MFF2010 Day 1: Friday

Mundane History

The first movie we watched on the first full day of the film festival was Mundane History from Thailand, directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong:

Mundane History

Ake, a young man recently paralyzed from the waist down, sits sullenly in bed all day long in his family’s declining mansion, refusing even the little pleasures available to him. His mysterious and stern father Thanin hires a male nurse, Pun, to care for Ake and keep him company. But a jaded Ake rebukes and ignores Pun’s quietly good-natured attempts to cheer him up, challenging Pun to find new ways to distract his patient. When the thaw finally comes, secrets and changes emerge – both personal and cosmic.

—from the Film Festival Guide

The film community in Thailand was a completely unknown entity to me until we saw Syndromes and a Century in 2007. I enjoyed Syndromes and a Century a lot, and I had the feeling I might like Mundane History as well.

Both films shared some similarities in their quiet, meditative pace and non-linearity. And the way Syndromes and a Century was previously described as “a stream of haunting sci-fi imagery worthy of Kubrick’s 2001″ could actually apply more to a few moments in Mundane History. But that’s were the similarities end.

A few minutes into the movie the screen went black and presented something that looked like end credits. I was puzzled and amused that several people left the theater in this very moment. Did they really think they bought a ticket for a 20 minute short? Maybe they just filled some time while waiting for another screening. Later the film burned and caused a few minutes interruption. I was very surprised. After all it was the first movie on the first day of the festival.

But the movie presented a few surprises as well. Most notably the music which reminded me a bit of post-rock bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Explosions in the Sky. Responsible for the music in this movie were Malaysian band Furniture and the Thai group Photo Sticker Machine which are worth a closer listen.

Another surprising moment was a scene featuring masturbation and full-frontal male nudity. I thought this might have upset the American MPAA judges who are known to appreciate violence but make a fuss about scenes with male-nudity or masturbation. I still remember Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut years ago, when certain scenes had to be blacked out for a non X-rating. These scenes turned out to be not as all as scandalous as they made you believe. I was wondering how would Thailand treat such an unusually graphic scene? When I looked up some information I found that this scene indeed caused it to become the first Thai film under Thailand’s motion-picture rating system to be given the most-restrictive 20+ rating. Be sure to bring your ID if you want to see this film in Thailand.

In contrasting moments of silence, weariness, frustration and anger, bitterness and disappointments, dreams and hopes this film also made some comments about Thailand’s class society. Mundane History surprised again later with the psychedelic cg-animated exploding star and the Cesarean birth of the child, a graphic scene during which made a point by showing how the umbilical cord was cut twice. Perhaps symbolizing the separation from the mother followed by a separation from father, class, expectencies?

I don’t want to attempt to analyze and over-interpret these scenes, but I couldn’t help to think of 2001 — A Space Odyssey when they hit the screen. No doubt, Mundane History was totally unrelated to Kubrick’s movie, but these two scenes were so unexpected and felt so out of place, I had to wonder if this could have also been a nod to one of the most remarkable movies in history of cinema. This was probably nothing but a coincidence…

Too bad there was no Q&A afterwards. I’d have been curious to hear more about this film.

Beijing Taxi

After a short break we entered our second screening of the day with Beijing Taxi, a documentary by Miao Wang about…

Three Beijing taxi drivers – two male, one female – prepare for an explosion of international customers in the days leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. Fifty-something Bai Jiwen came of age during the Cultural Revolution, and faces some harsh realities with hardened humor; Thirty-something Zhou Yi, remains optimistically grounded in his traditional lifestyle; while thirty-something mother Wei Caixia is a financially-minded go-getter driven on finding a more comfortable life.

—from the Film Festival Guide

This synopsis interested me. I had the feeling I would see a different, more realistic view of China’s people and culture that transcends the stereotypes the media generally seems to be most attracted to. When I read that it was co-shot by Sean Price Williams, who already caught my eye last year with Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo and in 2007 with Frownland, I had to put this film on my must-see list.

Beijing Taxi absolutely met my expectations, even exceeded them. It not only presented a character study of three individuals with their dreams, hopes and daily lives, but also details of Beijing I haven’t known or heard of before. In old Beijing, one of the taxi drivers explained, people didn’t need to be ambitious. The new and changing Beijing with the generation born in the 80s is very different and driven in comparison. I also didn’t know that to control traffic on Beijing’s roads they only permitted even license plate numbers on some days, and only odd numbers on other days.

