photo courtesy of Visions du Réel 2009

Nyon film festival 2009

by Jillian Hudson

The very essence of waiting and wanting seep through the screen in Bettina Haasen’s, “Hotel Sahara.” Heart-stopping cinematography coupled with a haunting soundtrack made this a film to remember. Haasen gives a voice to the dreams and desires of Africans in the westernmost point in Mauritania where they wait to attempt an illegal crossing to Spain by sea.

The film exposes the desires of people who, by merely following their dreams, feel they can never go home. As they speak of their reasons for wanting to find a way into Europe we see sadness in their eyes for having left behind everyone that they know and love. They exist in a sort of purgatory where the laws of the land won’t allow them to go forward and their sense of pride and responsibility for their family won’t allow them to go back.

They are the forgotten people on the outside quietly looking in. They are waiting for their chance to live the life that everyone seems to be allowed, except them. The film seems to subtly pose the question: “What makes their dreams and ambitions worth less than everyone else’s?”

see Visions du réel

Jared Bloch

In “C’est Notre Histoire,” the filmmaker Frank Wimart retraces the trajectory of his absentee father’s life, beginning from the younger Wimart’s 30th year to the moment his father, Jean-Pierre literally sailed away from the family 25 years before.  As Wimart unwravels his father’s convoluted past, he begins to discover if not to understand, the injuries that plagued Jean-Pierre and made him capable of abandoning his wife and young child.

Frank’s journey begins in France, where his parents grew up, and were married, before emigrating to Canada. Wimart establishes himself as a skilled interviewer early on in the movie, drawing candid comments and unedited diatribes from his paternal grandmother and uncle, both fully aware of the documentary unfolding around them. Even while his grandmother is recounting the pain and suffering of being disowned by Frank’s father, however, cracks begin to appear in this family history.

As Frank soon learns, his father was effectively orphaned three times over: his father’s father was killed before the elder Wimart was born, at which point Frank’s grandmother left his father in the care of a godmother, who subsequently returned the boy at age 5 to his biological mother.

During a summer visit to her hometown in Brittany, Frank’s mother confides, “He [Frank's father] told me he couldn’t teach you what hadn’t been taught to him.” But that is not an excuse not to break the cycles that hurt you, she adds.  “You divorce your spouse, not your child, you don’t do that.”

In fact, Jean-Pierre has apparently divorced himself from love, and this is the painful realization Mr. Wimart is left with. Having tracked down, befriended, and learned something of his estranged father, Frank bids him farewell at the airport, unsure of what words to say, and with Jeanne-Pierre literally incapable of uttering any words of endearment.

There are many reasons to appreciate “C’est Notre Histoire,” not the least of which is a keen sense for cinematography, and Mr. Wimart’s skill at letting the protagonists tell their own story. At 85 minutes, however, the introspection becomes belabored and some of the otherwise revealing interactions become quaint.  Still, as Frank’s mother comments, pain inflicted by those we love is not an excuse to ignore self-reflection or to pursue self-improvement, and in this sense Wimart’s film is a stunning success.

See Visions du Réel Film Festival for more information about this film.

Jared Bloch

The sound of dogs barking throughout sets the tone for this bleak film by Mathias Montavon and Marianne Thivillier.  A bombed out or otherwise disintegrated Georgian infrastructure in a nameless city, serves as backdrop for the poetic text provided by Thivillier via a narrative voice.

Amazingly, according to Thivillier, the text was largely the product of spontaneous musings on the themes of war and destruction and was not written specifically as a counterpart to the imagery in the film, which is at least as bleak as the text. The dog howls add perfectly to the narrative depicting human regression to a feral state.

The video footage for the film is based almost entirely on images of live mannequins, petrified humans arranged or captured amidst the rubble of destroyed factories and urban landscape. The images depicting the breakdown of civilization are all the more unnerving juxtaposed with the beautiful human forms, frozen as if in death. The one exception is a shot of three wildamen at rest outside, one delousing another, when suddenly they are frightened and run off.

This paradox sat heavy on my mind long after viewing. As a viewer, I expected to see the dead and deathlike images in these apocalyptic surroundings, not animals living amidst the debris, much-less human animals.  “Most of the inhabitants have left, but a handful of us will stay. . .wild like the dogs who will take over the town,” intones the narrator.

To the audience,  the fact of living, not of dying in these conditions, may be the more disturbing.

For more information see the Visions du Réel Film Festival website.

photo, courtesy of Visions du Réel 2009

Nyon film festival 2009

by Jillian Hudson

“Spaghetti alle Vongole” was an excellent first attempt for director Lila Ribi.  The camera captures her father’s severe depression and his difficulty in communicating with his daughter. Ribi manages to convey her feelings of disappointment and sadness at the lack of a father during her childhood as well as her desperation to establish a relationship with him now.

The sadness and the frustration are palpable in the intimate scenes in her father’s kitchen where it’s just a girl asking her father to let her in to his life. It was a very brave move for Ribi to take on a project that hit so close to home. If her father had been willing she could have taken the story even further.

The only downside of the film is the composition of the scenes. The camera is often oddly placed, framing the scene almost uncomfortably. The shots are unstable which adds an air of home video, but at the same time it creates a feeling of sea sickness that detracts from the strength of the dialogue.

If this film is a taste of what’s to come I am looking forward to seeing Lila Ribi’s next project.

see Visions du réel

photo courtesy of Visions du Réel 2009

Nyon film festival 2009

by Jillian Hudson

Wang Hao’s “Pediatrics Department” raises many interesting questions abut Chinese public hospitals and the medical system as a whole. Throughout the two hours that Hao allows us look into the professional lives of the doctors and nurses of the pediatric unit the audience has a chance to relate to the characters and sympathize with their troubles.

