A Film a Week - The Forbidden Aunt / Zabranjena tetka

 previously published on Cineuropa

Serbian-Australian actress Bojana Novaković is widely-known for her work in television, as well as in Australian and Hollywood films, and people also know a thing or two about her highly-publicised past romances. Now, for the first time, she is testing her capabilities as a filmmaker with a documentary film inspired by the relationships within her own extended family. One could expect a strictly personal project, maybe even a proper artist’s ego trip, but The Forbidden Aunt truly transcends, and turns out to be something quite universal. The feature has just premiered in the documentary competition of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival.

The filmmaker’s starting point was an awkward situation she remembered from her childhood: her immediate family never let her spend too much time with one of her aunts, even though the woman had never harmed Bojana in any way and the filmmaker also remembers her as a fun person to be around. The reason for this attitude may have been aunt Gordana’s lifestyle, as she was what could be described as a bohemian. In an attempt to investigate the matter, Novaković goes back to Serbia in her hometown of Užice, where Gordana still lives, with the intention to make an easy-breezy documentary about her quirky aunt, who might be a bit foul-mouthed, but means no harm.

This is precisely what she appears like in the opening shot, where Gordana is giving her niece a lecture on the advantages of granny panties over g-strings. Also, she is the kind of person who is always happy to lend her neighbours a helping hand. Born the third daughter of a working-class family, she was never great at school, but she was a talented and inspired artist of a hairdresser who also loved to party in the company of men she easily fell for, and who did love a drink. Although her own children, Mladen and Marija, do not seem to hold any grudge against her, the truth is that their mother’s drinking was so excessive, and her behaviour so erratic, that they were basically left to fend for themselves as early as in their teenage years.

As soon as this is revealed, a breach is made which gradually opens, leading to a darker side of things, as the aforementioned destructive behaviour certainly had its reasons. Indeed, Gordana was an unwanted child, her “crime” being that she was a girl when her family expected a son. While her older sisters, Bojana’s mother Biljana and the family’s favourite, Mirjana, fared much better, Gordana was neglected. This childhood trauma caused by her parents later led, in adulthood, to her inflicting the same trauma to her own children, because hurt people hurt people.

The gesture of flipping one’s childhood memories upside down by digging into the darker side of one’s family’s past is not a particularly new one in documentary cinema – families always tend to harbour secrets and serve as battlefields for various conflicts between their members. The sincerity of the approach can help, but only so much. The thing with The Forbidden Aunt is that Bojana Novaković clearly sees a wider picture, but has enough discretion to refrain from using her family’s story as a metaphor of sorts for the Serbian and former Yugoslav society. Instead, she shows a lot of empathy for her aunt, possibly because she herself is no stranger to some of Gordana’s patterns of behaviour.

The special treat here is Novaković’s decision to listen to her aunt’s suggestion and insert a number of telenovela-style segments to re-enact moments of the family’s past, and to complement the rather scarce archive material and the newly filmed footage (of varying quality), shot by the filmmaker herself under varying conditions, which form the rest of the movie. The soap opera scenes, where Novaković plays both herself and Gordana alongside both professional actors and non-actors, serve the film quite well, due to Dušan Grubin’s lensing and Milica Kolarić’s inspired costumes. Thanks to these segments, The Forbidden Aunt feel a bit less like a necessary, but still very bitter pill to swallow.

A Film a Week - We Shall Live Together / Živjećemo zajedno

 previously published on Cineuropa

The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, especially its Bosnia and Herzegovina chapter, and the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia left hundreds of thousands of people killed, wounded or forcefully displaced, and traumatised millions of them - so much so that it has remained, to this day, one of the main topics in public debate in all of the countries that resulted from the breakup of the socialist state. Croatian documentary filmmaker Damir Markovina certainly had a “front-row seat” to these events, which have been, along with his and his family’s ordeal during those years, a core interest in his work. In the medium-length film Wait for Me (2021), he approached the issue of his extended family’s forced mobility between five cities or villages, in three different countries. His follow-up offering, also a medium-length film, the Ji.hlava-winning title Deserters (2022), was centred on his and his former classmates’ experiences as exiles from their city, Mostar, during the 1990s wars.

In his feature-length debut, Markovina goes further and gets more personal, as the main protagonist is Damir’s politician father, Roko Markovina, with his different roles on the public scene and at home, as well his dilemmas, decisions and actions, all this before, during and after the war which had repercussions for the whole family. We Shall Live Together has premiered in the Documentary Competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival.

