Tag: SLIFF 2017

SLIFF 2017 Review – FACES PLACES

FACES PLACES screens at Plaza Frontenac Cinema (Lindbergh Blvd. and Clayton Rd, Frontenac, MO 63131) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Showings are Thursday, Nov. 9 at 4:30pm (purchase tickets HERE) and Sunday, Nov. 12 at 3pm (purchase tickets HERE).

 

What a charmer! Legendary French film director Agnes Varda and muralist/photographer JR take us on the most appealing of road trips. Varda is a founder of the French New Wave avant-garde film movement still actively making films, while artist JR specializes in placing giant photographic images on buildings and other surprising outdoor locations. At the time the film was shot, Varda was 88-years-old and JR was 33, she’s a tiny woman while he’s a tall man, yet they make a perfect team is this often comic but also though-provoking exploration of rural France. In FACES PLACES (Visage Village), they travel around France meeting ordinary people, taking photos, and turning them into striking giant photo art works plastered on walls and other large surfaces.

The van this unlikely pair travel in looks like a giant camera, and serves as a mobile photo booth that prints out large posters suitable for plastering on walls. The van attracts attention and also adds a touch of whimsy for the project. Although Varda, a short, round older woman, and JR, a tall, thin young man, look mismatched, they are the perfect team for this project. As they roll along on this road trip, the filmmaker and the artist joke, tease, debate artistic choices, and talk about life, art, and memories. In their travels, they also meet an array of ordinary people who have their own unique and fascinating stories.

The film has a stronger narrative line than one might expect, and one has to credit the legendary Varda for that. The director’s skills remain intact and her eye and instinct for interesting story in unexpected places is unerring. The film is a visual treat throughout, with well-framed and scenic shot after shot.

The murals they produce use photos of people with a connection to the building or outdoor location where the image will be placed. The images embody some of the human history of the place but they also have a good dose of whimsy and playfulness. JR’s previous projects include close-ups of eyes on round industrial storage tanks and other startling images. A similar sense of playing with perception fills the images Varda and JR create together.

But it is the entertaining, thoughtful interactions between these two that make this film so appealing and enjoyable. The back-and-forth banter between the two is warm, amusing, and insightful, as the two agree and disagree on artistic choices. Both share personal stories and indulge in impulsive, playful adventures. JR’s respect and affection towards the legendary Varda is touching, like a grandson’s, but Varda’s warmth and encouragement towards JR is just as appealing. One gets the sense these two have been friends forever but in fact met shortly before filming started. Clearly, the two just clicked, and that translated to magic and fun on-screen.

Filled with surprising and unexpectedly beautiful images of people and places, FACES PLACES is a perfect little gem of a film, a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, on the road with two fascinating and ever-curious people as they see what is around the next bend, in life and on the road. There is one word for this film: Wonderful!

 

SLIFF 2017 Review – HEAL THE LIVING

HEAL THE LIVING (Reparer les vivants) will screen at Plaza Frontenac Cinema (Lindbergh Blvd. and Clayton Rd, Frontenac, MO 63131) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Showings are Thursday, Nov. 9 at 6:40pm (purchase tickets HERE) and Friday, Nov. 10 at 9:30pm (purchase tickets HERE).

 

Three narrative threads built around the issue of organ transplantation – parents facing with the accidental death of their teen-aged son, the medical staff of a transplant team, and a middle-aged female musician dying of heart failure – are woven together in French director Katell Quillevere’s medical drama HEAL THE LIVING (Reparer les vivants). This is the third and most polished of her films, her previous works being SUZANNE and LOVE LIKE POISON.

In part, HEAL THE LIVING is a medical procedural, like countless television or movie dramas, but what sets it apart is its fuller emotional portrait of the patients and their families involved in this dramatic story, and its lush cinematic approach to the subject. Thankfully, that cinematic quality is less in the foreground in the surgical scenes, which are handled with taste and a minimum of blood, but it comes to the fore in depicted the rich inner lives of the people involved.

Emmanuel Seigner plays Marianne, a woman who gets the phone call every parent fears, that her 17-year-old son Simon (Gabin Verdet) has been in a car crash and is in the hospital near death. Once the teen is declared brain-dead, the doctors move into a new phase. Tahar Rahim plays Thomas Remige, the sensitive coordinator of organ donations who has the difficult job of talking to Marianne and her estranged husband Vincent (Kool Shen) about organ donation.

Fine acting, stunning photography, and music by Alexandre Desplat support the heart-wrenching emotion at the heart of this skillfully-told medical drama. Quillevere’s drama, which follows the donor and his family, the medical team, and the recipient and her family in turns, is full of emotion – human warmth, unspeakable pain, compassion, longing and loss – and is both beautifully acted and filmed.

