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.
Nyon Film Festival 2009
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.
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.
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.
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.
photo provided by Visions du Reel 2009
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.
Nyon Film Festival 2009
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.