Nisimazine Venice 2014 E-Book

Nisimazine

review

the magazine by NISI MASA - European Network of Young Cinema

VENICE ebook 1

review

Content Index

2

Nabat

32-33

Editorial

3

Line of Credit

34

Court

4-5

The President

35

Photo

6-7

Photo

36-37

Goodnight Mommy

8-9

Heaven Knows What

38-39

Theeb

10-11

Senza nessuna pietĂ

40

Belluscone - Una storia siciliana

12 - 13

Io sto con la sposa

41

La vita oscena

14 -15

In focus

42-43

Photo

16-17

Photo

44-45

These Are the Rules

18-19

Short Movies Section

46-47

Reality

20-21

La Bambina review

48-49

Bypass

22-23

La Bambina interview

50-51

Near Death Experience

24-25

Arta review

52-53

Photo

26-27

Arta interview

54-55

Jackie & Ryan

28-29

Lift you Up, In Overtime, Great Heat

56

Cymbeline

30

Castillo y el Armado, Maryam, Cams

57

Hill of Freedom

31

Credits

58 2

Editorial The 71st edition of the Venice Film Festival is finished, yet its echoes are still heard loud and clear all across the film world.

Despite the tough competition coming from across the Atlantic, which has inevitably sucked in much of the energy of the end of the summer European film festival circuit, Venice has somehow pulled an impressive show in 2014, perhaps even beyond most people’s wild expectations.

Such a phenomenon demands a deeper look and an analysis to understand how over seven decades after, an event of this nature manages to maintain itself not only relevant but, most importantly, essential.

A careful look at the program that was on display in Lido this year is all that is needed to find the surprisingly easy answer: Venice has just simply never lost its strong grip on the pulse of global film culture. I guess it takes years to develop such a keen sense, and even if some “new kids on the block” seem to have all the answers, come late August and Venice shows you once again how it is done.

You don’t believe me? Well, here are two almost conflicting reasons and film program propositions that will show you why.

Italian cinema may have lost much of the vigour of its past, but as the natural home of the region’s filmmaking efforts, this year the crowds of Lido were guided through a journey that could easily make you think that one of the traditionally most powerful film nations is back with renewed confidence.

Alongside many other examples, films such as Antonio Augugliaro, Grabiele del Grande and Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry’s On the Bride’s Side (see page 41), or Franco Maresco’ s (see page 8) go well beyond telling us much about contemporary Italy. They are the proof of a new tendency in Italian cinema and society, a converted interest in reality, no matter how painful and uncomfortable it may be, while at the same time there is still

space left for the outrageous, such as Renato di Maria’s La vita oscena (see page 18), where you can’t help but be reminiscent of Pasolini´s shocking 1970´s ventures.

The second factor that leads me to conclude Venice has its eyes wide open is its focus on what has recently been described as “the age of the weird”: a new current in global cinema dominated by surrealism and absurdity, a filmmaking wave which has traded atmosphere and emotion for narrative and experimentalism. If such a wave does exist, there were surely plenty of symptoms at this year’s Bienalle. Perhaps the most staggering example is Quentin Dupieux’s Reality (see page 20), a gloriously disturbing portrayal of an insane dream. Benoit Delipine and Gustave Kervern’s Near Death Experience is not to be ignored as well, conveying most of the attributes of the style while an odd looking Michel Houellebecq trying for two hours to kill himself on a French mountain. And last but not least, consider Arta (see page 52), a Romanian short film by Adrian Sitaru, that has as much ambition for the realistic as the insane, mixing the two with a both a pragmatical and magical touch.

Considering the length and detail of the film program of this year’s event, I could go on talking about how Venice is well aware of the growing impact of TV on contemporary narrative, or its never-ending love affair with Asian cinema, it’s recently explosive obsession with the art of documentary filmmaking, as well as many other factors.

But let’s stick to this “new” vision of Italy and the fascination for the “weird”, both extensively covered in this special edition dedicated to the prestigious Orizzonti section. Keep pondering a bit longer on this while you read the following pages produced by a series of up-and-coming critics from Italy, Hungary and Greece. Enjoy!

Fernando Vasquez

3

review

4

Court

review

Chaitanya Tamhane, India - Orizzonti

What the young director Chaitanya Tamhane brings to the big screen is a convincing exploration of the Indian judiciary, stressing all the prejudices and the law niggles where human rights are frequently dismissed.

A sewage worker is found dead in a manhole in Mumbai.

The authorities arrest an aged folk singer, accusing him of having performed a provocative song, which may have incited the worker to commit suicide. The case is debated inside the walls of a lower court, where the dreams and hopes of the people involved play out, trying to affirm their truth. On the first line, there are the lawyers (Usha Been, Vivek Gomber) and the judge (Pradeep Joshi), whose life is observed even out of the theatre of the courtroom.

The side that dazzles more in this film is the attentive analysis it makes over the state of justice and the trial system in India, going in detail and giving back to the audience all the anxious and claustrophobic atmosphere of a Mumbai court. The characters move within the perimeter of the story like pawns of a bigger design, seeking an occasion to have their voice heard and believed.

The acting is convincing, touching and it makes a huge effort in lending dignity to the characters, despite their specific flaws. Characters are indeed the real core of the action, and alone support the whole narration. They’re all personas with a solid background and a good construction of their behaviour as well as reactions, which allows them to appear on the screen as striking and real personalities, with a story to tell and rights to defend.

