since she grew up as part of an artistic clan, while one negative aspect, apart from it being overlooked for selection in one of the competitive sections, could be the fact that the same film, with similar actors and crew, was announced for 2022 under the title Connemara.

The aforementioned region of Ireland is also the location where the majority of the plot of My Darling Family unfolds. Our protagonist and focal point is Estelle (the magnificent Élodie Bouchez), who runs away from her abusive husband Antonio (Stefano Cassetti) and comes to the reunion earlier than planned with her three children in tow. Her mother (Marisa Berenson), referred to only as the Queen, probably because of her opera-diva background, is less than thrilled to see them early and seems uninterested in the children, being intrigued only by her youngest son’s return after 20 years.

The other siblings and half-siblings have their quirks and tempers, too. Janet (Jeanne Balibar) is bossy, Manon (played by the helmer herself) is a moody artist, Jean-Luc (Élie Semoun) has to pass myriad tests to be seen as a part of the family, since he is the Queen’s son from a previous relationship, while Marc’s (Axel Granberger) return causes an additional stir. He comes with a special request from the late father, and it has something to do with the tragedy involving their late sister. Memories, emotions, resentment and secrets resurface in a chaotic, unpredictable turn of events.

My Darling Family could be seen as a mix of tropes that are plucked both from movies about family gatherings and from more sombre reunion pieces, also known as “Big Chill clones”, but the messiness of the characters and relations makes it seem organic, almost like a piece of docu-fiction or auto-fiction work. The messiness, however, also extends to the craft aspects of the film, such as the narrative in the script co-written by the filmmaker and Steven Mitz (with the help of Raphaëlle Desplachin and a number of others), Le Besco’s own directing and the jumpy editing supervised by the filmmaker herself and carried out by a small army of people. It seems like Isild Le Besco’s wish was to try her hand at as many aspects of filmmaking as possible, also including songwriting together with composer Rafko Mekić (whose acoustic mix of piano and guitar usually complements the general sentiment), in order to retain control over the material.

Luckily, she has assembled a great ensemble cast, with Bouchez as a star able to infect the rest of the cast members with her power, heart and soul, and Berenson as a scene-stealer, since she plays the “meatiest” character of them all, while the filmmaker’s acting effort in the role of Manon should also be commended. The presence of Sam Spruell and Geoffrey Carey in bit roles that actually serve only to deliver an occasional pearl of wisdom also helps a little, but not enough to elevate the film to the ranks of an exceptional family-gathering movie. Although Isild Le Besco is not an amateur or a hobbyist in filmmaking, My Darling Family still plays out as a sort of vanity project.

A Film a Week - Enough for Now / Za danas toliko

 previously published on Cineuropa

Just over four years ago, Marko Đorđević brought innovations to Serbian cinema, both in terms of milieu and style, with his debut feature My Morning Laughter. Set in and around the city of Kragujevac in the central part of the country and among ordinary people who were not lucky or unscrupulous enough to move forward with their life, the film portrayed both the place and its characters without romanticising them or adopting a condescending attitude, espousing instead a particularly austere, naturalistic style of predominantly long, static takes.

On his new film, he reunites with most of his cast and crew from that solo feature-length debut and returns to Kragujevac and to the realm of “normal” people. The stakes are a bit higher and the task seems a little harder, because Enough for Now could be described as a film about “nothing.” However, the film has won two awards at Belgrade International Film Festival FEST, where it premiered, confirming Đorđević’s status as an auteur to keep an eye on.

The film’s silhouette of a plot unfolds over a course of a couple of weeks in the early summer and revolves around a family “clan” consisting of three siblings. Moca, our protagonist (Filip Đurić, star of My Morning Laughter), is a doctor at the local hospital and single father to a precious little girl, Marta (newcomer Miona Pejković). They share the family house with Moca’s sister, Višnja (Ivana Vuković, Đurić’s main screen partner in Đorđević’s previous effort). The ritual of baking their favourite dessert, the coco cubes, summons Moca’s and Višnja’s brother, Vasa (Nikola Rakočević, star of numerous Serbian films), who is trying to make it as an actor in Belgrade.

A string of low-intensity events unfolds. Their childhood acting teacher has recently passed away and all three appear at his commemoration at the local theatre. Moca takes time off from work and tries to relax, but he also has to overcome his fear of driving. His best friend’s daughter, Vanja (Milica Jovović), is coming from Bosnia to take the entrance exam for studies in Kragujevac, and the family decides to drive her back home afterwards in order to visit her father, Duško (Croatian actor Goran Bogdan). All the time, the family dynamic is overly playful, even a little childish, signalling that there might be things unspoken between them, if not outright secrets.

The way Đorđević handles that “secret” until the moment of its revelation can be rather frustrating, in large part because it can be guessed at quite easily. He nevertheless manages to turn his film into a cathartic experience by the end. Đorđević relies extensively on his actors, their improvisation and mutual chemistry — which does not always always go smoothly, especially when more famous actors have to adapt to the rhythm dictated by the leading duo.

Style-wise, Enough for Now is definitely breezier and more playful than Đorđević’s previous work, with Stefan Milosavljević’s camerawork more fluid in capturing the film’s summer tones, Lara Bunčić’s compellingly cramped production design, and Jelena Anđelković’s colourful costumes. The music in different shades of pop, written by Sofija Milutinović, is also suitable, while one particular scene, a car chase that essentially comes out of nowhere, turns out to be a total delight and a perfect showcase for Đorđević’s varied talent.

A Film a Week - Endless Summer Syndrome / Le syndrome de l'été sans fin

 previously published on Cineuropa

There is no such thing as a perfect (family) life, only an illusion of it. Once cracks appear in the facade, that illusion is broken and dangerous secrets can surface. At least, that is the case with Kaveh Daneshmand’s debut feature, the domestic thriller Endless Summer Syndrome, which enjoyed its world premiere in the First Feature Competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

It seems that the French family Denicourt has it all. The matriarch Delphine (Sophie Colon in a possibly breakthrough big screen role) works in high politics and gives lectures. Her husband Antoine (Mathéo Capelli, glimpsed in 13 Tzameti) is a writer with a stellar reputation. With their adoptive children, the introverted Aslan (co-writer Gem Deger) and the cheeky Adia (newcomer Frédérika Milano), they live in an idyllic countryside home where they enjoy endless summer days by the swimming pool, or at least intend to do so, since Aslan is bound to leave home and continue his studies in New York City.

However, one anonymous phone call changes everything. A woman on the other side of the line tells Delphine that Antoine admitted something to her when he was drunk, something quite inappropriate and involving one of their children. The call is clearly not part of a blackmailing scheme, though it might be someone’s twisted attempt to put pressure on the family, which would not be the first time. While Delphine trusts her husband and children, she knows that she cannot simply confront them with what she heard. So she starts “playing detective” to find out what is going on, which raises the tension and suspicions within the household. But the real question is whether she is ready for the truth she might find.

Although the setting is quite archetypal, the intervention that shakes its foundations a bit of a cliché, and the 3-act structure transparent despite all the ornamentation (such as flash-forwards to the police interviews), Endless Summer Syndrome is a film that grabs and holds the attention of the viewer for its entire duration. This could be thanks to the thorough writing work that went into creating the characters and their relationships, which establishes an environment for generally underused actors and newcomers to deliver compelling and memorable performances. For instance, Delphine being the lady of the house makes her a bit distant and strict, and the children more attached to Antoine than to her, but the love and the affection they share seems very real. Moreover, the mystery is well thought-out and timed for maximum dramatic effect and impact, although some of Daneshmand’s creative choices unveil elements of the truth too early and put too much emphasis on symbolism. This also makes the resolution of the plot a tad too neat and clean compared to the ethical “grey zone” and controversy that the film deals with.