The director treats both families with equal measures of care and compassion, but what reveals where her own heart lies on the subject of organ donation is how she depicts the medical staff. HEAL THE LIVING paints an ideal, perhaps idealized, picture of organ donation. The doctors and the staff handling the donation process are caring and sensitive, giving the grieving family the space to make their decision, and even carrying out the parents’ final request during transplant surgery. One can not imagine a more perfect medical experience for both families at that tragic time for one of them. Tahar Rahim as the coordinator who handles organ donation is the very paragon of flawlessly sensitivity to the grieving donor family, even challenging surgeons in the operating room. One hopes that organ donation is always handled with the degree of sensitivity shown in this film.

The moving, striking photography is one of the most unexpected aspects of this film, and is particularly strong in the first segment. That segment opens with handsome 17-year-old Simon climbing out of his girlfriend’s bedroom window, and follows him as he goes on a late-night bicycle tour of his city with friends, and then joins them in early morning surfing. The photography of the waves and water is beautifully shot by Tom Harari, symbolizing life and death, and foreshadowing what is to come. On the way home, the friend who is driving drifts off in a reverie about the ocean, until the devastating car crash jolts him awake.

The director blends the three stories well. Simon’s mother gets the call from the hospital, where her son is in a coma, and contacts her estranged husband. When Simon is declared brain-dead, his distraught parents are asked about organ donation. To give us an emotional breather from this heartbreaking situation, the director shifts the film’s focus then to the medical team, whom we follow as they go about their work, a segment that includes little touches to humanize them as well.

A third theme is added when we switch to the story of Claire (Anne Dorval), a successful musician who is facing heart-failure in middle-age. Her illness has forced her to stop working but she is coping with emotional support from her two caring college-aged sons, and a lover with whom she re-connects. Still, she is conflicted about her diagnosis and the prospect of going on the waiting list for a heart.

The acting and character development are strong, adding greatly to the emotionally power and individuality of the personal stories involved. Dorval, as the conflicted musician, is particularly strong, but all the cast are good.

The dedication of the film suggests a personal reason the director aims to promote the idea of organ donation, and to reassure and encourage donors, by painting as rosy a picture of the doctors and the process as possible. There are always more people waiting for organs than donor organs available. Whether the process is always as ideal as depicted in this drama is another matter but you have to give the director credit for making a touching, moving and cinematic film from a subject that has been handled with far less style, or compassion for donor families, in the past. It would be nice if HEAL THE LIVING became a guideline for medical personnel to handle the donors’ families with as much compassion and human gentleness as shown in this film.

 

SLIFF 2017 Review – THE TESTAMENT

THE TESTAMENT will screen at Plaza Frontenac Cinema (Lindbergh Blvd. and Clayton Rd, Frontenac, MO 63131) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Showings are Monday, Nov. 6 at 7pm (purchase tickets HERE) and Thursday, Nov. 9 at 2:15pm (purchase tickets HERE).

In the taut Israeli-Austrian thriller/mystery THE TESTAMENT, focuses on Dr. Yoel Halberstam (Ori Pfeffer), an Israeli historian with the Jerusalem Holocaust Institute, who is leading a high-profile court battle to preserve a site in Austria where 200 Jewish forced laborers were massacred and buried in March 1945. But the Israeli team working to preserve the site are racing a ticking clock, as the Austrian town of Lendsdorf is preparing to build on the site and is demanding proof of a mass grave before halting that plan. The problem is that witnesses are few and no one knows the exact location of the mass grave. Halberstam must find it before the deadline set by the court runs out. Unless the mass grave is found, the building plan will go ahead and the site will be obliterated.

This gripping Israeli – Austrian mystery/drama THE TESTAMENT debuted at the Venice Film Festival. Halberstam is an Orthodox Jew who lives for his work, and is known for his commitment to truth and his exacting research. But the solution to this puzzle keeps eluding him. One reason is that an earlier attempt to bring this crime to light, one made soon after the war, resulted in the assassination of one witness, and the rest have gone into hiding. While going through some classified testaments taken for that earlier investigation, Halberstam is startled to find his own mother’s name.

His mother (Rivka Gur) had always refused to talk about the war and a drive to know the truth leads Yoel to use his access to restricted files to find out more, despite the ethical questions raised. As the historian digs deeper, he discovers his mother is not who they always believed she was. The discovery is shattering for her son and the secret leads him to questions nearly everything about his life. Still, Yoel’s compulsion to find the truth has, no matter the consequences, unexpectedly brings new information and a new view of the mystery of the mass grave that might help solve the puzzle.

