Director: Baz Luhrmann
Writer: F. Scott Fitzgerald (novel), Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce (Screenplay)
Studio: Warner Bros Pictures
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton, Carey Mulligan
Release: December 25, 2012

Synopsis:
A 1950s-set drama centered on the relationship between a charismatic intellectual known as “the Master” whose faith-based organization begins to catch on in America, and a young drifter who becomes his right-hand man.

“The Master”
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson
Stars: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams
Release: Oct 12, 2012

Bond’s loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to haunt her. As MI6 comes under attack, 007 must track down and destroy the threat, no matter how personal the cost.

ABOUT THE FILM

Studio: Focus Features
Release: In Select Cities May 25
Starring: Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Jared Gilman, Kaya Hayward
Directed By: Wes Anderson
Written By: Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola

Synopsis:
“Moonrise Kingdom” is the new movie directed by two-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Wes Anderson (“The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Rushmore”).

Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, “Moonrise Kingdom” tells the story of two 12-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore – and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in every which way. Bruce Willis plays the local sheriff, Captain Sharp. Edward Norton is a Khaki Scout troop leader, Scout Master Ward. Bill Murray and Frances McDormand portray the young girl’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Bob Balaban; and introduces Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as Sam and Suzy, the boy and girl.

PRIZES
Two (2) winners will receive:

· T-Shirt

· Patches (set of two)

· Cooler

· Canteen

· Soundtrack

(Prizing values: $46.99)

Prizing provided by Focus Features

HOW TO ENTER

If you want one of these great prize packs, it’s a safe bet you’re a Wes Anderson fanatic. Tell us why. Is it the creative set design? The dysfunctional family relationships? The quirky humor? Give us your answer in the comments section below, via Twitter, or by visiting our Facebook page and posting under the “Moonrise Kingdom” post. Two winners will be chosen from all entries received by Saturday, May 26, 11:59 pm Eastern.

OFFICIAL TRAILER

Link Up!

Official website http://www.moonrisekingdom.com/#home

Facebook http://www.facebook.com/MoonriseKingdom

YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/moonrisekingdommovie

Twitter Follow @FocusFeatures on Twitter! Be sure to use #MoonriseKingdom when tweeting about the film

Aki Kaurismäki is one of those directors whose work is impossible to confuse with anyone else’s. Certainly, his style could be compared to Béla Tarr’s in the somberly staged performance of the actors. The Hungarian master’s work is more stately in its pace, though, with a blanket of chiaroscuro drawn across every frame. Kaurismäki’s image, by contrast, is bathed in a white light that can be unforgiving. The speed of his films mirrors the pace of everyday life in a small community, rather than the shifting of continents evoked by Tarr’s films. However slow Tarr’s speed, his camera tends towards perpetual motion, like the planets, while Kaurismäki often keeps his camera fixed to record his actors in tableaux, motionless as portrait paintings.

At the other end of the scale, Kaurismäki’s style may have inspired the French comedy “La Fée” (The Fairy), similarly stark in its lighting. Like Kaurismäki, directors Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon favor patches of bright primary colors, and cast actors with interesting faces rather than beautiful ones, with a talent for deadpan. Being a comedy, though, “La Fée” equally evokes the gangly caricature of a cartoon such as Popeye, whereas Kaurismäki, even when incorporating comedy, protects his characters’ dignity.

“Le Havre”, Kaurismäki’s most recent film, is set in the titular coastal city of north-west France. When an employee at the port hears a baby crying inside a container, paramedics and a counter-terrorist team stand by as the huge metal box is opened. The armed officers come off as absurdly optimistic, prepared for a pack of vigorous young men to spring from the container. The paramedics, meanwhile, anticipate the worst: a box of dead bodies. The two teams could be archetypes of the diametrically opposed reactions to asylum seekers: reject or protect.

Neither group’s worst-case scenario is realized: the door swings open to reveal a weary cross-section of humanity: young and old, men and women, fat and thin. Only a young boy, Idrisssa, has enough energy to escape. As he runs through a narrow crack between the containers, one of the officers raises his rifle, but the police inspector intervenes, saying, ‘he’s only a child’. As the forces of order scour Le Havre for the escaped migrant, the police inspector seems like an Inspector Javert, implacably pursuing a crime of self-preservation. But his initial protective gesture towards Idrissa already hints at his softer side. The only real villain in the film is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in a cameo.

