Catfish by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman

Film #8 at The BFI London Film Festival

To try to explain "Catfish" is to give away a surprising story... watch the movie and walk away with the disturbing knowledge of how our virtual worlds can trick but yet hold us in thrall with shards of online humanity.

It was TS Eliot who said about his poetry "against these fragments, I shore my ruins". Catfish reveals how against the fragments of Facebook, a human can shore the regularly rough edges of reality.

Image from BFI site here

Life, Above All by Oliver Schmitz

Film #7 at The BFI London Film Festival 2010

Somewhere in Africa, a ‘bug’ gnaws away, pulling mothers away from children, fathers from families and friends from each other. Even as the adults waver between choosing Christianity, black magic or isolation to deal with this menace, the children try their best to pick up the pieces and move on.

One of these children is Chanda in Oliver Schmitz’s ‘Life, Above All’. Adapted from Alan Stratton's "Chanda's Secrets", this is the story of a teenage girl in Africa who deals with the blight of AIDS in her own ineffable way. Growing up in a family where her father has died and her mother has taken up with another man (Jonah), Chanda lives life on her own terms and indeed she needs to… she takes care of her step-siblings, helps arrange the funeral of a baby sister, snatches money from a drunk step-father, does homework and tries her best to be a good friend to Esther (whose parents have died of AIDS, leaving her homeless/hopeless in a shack at the edge of the town).

The casting was mostly amazing… flinty Esther, precocious Chanda, the drama queen neighbours… all of these do complete justice to their complex roles (although just sometimes, it becomes a bit unreal as the milk of human kindness overfloweth– good-hearted shopkeepers and ambulance drivers seem to abound in Africa; in real life, in a developing country, I would imagine that ambulance drivers demand extra moolah for home delivery and shop-keepers being quite ruthless with margins). The music and the melodrama mix well with each other especially in the last scene where just the music/song could define the “desperate-for-salvation” mood that the movie plunged us, watchers into.

All through the movie, the spectre of AIDS is unyielding and omnipresent, casting a dark shadow over the sunny land... with Jonah catching the ‘bug’ and dying and her mother seeming to have contracted it as well, Chanda has to manage a complex maze of relationships and obligations that could easily overwhelm a regular 16 year old. But then again, this is no regular girl… this is Chanda, the girl who stands up against shrews, who brings back an abandoned mother from the edges of hell… this is Chanda who can and does anything.

I enjoyed best the scenes where the girls negotiate the hazy netherworld of adulthood… Esther’s miniskirted attempts to be cool and Chanda’s coy conversation with a boy after a dance are special and very deserving of the attention that the script and the camera pays to them. But fuzzy scenes do not a movie make; the harsh reality of an African generation blighted by AIDS re-emerges very soon and stuns you into silence – when the lights came on, I found a couple, almost looking stranded, in shock with tears in full flow.

But girls like Chanda redeem us all and lead... lead kindly, light, amid th’encircling doom.

Boxing Gym by Frederick Wiseman

Film #6 at the BFI London Film Festival 2010


Every art, every sport, every repeated ritual has a rhythm of its own making... this is almost a secret that practitioners effortlessly tap into, while for many outsiders this rhythm seems almost hypnotic in its pace, sound and sometimes, fury.

Boxing Gym, a documentary by Frederick Wiseman, captures the rhythm of the sport of boxing in all its glorious variations. Filmed in Lord's Gym at Austin-Texas, the film looks at the fascinating variety of people who jab and dance around on the gym's rings... men hiss/sputter their way into punches as babies watch, a mother bring her epileptic son to see if there's a chance for him to start, grandpa's almost do a slow waltz in the ring, all the while timing themselves to the omnipresent clang of the timer.

As the blurb on the BFI site says, 'this is a story about the human condition as much as it is about boxing'... the 'human condition' in its relentless pursuit of perfection and triumph and the ebbing impotence that awaits us all around the corner. If you're not the type that is taken aback by the wonder of all this, then the sheerly physical intensity of Richard Lord and his fighting women (and the occassional man!) will keep you alive through the 91 minutes of the film.

There is an utterly beautiful scene in the film where two of Lord's best boxers, a young woman and a slightly older well muscled man, practice in the same ring... they don't fight each other but shadow-box in the same enclosed space. The woman slips around the ring, breathing softly and scarily, in sleek sinous movements... yet you instinctively sense the immense, trapped power that lies within her, especially when you get a glimpse of her eerily focused, fierce eyes . The man on the other hand is much more direct and blunt about the retribution that he will exact... like a well oiled machine going though its paces, he chops the space of the ring into neat pieces, with angular shifts, sharp turns and the constant hiss that flies with his punches. Wiseman does a brilliant job mapping this interplay between the sexes... the footwork of the boxers, their glances, the movement of their muscles and in doing so, captures the spell-binding contrast between a man and a woman in a fighting space. Not very unlike two dangerous and completely alive animals in an arena, testing their territorial limits, marking their borders, the air crackling with the barely contained danger of it all.

PS: To be seen after reading Gordon Marino's take on the philosophy behind boxing in the NYT here.

Image from the mubi site here

To The Measures Fall - Richard Powers in The NY'r

A passage from Richard Power's new short story in the New Yorker "To The Measures Fall".

A story that starts with a bike ride through the Cotswolds and the discovery of a book and the changing meaning of the story and the book, a thread that follows the owner all through her life.

