We Are One: A Global Film Festival Dispatches #3

24 Frames per Century is part tribute to Jean Luc Godard's Le Mepris (1963). While that film tried to wrestle with the transition between the classical and modernist eras of cinema, this film, tackles the modern and the postmodern eras, and beyond. There's a particular kind of optimism that it espouses, that in the future, films may be experienced in different ways, perhaps even in the palm of one's hand. Time will only tell when the reel will be changed anew.

Mad Ladders juxtaposes two manifestations of fervent belief; the fanaticism of fundamentalist cults and the capitalistic idolatry made evident in contemporary pop culture. Both seem different, but are tied together closer than is apparent.

Indefinite Pitch, with its monologue about silent films and reality and New Hampshire, feels disjointed and alien. It makes sense only if you engage in the clever intellectual exercise it tries to get you to join, but it made me feel strangely cold.

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Dantza is tone poem, musical, cultural exhibit and dance film all in one. It perhaps requires more background on the cultural context behind its dances and music (all from a certain region of Spain), but even without the context it is a mesmerizing experience.

Macau in transition serves as the backdrop of Tracy Choi's 2016 film Sisterhood. It tells the story of two women - Sei and Ling, who befriend each other while working at one of Macau's many massage parlors. Years pass after their friendship is forever changed by a single event. Sei, now a middle-aged wife based in Taiwan, learns that Ling has tragically passed away. 

While one country breaks free of its colonial roots into a hazy, uncertain future, the women of this film create their own spaces, with the presence of men pushed to the periphery. In the process of creating that space, Sei and Ling form a bond that neither can articulate, a bond undefined and unnamed, a bond that feels out of place in a society still bound to colonial and societal traditions.

The film's third act feels a bit rushed, but the melodramatic payoffs prove more than effective nevertheless - reducing this reviewer to a blubbering mess on more than one occasion.

Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy sees the Thai director veer deep into experimental territory and explorations of form. The entire film is structured after a stream of tweets from twitter user @marylony. At one level, we see how strange social media storytelling can be - stripped of all context, tweets strung together sound like soundbites and snippets of a nonsensical story. Instead of trying to mold those tweets into some sort of sense, Nawapol leans into that absurdity, often taking these snippets and soundbites literally while writing his script, reverse-engineering a story out of tweets that have different contexts entirely.

And yet, something magical happens as the film goes on, as Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy transforms into a surprisingly poignant meditation on loneliness and mental health, as it depicts the helplessness we sometimes feel when we lose control over our own lives. It serves as an astonishing portrait of uncertainty and youth served in a contemporary package, its themes unraveling like a sculpture that only reveals its true form once you step back and see the whole thing.

Daigo Matsui's follow up to 2016's Haruko Azumi is Missing (aka Japanese Girls Never Die) is formally inventive, far more personal and a bit more optimistic than its predecessor. A youth theater troupe is commissioned to perform a version of Simon Stephens' play Morning, but the play is canceled before it even gets a chance to be staged, leading to the actors rehearsing the play anyway. One would think that the movie would match the depressing tone of Stephens' play, about the youth committing casual, horrible acts. But Ice Cream and the Sound of Raindrops feels like a rebuttal to that play, one filled with anxiety, yes, but also unbridled hope.

Shot in one take, the film follows these young actors as they try to prepare for a play that will never get shown. To further blur reality and fiction, their real names and the names of their characters in both the movie and the play within the movie are all the same. The aspect ratio changes as the film shifts from rehearsal to real life, but sometimes even that distinction makes it hard to tell which is which. And that formal experimentation works - the scenes play out like a distant memory, half-remembered, of disjoined sights and smells (like in the film's title), of memories of friends and colleagues that have perhaps moved on to other things.

The film's mantra, spoken repeatedly near the end, is "we are the cosmos made conscious." As it refers to the youth at large, it is both elegant and riddled with paradoxes - pointing both to the insignificance of our lives compared to the vastness of the world, and the unique place we have in it despite that smallness.

We Are One: A Global Film Festival Dispatches #2

There's a particular part in Los Gatos that will cause some people to tune off from the movie completely, and that's understandable. But that scene is at the heart of what the movie is trying to say: people sometimes seek out toxic relationships even though they are aware of the harm involved, because all these people want is to be loved.

The rows of meat seen in the opening moments of Dekel Berenson's Anna reminds me of similar visual references in Jay Altarejos' Jino to Mari, in that in both films, people are seen as objects and not as people. Anna is a lonely middle aged woman who just wants to date, but she finds herself entangled with a foreign bride business whose operators only want to sell these women as subservient maids with fancy names.

In Koji Fukada's Inabe, a solemn reminiscence doubles as a sort of existential meditation. The film tackles the dread of ceasing to exist without leaving an impression on the world. Such impressions do exist, seen literally as dug up memories in the life history of someone else, but for the person whose existence has just ended, such realizations will never come. 

Blood Rider, a documentary about blood deliverymen in Nigeria, is informative, tense and uplifting all in the span of seventeen minutes. In a time where the value of such essential workers is more important than ever, it's a fitting film for this festival.

In Stories of Destroyed Cities: Shengal, we are mostly shown destroyed, empty landscapes, overlaid with normal day to day conversations. This eerie juxtaposition gives the feeling that this is a city that once held life, and hopefully will hold life once again. It also highlights the human cost of such a tragedy, as a city's lifeblood is its citizens.

