Three Windows and a Hanging – The Movie Gourmet

Cinequest 2015: festival recap

March 31, 2015March 8, 2015 by movie gourmet

A pronounced overall success, Cinequest 2015 delivered hearty audience-pleasers from a varied and satisfying menu that featured some real gems from the indie, documentary and world cinema categories.

The fest kicked off with two huge popular successes: the feel-good BATKID BEGINS and the hilariously dark WILD TALES, and kept up the pace throughout the first weekend with an assortment of successful premieres.

Cinequest’s Director of Programming Mike Rabehl presented a fest especially rich in first features, including:

THE CENTER: An absorbing and topical American indie drama about the seductiveness of a cult; and especially promising debut from filmmaker Charlie Griak.
ANTOINE ET MARIE: A brilliantly constructed French-Canadian drama with two unforgettable characters (actually a second feature).
IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN: Unexpectedly sweet, this starts out with a Boys Behaving Badly set-up and then morphs into a tribute to enduring love. A festival surprise hit.
FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON: A good-natured Belgian comedy containing some very innovative nuggets.

Cinequest’s international film scout Charlie Cockey came through once again with the fest’s best film, the transcendent Georgian drama CORN ISLAND, which won the Jury Award for Best Narrative Drama.

This 2015 fest was the strongest recent Cinequest for documentaries. The well-deserved Jury Award for best Documentary went to ASPIE SEEKS LOVE, the story of a surprisingly sympathetic subject. Other excellent docs included:

the sometimes jaw-dropping MEET THE HITLERS;
the pleasurable Nerd Olympics doc SWEDEN’S COOLEST NATIONAL TEAM; and
the powerful look at capital punishment, THERE WILL BE NO STAY.

Not every film was a home run. Director John Boorman’s personal appearance was a hit, but his QUEEN AND COUNTRY was only moderately entertaining. And the eagerly awaited CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (Cesar-winning Kristen Stewart) and the Sundance award-winning SLOW WEST were clunkers.

Richard von Busack, the highly respected local film critic, picked Tuesday night’s L’ATALANTE:, rarely seen on the big screen. It’s the 1934 masterpiece of French writer-director Jean Vigo, who died at age 29 soon after its completion. A packed house agreed that this was one of Cinequest 2015’s top experiences.

Other highlights included the Belgian romantic dramedy THREE HEARTS, the French comedy GEMMA BOVERY and the exceptionally well-directed Kosovan drama THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING.

The most underrated movie at Cinequest? Somehow, the biting darkly hilarious Mexican social satire LOS HAMSTERS is flying under the radar. I think this tale of a dysfunctional family is both very smart and very funny.

BARCO Escape showcased developing three-screen technology to envelope the audience in the cinematic experience. I have reservations about the BARCO experience, but the short film WITHDRAWAL was a definite winner.

Here’s all my Cinequest coverage – with several features and comments on over twenty-five movies – conveniently linked on one page.

Cinequest Picks for Monday, March 2

March 2, 2015 by movie gourmet

My Cinequest picks for Monday, March 2:

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.

Cinequest: THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING

March 1, 2015 by movie gourmet

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.

Cinequest Picks for Friday, February 27

February 27, 2015 by movie gourmet

Here are my picks for Friday at Cinequest, starting with three of my favorites:

THE CENTER: An absorbing and topical American indie drama about the seductiveness of a cult. WORLD PREMIERE.
LOS HAMSTERS: A biting darkly hilarious Mexican social satire. NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE.
ASPIE SEEKS LOVE: A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a guy looking for love like anyone else, but whose social skills are handicapped by Asberger’s. WORLD PREMIERE.

I also like SWEDEN’S COOLEST NATIONAL TEAM (a character-driven take on the sports movie takes us into a Nerd Olympics) and the innovative and good-hearted Hungarian comedy FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON and I’ve heard great things about these following films:

GUARD DOG: dark and violent Peruvian thriller. US PREMIERE.
MILWAUKEE: US indie sex and relationship comedy. WORLD PREMIERE.

See you around the fest!

Cinequest 2015 – festival preview

February 27, 2015February 24, 2015 by movie gourmet

It’s time to dive into the 2015 version of the San Jose film festival Cinequest running from tomorrow through March 8. This year’s program looks GREAT. You can find my festival coverage, including both features and movie recommendations, on my Cinequest page (which you may wish to bookmark). Follow me on Twitter for the very latest.

Here are my 18 best bets at Cinequest 2015:

WILD TALES: the darkly comic Argentine collection of revenge stories. Wild Tales has been a festival hit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance) around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. One of its vignettes features one of my favorite screen actors, Ricardo Darin (the Argentine Joe Mantegna). See it at Cinequest before it gets to Bay Area art houses on March 6. Ann Thompson (Thompson on Film) will be receiving a Media Legacy Award at the screening.
CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA: The ever-radiant Juliette Binoche plays an actress now relegated to the older role in her breakthrough play, with her younger role going to Kristen Stewart (All About Eve, anyone?). And Stewart just became the first American actress to win a César (the French Oscar) for this performance.
’71: Everybody says that this thriller about a British soldier trapped overnight in a hostile Northern Ireland neighborhood during the Troubles is pedal-to-the-metal intensity.
SLOW WEST: This offbeat Western with Michael Fassbender won a prize at Sundance.
QUEEN AND COUNTRY: Director John Boorman’s Korean War-Era quasi-sequel to his Hope and Glory. Boorman (Deliverance) will appear at the screening. Silicon Valley release on March 6.
L’ATALANTE: The 1934 masterpiece of French writer-director Jean Vigo, who died at age 29 soon after its completion. Richard von Busack, the highly respected film critic for Metro, will receive a Media Legacy Award at the screening.

Here are my pre-festival picks from among the films that I’ve seen:

DRAMA:

ANTOINE ET MARIE: A brilliantly constructed French-Canadian drama with two unforgettable characters.
THE CENTER: An absorbing and topical American indie drama about the seductiveness of a cult.

COMEDY:

LOS HAMSTERS: A biting darkly hilarious Mexican social satire.
DIRTY BEAUTIFUL: An American indie comedy that is decidedly NOT a by-the-numbers battle of the sexes.

DOCUMENTARY:

ASPIE SEEKS LOVE: A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a guy looking for love like anyone else, but whose social skills are handicapped by Asberger’s.
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.
SWEDEN’S COOLEST NATIONAL TEAM: A character-driven take on the sports movie takes us into a Nerd Olympics.

I’ve also gotten tips from insiders about some other very promising films (that I haven’t seen yet):

CORN ISLAND: Reportedly transcendent Georgian drama.
FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON: Hungarian comedy.
GUARD DOG: dark and violent Peruvian thriller. US premiere.
MILWAUKEE: US indie sex and relationship comedy. World premiere.
THREE WINDOWS AND A HANGING: Searing Kosovan drama.

Take a look at the program and the passes and tickets. (If you want to support Silicon Valley’s most important cinema event while skipping the lines, the $100 donation for Express Line Access is an awesome deal.) You can download the Festival Guide from this page.