10 Films to Look Out for at the 15th T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival
The 15th edition of the T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival is just around the corner. It will be running in Wroclaw, Poland from the 23rd of July to the 2nd of August. So, to get you ready for this year's edition of the fest, here's a list of ten new films features in its programme and previously viewed and reviewed by CineCola at other festival to whet your appetite.
(NOTE: The list is not in order of preference)
MY MOTHER by Nanni Moretti
Funny and melancholic, yet brutally honest. No one makes films like Nanni Moretti, both in language and structure. This is very true and visible in the rhetoric lacking succession of humorous scenes with more dramatic ones. And while Mia Madre is neither his most ambitious nor best work, it is still excellent and disarmingly honest. Once again, the Italian filmmaker deals with death, and he does so by chronicling the life of a filmmaker who faces the struggles of keeping her film production together and live through other compelling aspects of her everyday life while her hospitalised mother is gradually dying. Her distraction leads her to frustration and an impending sense of guilt and moral emptiness. There is a sense of genuineness that is very true not only in the presentation of the themes, but also in the leading character of Margherita, who feels very real and dominates the narrative revealing her positive and negative sides - strengthened by a career defining turn by Margherita Buy. A histrionic John Turturro, in a supporting role as a self-obsessed and obnoxious American actor, is a significant added treat.
GOODNIGHT MOMMY by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz
A truly terrifying experience. A masterful conglomeration of horror film clichés with a compelling lenience towards arthouse cinema – in fact the same sort of arthouse approach that producer Ulrich Seidl is known for. Despite all this, first time feature directors Franz and Fiala already seem masterful in building an intense and chilling atmosphere with haunting and downright shocking relentlessness, spinning out of a relatively innocent domestic drama, developing into a dense psychological thriller with paranormal flirtations and erupting into a full blown tough to watch torture movie. The story is pretty simple – two twins become suspicious and then obsessed by the fact that their mother is not their real mother but a kidnapper or a monster. The visual charge of the film provides added immediacy in such elements as the bandages worn by the mother, who has just returned from a facial plastic surgery operation. It’s hard to pay rightful tribute to the visceral horror that is Goodnight Mommy. It is, in fact, one that has to be lived through but it is certainly not one to be experienced by the faint hearted.
HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT by Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie
Drug addiction, self destruction and wasteland. Heaven Knows What is a powerful attack on the audience – it is not meant to be pretty. There is almost no time for conventionality or melodrama in the film, which already begins abruptly with tragedy as a girl named Harley slits her wrists for the love of a manipulative man named Ilya. Their obsessive and bad natured love affair, it is plain to see, is born out of destruction and can only lead to more destruction. Channelling the spirit of the American New Wave, this film is gritty and character driven - rather than following a deductive narrative it follows naturalistic impulses, much like its zombie like characters. The focus of this film is the decadence of the junkie, heroin addicted youth and subculture of New York City, with the merciless urban setting playing a huge role in the intensity of the atmosphere. The Safdie brothers are far from being afraid to take their audience out of the comfort zone, in fact they turn against them quite often juxtaposing tough to watch graphic moments with blasted rave music. Heaven Knows What is really a rollercoaster ride to hell, a brave film that distinguishes itself quite easily (and perhaps even uncomfortably) from the acknowledged new American Indie Cinema of sunlight seen through tree branches and poetic out of field narration.
VIDEOPHILIA (AND OTHER VIRAL SYNDROMES) by Juan Daniel F. Molero
Modern life among Peruvian youth on a constant restless search for a new high, whether through drugs, sex or viral videos. Videophilia by Juan Daniel F. Molero is a restless and relentless exploration of the intensity of modern life, with its endless influx of information, a prominence of unpredictable danger and the chaos of multiple personality disorder. It is all this, in fact and more. Yet, despite the countless narrative and thematic elements it deals with, it embraces its atmosphere of modern decadence through its structural frenzy, impressive elements and a unique use of visual effects, or defects, that give the overall vision a strangely cohesive outlook, also through its sharp editing and edgy experimental identity, which often even audaciously flirts with abstraction and neo-surrealism.
LIFE MAY BE by Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari
Filmmakers Mania Akbari and Mark Cousins, after meeting briefly, choose to stay in contact through a series of video correspondence and by communicating through the language of cinema. This back and fourth of trails of thought is simply inspiring, hypnotic and causes a natural type of interaction with its audience. The sheer simplicity of the guerrilla filmmaking style employed by the two filmmakers makes the videos and ways of expressions all the more intimate and personal as well as more immediate, spontaneous and romantic. It’s also great to see the use of letter prose and context tied to the more modern ways of portable video making – a sharp and rewarding contrast of old and new which has arguably never been explored better on the big screen than in Life May Be. This spontaneous nature of the film is also ultimately what is so inspiring about it, on top of the infectously passionate personalities of Akbari and Cousins.
