ANTOINE ET MARIE: A brilliantly constructed French-Canadian drama with two unforgettable characters.
THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING: powerful and artfully shot drama from Kosovo about gender reactions to a wartime atrocity.
MEET THE HITLERS: Tracking down real people burdened with the Fuhrer’s name, this successful doc weaves together both light-hearted and very dark story threads.
SLOW WEST: This offbeat Western with Michael Fassbender won a prize at Sundance.
Cinephiles must see the exquisite and lyrical Georgian drama Corn Island. If it doesn’t turn out to be the best contemporary art movie at Cinequest 2015, I’ll be shocked. Corn Island has won nineteen film festival awards and was shortlisted for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.
Director George Ovashvili has created a near-masterpiece of filmmaking with this unhurried yet compelling story. We learn that each spring, Georgia’s Irguri River creates temporary islands of topsoil that local farmers squat on to grow enough corn to get them through the next winter (when the island will be washed away). We see an old man choose one particular island of maybe an acre. He brings his 12- or 13-year-old orphan granddaughter to help him, and they build a shack and plant and cultivate a tiny field of corn. The audience isn’t really watching corn grow, but we are observing how the man and the granddaughter react to what happens.
The storytelling is remarkably spare. There’s not even any dialogue during the first 25 minutes – and there are probably only about 30 spoken lines in the entire movie.
The old man is played by veteran Turkish actor Ilyas Salman is a superb performance. Georgian newcomer Mariam Buturishvili plays the granddaughter. Her eyes are very expressive, so she doesn’t need to say much. We watch her show up at the island clutching her doll – and then outgrowing it.
Here’s what you need to know before seeing Corn Island: the Irguri River separates Georgia from the separatist region of Abkhazia. The main characters speak Abkhaz. The soldiers patrolling the river are variously Georgian soldiers, Abkhaz militia and Russian peacekeepers.
So settle in for a contemplative experience and just watch this story unfold through Ovashvili’s masterful lens. Corn Island plays Cinequest again today, March 1 and March 4 at Camera 12.
[MILD SPOILER ALERT: The filmmakers built their own island in a manmade lake so they could control the water. And that is the only way that they could have filmed the spectacular climax.]
The dark and violent Peruvian Guard Dog is set in 2001, five years after a controversial amnesty for the government-sponsored death squads active in the previous decades. Our protagonist is the vestige of those death squads, an ascetic hit man who still performs some residual executions. He is a Man On A Mission, and one serious dude. After his opening hit, he takes out the photo of his victim and burns out the image’s eyes with his cigarette.
Guard Dog is ultimately more of a mood piece than a thriller. The theme of personal corruption keeps re-emerging, with a grossly rotting apartment ceiling and even a moment of pus-draining. The most interesting aspect of the story is our anti-hero’s encounters with an unjaded young girl who is, in contrast to him, bubbling and full of life.
I saw Guard Dog’s US Premiere at Cinequest, and it plays the fest again March 4 at the California Theatre and March 6 at Camera 12.
Made in Kosovo, the powerful drama Three Windows and a Hanging explores each gender’s differing reaction to a wartime atrocity in a traditional culture. This film is artfully shot, and it’s one of the highlights of Cinequest 2015. Three Windows and a Hanging was Kosovo’s submission for this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar.
It’s set in a village where some of the women had been raped while the men were away fighting in the post-Yugoslavia civil wars. The women haven’t told the men because, in this culture, being raped stigmatizes a woman and brings shame on her family. When the atrocity surfaces in a newspaper report, the men exclaim, “Who has done this to us?”. They’re not talking about the rapists. They’re talking about the rape victim who has disclosed an event that embarrasses them. Of course, this victim-blaming only serves to re-traumatize the already devastated and lead to additionally tragic consequences. It’s a tough subject, but not a tough movie to watch.
Throughout the movie, director Isa Qosja makes superb choices. He loves shots of loooong duration and they are very effective; the first five minutes of the movie are in just two shots. There’s an opening interview, filmed by focusing on the interviewer and her translator, and not even glimpsing the back of the interviewee’s head until the end of the shot. Before the topic of the interview is revealed, we know that it’s painful because of the nervousness of the interviewer.
There are many brilliantly shot scenes, especially one where a boy offers condolences to a man he passes on a road. There’s an interaction between three characters, first shot through one character’s armpit, and then from above and finally in a long shot from behind a window – all telling the audience EXACTLY what’s going on with each character irrespective of whether we can hear what they are saying. And when one character gets some devastating news, he’s in the shower, so we can only see his body stiffen behind the blur of the shower curtain. It’s really remarkable filmmaking.
Three Windows and a Hanging plays Cinequest again on March 2 and March 7 at Camera 12.
In the contemporary American dramedy Milwaukee, a bunch of thirty-something friends get together for a weekend at a vacation home. They drink some wine, resolve to have an Anything Goes night, get high and, before you know it, some partners are swapped. What could possibly go wrong?
