Peculiar Vacation and Other
Illnesses(Vakansi yang janggal dan
penyakit lainnya)
Synopsis
Fed up
with her daily routine, Ning takes on a new job at a furniture shop. There, she
gets the opportunity to get away from her indifferent husband Jarot for a
couple of days, having to deliver a sofa with her colleague Mur. Driving on
windy roads up the mountains to the remote village where the client lives, a
delicate love story evolves between the two. Meanwhile, left-behind Jarot is
trying to figure out the meaning of the word “husband” while watching the
matchmaking programs on TV.
When Night Falls
Synopsis
The
mother of a murderer awaits and prepares to meet her son. The true story of a
man who killed six Shanghai policemen after suffering police beatings as a
punishment for riding an unlicensed bicycle. This film was produced as a
part of the Jeonju Digital Project.
When Night Falls: Locarno Review
5:41 PM PDT 8/16/2012 by Stephen Dalton
The Bottom Line
Rough justice in modern China.
Cast
An Nai, Kate Wen, Sun Ming
Director
Liang Ying
Liang Ying's docu-drama, which won two Golden Leopard awards at the Swiss film festival, has stirred up controversy in China for its exploration of a notorious real-life murder case.
LOCARNO - Closely based on real events, this stern docu-drama from the young writer-directorLiang Ying offers an intimate psychological portrait of a grieving mother whose son faces the death penalty for a notorious multiple-murder case. Produced by the Jeonju Digital Project offshoot of South Korea’s Jeonju International Film Festival, the story casts a coldly critical eye on the Chinese justice system, and has inevitably ruffled feathers in Beijing. It also won the Golden Leopard awards for Best Director and Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival last weekend, although this artfully understated tale of revenge may proved a little too cold for audiences outside festivals or Chinese current affairs circles.
OUR EDITOR RECOMMENDS
When Night Falls is bookended with a montage of still photos showing the real subject of the story, the convicted killer Yang Jia. In between we see lightly fictionalized, elegantly composed scenes in which Yang’s mother Wang Jinmei (An Nai) sleepwalks through the last days of her son’s trial. Because the case has become a high-profile cause for human rights protestors, reporters and supporters shadow Wang constantly, often pushing her to the point of irritation. In between routine daily errands, she makes futile phone calls begging old friends for help, attends grim legal hearings and rages pitifully against the bureaucratic machine.
The grisly killing spree behind When Night Falls is not depicted on screen, only described in subtitles and fragments of dialogue. Yang Jia was an unemployed 28-year-old man arrested in Shanghai in 2007 for the petty crime of riding an unlicensed bicycle. After a rough interrogation, including alleged beatings, he tried to sue the police for mistreatment. When this failed, he stormed a police station in suburban Shanghai armed with knives and petrol bombs, stabbing nine officers, six of them fatally. Throughout his subsequent trial, his mother was incarcerated in a mental hospital by the authorities for 143 days, kept in the dark about her son’s crimes, unable to aid or defend him.
Yang’s divisive case earned unusually sympathetic media interest in China, inspiring street protests, tribute songs and intense online debate. The dissident artist Ai Weiwei even produced a documentary about him. Human rights groups protested irregularities in his treatment, notably an official refusal to examine the defendant for mental illness. Such was Yang’s folk-hero status that his trial was delayed during the Beijing Olympics to avoid negative coverage, but he was finally executed by lethal injection on 26 November 2008.
Filmed in long static shots, When Night Falls is the most discreet and elliptical kind of political statement. Indeed, the reaction of the Chinese authorities to Ying’s film has been more dramatic than anything he shows on screen. Effectively exiled to Hong Kong, the director has now been warned he faces arrest if he returns to the mainland. His wife and parents have been harassed by the Shanghai police, while shadowy figures even offered to buy the film’s copyright in order to prevent its Jeonju premiere in April. The screening went ahead anyway. Beijing’s clumsy attempts at censoring a low-key indie feature have only boosted its global profile and political impact enormously.
