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North America’s only competitive film
festival, The Montreal World Film Festival, ranks as the largest publicly
attended film festival in the western world, boasting 700,000 in attendance, as
well as an impressive array of 400 films from 70 countries, with a world
premiere count of 115 films. To reflect the international flavour of this 27th
edition, the selections were divided accordingly: Official Competition status
(features and shorts); Hors Concours (Out of Competition) section; World
Documentaries; Cinema of the Americas (Canada, U.S., Latin America); The Cinemas
of Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania; and the Student Film and Video section. This
year’s honorary tributes went to American auteur
Martin Scorsese, Swedish actor
Erland Josephson
and Canadian producer
Denise Robert.
TOP 10 LIST
Kordon (The Cordon) - (Serbia &
Montenegro)–From the “Czech School” of noted Yugoslavian directors, Goran
Marković’s docu-style fiction of the harrowing 1997 Serbian demonstrations
to overthrow dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Planta 4a (4th Floor)
- Spain—The insular and universal world of adolescence
from the perspective of an orthopedic cancer ward, where four boys must not only
deal with emotional growing pains, but the gut-wrenching challenges of a
terminal disease.
The Soul’s Haven (Il Posto
Dell’Anima)--Italy—As an American multinational tire plant plans to close
down in Italy, 500 of its workers in the tiny hamlet of Campolaro unite in
protest to try and save their livelihood. A nationwide brouhaha ensues, amidst
the personal tales of the blue-collar insurgents.
Montreal World Film Festival: Best Actor,
Silvio Orlando
This
Very Moment (Milchwald)--Germany—A bizarre fruit from Germany/Poland—in
part The Vanishing meets Tales from The Crypt (sans humour). It
involves a stepmother’s delirious dilemma after losing her stepchildren along a
highway on a shopping trip to Poland-- and unable to tell her husband the truth
for fear of reprisal. By film’s end, you wonder why she never attempted to off
the evil little stepdaughter herself…
Les
Triplettes de Belleville--Canada/France/Belgium--An utterly imaginative
and visually witty animated feature about three former vaudeville stars intent
on rescuing a Tour de France cyclist, an eccentric mama, and a faithful pooch
named Bruno. Director
Sylvain
Chomet 's impressive background in art, hardcover comics, and animation
shines in every frame.
21 Grams --USA--The
Mexican dream team of director Alejandro González Iñárritu and scripter
Guillermo Arriaga produce another successful collaboration after the
critically hailed Amores Perros. In this, the unsettling themes of the
value of life, death and redemption are tackled. The non-linear narrative and
gritty realism (via hand-held camera shots and diluted color tones) allow the
viewer to question their own conclusions on fate and human interconnections. 21
grams refers to the weight one loses at death; but the film is cogitation on the
philosophical measure of life itself.
The Station Agent--USA--An
abandoned train station in Newfoundland, New Jersey is the setting for this
debut feature by Tom McCarthy about the price of solitude and human
redemption through the links of camaraderie. Peter Dinklage finally gets cast
for more than his height in this sentimental winner of the Audience and Best
Screenplay Awards at Sundance.
Elephant--USA--Gus
Van Sant's dreamlike meditation on 'a day in the life' of a typical high
school doesn't endeavor to answer queries about Columbine, but rather sets a
tonal mood on the quotidian nature of America's adolescence in a stylistically
innovative docudrama, shot in standard TV aspect ratio. Aesthetically,
Elephant’s mellifluous yet controlled pace juxtaposing an unconventionally
sparse narrative, steers one through an odyssey on the nature of violence
without any clear-cut causal path. Van Sant makes the Columbine massacre
strikingly real to us, not through the minutiae of data, but through the
beatification of one autumn day gone unfathomably awry.
Cannes: Golden Palm, Best Director
Edi—Poland--Sadly
overlooked by mainstream critics (not enough hype), this feature debut by Polish
director Piotr Trzaskalski is nonetheless worth tracking down. It
recounts the atypical saga of a destitute scrap metal collector in
post-Solidarity Poland (living with his equally down and out alcoholic buddy)
who attains spiritual redemption in spite of the sadistic misdeeds of two local
hoods who mercilessly and mistakenly exact revenge on the hapless Edi. The
amalgamation of expert cinematography (digi video supreme) by Krzystof Ptak,
compelling storyline (co-scripter Wojciech Lepianka), and emotive musical score
(Wojciech Lemanski) set in the dog-eat-dog world of Poland's economic
doldrums provide this socially-conscious melodrama with yet another dimension,
credibility. In spite of Edi's sometimes implausible plot twists, it is
the expressive articulation of Henryk Golebiewski's Oscar-worthy
performance that leaves a lingeringly poignant imprint on the viewer.
