Third film of the day was INNOCENCE, a beautiful film from French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic, who should get an award for Best Name. It’s a horror that’s never scary, a fairytale without magic and a mystery that’s pretty obvious. A small girl, maybe six years old, wakes up from death. Or so it seems. She is adopted in a school of some kind for young girls, where the only class is balletclass.

The film defies explanation, and aims for a very experience-based narrative which feels in a strange way like a French prequel to THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. Where the Coppola-one was about the Grand Mystery that is teenage-girls, INNOCENCE is about the, you’ve guessed it, Innocence that pre-teen girls have to give up in order to become Mysterious. I really shouldn’t say too much about this film except that the capitals on Grand and Mysterious really apply, that it’s simply beautiful, and most definitely worth your time in a theater.

Final film of Tuesday was VITAL by Japanese director Tsukamoto Shinya, who has made films like the TETSUO two-parter and TOKYO FIST, hard-core visual spectaculars with a high testosteron-content. VITAL is very different.

While it could be classified as horror, and opens with a loud and visually intense series of shots, it’s like INNOCENCE never really scary, and certainly a lot slower than his early films. It is more a psychological drama about dealing with loss and grief, translated to a macabre and neo-gothic-like filmexperience. The story is about Hiroshi (a great role played by Tadanobu Asano), who wakes up after a car accident, suffering from memory loss and the news that his girlfriend was killed. He returns to his medical study, and becomes very good at it. When they come to anatomy class, and get to examine human corpses, he meets a nice girl, also talented, and they start a flirting relationship. (And hey look! The actor playing the anatomy professor I remember seeing imitating a bird in SURVIVE STYLE 5+…, and he also turns op in 69SIXTY-NINE) It is a little strange however, that the mysterious girl has the same tattoo on her left arm as the female corpse he is dissecting… Hiroshi sets out on an inquisitive journey into the human body, and into his memories, which seems to be returning slowly as he learns more of the human anatomy.

The (fake plastic) corpses look stunning, and as far as I can tell pretty realistic, including a total lack of redness and blood, which has been drained from the body. It reminded me of one late night watching television when I stumbled on a German channel that had a four+ hour long integral human dissection playing as the nightprogram, starting with the skin and ending up with a sliced brain nicely returned to the cranium. Spent four hours with my jaw in my lap, amazed that you can actually show that on public television.

Wednesday was, like Tuesday, another winner. First up was ABSOLUT by Swiss director Romed Wyder, a digitally shot thriller about a young man, doing his anti-globalist duty by attempting to install a computer virus to prevent a global leaders summit from taking place. All the preparations have gone well, but then he wakes up in the hospital, missing one crucial day in his memory. The film is a well-crafted and very intriguing mystery with an interesting twist in the end, and a bizar epilogue and a very dodgy director hinting at real events that have inspired this film… This is one for all you anti-globalists and big conspiracy theorists out there!! But beware of agents behind you in the theater…

Second film was the Spanish documentary and Tiger Award nominee EL CIELO GÍRA (THE SKY TURNS) by director Mercedes Alvárez, who was the last person ever born in the small village that is the subject of her film. It is a stunningly beautiful movie about many, many things. It deals with the rural village and it’s last remaining eldery inhabitants.

The movie tells about this theme of slow decay, and places it in many broad perspectives. An old lady shows us dinosaur fossils and foundations of a Roman villa, and we realize the villages and it’s inhabitants minute role in the geological history of the earth, and even the universe as a whole. We get to learn a little bit of some of the men and women, and hear their thoughts on anything from the lunar eclipse last night to the war in Iraq. We follow a painter, who is slowly loosing his vision and is perhaps only able to make one last painting. There’s talk about the fancy hotel being built in the old castle, could it save the village? The film is personal, epic and thoughtprovoking at the same time, and probably my favourite film on the festival so far. While looking at the rich images it was amazing to realize it was shot on video.

It doesn’t look it. It does seem that certain events and dialogues where staged for a small part, despite the director’s efforts to say otherwise, but hell, if it were all completely fictional it would still be an amazing cinematic experience.

Next was VISITS: A HUNGRY GHOST, a collection of four somewhat interrelated ghost stories from Malaysia. The segments have in common that they’re not necessarily horror-shorts - although there is some creepyness and blood involved - but more short psychological character studies. The last film looks to be the best, having the interesting effect that the entire short is filmed using (fake) security-camera’s and a nice twist at the end. The creepy-factor is the by-now already classic Ringu-style ripoff, including a few long-dark haired creepy girls, although I really liked the ghost behind the hospital-curtain effect.

The Q+A after the screening was hilarious, with not many interesting questions, but one interesting guy in the back who just did not get it and totally took over the Q+A demanding answers, in a friendly way, so the following is somewhat exaggerated, but still:

“But…. what’s in the fridge? He looks, and starts to puke? I don’t get it? And one minute he’s dead… and then he’s standing up? I don’t get it?! Whaddaya-mean that was a totally different actor? How’s THAT possible? WHAT’S IN THE FRIDGE?!?!?”

One of the directors, who was by now totally stunned by these un-answerable questions and had joined the rest of the audience in a barely suppressed giggle-fit, was about to call him a jack-ass but his colleague saved him and decided to try and help this stumper by giving him a hint:GO BUY ANOTHER TICKET AND SEE IT AGAIN IN THE NEXT SCREENING. “Where did the body go?” My reply: the same place where the editor lives, of course. Thanks man, you would have made my day, but that honour already went to EL CIELO GÍRA.

(btw, I hope he don’t read no aintitcool….)

Anyway, BIPEDALISM, a world-premiere for Russian necro-realism (yes, that is actually a legit Russian genre) frontrunner and festival Filmmaker in Focus Yevgeni Yuvit, can be best described as being somewhat akin to a black-and-white zombie-cloned hell-spawn concieved in a vodka-drenched hangover by Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Philip K. Dick and David Lynch. I’m not sure if it’s actually any good, but I gave it four stars out five for the hell of it.

69SIXTY-NINE