With its focus on illegal migration, “Le Havre” treats a pressing contemporary theme. At the same time, it seeks to shape the audience’s perspective through a provocative comparison with the past. In Le Havre, Idrissa is protected by a working-class community strongly reminiscent of those in the 1930s films of Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir, from their solidarity down to their costumes. An old shoeshine named Marcel Marx gives Idrissa food and cash and is soon hiding the little boy his own house. When Marcel goes on a trip to find one of Idrissa’s relatives, he leaves the boy with the woman who runs the bakery across the street. The neighborhood grocer, previously exasperated by Marcel’s endless tab, immediately offers his excess stock when he learns that Marcel has an extra mouth to feed.

By evoking cinema from the eve of World War II, Kaurismäki seems to draw a comparison between a present-day neighborhood rallying together to protect an innocent and vulnerable little boy, and those who hid their Jewish friends to stop them being deported and murdered in 1930s and 40s. The common thread linking the two situations is that of individuals defying unjust laws in support of their own sense of what is right. Just as there were informants in wartime, so too in present-day Le Havre there is a malicious neighbor (complete with black gloves) who observes the comings-and-goings in the street and reports his suspicions to the police.

There is another apparent allusion to World War II in the characters’ names, most notably the French first name and German surname of Marcel Marx, who is married to a German woman, Arletty, an iconic reference to classic French cinema. If Kaurismäki were using the Second World War as a simple trope, there would have been a clear division of French names for good characters and German names for bad ones. By combining French and German in the film’s protagonists, Kaurismäki reflects a change in attitude that needs to take place in order to address immigration more compassionately: rather than casting the foreigner as the villain, we need to recognize that most of us have a hybrid background. More importantly, though, we need to overcome a fixation on ethnic and national divisions in order to focus on the underlying humanity that unites us.

“Extraterrestrial” is a movie I’ve been excited about for a while, in part because of how it was marketed – the small, almost invisible glimpses of the alien ships in the posters, and the creative viral marketing aspect to it all. Later on, when it was revealed to be something of a comedy, with a smirking Spaniard looking out and holding a glowing tennis ball, everyone cocked their eyebrows, and wondered just what this thing was going to turn out to be.

It’s a slighter film than one would initially expect, being more dependent on the inter-dynamics of the three people and their ever-revolving love triangle at the heart of it than on any kind of spectacle that you would expect from an alien invasion movie, but that’s not particularly a bad thing. There’s much to appreciate with this film, if you’re geared in for what it’s putting out. Make no mistake, this is not a movie that poses any questions or at least any intriguing questions about the notion of alien life, and while things do blow up and explode, it’s mostly incidental.

The aliens make no appearance in the film.

I’m making a big deal out of this not because it’s any kind of flaw in the film as it stands, but because I’ve heard many complaints about the movie “not being what it sold itself as,” so lets get that out in the open: it isn’t that type of movie. In fact, for most of the movie, the alien invasion is a backdrop against which this darkly humorous human drama plays out, with the occasional tropes of the genre, like the Body Snatcher, being transformed into fodder for it – it’s a romantic comedy reduced down to its barest elements, without music or any particular artifice except that of the screen: two guys and a girl in an apartment together, and complications ensue. To elaborate, designer Julio finds himself trapped in the same apartment as the woman he’d slept with the night previously, Julia, and her husband, as a flying saucer takes root over their city, while across the street, a shrewd and vindictive neighbor with an eye for the woman waits for any opportunity to lay his claim. Because of the invasion, it seems at times as if they’re the only four people in Spain, making their awkward situation one that’s almost impossible to escape, and as things become increasingly more over the top and caricatured outside of the apartment, far harder to deal with. With all other sources of communications dead, the woman and the man who’ve just met have only their thoughts and their bodies to keep them company.

Nacho Vigalondo is a director who’s work I’ve been hearing about for a while, with his previous feature “Timecrimes” being a favorite in the type of hoity-toity film circles I travel in, but have thus far managed to unconsciously avoid. Oh, what a mistake I’ve made. Here is a director who is explicitly a Spaniard in sensibility, in the brash and broad make up of his characters and their uniquely real, pock-marked faces, and the idiosyncratic, economical sense of pacing and framing that seem to define the cinema of Spain. At the same time, though, there is a real, implicit understanding of human commonality and the foibles of relationships, which is thin ice to tread because it’s so easy to mis-handle and overcook.