On the level of craft, Endless Summer Syndrome is also impressive, polished work powered by smart decisions. The boxy 4:3 aspect ratio works equally well for the frequent close-ups and for the rare but powerful distant shots, while the summery, bright and saturated colour scheme of Cédric Larvoire’s cinematography stands in striking contrast with the film’s dark and controversial content. The editing by François and Pierrè’ Del Ray sometimes slips into the music video style, which is understandable considering the pulsating score by Matteo Hager and Jakub Trs.

Endless Summer Syndrome may not be perfect in absolute terms, but it is an outstanding debut that shows a lot of heart, a lot of thought and a lot of talent from the creative team, the cast and the crew.

A Film a Week - Lunatic / Šterkijada

 previously published on Cineuropa

The central figure here is the filmmaker’s father, Jure Šterk (played by Janez Škof), a seaman and adventurer who was the first Slovenian to sail around the world and the first man to do so in a boat that was only 6.5 metres long. In January 2009, he disappeared in the Indian Ocean, following a technical issue with his vessel, the titular Lunatic, and his own attempt to fix it. Šterk was sailing around the world again, but this time, it was a non-stop trip, and since he was 73 years old at the time, if he had completed his voyage, he would have been the oldest person to do so.

However, Lunatic is less of an account of Jure’s maritime adventures, and more a study of the family dynamics Jure shared with his wife Vojka (played by Silva Čušin) and son Igor (played by Tito Novak as a child and Jernej Gašperin as a young man). Right from the start (the mid-1970s), one can see that said dynamics are volatile, as the opening scene is a heated argument in which Jure’s womanising clashes with Vojka’s jealousy, while little Igor is in bed, listening to his parents fighting. But when Jure is at home, he can be a fun father who bribes his son with scoops of ice cream to get him to do some more swimming and who smuggles him into a music school so he can practise the piano. However, Jure can also be a strict disciplinarian who does not tolerate the carefree moments of childhood.

Jure can also be pretty careless himself, which is amply demonstrated in the next sequence, set during the 1991 Slovenian War of Independence, in which Jure jeopardises his planned trip around the world, for which he accepted sponsors’ money and got into debt, so he can take part in the war. But even when he triumphantly completes his quest in 1994, he does not wish to rest on his laurels, so he thinks up new outings and manages to persuade Igor to invest in a newer, bigger and more advanced boat. As Jure’s actions get less and less predictable, Vojka slips into superstitions and alternative medicine, which brings on physical illness, and Igor, unable to strike a balance between these two selfish and impulsive people, starts to snap under the pressure.

In the script, Šterk might have been aiming for some more humour of the absurdist kind and some more warmth to balance out the toxicity of the family relationships, but in the end, Lunatic serves better as a densely packed, intense family drama in which Jure’s absence can be as stressful as his presence. Šterk’s tone is sincere, rendering his motivation to try to figure out how living with these two people affected him completely believable. However, his execution in the form of long, dialogue-driven scenes puts a lot of pressure on the actors, who sometimes lose control and end up in the realm of theatrics.

Technically, Lunatic is an accomplished work. Miloš Srdić’s cinematography smoothly transitions from the warmth of the 1970s, through the murkiness of the 1990s, to the coldness of the new millennium, the production design by Marco Juratovec is fabulous, while Petar Marković’s editing keeps the running time more than pleasant at 77 minutes. However, a less linear approach could have generated some additional tension and – why not – added some lunacy to the picture.

A Film a Week - Body / Telo

 previously published on Cineuropa

Slovenian producer and documentarian Petra Seliškar does not shy away from expressing very personal thoughts and feelings in her work, from her feature-length debut (and her best-known work) Grandmas of Revolution (2006) on. She has a habit of sharing her own thoughts with her audiences, as well as exposing her family and circle of friends in her films. In her newest outing, Body, filmed over the course of 20 years, she deals with a friend she’s had since her adolescence, Urška Ristić, and her battle with autoimmune diseases. Body premiered in the Documentary Competition of Sarajevo, and further festival exposure should be expected.