In the wake of increasingly polarizing conversations about whatever is the political hot button topic of the day, Ingen Lyssnar (Who Talks) shows us that in the face of increasingly extreme rhetoric from both sides, moderate, honest opinions are the ones that suffer the most.

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The 1928 silent film Shiraz made its way to the We Are One film festival, thanks to the efforts of the British Film Institute. As the second entry in a trilogy of Franz Osten - Himansu Rai silent film collabs (the other two being Light of Asia (1925) and A Throw of Dice(1929))  it still holds up even today. It's a very ambitious film in many ways; it is a co-production of three countries, it boasts impressive production design and cinematography (in any era), and it features a large cast of characters and extras.

For this version of the film, the soundtrack was performed by Anoushka Shankar, famed sitar player, accompanied by an expert orchestra. It mixes traditional Indian tunes and beats with a touch of more modern orchestration.

As for the story, it's a fictionalized retelling of one of the greatest love stories in Indian history (and all history, for that matter). It goes straight for the feels and it stays there especially during the last act. If you haven't seen a silent film before and want to start, this is a good place to do so.

Cesar Arechiga spent 45 days in a maximum security prison to teach painting, sculpture and art to several inmates. In this solemn documentary, we look at these inmates (mostly convicted of drug related crimes) intimately. We are made to know of their atrocities, and while some of them don't exactly regret what they did, others are people that seem to be genuinely striving to reform themselves. Art creates a space of vulnerability where these people can express themselves candidly.

Should we empathize with them? Should we judge them immediately for their crimes, or should we also look at the social inequalities and systemic flaws that helped bring them to prison in the first place? At the very least the film makes us think about those things and more.

We Are One: A Global Film Festival Dispatches #1

I never thought I'd be reporting a film festival in these times, but people find ways. We Are One: A Global Film festival is a one of a kind event, a free global online festival featuring content from some of the world's best regarded film festivals. Here's what I've watched so far.

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The short films make up a good bulk of the festival, starting out with a trio of films co-produced by Dreamworks Animation. Two of those films, Bilby and Marooned, are potent allusions to parenthood, or at the very least love letters to it. They're also very cute films.

There's also the sensual The Distance Between The Sky and Us, a perfect encapsulation of what happens when something just clicks with a total stranger, finding connections in unlikely places.

A lot of feminine energy comes from films such as Chloe Sevigny's White Echo, a film that tends more towards abstract, artsy horror. It doesn't congeal thematically as I would have liked, but this one warrants a rewatch. On the other hand, Britt Lower's Circus Person feels like its quirkier, more whimsical sister, though the whole circus part feels out of place. (Framing the story as a letter to an ex's new lover is peak film festival material, though.)

Then there are films like Raw, which in the words of an anonymous Youtube commenter is "like Whiplash, but cooking." I'd say that's pretty accurate, and I'd also like to note that I'm lukewarm on that film.

The Tribeca short films have some great entries. Toto made me not want to have kids, but that's not exactly a bad thing. It's a sweet film about a lonely old lady who just wants to connect with someone. (Are there no cloud saves in the near future!?) The Light Side's story of a reformed old Sith Lord is just as uplifting, though it does rely a bit on Star Wars knowledge. But perhaps my favorite Tribeca short from the first few days of the festival is Michael J. Goldberg's Egg, a film that takes the phrase "know how the sausage is made" to a whole new level. It's also a love letter to at least half a dozen classic films and it is absolutely hilarious.

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Trojan Records is a UK label roughly described as "Mowtown, but with Jamaican music." Their story is a story of immigrants making art in the new spaces that they've carved out for themselves. But like most contemporary immigrant stories, there's pushback from a populace wary of the new people moving in. The label's early days were rough, because these immigrants were looked down upon, with the British reluctant to embrace the changing diversity of the times. That said, it only takes one catalyst to make such cultural works enter the bigger social consciousness.

It's always a treat to watch films like these. I would have appreciated if the film gave more details on how the company was sold off and what remains of it today, but as it is, it remains a relatively engaging documentary.

In the world of Prateek Vats' Eeb Allay Ooo!, there's always a bigger fish. Humans dominate other  humans. Monkeys harass the human population, and since they are sacred, options to drive them away are limited. Langurs are the monkeys' natural enemy; and thus they dominate the monkeys. 

Hired by the government to drive away the monkeys using specific sounds, Anjani (Shardul Bharadwaj) is not very good at his job. He tries to innovate in rather silly fashion, but his attempts do not fare well with his bosses or with certain segments of the population. There are attempts to become something greater, and chances exist in the form of a costume (embodying a figurative transformation) and an unwanted firearm, but power structures exist to keep things as they are and make animals of us all.

No industry in the world has captured the sheer exuberance of filmmaking as well as Uganda's homegrown Wakaliwood. Its latest international release, the 2014 production Crazy World, is every bit as crazy as its title suggests. A pastiche of macho American action films, Chinese Kung-fu films and even Ugandan oral storytelling tradition, the film is best experienced communally. The YouTube live chat served that purpose to an extent, perhaps made even more poignant considering that it's an audience composed of members from all over the world watching together.

And yet, buried within the film somewhere is a message against child kidnapping, a very serious problem in African countries (the film's director  apparently made the film in the first place to dissuade people from kidnapping his children!) It's certainly a very relevant message wrapped up in a very unconventional package.

If only for its earnestness it's one of my favorite films of the year.