On the political front, Roko Markovina was a remarkable figure – a man who refused to betray his socialist ideals in the midst of nationalist hysteria, and who was ready to pay the price for it. On a personal level, however, he could easily be described as a stubborn, selfish idealist of a man whose fair, but rigid, moral principles and will to sacrifice the well-being of his family to defend them left many scars. The questions that Damir Markovina primarily addresses are Roko’s reasons for having his family evacuated from Mostar so late, too late, and his refusal to come back to live in “his” town after the war – while his younger son, the well-known left-leaning intellectual Dragan Markovina, went back and still lives there now. Both of the sons play the devil’s advocate, asking their father the questions which should theoretically help them clarify certain things and also get closure, whereas their mother, Zina, keeps suffering quietly, craving some sense of stability and predictability in her twilight years.

We Shall Live Together is a demanding film that asks the viewer to take in a wealth of both facts and emotions (spoken or unspoken) – indeed, those who have seen some of Damir Markovina’s previous works or know something about the recent history of Yugoslavia are definitely at an advantage. For those less familiar with the topic, Markovina provides enough contextual elements – via thoughtfully written on-screen intertitles – which feel unique and fit the general vibe of the film perfectly.

The same level of intricacy can be observed when it comes to the craftsmanship behind the film, which Markovina has lean a bit more towards experimental cinema than his previous ones – for instance, when he projects home movies onto the faces appearing in a still photo in the opening scene – while making sure he delivers a smooth blend, melding spontaneous newly filmed footage (shot by himself, Krešimir Štulina, and Tomislav Krnić) with intriguing archival images of the war and the Parliament. The striking sound design (courtesy of Miroslav Piškulić) must also be mentioned as one of the film’s highlights, and so must the editing, masterfully handled by Vladimir Gojun and Marta Bregeš.

In the end, We Shall Live Together is not just (and is not yet another) documentary about war, damaged family relations and the collapse of Yugoslavia told in the first person; it may very well be the ultimate film on all of these subjects.

A Film a Week - Sweetheart / Gioia mia

 previously published on Cineuropa

Movies can sometimes make us hope that we will learn our lessons, overcome our differences and make the world come together. That seems to be the mission of Margherita Spampinato’s debut feature Sweetheart, which premiered in Locarno’s Cineasti del presente competition.

Nico (Marco Fiore) is on the verge of puberty and still struggling to accept the departure of his beloved babysitter Violetta (Camille Dugay, in a brief appearance), who is leaving her job in order to get married. Since the school is out for summer, Nico is being sent from Milan to his great aunt Gela's (veteran actress Aurora Quattrocchi) in Sicily. However, for Nico, the change of environment is not remotely as hard as the change in terms of time, as two of them come from different centuries and therefore live different, almost incompatible lifestyles.

Gela is religious and passionate about getting together with her neighbours, while Nico’s only passion seems to be his sadness over Violetta and the video games he plays on his cell phone. Gela cooks traditional food, but Nico wants something more “normal”. She insists on order in the house and following routines, while he is accustomed of being left alone and taken care of. 

Nico's first encounter with the neighbourhood kids who are also staying with their grandmothers in the same building ends in embarrassment for him. But with time, Nico and Gela start bridging their differences and, thanks to the bond he forms with the only girl in the neighbourhood, Rosa (Martina Ziami), he gets accepted into the kids gang. But what will happen when some carefully kept secrets and placed lies come to the surface?

Powered by strong performances from young actors who already have some credits under their belts, with the help of the always great Aurora Quattrocchi, and heightened by some interesting artistic choices, such as the chiaroscuro contrasts of lighting in Claudio Cofrancesco’s largely hand-held camerawork, Sweetheart is a sweet, warm piece of work that achieves a certain intimate and cosy feeling. The question is, however, whether the three-act structure, as well as the music, which starts in a tense mode but soon deflates tension, end up making the film too predictable. Additionally, while some exaggerations in the differences between Nico and Gela are clearly played for laughs, they also set a tone that is way too naive to be taken at face value. 