This aspect goes with a droughty, stylized and almost invisible photography and lighting, letting us to proceed deeper in the psychology of the protagonists, generating rage, disappointment or simply interest, even when the situation falls vertically until a point that seems of non return.

orizzonti winner

stic rendering of a theme that is important even beyond India. The mechanisms of law and justice that frequently unravel regardless the human and personal situation of individuals, condemning or absolving without taking into consideration the evidences and the dynamics that have driven to that specific aftermath.

The court drama is reconstructed with a sober and documentary style, which sometimes makes the viewer wonder if it’s an archive footage film rather than a fiction one.

Generally, this choice to stick to the real representation of an Indian court is surprising and it gives much more reliability to the whole tale.

Nevertheless, it’s a pity that sometimes the rhythm is affected by this static flow of witnesses, judicial hearings, lawyers’ statements, and judgers’ decisions. The attempt to show what really happens in a court is laudable, although this makes the film much more slow, monotonous and stationary. Happily this doesn’t compromise the enjoyment and wards off from getting dull or pretentious.

The victory as Best film in the Orizzonti competition, along with the Lion of the Future, is well deserved, and it increases hopes that films discussing prickly and daring issues can also be appreciated and distributed to a wider audience, beyond the movie theatres and the gardens of the Venice Film Festival in Lido.

It is a very good achievement considering that, behind the expressive faces of the characters and the sterile procedures of a trial, there’s a whole community, a city of dreams and hopes that leaves its mark on every single shot of this picture.

Stefano Raspa

What really surprises in Court is the objective and reali5

review

6

review

7

review

8

Belluscone -

review

una storia siciliana Franco Maresco, Italy - Orizzonti Venice goes yellow as a mystery engulfs the Serenissima: Franco Maresco, satirical director from Sicily, has suddenly disappeared and apparently no one knows where he is. Interviews were never confirmed, the press conference was cancelled at the eleventh hour, and, what is worse, he left his movie, Belluscone – Una storia siciliana apparently unfinished. The title itself suggests that the director, known to the Italian public for CinicoTV, a satirical TV program aired in the 90s, has touched too many raw nerves to come out in the sunlight, as if nothing happened.

Maresco’s purpose was to shoot a documentary that explained how come Silvio Berlusconi was so deeply attached to Palermo and its suburb, Brancaccio, where he always gains a multitude of votes at every election. Here he is perceived as a mythological figure, even capable of miracles, but yet, there is something wrong around this blind, unconditioned love and usually, in Sicily, exaggeration goes hand in hand with the mafia.

In tracing the origin of the relationship between the so-called Knight of Labor and the Island, Maresco goes back in time to explain the rise of Berlusconi’s political empire and how it is linked to mafia men and bosses. In doing so, he creates a harsh but still tragicomic x-ray of Italy, so far known. His analysis does raise a large amount of doubts and questions on the longstanding issue regarding the negotiation between Nation and Mafia. Although Sicilians unwittingly nod at it with silence and denial, the whole editing, built up on a combination of fragments from newscasts, interviews, newspapers, archival footages and TV programs, lets the truth speak for itself.

This extensive research through a typical Sicilian story of hushed up truths might have caused him some serious troubles from Brancaccio’s power that be. This is why the whole story revolves around him being missing and leaving the movie unfinished.

of Maresco’s, who here investigates on his disappearance, explaining the events and commenting on what remains of the incomplete work. The journey starts from the outskirts of Palermo: Brancaccio is still strongly imbued with traditional folklore. Festivals take place in the streets and neomelodical singers bow in the presence of Mafia bosses living there.

But who exactly are neomelodicals and what they have to do with Mafia and Berlusconi? They are an undefined group of Neapolitan singers whose lyrics deal with low popular culture issues. One of their songs, that ironically became the soundtrack of the movie, is a tribute to Berlusconi. Moreover, during their performances, the singers are asked – or rather forced - to bring a kind greeting to their dear inmates.

A song becomes the starting point for the director to a deeper research. Every piece of information is ultimately put together to draw an audiovisual jigsaw puzzle, reassembled piece by piece in front of the viewer’s eyes. The hardest part, if not the most dangerous one, must have been involving the bigwigs in this process: repentant mafia men, famous politicians and journalists: People who know but are not always that willing to stand up for it. Their involvement seems to be enough to raise a fuss and discourage Maresco from finishing the movie.

Yet, is an end really necessary? Maresco asks the audience a rhetorical question. But the answer, if needed to solve the enigma, is quite clear, as it flashes out of every spoken word and footage. In rebuilding a piece of contemporary Italian history, Franco Maresco gives not only a true example of the brilliant Sicilian humour, but also a huge stock of food for thought. It makes it an absolute must-see, if you are eager to know more about two of the most trending Italian topics.

Marta Tudisco

The story is told by Tatti Sanguineti, film critic and big friend 9

review

10

Theeb

review

Naji Abu Nowar, JORDAN - Orizzonti

Jordan’s cinema has always been one of the most secluded in the Middle East, but in recent years this fact is tending to change. A new generation of emerging filmmakers is gaining the necessary international recognition. Naji Abu Nowar belongs to that generation. His directorial debut was in 2009 with the short documentary Death of a Boxer and five years later he finally presents his first feature film Theeb.