Seliškar opens her doc with a sequence that radiates calm, wisdom and clarity. Urška, now in her forties, sits on a lakeside beach with her daughters Zoja and Mija, preparing to reflect on her life so far. As we learn from an excerpt of archival video material, Urška was a promising pianist who even competed internationally. We also learn that she led an interesting life, to say the least, in her twenties, spending some time in a psychiatric ward and having her first daughter quite early and out of wedlock. Zoja changed her for the better and made her more stable, repairing her complicated relationship with her own parents – but then the first disease struck.

After a delay in getting the proper diagnosis and appropriate treatment, Urška was left in a sorry state, having to learn to speak, walk, and recognise her family and loved ones again. Being a fighter by nature and enjoying a lot of support from her parents, daughter and Bojan, with whom she was in a relationship at the time, she gets better, starts playing again and attains happiness once more, with the icing on the cake this time being the birth of her second daughter. But a new disease starts to afflict her, and this time it’s even more insidious. Can she accept this change to her body and her mind, and come to accept and love herself again?

Seliškar covers this extended period of time and the wide spectrum of topics touched upon in Urška’s inspired and frank narration with an exceptional sense of style. The primary timeline, in which Urška and her daughters spend their time as a family on the lake, serves as the basic framework for the whole film and constitutes the starting point from which the narrator jumps to her memories and musings. Seliškar tends to capitalise on the optimal distance and point of view in Brand Ferro’s lively, summer-tinged camerawork in order to paint an emotional picture, while the length of the blackouts, slow fade-outs and fade-ins in the editing by Sashko Potter Micevski and Sandra Bastašić provides the necessary emphasis on what is important.

Seliškar is even more playful when she provides the visual background to Urška’s memories, thoughts, musings and even dreams, using a lot of archival and home material filmed ad hoc, but also some abstract imagery filmed through a microscope lens. The music, varying from punk rock to neoclassical and even experimental tracks composed by Vladimir Rakić, is also in perfect sync with the visuals, and complements this portrait of an extraordinary person and her battle. In the end, Body is a visually stunning and emotionally breathtaking piece of cinema.

A Film a Week - She Came at Night / Prišla v noci

 previously published on Cineuropa

There must be a reason why there are so many mother-in-law (or father-in-law) jokes in every language and culture. Family life is hard, and people who share genes, not to mention those who are related only by marriage, do not necessarily have compatible personalities. Jan Vejnar and Tomáš Pavlíček’s She Came at Night, which has just premiered in the Special Screenings section of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, takes a relatively ordinary family situation and slowly turns it into an extreme one.

Jirka (Jiří Rendl, glimpsed in a number of recent Czech films like Droneman, Charlatan and Zátopek) and Aneta (Annette Nesvadbová, most active on television) are an ordinary, young, urban couple. She is exhausted at her hospital job as an ergotherapist, while he is a freelance translator, currently busy translating a book of Soviet-era Latvian jokes. They have their minor niggles, but their real problems will occur when the titular “she” comes one night.

“She” is Jirka’s mother, Valerie (Simona Peková, in full-on diva mode), who apparently has no place to stay after her latest partner left her, and she asks her son – who knows full well her history of mess-ups and, perfectly reasonably, has a foreboding sense that chaos will ensue – if she can stay for just one night. One night turns into several days, and then weeks, while Valerie invades the couple’s privacy and meddles in their life and their choices further and further. As a consequence of her presence in their day-to-day life and their flat, the rifts between Jirka and Aneta slowly get deeper and wider. But the culmination, and the point where the movie veers from sitcom into horror-like territory, comes when Valerie brings along her newest boyfriend (and he brings his friends), and they take over the apartment completely.

Pavliíček already has some experience with the feature-length format and comedy as a genre (as demonstrated by his previous films Totally Talking and Bear With Us, which both premiered at Karlovy Vary), while Vejnar has made a name for himself with genre-infused shorts enveloped in an unsettling atmosphere. In theory, She Came at Night would seem like the perfect way to marry their previously established poetics, and the blend they make together is smooth and seamless. Along with several smart moves, like the already handheld camerawork by Šimon Dvořáček getting more fidgety and editor Jakub Vansa’s cuts getting more rapid, with frequent “visits” to the close-ups on Valerie’s face whenever she starts one of her monologues, the key thing the filmmakers get right is making the transition between the genres and their respective atmospheres slow and gradual, as the tension between the three characters builds up.