Director Amichai Greenberg brings a fresh look at the Holocaust by focusing on this personal story and raising questions about identity. The mystery is tense and well-paced, and woven in well with an exploration of matters of identity, secrets buried in wartime, and lingering fears of survivors who are forever marked by their experience. The photography is striking, often visually beautiful, and the film contrasts modern architecture of locations against a mystery about the past. The contrasts between the past and present world course through this exploration of truth and identity.

Yoel’s focus on his work and even his Orthodox faith have narrowed his view of life and even his awareness of the modern world. Known for his passion for the truth, Yoel has devoted his life to his work, neglecting his family to the point that his wife divorced him. Yoel lives with his elderly mother and his married sister who chides him for his neglect of his personal life. The historian struggles to make time to help his son prepare for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah but has trouble connecting with the boy.

The acting is superb in this thought-provoking drama. Pfeffer does as excellent job as Yoel, wrestling with his conflicted feelings and with the mental puzzle of the mystery that confronts him. Yoel’s mother Fanya, played well by Rivka Gur, dodges her son’s questions about the war, mostly by simply ignoring them. She’s in poor health which makes pressing her difficult, and Yoel’s frustration is palpable.

His discovery about his mother brings into question his assumptions about his own identity and causes him to reassess his personal life. While the personal crisis sends him reeling, he ultimately must re-focuses on the task at hand.

THE TESTAMENT is an intriguing mystery and a different kind of Holocaust tale, as well as a thoughtful exploration of the nature of identity.

 

SLIFF 2017 Review – 1945

1945 will screen at Plaza Frontenac Cinema (Lindbergh Blvd. and Clayton Rd, Frontenac, MO 63131) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Showings are Sunday, Nov. 5 at 5pm (purchase tickets HERE) and Tuesday, Nov. 7 at 4:30pm (purchase tickets HERE).

 

1945 is a haunting Hungarian drama from director Ferenc Torok that takes place in a small Hungarian village shortly after the end of World War II. It is a tale of guilt and greed, revealing what was done to the Jewish population by ordinary citizens during the war.

The arrival of two men dressed in black, who appear to be Jewish, grips this small rural town with fear and guilt. The Town Clerk, Istvan Szentes (Peter Rudolf), a prosperous politician who seems more like the town’s mayor, is preparing for his son Arpad’s (Bence Tasnadi) wedding that afternoon. But this festive occasion is disrupted when he gets word from the train station master (Istvan Znamenak) about the arrival of the two men, one old (Ivan Angelus) and one young (Marcell Nagy), who have arrived with two large boxes labeled perfumes and cosmetics. The name of the older man, Herman Samuel, does not match any of the town’s Jewish former residents and no one recognizes the newcomers. Nonetheless, the news shocks the politician into a panicked frenzy of guilty activity. Other villagers are alarmed too, gripped with either fear, guilt or overwhelming remorse. Everyone is asking, will more Jews arrive?

Director Torok’s film is based on the lauded short story “Homecoming” by Gabor T. Szanto. But the story reflects what happened in many places during the war, spotlighting the role human greed played in what happened to Jewish families throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Torok treats this story like a mystery, slowly uncovering the rottenness beneath the village’s quaint rustic veneer. The plot reveals the treachery and collusion among these villagers, particularly the Town Clerk, that exploited the plight of the Jews for their own material gain during the war, an ugly tale that was repeated throughout Hungary, and even Europe. As the plot slowly reveals, these townspeople did more than simply stand by as their Jewish neighbors were deported to concentration camps.

Tension is high in this suspenseful and beautifully photographed black-and-white drama. Director Torok handles the story brilliantly, teasing us as he reveals horrifying tidbits of information. The gorgeous black-and-white imagery captures just the right for the tone of this period tale, and helps boost its feeling of foreboding.

The two men at the center of this frenzy, say nothing, except to arrange transport of the two boxes to town. Wary of what may happen, the draftsman hauling the boxes by his horse-drawn cart asks for payment in advance. The old man shoots him a sad look but says nothing as he pays.

As the two strangers walk behind the cart on its slow progress towards the town, word of their arrival spreads through the village, even upending preparations under way for the big wedding and feast to follow. Everyone seems worried, and questions abound. Who are these men?Are they the heirs? Did they purchase the property from the Jews who were deported? Most importantly, will the Jews want to take their property back?

While the Town Clerk obsesses about the past, an uncertain future looms unnoticed. The town is occupied by the Russian army but the Town Clerk seems only mildly interested in the upcoming election, one which will sweep the communists into power and do more to transform the village’s comfortable traditional life.

