“Cinema Six” is the definition of average, which is strange considering it was probably the most pumped film at the festival. You couldn’t walk an inch in the press lounge without stepping on one of their little yellow adverts. To begin with, it’s obviously Mark Potts’ first film, as narratively, it’s derivative of so many other, better, things. A lot of the emotional ennui that the filmmakers are trying to convey about working at a movie theater, particularly one that feels so run down and little visited – something that, yes, I can currently attest to as a popcorn pusher in my spare time – are culled from “Clerks” in a way that’s a little too far in the direction of laziness rather than homage. Its attempts at male conversation and camaraderie are part and parcel of the produce of Judd Apatow and his ilk – a lot of “fucks” and a lot of empty vulgarity about balls that doesn’t really feel natural, even though the film makes a great attempt at putting that impression forward.

Yet, while superficially it looks like a lovechild of the aforementioned — those movies at least made an effort to have an arc, to tell a genuine story about disaffected twenty-somethings who come to some real conclusion about their lives through trial and error — “Cinema Six” ultimately feels like a big, floppy let-down. The ending arrives suddenly and the most interesting moments, which should have comprised the better part of the narrative, happen in only the last few scenes. It feels like the director gathered a crew of people and rented out a movie theater and just let them goof off for a while with the camera rolling, and then realized he was making a movie and scrambled to fashion some kind of coherence out of the chaos. Yes, goofing off is what we do most of the time behind the concession counter. It’s not an exciting job. But, that don’t make for good cinema. Six.

****

“Compliance”
Director: Craig Zobel
Writer: Craig Zobel
Starring: Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker and Pat Healy

Craig Zobel’s “Compliance” was among the strangest screenings I’ve been to in my four and a half years writing semi-professionally. There was such a feeling of tension in the air – people were audibly responding to the screen in full sentences, and there were moments where it almost came to blows, as one gawky teenager continued to laugh in a room full of pin-drop silence until the whole theater rose up and intimidated him into shutting the hell up. This is perhaps the strongest compliment an audience can give a film intended to provoke intense reactions.

Shot in a claustrophobic and harried fashion, the film depicts the true story of the 2004 serial prank caller who posed as a policeman, made a mockery of the manager of a McDonald’s and sexually abused a young girl. The story is told with such a sharp sense of narrative precision that by the end, the rest of my party was asking me (the only guy who’d followed the story when it happened) just how true it was, because so much of it seems outside the realm of possibility. But, yes, this happened, and it’s to the film’s credit that it refuses to give the audience any distance from the events it portrays, because it forces us to watch the whole thing spiral out of control not as a quiet spectator but as an involved assailant, leaving us breathless because – up until the final twenty minutes – we’re refused exit from that manager’s office, and we’re left questioning after just where exactly it all went wrong. The answer is not in a specific point in the narrative, but in the compliant (haha!) minds of the people, all the people, involved. It’s an effective film made up of uncomfortable people not necessarily being forced into an uncomfortable situation, but going along with it of their own volition and – well, very human stupidity. And, that’s the point, and that’s why it’s so affecting, something the film knows and acknowledges with the last coda against black before going to credits: the events reenacted here happened seventy times in the course of a year. It wasn’t just a fluke of happenstance, and it’s not at all surprising to me to learn that this is being called the most divisive film out of Sundance.

But, to be fair, the manager and company who were at the heart of the incident don’t seem like the brightest people. There was a line that the filmmakers surprisingly didn’t keep from the original proceedings that would’ve only added to this subtext, from the girl who’s life was turned into a shambles at the heart of it all, when she was questioned as to why she even when along with it in the first place rather than raise ire and storm out of the restaurant. She said something in
response that was similar to: “I was raised in a house where you did what you were told, without question. So, that’s what I did.” With this soundbite in mind, the film could also be a pretty damned funny black comedy on the nature of blind acceptance – and, I could understand why that little fuck in the row in front of me couldn’t stop laughing.

****

“Faith, Love and Whiskey”
Director: Kristina Nikolova
Writers: Kristina Nikolova, Paul Dalio
Starring: Yavor Baharov, Lidia Indjova and John Keabler

Kristina Nikolova’s surprising and refreshing “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is a film my brother and I picked out of the festival book on a whim, partially because it felt like one of the notable movies of the festival and that it probably would do well to cover it in some measure or another.

At the outset, I had no real interest in seeing it, because the way it was being promoted was on all sides very much that of a conventional, empowering chick-flick. Indeed, even the words of the promoter at the beginning of the screening said as much, because it boiled down to, “you’re about to see a great film about women! And Bulgaria! And women in Bulgaria!”

But, a man can be wrong – “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is probably my favorite of the feature length films that I saw at the festival, this year. Not a little of that is due to it feeling like the only truly independent film at the festival, the only one out of the crop that I saw that made no real concessions toward the type of bland and disposable main-stream that so many of the others were aiming for.

It’s uncomfortably raw and real, and warm. It’s a such a beautifully naturalistic, unconventionally raw examination of relationships, of femininity and masculinity, combined with a photographer’s eye toward the landscape of Bulgaria, a strange and almost magical combination of the urban and the rural seeping into each other, where the boundaries are never defined between either.