The story is set in 1916 in Arabia, just before the Arab Revolt. Theeb (Jacid Eid) is a Bedouin young boy that lives with his tribe in the desert. His brother Hussein (Hussein Salameh) has always been his best friend and his only companion. One day they welcome an unexpected visitor, an English soldier (Jack Fox) who wants to go to a secret water-well in order to trace the route for a railway. Hussein is the only one that can guide him and Theeb will follow them to that life changing and tragic journey.

The historical content undoubtedly dominates the narration. Like Theeb himself, the whole Arabian Desert is going through a transitional period comparable with adulthood.

Everything is on the borderline since the arrival of the iron donkey (railway), right before WWI and the upcoming breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Arab revolutionaries, Bedouin raiders and Ottoman mercenaries have to share the same land and they all want to get a piece of it.

Theeb is a coming-of-age drama and the whole film is building around the character of this young Bedouin. His name means “wolf” and due to the symbolism of the animal, Theeb has to undertake all the important changes of his life by himself. He should respect his family’s heritage and limitations while at the same time evolving his own personality. He also should find ways to survive and adapt to difficult situations and through that process, he will abruptly reach adulthood since he is still just a child. Jacid

Eid works exceptionally on this part as his physique and performance are dominating the whole film. Considering he is a non professional actor the result becomes unique.

Nowar divides his film in two major different parts. At the beginning, the focus is more on the ethnological approach on the Bedouin’s life and customs, especially the relationship amongst the brothers. This naturalistic and persuasive treatment helps the viewer to understand the historical concept behind the story. The trip through the desert also gives the right tone for an adventure and the whole action offers the film a gripping sensation, particularly when it turns into a peculiar spaghetti western. After that thrilling tension, the director tames down the initial anxiousness and transforms it into an internal survival and slow burning fear. The narration follows a more moderate pace that becomes somehow more predictable as the story unfolds. These sudden emotional changes might give a feeling of unbalance to the final perception.

By using only locations in the Jordanian desert, Nowar created a visually realistic and impressive film. The image is so pristine and lifelike that the viewer can easily sense the sand and the flies floating around him. This result is the responsibility of Wolfgang Thaler, Ulrich Seidl’s DoP, who enriched the aesthetics of the film with a documentary fell.

Theeb is a brave debut feature especially because Nowar decides to give a multilayer perspective to his story. Despite some minor weaknesses, he succeeds to deliver a motivating, and above all, an eye-catching film that will affect the viewer’s emotions and gain his attention.

Vassilis Economou

11

review

Goodnight Mommy Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala, Austria

Orizzonti

Review and Interview by Marta Tudisco 12

The austrian psychological thriller Goodnight Mommy stood out from the rest of the Orizzonti competition for presenting a different proposal. The directos Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz sat down with our reporter Marta Tudisco, to explain the difficulties and meanings behind such a production.

How did you come up with the idea for the film?

Severin Fiala: In Austria and Germany there is this sort of documentary, a TV program about women who come home completely changed after plastic surgery. They are supposed to look very beautiful to their close ones, but frequently they are rather scared than happy!

Veronika Franz: Yes, everyone smiles, but children hardly recognize their mothers, so we thought: what can happen if you take this idea and go along with it? And so that’s how it started!

Can it be considered a critic towards such TV programs?

SF: Not really. Actually it starts from there, but the movie raises questions about identity. Who are you? Are you the way you look? What would happen if you changed it? Will you always be the same person?

VF: Yes, and also how important is the surface?

It is also a film about masks and surfaces, bandages, appearances. She is a television hostess, of course it is important how she looks, but also what is behind it, what are the basics of a person, is important too. You can be another person in another situation, it depends on the context, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible, in our times, that an ordinary man becomes a monster. We all have a monster within. It always depends on what you show, on what mask you wear.

There is a strong sense that the whole story is like a game held by these two young kids: how was directing them into this story?

SF: Working with children is easier; they are a lot more spontaneous. We gave them the script

review Two kids, two twin brothers. A big beautiful house in the middle of the Austrian countryside. A young mother who has just undergone plastic surgery and should come home to find her children waiting for her with open arms. But there’s something wrong with her attitudes: the bandages covering her face seem to have absorbed and replaced her sweetness with an unexpected and unrecognizable bitterness. A horrible thought torments the two brothers: what if that woman was not their mother, but a different person?

The Orizzonti section bows with a shiver to a perfect example of a hybrid movie that skilfully blends horror, thriller and psychological drama features without ever losing the thread or falling into the predictable.

Goodnight Mommy dares you to solve the riddle hidden in a Rubik’s cube, where every possible combination is both the right and wrong one. The viewer takes part in a game apparently led by three characters: two kids who act as one, and their mother, who could be someone else. Identities get twisted in the search for redefinition, within a new balance where the characters deny to accept the terrible truth, revealed only at the end of the movie.

Directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala took inspiration from a reality show about stories of Austrian women almost unrecognizable after plastic surgery, and developed a complex script, taking the basic idea to its extreme consequences. The film wonders about the broad and universal concept of identity, calling upon the viewer to reflect on the importance of appearance over content. Would we be the same people if we changed our physical appearance or are we just the masks that we wear? Not surprisingly, the movie tells the story from the point of

and told them few things about it, and then we shot chronologically, so as to get them deeper and deeper into the story.

VF: It was like reading a fairy tale: every day we told them a bit more about the script, to keep them interested. It is real fun to work with children; they are not that serious! But they worked very hard; they were almost in every scene. We were lucky to have them!

Some elements recall the features of traditional fairy tales: the isolated house in the woods, the Doppelganger, for instance.

Did you get inspiration from that world?

SF: I think that it comes from the children’s perspective. Children live in a fairy tale world. We wanted to be fair to them and tell the story from their point of view.

VF: We thought about the tale of the Wolf and the Seven Little Goats, with reference to the part when the mother leaves and the wolf comes back in disguise. We thought about it but then we said: “No, it’s too much!”

view of two young children, leading a macabre role-playing game made of doubles, masks, bandages that cover - and rather reveal - the alleged identities: the brothers strive to look exactly alike, while the mother is still processing her new look. The narrative is driven by small fragments of doubt that hook the viewer to his seat until the final plot twist, when each piece will be put together to assemble the final puzzle.

The editing reassembles the footages in a chronological order, as if it was a fairy tale. And this is how the two directors worked with the 9-year-old twins, Lukas and Elyas: “Every day we told them something more about the plot, so as to drag them into the story deeper and deeper” said Fiala. This explains the incredible reality effect emerging from the spontaneous interpretation of the two children, absolute protagonists of the story.

Set design and photography are punctual and detailed. The interior of the house leaves nothing to chance: every object - like the picture of the blurred woman towering over the living room - is conceived to tell a story, to suggest more clues towards the solution of the riddle. But be careful and make sure that you have enough guts to stand some of the scenes with a high level of violence. Although one might say that they were not necessary and somehow splatter, they are unquestionably consistent with the logic of the entire film. Probably without their visual presence, Goodnight Mommy would have just been an average movie, but yet it remains one of the most interesting and surprising movies of this year´s Mostra.

Your style is figuratively very punctual: everything is exactly where it should be.

Can you tell us more about the meaning of photography in your movie?

VF: The set design was based upon contrasts. The house was real and had a real owner, but we had it redecorated completely, to create the contrast between light and dark, since it had no blinds at all.

There is also the blurred picture of the woman, but mostly every object in the house tried to fit as much as it could, to suggest something more about the characters. We wanted the house to be somehow a protagonist of the story.

13

review

These are the rules

Ognjen Svilicic’s feature film “These are the rules”, inspired by the true story of two parents whose son dies after being beaten up, criticizes strongly how society stopped caring about its people and how empathy is lost. We discussed with the director about his choice of story, the process of understanding society, and the future of Croatian film.

Ognjen Svilicic, CROATIA

What motivated you to make the film? Why did you choose to base it on a true incident?

Deep inside I wasn’t satisfied with the way society, Croatian one in this case, functions. What I always felt was that it is a big mess. The older I get, the more I feel people are losing empathy.

Through this feeling I found the story of that boy being injured in the street; he died and the police didn’t care too much. They didn’t make any investigation and even the doctors didn’t do their job properly. For me what is wrong is that the rules are different than we are told. They are actually cruel, barbaric. Society is not functioning because institutions don’t care and I wanted also to show what happens when society tolerates violence. The real parents are totally different- they took action to raise awareness. I wanted characters who are not able to do this, who are more

Orizzonti

Review and Interview

by Vicky Griva 14

ordinary, who don’t want to be activists, people who just can’t do it. I wanted characters who are not charismatic because this way you can see the real tragedy of this situation.

Is the way you present the characters and their behavior a statement or criticism on parenting?

Yes, also. Many people are ignoring the rules of society. They don’t want to change them. Somehow they are helping this situation, because they are closed in their boxes watching television and eat their little dinners. When something happens they don’t know what to do. Because, of course, it is all false. Deep down something more evil is happening.

How was the process of making this film? What were your feelings towards the story when you were making it?

I really developed the story and shot so much, that after I was cutting off. It was more chopping off pieces at the end until I get a real clear picture of what it was about. It was after I made this story, and saw the acting that I truly realized what I wanted to make. The film is burning slowly, so the film-making process reflects on the work. I wanted to give the feeling that there is something

review Ognjen Svilicic´s latest feature film explores some important aspects of a collapsing world and a brutal society where ordinary people have to face the reality of redefining their personal values. Based on the true story of Luka Ritz, who died in 2008 after he was attacked in the street, this film makes a caustic remark on how society brutally ignores the people it is supposed to protect.

Maja (Jasna Zalica) and Ivo (Emir Hadzihafizbegovic) are an ordinary couple living in Zagreb. Their daily routine is fractured when their 18-year old son, Tomica (Hrvoje Vladisavljevic), comes home late one night after being beaten in the street. After a visit to the hospital and a couple of x-rays, they confront a system that completely ignores human existence. While Tomica is suffering from headaches, Maja and Ivo are struggling to deal with the fact that their son wants nothing to do with them.

Everything collapses when Tomica is found unconscious by his mother in the bathroom and eventually dies in the hospital. The sudden change in their life accompanies the realization that the rules they eagerly follow all those years were not made for them. The bureaucracy of the system, either in the hospital or at the police station, keeps breaking them apart. Soon they will know that in this life nothing is given to you unless you claim it.