Song
for a Raggy Boy--Ireland-- Based on
Patrick Galvin's autobiographical testimony of his reform school experiences in
Ireland, 1939, one could submit Aisling Walsh's Song For A Raggy Boy as the male version of The
Magdalene Sisters: a further plunge into the
dark recesses of Ireland's past; specifically the shameful abuse of power by the
Catholic Church, especially on children. Here we have the ultimate
struggle--morally decent teacher versus dissolute priest for the impressionable
hearts and minds of the ill-fated young offenders unaccountably placed there by
the courts. The fact that their punishments in no way fits their crimes, is yet
another indication of contemporary Church versus State issues, and another
reason for the justified continuation of modern class-action suits against the
almighty and historically untouchable Irish Catholic clergy.
Amiens International Film Festival: Best Feature
Film: Audience Award, Golden Unicorn,
Copenhagen International Film Festival: Golden Swan
Woodstock Film Festival: Haskell Wexler Award
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Interviews
Vladimir Alenikov: The Gun
Vladimir Alenikov has been
involved in the international film scene for 25 years: teaching at Los Angeles'
UCLA, as cultural advisor at the Mikhail Gorbachev Foundation, and as an indie
filmmaker. His latest feature, The Gun (from 6 to 7:30 PM) is a bit of a
departure. In this, he recounts the passing of a gun from person to person (and
what happens in between), in a period of 90 minutes, in real time. In
film lingo, real time is just that: no quick edits, just the way life happens.
90 minutes is also the prescribed length of most feature film. In technical
terms, Alenikov and his resolute cinematographer Kirill Davidoff managed
the entire feat in 15 long takes, which is an altogether mind-boggling
achievement.
What Alenikov was after was "to make
people feel that it was absolutely real…. I wanted to break the rhythm of
the modern image, putting the audience into real time and real life.
Here the camera travels outdoors, crosses streets, alleyways, goes in and out of
houses. It's an extremely complicated choreography of actor and camera."
Following the journey of the principal
character (the gun), the story weaves the intermingling of diverse people with
very different lifestyles, who only common link is that particular gun. Director
Alenikov furthered his discourse by stating, "I feel that this [real time/long
takes] is the perfect format for the story to unfold. The level of detail here….
very little is extraneous…. The urban danger of Los Angeles is very different
from Montreal." As an independent urban thriller from the city that spawns that
genre like fish, this can be added to that long list of L.A.-based crime dramas.
A novel concept in film editing rhythms, The Gun should be viewed on its
own merits; as Alenikov added, "I feel that people will be divided--either
they'll be real big fans, or they don't get it."
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Steven Lewis Simpson:
The Ticking Man
On first meeting
Steven Lewis Simpson, it's hard to imagine him as a stockbroker, wheeling
and dealing commodities in a British 'boiler room'. It's even odder to discover
that, at 18, he was the youngest fully qualified stockbroker and trader in
Britain. Then, at the tender age of 22, he traded in commodities for film, went
to Los Angeles to work for legendary B-Mogul
Roger Corman, and the
rest, as they say, is movie history…Flash-forward one decade, and seven films to
his credit, we arrive at his latest, The Ticking Man. If The Gun was
meant to break the modern image, The Ticking Man is the diametric opposite.
This fast-paced "rural-action thriller"
concerns a double-crossing drug-dealer who kills a drug trafficker, then gets
arrested only to find out he has two unknown witnesses to the murder. He hires a
hit man to kill all the potential eyewitnesses in the coastal Scottish hamlet;
catch is, the hit man has 10 targets to kill in 28 minutes, 36 seconds. The
countdown begins…and so does the adrenaline rush.
In the press notes,
Director/Producer/Writer/Musical Composer Simpson unabashedly reveals that where
the average feature film (of 90 minutes) has approximately 650 edits, The
Ticking Man contains 2,300 edits in its 85-minute format. After all,
according to Simpson, "it's all about the feeling and the rhythm." He fully
comprehends the fabric of cinema. "For the concept and narrative structure to
work…the style has to work…you want to go beyond having a few cinematic tricks."
And that he does, incorporating lightning fast edits (think
The Wild Bunch), split
screen techniques, and a host of other resourceful cinematic techniques that add
up to a suspenseful indie gem that rivals much of the humongously-budgeted
studio thrillers. All on a low budget (Scottish film finance agencies), along
with a 3-week shooting schedule and a lot of post-production work. Except
the look and feel of the film are anything but meager. Says Simpson" I don't
like doing things small, even with a small budget. I don't want to compromise."
When asked how he would encapsulate
The Ticking Man, director Simpson offered the following: "It's an anti-Dogma
movie, because it celebrates the full canvas of cinema that the director has to
play with, as opposed to being a stifling, restrictive, but effective marketing
gimmick." |