In the light of such state-sponsored bullying, it feels churlish to criticize When Night Falls for its minimal entertainment value. But the pacing is painfully slow in places, while the lack of factual background seems to undermine Ying’s intention to illuminate an infamous injustice. His thin script does not put a clear case for Yang’s innocence, fragile mental state, or mitigating circumstances. More detail, more context, more argument on both sides would have been very welcome.
The film’s English title is also a little clumsy, making it sound like a generic noir thriller – a more accurate translation from Mandarin is “I still have something to say”. This may well be true, but a better film could have told us a lot more about Yang’s shameful, sensational, shocking story.
One Day or Another(El Yazisi)
·
Turkey 2012; 98
min
·
Original version: Turkish, French, English
Synopsis
Set in
a humble Anatolian town in 1998, ONE DAY OR ANOTHER follows three
stories on a summer day when the town is welcoming its very first foreign
English teacher. As an accidental tourist is mistaken for her, the wind of
change starts to blow. The first story is about Zeynep, the town's pharmacist
from the big city. She is about to marry the town's respected teacher Celal.
Today, Volkan, a drug representative and an old friend, arrives for
stock-taking. Wedding news is a surprise for him. As he questions her, the
reality gradually emerges, so does Volkan's feelings towards Zeynep. The second
story is young Ahmet's, son of the school headmaster. He loves a girl from the
village; both the townspeople and the villagers are against this relationship.
Today, as he is planning to elope with her, his father assigns him to guide the
foreign teacher around the town. There is one little problem. Neither Julie nor
Ahmet don't speak English. Without understanding each other, gradually they
connect with the other's trouble. And finally Ragıp, an eight years old boy...
He is in love with Zeynep the pharmacist, each day he makes his knee bleed and
goes to her for treatment. At last he sits down and writes down an innocent
love letter. Just when he is about to deliver it, the letter gets stolen from
his pocket during the welcoming ceremony. As he searches for the letter, he
happens to meet a little girl Sevgi from the village who is in love with Ahmet.
After their naive crushes they run around the town, gradually they discover the
real friendship. ONE DAY OR ANOTHER is a cross section of the daily humble town
life where, no matter how much they move, the bricks never fall out of their
places. But our story is about the ones who inhale the wind that blows the
change.
·
United Kingdom,
USA, France 2012; 87 min
·
Original version: English
·
Genre: Drama
·
o
FIPRESCI Prize
& FICC / IFFS Jury Special Mention - FF Locarno
Synopsis
In the
very waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, LEVIATHAN captures
the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras –
tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker – it is a cosmic
portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.
Press Quotes
Despite
the lack of dialogue or editorial voice, there are flashes of literary
intelligence and dark humor at work in Leviathan.
Stephen
Dalton, The
Hollywood Reporter
There
are moments in "Leviathan" so breathtaking that it's easy to forget
they're also familiar.
Eric
Kohn, Indiewire
There
has not yet been a film quite like Leviathan: see and feel it for yourself.
Mark
Peranson, Locarno
IFF
Locarno Review: Masterful Fishing Doc 'Leviathan' Presents a Fresh Take on
the Nature Documentary Form
The seagulls of "Leviathan."
There are
moments in "Leviathan" so breathtaking that it's easy to forget
they're also familiar. Documentarians Vérena Paravel and Lucien Castain-Taylor
follow a pair of fishing vessels off the coast of Massachusetts from nearly
every imaginable angle as well as a few impossible ones: Captured on small
digital cameras fixed to fishermen helmets, tossed beneath the waves and strewn
across the deck among the dead-eyed haul, the barrage of visuals populating
"Leviathan" contain a routinely dissociative effect. The dialogue is
sparse and distant, drowned out by hulking machinery, wind and water. The movie
could take place on another planet; instead, it peers at this one from a
jarring and entirely fresh point of view.
