Mama

From Russia, by Yelena and Nikolay Renard with Ludmila Alyohina and Sergey Nazaro.

Ludmila Alyohina

With the film Mama, Russian husband-and-wife directing team Yelena and Nikolay Renard have achieved something quite remarkable: they have crafted an emotionally resonant and deeply insightful film out of the completely unremarkable lives of the two main characters, all without the use of dialogue. The story revolves around the complex co-dependent relationship between a mother and her morbidly obese 40-year-old son.

This spare film uses the camera to achieve an almost painterly quality in each shot. The static camera frames a scene and then waits patiently as the actors come and go, often leaving the scene devoid of characters, but never empty. In keeping the camera firmly rooted in one position and letting it dwell on the scene, the Renards achieve a smoldering intensity of feeling that many flashier films would die for. Exquisitely long takes, few edits and a complete lack of dialogue (although wonderful use of sound) allow the viewer to become engrossed in the lives of the two main characters and afford an almost extra-sensory glimpse into their thoughts and feelings. [...] (J. Scott Braid)

—from the Film Festival Guide

Mama was one of the most intimate and beautiful movies I have seen in a while. I’m eternally grateful the filmmakers allowed me the time to rest in these long scenes, and take in the images, details, mood and unspoken expressions.

Sometimes I discover a movie or a series of pictures that manages to bring back childhood memories, and I don’t mean vague or foggy memories, but very strong and vivid memories that include a sensation for all senses…memories of touch and smell, sounds or silence, facial expressions or movements that have become a person’s signature after many decades of daily routines.

Two examples — one movie that brought such memories back a few years ago was The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. This movie had nothing in common with Mama, but it activated a childhood memory of my granduncle’s apartment in this 5 or 6-family house. When I saw the stairway and some of the interior I was thrown back in time. Something similar happened when I discovered Helga Paris’ work. About two years ago I wrote a bit about her photographs which brought some memories back as well. If Helga Paris made a movie, I can only hope she would do it like Yelena and Nikolay Renard with Mama.

Mama by Yelena and Nikolay Renard

And Mama was even more astonishing as it brought my grandmother and her kitchen as I remember it back to life with an unbelievable number of similarities. From what she was wearing, the way she cooked instant coffee or tea, the way she prepared breakfast, the ritual before going to sleep, and the amount of movement and care, the routine of housekeeping, her facial expressions, even her hair, the kitchen interior with the old table and the vinyl table cloth. Of course my grandmother talked more, but the silence in Mama I think added to the magic of familiarity. A voice might have destroyed the illusion. There were so many little details that seemed so very familiar to me. I was absolutely amazed.

What are the odds to watch a recently produced movie and recognize so many details I grew up with 20-30 years ago?! What a coincidence that there were not only similarities in the environment, but also an astounding familiarity with actress Ludmila Alyohina’s appearance?

Ludmila Alyohina

It’s possible that I might tend to look for such similarities in movies and pictures. If I compare the now and here with then and there I find so many differences… It’s hard to imagine that somebody would be able to bring back something that I believed was just a personal memory and not a global trend or fashion phenomenon of a decade like the 60s, 70s or 80s. This here wasn’t about clothes, hairstyles, furniture or design of a past era… the carefully composed pictures in Mama are timeless and subtle, transcending the short-lived waves of changes that came and went in all these years.

I have to admit that these and other personal impressions occupied me a little during the movie, but I was still able to appreciate what I didn’t feel familiar with before. The sound, images and pace, everything was realistic, natural, organic and masterful. When Scott Braid introduced this film he said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that this film will reward your patience. I didn’t feel like I had to be patient, but Mama was an absolutely rewarding experience from beginning to end. Another of my top-favorites at the film festival this year.

Faces

I mentioned in other reviews I wrote in the past couple of years how much I liked movies like Frownland, Yeast, Baghead, Medicine for Melancholy or this year’s Daddy Longlegs. But I didn’t know a lot of movies–if any–before this young generation of filmmakers defined their new genre [to avoid overusing m-word again :)]. I’m ashamed that I wasn’t familiar with John Cassavetes before. Well, I have seen him perform as an actor before, but I didn’t know of his work as director with movies like Faces or Husbands which I have seen shortly after the film festival.

John Marley

Nominated for three Academy Awards, Faces tells the story of middle-aged husband Richard Forst (John Marley) and wife Maria (Lynn Carlin) trying to escape the wreckage of their disintegrating marriage by seeking comfort in the arms of others. The film focuses on the night in which their mutual dissatisfaction comes to a head. Richard spends his evening cavorting with a young prostitute named Jeannie (Gena Rowlands), while Maria and friends pick up an eager-to-please young beatnik (Seymour Cassel) at a club. As the night wears on, it becomes clear that a passionate fling cannot reverse the tides of years of unhappiness.

John Cassavetes is one of the most important cinematic figures of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. A pioneer of American independent film, he remains one of its most recognizable names. Using the money he made acting in Hollywood studio projects, Cassavetes financed his own largely improvised films — films which to this day are some of the most poignant and devastating ever committed to celluloid. Faces is a prime example.

Faces has been selected by guest-host Bill Callahan, who will introduce the film and discuss it afterwards, joined during the Q+A by Faces cinematographer Al Ruban. (J. Scott Braid)

—from the Film Festival Guide

I wasn’t familiar with Bill Callahan before either. But he piqued my curiosity when he gave an incredibly peculiar introduction after Scott Braid raved so much about him and his long musical career. I just wondered “Who is this guy, and how does he relate to this movie?” When I looked up more about him and his work I found especially interesting that “critics have generally characterized his music as depressing and intensely introverted [...] view into an insular world of alienation” [wikipedia]. He is also described with a tendency to black humor. One day I have to listen to some of his music that gave him his reputation.

But back to Faces. The film guide above already gives a good summary of the film. First you join Richard in his nightly adventure with a prostitute, then you follow his wife on her night with her friends and Chet, until they are finally both back home. The film felt largely improvised, unscripted and spontaneous with raw and realistic dialogues. Cinematographer, editor, and associate producer Al Ruban explained during the Q&A, however, that they indeed had a script when they shot the movie. It wasn’t as unscripted as it may have seemed.

Faces by John Cassavetes

He also talked about his idea to shoot on different film stocks for different places and light conditions. He didn’t realize how much trouble all the different formats would give him in the editing stage. This may have been trouble but I’m sure they added a lot to the unique look & feel of this movie.

Made in 1968 I felt this movie was way ahead of its time, especially for American cinema at the time. I don’t remember having seen any other movie that would focus on individuals, emotions and realistic psychological relationships, presenting the way it is rather than the ideal way it should be or they want it to be. I have seen other movies of this era with a similar focus, but they were often set in a much more controlled environment with introverted, isolated subjects. What makes Faces especially unique and special is the seemingly uncontrolled environment, the interactive and a bit extroverted characters.

If the festival gave any awards, the award for the best teaching moment would have to go to Faces. It really filled a important gap in my movie and director knowledge. Shortly after the film festival I saw John Cassavetes’ Husbands which was at least equally as impressive as Faces. I have no doubt his work has influenced a whole generation of filmmakers. I can’t believe I haven’t known of him before.

And Everything Is Going Fine

Spalding Gray, a product of the seminal 1960s avant-garde theater troupe The Performance Group and co-founder of its successor, The Wooster Group, is best known for championing an extraordinarily simple and compelling form of live theater: storytelling. His stories were entirely personal, recounting his struggle with macular degeneration (Gray’s Anatomy), his experience acting in a big-budget movie on foreign soil (Swimming to Cambodia), or just a day in his life (Morning, Noon and Night). Anyone lucky enough to see him perform one of these monologues (and he performed twice at Centerstage) will never forget their dramatic power and insight.

These stories fascinated a number of top filmmakers; Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme filmed Swimming to Cambodia, legendary documentarian Nick Broomfield helmed Monster in a Box, and Steven Soderbergh brought us Gray’s Anatomy. Spalding Gray died in 2004, in the midst of working on a new monologue, an apparent suicide. Now Soderbergh returns to pay tribute to his friend and collaborator with this compilation of seldom-seen and never-before-seen footage. An exploration of Gray’s life and art that is at once thrilling and heartbreaking, Soderbergh has given us exactly the right tribute to a man who loved to uncover universal truths in the smallest details of daily life. (Jed Dietz)

—from the Film Festival Guide

I don’t remember exactly when I discovered Spalding Gray. I think it must have been sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s when I first visited Baltimore. I remember when I watched Soderbergh’s Gray’s Anatomy for the first time, maybe on television or a video rental. It was in English, so it must have been here in Baltimore. Anyhow, I was absolutely captivated and fascinated. It was such a simple format: a desk, a glass of water, a microphone, and Spalding Gray telling the story about his eye condition and the journey he undertook to find an alternative to surgery. I can’t even explain what exactly fascinated me so much about it.

Spalding Gray

Perhaps it could have been the unusual format of a monologue made into a movie. Before Gray’s Anatomy I would have never thought that a monologue about an eye condition had the potential to be so enthralling, although I knew ever since Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio that a focus on a single talking person can be incredibly intense. But that wasn’t it… It wasn’t the camera moving around Spalding Gray here, or the background imagery, no… it was Spalding Gray and his story that captivated me most.

After seeing Gray’s Anatomy I sought other projects he was involved in and watched Monster in a Box and his role in The Killing Fields which provided material for his Swimming to Cambodia. Then life became occupied with studies, work, move, this and that, and I wasn’t very up-to-date about Spalding Gray’s more recent projects until I read one day about his death — I think about a year after he died.

Spalding Gray’s view of the world and incredible gift of telling his stories is something I have never seen anywhere else before. It’s as much the person Spalding Gray as it was his monologue I fell in love with and I regret I have never seen him live. One day I have to catch up with his contributions I haven’t seen before.

When I read that a documentary about him was coming to the festival this year I didn’t hesitate a second. It was clear to me I had to see this film. And I enjoyed it as much as I thought I would. Instead of talking about Spalding Gray, his life and work, Soderbergh let him talk for himself. The result was a fascinating collage of footage throughout the years and decades that concluded with the most heartbreakingly moving and beautiful closing scene shot in 2001 by Barbara Kopple accompanied with a coincidental “Chekhovian howling dog” in the background. I wish I had a video clip available to insert here, but Theresa Smalec recalls:

Shortly after his devastating 2001 car accident in Ireland, Gray returns to America, where he is interviewed by a longtime friend, Barbara Kopple. “What are you worried about?” Kopple asks the artist, who now looks gaunt and pale, and walks with a visible limp. “The next accident,” Gray replies solemnly. Since their interview is set in the Hamptons, they talk about life on Long Island. Gray confides that he thinks he drinks too much in the Hamptons: “When I drink, I feel like I’m coming closer to my mother.” In the background of this sad conversation, a dog starts to howl. The dog sounds heartbroken, utterly forlorn. “The dog is already howling for the late Spalding Gray,” Gray says, chuckling softly. As the dog continues to howl, Gray laughs until his eyes fill.”

When he paused to listen to the dog’s howl, this final moment and his face encapsulated everything I found and loved in him on first sight: a lifetime of brilliance, clarity and thoughtfulness. I would love to see this film again sooner than later.

Liverpool

The next screening was another special international treat during this year’s film festival. Liverpool. Unlike other international selections this one was presented by director Lisandro Alonso who traveled all the way from Argentina to host this screening.

A hard-drinking worker on a massive freighter, Farrel (Juan Fernandez) requests a shore leave as his vessel returns to Argentina. The leave granted, Farrel begins a long journey to the remote, bitterly cold region of Tierra Del Fuego off the southernmost tip of the continent. He hitches rides and sleeps and drinks wherever and whenever he can, his interactions with other humans scant as he heads for territories less and less populated, more and more remote. While the purpose of his journey has been stated, his pursuit of it becomes more and more dogged and mysterious as time passes.

Lisandro Alonso’s brilliant film offers a real challenge to open-minded viewers – and ample rewards to those who accept. Liverpool has unsettled and even angered some viewers; indeed, at times the film feels singularly transgressive. However, it accomplishes this not through graphic or offensive content (the film has next to none), but through unusual pacing and disarming narrative choices that violate outmoded storytelling conventions.

Liverpool by Lisandro Alonso

Liverpool’s use of (brilliantly natural) non-professional performers, long takes, and sparse dialogue may recall world-cinema heavyhitters such as Reygadas, Bresson and Antonioni, but the specifics of his characters, settings, and storytelling announce a major new voice. Alonso’s film is a triumph for those open to something new, and a slap in the face to those who feel the history of narrative film is a closed book, taking us to places we’ve never been before (places both literal and figurative). (Eric Allen Hatch)

—from the Film Festival Guide

After reading this synopsis I was a bit worried, but how could I not take the challenge?! :) First off, this movie was brilliant. Neither setting, pace, characters nor story made me lose interest for a second. Farrel’s journey was mesmerizing, fascinating beginning on board of the freighter, and ending with his short stay in his home in Tierra del Fuego before we walks off again.

I thought Liverpool had a few things in common with Mama I wrote about earlier. I didn’t find the degree of familiarity in Liverpool, but both movies worked with very long takes, resting and observing eyes on scenery and surroundings, long lasting moments of silence, meditations on the ordinary turning into something extraordinary and memorable, and both featured (unusually) introverted characters. I can only hope to see more of this kind of film making in the future. It’s such a contrast from the fast-paced entertainment industry that seems to dominate markets and society.

The movie felt very realistic and natural, almost as it was trying to achieve the objectivity of a documentary. Liverpool allows you to observe the main character Farrel, but you never get a point-of-view perspective that could allow you to identify with him or feel like being him for a moment. Instead you follow him as a subject until he disappears. The people in this movie all were real people and not professional actors, which without any doubt has contributed to the movie’s authenticity as well. The places and people, as Lisandro Alonso mentioned during the Q&A, were pretty much the same in real life as you saw in his film, as foreign as they all may have seemed to a big-city audience.