Even with the conceit of the alien invasion and the inevitably Spanish sense of humor that overtakes the film not a little, particularly in its final half-hour with the appearance of a balsa-wood teacup float battle-tank trundling down the empty city street, there’s still something very tangible here. In the way that Julia rolls over and asks Julio nonchalantly, “Want to have sex again?” after pining over her husband for a moment. In the way that none of the characters are idealized – none of them would ever be the smartest or the most honest or the most charming in the room. In the awkward, harsh words whispered under the breath out of spite to which no one pays attention. Because of all this, when the film does come to its inevitable “declaration of true love” conclusion, it has a bit more weight and heft than most other romantic films. As does most of the rest of the film, by consequence.

See, Hollywood? All it took was an alien invasion to wring something honest out of a romantic comedy. That was the missing element all along, you fools!

****

“Bindlestiffs”
Director: Andrew Edison
Writers: Andrew Edison, Luke Loftin
Starring: John Karna, Luke Loftin and Andrew Edison

Andrew Edison’s grungy “Bindlestiffs” is an interesting experiment, filmed over a period of two years by high school friends high on a flux of Kevin Smith and the more recent spate of gross-out comedies. It has a “do this because it’s funny, and we’ll cobble it into something later” feel, something the barely pubescent director acknowledged as a sentiment in the Q & A afterward. But, it’s not a particularly pleasant film to watch, because it’s kind of ugly and garish to look at thanks to its use of hand-held camcorders and redundant sense of rhythm and pacing in terms of editing. It’s a movie that inspires laughs, at least at the beginning, up until about the twenty minute mark when you realize it has a pretty repetitive and shallow sense of humor – juvenile in the negative sense, something that really does feel like it was written by a pair of high schoolers — which it was. Mr. Edison has accomplished more than I ever did when I was in high school, though, so what do I know, right?

****

“Quick”
Director: Beom-gu Cho
Writers: Soo-jin Park, Youn Jk, Beom-gu Cho
Starring: Min-ki Lee, Ye-won Kang, In-kwon Kim

It was probably the only thing that we saw in Dallas that could conceivably be called an action film, and Cho Beom-gu’s bombastic, zany spurt of energy, “Quick,” is a lot of breezy, enjoyable fun. Like most Korean action films, it abounds with all sorts of disparate tropes and tones bumping up against each other, at one moment allowing us the small pleasure of a good, old fashioned trashcan-on-the-head pratfall and the next sending us headlong into one of the many visceral chase sequences.

It has an initial conceit that reminds one a lot of the “Crank” movies, which were themselves derivative of Korean cinema and video-games – that of finding out that some days you literally can’t get rid of a bomb when it’s implanted in a motorcycle helmet that’s glued to your face – where the characters all move from one set-piece to another under a ticking clock that resets once they’ve obtained their objective, with a repetitive set of goals and obstacles every time around. But, what saves the movie and what makes it so much more enjoyable for me than Neveldine and Taylor’s silly pieces of excess is Beom-gu’s propensity for, and seemingly unbridled reserve of, visual humor. This film is very much a two hour long Benny Hill sketch on a motorcycle, with all that that entails. Toward the end, it suddenly has a shift in tone veering harshly into tragedy and self-sacrifice that, though jarring, is like the best Korean action cinema, and forces us to realign our moral acquisition of the whole of the events of the film beforehand. Aside from that, it is by no means a serious film, and it lets you know that, and would probably laugh at you and spit on your shirt if it heard you try to dignify it. But, it has a strong, fist pumping effect on the audience, and is one of only two films this time around where I heard someone shout out, “Yeah! Alright!” at the screen. That, by itself, is serious stuff.

****

“Robocop” (25th Anniversary Screening)
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Writers: Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner
Starrng: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Dan O’Herlihy

Since more than enough has already been said about Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic, I’m not even going to try to add in another word edgewise to that long discussion, except to say that I agree with one film critic in particular when he called it “. . .one of the best science fiction films since ‘Metropolis’.” Instead, I’d like to turn my attention more toward the screening itself, and what followed.