Ivo is the father who has always followed the rules and obeyed the conventions of the world he lives in. When he finds out his son participated in a fight he feels pride, considering he always urged him to fight back, while the mother expresses her worry about how the life of her son had turned out. Maja is the type of strong mother figure who despite the fact that she knows more about her son than Ivo, she does

in your throat all the time. To create this I needed my actors to stay really calm, which was hard as they are both parents. I needed complete silence on set for this, we were whispering. In movie-making all camera moves are already discovered. What is not discovered is getting to somebody’s soul. I wanted to cut every other aspect from the movie and get this main feeling. It is not camera before acting, acting is the most important thing- it gives such a human element to the film.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

I like Robert Bresson, because his work is so minimalistic, so precise. I really like a director who can put the moral in the story. For me movie-making is not about special effects or being visually nice. To be honest I never liked Kubrick. I never understood why he was special. But I liked directors like Dryer, who used small spaces and made something really deep.

You mostly write the scripts yourself. Is there any particular reason for that?

I think as a director I am not very skilled (laughter). I can direct three people but not more than that. I don’t like thinking a lot about

not really share a real connection with him.

They are both trying to live their lives, even despite the fact that the obstacles ahead keep multiplying. As long as they obey the rules, they believe everything will find its own way, even if the death of their child was the outcome of this behaviour. They trust society and its people, they believe in the world they live in. But until when? Everyone they meet shares a disturbing unconcern for their situation. Grief gradually roots inside them, exposing real anger and rage. It is time to act.

The minimalism in Svilicic’s images is shown through a slow burning procedure which scars those people who are trying to heal. By showing their everyday small habits, he intensifies the fact that they are just ordinary, small and unable to deal with such injustice. The social extensions of this film are its core. Those people are just numbers to a world that was built on rotten foundations, swallowing every single bit of humanity and throwing up violence.

The insignificance of Maja and Ivo’s existence becomes evident through the strong narrative form that is being used. More and more they come to realize that those “barbaric” rules, as Svilicic himself named them, have no meaning at all. Justice should be served in order to release some of the grief and regain power in life. This is what goes around Ivo’s mind until he decides to take the law into his own hands.

These Are the Rules can be read as a statement towards parenting, but mostly as strong criticism towards the hollowness of society and how people stopped caring about each other. Pointing out the importance of family bonds, Svilicic managed to bring to the screen the deep dissatisfaction he feels about the cruel world we are bound to live in.

technical details. I basically always write what I can direct. That’s why I prefer to write for myself, although to some they are the kind of stories that are boring to direct.

How would you define Croatian cinema today?

It’s actually fantastic. Financing is pretty well established. The Croatian Audiovisual Center, a public institution, deals with promotion and financing. It gives results because many movies are being digitalized and the audience is coming back to cinemas for Croatian films. We would like young people to grow as an audience and watch even more Croatian movies. There is some hope for Croatian cinema.

What does it mean for you to be here in Venice?

I have been two times in Berlin before, but here I get more attention. I have the feeling I can be part of European cinema, which is really important for me because Croatia is a really small country. It makes sense to me if somebody outside Zagreb and Croatia recognizes my movies.

When I come to a place like this, you understand that this language of cinema is universal.

15

review

“Hold on tight!”

16

review

17

review

La vita oscena Renato de Maria, ITALY

Orizzonti

Review and Interview by Martin I. Petrov 18

Renato De Maria grew up in Bologna, where he studied philosophy. He has directed many experimental videos and TV commercials, followed by the successful docudrama Il Trasloco and several documentaries. La vita oscena, based on the autobiographical novel by Aldo Nove, is his fifth feature film.

What was the motivation to adapt exactly this story?

It touched me very deeply in a very dramatic and visional way, because it shows the transition that everyone has gone through in his/ her life - the one of becoming an adult. It has given a lot of inspiration for many writers in literature and it has been used many many times in films as well. The story of Aldo Nove that I adapted is very visionary: a 17 year old teenager is trying to suicide with 17 grams of cocaine and he can’t succeed - that’s why the images are very intense and very pop too. Because I love video art and I follow the work of numerous video artists, I tried to make a mixture of things. I also got a lot of

inspiration from films I like, e.g. Inland Empire

by David Lynch or Enter the Void by Gaspar Noé and combined it with the visuals of the early 80s which were the most trendy special effects of that time in the music video industry.

There isn’t much dialogue in the film, but you use a lot of narration. Is this coming from the adaptation or it was your intention to bring the character closer to the real one, as described in the book?

It was a feeling that I had from the beginning.

When I read the story, I immediately saw it this way. I thought that it will be better to narrate through images and use short poems throughout the film. I included original pieces from the book which could be the most representative to make the story appear more real.

You try to explore your character’s sexual life and give some space in the film to present his self-discovery and experimentation. Do you find it easier or harder for teenagers today to

review Common knowledge: teenagers hate their life, the world and the planet. They want to experiment, to try drugs, to have sex. This is all good as long as you don’t interfere in their zone of freedom and their illusionistic dreamland. If you decide to do so and you don’t know how to decipher their psychology and their view of life, you’ve lost the battle.

Italian director Renato De Maria finds inspiration in the autobiographical book by the Italian poet and writer Aldo Nove, a story focusing on his turbulent teenage years and early adulthood. After losing both his parents at the age of 17, Andrea (Clément Métayer) cannot find the purpose of life within his everyday routine. His sense of reality and his ability to draw lines between past, present and future is suddenly gone, replaced by a constant entrapment into the delirium of depression and ignorance. Determined to end his life, he buys 17 grams of cocaine – each for every year of his life, perhaps – and takes his position into a marathon with death, desperately trying to terminate second. But for some reason, the universe tries to keep him alive.

Starting with an original approach and making clear from the beginning that surrealism will have the upper hand in his aesthetic choices, De Maria picks up French teen Clément Métayer to incarnate his vision of Andrea, whose thoughts and memories we follow within the lines of his continuous narration in past and present. Future is never an option for obvious reasons. The camera is constantly observing him as an alienated version of human being that is lost somewhere in the societal chaos. Métayer tries really hard to bring out his inner teen spirit but no matter how much coke he smirks, his part remains lifeless and the narrative has a rather descending climax.

With sparse dialogues and poetic notes from Aldo Nove’s existential scripts, it is hard to establish an interactive ground with the characters. The mother figure

find sexual liberation? And is it still taboo to show that in Italian cinema?

It is a taboo subject, not only in Italian but in cinema in general. Everything today is easily available through the internet. If I had done the film some years ago I would had to use some more sex scene footage in order to show exactly what I wanted to do. Today we’ve lost this sense of discovery or mystery, because everything is out there, available to everyone. But this makes it more and more difficult to discover your sexuality day by day.

The more you are connected the more you are alone. Films like Shame are presenting this issue very clearly. I am also a huge fan of American TV series or films like Gus Van Sant’s The Boss, although there the exploitative side in the sex scenes is very obvious.

Would you position your film as part of the general social realist Italian new wave?

I wouldn’t like to put it in boxes. When you

is almost constantly present in Andrea’s imagination and dreams, played here by the director’s life partner Isabella Ferrari and being the only partly developed character after the protagonist. The relationship between mother and son is given through several flashbacks of sincere and melancholic emotional exchange, probably the only parts of the film where Métayer manages to jump out of the screen’s dimensions.

De Maria seems determined to give full potential to his character’s teen obscenity, spending almost one third of the film on Andrew’s sexual experimentation, shown in ways that reminds us so much of Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza.

Bizarrely superficial and awkward, this eroticism seems like a clumsy mishmash directed by Sorrentino’s rich, poshy dolls – as we can recall them from Jep Gambardella’s furious parties - who would change their career orientation in split second, becoming poets from actresses or directors from poets, obviously incapable of performing any real task.

For a director like De Maria, who’s worked both in television and cinema, it is unavoidable to integrate some stylistic habits from the one to the other and vice versa. The long and monotonous scenes are not really helpful when constructing a biopic. Slightly balanced by De Maria’s interesting cinematographic approach, the film ends up being a colourful, psychedelic journey on a teenager’s skateboard, but sadly it stays there. Filtered, well polished images give a great start, but then they give way to a stiff, rigid and overly surreal 80 minutes, where the director’s interpretation of a teen’s life never achieves its goal.

Hard to tell if it’s the limited flexibility of the plot, the rather spasmodic acting or the adaptation of the particular biography itself, but certainly La vita oscena doesn’t reach the high standard that De Maria had initially designed in his mind.

start visioning your film you are alone and you do not particularity identify with something going on at the same moment. Maybe in 20 or more years from now people will be able to say that ‘this director did the film when this particular movement was happening there, etc.’

Regarding the visuals that you use in the film and the filters and vintage look that you applied to many scenes, is it a post production decision or you figured it out during the shooting process of every scene?

Almost everything was very prepared from the beginning. I had already preselected many images from movie frames, the web, and from video art and I knew how I want to position them throughout the film. On post production stage, I mainly played with the intensity of the colours. Mostly with orange and blue, the colours that make the contrast between the warm and cold scenes in the film depending on the atmosphere I wanted to create every time.

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review

Reality Quentin Dupieux, FRANCE/BELGIUM - Orizzonti

Quentin Dupieux, director of the infamous Rubber (2010), has come to Venice with a luggage full of distorted realities or, perhaps more accurately, a strange need to explore the idea of mixing everybody’s dreams, making us wonder if anything of what we saw was part of a twisted game.

“Reality” struggles hard to find the necessary balance between its real purpose – if there is any - and the overachieved surrealism it inevitably shares.

Jason is a peaceful cameraman living in California. He is dreaming of making his own film, where television sets are the most dangerous thing in the whole planet. They produce those weird kinds of waves that slowly make humans more stupid, while their ultimate goal is to extinguish them. He approaches Bob Marshal, a film producer, who gets overexcited with his crazy idea. He will sign the deal as soon as Jason gets the perfect groan in 48 hours.

But Jason’s is not the only story we discover. A young man working as a TV presenter on a food program has an unstoppable need to scratch himself, thinking there is something terribly wrong with him, while everyone else thinks he is overreacting. A young girl witnesses a videotape coming out of the insides of an animal, while her father cleans it in order to embalm it. Nobody believes her, but we will come to know that this videotape somehow is the answer to loads of questions. All of those stories, as distant as they might seem with each other, they share something in common; the same confusing connection that leads to nothing more than a dead-end.

In the world Dupieux has created, parallel dreams stream like parades of surrealistic thoughts and acts on one’s self and the perception of reality. While the first scenes seem indifferent, you do get hooked on the way the story evolves. The head-exploding music makes sure to achieve that in a conscious but also a deep subconscious level, while the physical effect of it can be disturbing for some time

after you watch the film. You too immerse in a deep dream along with the characters. You too step by step lose the sense of reality presented to you.

Dreams lost in dreams in an endless maze with no exit signs; A surreal world where nothing makes sense and somehow everything fits in a distorted kind of way. This is what is being achieved through Dupieux’s direction and the narrative he has chosen. His images betray his blurry vision though and the fact that none of these has any clear purpose, only to throw us into the endless world of dreaming.