There were several scenes I still remember well (now a few weeks after we’ve watched this movie). It all started with the opening on the freighter. These scenes reminded me a little bit of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a 1995 film by Marion Hänsel about a radio operator of a merchant ship that arrived in Hong Kong. The character in this movie was as introverted, self-destructive, and locked in a state of ‘unfinished business’ as Farrel in Liverpool. One smoked opium, the other drank vodka all the time, one was sad, the other was numb. Perhaps Marion Hänsel’s character Nikos could have become Farrel one day if he hadn’t met the Chinese girl in this movie? Anyway, the many weeks and months on the open sea seems to create a special emotional state. When I once looked into freighter travel I read about some of the characteristics compared to a standard cruise. I’m sure I would love it, I only wish I had a month or more to spare.

Another scene (short and perhaps insignificant compared to the movie’s scope) took place in a room with a few people when Farrel was waiting to catch a ride on the back of a truck. A television in the background. Some guys waiting, eating, reading? Not sure anymore. I didn’t catch whether it was a gas station, rest stop, a place of business, too. But the scene felt very unusual but at the same time absolutely ordinary. Like the transportation I took in Turkey many years ago. To me it was absolutely unusual and adventurous, but for the people there it was as normal as taking a bus or a cab here. This just was a tiny moment but so believable it added a lot to the movie’s authenticity.

Lisandro Alonso

The scene in the canteen was similarly unusual yet ordinary as well. I’m used to the standard American dining formula now, but whenever I visit Germany again I have to adjust, and whenever I travel to other places I will find slightly different customs again. Things that seem unusual to me but are ordinary to others. And Liverpool took me on a journey to such a different place. Again, this is probably an insignificant moment in this movie, but one that somehow stuck with me. Perhaps it was thanks to the pace and authenticity, perhaps these were just some of the few moments with other people. Every interaction with another person gets a much higher significance when compared to the lack thereof in most of the movie.

Then of course there’s the key scene that gave this movie its name… but I think I already revealed enough spoilers. Overall it was a brilliant movie that left a lot of room for thought and your own interpretations. You might spot a brief hint of humor in it as well. It surprised me with a different point of view and doing something with the main character I didn’t expect. Really interesting was the degree of objectivity in this movie. Was Farrel likable? Was he not? It really was up to the audience to decide and project onto the character. I found that quite extraordinary.

Off to the next, and last one…

Until the Light Takes Us

Few music scenes or subcultures have caused as much controversy and generated as much sensational press as Norwegian black metal in the early 1990s – not least because several key musicians in the genre have been convicted of serious crimes, and one was himself murdered. Their beliefs are certainly baffling to the average person — not to mention the crimes they committed or inspired, which include multiple murders and a wave of church burnings. Yet behind the violence, posturing, media hype, and (in some cases) hateful rhetoric, these musicians possess deep intelligence, have challenging viewpoints regarding Christianity and consumerism, and have created complex, sometimes beautiful music that has thrilled and moved as many people as it has shocked.

To capture these larger-than-life figures as real people, directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell moved to Norway, living with some of their documentary subjects. That proximity results in a documentary that’s intimate character study, cultural history, and true-crime thriller all at once [...]

—from the Film Festival Guide

Well. To be frank, this was the least favorite movie I watched this year. I struggled a bit to make a choice about how to conclude that Saturday. There was the Total Recall screening presented by Dan Deacon in one theater, and Until the Light Takes Us in the other. Total Recall is a classic and I have seen it so often before, and the summary of Until the Light Takes Us sounded promising and so I went with a new screening. A documentary.

I love documentaries, no matter what they are about. So often they added something to my knowledge about a topic I was already interested in, or managed to pique an interest in new topics I didn’t expect to be interesting at all. Until the Light Takes Us interested me as well. I thought this film might be challenging perhaps, but enlightening in the end. But it wasn’t. It just wasn’t good.

I have seen news footage of Vikernes’ arrest and trial on television many years ago. The media likes to take the same footage out of their box whenever they run a report about satanists, occultists or metal bands, alongside with pictures of Hendrik Möbus, or the Ruda couple that received a lot of press in Germany a few years ago. When I read about this documentary I thought it might shed some light and also provide a less tabloid but perhaps a more balanced view of the music scene.

I have to admit it did present a different point of view than the rest of the media usually does. But I felt it was just as subjective, biased and unbalanced as the average tabloid report. Only on the opposite side that isn’t any less ridiculous. Generally, it was good to let the documentary subjects talk and explain their point of views instead of presenting someone talking about them. But the film did nothing but focus on the sensations that make good headlines and took sides with them. The filmmakers seemed to be sympathetic to their subjects and support their actions and philosophy. They didn’t seem as neutral and balanced as I expected them to be. Perhaps they lived too long with them?

To be fair, the audience in the theater surely added their part to my impression of the movie and its intent. Several people cheered in excitement and appreciation about stories that included taking a photo of one of the band members after he committed suicide and using his corpse and blown out brain as an album cover, burning churches, or committing other violent crimes. Some of the audience clearly endorsed these actions and sympathize with a group of people who may be very intelligent but extremists on the wrong side of the political spectrum. But was it just the audience?

This documentary made this music scene look as if it is made up of nothing but a bunch of Nazis, feeding right into the image the media so often likes to portray. This reminds me of similar silly prejudices about the dark wave, goth, industrial scene back in the 80s and 90s.

The documentary subjects may have long hair and not dress up like skinheads, but they are Nazis nonetheless. In the film they explained how and why they want to rid their homeland of the bad influence from foreigners, capitalists, or the American influences, and destroy Christians as they robbed them of their pagan identity and inheritance. Same body of thought you will find in other extremist groups. But is this true for an entire music scene? Granted, this documentary was not just about a music genre but the “Norwegian Black Metal” scene in particular. But how many people would know how to draw a distinction between “Black Metal” and “Death Metal”, or “Doom Metal” etc?

Metal and other music listeners are not all the same, they are not all on the right extremist side of the political spectrum, they are not all Nazis, murderers, criminals, satanists, or suicide candidates. In my youth I have listened to a good share of metal myself. The majority of people I’ve met during that time– fans as well as musicians–were just as normal as most, or even nerds, who appreciate perhaps the entertainment, energetic sound, lyrics, riffs, instrumentation, etc, and they often had a much wider range of musical interests than just that single sub-genre. None of them were the loud mouth extremists, racists, ‘white trash’, political activists or far right-wing fanatics. Perhaps this may be different from country to country. As far as I understand, Brazil known for their huge metal-fan base is probably quite different from Norway, UK, Germany or fans in the US.

But I digress, I know this wasn’t a documentary about the different music genres, but I wish it provided at least a more balanced view if not a more critical one. It should have placed the Norwegian black metal incidents into perspective as a singular exception. I didn’t like the fanatics in the audience, they may have changed how I felt about this documentary. But I think the film was more propaganda than documentary.

This film, by the way, reminded me a lot of Radio Werewolf’s Charles Manson Superstar in which Nikolas Schreck conducted a feature-length interview with Charles Manson in jail. To some degree it was interesting to see Manson talk, but the intent and neutrality were as questionable as this documentary.