The helmers also get the casting choices spot-on and work with their chosen actors sure-handedly, leaving them enough freedom for interplay. With his permanently “long” face, Jiří Rendl is convincing as the non-alpha male in the couple, while Anette Nesvadbová is compelling as an overworked and fed-up woman on the verge of simply not being able to take it any more. However, it is Simona Peková who steals the limelight here, making her character a notable addition to the mother-from-hell type and contributing significantly to the fact that She Came at Night is not just an easy watch, but also an accomplished cinematic effort.

A Film a Week - The Mountains / Bjergene

 previously published on Cineuropa

The Mountains is the feature-length directorial debut by Christian Einshøj, the Danish filmmaker behind several shorts and the editor of numerous features. Described by the auteur as a “family self-portrait” on an introductory title card, which is reinforced by a dedication to his parents and brothers on another title card just before the end credits, the film is also a mystery of sorts and a hero’s quest for reconciliation and dealing with loss from the past.

It premiered at CPH:DOX in March, where it got an Honourable Mention for the POLITIKEN:DOX Award, while its international premiere took place in parallel at Visions du Réel and Hot Docs. At the latter festival, it scooped two prizes in the international competition: the main Award for Best International Feature Documentary and the Emerging International Filmmaker Award.

The filmmaker’s family, led by his businessman father Søren, moved from their native country of Denmark to Norway for the father’s work, and was then struck by a tragedy in the new nation. The third son, Kristoffer, was born with a severe illness, and his condition, medical treatment and eventual death prevented the family from moving back to their homeland. The shadow of the tragedy affected the parents, Christian, his brother Frederik and also the youngest brother, Alex, who was born after Kristoffer’s death, in different manners, and this rarely spoken-of family crisis morphed into a marital and identity-related one when the father lost his job and the brothers moved away from home.

This is the starting point for Christian’s documentary, made up of his own voice-over narration, photo and video material from his home archive, as well as newly filmed material recorded on his own quest. He opens the documentary with a shot of himself and his brothers in superhero outfits against a backdrop of breathtakingly beautiful mountains in the Norwegian polar area, describing himself as Batman on a desperate mission to salvage something long lost. The thing that was lost was the closeness and even the communication between the family members, who dealt with Kristoffer’s death in different ways, as mentioned above. Over the course of four chapters, we learn that the father’s way was keeping busy with work on regular days and staying in constant motion on holidays; that Frederik, after his failed marriage in the USA, engrossed himself in work; and that Alex never considered himself to be fully part of the family, even refusing to speak the language that was used at home.

Early on, Einshøj establishes a tone of contrasts between the seemingly idyllic surroundings of nature and a fulfilled family life, and the inner turmoil taking over the family members separately, and maintains it until the final chapter of the film. The blend between the home material shot on unprofessional equipment and in a narrow 4:3 format, and newly filmed, digitally crisp and widescreen footage, is smooth thanks to the filmmaker’s own editing and almost constant voice-over narration that serves as the connecting tissue and the principal film text. The mood is also set by Toke Brorson Odin’s downtempo electronic music score that sometimes toys with 8-bit and 16-bit influences. In the end, The Mountains is a sincere piece of family history, an exceptionally made documentary and a potent reminder that communication is key in order for a family to stay together while it deals with a tragedy.

A Film a Week - Cricket & Antoinette / Cvrčak i mravica

 previously published on Cineuropa

We all know the tale of the cricket and the ants, and the moral of the story: a fun-loving, lazy cricket gets punished for his lack of organisation, preparation and hard work once the winter comes. That kind of moral, which champions only one type of behaviour and the character traits it entails, while disparaging the other possibilities, could easily serve to create divisions and an atmosphere of intolerance within society. It is evident that the fable told by both Aesop and de La Fontaine needed a sort of overhaul to fit the needs of the more complex contemporary world. That task was undertaken by a group of Croatian creatives at the Diedra animation studio, and the result is the first Croatian feature-length 3D animated film, Cricket & Antoinette, which has gone straight into theatrical distribution domestically, while the global release will follow later this year.