The screening took place in Dallas’ newly renovated Texas Theater, which I’d heard a lot about but, despite living here for about four and a half years in a row, had never actually been to. It’s a place full of nostalgia, and harkens back to a time that wasn’t actually all that long ago when going to the movies was an event, a night out, and it wasn’t at all disgraceful to actually make a date out of it.

Old, hand-painted portraits line the adobe walls, reproductions of old EC Comic book covers that become delightfully garish in the low, warm lighting of the place. There are bookshelves full of tomes old and new about cinematography and lighting, and plush, comfy couches to sit back and read them on. Restored arcade games from the early eighties occupy the downstairs lobby, and they sell film stock and Mondo posters for “8 1/2″ and “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” This is the film critic’s movie theater, because, unlike a place like the contemporary, clean Angelika on Mockingbird, or the compact, velvet Magnolia in Uptown, it feels like it has a real, palpable history running through it and rising up from the carpet.

There’s one screen in the theater, an auditorium itself continues the bygone impression – the seats are small and red and without cup-holders. There are fans on the lowered portion of the ceiling, which opens out onto a floor made for discussions and having a film shown right behind an actor or a director’s head as they point out the idiosyncrasies of the production. The screening itself was one of those unique, insular experiences you get when you cram about two hundred people in the same room, who’ve all seen the same movie, and know all the lines and the jokes. There was a feeling of real, silent fan camaraderie through the whole thing, and I was right there laughing along with them. My girlfriend, however, hadn’t seen the film before and couldn’t quite understand why we were busting a gut when poor Kenny got his innards blown out by ED-209, or “Bitches leave.”

Later in the night, when we had an impromptu sit-down talk with the two writers and the producer of the film at the after-party at the Keller, upon telling them this, they didn’t quite know what to say. The print of the film itself, which we were told was an original 35mm copy, looked more than a little ratty and dirty, full of cigarette burns and pock-marks, and I suspect it probably would’ve been more becoming of the event if they’d used one of the various restored editions. But, they wanted the impact of saying they’d gotten one of the original prints, I suppose. After the screening, all three of them plus Peter Weller came out and hatched a Q&A session, where they talked about the various iterations of the screenplay that were in development all throughout the early eighties, it’s initial inspirations, and the strange snakelike dance movements that were almost planned for Robocop but were dropped at the last minute.

This Q&A reiterated to me something that, having met him a few times now, I’ve come to know quite well – Peter Weller doesn’t really seem to enjoy doing these things, and doesn’t much like any of his fans. He brusquely talks over them, he chides them and waves them off dismissively, and he’s generally not a very enjoyable personality. It’s a story of legacy between my brother and I, the time we managed to get him personally angry at us because we were in the same Starbucks as him and Elvis Mitchell, about six months ago. This time, neither of us said a word to him, but it was an interesting thing to just sit back and watch, and surprisingly we weren’t alone in this impression, having it repeated back to us by a girl who’s question he just plain avoided laughingly. Damn, Robocop.

The after-party for the event took place at the Keller, and it was here that I had a chance to actually talk informally about films with Michael Miner and Jon Davison. Here are two men so full of filmmaking wisdom, knowledge and wine that it was a pity I didn’t record or at least transcribe the whole thing, because it was an intensely interesting conversation. On the subject of first time directors, he noted that a lot of them made the mistake of trying to do too much, formally – something on which we agreed upon.

“Mainly what you need to worry about is coverage, which is something you’ll discover pretty early on if you’ve never directed anything. If you have a good script, a good crew and good actors, your main concern should just be getting them on camera,” Davison said. “A lot of younger directors say they’re tired of the shot/reverse shot dynamic to most conversational scenes, but there’s a reason they exist, rhythmically.”

He’d also met one of my favorite filmmakers, George Miller, and had worked with him several times when he made his few ventures into America in the eighties – here I was, a writer who’d made my name on the internet with two essays dissecting Miller’s dancing penguin movies, and here was another guy who shared very much the same thoughts as I had when I wrote them, without having ever read it. We both agreed that “Happy Feet” was an under-appreciated film that brought a lot to contemporary, mainstream animation, but that it’ll be good to see him get involved with real actors again. We then had a hearty laugh, and all went our separate ways. It was a good night.