It’s difficult. How would you make a documentary about this topic and these people? I don’t have the answers, but I do think it’s possible to be more critical verbally as well as non-verbally. There are documentaries that manage to exercise criticism without a single spoken word. And just by adding some footage and views of the other side of the “argument” would have created more balance. This film didn’t present anything about the victims or the cultural and religious changes in Norway they were protesting so violently against. This wasn’t Charles Manson Superstar but Mayhem Superstars.

After the movie we had to run and didn’t sit through the Q&A although I wish I’d been there. I read that there was a heated discussion afterwards with the film makers becoming combative when some audience members questioned their appreciation of the musical genre leading into an argument about liberal people appreciating a culture created by extremists like those in their documentary. But I wasn’t there and I don’t know anything about the discussion and argument.

This film was uncomfortable to watch in a Charles Manson Superstar or Triumph of the Will kind of way. Perhaps all these films don’t need to be more critical because their subjects already speak for themselves and show how ridiculous they are. But just like Triumph of the Will still manages to fascinate quite a few people enough to be drawn to the Nazi ideology over half a century after WWII, there were quite a few people in the audience who found these Blackmetal heroes just awesome and cool. Free speech and expression all well and good, but I don’t think they should be presented in a non-critical and rather laudatory context.

…and this is the end of Maryland Film Festival Saturday, May 8, 2010 :)

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.

Dogtooth

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

Gayby with Jenn Harris and Matthew Wilkas

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?

From left to right: Josh Safdie, Ronnie Bronstein, and Programming Administrator Scott Braid

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!

The Charles Theater

During this year’s film festival I once again realized how much I love the Charles Theater and the Maryland Film Festival. I always appreciated classic, independent or international movies and documentaries and was eager to see them on the big screen, but when I grew up I didn’t have easy access to them. My hometown in Germany used to have a hand full of screens for the big mainstream releases, and everything used to be dubbed in German, so if I wanted to see something the way it was intended I had to import videos from other countries, and make sure my vhs-player was able to handle the foreign video-formats. In those days it would have taken years to download a video. Occasionally I could tune to arte, a French/German tv-channel that sometimes presented movies with subtitles and original audio tracks. This channel helped me discover a number of interesting and unusual movies, but I also imported many of my favorite movies and directors from the UK, Belgium, Canada, and the US.

When we attended the Maryland Film Festival for the first time in 2002 I knew what a priceless treasure we had found with the Charles Theater — not only during the film festival, but also all year long. Where else would you ever get an opportunity to watch a dozen Ingmar Bergman movies on the big screen? Where else could an event like the film festival take place if not at the Charles?

Last week I thought to myself: “What if the Charles had to close one day?” Would there be a film festival? Would there be any alternatives? Other theaters, like the historical, famous and celebrated Senator had to struggle for many years. I can only hope the Charles will continue to do well. Baltimore would become a film desert without it. Or even worse, it would be the death of the city. It is really important to support this theater. If you are slightly interested in good movies, I recommend to check their schedule on a weekly basis. Some movies are only there for a week, so be sure not to miss them! But enough of my shameless blatant advertising insert.

Preparations

Eight years ago we attended the festival for the first time, six years ago we joined the Friends of the Festival sponsor program, three years ago we decided to attend the festival with All Access passes rather than buying so many single tickets. This year we increased the number of movies we were going to watch on a single day from previously three or four to a lot of five per day! We also broke with some of our old traditions and decided not to watch the classic 3D movie, the silent movie with live music, and the annual selection by John Waters. We also skipped the closing night this year in favor of Mother’s Day and a mother’s pleasure to have dinner with us and the rest of the family.

We kept the Opening Night of course, but on the other days we decided to focus on the amazing selection of new and international films in this year’s line-up. It was quite difficult for us again to come up with a weekend schedule. But I think we are getting used to it, facing the same problem every year. I just added the movies we were not able to see to our Netflix queue. Hopefully they will get released one day so we can catch up with them later.

So this year we were going to see:

• Opening Night Shorts at MICA
• Mundane History
• Beijing Taxi
• Dogtooth
• Funny People Shorts
• Daddy Longlegs
• Mama
• Faces
• And Everything is Going Fine
• Liverpool
• Until the Light Takes Us
• General Orders No. 9, and
• Earthling

I will write a little bit about them in this and my following blog posts.

The Opening Night

Jed Dietz opened the 12^th Annual Maryland Film Festival a few weeks ago on Thursday, May 6 at the MICA Brown Center with a series of seven short films all of which I enjoyed. I don’t remember the exact order in which these shorts were presented, but one of the first films was Bikini Lighters by Andrew Blackwell and Andrew Goldman. It was about a few kids who shoplifted a bag full of cigarette lighters to create an explosion in the woods.

We also saw Junko’s Shamisen by Sol Friedman which stood out as one of my favorite shorts that evening. A young girl in old Japan returns to her grandfather and finds him murdered. When she leaves to find another place to live she encounters the evil samurai who killed her grandfather. This film was a hybrid of live-action, cell, stop-motion and computer animation. Stylish, visually attractive, funny and dark… I can imagine watching a full feature created in a similar fashion. Thinking of hybrids…imagine Sol Friedman had added some of his creative magic to A Scanner Darkly a few years ago! I could have loved this film.

The Late Mr. Mokun Williams by Kenneth Price was about a letter that sends a farmer on a mission to help a girl in Nigeria. It didn’t take long to figure out where this story was going, but that didn’t matter at all. It was a great idea, and very funny. I can imagine a whole series of shorts to visualize certain mail or email pieces I received over the years.

Patrick Bergeron’s experimental short film LoopLoop can be described as moving photographic sculpture. Short films that withdraw themselves from a standard form risk to be misunderstood like some I have seen in previous years, but I was fascinated and impressed by this one. The film festival guide describes it as a sequence “[...] mimicking the way memories are replayed in the mind,” and if I think about it, it really did succeed with it.

Monroe St. by Durier Ryan is a film about finding the courage to open up — the story about a teen who is passionately capturing his neighborhood in Brooklyn with a borrowed video camera but keeps his creative ambitions a secret from his girlfriend.

Another remarkable short film was Slow Pitch in Relief by Mark Cummins which was set in 1957 and told the story of Bill Herman, a door to door salesman who meets Jolene, a working single mother. To impress her son he told him the story that he once played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. This film’s look and feel reminded me of something that really could have been produced in the 50s. Mark Cummins, who played Bill Herman looked as if he traveled through time and arrived straight from the 50s. I was fascinated and impressed. Mark Cummins is no newcomer. When I looked him up on IMDB I found that he’s been active as actor since the early 80s.

My favorite of the opening night was Voice on the Line by Kelly Sears. Voice on the Line was a brilliant collage of vintage archive footage, bit and pieces from many different sources, tied together to a unique fictitious document on the history of telecommunications since the cold war era. Brilliant from beginning to end! I loved how the animated wallpaper background served as a glue throughout. It was very inspiring. I felt invited to begin collecting media artifacts myself. During this film I was wondering if Kelly Sears had the story and narration first and looked for clips to support her story later, or if she started off with the clips and then added the narration & story to it later. During the Q&A she explained that she had all these telephone operators and thought she needed to do something with them, and the story kinda grew around these clips.