It would really be pointless to talk about what “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is about in a narrative sense, because at its real core its about simple human things expressed with a feeling of great, palpable humanity and lyrical grace, and with surprisingly little in the way of dialogue. Most of what’s here is made known through a sort of constant visual collage of snippets – eyes, faces. Expressions. Winding roads. Glances. Glass bottles on a window sill, growing ever bigger. When there are words spoken, they’re either hushed tones of reluctant acceptance given pin-drop weight by their emotional importance to a scene or drowned out by the blaring music of the sweaty night-clubs that make up a good portion of the film’s background.

So much of this goes into what the film does so well, which is make a film that is actually “universal,” a buzzword that so many films make a claim for, by dealing in emotions and feelings rather than the artifice of genre, something I saw too many other films fall before than I’d like, this festival. That feeling of being romantically trapped, and wanting a last fling before its all concretized, and in that old dilemma it finds something more personal and complicated, being stuck between the comforts of a familiar and juvenile fling, or the burgeoning adulthood that marriage promises, and the feeling of hidden guilt when this marriage is crowed about by family in front of the other man’s face. The euphoria that comes with a reconciled love, and the unabashed shame when it turns out to be merely a temporary thing, and you end up being the one who has to leave the room. Days drift by, more and more until reality suddenly returns to returns the main character Neli back to the world she’s resigned herself to – but, just how reluctantly, we’re never made clear.

****

For more information on The 2012 Dallas International Film Festival go here.

As a freelance film critic looking to get involved with film festivals, I feared that talks at the International Film Festival Summit might be too specialised for me. True, I was one of only two film critics in a room of about 40 people, many of whom had vast experience in founding, financing, organising and programming film festivals: about half gave keynote addresses or participated in panels to share their knowledge. In-depth knowledge of a subject can make it difficult to talk about it without going into the kind of detail that will bore the uninitiated or blind them with science. Yet most of what these highly knowledgeable speakers had to say was completely accessible to the novice. The name ‘summit’ also evokes a vast, potentially intimidating gathering of people, but this summit was a personal and welcoming affair, hosted in a cosy meeting room at the Hotel du Louvre, right in the middle of Paris’s first arrondissement.

Over two days, I listened to the advice and opinions of experienced professionals covering every key area of running a film festival, including programming, financing, film markets, new technology, and originality. The speakers were connected with a range of (mainly European) festivals, big and small: Venice, Cannes, Moscow, Paris Cinema, Stockholm, Oldenburg, the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, the Deauville American Film Festival and the European Independent Film Festival. There were special guest speakers such as Chris Fujiwara, Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Axel Brücker, founder of the Trailer Museum. Michel Hazanavicius also made an appearance to accept the summit’s Best Festival Film of the Year award for The Artist.

Referencing Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, Fujiwara gave an erudite address on the role of film festivals in bringing people together and developing a trans-national, universal community, one that goes beyond national identity and special interest. He made a point which may encounter some resistance in a world which leans increasingly towards individuals interacting with their personal screens: he argued that cinema must be a shared experience, and that watching a movie alone (specifically on DVD at home) fundamentally diminishes the experience. Readers are welcome to comment below regarding their feelings on the matter: is there a special pleasure to watching a DVD on your own at home, and (screen size, and sound/image quality aside), do you feel you benefit from a communal experience even if there is only a handful of other, silent people in the cinema? Do also respond to Fujiwara’s central argument: that festivals have the potential to create a universal community by drawing attention to common concerns (art, the human experience) over national boundaries and other factors which separate us from the wider world.

Fujiwara’s contribution was the most philosophical: his most concrete piece of advice was that programmers should allow the films to guide the festival’s programme, rather than seeking to impose a pre-existing vision on the festival. Other speakers focused entirely on practicalities, of which I’m going to share some of the most useful and interesting:

-Festivals should focus on full houses and good experiences.

-To appeal to a diverse audience, you should have a diverse group of people selecting films. At the same time, programmers shouldn’t just go by personal taste: a ‘bad’ film may appeal to audiences and attract media attention.

-While most festivals boast of being bigger every year, there is value in intimacy: even if you are a festival in a large city, by choosing a small neighbourhood within that city, you can create an intimate atmosphere which encourages people at the festival to talk to each other.

-Be open to new technology: making films (securely) available online can give people in the industry a chance to watch the films before the festival, so that they can focus on networking during the festival. A festival could also sell video-on-demand passes to audiences, who would then [pace Chris Fujiwara] be able to watch the festival’s films online at home (currently a challenge because of rights, however).

-Look after your guests (the ‘talent’ and those around them)—especially if they’re not paid to come to the festival.

-Look after your sponsors: while keeping in mind that sponsorship money is for the festival, not promoting the sponsors, be generous, flexible and reliable with them (e.g. offering free seats, posters, a chance to meet a favourite actor/actress).

-Have your sponsors work together to promote each other’s products (e.g. a sponsor restaurant serving the drinks of a sponsor coffee company): this is known as cross-marketing.

Finally, one of the speakers at the summit pointed out that people in different areas of the film industry (producers, distributors, festival directors, etc.) don’t understand each other’s points of view: it would be very constructive if a festival were able to put together such a diverse group of people in one room, so that each could finally understand the concerns and motivations of the others.

