Keep Going is a cowboy movie of a kind. Two partners cross the Kyrgyzstan steppe on horseback. An angry young man and his estranged mother, struggling to find common ground across this trying journey. In another way it is a love story, of a man letting go of years of resentment and allowing himself to love his mother.
Werewolf is set in the absolute chaos following the liberation of the concentration camps. The prisoners, the Nazis and their brutal attack dogs flee into the surrounding countryside. A group of children are set up in an abandoned mansion, and told to waited for supplies once Allied lines are solidified. But the food never comes, and the children are trapped as the now starving camp dogs surround the building. Think Cujo with concentration camp survivors.
The Feeling of Being Watched is a documentary about a journalist’s struggle to uncover the decades-long mass surveillance of her hometown community of Muslim Arab-Americans in Bearview, Illinois. In some ways the film ends up focusing more on her than on the subject she’s covering because she can never concretely get tangible proof and the FBI refuses to release any information to do with the case.
Basically, in the 90s, one of the guys from the mosque raised money for humanitarian aid for Palestine, went over to deliver it, and was immediately arrest by Israel for providing financial support for Hamas. From that one guy, who was found not guilty in a fair trial in the States, the FBI launched Operation Vulgar Betrayal, pushing the investigation wider, into the mosque itself, and then into pretty much every Islamic charity and everyone who donated to them. This basically meant that by being Muslim, being active in your mosque, or fundraising for the welfare of others, you were making yourself a target for a terrorist investigation.
Ironically, as the filmmaker points out, the very thing that people in immigrant communities typically do – actively participate in their community, establish philanthropic organisations to help their own and others in need (everything that if you were a white Christian would be considered what makes America great) – became grounds for criminal suspicion.
And it’s almost like, the FBI were sooo sure they would find wrongdoing, they couldn’t believe it when it didn’t turn up. So it must be they just weren’t looking hard enough. So after 10 years of wiretaps, and drive-bys, and photos through long-distance lenses, when they got nothing, they couldn’t admit they’d wasted 10 years of manpower and resources. So it went on for another 10 years.
The filmmaker kinda hits the nail on the head when she finally reaches the conclusion that paranoia was not a by-product of the surveillance, but the purpose of it. The FBI knew there was no terrorist links in the community. They had decades of invasive investigation to prove it. But making every Muslim in that community fear the FBI like the eye of God, that was real benefit to the American government. That’s how a state ensures peace.
In an absolute stroke of genius, the film scheduled in that screen right after was Team America: World Police Sing-A-Long.
Bravo GFF programmers!
Magical realism from Sweden, Border is based on a short story by John Ajvide Linquist, author of Let The Right One In. Tina is half sniffer dog, half woman, capable of smelling deception. She works at border control where she uses her talent to stop ne’erdowells. From there the story forks into her helping track down a child trafficking ring, and her meeting her match in the form of Vore, a man who seems to be unusual like her.
Border is about arbitrary divisions; between our identity in civilised society and our selves as animals in nature; between male and female, between magic and reality. Truth rarely has these borders, where our authentic selves and lived experiences lie.
Aquarela started 15 minutes late because the producer decided to introduce the movie by giving its entire thesis. As she did so, I had a sinking feeling the movie might be shit. This was compounded when the opening theme music, repeated intermittently throughout the film, was a bash of utterly shit nu metal. When it became apparent I was going to be in for 1 hour and 40 minutes of shots of creaking ice and crashing waves, I sat back resigned to the situation.
I don’t have a problem with long slow movies with no traditional plot, characters or dialogue, but they have to be good. Even a middling movie with a clear story and punchy dialogue will carry you along, but if a contemplative helioscope of a movie isn’t good, it is interminable. That was this movie. As for a movie told about and through water, I’ve seen it done before and better (The Pearl Button for example).
The only piece of incident throughout the film, and the only part to give me hope for improvement, was of Russian rescue services fishing motors out a frozen lake when eejits thought it’d be wise to drive across it after thaw began. Watching people disappear under the ice in an instant was horrifying. Luckily we didn’t stay with anything that engaging for very long, and swiftly moved on to more creaking icebergs.
If you want to recreate this movie at home, just queue up videos of icebergs on YouTube and play the most deservedly forgettable nu metal from the early 2000s. Same experience.
Spotted myself in the crowd at the Opening Gala. Can you spot yourself?
A movie based on the Flannan Isle Mystery. It has a 3 scene cameo from my favourite pencil-necked, blue-eyed psychopath Soren Malling, which almost steals the show for understated ratcheting of tension. Much in the same vein as Shallow Grave and A Simple Plan, it has an element of conflict injected into a tight group, and everything falls to shit.
Family politics in 19th century Vietnam as a wealthy silk producer gets himself a 14-year-old for his third wife. The Third Wife is everything you’d expect in historical drama set in East Asia – sumptuous gowns, sensuous filming, candlelit sex scenes.
A movie that could not be more relevant to the current newscycle, Dear Son is about a father searching for answers after his son up and runs off to Syria. A vividly drawn picture of an ordinary family undergoing the ordinary issue of a teenager making a bad decision, painting the ecstatics of betrayal and grief buried in ordinary life.
The actor playing the father conveys a world of meaning, both in his lines and in his silences. He is on the brink of retirement, looking forward to the joys of watching his son ascend into all his promise, and reap the rewards of years of work and sacrifice. You get the idea that this, their only child, was a much wanted baby who appeared after all hope for a child was beginning to wane, and he became his parents’ whole life.
The son on the other hand is clearly cracking under the pressure of being the centre of his parents’ world. He has genuine love for them but there is an unstated need for escape.
This movie is really about the contrast between the mundane and the dramatic. For all the raw, heart-rending drama in this story, it mostly takes place in a drab flat or in offices or hotel rooms. The big events taken place off screen and you’re left to survey their aftermath. In a sense this movie is the classic conflict of a son rejecting his father’s path. What he rejects is the boring, everyday, ordinariness of it all, the map laid out of exams, uni, marriage, work, death. Like most terrible teenage decisions, central is the need for glory, for drama, for some spectacle or gesture to prove your life is meaningful. And while Syrian jihadists are villains to most and heroes to some, what they are not is boring.
His father would have found his son’s life meaningful no matter what path he had chose, so long as it made him happy. Instead his son chooses to throw his life away. For all the son’s ambition to be this romantic figure of strength and bravery, it is his father’s survival in the aftermath of his decision and resolution to endure that evinces real bravery and strength.
An Indian retelling of the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Kia, an autistic teenage girl, investigates the death of Cosmos, a pregnant cat. The movie is beautiful but has no pacing at all.