Left to right: Andrew Blackwell (Bikini Lighters), Mark Cummins (Slow Pitch in Relief), Durier Ryan (Monroe St.), Kenneth Price (The Late Mr. Mokun Williams), Festival director Jed Dietz, Patrick Bergeron (LoopLoop), Sol Friedman (Junko's Shamisen), Kelly Sears (Voice On the Line), Director of Programming Eric Allen Hatch, Programming Administrator Scott Braid

We concluded the opening night with a fine bottle of imported beer outside the crowded MICA hall and were ready for the 3-day movie marathon. Were we? Stay tuned, my next post follows shortly :)

Armée des Ombres by Jean-Pierre Melville

Chatte à Deux Têtes by Jacques Nolot

Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran by François Dupeyron

Les Quatre cents coups by François Truffaut

Les Triplettes de Belleville by Sylvain Chomet

Les chansons d’amour by Christophe Honoré

Une affaire de femmes by Claude Chabrol

De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté by Jacques Audiard

Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard

Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux by Jean-Luc Godard

The Mother’s Day weekend was dedicated to the Maryland Film Festival for as long as I can remember. I think only once it took place a week earlier or later. I have been lucky because my mother lives in Germany and six hours ahead of our time-zone. But not everybody is so lucky. Other people have mothers here, who may want to spend their day with their children, and who may not be interested in movies. This has always been a problem…it never felt right to ignore Mother’s Day in favor of our movie habit.

So this time we made a compromise: We skipped our first movie and had a nice Mother’s Day breakfast instead before we started our festival day in the early afternoon. We missed our traditional silent movie with live-music — this time it would have been probably the most important film of the silent era: Man with a Movie Camera — but I think we made the right decision and it all worked out very well. I have seen this film several times before anyway, with Cinematic Orchestra’s soundtrack being one of my all-time favorites.

Our first screening was a short film program called These People Have Issues [MFF] including:

• Butthole Lickin by Kanako Wynkoop
• Cold Turkey by Kyle Spleiss
• Countertransference by Madeleine Olnek
• FaceMouth by Dave Kratz
• Hungry for Love by Ruckus Skye
• Imminent by Randall Good
• Power Mini Ultra Flex Turbo by Better Hollywood

All of these short films were amusing to some degree. Some were funnier or sillier than others, some were darker than others, some were more dramatic than others, but I thought they all were solid and pretty well done. I did enjoy watching them to some degree, but I have to admit that I found none of them really that outstanding, extraordinarily great and groundbreaking. Something was missing in this short film program…but I’m not sure what.

Maybe the title promised more than the candidates were able to deliver? Maybe I expected something like the On The Edge shorts we saw last year or something more dark-comedic? I don’t know. The films presented in These People Have Issues had a few humorous moments, but they didn’t grab me that much. Compared to other short film programs we have seen in the past regardless of whether it was comedy, narrative, animated or documentary, this selection felt incomplete, unfinished or perhaps just uninspired. At the same time it wasn’t bad either! I have seen a lot worse before. Perhaps I just entered this screening with the wrong expectations.

Our next screening was The Overbrook Brothers, directed by John Bryant, starring Nathan Harlan, Mark Reeb and Laurel Whitsett [IMDB][MFF]. The screening took place in the large theater 1 of the Charles which usually finds a rather large audience. The Overbrook Brothers, however, didn’t seem to attract a large audience at all, which really surprised me. It’s possible that it was because of Mother’s Day, or a lot of people were already done with the festival, or those who were interested already saw the first screening on Friday.

The Overbrook Brothers are Jason, a sensitive writer and Todd, who is cruel, immature, abrasive, and pretty much the opposite of Jason knowing just how to push his buttons. When they find out why they have always been the least favorite children of the family they both go on a trip to find their true origins.

This movie is a feature adaptation of John Bryant’s earlier short film, Momma’s Boy, which screened at the 2006 Maryland Film Festival. I haven’t seen it back then but I would be very curious to find out how they compare. I loved The Overbrook Brothers, Todd’s character and the dynamics between him and Jason. I have rarely seen a character that is so sinister, manipulative and at the same time very cool and likable. The only one I could think of is Rob Lowe’s character in Bad Influence, but they don’t really have that much in common. Mark Reeb who played Todd was really wonderful bringing this character to life, but I kept wondering: “Is he somehow related to Eric Roberts?”. Haha, of course he isn’t, but I felt like there was a slight resemblance. With a really nice mix of dark comedy and drama I absolutely enjoyed The Overbrook Brothers! Unfortunately, there is no trailer for it yet.

Matthew Modine and Jed Dietz

After a short break it was time for the last movie of the festival and the closing night party. The movie and its director were introduced by Matthew Modine who played Pvt. Joker in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket back in the 80s. I saw him earlier in the filmmaker’s lounge — dressed in all white he lightened up the tent — but I couldn’t place him at all until his introduction when he spoke about filming Full Metal Jacket. Wow… that’s so long ago. After I checked his long film career on IMDB and noticed that I’m not familiar with any of the movies he was involved in since then… no wonder I wasn’t able to recognize him first! Hm, so I was in the same room with somebody who worked closely with Stanley Kubrick, the master himself? What an awe-inspiring moment!

But it was not him who was involved in the following movie, but Kathryn Bigelow who created with The Hurt Locker [IMDB][MFF] a war action-drama about a bomb expert and his work in the chaos of the Iraq war. Constantly living on the edge and having his hands on explosives that could go off any moment while often under sniper fire from insurgents, he not only remains calm, collected, curious and easy, but also develops a resistance against and an addiction to the unimaginable dangers that surround him on a daily basis.

I liked about this film that it mostly focused on an individual and the nature of his job, and how this war affected him or not. Thanks to an extraordinary camera and editing job it also illustrated how everybody lived in a constant state of alert and uncertainty, surrounded not only by bombs but also people in every angle who may or may not pose a threat to them. In the wide open landscape she managed to create a very claustrophobic atmosphere as if you were locked in a small room. This was captured very well and something I don’t think I have ever seen in a movie before.

Having said that, I felt it lacked some depth portraying the characters, especially Saff Sergeant William James. It fell a bit flat for me. I was hoping to get more insights about him, how the war affected him and how his brain works. I’m not a huge fan of war films, but I remember some great films with Oliver Stone’s Born on the 4th of July or Heaven and Earth that succeeded in this regard. But maybe there was not more than we were supposed to see. After all he was addicted to war and rather divorced from the normality of a safe and secure life.

Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow and the press

If I take this film as a war drama and action thriller I think it was a good and solid film for its genre. It’s not a movie I normally would have chosen to watch, but once I was in, I stayed interested from beginning to end and didn’t get bored. I liked that this film stayed non-political, non-propagandistic and not overly patriotic unlike some other movies or Army commercials. Kathryn Bigelow, by the way, also directed Strange Days and Wild Palms back in the nineties, both of which I loved.

After The Hurt Locker we spent a few minutes at the closing night party and headed back home. That was the end of an exhausting but very wonderful and exciting movie weekend.

It was a wonderful year for the Maryland Film Festival. The line-up included so many great movies. I especially appreciated the foreign movie choices even though we were not able to see all of them. I hope we will find such a nice selection again next year.