The International Film Festival Summit was held on April 3^rd and 4^th 2012. For more information on the programme, and future summits in other European and US cities, visit http://filmfestivalsummit.com/iffseuropeagenda.html

After the last two weeks’ blogs on highlights of Toulouse’s Cinélatino film festival, this week will conclude with a selection of films which, in my opinion, should be avoided at all costs. First of all, Alejo Franzetti’s The Destruction of the Ruling Order (La Destrucción del orden vigente), which wanted to be a thriller/murder mystery. Unfortunately, wooden acting made it more like a failed comedy. From the very first moment, the film felt passé, the style of its music and title sequence vaguely evocative of Almodovar’s early work: a film of La Movida, 30 years late. It was as though the film itself were on ketamine, the protagonist’s drug of choice. Clara tries to find out how her boyfriend died. At the same time, she receives mysterious fake newspapers with headlines warning her to investigate her mother’s death—‘it was not a heart attack’, they say cryptically. Clara’s mane of blonde hair was the most versatile presence in the film, able to appear up or down, messy or controlled, nuances which eluded the actors entirely.

In the Sky (Al Cielo, 2012), meanwhile, was unwatchable not because there was so little action (which was also true), but because of the director’s literally nauseating style. Like Gabriel  Mariño, director of A Secret World, it seems that Diego Prado wanted to use the camera to suggest that the teenage Andrés is living in his own world. However, where Mariño trained the camera on his protagonist’s profile, Prado focused most often on the back of his protagonist’s head, leaving everything around him blurred. Combine this with a handheld camera following the character around, and it’s guaranteed that some spectators will feel sick well before the end of the film. The idea behind Al Cielo had great potential: the lead singer of the protagonist’s favourite punk band, Noche Nero, dies. Concerned that Andrés will become depressed and get into trouble, his mother pushes him to join a church youth group. He agrees to go, even though he clearly doesn’t fit in with the other kids and their earnest discussions. By chance, he does meet some people more like himself at the church: a punk band which is allowed to practice on church premises since one of its members regularly attends services. Andrés’s relationship with one of the band members is one of the few elements of beauty and hope in this otherwise disorienting and dull film.

Most banal of all, though, was The Last Elvis (El Ultimo Elvis, 2012, dir. Armando Bó). While it was technically professional, unlike the other two films it did not even try to do anything new, different or contemporary. It is the story of a man in his 40s, separated from his wife, and father to a 6-year-old girl. Rather than stepping up to his responsibilities, he indulges his fantasy that he is Elvis Presley, insisting that people call him by this name rather than his real one. The audience is subjected to his performances as an Elvis impersonator, which are not terrible but not specially good either. The film is intended as a comedy, but it is hard to have much sympathy for this selfish man: if the audience doesn’t care about the central character, it is hard to engage with the film as a whole. There have been great tragicomedies about would-be music legends: these prove that audiences can sympathise with characters who struggle, however absurdly, to live their dreams alongside their everyday reality—Anvil: The Story of Anvil! (2008) was a superb example. Most of us wish that our lives could be more glamorous, and try to follow our dreams in a small way. Elvis wants to do more, though, living his life exactly as if he were The King himself. The redeeming element in the film is his daughter, a wry and endearing little girl. Initially she is contemptuous of her father, but when fate forces her to live with him for a while, she immediately adapts, warming to both her father and his lifestyle, and demonstrating a heartbreaking degree of acceptance and affection for a man who has little love for anyone but himself. Where it ought to have focused more on the little girl, the film follows Elvis, cheering him on for his selfishness rather than condemning it. This is a film which divides opinion, though: while there are those who will agree with me that it is banal, the French critics’ jury at Cinélatino awarded their ‘Discovery Prize’ to The Last Elvis.

Like A Secret World (reviewed last week), Southwest (Sudoeste, 2012, dir. Eduardo Nunes) was a flawed film. But audiences are more likely to be forgiving of A Secret World’s flaws because the director was wise enough to keep it short. Audiences might be prepared to be mildly bored for an hour and a half, but over the two hour mark a film has to work hard to keep the audience engaged. At a screening of Southwest at Toulouse’s Cinélatino film festival earlier this month, at least six people walked out. This was in a city where audience attendance is surprisingly high for films that might be classed as difficult, and audience questions in Q&A’s with directors tend to demonstrate a great sensitivity to cinematic language.

That people should walk out of Sud-Oueste was a shame: it was clear from the beginning that it would be a slow film, but it was equally clear that the director had taken as much time over the film’s aesthetics as he was taking to tell the story. The film is in black and white, a little over-grainy, making some parts of the image a little ‘busy’ for my liking. But Nunes composes his shots with exquisite care, often incorporating unusual angles which emphasise diagonals. Most intriguing of all is the film’s format: wide screen, but very narrow from top to bottom, like a panoramic postcard.