The music in Beijing Taxi was remarkable, too! Beijing artists and bands like Sand, Zhou Yunpeng, Sound Fragment or Miserable Faith deliver music I would have never heard without this film. I may not understand the lyrics, but I love the sound and mood of Together by Sound Fragment. Sand’s Consumer’s Song is great, too. A few tracks can be found on the movie website at www.beijingtaxithefilm.com. The site also has a playlist of the beautiful score by Stephen Ulrich and Itamar Ziegler. Beijing Taxi was one of my highlights at the festival this year.

Dogtooth

Father (Christos Stergioglou) lives with his wife and children on an estate not far from the big city. He’s raised three teenagers in a gated community of sorts – except that the community contains only his house, and his children have never travelled further than their own backyard. Despite having no friends, no knowledge of telephones or computers, and a limited understanding of television and radio, some “tainted” words pertaining to sex, violence, and travel do somehow enter their vocabulary. Thus, they’re told that “telephones” are salt shakers, that “the sea” is their living-room armchair, that the cat that scampers into their yard is a rare and dangerous beast, and that the airplanes they see in the sky are no larger than toys – leaving the teens to play (and live) in the distorted world Father’s lies create.

Far from understanding that they’re prisoners of a sort, the children believe Father when he tells them that they, like him, will someday experience the outside world – as soon as their third set of teeth comes in.

This unsettling vision offers a riveting hybrid of dark comedy and psychological thriller as it explores language and morals, and probes the point at which unconventional parenting crosses over into social experiment or even abuse. Dogtooth won the Prize Un Certain Regard at Cannes, played Toronto and New Directors/New Films, and, in the humble opinion of this programmer, stands as one of the great accomplishments in recent world cinema. (Eric Allen Hatch)

—from the Film Festival Guide

Doogtooth. Wow… I don’t think I have ever seen a movie from Greece, and this debut has definitely left a lasting impression. It created memories I will not easily forget. It was probably the biggest surprise of this festival, too. This movie wasn’t what I expected after reading some comments and watching a clip. I expected a dark comedy… and what I saw was dark, yes, but not a comedy in my opinion.

There were scenes that would have been somewhat amusing in a different context and a different movie. In Dogtooth’s context, however, I quickly lost any desire to laugh about what presented itself on the screen. And I don’t mean it in a negative way. Not in the slightest!

Dogtooth was a true masterpiece in how effectively it managed to establish an uncomfortable, disturbing and nightmarish microcosm of years of psychological abuse. It took what could perhaps be called parenting to new and perverse extremes. But if you step back and take a look behind the atrocities taking place in this family, you might find some analogies to the real world.

We grow up with truths and imprints provided by our parents and closed family unit. These truths don’t necessarily match with other families’ truths. If we expand our social circles and look at what’s happening in other families, a class room, office, or in the society, culture, religion, country as a whole… these truths or half-truths are often biased, and may not represent the ultimate reality we believe or trust it to be.

The more closed the borders of this social unit are, the more likely are these alleged truths further away from reality than its members might realize. It’s easy to find examples in closed neighborhood communities, prisons, religious cults, East Germany when it was still separated, or dictatorships throughout history. But even in the open enlightened world most of us live in nowadays, the truths presented to us, for example through the media (tabloid or serious), are often just a very distorted image of reality.

Truths need to be shared and transported very carefully, with reason, especially to children who have to rely on their parents and authority figures in their lives. What took place in Dogtooth, even though it appeared very extreme and out of this world, could really take place somewhere, sometime, more easily than one might expect.

Dogtooth reminded me a bit of Michael Haneke. I didn’t think it was a dark comedy. Dark comedies, in my opinion, present terrible and horrific events or actions in a humorous manner. I would count films like American Psycho, Heathers, Secretary, Very Bad Things, After Hours or Fight Club to the genre of dark comedies, but not Dogtooth. I was surprised to hear people in the audience laugh. But yes, maybe it was just their way to cope with the horror that unfolded in front of their eyes.