The foundations for the new reading of the old tale were laid by Darko Bakliža in his 1999 stage play for children, and this was adapted into a script by Luka Rukavina, who also directed the film, and Rona Žulj. It tells the story of a cricket musician and band frontman, Ket, and the ant princess Antoinette. While he is a typical fun-loving and creative cricket, she is more easy-going and less well organised than the rest of her ant colony, which adheres to strict rules. After a chance encounter between the two at the Roachella music festival, a strange affection ensues. Ket follows her home, only to get in trouble with the law at the ant colony, and Antoinette saves him out of gratitude. She then feels the urge to warn the crickets and the other bugs at the festival of the upcoming winter, which they all see as a myth and so pay little attention to her words. Maybe it would be easier if she could sing it to them. But can an ant sing? Can crickets accept the concept of preparation? Could these two different worlds come together, especially when certain forces want to keep them apart?

The story has a universal appeal and is suitable for family audiences, mainly children and their parents. Although it is his first work in the field of feature-length animation, Rukavina has previously gained a lot of experience with both animation (as a dubbing director for the Croatian releases of major animated flicks) and its target audience (as a director of numerous short documentaries for children and youth TV programmes), so he keeps the key ingredients well balanced. The dialogue is quick and snappy, an element of relaxation comes in the form of the songs composed by Gordan Muratović (better known as accomplished pop musician Coco Mosquito), which are quite catchy and are slickly blended into the sound design by Vjeran Šalomon (who also wrote the score), and the visual design features made up of richly textured objects (with some use of macro photographs for the backgrounds) and models in enhanced, but still natural-looking, colours really fit the bill. Technically speaking, Cricket & Antoinette might not be a shining example of the most modern 3D animation (since the project spent quite a long stretch of time at various developmental and production stages), but it is still groundbreaking in the national context, and its retro and slightly naive style serves as a perfect vessel to deliver this new moral of the old story to the widest possible audience.

A Film a Week - Too Close

 previously published on Cineuropa

The topic of the sexual abuse of children within the confines of the family or a household is always a sensitive one, and there is probably no right way to deal with it using the form of documentary cinema. The victims are usually unwilling to open up and talk about it, as they risk further victimisation and judgement from their own milieu. This makes Botond Püsök’s Too Close an extremely risky, brave, delicate and ultimately potent portrait of the aforementioned situation. Fresh off its premiere in the documentary competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, it should secure further bookings at documentary film festivals.

The protagonist is Andrea, a theatre actress who lives in a Hungarian-speaking village somewhere in Transylvania, Romania. Her daughter Pirkó was systematically sexually abused by Andrea’s then partner Pika, and the whole story emerged while Andrea was pregnant with Pika’s son Bogyó. Confronted by Pirkó and Andrea, Pika confessed everything and was sentenced to several years in prison. However, his early release for “good behaviour” threatens to disrupt the fragile balance that Andrea and Pirkó have managed to achieve through therapy.

The reason for the panic within the home is not just Pika, but also the entire village, the locals’ behaviour towards the broken family, and their generally positive attitude towards and support for Pika. In their minds, the whole story is a lie, and in their conversations, Andrea is referred to as “The Actress”, meaning that she lies for a living, while Pika is a “salt of the earth” type, the son of the local Reformed Church priest, and the genius engineer who brought pavements and gas to the village. How could such a “good man” be a paedophile behind closed doors?

Knowing that she cannot count on the help of the local community, in which she has been assigned the status of a stranger who could never be accepted, and that any help from the official system would be flawed, insufficient and tardy, Andrea’s only hope is to sell her house and move somewhere else with the children – somewhere where all three of them could have a fresh start. In the meantime, the atmosphere in the village will become so toxic that the family will feel imprisoned in their own house and the yard around it.