THE ASSASSIN by Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Hou Hsiao-Hsien returns to the big screen after eight years and takes on the martial arts period drama. Rather than adapt to the nature of the genre, he adapts his own low key style to it and adds great visual beauty through vivid cinematography, stunning art direction and by paying a careful attention to a soundtrack that drives the pace of the film and regales it with a meditative, musical and infectuously solemn rhythm. The story is set in China at the time of the Ting Dynasty and revolves around a formidable female assassin whose humanity and sensitivity is awakened by her failure to fulfill one of her missions. More intimate, political and thrilling aspects of the story are examined throughout in an intricate storyline, which is only demanding when followed in the traditional sense. The Assassin seems more like the type of movie that aims to achieve a metaphisical interaction with its viewer, who is invited to become immersed whole heartedly in the film and not only to strictly follow its narrative. This approach evokes influences and comparisons to other types of artforms, from paintings to ballet, and builds an infinitely rewarding sensual experience that is naturally absorbing and unique. Arguably Hou Hsiao-Hsien's most ambitious work to date.
THE QUEEN OF SILENCE by Agnieszka Zwiefka
Agnieszka Zwiefka follows the life of a ten year old deaf mute girl who lives in a childish world of her own dancing like a Bollywood princess. The real story of this girl becomes the perfect metaphor of the innocence of childhood placed under threat by the serious socio political context in which she is being brought up, unwelcome along with her Roma community residing in Poland, and her sensory awakening after she receives a hearing aid dramatically co-incides with this community fighting back deportation from the country. The Queen of Silence also plays a lot with the cinematic medium, thus giving us a byway into the world of fantasy of the little girl, almost encouraging the afore mentioned influence with glorious musical numbers, and at this point it is only fair to say that the music also contributes to a wonderfully engaging viewing experience.
INHERENT VICE by Paul Thomas Anderson
An inept pot smoking private detective in the midst of the psychedelic American seventies goes looking for his missing ex-girlfriend and stumbles upon an unfolding crazy and mysterious case. Inherent Vice is a remarkable, intense and quasi surrealist experience that openly disguises itself as a crime drama, but is in fact a strange and exciting comedy with modern noir elements. Unafraid of eccentricity, and delving upon Alice in Wonderland territories, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is quite an exciting and even unpredictable journey coated with colourful characters and delightfully confusing twists and turns that allow us to experience the disorientation of the slobbish leading character, personified excellently by Joaquin Phoenix. The atmosphere is outlandish and bizarre, yet carefully distinguished not just by the quasi inconsequential unfolding of the story, but also embraced by the art direction’s flamboyance in an incredibly blatant representation of its times’ identity.
PASOLINI by Abel Ferrara
Under no circumstances should this film be taken like any ordinary biopic. Of course, that is implied as not only is this film directed by one of the most audience splitting directors, Abel Ferrara, but it is also a film about one of the most celebrated and discussed figures in cinema history - Pier Paolo Pasolini. This film utilises the structure of the last day of Pasolini's life, and make no mistake - it is a subjective vision. An interview, casual interactions with family, friends, and feeding into his unhealthy habit of picking up kids at the train station in Rome. Most vivid is the attempted and audacious downright collaboration Ferrara dares when he brings Pasolini's final documented big screen vision on film, in which we lovingly see the casting of Pieruti's muse Ninetto Davoli. Eccentrically, little concern is given to accents and disorienting mixtures of languages, but that is a concern that fails to look at the bigger picture - or even consider the fact that Pasolini himself would often cast foreign actors and dub them in his works. The whole film Pasolini feels like more than a tribute - it is like a daydream that a filmmaker had about his hero and as such it is a priceless, non-conventional and by some extents rebellious work that exists to be hated or loved and very little in between.
SONGS MY BROTHERS TAUGHT ME by Chloe Zhao
A rare and admirable example of representation of the contemporary Native American community. Songs My Brothers Taught Me is more specifically set in Pine Ridge, an empoverished area of South Dakota plagued by alcoholism and general neglect. The narrative is not particularly original - a young man from the community dreams of getting away. Yet, first time feature director Chloe Zhao makes the viewing experience very rewarding by focusing on atmosphere, not least of all by taking advantage of the distinctive desertic setting, but also by revealing the fascinating community as a whole and with a closer examination of individual characters and their own distinctive personalities. This also prevents the film from seeming preachy, and feeling more like a tribute with an uplifting final message about the hope that rests in the hands of future generations. Songs My Brothers Taught Me is also a testimony to the great impact and enriching aspects of street casting. The lead players, mostly playing themselves, are incredible and add a great tinge of realism that would have been difficult to achieve otherwise.