Dogtooth was really excellent and extraordinary, definitely one of my favorites this year. But would I recommend anyone to go see it? I don’t know — I always hesitate to recommend very disturbing movies even if I appreciated them personally. This doesn’t happen very often, I think the only other movie I felt a similar hesitation about was Lars von Trier’s Antichrist a year or so ago. Maybe I don’t want to anger my friends with uncomfortable or traumatic movie experiences :) However, if you are ready and willing to take a challenge, I’m sure Dogtooth will give it to you, make you think long after you’ve left the theater, and provide you with a memory for life.

Funny People Shorts

There are not many opportunities to see short films, especially not on the big screen. But you can’t watch them on television or rent them on DVD either. The film festival provides some great and rare opportunities to discover some mini masterpieces. Several short film programs looked really interesting to me this year, especially Dark Comedy Shorts. I would love to see Daniel Martinico’s Bike Thief! And The Armoire by Jamie Travis’ whose Saddest Boy in the World was one of the short film highlights a few years ago. But, I didn’t manage to fit it into our schedule.

What I did manage to fit in were the Funny People Shorts which seemed like a nice way to ease the weight of some of the other screenings we attended and would attend later. Funny people could be found in…

Good People

On her way to work one morning, Amy comes across a suicide note. She doesn’t know who wrote it, or where they are, but she is convinced she needs to take action. The problem is that she only has until 5 o’clock to find the person who wrote it, and help them to do what’s right…

—from the Film Festival Guide

Haha… a few weeks have past now after the film festival, but I remember how much I enjoyed Alex LeMay’s short. Completed early 2009 it’s not the newest film anymore, but it was great to have it in the series. The conclusion was great, and quite surprising (to me at least) :)

Planet Sun

Over-tanned and distracted employees of a strip-mall tanning salon ignore and insult customers as they obsesses over themselves and their boyfriends in this comedic short, which had its world premiere at Slamdance 2010.

—from the Film Festival Guide

What I still remember best about Matthew Atkinson’s short is Jim Annan whose name I didn’t know before, but his face that looks a lot like somebody’s face I know. Every time I saw him on the Verizon commercials I had to ask Alice “Isn’t that Tim?” It’s an old face recognition game I’ve been playing for years. And there I spotted him in Planet Sun. I looked him up later, and there: I was right! It really is the guy from the commercials. However, it also proves that Jim and Tim are not the same person or even related :)

Poi Dogs

Poi Dogs is the story of two local Hawaii teenagers and their awkward attempts at expressing a budding romantic interest in each other. Toa, a tough-acting lineman on a crappy high school football team, has just lost the big game. Distraught and alone, he drives home on his old ramshackle moped, which breaks down in the shadow of an abandoned sugar mill. Enter Anela, the tough-acting tuba player on his team’s marching band.

—from the Film Festival Guide

Joel Moffett’s short was sweet and amusing. I especially appreciated the moped. The background scenery reminded me of an area I pass through on one of my bicycle routes.

Gayby

Jenn and Matt are best friends from college who are now in their 30s. Lately, their relationship has dwindled to the occasional social-networking exchange. In an effort to ‘reconnect,’ they decide to have a baby together, taking the easiest, cheapest route of just having sex—even though Matt is gay and Jenn is straight. From the award-winning director of Woman in Burka (MFF 2008). Warning: this film contains an incredibly awkward sex scene.

—from the Film Festival Guide

Absolutely brilliant and funny! I loved it. This 12 minute short by Jonathan Lisecki was my favorite in this short program. The title alone was great, but the interaction between the stars was priceless.

We also saw Trevor Cohen’s

Public Access

A satirical short about a dysfunctional suburban couple whose problems are falsely resolved by watching a talk show on public-access television. When the show is cancelled, the couple is forced to take matters into their own hands.

—from the Film Festival Guide

and James Johnston’s

Receive Bacon

The charming tale of a raunchy bathroom tryst interrupted by an unfortunate case of the giggles. From James Johnston, the director of the short Merrily, Merrily (MFF 2008) and producer of the feature St. Nick (MFF 2009).