The moments in the film that are meant to be humorous, fail to communicate any connection with the content. This constant attempt to revive the plot with funny moments is not enough to explain any of what is being shown. While Dupieux can’t stop mixing his narrative, we keep wondering how such a promising idea of dreaming in a dream got stuck in all those flat characters and their tiresome realities. This flatness is probably used on purpose in order to intensify the hollowness they carry or probably the fact that they are just plain visitors in those dreary dreams.

There are many questions raised about the definition of our dreams as much as the perception that we have for the realities that surround us. For some of us it is complicated – or intentionally complicated - like in Dupieux’s mind and for some others is simpler or indifferent. Those questions only meant to be left unanswered in a film that flirts with the vastness of the subconscious and manages at the same time to convey a frustrating self-conscious feeling. If you have never been lost in a dream, this is your chance to discover how that might feel. Are you ready?

Vicky Griva 21

review

Bypass Duane Hopkins, Uk

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Bypass was one of the most eagerly anticipated British entries at this year´s Venice Film Festival. Spearheaded by yet another strong performance by the up and coming George McKay, the film takes us into a voyage through the difficult, underprivileged and risky life of a young man in the margins of society. We sat down with the director, Duane Hopkins, to find out more about Bypass.

Orizzonti

How did you first come up with this storyline?

Review and Interview by Reka Holman

When I was casting for my previous film in a large satellite town, which was kind of developed and had a population boom and then when the industries left these estates fell into disrepair. I ran into this kid and asked if I can have a conversation, at that time I said I was only a casting director, because when you say you’re a director it stops certain conversations.

So I went to his flat, there’s no heating, the window is broken and he’s sitting there with his friends. At the beginning they were kind of suspicious, but then we had very good chat.

And when I was leaving I asked them what they

were doing later on and then they explain to me that they’re doing three burglaries that night.

So okay that’s not too shocking, it’s kind of surprising, but not too shocking, but then they explain to me that they knew these people very well and they knew these people were out of town. At that point I knew that the environment they were living in was much tougher than I had ever imagined, it was much more out of control than I had ever imagined, that there was no trust, there was no kind of loyalty left. But there was one kid who throughout the conversation seemed to be the most sensitive, I kind of felt that he’s wondering whether or not he should be doing this. I became very curious about this one kid who had this moral problem.

And then I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened that night, about what happened to him.

Why did you choose such a different approach to casting then in your previous work?

I think I just wanted to change the ingredients from my last film. I had this feeling that with every film that I make it’s not just the questions of going there and doing what I did last

review In Bypass British director Duane Hopkins transforms his sociological sensitivity into a stylistically coherent film approaching the questions of remembrance, repetition, memory and mourning, using characteristic stylistic elements while building up a highly dramatic plot. The criminal past and present of the brothers depicted in the movie points towards a thriller dramaturgy, while building up suspense, depicting the main characters in constant threat from their surroundings.

After introducing the film with the story of the older brother’s criminal activities, and eventual arrest, the film actually turns out to be the story of the younger brother, Tim; brilliantly portrayed by young British starlet George McKay. The fact that he is taking over his brother’s position as the caretaker in the family, his involvement with the same criminals as his elder brother, and the flashbacks of both brothers trying to deal with the loss of their parents all pose the questions of repetitive storylines. This search for their own individual identities is stylistically also emphasized by the reflections of both brothers on different surfaces.

The love story is both literally and metaphorically the only element that shines a light into the gloomy life of Tim: the love scenes with his girlfriend Lily are lit with warm, natural lights, caressing the heroes bodies as they caress each other, bringing hope into their lives, drawing a very rarely seen smile on Tim’s face. This motive later fades into the gloominess of the disease-ridden hospital waiting room, only to conclude in another twist and change of lighting at the very end.

Related to representing an expressive imagery of the heroes inner world, the film has a strong aesthetical, with strongly worked out elements, but the overuse of these ideas leads to a dull repetition of

time, it’s a question of how I change the content. So I knew I wanted to work with actors rather than non-actors. I wanted to see what it was going to be like when I was working with someone with whom I am able to have a complete dialogue. With amateur actors you take what they give you, sometimes after provocation, but then you realign that and you do that on purpose because you have fewer choices. This time I wanted to expand my choices of what I could do. And I’ve always been a fan of Alan Clark who found actors like Tim Roth and Gary Oldman. I was interested in whether or not we could unearth what was the next generation of that kind of actors that had that level of talent, that level of commitment to their craft. And see what we can do if we can write good enough, complete enough roles for him.

How did you come up with the visual concept?

Better Things was kind of static and I was very influenced by a kind of painting, especially romantic period painting. Here I

the same method. The sharp contrast between natural and artificial lights, the close-ups of body parts and objects, reflections in mirrors and flashbacks appearing from time to time, as well as the extremely excessive use of slow motion and a dramatically intensifying musical score are audio-visually capturing, but dominate too much to maintain their novelty. A large part of the film consists of overemphasized sequences of slow motion accompanied by music, during which at least part of the audience might wish for less.

The escalation of problems on all levels can paradoxically lead to disengagement with the characters by inducing a degree of suffering that is not only unbearable for the heroes but for the audience as well.