A documentary dream team for enthusiasts of experimental approaches to the
form, "Leviathan" recalls the strengths of both directors' previous
efforts. Castain-Taylor's pensive 2003 look at sheep herders,
"Sweetgrass," similarly foregrounded the inextricable bond between
humanity and nature, while Paravel turned the grimy discomfort of a Queens
junkyard into a marvelously engaging paean to people living at the edges of
society. The anonymous fishermen regularly glimpsed throughout
"Leviathan" contain a primal dimension drawn out by the way they become
almost immediately subsumed by the surrounding environment.
A documentary dream team for enthusiasts of experimental approaches to the
form, "Leviathan" recalls the strengths of both directors' previous
efforts. Castain-Taylor's pensive 2003 look at sheep herders,
"Sweetgrass," similarly foregrounded the inextricable bond between
humanity and nature, while Paravel turned the grimy discomfort of a Queens
junkyard into a marvelously engaging paean to people living at the edges of
society. The anonymous fishermen regularly glimpsed throughout
"Leviathan" contain a primal dimension drawn out by the way they become
almost immediately subsumed by the surrounding environment.
Read more of
Indiewire's extensive Locarno coverage
The movie opens with a quote from Job about the unflappable power of the leviathan (the title is later referenced with a sampling of a song by heavy metal rockers Mastadon). But the filmmakers eschew biblical aspirations for raw, cosmic power rendered especially involving by disorientation. Both during the black of night, when the boat forms a piercing figure in the black frame, and in the daylight glow, the camera rarely ever stops moving: From the earliest shots, it constantly shifts from the loud interiors of the boat to view the dark abyss below, resting on blotches of white foam and endowing them with abstract power.
There's little time to adjust before the first of many horrific plunges into the water, where the adventurous, free-romaing lens peers upward before careening to the surface for air. The angles and framing "choices" are as much beholden to a natural ebb and flow as the ocean itself, but the filmmakers thread the images together with brilliant finesse, so that it's often difficult to spot the abrupt editing choices; even more frequently, the montage builds to such an absorbing effect that it's impossible to break the spell and look for them.
Having established the POV of the fishermen, "Leviathan" shifts to the semi-static view of the fish. As cameras lie among the detritus and observe its chorus of vacant stares, the cycle of the fishermen's work is echoed by the rhythmic sounds of chopping and the thud of animal parts hitting the hull as scales glitter among pools of blood.
The movie opens with a quote from Job about the unflappable power of the leviathan (the title is later referenced with a sampling of a song by heavy metal rockers Mastadon). But the filmmakers eschew biblical aspirations for raw, cosmic power rendered especially involving by disorientation. Both during the black of night, when the boat forms a piercing figure in the black frame, and in the daylight glow, the camera rarely ever stops moving: From the earliest shots, it constantly shifts from the loud interiors of the boat to view the dark abyss below, resting on blotches of white foam and endowing them with abstract power.
There's little time to adjust before the first of many horrific plunges into the water, where the adventurous, free-romaing lens peers upward before careening to the surface for air. The angles and framing "choices" are as much beholden to a natural ebb and flow as the ocean itself, but the filmmakers thread the images together with brilliant finesse, so that it's often difficult to spot the abrupt editing choices; even more frequently, the montage builds to such an absorbing effect that it's impossible to break the spell and look for them.
Having established the POV of the fishermen, "Leviathan" shifts to the semi-static view of the fish. As cameras lie among the detritus and observe its chorus of vacant stares, the cycle of the fishermen's work is echoed by the rhythmic sounds of chopping and the thud of animal parts hitting the hull as scales glitter among pools of blood.
Even as its
perspective grows increasingly alien, 'Leviathan' is full of life.
Despite the
overload of sights and sounds, "Leviathan" adheres to a remarkably
cogent aesthetic filled with innumerable painterly touches, from the red and
blue gloves of the fishermen to the dark yellows of the ship interiors.
Flitting across the screen at a relentless pace, the ongoing motion gives the
impression of the late Stan Brakhage's dizzying stylings in aquatic terms.