The filmmakers lounge was moved to the tent village across the Charles again like once before. I love this location. I liked this setup much better than the other venues of the past few years.

I loved the opportunity to purchase the All-Access passes at a lower price this year. Overall, this festival felt very close to what made me fall in love with it back in 2002 when I visited for the first time.

I like some of these equally as much, so it was nearly impossible to give them a fair spot in my list, but here it is! My top-11 of all the feature length movies seen on Friday and Sunday:

1. Modern Love is Automatic
2. Love Songs
3. Invisible Girlfriend
4. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
5. Strongman
6. The Overbrook Brothers
7. Stingray Sam
8. Lake Tahoe
9. World’s Greatest Dad
10. The Hurt Locker
11. Seventh Moon

The MFF2009 Crew

Last but not least I would like to thank everybody who made this festival possible! We had a fantastic time — thanks very much!!

Maryland Film Festival 2009

Lake Tahoe [IMDB][MFF], directed by Fernando Eimbcke, starring Diego Catano, Hector Herrara and Daniela Valentine…a story of Juan, a teenager who crashes his car on the outskirts of a sleepy Mexican town and tries to find a mechanic. During his quest he doesn’t seem to find what he is looking for, but meets an old paranoid dog owner who wants him to walk his dog, a young punk mother who is looking for a babysitter and a Kung Fu fanatic who’d like to watch a Bruce Lee movie with him. Their relationship to each other is quiet, perhaps as sleepy as the town, but during his mission to get the car running again he slowly finds some friendships and people he hesitatingly begins to care about.

Lake Tahoe was a genius mix of deadpan humor and drama that kept me interested from beginning to end. I loved the overall mood and atmosphere, the characters and how they interacted with each other. It was slow and quiet, but in a very good way. Very nicely paced, beautifully photographed, it managed to say a lot without using many words or music. Watching this movie reminded me of spending a relaxing vacation in another country…and I could have stayed a bit longer.

Our second screening was Stringray Sam, directed by Cory McAbee, starring himself, Crugie, Joshua Taylor, Willa Vy McAbee, Bobby Lurie, Frank Swart, Caleb Scott, Jessica Jelliffe, Ron Crawford, Michael DeNola, Michael Wiener and David Hyde Pierce [IMDB][MFF]. It actually was a story split in six Youtube-friendly parts…a sci-fi-western-musical. Another musical?! Yes! When I looked at the film-descriptions all it took to make me want to see it were Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and “homage to the cinema, rock & roll, comic books, and everything else cool from our childhoods.”

I didn’t expect it to become our second musical this year…and what a cool and fun musical! I absolutely enjoyed the songs, I loved director Cory McAbee in his role as Stingray Sam and guitarist Crugie as Quasar Kid, the Monty Python’esque collage-art…and how it managed to speak to the kid inside of me. During the Q and A Cory McAbee told his story when he was interviewed in Europe about one of his previous features The American Astronaut. The interviewer explained to him that many people in Europe were very angry with the American government and what they were doing at that time…that they feel like they don’t like Americans. His movie, however, included many things Europeans always loved and enjoyed about America and American culture. With this conversation in mind he wrote Stingray Sam including the Wild West, Cowboy, Sci-Fi, Musical, Space-Travellers that Europeans (or Germans in my case) always loved about American culture, but also highlighted the dark side with Tobacco and pharma companies, the privatised prison system, etc. Being European myself I can confirm that in Stringray Sam you can find the “cool” things we love about America, without ignoring the not so cool things.

It felt a bit strange to see six separate episodes in a row and not one full-length feature, but these episodes had cult-potential, were a lot of fun and I absolutely enjoyed them. I haven’t seen American Astronaut yet, but will have to check it out sometime.

After a short break we saw a documentary about Stanley “Stanless Steel” Pleskun in Strongman [IMDB][MFF] by Zachary Levy. A man strong enough to leg-press massive trucks and bend pennies with his fingers reaches his middle age and struggles with difficult personal relationships and a number of career disappointments. This documentary was filmed over the course of several years and presents a close portrait of Stan who wants to prove that he’s still got it, and that he is more than a kids’ party-attraction. Life, however, presents him with another reality…other strong men who bend bolts with much less of an effort or pull nails with their teeth…problems to stop smoking, breathing issues…family and relationship problems…and an alcoholic brother who developed a crack habit.

This film moved me on several occasions. It seemed obvious that Stan invested a many years and a lot of discipline to train and build up his strength, to become “the strongest man on earth”. I had the impression he might have found his motivation in an attempt to find a better life for himself than what his background was like growing up. His brother was presenting him an example of what not to become. I felt reminded of my own background… I, too, put a lot of work, time and discipline into my education to break out of my working class background and find a better living for myself. I don’t think I’m the strongest man, but there was a time I felt like I was the best software developer on earth. After a few disappointments I had to realize that was a big mistake. There were a few other moments in Strongman that reminded me of my own history in one way or another, turning this documentary into more of a personal experience than I ever anticipated. I really enjoyed this film.

Your Humble Narrator

In a slightly different matter: The film description in the festival booklet calls Strongman a cinéma vérité portrait. I think the director mentioned this documentary style during the Q and A as well. Not familiar with this expression I looked it up and found that it combines “[...] naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camera work, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects.” I might be wrong but I didn’t feel this applied to Strongman. Direct cinema on the other hand seemed to be a better fit. I read that both cinéma vérité and direct cinema have in common that they don’t use voice-overs, they both try to let the subjects speak for themselves, avoiding to make them dependent on the filmmaker’s interpretation, and they both try to avoid assigning social problems to a larger political or cultural context. Instead, they both try to capture truths and the everyday reality.

Furthermore I read that the difference between cinéma vérité and direct cinema is that direct cinema tries to put the camera and film maker as far into the background as possible. The camera is as a “fly on the wall” supposed to be as unnoticed as possible. Camera and crew should try not influence the situation at all to capture the “privileged moments” in which the person forgets about the camera’s existence and reveals truths you otherwise wouldn’t get to see.

Cinéma vérité, so I read, follows a different strategy…instead of being a “fly on the wall”, the film maker becomes a “fly in the soup”, actively participating in the situation and trying to provoke those “privileged moments”. Some examples would include reality-television or interview movies. Even fictional movies like the Blairwitch Project used this technique. I wonder if I understood it right… how would you as educated film people define the difference between cinéma vérité and direct cinema? It has nothing to do with Strongman, but I was curious because I wasn’t familiar with this word before.

Off to the next and last movie of the day, presented by director Bobcat Goldthwait himself: World’s Greatest Dad [IMDB][MFF] with Robin Williams, Daryl Sabara, Alexie Gilmore, Geoffrey Pierson, Henry Simmons, Mitzi McCall and Tony V. It’s the story about a middle aged author and poetry teacher Lance who fails to find somebody to publish his writing. He also seems to fail as single father of an abusive son Kyle. After an abrupt turn of events, Lance faces new challenges, fame and respect approaching from all directions.