When it comes to evoking texture and developing atmosphere, sound is more important than image in this film. It opens with the haunting, near-musical sound of a squeaky windmill, which for many viewers will inevitably evoke The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966). Southwest is similar insofar as it takes place in an untamed, austere new world landscape: coastal Brazil, with its salt plantations and scrubland, continuously swept by a whistling wind and baked by the sun’s molten gaze. Unlike a western, the film focuses less on hardened male pioneers, more on women and children. The latter introduce a vulnerable element of softness, compassion and wonder, and they discover the more delicate aspects of this landscape: the soft sand, the lapping water, and the delicate shells that the ocean deposited before it receded.

I mention the film’s aesthetic and atmosphere first because it is the most reliable element in a film where the narrative sometimes falters. The story itself is a very strange one: a woman named Clarissa dies before giving birth to her child. The midwife is left alone with the body, and returns home with a baby. The story in the village, though, is that mother and child were buried together. The midwife lives in a hut on stilts in the middle of a lake, and is considered by the locals to be a witch. The next time the baby appears, she has grown into a little girl of about 10, who comes to shore alone. Yet no time appears to have passed, as Clarissa’s parents have just learned about her death. The little girl is strange: she is slim and delicate, and wears a white lace dress like the one her mother wore when she died. Initially, she barely speaks, and greets the villagers with a tiny smile hovering permanently around her mouth. Eventually she becomes more involved with Clarissa’s family, attempting to comfort her mother and little brother Joao.

The story is engaging insofar as it encourages the audience to figure out what is going on, relative to the little girl and the passage of time. As the midwife is nowhere to be seen after the baby has grown into a girl, has she somehow worked her magic on the baby, joining their two forms together, so that the baby has aged 10 years in a day? Or was the baby, who logically ought to have died along with her mother, granted a brief respite from death, so that she lives her entire life in the space of a day? (This seems the most likely explanation). Or was it not just a baby that the midwife brought back, but the spirit of Clarissa, who is given a day as a ghost to visit with her family? Towards the end of the film, the absence of further information or real developments means that the audience has little new information to add to their understanding of the film, and must merely passively watch as the film goes on just that bit too long. Still, the film’s outstanding visuals, its haunting atmosphere and the originality of its premise have twice earned it the FIPRESCI prize (at Rio de Janeiro in 2011, and at Cinélatino this year), marking out Southwest as a film worth watching in spite of its flaws.

A Secret World (Un mundo secreto, 2012) was among 14 films in the fiction feature competition at Cinélatino, Toulouse’s Latin American Film Festival. The film received a special mention from the French critics’ jury. Perhaps more important, though, it also received the ‘Prix lycéen de la fiction’, an prize for best fiction film as awarded by a jury of local high school students: their approval suggests that director Gabriel Mariño did an excellent job of capturing the teenage experience in this film.

The film centres on Maria, a strange young woman who lives in a world of her own. She has just graduated from high school, and has sex with anyone who asks her to. Far from being a seductive glamour girl, though, she dresses in the relaxed uniform of the adolescent: baggy jeans, tank tops, ragged scarves and hoodies. As she heads off for her last day at school, her hair still wet from the shower, her mother tells her that she ought to make more of an effort. Finished with school, Maria immediately sets off alone on a trip across her native Mexico, without telling her mother.

The title of this film made me immediately wary. Taken literally, it offers the promise of entering a private, perhaps magical realm. More often, such a title is metaphorical, and it was the case with this film. Much of Maria’s secret world remains secret: she speaks very little, unwilling to reveal her true thoughts except in her notebook, which she fills with skilful sketches and strange messages, addressing herself as though she were another person. Maria reads these messages aloud to the audience, as slowly as she writes them. Even the notebook reveals little about her, except that she sways between typical teenage extremes of self-love and self-loathing. More commonly, and most maddeningly, Maria’s ‘secret world’ is conveyed through long takes of her face in profile, with an expression of docile distrust, staring into space. These shots often leave the background out of focus, as if to emphasise Maria’s complete absorption in her own world.

The interest that this film holds is, above all, in its cinematography. A very promising director, Gabriel Mariño grabs the audience from the get-go with striking, beautifully composed shots of Mexican landscapes, both urban and rural. These lyrical shots, characterised by their sensitivity to detail and seductive patches of bright colour, entrance the audience in the absence of a more involving, better-developed narrative. For Maria herself is an exasperating character: we feel sympathy for her, but it is irritating when a protagonist keeps nearly everything on the inside. She meets three different people on her trip, people who take care of her, take advantage of her, or a bit of both. It is surprising that anyone approaches her at all, as she is so begrudging in her conversation: it is always someone else who has to take the first step.

Maria does finally meet a gentle young man, Juan, who gets to know her before sleeping with her, and actually makes her smile when she has sex, rather than lying bored and passive as she does with every other partner. Yet even with him, she is only slightly more talkative. Juan tells Maria his own story: a harrowing explanation of why he has had to defy his parents’ wishes and head to the US to earn a living. In return, Maria tells him about a dream she had, in which a whale plays a magical role and her mother a sinister one. Juan confronts the unknown in America, going to work in a country he has never previously set foot in. He asks Maria, who visited the States as a child, what it is like, but her experience was quite different from what his will be: she is only familiar with tourist attractions like Disneyland and shopping malls. Although the director says that he wanted his film to convey the uncertainty of the future for today’s youth in an increasingly violent Mexico, Maria’s experiences seem much less compelling than Juan’s, making the audience wonder why the movie wasn’t about Juan instead.