However, the stunt work on display roots the continuing sequence that forms the entire movie in a precise world. "Leviathan" resembles nothing like the existing format for nature documentaries, but it does point to a different approach to it. Generally speaking, the genre is predicated on distance between the viewer and subject. "Leviathan," on the other hand, delves into the thick of it, the camera merging with subjects living and dead, fashioning the natural world into the ultimate expressionistic accomplishment.
READ MORE: 5 Movies to Watch at the 2012 Locarno Film
FestivalHowever, the stunt work on display roots the continuing sequence that forms the entire movie in a precise world. "Leviathan" resembles nothing like the existing format for nature documentaries, but it does point to a different approach to it. Generally speaking, the genre is predicated on distance between the viewer and subject. "Leviathan," on the other hand, delves into the thick of it, the camera merging with subjects living and dead, fashioning the natural world into the ultimate expressionistic accomplishment.
Even as its perspective grows increasingly alien, "Leviathan" is full
of life. The most striking moment involves a flock of seagulls seen upside down
against an empty sky, the digital image morphing them into violent brushstrokes
on a blank canvas. The stunning black and white tableaux frees the gulls from a
familiar reality while poeticizing their natural buoyancy.The fishermen are also folded into this reverse objectification. In the lengthiest scene, a middle-aged man rests in the ship interior, neatly framed in a shot that drags on for minutes until he eventually falls asleep. Viewed in his natural habitat, he takes on the same primitive qualities applied to the cold-blooded vertebrae lining the ship.
Without rescinding its atmosphere, "Leviathan" finally brings up its credits, which contain a tribute to vessels lost off the Bedford Coast. Even then, however, it avoids hitting an elegiac note. While ominous, the movie maintains a life-affirming message, celebrating an ancient ritual by plummeting its lyrical depths and staying there.
The Shine of Day(Der Glanz des Tages)
Directed by Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel
·
Austria 2012; 90
min
·
Original version: German
·
Genre: Drama
·
o
Leopard for Best
Actor (Walter Saabel), FICC / IFFS Don Quijote Prize & Ecumenical Jury
Special Mention - FF Locarno
Synopsis
Philipp
Hochmair is a young and successful actor working for the most important
theaters in Vienna and Hamburg. He spends his time learning new texts,
rehearsing and performing, gradually losing touch with everyday reality. But
when Philipp meets Walter, with whom he starts an ambiguous friendship, and has
to face his neighbour Victor’s destiny, he is reminded
that life is more than a stage.
Der
Glanz des Tages -
Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel
The film Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel festival following the
success achieved by the Pivellina is once again a realistic film,
semi-improvised and based on how the sudden seriocomica relations between men
can change someone's life framed. The
encounter / clash between two strong men from the ego: the circus Walter
(Walter Saabel directly from the cast of The Pivellina ) and actor Philipp Hochmair who plays
a fictionalized version of himself.
Walter's uncle Philipp, the black sheep of the family: the two
have never met, but Philipp is still present at the port in Hamburg since
Walter called to try to play Woyzeck at the Thalia. Will then start a friendship with his
uncle, who had followed him to Vienna, where the actor works caused great
excitement at the Burgtheater. Walter ends up sleeping on the couch with the task
of Philipp occasionally to take care of neighbors' children because her mother
is trapped in Moldova.
Neither man lacks appeal because their is a comparison between two
different characters that represent not only recitative style, but also
opposing conceptions of freedom.
Philipp is constantly in "arrogant actor," able to find
freedom running free in a fit of anger in many different roles; invecchianto
and driven by the desire to make amends for its past, Walter moves into a real
world that it bears fighting and throwing knives. For Walter freedom (or the glint of
the day) is given by just sitting by the river fishing. Jumping from the stage play to private
spaces, Covi and Frimmel reveal what happens behind the curtain of everyday
life.
Museum Hours
·
Austria, USA
2012; 107 min
·
Original version: German, English
·
Genre: Drama
·
o
CICAE Art Cinema
Award - FF Locarno
Synopsis
When a
Vienna museum guard befriends an enigmatic visitor, the grand Kunsthistorisches
Museum becomes a mysterious crossroads which sparks the exploration of their
lives, the city and the ways art reflects and shapes the world.
Museum Hours
(Austria-U.S.)
A Little
Magnet Films, Gravity Hill, KGP Kranzelbinder Gabriele Prod. production.
(International sales: MPM Film, Paris.) Produced by Paolo Calamita, Jem Cohen,
Gabriele Kranzelbinder. Executive producers, Guy Picciotto, Patti Smith.
Directed, written by Jem Cohen.
With:
Mary Margaret O'Hara, Bobby Sommer, Ela Piplits. (English, German dialogue)
With the
aid of helmer Jem Cohen's focused eye, auds as well as protags learn to view
art and the world around them through complementary lenses in the warmly intellectualized
"Museum Hours." At once intimate and expansive, the pic uses the
chance encounter between a Canadian visitor and a museum guard at Vienna's
Kunsthistorisches Museum to explore how it's possible to see transcendence even
in the mundane. Results are self-consciously arty yet accessible to those
willing to have their minds expanded; fest viewers will happily wile away
"Hours" before targeted arthouse play.
Cohen ("Chain")
dexterously balances narrative with visual and verbal exposition, training the
eye to seek out details and match them with similar elements on canvas and in
real life. In a sense, he's taken up the mantle of art historian Aby Warburg,
who exhorted his students to find thematic and formal parallels in art as a way
of educating the eye toward connoisseurship. Though the helmer occasionally
allows a bald didacticism to creep in, it's used as a way of getting viewers to
make their own judgments.
Janet (Mary Margaret O'Hara)
flies to Vienna after hearing that a cousin is comatose in a hospital. Her
first stop in town is the museum, where she asks guard Johann (Bobby Sommer)
for directions to the medical center. With repeat museum trips, these two
lonely people strike up a platonic friendship, and he even accompanies her on
hospital visits.
Both are at an in-between stage
of their lives, yet the script isn't interested in filling in too much
background. They are who they appear to be, opening themselves up after a
period of inner focus, and the conduit for this expansion is an appreciation of
their surroundings. Cohen juxtaposes closeups of casual objects in a painting,
like a broken eggshell, with shots of a discarded cigarette butt or a beer can,
guiding the beholder to contemplate the wonder of the small touch; even
detritus from a flea market, lying in the slush, becomes an object for
consideration, and there's no question that Janet and Johann are stand-ins for
the audience as a whole.
It's this minor key that plays
out best in the pic, especially when contrasted with the too-explicit verbalization
of visiting docent Gerda (Ela Piplits) lecturing to museum visitors about
Brueghel. Her gallery talk exhorts listeners to appreciate the artist's
cacophony of detail, which famously put his paintings' ostensible subject on
the same level as the incidental. The lesson is overstated, and Piplits'
delivery artificial (plus, the people cast as her tour group can't act);
something a bit less obvious would jive better with the subtlety Cohen
demonstrates elsewhere.
Similarly, a fantasy scene of
nude museum visitors, coming immediately after Janet remarks on the lack of
shame in Lucas Cranach's naked "Adam and Eve," is heavyhanded and
inadvertently seems like a parody of a Thomas Struth photograph. Despite such
missteps, Cohen's overall strategy is deeply satisfying. He's got a marvelous
eye for detail, not just in artwork but in the world around him, and appears to
be following Raymond Depardon's style of avoiding picture-postcard sites, and
instead bringing out what's notable in the everyday and ignored.
Exteriors were lensed on Super
16, retaining a sense of texture even after their digital transfer; interiors,
shot on HD, are clean without being harsh. Minor sequences, such as shifting
light within the hospital room, or Janet singing softly to herself, have their
own mesmerizing power, yet Cohen knows that nothing will ever beat the wonder
of a closeup of Rembrandt's brushwork.
അഭിപ്രായങ്ങളൊന്നുമില്ല:
ഒരു അഭിപ്രായം പോസ്റ്റ് ചെയ്യൂ