Ultimately, the world Spampinato has created with Sweetheart is too unlikely in today’s reality and looks more like a diffuse memory of her own childhood, rather than a truthful representation of the rift between generations today. The point she tries to make is not exactly new, but it stands firmly whether we side with one protagonist’s point of view or the other's: technology cannot replace human contact, just as time cannot be frozen out of regret or sadness, so this gap between young and elderly should be overcome through compromise and joint efforts. We should also keep in mind that the middle generation, which should serve as a mediator, is completely left out from the film, and probably for good reason. Ultimately, however, Sweetheart reveals that a film made from the seemingly typical template of the contrasts between children and old people can offer many more layers for reflection.

A Film a Week - Donkey Days

 previously published on Cineuropa

Family dynamics are always tricky to negotiate, so it should come as no surprise that the relations between family members are often at the centre of the literary and cinematic works. This is certainly the case with Donkey Days, the sophomore feature written and directed by Rosanne Pel, so far best known for her Toronto-premiered debut, Light as Feathers (2018), in which she examined how an abusive relationship between a teenager and his mother can spill over to the outside world. Donkey Days has premiered in the main competition of Locarno.

This time, we have two adult sisters, Anna (Jil Krammer, in her first screen role) and Charlotte (German actress Susanne Wolff, recently glimpsed in Köln ’75), who have always fought for their mother’s attention. The mum, Ines (veteran actress Hildegard Schmahl), is quite a piece of work herself. At first, one might think that she is trying to balance out the dynamics between her daughters, but she actually fuels their rivalry. The question is whether she does so willingly, for the sake of manipulation, or unwittingly, simply by making questionable choices.

The sisters have adopted different coping mechanisms to deal with the mother. While schoolteacher Anna reacts impulsively, through sulking and childish tantrums, Charlotte tries to present herself as a highly organised person. Their tactics, however, take different tolls on their lives, since Anna manages to sabotage the relationship with her partner Noe (Amke Wegner), and Charlotte always comes across as cold and distant. Ines’s advancing age and her secrets, which Anna and Charlotte come to discover, such as a “mystery urn” and her love of donkeys, present new challenges for them and their already troubled relationship.

The structure of the movie, in which the first two-thirds of the running time can be seen as a prolonged exposition, does not make watching Donkey Days a very pleasant experience. However, it places the viewers directly into the minds of the sisters, particularly Anna, and makes them feel the emotional turmoil the two have to grapple with when dealing with their mother. Viewers may also get a bit lost and confused owing to the fact that, at least during the exposition part, the plot might (or might not) be presented chronologically, while the filmmaker also introduces a kind of “alternative reality” where the sisters meet their mother as a young person of about their age. The sense of unnerving disorientation is further underlined by the use of unsteady, handheld camerawork with numerous horizontal pans by cinematographer Aafke Beernink as well as by Xander Nijsten’s seemingly rough editing, while the atonal music score by Ella van der Woude also plays a part.

The actresses and their work are among the chief saving graces of the movie. Hildegard Schmahl has a strong, commanding screen presence, while the chemistry between Susanne Wolff and Jil Krammer is palpable. The latter is also paired well with another non-professional, Amke Wegner, and thanks to Rosanne Pel’s work with them, their lack of formal experience never shows. As a bonus, Carla Juri shines in a few flashbacks as the young Ines.

In the end, Donkey Days is less about the story and making some kind of point than it is about the vibe. This kind of approach could be classed as risky, but it is obvious that this time, it is a deliberate choice, and it consequently bears a strong auteur-driven hallmark.

A Film a Week - Daughter's Daughter

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

This year, the Lightbox section of Toronto International Film Festival is hosting the world premiere of the sophomore feature film directed by Xi Huang, “Daughter’s Daughter”. The director’s debut “Missing Johnny” (2017) had a healthy and fruitful festival tour, but mainly on the Asian continent and at festivals specialized in Asian cinema. The new effort is more likely to travel further and longer, while the name of the legendary Taiwanese New Wave filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien as the executive producer on ending credits suggests that Xi might be the new, internationally recognized voice of the Taiwanese cinema.

The protagonist of the film is Jin Ai-xia (the one and only Sylvia Chang), a woman who spent a part of her life in New York and the other part in Taipei. From the two “episodes”, she has two daughters, Emma (Karena Lam) who lives in New York and Zuer (Eugenie Liu) who lives in Taipei. The two had never met, until one night in the winter of 2018, when they both came to visit her mom who ended up in a hospital with a leg injury. The reason for them to meet was to share responsibilities regarding the care of their grandmother (Allanah Ong) who suffered a stroke on top of showing early signs of dementia.