Unfortunately the film is an overly long tirade of the characters’ struggles with unfair salary practices and their disillusion with the system. The majority of the scenes are staff meetings and angry phone calls between the director of the department and management. The recurring themes were the parents’  inability or unwillingness to pay for their children’s treatment and the hospital’s inability or unwillingness to pay for their staff’s services.

Overall the film is a successful social portrait, with an honest view of the struggles of health care providers. However, the passion that can draw viewers into a world very foreign from their own is lacking in “Pediatrics Department.” The subject could easily have been conveyed in half the time it took to reach the end of what felt like a very long staff meeting that neither the doctors nor the audience wanted to be stuck in.

see Visions du réel

Jared Bloch

Sergiy Bukovsky’s, “The Living,” is a 75 minute indictment of the methodological impoverishment and starvation imposed on Ukrainian “kulaks” by the Soviet State in the 1930′s.

The film presents a chronological accounting, via diplomatic letters, of the excruciatingly purposeful suffering inflicted on Ukranian peasants, in the form of farm collectivization.

"I'm afraid to remember those times". Photo courtesy of Visions du Réel Film Festival

The anger and sadness in the faces of those who lived through this tragedy is almost unbearable to look at as they describe in minute detail their ordeal. “I’m afraid to think about, let alone remember those times,” one interviewee tells the camera.

Bukovsky’s narrative tends towards dry in its presenation of historical letters, however the film is well worth seeing if only to appreciate the cache of historical memory provided through first hand accounts from what must be octogenarian Ukrainian citizens.

For further information on this and other Stalinist era “purges”, see Martin Amis’ book, “Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million“. See also,Current Politics in Ukraine Website.

Visions du Réel Film Festival website.

photo, courtesy of Visions du Réel 2009

Nyon film festival 2009

by Jillian Hudson

Yu Guangyi’s documentary “Survival Song” is a shockingly candid view into the lives of a Chinese working class family who has been forced to live in poverty and misery in the name of a new and modern China.

The main character, Liao Han, is a 47-year-old man with a college education who lost his job as a forest warden, his home, and his land when the government decided to create a reservoir in place of the forest. He received no compensation for these losses and moved into an abandoned shed in the mountainous region of Changbai. This highly skilled forestry expert spends his days herding goats and poaching boars in order to survive and to provide for his family.

The film is a very honest portrayal of the family’s struggle to make the best of a hopeless situation. The characters are not made out to be heroic and the situation is far from poetic. There is little optimism for a brighter future and a great deal of resentment towards the government oozes between the lines. The viewer really feels the quiet drudgery of the day-to-day lives of these people who live on the fringes of society.

There is comic relief in this rather dark and desperate film in the form of Liao’s brother Xiao. Xiao loves to sing and dance in the filth of his shed behind his brother’s home and to spy on his brother’s wife while she uses the outhouse. He’s not a happy character, but he is full of odd behavior and random outbursts of joy.

Overall I found “Survival Song” to be a successful look into the intimacy of a family forgotten by its country and grasping to remain human in an inhumane world.

Visions du réel, Nyon documentary film festival, web site

photo provided by Visions du Reel 2009

Nyon film festival 2009

by Jillian Hudson

“Cash and Marry” is the humorous portrayal of a man’s search for an EU (European Union) bride at all costs. Director and main character Georgiev Atanas calls upon his Bosnian friend Marko who is currently living in Vienna, Austria to help him find a bride who will give him papers to live and work in the EU.

The overall style of the film is witty and charming which keeps the tone light and easy even while discussing the serious subject of a paper or “white marriage.” This is largely thanks to the charisma of Marko and his straightforward approach to finding a suitable and willing woman to marry his friend. The camera crew follows the two men around town as they hand out fliers to potential brides until they find one who is willing to cooperate with them. There is also the underlying thread of love and the discussion of the different reasons why anybody gets married, let alone illegal immigrants.

This is a social study of the differences between the east and the west of Europe and the lengths people will go to in order to change the course of their lives, definitely worth the audience’s time.

Visions du réel, Nyon documentary film festival, web site

Jared Bloch

Danny Chanoch, courtesy of Visions du Réel Film Festival

Moshe Zimmerman’s, Pizza in Auschwitz is a disturbingly beautiful treatise on what human beings make of pain and suffering, how human beings have the capacity to transform horror into something altogether comprehensible.

Born in Lithuania, Danny Chanoch is a holocaust survivor and Isreali citizen. He has convinced his two adult children to visit his childhood home and the sites of his multiple incarcerations in Poland. The trip for the elder Chanoch is a chance to reclaim a childhood which, as his daughter offers in one of many heated family discussions along the way, was stolen from him in the most cruel way.

Zimmerman, who wrote and directed the script, collaborates with Chanoch’s daughter, Miri, to provide an agile narrative.  If the film is repetitive in its theme of the tension inherent in the children’s attempt to understand their father, it also provides moments of revelation, as when Miri finally concedes to her father, “Fortunately, I don’t think we can understand you.” Danny is a consummate optimist, as he points out, he didn’t have another option; “There were always people throwing themselves at the electcric fences, which I couldn’t understand, certain death was awaiting us anyway,” why the rush?

Survivors? Courtesy of Visions du Réel Film Festival

Danny’s optimism represents an incredible ode to the resilience of human beings, and a powerful expropriation of history in his claiming the former killing grounds as having been home to him.  But he is hardly an unblemished soul which he illustrates by insisting on subjecting his children to the images of suffering and dying which he experienced as a boy. His daughter, who imagined stormtroopers knocking on her door as a child, retorts, the holocaust is “too much information” for 3, 4 and 5 year olds, and concludes “I guess there is no such thing as a Holocaust Survivor.”

Visions du réel, Nyon documentary film festival, web site