Exactly why Maria appears so detached from the world is never made clear. Her problems with her mother seem fairly typical for an adolescent. Of greater concern is her combination of solitude and sexual passivity: a girl on her own, there for the taking, with no friends to guide her or give her support. Although she does achieve a victory of sorts at the end of the film, Maria remains solitary and her inner thoughts mysterious—too mysterious. The director had a noble objective in using Maria as a symbol of aimless youth, but the other problem, that of violence, remains very much in the background. There is no reason to wish for more violence in a film, but if the director wanted to confront this particular problem, it was not enough to introduce Juan’s brief account of it. While Maria’s attitude and experiences may correspond to that of Western youth in general, her life is too turned in on itself to speak about Mexico’s own wider problems.

Slow, meditative films that were thin on plot dominated the awards at the16th Sofia International Film Festival. Grand Prix winner Stories Which Only Exist When Remembered (dir. Julia Murat) centred on a young photographer’s stay amongst the elderly of a small village, while Jaffe Zinn’s Magic Valley traced the discovery of a crime in a quiet town. Konstantin Bojanov won four of the festival’s ten prizes for Avé, a film about two young people hitchhiking across Bulgaria.

Given this general trend in the festival’s prize-giving, it was disappointing that the juries overlooked a film which was of a similar spirit in terms of its plot and pacing, and which treated an important subject in a nuanced way. Özcan Alpek’s Future Lasts Forever concerns Sumru, an ethnomusicologist on a research trip. Her mission is to record Kurdish women singing elegies for male family members who were killed when their villages were attacked by Turks. In the city of Diyarbakir, she meets Ahmet, a film-lover who sells world cinema DVDs at the market. Ahmet becomes drawn into helping Sumru with her work. Together, they listen to women who, before singing their elegies, give horrifying accounts of their experiences. Ahmet and Sumru also work together at a local library to re-organise a large existing archive of atrocities, in readiness for an official investigation that has yet to take place.

Audiences may tend to shy away from films which incorporate talking-head accounts of atrocity. On the one hand, the viewer naturally wants to empathise with the speaker on a personal level, but the horror is such that most can never comprehend the full extent of the speaker’s pain. On the other hand, the violence becomes banal and depersonalised, as the viewer thinks of how many similar events have taken place across the world, now and in the past: the viewer becomes depressed thinking of the inhuman acts that humans have been, and are still, capable of. Comprehending an overwhelming history of suffering becomes even more difficult than confronting it on an individual level.

Future Lasts Forever takes a very balanced approach to its subject matter, however, and this is part of its originality. The film does not simply follow its fictional protagonist’s quest as an ethnomusicologist; it also confronts difficult questions about why she is doing this research. Ahmet is the first to raise the question, muttering darkly about Kurds now being of academic interest. As a Kurd himself, he has been touched by the stories and songs which Sumru is recording. As Sumru is not Kurdish, there is automatically an underlying question of motive. If she were looking at the atrocities per se, it would be easy to see how her research could be motivated by the suffering of fellow humans. The fact that her interest is in elegies, which are a step away from the atrocities themselves, leaves her open to accusations of academic distance from her subject, or worse, of morbidity in her avid interest in sufferings that she is not personally connected with.

Future Lasts Forever incorporates only one short sequence of documentary-style footage of an attack on a Kurdish village, and even this merely hints at the summary executions that took place. The film as a whole is strangely lyrical and peaceful considering its sombre and violent subject matter. Its images of natural beauty, from mist on a wooded mountain road, to rain in a small church courtyard, sent tingles up my spine in a way few films ever have. It is possible that the director intended to reflect the calming, cathartic impact that nature’s beauty, like human art (elegies for the dead, in particular) can have. But the film does not presume to suggest that elegies can neutralise the loss of a loved one. Its title, ‘Future Lasts Forever’, can refer to the fact that the future, as it is always ahead of us, offers a feeling of eternity: it can be a happy place, when you make plans with someone you love, but it can also be an eternally lonely place when you have lost that person forever. When Sumru mourns her own loss, the audience, like the film’s other characters, remain distant from her. The film’s final shot of her walking alone, slowly vanishing, along the edge of a snowy lake, acknowledges loss as something personal, which isolates the individual.

Art films don’t have to be serious, but a lot of them are. Madness, suffering, death—at times these become depressingly familiar themes at film festivals. For this reason, the rare comedy film is welcome: comedy highlights of last year’s festivals were Matchmaking Mayor at Berlin and Sons of Norway in Reykjavik. Although you’re primed to enjoy them, comedies are a reliable choice, as they typically have to be original, as well as funny, to be included in the festival.

What if you could have a festival that showed nothing but comedies? And what if it cheered you up during the most depressing month of the year? That’s just what the charity ‘Loco’ has done this year. London’s very first comedy film festival is taking place this weekend at the BFI. It started last night, and you’ll have to be quick if you want to take part: it ends Sunday night, and tickets are selling fast.

