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Some thoughts on Film Festivals 2007:
The obvious
films will appropriately receive much publicity: RENDITION,
brilliantly-made, politically nuanced and relevant,
ATONEMENT, far better than some of the reviews, includes
one of the best depictions of World War Two ever seen on
film, beautiful and a reflection of the spirit and
political philosophy of Ian McEwen in the
novel. The following list is list of
eight films one may have to keep one’s eyes out to see,
but are more than worth the effort before they become
DVDs.
THE VISITOR, HAPPINESS, and DOL: THE VALLEY OF
THE TAMBOURINES in particular are films which
should be on a permanent must-see list. This are eight
films that push the frontiers of global cinema and are
simply worth seeing:
THE VISITOR
by Thomas McCarthy Probably
the most not-to-be-missed film of the year. The acting
is brilliant, the soundtrack is brilliant, and the film
is an ode to humanity.
HAPPINESS by
Heo Jin-Ho not quite as good
as APRIL SNOW but still a
brilliant film.
DOL: THE
VALLEY OF THE TAMBOURINES by Hiner
Saleem could be watched without
subtitles, because the cinematography is so
beautiful.
Profound, politically relevant.
BUDDHA
COLLAPSED OUT OF SHAME by Hana Makmalbaf.
The pace of
Iranian-style filmmaking can be trying, but in this one,
no one cared. It is so
beautiful at so many levels that the pacing doesn’t
matter at all.
PERSIAN
CARPET a showcase for Iranian cinema with 17
different directors doing short films on the riff of the
importance of Persian carpets in Persian culture. Obviously
uneven, but inspired and a terrific showcase.
M by Lee
Myung-se
Lee is one of
most original visual directors in the world, turning
motion into a form of choreography in The Duelists. This is
contemporary, often-confusing and still worth every
moment for the innovativeness of it. Like Beneix, or
Rodriguez in Sin City, Lee is doing
things with film that no one else ever came up
with.
BRICK LANE by Sarah Garvin
An adaptation of
the novel that works by focusing on one year from the
longer novel.
CARAMEL by Nadine Labaki
A poem to
Beirut, to strong women
and to simply excellent filmmaking. This is an
incredible film about emotional worlds in transition and
the importance of allowing people to manage this without
turning existential moments and experiences into
political slogans.
June 11,
2006
Five personal
favorite films viewed in
2005:
Five films
that captured the imagination in the last year that are
not household names. Some are widely
distributed, some not. This is
not a 5 Best list, but I think by any
criterion Water and April Snow would be on such a
list.
It is meant to be a testament to the creativity
in global film and a personal list of “undiscovered”
films, at least undiscovered by broad Canadian
audiences.
1. April
Snow. Hur Jin-ho
creates a film so perfect in its depiction of real human
emotions and so contemporary in its setting that it
shows the drama in ordinary, real lives.
2. The
Duelist. Lee Myung -Se creates a
film that is almost about motion, movement, not just as
dance or choreography but as a subject in itself. It is almost
physics, but it is also an exquisite period piece,
eligible in a way for the “Best Representation of
History in Film” award, although unlike, say, Joyeux
Noel, it is more about the mood of the
time than about the details.
3. Sex
and Philosophy Makhmalbaf
has shown that dance can be filmed and that dance is
itself poetry and private self-expression. The film
is flawed in its narrative and frustrating in the
unexplored pathways that make it Persian and Russian (in
the spirit of classical ballet), but somehow it
doesn’t matter.
4. Water. How good can an
important film be? This film
is the best film about the most important issue
confronting global politics today: the liberation
of women in societies where that is still an issue, but it is so
powerful emotionally and so beautiful at every level of
filmmaking (soundtrack and cinematography), that even if
it weren’t as important., it would still be among the
very best films of the decade.
5. Sunrise
Sunset. Not just
because of Fiona Sun’s performance, and not just because
of the extraordinary music. It is
politically interesting and enormously self-aware about
the challenges of maintaining traditional culture in all
modernizing societies.
July 22, 2005 Korean film exports
to
China
: The
rise of an Asian film industry in South Korean has
produced one of the interesting cultural export case
studies in the current world of globalization. It
is analogous in many ways to the development in the
1960s of an Italian film industry around some key
directors who were more innovative than anyone else at
the time.
The Korean industry, which has been noticed for a
number of years
)
has produced world-famous
films now several categories of film: contemporary
action cinema,
traditional classical pieces (Chihwaseon and
Chunhyang), innovative Buddhism (spring, Summer,
Autumn, Winter, Spring and 3-Iron, complex analysis
of Korean nationalism and the development of a modern
society in an Asian context (Turning Gate,
Century’s End) and simply the kind of film that looks at
class and (The Truth About Cats). For all
these reasons, Korean film becomes a leader in the
cultural industries, an innovative Asian voice and a
case study of a film industry with significant export
successes.
(See www.koreanfilm.org and
www.cinekorea.com and to see
a discussion of the current export markets of Korean
film, see the
Hollywood
Reporter http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/international/feature_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000930566
)
June
28, 2005 : Learning about Africa from a
dynamic African film industry: These are a few
links to some of the most interesting films which could
be used in a course on African politics. They
represent filmmakers from Cameroun, Mozambique, Burkina
Faso, Senegal, Mauritania, and, in the case of Rauol
Peck, a Haitian documenting a story about the history of
the Democratic Republic of the Congo (and all of
Africa), i.e. Lumumba. For exccelent
coverage of Africa film, see Mary-Anne Awori's web-site www.originfilm.com
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,338784,00.html Chocolat
http://www.berlinale.de/external/de/filmarchiv/doku_pdf/20021585.pdf
Lenteur http://www.africultures.com/anglais/articles_anglais/Yameogo.htm Yameogo
http://www.newsreel.org/films/ainsi.htm Moussa
http://www.africultures.com/anglais/articles_anglais/Sissako.htm Sissako
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2001/07/072704.html Lumumba
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