When you think of cinema, Turin may not be the first city that comes to mind. While Paris, a city famed for its cinephilia, has its cinemathèque at Bercy, somewhat off the beaten path for tourists, Turin makes sure almost every visitor experiences cinema history: its Museo Nazionale del Cinema in situated right inside the city’s most famous landmark, the Mole Antonelliana. This is a building which distinguishes Turin’s skyline, looking like a giant church steeple. In fact, the building used to be a synagogue, and it was built high in order to compensate for the small plot of land available. Like most towering landmarks, the Mole Antonelliana is a magnet for tourists who want to go up: thankfully, instead of a gruelling spiral staircase, there is a glass elevator which whisks you to the top—the hard part is waiting in line, sometimes up to an hour, as the elevator takes a maximum of 10 people at a time. The view from the top of the Mole is enjoyable for a few minutes, but the museum inside has enough to keep visitors happy for hours.

The cinema museum has four floors, plus a temporary exhibition space around the walls inside the spire, which visitors can enjoy by walking along a gently spiralling ramp with a dizzying perspective on the main exhibition space below. In many ways, Turin’s cinema museum is like so many others across Europe: it tells the same history of cinema they all do, illustrated by displays of historical artefacts: from shadow puppets, magic lanterns, and zoetropes to scripts, costumes and film posters. Where Turin’s cinema museum differs is in the quantity of these artefacts, and of the degree of interactivity in their display.

The first floor of the museum traces cinema’s history from its beginnings. Like other cinema museums, Turin’s displays many of its artefacts in glass cases, but it also sets many of them in motion. When you first walk inside, jointed shadow puppets come to life against a white sheet, giving a sense of their original magic. Alongside historic lithographs of adults entertaining children by using their hands to make animal shadows, a diagram on the wall shows visitors how to create their own rabbits, squirrels and human profiles. Old magic lanterns are plugged in, so that visitors can see exactly what kind of images this old technology actually created and the sort of motion it could simulate: shadows moving across a churchyard, a frenetically bowing devil, or fireworks on a London skyline. Not content to simply display stereoscopic postcards alongside the devices required to appreciate them, the museum has an entire room where visitors can peer inside stereoscopic boxes, or look through a binocular viewfinder and press a button to flip through a series of stereoscopic views of Edwardian weddings, postcards of old Turin and even nude women (the last in a red-curtained booth labelled ‘adults only’).

While the first floor of the exhibition is fun, the displays on the second floor are more like an amusement park. Film clips are screened inside appropriately themed spaces, including a reproduction of the famous Café Torino, a scientific laboratory, a 1950s living room, a space capsule and a saloon. The places to sit or lie to view these clips are also playful: a bed, a toilet or, in the centre of the exhibition space, dozens of red plush sun loungers with speakers in the headrests. Regular cinemas should really introduce the last type of seat: considerations of space aside, there’s no reason why we need to sit bolt upright to enjoy a film….

Like the first floor, the third floor is more educational, taking visitors through every level of filmmaking, from script and budget to costumes and sets. This section is illustrated mainly by production stills from film history, with an approximately equal representation of Italian and Hollywood cinema. Here too, though, the museum has paid attention to interactivity, allowing visitors to step inside a simulated director’s office, or watch themselves taking part in a special effect on a TV screen, which makes it look like they are falling down a hole.

Perhaps the best part of the entire exhibition, though, is the least interactive one: the fourth floor’s beautiful selection of world cinema posters from the 1920s to the 1990s: Nosferatu, Jules et Jim, To Catch a Thief, Riso Amaro, Il Gattopardo… The overwhelming impression here is that movie posters were most artistic between the 1920s and 1960s: later posters just aren’t as striking in their design, or entrancing in their effect.

Turin’s cinema museum is billed as kid-friendly, but it is of equal interest for serious film lovers, who might do well to leave the kids at home: while fun, the exhibits won’t keep the little ones entertained long enough for the adults to appreciate everything.