Bobcat Goldthwait and Jed Dietz

Bobcat Goldthwait originally planned somebody else for Robin William’s role, and his character as poetry teacher was not at all related to the old Dead Poet’s Society at all, he explained during the Q and A. I enjoyed this film. It was very entertaining, funny, and sometimes also very dark which I always appreciate in a comedy. Similar to Sleeping Dogs Lie (a screening we saw a year or two ago), he managed to play with a darker, unspoken side of an individual’s psychology or social/cultural standards as a whole, while giving it all a very entertaining, lightweight appearance.

The following list is in order from my top pick down for both Friday and Saturday:

1. Modern Love is Automatic
2. Love Songs
3. Invisible Girlfriend
4. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
5. Strongman
6. Stingray Sam
7. Lake Tahoe
8. World’s Greatest Dad
9. Seventh Moon

Our day started with Modern Love is Automatic [IMDB][MFF], directed by Zach Clark, starring Melodie Sisk (as Lorraine) and Maggie Ross (as Adrian).

Modern Love is Automatic was a dark and dry comedy-drama about nurse Lorraine who, bored with with her environment and the people in her life, detached herself emotionally and socially from everything. Controlling every detail in her life it doesn’t seem surprising when she finds interest in a dominatrix magazine. When she finds her boyfriend cheating she decides to look for a new roommate and becomes a dominatrix at night. She finds aspiring fashion model Adrian, whose emotionality and bubbliness very much is Lorraine’s total opposite. But just as opposites attract, they very slowly develop a friendship in the background of their individual lives and Adrian’s boyfriend Mitch who is uncontrollably obsessed with Lorraine.

Zach Clark, Maggie Ross, Melodie Sisk, Daryl Pittman

This movie was easily one of my favorites this year. I not only loved the great performances, cool sets, colors and costumes, but also the pace and quiet as well as Melodie Sisk’s facial expressions that said more than could ever be said with words. Modern Love feels like a nice companion to my other favorites from the last two festival years when I saw Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland and Mary Bronstein’s Yeast. In these movies I was able to identify with the characters and their paralyzed social lives and relationships to an unusual extent. What can I say, I loved everything about Modern Love is Automatic. Even the bursts of doom metal worked really well in there. Definitely a movie I would like to see again sometime, and one I can highly recommend.

David Redmon

Our second screening this Friday was Invisible Girlfriend [IMDB][MFF], directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, with and about Charles Fihoil, a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic who lives in Monroe, Louisiana with his parents and children. He is in love with his invisible girlfriend, the spirit of Joan of Arc, and decides that DeeDee, his pen pal and New Orleans bartender, might be Joan of Arc in the flesh. The filmmaker follows him on a 400-mile bicycle journey to find DeeDee.

This was a wonderful documentary about a man who may be a bit crazy, but also very intelligent, insightful and caring. During his journey through rural Louisiana, which lasted about 12 days, he met several generous, kind and very down-to-earth people who gave him a ride or shared food and stories with him. I found it interesting how this journey was accompanied by a number of moments of death and decay that foreshadowed what he would find at his destination. Beautiful, sometimes funny, but also very sad, this film managed to create a non-judgmental portrait of Charles Fihoil and the people he met on his way. I really liked this film. I was also very impressed by some of the music choices.

Another documentary we saw this Friday was Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, directed by Jessica Oreck. This film portrayed a part of Japanese culture I was completely unfamiliar with before: Japan’s love and fascination with insects that is inherent in the whole society and all generations from young to old age. Insects are collected like trading cards or comic books, are part of quite a significantly sized industry of collectors and breeders. Insects appear in shape of dolls, toys, video games, candy, but also inspire art and literature, dating back to the beginning of Japan’s history.

Jessica Oreck and Sean Williams

Beetle Queen was partially in English, partially Japanese with English subtitles and filled with a great amount of insight, history and poetry about an ancient and still mysterious culture that may mostly be known to the Western world for their car and electronic brands, fashion and pop culture, their tv-shows or cuisine. I can highly recommended it to anyone who is interested in learning more about Japan from a slightly different angle. The cinematography comes from Sean Williams who also shot Frownland and Yeast I mentioned above. I would love to see it again and follow the history and poetry in more depth than I was able to comprehend upon my first viewing.

I have to admit: A few days ago, if someone had told me to watch a romantic musical, I probably would have would have smiled and dismissed it without giving it a chance. The musical genre was not one I was particularly interested in before. The few musicals I have ever seen were entertaining to a degree, but they didn’t manage to grab me. Why? I’m not sure… perhaps it’s something I wasn’t properly introduced to growing up in Germany. About every movie made in Germany of the 50s and 60s was incredibly silly and featured a lot of bad German Schlager music. Television was practically non-existent, and eventually the popularity died off and no musical films were produced anymore for a very long time. I can’t really think of any musical film produced in Germany since the days of the economic boom.

In the mid to late 80s (stage) musicals became very popular with Cats. Many others including Starlight Express, Phantom of the Opera followed later, and they are still popular in Germany, but as far as I know, there haven’t been any movies to speak of. Every time I saw a movie with dancing and singing people they appeared very foreign to me. Something I couldn’t connect to.

Perhaps the setting and background were too artificial…perhaps the music was too methodical or constructed…perhaps I was thrown out of the story every time one of the actors starts to sing instead of keeping his character. How believable is the evil villain, mad professor or action hero who suddenly begins to dance and sing?

John Waters and Jed Dietz

Being a romantic musical I never would have volunteered to pick Love Songs [IMDB][MFF] if it hadn’t been the John Waters pick this year. The annual “John Waters Pick” has been one of our traditions since we started attending the film festival. His movie selections did never disappoint in the past few years. Most of his selections, including Story of Women, Dog Days or Head-On offered an extraordinarily realistic view on love, people and the complexity of their emotional, social, sexual, human interactions…reflecting what life is really like, challenging what most movies try to suggest as reality.

Love Songs was directed by Christophe Honoré and stars Chiara Mastroianni, Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier and Clotilde Hesme. It’s a romantic musical, yes…but one I actually enjoyed very much! It felt very current and natural, the songs and music were beautiful and were very elegantly woven into the story. So fluent, it almost felt as if these moments could have happened in real life… although I have never seen someone walking down the street singing, have I?

Everybody looked great, very natural and likable, the story was beautiful, so was the atmosphere and mood. I still find myself surprised how much I enjoyed this movie. Another contemporary musical film I saw a while ago (Sweeney Todd) left me with the same impression I had of other musicals before, not so Love Songs. Perhaps it worked so well because it was in French and playing in Paris? I don’t know, but I really enjoyed its pace and rhythm. I think I might have to correct some of my views I used to have about musicals. Perhaps there is more out there I would enjoy if I gave it a try.

After Love Songs we had our first break of the day and we used the opportunity to celebrate our 5th filmfest membership anniversary with a pitcher of sangria. I should have eaten something first, because the wine quickly made me feel a little fuzzy-headed.

Of course this didn’t help when we entered our fifth and last screening of the day: Seventh Moon [IMDB][MFF] directed by Eduardo Sánchez, starring Amy Smart, Dennis Chan and Tim Chiou. The story takes place in China where Melissa and Yul enjoy their honeymoon. Their visit coincides with the sacred Seventh Moon festival, celebrating the full moon of the seventh lunar month, which, according to a Chinese myth, is a time when the dead are free to walk the earth. The couple, drunk after celebrating, start a late night cab-drive to Yul’s grandmother’s house in the countryside. This trip will of course end somewhere lost in the middle of nowhere where the horror is about to take place.