Two of tonight’s films have been selected by Edgar Wright, who wrote and directed Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs the World. He will be at the BFI to introduce screenings of his own film, Shaun of the Dead and Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet. Alongside these two established talents, Loco will present its ‘Discovery Screening’ this evening: Black Pond, the feature debut of Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe, and ‘All Consuming Love: Man in a Cat’, an animated short with a decidedly unusual premise.

Sunday starts with a Keaton-Chaplin double bill (Sherlock Jr and The Champion), followed by a 50^th anniversary screening of Go to Blazes, a British comedy about a bunch of jewel thieves who choose a fire engine as their getaway car. The festival concludes with its most unusual and intriguing event: the first-ever live reading of The Day Off. The script was written in the 1960s by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (creators of Steptoe and Son), and intended for a film starring comedy legend Tony Hancock. Unfortunately, the film was never made, but maybe a modern adaptation will be in order if this weekend’s live reading proves a success.

Last night, the festival kicked off with two previews: a sell-out screening of The Muppets, followed by The Fairy (La Fée, 2011). The Fairy is set in the port city of Le Havre, and stars the film’s three writer-directors: Dominique Abel as ‘Dom’, a night porter at a cheap hotel, and Fiona Gordon as ‘Fiona’, a scruffy guest who introduces herself as a fairy who can grant Dom 3 wishes. Bruno Romy plays the perilously short-sighted owner of a local bar, ‘L’Amour Flou’. The film’s creators act alongside an excellent supporting cast, including Philippe Marz as troublesome British guest ‘John’, with ‘Mimi’, his beloved Westie.

The programme guide describes The Fairy as influenced by Michel Gondry, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Jacques Tati. True, it does contain something of Gondry’s whimsical imagination, Jeunet’s eccentric and grotesque characters, and Tati’s near-silent physical comedy, but these are merely comparisons that help audiences to know what to expect. The Fairy has its own original spark, and couldn’t be confused with the work of any of these directors. Its comic situations are highly original, often laugh-out-loud, and at times daring: many gags made the audience not just laugh, but gasp with shock, or cringe in pain. While The Fairy pushes the envelope, its overall tone is rarely as exaggerated or baroque as either Gondry or Jeunet, and its storyline has more drive than Tati. As stand-up comedian Stephen K. Amos remarked in a surprise introduction to the film, the trailers really don’t do this film justice. Any one sequence from the film could reasonably stand alone as a comic sketch, but the real power of the film’s comedy only emerges when the scenes are linked together into a coherent whole, building on each other with their repetition and variation, enacted by an endearing cast of characters.

While The Fairy is a thoroughly enjoyable and original comedy the first time around, much of its appeal lies in surprise, so it’s probably not a film that you would want to watch again and again. Classic comic films often rely on verbal or physical gags that can be easily repeated: this way, we enjoy them again, mentally, every time we are reminded of them by situations in our everyday life (the perennial response to ‘Surely…’ in Airplane! for example, or The Young Frankenstein‘s use of ‘Ovaltine’). In The Fairy, there is very little verbal humour, and its physical humour is so extreme that it evokes cartoon more than reality—you will probably never encounter anything like it in real life. I still recommend this film wholeheartedly, though, for its genuinely funny gags, its originality, and last but not least, its lovely aesthetic, which splashes cheerful patches of colour onto a modestly washed out backdrop.

As for Loco itself, the festival is a fantastic idea, at the perfect time of year. A comedy film festival should have the potential to attract a broader audience to the festival experience. True, it’s not as though we can’t get comedy when we want it, on TV or at the multiplex. But the popularity of events like Secret Cinema has proven that people want not just content but a proper experience: a night out with friends, some live entertainment, and a chance to participate: Loco, with its parties, workshops, special guests and public screenings provides just that. I hope that it will be back again next year, hopefully lasting longer than just 3 days, and with a line-up that includes more contemporary international fare. As The Fairy proves, comedy can travel very well.

To find out more about Loco, visit their website.  To buy tickets, visit BFI.

The London Iranian Film Festival is only in its second year, but already it boasts an enchanting and highly professional-looking trailer, as well as a varied line-up of films that blast open the old 80s stereotype of Iranian films as being superficially sweet studies of childhood in which social commentary was necessarily covert. It is of course important not to lose sight of the real censorship and official bullying of filmmakers that takes place in Iran, the most infamous example at the moment being Jafar Panahi. The London Iranian Film Festival has certainly not forgotten Panahi: it screened his new documentary, This Is Not a Film (In Film Nist, 2010), which records his struggle against the 6-year prison sentence and 20-year ban on filmmaking imposed by Iranian authorities last December.

The festival demonstrates the inspiring variety of contemporary Iranian filmmaking. Obviously, this year’s festival had to include A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin, 2011); although it already had a general UK release over the summer, it is a film that can be watched again and again, both for its acting and its intricate layering of truth and deception. The festival also included films which most London audiences will not have encountered before: A Very Close Encounter (Barkhord-e Kheyli Nazdik, 2010), a thriller about the criss-crossing relationships linking two women involved in a car crash, and Please Don’t Disturb (Lotfan Mozahem Nashavid, 2010) a low-budget comedy about an elderly couple afraid of the repairman, a pickpocketed cleric, and a woman threatening to leave her abusive television-personality husband.