Milwaukee is well-made, even a little slick, and very well-acted. But there’s really not much to think about after it’s over.
I saw Milwaukee at its world premiere at Cinequest, and it plays again March 1 at Camera 12 and March 4 at the California Theatre.
Here’s the premise of Songs She Wrote About People She Knows – a dissatisfied but very contained woman adopts the therapeutic device of SINGING her true feelings. So she expresses her resentments by leaving excoriating singing voicemails. When she melodically rips her ubercaffeinated boss, there is an unintended consequence. Her harangue sparks both his personal interest in her (unwelcome) and a sudden decision to swing his life 180 degrees. He gloms on to her as he seeks to his artistic dream. It becomes an odd couple movie, where he spends the rest of the movie annoying her (and, believe me, this is not very entertaining).
In the lighthearted Italian Wax: We Are the X, a notoriously shady producer sends two guy filmmakers to Monaco to scout locations for a commercial and meet a gal French casting director. They are all hired because they work cheap. What follows is a little whodunit, a little relationship drama, a little comedy and, as one might expect, a ménage à troisillustrating the open-mindedness of French women (in the movies, anyway).
The best five minutes of the movie is right at the beginning, when the producer demonstrates his mastery of getting someone else to pick up a tab.
There is a superfluous but welcome cameo by 70-year-old Rutger Hauer (it’s been over thirty years since Nighthawks and Blade Runner!). And there’s a Gen X hook, an attempt to make Wax: We Are themore than it is, which is basically an entertaining piece of Euro-fluff.
In the bawdy Norwegian comedy Chasing Berlusconi, a beleaguered harness racing driver gets into trouble with menacing (and very, very funny) Finnish loan sharks, which precipitates a farce involving two shady dim bulbs and a pair of even dumber cops. Oh, and then there’s the driver’s nyphomaniacal wife. Did I mention the racetrack owner with a piercing, sudden cackle and a predilection for toupees and cowboy hats? (The movie’s title comes from a racehorse named for the Italian scoundrel/politician.)
This all makes for very good lowbrow comedy. And lowbrow it is, featuring jokes based on impotence, penis length, horse poop and the like. Chasing Berlusconi also features very clever references to Columbo, The Wire and Fifty Shades of Grey. The characters of the racetrack owner and the lead loan shark are especially funny.
I loved filmmaker Ole Endresen’s hilarious King Curling at the 2012 Cinequest. That story had a very original hook – to win a curling tournament, the protagonist needs to stop taking his meds, and then tries not to slip into psychosis. Chasing Berlusconi isn’t the comic masterpiece of King Curling, but it’s worth some guffaws.
Chasing Berlusconi plays again at Cinequest March 1 at the California Theatre and March 3 at Camera 12.
Another struggling Hollywood artist is the heart of Booze Boys and Brownies, and this, time, she bursts into song. She’s an actress unlucky in both love and career, and she navigates through both with her BFF and her once and future boyfriends. Not one of the songs is a show-stopper. None of the characters is especially winning. Pass.
Cinequest Director of Programming/Associate Director Mike Rabehl
I asked Cinequest’s Director of Programming/Associate Director Mike Rabehl to compare the 2015 Cinequest with the programs of previous festivals. After all, he’s put his imprimatur on twenty Cinequests. “The first time feature filmmakers are the strongest in many years,” Rabehl noted, specifically calling out the overall quality of this year’s writing.
What are your predictions for the biggest audience pleasers? Something like The Sapphires from 2013 or The Grand Seduction from 2014?
Rabehl: Probably Batkid Begins, Wild Tales and Slow West.”
What might be the festival’s biggest surprise hit?
Rabehl: “Possibly Milwaukee, The Centerand/or Marry Me.”
Is there anything that we haven’t seen before in a movie? Something wholly original like Polski Film or The Dead Man and Being Happy from the 2013 Cinequest?
Rabehl: “Beast of Cardo is a film that is more about her relationship to the town than it is about the supernatural. Corn Island is completely unique, with very little dialogue, and the filmmakers built their own island to film it. ”
Is there any remarkable new filmmaking talent (a la the 2013 German gem Oh Boy, which later secured a US theatrical release as A Coffee In Berlin)?
Rabehl: “The Center, Antoine et Marie (a second feature), Dermaphoria(a first narrative feature), Feverand Happiest Place on Earth. Plus For An Inexplicable Reason, Factory Boss, Malady and In the Company of Women.”
How does this year’s international cinema shape up?
Rabehl: “Belgium (especially the Flemish side) and Norway are really strong this year.”
Belgian entries include the Flemish films Halfway, In the Heart, Marry Me and Plan Bart, plus the French/Belgian Three Hearts. Cinequest’s Norwegian films are Amnesia, Beatles and Chasing Berlusconi.