Six years later, Zuer and her girlfriend Zhou Jia-ji (Tracy Chou) are in New York for the attempt of in-vitro fertilization that could grant them a child. Unfortunately, they both die in a traffic accident, so Ai-xia becomes a legal guardian of the embryo, with a “choice” of four options. She could keep it frozen, donate it to another couple, find a surrogate mother or terminate it. The thing is, Ai-xia was never a good mother to either of her daughters and she has never been a mother material. She now has to decide about the fate of her late daughter’s daughter (hence the title), while also having some explanations to provide to her surviving, older daughter.

It is certain that the stakes are high for Xi who tries to tell an emotionally charged story in a compelling and heart-felt way. In order to keep the grip over the viewer’s attention, he splits it into two different time frames that he seamlessly goes between for the 126 minutes of the runtime, revealing the protagonist’s backstory slowly and carefully. The viewers learn as much about her, the pressure she is under and the emotions that influence her decision as they need to know, so the effect of those perfectly timed revelations is maximized. On top of being a writer who is in complete control of the story, he is also a master director who not just pays close attention to the details of the background, but also knows how to frame his actresses and actors, usually in longer, continuous takes, to make them shine.

Speaking of which, Sylvia Chang has her masterclass here, but the others, such as the Allanah Ong, the established Karena Lam and the promising Eugenie Liu, are brave enough to let themselves get into the interplay and a bit of a sparing with her. With an array of interesting supporting performances, for instance the one of Winston Chao who is very relaxed in the role of Ai-xia’s former lover and life-long New York friend Johnny, it is safe to say that “Daughter’s Daughter” is a very well acted piece of cinema.

Things look well on the craft level as well. The crisp-digital cinematography by Yao Hung-i captures the details laid out in Hwarng Wern-ying’s production design, such as the vibe of the New York Chinatown, the editing by Liao Ching-sung helps the complicated story come out clear and easy to follow, while the sparsely used gentle synth music is always in sync with the emotions portrayed.

“Daughter’s Daughter” is definitely a deftly made film that lives up to the ambition to make the deep emotions feel real on the screen. But the definitive added value here is Sylvia Chang who imbues her very complicated character with life in every scene.

A Film a Week - Carbide / Garbura

 previously published on Cineuropa

The year 2022 should be remembered as a successful one in Croatian cinema, especially considering the feature debuts that made a splash on the festival circuit. First, The Uncle, written and directed by Andrija Mardešić and David Kapac, premiered at Karlovy Vary, and then Juraj Lerotić’s Safe Place premiered at Locarno and triumphed at Sarajevo. One more title can now be added to the list: Josip Žuvan’s Carbide, which had its world premiere at San Sebastián and had the honour of closing the New Directors section.

Nikola and Antonio (played by newcomers Franko Floigl and Mauro Ercegović Gracin, respectively) are pre-teen kids, next-door neighbours and best friends from an unnamed, semi-rural suburb of a coastal town in Croatia. Since there is not much to do in their neighbourhood, especially during the winter holidays, their favourite pastime is large-scale, low-tech pyrotechnics: blowing up kegs with carbide and filming the chaos with their mobile phones, in the hope of becoming YouTube sensations.

The trouble is that their families are feuding, this time over an easily solvable problem of water and mud flowing down from Antonio’s family’s house to Nikola’s family’s yard. However, it seems more like a current excuse to continue a quarrel that started years ago, instigated by Antonio’s emotionally detached grandfather Vlado (Zdenko Jelčić) and Nikola’s grandmother Ivka (Asja Jovanović), now seeping down to the generation of the kids’ parents, Nikola’s father Zoran (Serbian actor Ljubomir Bandović) and mother Marija (Marija Škaričić), as well as Antonio’s single mother Ines (Ivana Roščić). Over the course of one holiday season, a number of secrets at the root of the feud (or merely fuelling it further) will be revealed (or at least hinted at), and the way things pan out will also affect the relationship between the two childhood friends.