I attended a screening of a film that, from its description, seemed to correspond more to the lyrical, child-focused Iranian films of the 1980s. The Other (Digari, 2010) concerns Reza, a boy of about 10, who lives with his recently-widowed mother. Reza goes on a trip to Tehran with Mr. Ebrahim, his father’s old friend and business partner, to sell the business’s van. Reza’s uncle is forcing Ebrahim to sell the van, but doesn’t trust him and so sends Reza to supervise. Mr Ebrahim, himself a widower with a 6-year-old daughter, would clearly like to marry Reza’s mother, but the uncle is opposed to the match. Reza himself is initially hostile towards Mr Ebrahim, but they grow closer over the course of the trip.

The Other is director Mehdi Rahmani’s first film, and in many ways it shows. The film’s technical quality is lacking: its colours are at once saturated and washed out, making the film look like it was made in the 1970s rather than just last year. This, combined with drab, worn-out surroundings means that shots of visual appeal are rare. The script, too, is not quite as unified as it could be: while the dialogue feels largely authentic and moderately interesting, it lacks momentum at times. The exposition is also a little confusing at first: luckily, the film’s plot and characters are restricted, so just by patiently listening to the characters, it becomes clear what is going on and what is at stake—rather as in real life.

With such reservations, I felt like I wasn’t really enjoying the film at the time. Over the hours and days following the screening, though, many themes and images kept coming back to me, making it clear that for all its roughness, this was a film that presented an authentic picture of present-day Iran, and had something serious to say about its social structures. It may have been the austerity and hardship that the film presented that provoked my initial negative reaction, as much as the film’s artistic weaknesses.

In retrospect, it is easy to see why this film won Best Children’s Feature Film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards last December. On the one hand, The Other will have cross-generational and cross-cultural appeal through its focus on the difficult relationship between children and any adult who attempts to stand in for a missing parent. On the other hand, the film examines Iran’s particular situation with regard to women’s marital rights: aside from the example of Reza’s mother, who can’t remarry until her brother-in-law says so, Reza and Mr Ibrahim encounter a troubling example of family strife in the room next door to theirs at the hotel in Tehran. While The Other can be a troubling film to watch in terms of its portrait of life in Iran, its heartfelt authenticity will remain with the viewer long after the end credits.

For more information about past and future editions of the London Iranian Film Festival, consult their web site: http://ukiff.org.uk/

This year London’s Czech Film Festival, ‘Made in Prague’ celebrated its 15^th edition (10-27 November). The theme for 2011 was ‘Film and Literature’, and included hard-to-find retro delights such as the 1959 adaptation of Jaroslav Hašek’s comic novel, The Good Soldier Švejk, and Czech New Wave classics like Jiří Menzel’s Capricious Summer (1967), adapted from a novel by Vladislav Vančura. More recent productions included A Walk Worthwhile (2009), directed by Miloš Forman and his son Petr Forman, based on a jazz opera by Suchý and Šlitr, and Of Parents and Children (2008), an adaptation of a novel by prize-winning contemporary writer Emil Hakl.

Czech New Wave director Juraj Herz attended the festival to present his famously dark The Cremator (1968), as well as his most recent film, Habermann (2010). Based on a story by Josef Urban, it joins an increasingly long list of films examining the mass deportation of Germans from Czechoslovakia following World War II.

Clearly, the Czech Republic has a strong literary history, from Kafka, Čapek, Nezval and Hrabal to Milan Kundera. Václav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s last president following the fall of Communism, and first president of the Czech Republic, was an established playwright before he even entered politics. This year’s ‘Made in Prague’ festival showcased Havel’s directorial debut, Leaving (2011), based on one of his most recent plays. The film reflects his experience as a politician, his background in theatre and, unfortunately, his inexperience with cinema. Many plays have been made into excellent films, but this only works when the director has a good sense of cinema’s specificity: not just the special expressive capacities that cinema offers, but what it takes to make a good film. A play, recorded on camera, is not a film.

Leaving concerns Vilém Rieger, a politician who is about to leave office. It is clear that he is not quite ready to let go of power, and equally unwilling to relinquish of his ministerial mansion in the countryside. There, he is surrounded by his family: mother, glamorous but jealous trophy wife Irena, teenage daughter cocooned with her laptop and mobile phone, and grown-up daughter constantly pushing legal documents at him to secure her inheritance. While the staff divide themselves between catering to the family’s needs and preparing for the move, the great man receives three very different types of visitor: a cynical tabloid journalist; a reverential sex kitten of a graduate student; and the incumbent chancellor, whose bright, loudly patterned clothing reflects his vulgar character.

In its favour, Leaving boasts a number of well-known actors, including veteran Josef Abraham (I Served the King of England [2006], Dita Saxová [1968], Courage for Every Day [1964]) as ex-chancellor Vilém, and Havel’s own spouse, Dagmar Havlovà, in the role of trophy wife Irena. The film also seems to feature a characteristically Czech sense of the absurd: the set includes two ridiculous obstacles that the characters continually have to negotiate (a badly-placed rock and a large puddle), and the family itself is marked by a baroque, outdated air of aristocracy, which they are determined to maintain even in the face of a stark change in fortunes.