—from the Film Festival Guide

Both were funny, and I enjoyed them both, but I can’t think of anything meaningful to say about them. So I will just leave it there. :)

The last screening of the day was

Daddy Longlegs

Thirty-something film projectionist Lenny (Ronald Bronstein) lives in a studio apartment in New York City, jumping from adventure to adventure and, when possible, from bed to bed. His love of spontaneity and loathing of structure collide with his responsibilities as father to two precocious children, 9-year-old Sage (Sage Ranaldo) and 7-year-old Frey (Frey Ranaldo), who he cares for just a few weeks out of the year. While his freewheeling ways and vivid imagination often delight Sage and Frey, it also makes their stays with Lenny frantic and chaotic, filled with impromptu babysitters, unexpected daytrips, and bizarre encounters on the streets. When one of Lenny’s hasty solutions to a scheduling conflict at work leads to high drama, Lenny and the people around him are forced to take a hard look at his parenting skills and the blurry line between childhood and adulthood.

This is the Safdie Brothers’ singularly offbeat ode to their own father and childhoods, concentrating on the emotional truth found in their memories rather than factual autobiography. As with Frownland (MFF 2007, directed by Daddy Longlegs star Bronstein), Daddy Longlegs seems to exist simultaneously in the present day and the New York Cities of the 70s and 80s. The instinctive connections their lens makes to the last 40 years of their city’s cinematic history – from the underground to big names like Cassavetes, Jarmusch, and Ferrara (who also appears) – help the film stake its own major place in that still-unfolding timeline. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, and never predictable, it all culminates in a stunner of a closing shot, one of the most resonant in recent memory. (Eric Allen Hatch)

—from the Film Festival Guide

I hadn’t read much about Daddy Longlegs before we went to see it, so I was quite unprepared and didn’t know what I was about to see. I have to admit, it took nothing more than reading about Frownland director Ronald Bronstein’s acting debut in Daddy Longlegs to spark my interest.

Frownland a few years ago was one of the most memorable favorites at the Maryland Film Festival. And although he didn’t direct Daddy Longlegs, I had the feeling I was going to watch something special, personal and real, a film you would only find once in a few years. I compared Ronald Bronstein to one of my master filmmakers once in one of my posts and I still think he is member of a new generation of filmmakers who could add a lot of timeless brilliance and depth to cinema as an art-form, and produce movies that will find new fans even decades later when many of today’s major or independent productions are long forgotten.

I haven’t been familiar with Josh and Benny Safdie before, but I was curious to find out if they, too, created something that would speak to my taste in filmmaking. And after watching Daddy Longlegs I have found the answer. Their movie was a total success, brilliant from beginning to end!

In Daddy Longlegs I watched and followed Lenny who had his children with him for one of the brief periods in a year, as he slips further and further down the spiral of stress and chaos. I was wondering how much further he could let it go on like this without taking control and responsibility for once. A grown-up child trying to take care of children who were more grown-up than he was. For a good while it was easy to forgive him for his irresponsibility, take his side and defend him when mother and teacher of the kids give him a hard time, but eventually he takes it one step too far and it doesn’t seem so easily forgivable anymore.

Funny that John Cassavetes was mentioned in the film festival guide above. During the festival and shortly afterward I was introduced to his movies with Faces and Husbands both of which he created in the style of cinéma vérité. I love the style and perspective both of these films presented to me, and that’s what I really loved about Daddy Longlegs, too. Other movies in the mumblecore genre have this in common as well.

Daddy Longlegs surprised me with an appearance of Abel Ferrara and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. The two boys in the movie are actually Lee Ranaldo’s kids Sage and Frey Ranaldo.

I couldn’t conclude it any better than this reviewer on IMDB:

It’s autobiographical, yet collaborative and imaginative. It’s improvisational, yet very well planned. It’s appalling, yet also appealing — a film that sticks in the craw but also lingers in the mind and the heart. It signals the arrival of yet another team of film-making brothers whom we need to watch.

—Chris Knipp

That’s so true, I couldn’t agree more. I absolutely loved this film and know I will be watching it again sometime. One of my favorites this year. Congratulations Josh, Benny, Ronnie, and everybody involved in making this movie. With Daddy Longlegs you have created a masterpiece. Oh, and the best opening scene I have seen in a long time! I’d love to insert a clip of it here :)

I wonder why its title is listed as “Go Get Some Rosemary” on IMDB. Legal issues?

This was the end of our amazing movie-trip on Friday of the MD Film Festival. It took me forever to write this, but I hope I will find some time to write a bit about Saturday and Sunday very soon!