Directed by Eduardo Sánchez who with Daniel Myrick also wrote and directed the Blair Witch Project, Seventh Moon felt a lot like Blair Witch Project including its shaky camera work. Even without sangria I got motion sick when I watched the Blair Witch on the big screen. The same happened Friday night during the Seventh Moon. I survived about three quarter of the movie, but I had to close my eyes because I felt increasingly dizzy. A few minutes before the movie was over I had to leave the theater to breathe some fresh air and get stable ground under my feet which made me feel better. Unfortunately I missed the ending of the movie and the Q and A afterward, but my stomach wasn’t ready for it. Next time I should probably take some pills for motion sickness before I watch another shaky movie.

The following list is in order from my top pick down for Friday, May 8:

1. Modern Love is Automatic
2. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
3. Invisible Girlfriend
4. Love Songs
5. Seventh Moon

PS: Sorry about the bad quality of these photos. My camera didn’t take the low-light too well. I hope I got all the names right. Please correct me if I made a mistake.

By the way, we are celebrating our 5^th red carpet membership anniversary supporting the film festival as Friends of the Festival! Amazing how quickly all these years passed. I still remember our exciting first festival in 2002 before we became members as if it took place just a few months ago.

MICA Brown Center

This year’s festival opened at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Brown Center with an introduction by festival director Jed Dietz, followed by a selection of eight short films to celebrate the art of filmmaking in its purest form. Bobcat Goldthwait was the host tonight and launched the presentation with his own Goldthwait Home Movies in which the “cast” of an old home movie reunites to record an audio commentary for the 40^th anniversary DVD. I enjoyed this little funny film.

Jed Dietz & Bobcat Goldthwait

Next was The Bellows March by Eric Dyer. He uses the old pre-cinema zoetrope technique he first explored in 2006 with Copenhagen Cycles. This time he added a third dimension to his zoetropes by using digitally printed three-dimensional sculptures.

3-dimensional metallic concertina-soldiers march, dance, and burrow; rain falls on the fallen ones, who are reborn as colorful plants blooming in mock-timelapse. They dance in grassy fields, intertwining with each other in a colorful kaleidoscope of motion, until joining in ordered rows and devolving into their militaristic marching form.

I liked the aesthetics, rhythm and visual effects, the patterns, images, and especially its technical background. While watching this film I thought to myself “This is very unique, there probably is no other way to produce this look.” Having said that, there was something missing for me however. I had a similar experience when I saw Copenhagen Cycles before. I fully recognize and appreciate its artistry, but I’m missing emotionality in its mechanics. I can picture it being used as a music video, or in a context with another elements adding emotionality to the ever-progressing and pulsating images. But as a short film alone, it didn’t manage to grab me as much as it could have.

Somewhat inspired by Eric Dyer’s film was Michael Langan who created “a moving portrait of the bustle and permanence of a city” with Dahlia [IMDB] by taking several photographs of an object or similar objects in focus with a changing background scene. He took, for example, pictures of different parking meters in different locations with the same viewing angle and used them as animation frames. This reminded me very much of the video animation Noah Kalina with the pictures he took of himself every day for six years. I liked this film and thought the music worked really well to the images. It added to the film what The Bellows March was missing for me.

Andy Cahill, Jed Dietz, (Pat Clark?), Jay Zimmerman, Matt Cornwell, Jim Jacob (please correct me if I got anybody wrong.)

Jay Zimmerman’s Done In One [IMDB] was a funny and genius little short film taken in in a single shot without any editing. Very clever, I loved it!

Andy Cahill created with Trepan Hole [IMDB] an animation of “squiggling, spastic, rail-thin creatures with clay souls and throbbing heads bounce off each other for six minutes.” It amused me to some degree, but I found myself scratching my head for most of the six minutes. :-D

Mildred Richards by Marc Kess (“KESS!”) looked and sounded fascinatingly 1940s in every aspect. The sound actually recorded in the 1940 for a radio play. The film was newly created to match the old recording. I thought the Radio Film Picture was very well made. The new visuals looked very convincing and authentic, and you couldn’t really tell what has been done, except occasionally the lips didn’t sync 100%. I thought the story was fun, too.

Julia Kim Smith’s Grand Teton [IMDB] was my least favorite film this evening, quite a disappointment to be honest. It was a video portrait of a first generation Korean-American family who comes together for a group photo at the same spot after 35 years. The pictures showed a range of mixed impressions from silliness, happiness, gratitude, perhaps melancholy and sadness as well, but they were overshadowed by a distracting, ugly, overpowering and awfully disturbing soundtrack. Did she try to illustrate the degree of identity loss people experience in the attempt to assimilate? In that case this film would have been disturbing but successful. But I’m not sure if that really was intended.

The opening night concluded with About Film Festivals by Jim Jacob. That was very funny, I loved it! Let’s let him speak for himself:

But once in a while I discover a movie like Together or The Fall too impressive not to mention in some way. I may not analyze it deeply, take it apart and write about every single aspect, but I feel I have to create a record of its existence and make a recommendation. Yesterday I watched such a film: Vozvrashcheniye or The Return, by Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev.

What a brilliant and unforgettable movie! Although it was his debut directing a full-length feature after working only with commercials before, it instantly found a place in my list of top-favorites. The Return is a masterpiece and I can only hope that Zvyagintsev continues his path that started out so promising. He could be worthy to become Tarkovsky’s, Truffaut’s or Ingmar Bergman’s successor.

Everything was as close to perfection as it can get. The photography was just beautiful, the camera work outstanding. The actors, especially Konstantin Lavronenko were fantastic. The music (as well as the silence) was wonderful, the mood and setting, psychology, characters and story, the ending, the complexity within the minimal, the unexpected…

I can’t wait to see what his next projects will be like. After The Return he also directed a film named Izgnanie or The Banishment released in 2007, also starring Konstantin Lavronenko. I have to watch it as soon as it becomes available on video.

I have to thank Zvyagintsev for enriching the movie industry with The Return. I can highly recommend this film.

One house: one revolutionary; two open straight marriages; three gay people (maybe four); three children; two carnivores and eight vegetarians; there’s only one way they’re going to make it… together.

Last Thursday we saw Lukas Moodysson’s “Together”, a funny and beautiful story of a Swedish commune in the 1970s. To keep it short, I just loved it…for all the individuals and their differences, troubles, compromises, solidarity and being real. Although I’m normally not a fan of happy endings, I thought it worked really well in “Together” considering how they all influenced each other and developed over the course of this film. The American trailer I found on YouTube is really bad and doesn’t reflect what I have seen on Thursday at all, but I can highly recommend it.

Unfortunately, it was the last of the free movie series at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Despite two years of great screenings of visionary films from all over the world with an average attendance of 150+  people, the BMA has decided to stop the funding. Anyone who enjoyed this series in the past and wants to ask the museum to reconsider their decision can reach them at: programs@artbma.org