Okay... who in the fuck is going to pick up ZIDANE for American distribution? Sounds like a nearly impossible sell here in the States, but it also sounds amazing.
I must see it. Please. Please. Please.
Goodevening I believe,
No films on tuesday, but monday had some really cool stuff in Rotterdam... Here goes.
The Rotterdam Festival has always had a strong emphasis on world cinema in the Time & Tide program, specializing in films from East Asia, and on first time directors, with the main Tiger Award competition running some of each years best feature film debuts from around the world. Among the directors whose careers have gotten significant boosts by winning a Tiger Award are Te Lou (for SUZHOU RIVER) and Christopher Nolan (for FOLLOWING). An important program as well is the Cinema of the Future: Sturm und Drang-section, which focuses on young directors who don't shy from experimental narrative cinema. The Rotterdämmerung label is reserved for the culty and extreme.
Monday's program gave me a little bit of everything, and started out at 10:30 with Rolf de Heer's TEN CANOES, a film that claims to be the first film for and by the Aboriginals from Australia. The acting roles in the film are played by the Yolgnu-tribe from Raimingining (Arnhemland), a vast swampy and tropical area in northern Australia, the film was initiated by pretty much the only professional Aborignal actor David Gulpilil, and actor Peter Djigirr recieves a co-directing credit. The story is told in Aboriginal style, in whose oral culture the telling and re-telling of stories is incredibly important. There's a quote from the film that says that stories are like trees with many branches, each of which have to be told to understand the story completely. So the film is a story-within-a-story, following a the men of a tribe that lived one thousand years ago who are going hunting for ducks in the swamp, and loosely investigates different ways certain events could have taken place.
The tribe is portrayed as almost childlike people, living an almost Utopian life in peace with the wilderness, were war, vengeance and violence are sad but essential parts of existence. One of the younger men in the tribe has a crush on one of the three wives of his brother. This could upset the delicate social order in the tribe, and to explain this an older man tells another story, taking place one thousand years earlier about a young man who has a crush on one of his brother's three wifes… In that story, the appearance of a stranger introduces leads to a series of tragic events. TEN CANOES is a slow, humorous and respectful film that succesfully combines ancient storytelling techniques with modern filmmaking.
Next was MISCHIEF NIGHT, by British director Penny Woolcock. The title refers to a northern England pre-Halloween custom, where one night a year, people are allowed and encouraged to play tricks on the neighbourhood. Situated in a suburb in Leeds, the colourful and pleasant-natured film tells about it's inhabitants, a tricky mix of white and mostly Pakistani second and third generation immigrants, during the five days leading up to Mischief Night. The narrative mostly centers on a thirtyish semi-single mom of three, and her perhaps rekindling relationship with a former school friend, and a young Pakistani kid who gets involved perhaps a little too much with the criminal elements in the neighbourhood.
Racial and religious tensions and other heavy themes like crime and drugdealing by minors to young mothers are treated lightly and played more for humour than for drama. So the scenes where the young kids are cheering madly when their evil one-eyed fundamentalist imam shows them "Jihad-videos!" and the Battle for the Mosque between the imam and his goons and the Moderate Elders deservedly got big laughs, and it's nice to see these things put in a little perspective. As the director herself says, these twelve year old kids want to see these things because of the violence, not necessarily because they have any clear idea about the issues behind them.
The big irony here ofcourse is that the movie was shot in Beeston, Leeds, the same neighbourhood where the suicide bombers from the July 2005 attacks came from, and the production actually had to be temporarily shut down "while the army more or less invaded."
My following screening was of ZIDANE: UN PORTRAIT DU XXIÈME SIÈCLE (ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTRAIT) by video artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno. Now soccer is ofcourse a big thing here in Europe, and Rotterdam is home to the club Feyenoord, and to several famous soccer players. None so famous probably as Zinédine Zidane however. The French and international player with Algerian roots is currently most famous for his headbut during the 2006 World Cup final, but is still very popular and certainly respected for his talents around the world. At the filmfestival he is the star of a film that is a portrait of him as a soccer player.
Sort of, anyway.
The film is the result of a daring enterprise, where under the supervision of cinematographer Darius Khondji (SEVEN, THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN) 17 cameramen used an army of cameras, including two HD camera's supplied by the Pentagon, two follow Zidane during a Spanish competition match between his Zidane's Real Madrid and Villareal. And that's it. The film opens with the referee's whistle and ends exactly 90 minutes later as Zidane steps of the field. In real-time we focus exclusively on Zidane, and I think the match ended in 2-1, but I'm not even sure, and this is not the point of the movie. The point is Zidane, from his shoelaces, to the smallest drop of sweat on his forehead, all shot in extreme close ups and in high definition. We get to know Zidane as a solitary player, who doesn't see much action during the first half, but displays in his first real play his talent with the ball when he passes several defenders and gives an impossible assist to help score an important goal in the match. We notice he drags his toes a lot. Occasionally quotes by Zidane are superimposed as subtitles. The movie is in that sense an approximation of Zidane's subjective experience of a soccer match, and with the smart placement of some of his quotes makes him appear as an almost mythical, Zen-like Master of Soccer.
