Category: GFF strand – Pioneer

Fugue is about a woman struggling to rediscover what happened to her 2 years after she loses her memory. At the same time, her family struggle to adjust to her new personality, which is a permanent state of Cannot. Be. Fucked. With. This.

Arctic is a tense, gruelling survival film. Mads Mikkelsen has to trek across the Arctic tundra with an injured friend, facing down polar bears and all sorts.

The visuals on this are just amazing. Even the scale. It goes to wide shots and you’re like, “Which black dot is Mads?” Even though it’s shot in colour, it feels very monochromatic, with figures just silhouettes against the white snow.

By the end, Mads is looking totally wrekt. 

Chained For Life is a movie about an able-bodied actress playing a blind woman opposite a disabled and deformed man in a schlock horror film. The film is obviously about disability, representation and cripface casting. You’d think with such an explicit message as its main thrust, it would be heavy-handed and obvious. Instead, it’s actually hilarious.

I’d actually say this is more a meta-horror. To me it was more reminiscent of something like Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace or Attack of the Bat Monsters from last year’s Frightfest. It’s more a deconstruction of a horror trope.

Disability and deformity has stood for inner evil or movement away from complete humanity since the earliest days of horror film. Disabled actors have been exploited as horrifying freak show spectacles to be used for shock value and jump scares.

As the able-bodied actors shoot their scenes, they don’t give much thought to the content. Yet when the disabled actors show up, that changes. At least, it does for the able-bodied actress playing the lead female role as Mabel. She gets to know her opposite, Rosenthal, played by Adam Pearson. Soon all the lines about him being hideous and how grateful he is expected to be for her kindness all sit less comfortably.

While I thought this was going to be an ‘issue’ film, I’d say it’s actually more a genuinely funny take down of one of the staple tropes of the horror genre.

Permission is about a female football captain who is denied the right to leave the country for the cup final at the last minute by her husband. He is a slick looking Nice Guy TM who has been waiting for her to fall on her face and, since that hasn’t happened, has decided now is the time to bring her to heel. When she doesn’t beg sufficiently to his liking, he sets about destroying her life. Tough watch. 

Thunder Road is amazing! Funniest movie of the festival so far. Really, bleakly dark humour. It follows Jim, a buttoned-down, dorky, Texan, beat cop as he has the worst week of his life. If you ever wondered what it’d be like if a stereotypical, yes-sir, thank ya-ma’am, policeman took a total nervous breakdown, the answer is it’s hilarious.

It starts with him giving the eulogy at his mother’s funeral. For anyone who’s seen the BoJack Horseman eulogy episode, it’s like that, but worse and ending with a dance number.

And the main guy, the actor who plays the lead, just has such perfect timing, like absolutely nails it. Almost none of the humour in the movie is in actual jokes with a setup and punchline. It’s all the character’s manner of speech and the absurdity of watching him try to maintain a veneer of calm politeness as he rapidly spirals out of control. And it has to be delivered so exactly, it’s just done beautifully.

And it hits all the dramatic moments as well, the reality of the loss and anger and terrible loneliness and regret is so real. The humour is there but doesn’t try to detract from the poignancy of the moment. Really this is one to go see. It’s not a laugh a minute like some constantly turning barrel of one-liners, but a real heartfelt drama with causticly black humour about the misfortunes of life and the flaws in our character. 

The Man Who Surprised Everyone is a queer film out of Russian. A well-respected family man at the centre of his rural community is diagnosed with untreatable terminal cancer. He makes preparations for his family once he’s gone but his wife begs him to go for last-ditch efforts, even seeking out a traditional healer. This is an awesome Baba Yaga-looking pagan in a blackbird headdress. She performs a healing ceremony and tells him a folktale of how one man cheated death by disguising himself as a duck so Death could not find him. So the main character gets a dress and some makeup and begins living as a woman.

The main character doesn’t speak another line after this point, because the movie’s not really about having them justify if they are disguising themselves to hide from Death or if they are living the last few weeks of their life the way they’ve always wanted to. They don’t owe anyone, including the audience, any explanations. Instead what we see is that, without changing forby a dress and some lipstick, everyone’s reactions to them change. After fundraising money for their treatment, the whole community turns on them, beats them and drives them from the community. This movie does depict verbal, physical and sexual violence. But it does make the point clearly, rather daringly for a Russian film, that it is ridiculous that a little cloth and a bit of rouge should be enough for people who esteem you, respect you and even love you to think any differently or any less of you. 

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. 

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.

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.