Although the clerk seems to have profited the most, everyone in town seems to bear some guilt in these evil deeds. Some are defiant in their claims to stolen property but other are wracked with remorse over the evil done. None does anything to right the wrongs done. Even the priest (Bela Gados) seems willing to ignore the past.

The acting is excellent, with actors peeling back the layers of complex relationships built on evil deeds, which begin to crumble as facts and truth are forced to the surface. Peter Rudolf particularly good as the oily, bullying Town Clerk, as is Jozsef Szarvas as his hard-drinking lackey, who is crushed by his regrets. Agi Szirtes also is good as his wife, seized with fear she will lost the house she lives in, still surrounded by the possessions of its Jewish former owner. But perhaps the most striking, moving performance is Ivan Angelus as the older Jewish man, in which he conveys volumes of meaning and feeling without a single word.

Director Tobok plays a cat-and-mouse game with the audience, keeping us off-balance until the end. 1945 is a brilliantly made film, and powerful, moving reminder of the evil that can take place under cover of wartime and the power of greed.

 

SLIFF 2017 Review – TANNA

TANNA will screen at Plaza Frontenac Cinema (Lindbergh Blvd. and Clayton Rd, Frontenac, MO 63131) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Showings are Saturday, November 4th, at 12:05pm (purchase tickets HERE) and Friday, November 10th, at 4:40pm (purchase tickets HERE).

 

TANNA is a gripping tale of adventure and star-crossed love on a beautiful Pacific island. Based on a true story of the Yakel people and performed by them, this stirring, moving drama offers intriguing insights into the culture and history of these island people through a story of two people, a tale that has a little of both James Fenimore Cooper and Shakespeare.

Beautifully shot by co-director Bentley Dean, the script was written by co-director , Martin Butler and John Collee with the help of the Yakel. Visually stunning, TANNA immerses us in a lovely green natural setting, a Pacific Island paradise where the happy, peaceful lives of a little village seems untouched by time.

The people of this village call themselves Tanna. We see images of the happy, peaceful Tanna people of the village smiling and laughing as they go about their daily chores. The forest village looks lush and idyllic, with happy, singing children in grass skirts playing, but the film opens with text on-screen noting that “since time began” elders have arranged marriages, so there is a little foreboding under the idyllic setting.

The story is told partly through the eyes of a mischievous little girl named Selin (Marceline Rofit). Selin is the younger sister of pretty teen Wawa (Marie Wawa), who is secretly meeting the chief’s handsome grandson Dain (Mungau Dain) in the forest. The two are just talking and flirting, but a romance between them is forbidden. Girls are supposed to marry outside their village, and all marriages are arranged by the elders, following their tradition of beliefs and rules, called the “Kastom Road.” When Wawa catches little Selin spying on them, she asks her sister not to tell their parents. Selin, who looks to be about seven, is a bit of a rebellious child, running off to play instead of doing chores like her parents ask, and pranking playmates. It isn’t clear if she will do what her sister asks.

Breaking the rules is a serious offense in this traditional village, where family and community mean everything, not just emotional connection but the ability to simply live. The women wear long grass skirts and the men wear loin cloth-like coverings made of woven grass, and adults wear headbands variously made of grass, leaves or feathers. The huts they sleep in, under grass blankets, are thatched and cooking is often outside and communal.

Everything in the village is gentle and peaceful, and children are scolded but not punished. Waka’s mother Yowayin (Linette Yowayin) and feisty grandmother (Dadwa Mungau) tease and joke as they prepare the teen for the ceremony that will proclaim her a women, telling her a marriage soon will be arranged for her with another village. Meanwhile, Wawa’s father, worried about his wild second daughter, asks her grandfather (Albi Kowia), who is also the village shaman, to take her in hand. Grandfather takes Selin to visit a sacred place, Yahul, where their deity lives, which turns out to be an active volcano.

The time period of this story is not clear, but there are no signs of the modern in this village. It is some time after Capt. Cook landed there, as Selin’s shaman grandfather points out the landing spot from a hilltop. He tells her many villages have converted to Christianity and left traditional ways, but not the Tanna people, who still follow the “Kastom Road.”

Yet, the Tannas’ peaceful life is distupted by a neighboring enemy tribe, the Imedin, whose new attack brings the prospect of war.

The story that unfolds is gripping stuff, drama heightened by the beautiful setting, a strong script of romance and conflict, and the surprisingly good performances by the actors. Young Marceline Rofit as Selin is particularly effective, often staring into the camera with a mix of playful charm and wisdom beyond her years.

TANNA is a completely winning film, packed with beautiful images, sprinkled with insights into a remarkable culture and a moving and engrossing story that is both specific to that them and universal.