For visitor information, and to learn more about current exhibitions, consult the web site of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

“Cinema Six” is the definition of average, which is strange considering it was probably the most pumped film at the festival. You couldn’t walk an inch in the press lounge without stepping on one of their little yellow adverts. To begin with, it’s obviously Mark Potts’ first film, as narratively, it’s derivative of so many other, better, things. A lot of the emotional ennui that the filmmakers are trying to convey about working at a movie theater, particularly one that feels so run down and little visited – something that, yes, I can currently attest to as a popcorn pusher in my spare time – are culled from “Clerks” in a way that’s a little too far in the direction of laziness rather than homage. Its attempts at male conversation and camaraderie are part and parcel of the produce of Judd Apatow and his ilk – a lot of “fucks” and a lot of empty vulgarity about balls that doesn’t really feel natural, even though the film makes a great attempt at putting that impression forward.

Yet, while superficially it looks like a lovechild of the aforementioned — those movies at least made an effort to have an arc, to tell a genuine story about disaffected twenty-somethings who come to some real conclusion about their lives through trial and error — “Cinema Six” ultimately feels like a big, floppy let-down. The ending arrives suddenly and the most interesting moments, which should have comprised the better part of the narrative, happen in only the last few scenes. It feels like the director gathered a crew of people and rented out a movie theater and just let them goof off for a while with the camera rolling, and then realized he was making a movie and scrambled to fashion some kind of coherence out of the chaos. Yes, goofing off is what we do most of the time behind the concession counter. It’s not an exciting job. But, that don’t make for good cinema. Six.

****

“Compliance”
Director: Craig Zobel
Writer: Craig Zobel
Starring: Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker and Pat Healy

Craig Zobel’s “Compliance” was among the strangest screenings I’ve been to in my four and a half years writing semi-professionally. There was such a feeling of tension in the air – people were audibly responding to the screen in full sentences, and there were moments where it almost came to blows, as one gawky teenager continued to laugh in a room full of pin-drop silence until the whole theater rose up and intimidated him into shutting the hell up. This is perhaps the strongest compliment an audience can give a film intended to provoke intense reactions.

Shot in a claustrophobic and harried fashion, the film depicts the true story of the 2004 serial prank caller who posed as a policeman, made a mockery of the manager of a McDonald’s and sexually abused a young girl. The story is told with such a sharp sense of narrative precision that by the end, the rest of my party was asking me (the only guy who’d followed the story when it happened) just how true it was, because so much of it seems outside the realm of possibility. But, yes, this happened, and it’s to the film’s credit that it refuses to give the audience any distance from the events it portrays, because it forces us to watch the whole thing spiral out of control not as a quiet spectator but as an involved assailant, leaving us breathless because – up until the final twenty minutes – we’re refused exit from that manager’s office, and we’re left questioning after just where exactly it all went wrong. The answer is not in a specific point in the narrative, but in the compliant (haha!) minds of the people, all the people, involved. It’s an effective film made up of uncomfortable people not necessarily being forced into an uncomfortable situation, but going along with it of their own volition and – well, very human stupidity. And, that’s the point, and that’s why it’s so affecting, something the film knows and acknowledges with the last coda against black before going to credits: the events reenacted here happened seventy times in the course of a year. It wasn’t just a fluke of happenstance, and it’s not at all surprising to me to learn that this is being called the most divisive film out of Sundance.

But, to be fair, the manager and company who were at the heart of the incident don’t seem like the brightest people. There was a line that the filmmakers surprisingly didn’t keep from the original proceedings that would’ve only added to this subtext, from the girl who’s life was turned into a shambles at the heart of it all, when she was questioned as to why she even when along with it in the first place rather than raise ire and storm out of the restaurant. She said something in
response that was similar to: “I was raised in a house where you did what you were told, without question. So, that’s what I did.” With this soundbite in mind, the film could also be a pretty damned funny black comedy on the nature of blind acceptance – and, I could understand why that little fuck in the row in front of me couldn’t stop laughing.

****

“Faith, Love and Whiskey”
Director: Kristina Nikolova
Writers: Kristina Nikolova, Paul Dalio
Starring: Yavor Baharov, Lidia Indjova and John Keabler

Kristina Nikolova’s surprising and refreshing “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is a film my brother and I picked out of the festival book on a whim, partially because it felt like one of the notable movies of the festival and that it probably would do well to cover it in some measure or another.