But this film is not necessarily for the average soccer fanatic or Zidane lover, this is a film for cinema lovers, and that is not because Zidane is so interesting (although this probably wouldn't have worked with any other soccerplayer, the mythic quality that Zidane already has by reputation helps a lot here), but mostly because of the brilliant editing, the beautiful cinematography, and the engaging soundtrack. That last one mixes live stadium sounds and music by Scottish band Mogwai with detailed recordings made during training and foley sessions, so the movie can isolate Zidane completely, giving us only his breaths, and the rustle of his clothing, only to fade right into a full surround sound of the enitre stadium when an action on the field, or a light somewhere high in the stadium, or something else diverts his attention.
Respect has to be given for the camera operators who shot all that beautiful footage and the directors for managing to put it together as a coherent and interesting film experience. It's a risky and costly undertaking, and they could only guess how the match would develop. What if Zidane ended up injured? What if, for some other reason, the match was interrupted? The only real time deviation is half time, which in the film is 7 instead of 15 minutes and is filled with a montage of imagery from news journals from that particular day, April 23rd in 2005 if I remember correctly, that places the film in an unexpected and larger context.
There are no headbuts this time, but (spoiler warning!) if you take into consideration the 90 minute running time of the film and the fact that there's a seven minute interlude, you can pretty much guess the surprise twist at the end…
More Sturm und Drang programming was next in the shape of a CONTAINER, by Swedish director Lukas Moodysson (FUCKING ÅMÅL, LILJA 4-EVER). CONTAINER is his most experimental film to date, presenting us with 65 minutes of streaming consciousness, musings on pretty much every subject you could think of within that time. Whose consciousness, whose musings, remains ambiguous, since the movies big trick is a virtually total seperation of sound and image. Visually we follow in grainy black and white images a seemingly depressed transvestite (Peter Lorentzon), sometimes together with a young girl (Mariha Aberg), as he wallows in his apartment or wanders through a desolate town. The audiotrack is a continous monologue by actress Jena Malone on seemingly random subjects, spoken in a near whisper. Anything from the war in Irag to sexuality to the trappings of celebrity life passes by.
The film seems to make little sense, and is at the same time open to various interpretations. The title CONTAINER does seem fitting, because the first question is obvious: is this soundtrack contained by the image, that is, is it an interior monologue of the diva girl inside the man? "How I wish I was a boy. But I am not. I am a girl inside a boy." the voice says. But it could also be the other way around, the voice is really that of Jena Malone, who has a delirious fantasy, perhaps a dream, outside of her normal celebrity life. Many of the ideas mentioned refer to things-within-things, and even visually there's lots of crawling inside bedsheets, under couches, putting on make up, cross-dressing, looking at bottles, staying inside, many visual highlights that contain perhaps not meaning, but certainly an opening or possibility for one.
It's a daring experiment, with again many walkouts during the screening, but I dig this kind of stuff as long as the mood is right, which in my opinion it is in CONTAINER. It's interesting to see how Moodyson is going a somewhat counter-intuitive direction as a filmmaker, starting out with the audience friendly but already quietly queer cinema like FUCKING ÅMÅL (SHOW ME LOVE in the US) and TOGETHER, and then sliding off ever deeper into alternative territory with LILJA 4-EVER and A HOLE IN MY HEART. It almost seems that the cuteness of SHOW ME LOVE and TOGETHER was more something of a happy accident, and perhaps more influenced by outside forces, since Moodyson has indicated before in interviews he is more interested in experimenting than in pleasing boxoffice, or perhaps even the audience.
Last film of the evening was back to the Luxor for more Rotterdämmerung, this time in the form of FREESIA (also BULLET OVER TEARS or ICY TEARS) by Japanse director Kumakiri Kazuyoshi, freely based on the cult manga by the same name. It's a meditative actionfilm that takes characters and context from the manga, but comes up with a new story. In the near future we follow the hitman Hiroshi (Tamayama Tetsuji) who works for a program that follows the Retaliation Act, under wich victims of crimes are allowed to kill the criminals during a controlled gunfight, using hitmen for the victims and bodyguards for the criminals.
Earlier in his life, as we see during the opening images, Hiroshi was involved in a military experiment to test an instant freezing bomb, which he and one other girl survived, while leaving him without feeling pain or emotion. When he cries, he cries frozen tears. Like many similar films in it's genre in Japan, the storyline can be related to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a devastative explosive event that forever changed Japanese history, and which requires some serious healing to warm the cold and numbing cultural fallout.
It's all very dramatic, and meditative, so fans hoping Kumakiri has returned to his dark horror roots (KICHIKU DAI ENKAI, 1997) will be slightly dissapointed and probably bored by the slow pace of the film, while fans of his later contemplative and romantic films like HOLE IN THE SKY and THE VOLATILE WOMAN might be shocked by the gory violent moments and it's dark humour. That's not to say the movie is not any good, because it certainly has it's share of beautiful and poetic cinematic and dramatic moments, but the fact that your leading man is an emotionally numbed person is a difficult fact to ignore. The film wisely doesn't and makes it pretty much the main point of the movie instead, but this doesn't always work completely. Respect for the actors though who pull it all of, especially Hiroshi's romantic interest who has her own history to deal with as well.
Greetings / mzl
dapascha