The observational style with zero commentary by the filmmaker is not just a fitting and tasteful choice, but is also a testament to Andrea’s and her children’s courage in letting Püsök and his skeleton crew (the filmmaker also did the shooting himself) deep into their lives. On camera, all three of them appear completely sincere and natural, like people who have nothing to hide, regardless of Andrea’s profession, which the villagers like to disparage. Unlike the family, the locals are represented only in the form of a “gossiping chorus”, spreading their opinions and insults via voice-over narrations that are minimally processed by Támas Bonács’ sound design. This sound design and the music composed by Andor Sperling and, to a lesser extent, David Stephen Grant are used to infuse the documentary with a degree of tension that verges on the level of a thriller, and this is also thanks to the tight editing by Brigitta Bacskai, who also served as the film’s co-scriptwriter.

In the end, Too Close is equally effective as a testimony of the human nastiness that flourishes in small, enclosed communities, as a brave documentary that takes no prisoners and as a tense, pounding thriller. Its versatility makes it quite exceptional.

A Film a Week - Let It Be Morning / Vayehi boker

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

One of the few good things on the margins of the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that there is at least some cultural exchange between the sides, so dissonant tones critical to the official policies can be heard, at least coming from the Israeli side. One of those voices certainly belongs to filmmaker and screenwriter Eran Kolirin whose film “The Band’s Visit” (2007) dared to ask a crucial question how it is for good people at a wrong place, such was the case of the visiting Egyptian band in Israel.

Kolirin’s newest film “Let It Be Morning” is a proper Israeli-Palestinian collaboration, based on the novel by the Palestinian journalist-writer Sayed Kashua, known for the source material of the films “Private” (2004) and “A Borrowed Identity” (2014), and on the topic of the Israeli Arabs and their need to re-assess the identities they have built in the times of distress. Filmed with a Palestinian cast and a mixed crew, it tells a Kafka-esque story about a man’s life getting shattered after he was forced to stay with his family and childhood friends for way longer than he expected, due to the lockdown imposed on his home village.

When we first see him, Sami (Alex Bakri) has all the reasons to be satisfied with himself: he has a good job in Jerusalem, he is married to a beautiful woman Mira (Juna Suleiman) with whom he has an adorable son, and his father Tarek (Salim Saw) wants to add a wing to the family house just for him. The reason for Sami’s visit is the wedding of his younger brother Aziz (Samer Bisharat) and also an attempt to explain to his father that he is not willing to quit his Jerusalem life just yet. The trouble hits him on his way back after the wedding: the village has been put under lockdown by the Israeli army, and the reason for such a development might be the question of “daffawis”, the undocumented West Bank Palestinians who use the village for getting into Israel where they work illegally.

Sami cannot go back, so he has to face all the things he was running from to his job and his mistress for years: his immediate family, dissatisfied wife who senses something is wrong, his over-bearing father, his hopelessly naïve brother, his sister and her husband who is into local politics, the local politics itself full of lies, criminality and corruption, and his childhood friends, namely Abed (Ehab Salami) who did not find his place in life. As the conditions worsen day by day, Sami has to admit that he is no better than the others and that he has been living in a lie.

At a deliberately slow pace, “Let It Be Morning” goes down multiple tracks, exploring various rarely exposed topics from the daily life of Israeli Arabs and other Palestinians, the differences in their status in Israel and even in its Arabic villages and settlements, and switching tone between an absurdist comedy and a serious drama. On the other hand, it is also a film about the family- and even more general societal and human relations in a situation that is certainly out of normal, and that strikes suddenly, even though it could be expected to occur.

The slowness takes a toll on the viewers also, but there is a good reason for that, since both Kashua in his novel and Kolirin in his film are actually exploring an uncharted territory and are set on creating an atmosphere of waiting and helplessness that is quite universal for common people stuck in a situation at odds with authorities. Also, it leaves enough time and space for the characters to develop, which facilitates the job for the actors. Alex Bakri is a domineering presence on the screen with his blend of smugness and melancholy, Juna Suleiman steps in the role of Mira bravely, Samer Bisharat plays the comic relief-type of character with certain grace, while Ehab Salami manages to squeeze sympathy for the little man who never had a lucky break.