At the outset, I had no real interest in seeing it, because the way it was being promoted was on all sides very much that of a conventional, empowering chick-flick. Indeed, even the words of the promoter at the beginning of the screening said as much, because it boiled down to, “you’re about to see a great film about women! And Bulgaria! And women in Bulgaria!”

But, a man can be wrong – “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is probably my favorite of the feature length films that I saw at the festival, this year. Not a little of that is due to it feeling like the only truly independent film at the festival, the only one out of the crop that I saw that made no real concessions toward the type of bland and disposable main-stream that so many of the others were aiming for.

It’s uncomfortably raw and real, and warm. It’s a such a beautifully naturalistic, unconventionally raw examination of relationships, of femininity and masculinity, combined with a photographer’s eye toward the landscape of Bulgaria, a strange and almost magical combination of the urban and the rural seeping into each other, where the boundaries are never defined between either.

It would really be pointless to talk about what “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is about in a narrative sense, because at its real core its about simple human things expressed with a feeling of great, palpable humanity and lyrical grace, and with surprisingly little in the way of dialogue. Most of what’s here is made known through a sort of constant visual collage of snippets – eyes, faces. Expressions. Winding roads. Glances. Glass bottles on a window sill, growing ever bigger. When there are words spoken, they’re either hushed tones of reluctant acceptance given pin-drop weight by their emotional importance to a scene or drowned out by the blaring music of the sweaty night-clubs that make up a good portion of the film’s background.

So much of this goes into what the film does so well, which is make a film that is actually “universal,” a buzzword that so many films make a claim for, by dealing in emotions and feelings rather than the artifice of genre, something I saw too many other films fall before than I’d like, this festival. That feeling of being romantically trapped, and wanting a last fling before its all concretized, and in that old dilemma it finds something more personal and complicated, being stuck between the comforts of a familiar and juvenile fling, or the burgeoning adulthood that marriage promises, and the feeling of hidden guilt when this marriage is crowed about by family in front of the other man’s face. The euphoria that comes with a reconciled love, and the unabashed shame when it turns out to be merely a temporary thing, and you end up being the one who has to leave the room. Days drift by, more and more until reality suddenly returns to returns the main character Neli back to the world she’s resigned herself to – but, just how reluctantly, we’re never made clear.

****

For more information on The 2012 Dallas International Film Festival go here.

As a freelance film critic looking to get involved with film festivals, I feared that talks at the International Film Festival Summit might be too specialised for me. True, I was one of only two film critics in a room of about 40 people, many of whom had vast experience in founding, financing, organising and programming film festivals: about half gave keynote addresses or participated in panels to share their knowledge. In-depth knowledge of a subject can make it difficult to talk about it without going into the kind of detail that will bore the uninitiated or blind them with science. Yet most of what these highly knowledgeable speakers had to say was completely accessible to the novice. The name ‘summit’ also evokes a vast, potentially intimidating gathering of people, but this summit was a personal and welcoming affair, hosted in a cosy meeting room at the Hotel du Louvre, right in the middle of Paris’s first arrondissement.

Over two days, I listened to the advice and opinions of experienced professionals covering every key area of running a film festival, including programming, financing, film markets, new technology, and originality. The speakers were connected with a range of (mainly European) festivals, big and small: Venice, Cannes, Moscow, Paris Cinema, Stockholm, Oldenburg, the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, the Deauville American Film Festival and the European Independent Film Festival. There were special guest speakers such as Chris Fujiwara, Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Axel Brücker, founder of the Trailer Museum. Michel Hazanavicius also made an appearance to accept the summit’s Best Festival Film of the Year award for The Artist.

Referencing Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, Fujiwara gave an erudite address on the role of film festivals in bringing people together and developing a trans-national, universal community, one that goes beyond national identity and special interest. He made a point which may encounter some resistance in a world which leans increasingly towards individuals interacting with their personal screens: he argued that cinema must be a shared experience, and that watching a movie alone (specifically on DVD at home) fundamentally diminishes the experience. Readers are welcome to comment below regarding their feelings on the matter: is there a special pleasure to watching a DVD on your own at home, and (screen size, and sound/image quality aside), do you feel you benefit from a communal experience even if there is only a handful of other, silent people in the cinema? Do also respond to Fujiwara’s central argument: that festivals have the potential to create a universal community by drawing attention to common concerns (art, the human experience) over national boundaries and other factors which separate us from the wider world.