The plot might seem clichéd, but the attention to detail in the character-building and the precise doses of the revelations dished out in Žuvan’s script make the film feel quite credible, while the choices in terms of the production and costume design (handled by Petra Poslek and Katarina Pilić, respectively), and especially regarding the music heard from the TVs, radios and mobile phones (consisting of saccharine Croatian mainstream pop), serve to enhance this authenticity. The various insights into Croatian society, torn between traditions (gerontocracy and patriarchy complementing each other) and modernity (the fierce race for technological gadgets and online prestige, measured in likes, shares and subscriptions), are woven into the script masterfully.

The actors are the ones who benefit the most from Žuvan’s detailed and measured approach. Both of the young performers are quite natural in their roles. Ljubomir Bandović, playing a temperamental, yet frustrated, man with chops he has already mastered in a number of recent Serbian series, proves to be a worthy addition to Croatian cinema, while the toned-down approach that both Marija Škaričić and Ivana Roščić adopt speaks volumes about their characters’ positions within their own households. Finally, character actress Asja Jovanović proves to be a proper scene-stealer as the menacing grandma insulting everybody in the vicinity.

On the craft level, the decision to mix long tracking shots and some hand-held camerawork by Tomislav Sutlar, in drab and murky colours, proves to be a shrewd one. On the other hand, the pace of the film is occasionally a little too slow, but the mobile-phone clips edited into the material by Borna Buljević add to the dynamism of the movie. In the end, Carbide might not be as explosive as the title suggests, but it is certainly simmering with tension.

A Film a Week - Beyond You / Geudae noemeoe

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

The indie movie scene in South Korea is alive and productive and Park Hong-min is a part of it. After some modest success with his previous works “A Fish” (2011) and “Alone” (2015), he is back with a metaphysical melodrama “Beyond You”. It premiered at last year’s edition of Busan and was selected for the competition of Osaka Asian Film Festival where we had the chance to see it.

The plot of the film runs on some standard tropes like broken family ties. The career-obsessed filmmaker Kyung-ho (Kim Kwan-hoo) meets a young woman named Ji-yeon (Yoon Hye-ri) in the park. She drops a bombshell on him: she is the daughter of his college ex-girlfriend In-sook and he might even be her father. He rejects the sheer possibility of that kind of prospect and the trouble is that In-sook (Oh Mine) suffers from a progressing Alzheimer’s. Intrigued, he follows Ji-yeon to meet In-sook and to try to solve the mystery.

The plot gets messier from there, as it starts moving in circles and creating time loops where all three characters are driven by the senses of loss and regret to some extent. Same scenes play out again to different outcomes and characters appear in one another’s vicinity seemingly for no reason. There are two additional layers of reality in the film, the first clearly being a metaphor using ants as Kyung-ho’s long-standing obsession and the face of his recent fear, while the second one is Kyung-ho’s work on a new script that depicts the situations and relations from his life. A philosophical dilemma rises and remains unanswered until the very end: whether Kyung-ho works on the script based on autobiographical elements or the whole film is an adaptation of Kyung-ho’s fictional script.

The plot seems convoluted to a point that it is not clear what Park and his co-screenwriter Cha Hye-jin are trying to communicate, which becomes extremely tiresome in the film’s runtime of nearly two hours. Luckily, Park, working as a production designer and editor along his screenwriting and directing work, has some interesting ideas. Firstly, he uses the locations of Seoul’s back alleys to perfection, reflecting the metaphorical maze the characters are in to the physical world. Secondly, his directing style, resembling Hong Sang-soo’s poetics of extended, dynamic takes with zooms and camera movements serving as the means of the internal montage, leaves him less extra work in the editing room and style-wise makes up for the lack of substance in the script. For that, the cinematographer Kim Byeong-jung should also be commended.

The lack of clarity of Park’s vision also reflects on the acting. It remains unclear if Kyung-ho is actually troubled by the fact that he forgot his first love or he is just a jerk that wants to make sure that he is not a Ji-yeon’s father, and if it is impossible, to use the situation as the source of artistic inspiration. Kim Kwan-hoo goes for the only solution he has on his disposal: acting in a constantly elevated emotional register, which does not work well at times. Oh Mine also has to play a one-note character, so her performance is, well, one-note. Yoon Hye-ri does the best of the trio, finding a balance between overdoing and under-doing, but her character is also more of a sketch. The attempt of coding emotions by the music in loops on piano, synth and acoustic guitar written by Kim Cheol-hwan also seems half-baked.

In the end, “Beyond You” does not live up to its ambitions, as it is unclear and uncommunicative. For the extreme enthusiasts only!