There are two principal problems with the film, though: first, none of the primary characters are sympathetic, making it hard for the audience to care about what happens to any of them. Vilém may be seen as a distorted reflection of Havel himself, a man who understands the challenges of life in office: so many good intentions, so little possibility of realising them fully. In spite of the grace with which Josef Abraham plays this character, Viém is at base a vain womaniser and reactionary, and therefore difficult to truly like.

The film’s female characters, meanwhile, fall correspond to one of two extremes: sex objects (his wife and the graduate student) or cold, rather austere women (his mother and daughters). All, however, are materialistic and calculating: while this could be said to show their shrewdness, at base it reflects the fact that these women depend on men for their material wellbeing. The figure of the absurdly sexualised graduate student is most objectionable: even when a woman devotes her life to the intellect, Leaving insists on her physical attributes above all. The film even parodies academic interests, as the student instantly switches her studious adoration to the new chancellor, making her yet another stereotyped female opportunist.

Ultimately this film parodies every character, though it is a bit softer on the Vilém’s teenage daughter: the only constructively resourceful character in the film, it is she who ultimately saves the family through a cross-cultural relationship (notably conducted in English, over her mobile phone and the internet). Perhaps Havel intended to present the European Union as the best means of escape from an insular confrontation between the outdated elite and a new generation of uncultured, corrupt parvenus.

The other problem with the film is that Havel seems hardly to have grasped cinema’s language. There are attempts to make the film cinematic: the use of slow motion, baroque angles and, most disconcertingly, racking focus over a short depth of field, which gives a bilious fisheye effect. The entire film takes place in the garden of the ex-chancellor’s ministerial mansion, with the mansion itself as a backdrop and a pond in the foreground. There are precious few departures from this boring setting: a handful of shots show another part of the garden, or the field or road just outside the estate. Essentially, the film differs very little from a stage play with a single set. Even the initially amusing physical obstacles mentioned earlier feel like stage props, with one anchored at the centre and the other at the side of the set. The script itself, with its insistent themes, stilted lines, and formal entrances and exits, feels as though it has barely been altered at all from its original form. It creates the claustrophobic impression characteristic of a film that has been badly adapted from a play. We are shut in a small space with a bunch of unsympathetic characters: I can think of few greater cinematic tortures.

It’s a well-worn observation that the book is better than the movie. But what about the graphic novel? It seems reasonable to expect the transition from one predominantly visual medium to another to be smoother. It was pleasing to see Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis gain wider attention through the animated film adaptation she directed in 2007 with Vincent Paronnaud. While fun, that film still had nowhere near the impact of the original.

Satrapi recently paired up with Paronnaud again to direct a film adaptation of her shorter graphic work, Chicken with Plums (Poulet aux Prunes, 2011), this time using predominantly live-action rather than animation. Mathieu Amalric stars as Nasser-Ali, a violinist who decides it’s time to die when his beloved violin is broken. Neither his wife, his two young children, nor his brother can dissuade him. On his elective deathbed, Nasser-Ali recalls his past, above all his doomed relationship with the beautiful Irâne.

Chicken with Plums is a very strange film, but the directors first deserve praise for their remarkably creative approach. Even if the film’s parts did not hang together well, Satrapi and Paronnaud should be admired for their willingness to switch between starkly different aesthetic modes. The film’s dominant style is that of the period piece, a conservative mode which makes creative departures all the more surprising. The directors have reproduced mid-twentieth century Iran with an intimate, almost mystical atmosphere, predominantly green in hue: a sort of fairy-tale re-imagining of place that recalls Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Then, without warning, the film makes a brief departure into garish, mass-produced modernity: a flash-forward to Nasser-Ali’s son’s future life in the U.S., complete with obese children, junk food, and chihuahuas. While embarrassingly caricatured in its portrayal of the American lifestyle, this episode could be an Iranian response to the West’s equally stereotyped images of Iran.

Later, in one of the film’s most pleasing sequences, Chicken with Plums incorporates a colourful animated episode to illustrate a story that the devil, Azraël, tells to Nasser-Ali. Speaking of the devil, Satrapi and Paronnaud also open the doors to the imaginary within the film’s period setting: the giant, black, long-horned, bright-eyed Azraël, for example, or Nasser-Ali’s suicidal and erotic fantasies. These imagined elements, which can be easily incorporated in an illustrated medium, often appear literal-minded in a live-action film: unnecessarily grotesque enactments of every idea that passes through the character’s head. Here again, the film recalls Jeunet, but without that director’s sense of charm and nuance.

Aside from its uneasy baroque tendencies, there is the issue of the story itself, which is based on the life of one of Satrapi’s relations. In the context of one’s own family, it is easy to see how a story of lost love could be intriguing. In the wider world, though, romantic disappointment is all too common, making it hard to see why Nasser-Ali’s story should be of special interest to the public. Given that his love story is unremarkable, it makes it even more difficult to accept the story’s other details: that he agreed to marry a woman he didn’t love, and that he now decides to die, leaving his two young children alone with their overly-demanding mother. Perhaps Nasser-Ali was more a more likeable character in the original work. In any case, when it comes to stories with a more personal relevance, literature may be a more sympathetic medium than film.

Chicken with Plums was screened at the BFI London Film Festival.