Fujiwara’s contribution was the most philosophical: his most concrete piece of advice was that programmers should allow the films to guide the festival’s programme, rather than seeking to impose a pre-existing vision on the festival. Other speakers focused entirely on practicalities, of which I’m going to share some of the most useful and interesting:

-Festivals should focus on full houses and good experiences.

-To appeal to a diverse audience, you should have a diverse group of people selecting films. At the same time, programmers shouldn’t just go by personal taste: a ‘bad’ film may appeal to audiences and attract media attention.

-While most festivals boast of being bigger every year, there is value in intimacy: even if you are a festival in a large city, by choosing a small neighbourhood within that city, you can create an intimate atmosphere which encourages people at the festival to talk to each other.

-Be open to new technology: making films (securely) available online can give people in the industry a chance to watch the films before the festival, so that they can focus on networking during the festival. A festival could also sell video-on-demand passes to audiences, who would then [pace Chris Fujiwara] be able to watch the festival’s films online at home (currently a challenge because of rights, however).

-Look after your guests (the ‘talent’ and those around them)—especially if they’re not paid to come to the festival.

-Look after your sponsors: while keeping in mind that sponsorship money is for the festival, not promoting the sponsors, be generous, flexible and reliable with them (e.g. offering free seats, posters, a chance to meet a favourite actor/actress).

-Have your sponsors work together to promote each other’s products (e.g. a sponsor restaurant serving the drinks of a sponsor coffee company): this is known as cross-marketing.

Finally, one of the speakers at the summit pointed out that people in different areas of the film industry (producers, distributors, festival directors, etc.) don’t understand each other’s points of view: it would be very constructive if a festival were able to put together such a diverse group of people in one room, so that each could finally understand the concerns and motivations of the others.

The International Film Festival Summit was held on April 3^rd and 4^th 2012. For more information on the programme, and future summits in other European and US cities, visit http://filmfestivalsummit.com/iffseuropeagenda.html

Hugo Dillon and Molly Ryman in "Things I Don't Understand"

Someday, everyone you know won’t exist. Tomorrow doesn’t matter until it’s today. No one makes it through life unscathed, in one way or another.

These are just a few of the lessons found in “Things I Don’t Understand,” a small indie rumination with big pretensions. In his follow up to his debut feature “…Around” (2008), director David Spaltro gets ambitious and tackles life’s essential questions: what happens when we die? why are we here? what does it mean to love? how can we accept death?

Violet is an aloof grad student hoping to discern life’s indiscernible mysteries through her study of death and beyond. Along the way she’s befriended, challenged and enlightened by a terminally ill woman and a cagey bartender, and faces the realities of adult life with her boisterous artist roommates.

As in his debut “…Around,” Spaltro again focuses on the volatile, transient period of uncertainty so commonly associated with young adulthood. These characters are on their own, several years removed from mom’s basement, yet they have neither the wisdom nor the perspective that comes with age. They’ve just begun the journey of self-discovery and existential examination that will last the rest of their lives.

Aaron Mathias and Grace Folsom, the mysterious bartender and terminally ill patient, respectively, anchor a strong supporting cast, which adds flavor and dynamics to Violet’s quest. Molly Ryman, who also starred in “…Around,” has the face of a star. Her portrayal of the intrepid, sporadically abrasive protagonist holds the entire enterprise together. She is ready for the big time.

The film, though visibly low-budget, is nevertheless technically accomplished. Small nitpicks such as a too-wide shot in the therapy sessions, the occasional acting misstep, and a dull, homogenous lighting scheme aren’t enough to overshadow its refreshing earnestness and relatively low-key approach to decidedly high-key themes.

Though he occasionally overreaches, or makes too obvious an observation, Spaltro generally handles the weighty material deftly. “Things I don’t Understand” smartly avoids the preachiness plague, and serves as the audience’s companion rather than its teacher. Too often, burgeoning writer/directors pour the bulk of their energy into the craft of filmmaking, getting bogged down in blocking, framing, lighting, etc., and neglect the emotional side of storytelling. Spaltro has sidestepped this problem and seems poised to have a big impact on indie film in the coming years.