More about it here and an abstract of the original here (The NYr's put it behind a pay wall, sorry :-( )

I Wish I Knew by Jia Zhangke

Film #5 at the BFI London Film Festival 2010 – I Wish I Knew by Jia Zhangke

I Wish I Knew by Jia Zhangke is a collection of memories and experiences about Shanghai… over 18 interviewees recount the role that Shanghai has played in either their own or their family’s lives. From sons of soldiers executed by the Kuomintang, to port labourers to gangsters to award-winning textile workers to actresses to bloggers, Shanghai and this film has it all. With the raw emotional intensity that real people bring to a documentary, the film cuts across the borders of mainland China to Taiwan and even Hong Kong and in doing so paints a telling picture of the politics and history of China. It easily took me back to Class 10 history books in India that almost painted Sun Yat Sen and the KMT as exiled heroes and Chairman Mao as the villain.

At the same time, the documentary does not flow easily and that is a primary failing, I think… each anecdote, each character brings a thread of history and emotion which is beautiful by itself (imagine a textile worker who gets to meet Chairman Mao and getting a chance to visit Vienna, where she recalls streets filled applauding Austrians) but at the same time, deserve a better job of being woven to form something larger. Combining many vignettes about a dynamic city is no doubt a daunting challenge, but is much needed in a 2+ hour film… and when not executed properly, the disjointed pieces detract from the formidable theme and almost become tiresome.

But the stories themselves, from the little boy who wants to beat up the world to Han Han, the blogger who didn’t buy a Jeep because it was too cheap, are truly memorable and evoke memories of a city and era gone by, but preserved in film by Jia Zhangke.

Image from www.filmofilia.com here

Circo by Aaron Schock

Film #4 at the BFI LFF 2010 – Circo by Aaron Schock

The Circo Mexico is a travelling circus company run by one of the Ponce brothers, part of a family that has been running circuses for over 100 years in Mexico. With a rag-tag collection of animals and artistes, the Circo tours rural Mexico putting up an inventive variety of shows and acts. Everyone in the circus has their role to play: from the ‘patrone’ grandfather who collects tickets, to the teenage ‘contortionistas’, to the ‘death-defying’ motorcyclist... all the way down to 8 year old Neymadelita (?) who dons an outsized mask to become a very popular, hand-shaking clown, her 15 minutes of fame.

But all the vignettes and fun cover the many fault-lines underneath… of wives unhappy with their children's burden, of grandparents (almost a Greek chorus in themselves, as the presenter said) who constantly judge their sons' women, of children who only know to spell mama, papa and bear, of boys who break teen hearts in every town they visit. Suffused with an exact delicate mix of humour and pathos that makes it such a feast, the movie pans across a dying tradition and way of life... one that is precious for its practitioners now as it was for it’s audiences 50 years ago.

Aaron Schock, the director came on stage to talk about the movie – he had actually gone to Mexico intending to make a documentary about the NAFTA impact on Mexican corn farmers… he said he was gathering information and searching for a story when Circo Mexico came into town. After meeting up with the artistes and the Ponce family, he knew he had his story.

He was pleasantly surprised that the London audience ‘got’ most of the funny quirks he had captured, in marked contrast to American audiences, he said. He was looking forward to the Mexican premiere, 2 days from now when ‘Circo’ would be screened in a plaza with Tito Ponce & family attending. Someone in the audience asked the question that was on everyone's mind, "What happened next?" - the movie closes with Tito's wife insisting that they split from her in-laws and they actually do. The director said that the (Greek chorus!) grandparents had actually shut down the circus and settled down near their daughters; meanwhile, Tito and his wife, Ivonne along with their children have started off their own circus on a much smaller scale with much less resources... but as Schock said, "If anyone can pull it off, it would be them". When you watch the documentary, you'll know why.

‘Circo’ continues from where “The Eagle Hunter’s Son” left off from last year… the only difference was that this was real and therefore, direct and disturbing.

Viva El Circo Mexico!

Image from BFI website here

The Temptation of St.Tony by Veiko Ounpuu

Film #3 at the BFI London Film Festival 2010

The Temptation of St.Tony This was my first Estonian film (at first, I thought it was Finnish) and it was… uhmmm… different. The movie opens with Tony, a factory manager, attending the funeral of his father and from thereon, events spin out of control. In a jagged, surreal, allegoric narrative, Tony spins around a bleak, white landscape getting manhandled by goons, almost being eaten alive, making love to a dark haired beauty, running naked with only the Estonian flag between him and fierce winter.

The unforgiving land, grim music and whipping snow are the only constants as the movie wavers between real life, dreams, nightmares, questions and incomplete answers. Stark and spell-binding, Tony’s trips into the netherworld of morality may be enjoyable only in bits but are always thoroughly engrossing.

3 Seasons in Hell by Tomas Masin

Film #2 at the BFI London Festival

“3 Seasons In Hell” is about the life of Ivan Heinz, a young Czechoslovakian poet as the Iron Curtain descends upon his country and people. His anarchic, bohemian spirit pours over into his poetry, into his friendships, into his father’s home, into every corner of his life… at the same time, he also meets another free spirit, Jana, who refuses to let him make love to her, hoping that this will drive his creative forces.

But even as he succumbs to the charms of chaos, rebellion and Marxism, the angles of his life repeatedly abrade against the newly formed Iron State. His friends are executed, he steals food to survive and his father’s house is 'socialized'. As he decides to make a last ditch attempt to flee to Paris, fate intervenes. But then again, so does the goodness of humans. Great casting; if Krystof Hadek (Ivan) is good, Martin Huba (Ivan’s dad) as a retired Colonel is impeccable.

Incidentally, I realized that the title is from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer)