Nowtopian

My ongoing reactions and mini-reviews… the Festival ends today and I am finally coming up for air. 36 movies! Wow!…

A Walk to Beautiful
Remarkable documentary on a type of contemporary lepers–in this case it’s young women in Ethiopia who “leak” after failed childbirth when they’re 12-13 years old and their pelvises are not ready. Stillbirth is compounded by fistula–a hole between urethra and vagina, and/or rectum and vagina, leading to incessant drainage and complete social ostracism. It mostly happens among young teens in extremely remote rural Ethiopia (6-10 hour walk to nearest road is typical–146 ob/gyn doctors in a country of 77 million!). The story is heartbreaking, to see so many young women treated like pariahs by their villages and too often their own families. A happier part of the story focuses on the Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa. It repairs 93% of the 1500 women they operate on per year. Incredibly inspiring place, fantastic to see the women transformed by this fairly simple surgery. And the longer-term impact of the 1500 women a year getting educated about fistula, childbirth, etc., is extremely hopeful. Great documentary! (update: This won the Best Documentary award at the festival as determined by audience rankings.)

The Violin
This won the big prize for best first feature film in the SF Int’l Film Festival I just heard. A beautiful, amazing movie set in a small village in rural Mexico during the 1970s (or the 80s or the 1930s or now!). The director, Francisco Vargas, claimed it had no particular time or place. It feels very timeless, the endless story of Mexico, brutal federales (natioanl army) attacking rural Mexicans who try to defind their land and lives. Vargas said it was a movie easy to describe in terms of time and place. Put a map on the wall, cover your eyes and point, and the place your finger lands is a place where this story happened a long time ago, or is happening right now, and disgracefully will continue happening in the future… An homage to traditional Mexican cinema, music, literature. Vargas happily affirmed his film as a corrido, sandwiched as it is with a corrido at front and back, one that evolves with the saga the movie told. The film is in b/w, no special effects, very nostalgic in certain ways, also very stark. The old violin player tries to save his guerrilla son by riding a mule back into their occupied village, escaping direct violence by his wiles, and playing music. A soft moment with the comandante reveals his own poor background, unrequited love for music, and a little trick solidarity is created between old man and grizzled comandante. But who is tricking whom? The old man smuggles ammo from his corn patch, but is fooled into transmitting disinformation to the guerrillas–the comandante was as wiley as he was. Sad movie, harsh scenes of torture and rape at the outset, but it underscores the intensity of the perpetual rebellion of the Mexican peasantry. Great movie, albeit a bit lost in the romanticism of armed struggle (even if at one brief point the army and the guerrillas are juxtaposed doing the same drills with the same militar resolve).

Reprise
Ostensibly this Norwegian film is about young men, two of whom are aspirant writesr, and their camaraderie, problematic relations with women, careers, happiness, etc. So it is. But it’s the odd herky-jerky pacing and editing, the very funny jokes and vignettes, that make this movie. It’s a sad meditation on madness and survival too, existential malaise, how to love… but it works as a movie, even if I didn’t ultimately love any of the characters. A few flashes of good punk rock too!

Continue reading SF Int’l Film Festival! pt 4

I’ve been having a fantastic time at the Film Festival. Not that I’ve thought the films are so great… in fact, there have been some amazing gems, but a lot of mediocrity and some outright bombs. Still, amidst a just-broken heat wave and an absolutely iridescent light over San Francisco these past days, it was difficult to keep going indoors, or it would have been if I hadn’t been so lost in the pleasure and rhythm of a full-blown International Film Festival.

I did get a moment to catch up on my ever-rising pile of incoming periodicals and in particular want to recommend to everyone the two-part Curtis White essay in the last two issues of Orion Magazine. I referenced some of his writing a year ago, and once again, he’s come through with one of the most lucid and clearly written repudiations of the basic absurdity and self-destructiveness of modern work that I can recall reading. Check out part two especially.

Anyway, back to my capsule reviews and reactions to films:

The Old Garden
This was a FANTASTIC movie! It will get on to my top 3 or top 5 list for this festival. The plot revolves around a couple, the guy was very involved in the Gwangju uprising in 1980 in South Korea, and a half year later gets caught and imprisoned, before eventually being released two decades later. While on the run he hid out with a gorgeous, feisty, independent woman, a schoolteacher and painter, who angrily watches him leave her after hiding for months, in a rainstorm, they cling, knowing somehow it’s their last moment together… She calls him an idiot as the bus drives away (I fed you, I gave you a place to sleep, a place to hide, I let you fuck me, and you leave… Idiot!). But he’s her true love, and she’s pregnant. The structure of the film jumps back and forth in time, to the massacre, to his return from jail, her death from cancer before his release, numerous episodes among movement activists, arguments then about politics and the military dictatorship; later, one of their close friends is involved in a labor uprising, fired and repressed, after which she suicides through self-immolation. (A reference to the intense class war that continued over the next two decades, that played an important part in bringing South Korea to its present state of modernization.) The personal stories, the wrecked and altered lives admist the big historical narratives that define S. Korea since 1980–fantastic juxtapositions, nuanced portrayal of how personal and political intersect. Beautifully shot, great acting, wonderful editing. When Hoon-yee first comes back from jail to Gwangju he meets an old comrade who has been driven mad. They go to a small reunion banquet which ends in a drunken brawl, one of them saying “Life is long, but the revolution is short!”–towards the end of the film the schoolteacher says the companion line: “Life is long. History is longer!” What a great movie!

Continue reading SF Int’l Film Festival! pt 3