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