Shai Goldman’s cinematography catches the claustrophobia of the cramped village and cramped houses shared by family clans instead of nuclear families, and puts it in contrast with the diverse landscape around the village that seems like a hilly, arid desert from one angle and an oasis from another, hinting that some beauty and peace could be found even in a hopeless place. Maybe it was the original goal of both Kashua and Kolirin. “Let It Be Morning” is certainly more about the journey than about the destination.

A Film a Week - Summer with Hope

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Rarely in cinema, and especially in Iranian cinema, we get a glimpse into the lives of upper classes, especially upper-middle class, commonly known as bourgeoisie. The oddity is even higher if the plot of the story is not set in the capital Teheran. “Summer with Hope”, a sophomore feature by Sadaf Foroughi, following her 2017 acclaimed debut “Ava”, is one of such oddities. The film premiered at the Crystal Globe main competition of Karlovy Vary and it seems like it will be going places, establishing Montreal-based Foroughi as one of the most interesting voices in the contemporary Iranian cinema.

Our hero Omid (Mahdi Gorbani, seen in Saeed Roustayi’s 2016 title “Life and a Day”) whose name translates to “hope” from Farsi is a big swimming prodigy, which was the reason for his family, mother Leili (Leili Rashidi, returning to the collaboration with Foroughi after “Ava”) and uncle Saadi (Alireza Kamali) to move from Teheran to an elite residential area in Gilan province on the bank of the Caspian Sea. While Leili waits to finalize the divorce from Omid’s father, the son puts all his hopes in the upcoming swimming championship.

Omid is a national team-level of a talent, but he is denied the right to compete due to technicality by the strict, somewhat bureaucratic coach Karman (Milad Mirzaee), which serves as the entry point of the escalating situation in which we are about to learn a thing or two about the relationship between Omid and his junior coach Mani (Benyamin Peyrovani), the dynamics within the family and the way how the Iranian society operates in some situations, fuelled by rumours of the coach and student maintaining a clandestine gay relationship. Our hero is driven by angst and impulses, and his every action puts him deeper in trouble with all of the authority figures in his surroundings…

Like many films currently on the festival circuit, “Summer with Hope” is a bit too long and too slow for its own good, especially in its exposition phase, so it takes quite a bit of time for the viewer to sense where the actual story is starting and on what grounds. Once it is achieved, it plays out like an atmospheric, complex mix between the family drama and a thriller in which the things unspoken echo way louder than the spoken ones. Imagine a Xavier Dolan film (Foroughi actually quotes the Quebecois “enfant terrible” auteur with the opening shot of Omid dancing to a loud club hit in a neon-lit club), with all of its inter-familial relationships and the characters at odds with the society that surrounds them due to certain behaviour codes, but set in a way more conservative society.

The parallels with Canada and North America in general do not stop here, since the whole film looks a bit American and Canadian, from its filtered visual polishes and steadicam shots lensed by Amin Jafari (whose recent work we saw in Panah Panahi’s last year’s debut “Hit the Road”), to the very landscape bathed in deep greens of the surrounding woods and North American suburban, modernist architecture of the settlement and all its facilities. One might even assume that a lot of work was put on the production designer to scale down the consumerism plentifulness regarding the interiors and the props team to acquire all those French cars and the Iranian licence plates to make the place pass as Iran. Surprisingly, the place like this actually exists in Iran, and is influenced by the complicated history which is never mentioned, but still keeps hanging in the air.

Even in the acting department, there is some of the restrain contrasting the usual theatrical style that is kept in the Iranian cinema. That certainly does not mean that it is devoid of expressiveness and emotions, but there is a sense of a stricter directorial control along the lines of psychological realism, which suits such a story well.

Deft in the terms of craft, intriguing as the story with some additional layers to it and strongly atmospheric, “Summer with Hope” might take a bit of time to start moving. But once it does, it becomes gripping. It is an example of a fine cinematic work.