Nowtopian

I am crazy for International Film Festivals and every year I buy a bunch of tix for the SF fest. This year I have about 16 movies! It’s the only time you can see great films, both narrative and documentary, from places like Iran, Argentina, Indonesia, Brazil, Korea, etc. Here’s some capsule reviews of some of my faves so far (only half way through):

Lucia Morat’s narrative “Almost Brothers” is an incredibly interesting movie. It is set mostly in prison (she herself was a political prisoner during the Brazilian military dictatorship) but goes back and forth in time between the 50s, 60s, 70s and now. It revolves around two characters, one black and one white, who first meet as small children when their fathers connect (the white guy’s dad is a musicologist, the black guy’s dad is an awesome samba composer who never makes an album). The white guy grows up to be a leftist militant who is imprisoned by the dictatorship. In jail he meets his childhood friend who was imprisoned for some petty crime. A political process unfolds in which the political prisoners integrate the ‘common’ criminals into their “collective”, set down rules of behavior and solidarity and create some real space in jail for themselves.

The story is interspersed with a contemporary scene in which the former political prisoner is now a parliamentarian visiting his old ‘friend’, now a big-time criminal gang leader, still in jail, but running his boys from a mobile phone in his cell (is that why it’s a cellphone?), ordering executions and managing drug and weapons buys from inside. The contemporary story becomes increasingly understandable as the flashbacks reveal how the prison culture evolved as more ‘common’ criminals arrived and the political prisoners, trying to resist the descent into a darwinian struggle for survival, segregate themselves (which turns out to be an oblique reinforcement of the basic racism of Brazilian criminal ‘justice’).

It’s a fascinating, powerful film, brilliantly scripted, acted and directed, and works too as a larger metaphor about the world today. How are self-conceived rational, political people going to influence the course of events dominated by Might is Right and insane levels of armed violence, drugs, brain damage, racism, and philosophical retardation? No easy answers…

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