Tim is not only haunted by pieces of his family past, but also faces a financial and social crisis and life-threatening experiences due to his involvement in crime and the increasing symptoms of his deadly disease. All of this is represented as an exaggerated tragedy on screen leading the viewers to have sarcastic expectations and almost eagerly wait for the appearance of yet another well predictable catastrophic event. The script seems to be overwritten in this respect, while at the same time the opaque allusions to family history and memory remain underwritten.

If you are able to get over the annoying and constant repetition of individually innovative stylistic features and plot elements that tend to over-accumulate tragedy, Bypass is actually a gripping film that holds the attention of the audience through most of the movie and even provides an unexpected twist at the very end in the form of an excessive and long scene using solely slow motion - as we might have very well expected.

knew I wanted the camera to be constantly moving and dynamic. I shot in a different aspect ratio that changed how I did compositions. So there are no shots in the film where I ever use a tripod. You need to be always at the shoulder of the character, you need to be directly connected. I wanted you to feel very close to his skin, to his emotions and feel as though you’re just in front of him. But I also wanted to find a different way of doing handheld which was kind of unique to the film.

It was hard to identify the illness of the main character simply based on the symptoms. Do you have any idea what is the disease?

I don’t know. I don’t know what it is and I kind of mixed it very much on purpose for that reason. The illness is real, it’s actually kind of happening to him and it’s also metaphorical for what’s happening to his community, for what’s happening over kind of the process of the film.

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review

Near Death Experience Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern, FRANCE - Orizzonti

Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern, with their latest film Near Death Experience, dare to confront death courageously by expressing their own personal thoughts and feelings about its significance and effect on human lives.

This directorial-duo delivers with great simplicity and purity a film about facing the end as bravely as one can face life.

Paul works in a call center of a cable company. His ordinary routine takes a sudden turn when he realizes the emptiness in his life and decides to escape to the mountains of Provence in order to rediscover what he feels he has lost; a true meaning. After biking for hours, he hikes along the mountains in order to find a good spot to kill himself. Unfortunately for Paul there are people everywhere and he can’t bring himself to go ahead with it. This prevents him from actually jumping off a cliff, making us wonder if he really is planning to do it or he just wants an excuse to avoid it.

Paul is putting constantly his body to the test, along with his mind. He narrates his story and details of his past by talking to himself or at times making imaginary dialogues, a procedure that provokes leisured laughter but also offers food for thought. By poetically exploring the lost meaning of his life, his natural pessimism in combination with a witty self-sarcasm, offers a light veil on the universally difficult subject of suicide.

On this self-discovery trip we learn a lot about Paul. He is a fighter who lost track of what he was fighting for. He is a human being with a deep understanding of himself and his surroundings. Yet he is lost and his constant need to avoid confrontation proves how compromised his life has become. He prefers to talk to rocks representing his family than actually going directly to them. Or maybe this is his way of dealing with the uncertainties in his life. This self-reflecting journey reveals the life of a man whose world is shattered, struggling to see anything in a good perspective.

With a simple direction and a great appetite for productive discussion, Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern have managed, via different shooting angles, to build an experimental film which above all else talks about the importance of dealing with death and people’s struggle to define their self. With only one main actor, one camera and a script full of philosophizing thoughts, Near Death Experience is one of a kind.

The plain shots might lack cinematographic value but they work exceptionally as additional material to the words.

Paul walks around for what seems like an eternity, wondering about the hidden truths of his own existence. It is challenging and provocative how the character behaves, engaging any type of audience that is willing to let go for a while and get lost into a deep confrontation of death.

Paul dared to question the foundations of the life he chose and lose himself on an endless soul-searching trip. Death for Paul is necessary, but life insists on proving essential in the unstoppable conversation of human existence and the discovery of a true meaning. Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French writer and poet, assumes the protagonist role of Paul, carrying successfully the entire film on his shoulders. His authenticity adds a sense of realism to the film, dissolving any doubts about its apparent amateurism.

The charismatic narrative way of the film creates a need to reconsider our own lifes, our own relationship with Death and eventually make amends with it. Near Death Experience has the ability to remind us via contrasts - the serious but also humorous way it approaches its subject - how necessary loneliness is, how life matters by interacting with other people and, more importantly, how life itself makes sense through death.

Vicky Griva

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“There is not a better place on earth to be a grandma. Putting on your lilac dress and some pearls, catching up with stars on your way to the grocery shop.�

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review

Jackie & Ryan Ami Canaan Mann USA

Orizzonti

Review and Interview by Tara Karajica 28

Ami Canaan Mann may be the next in line in what is fast becoming another Hollywood dynasty, but she is definitely leaving a mark of her own. We could not let the chance to catch up with her go by, so Tara Karajica sat down with the director to learn more about her latest work, Jackie & Ryan.

What prompted you to make Jackie & Ryan?

I was in Austin, Texas at the SXSW Film Festival where I had been invited to speak on a panel and I was walking on the street and I heard this street men play. They were playing this music that I remember hearing as a kid in Indiana. So, as I was listening to it, the story kind of came to me.

I was thinking about people who are trying to be excellent at their craft…. And then, I was thinking about what if you had somebody– another character who had also a gift but had got lost with it – and what would happen if those two people got together.

Well, they say that you write about your own backyard so I think that whenever you’re telling any kind of story, there’s some part of it that’s personal – should be personal – because you want to imbue it with as much emotion as you possibly can. But, the actual story itself is fiction; I made that up. I guess it’s autobiographical in the sense that I love filmmaking and only want to become better at filmmaking for the sake of becoming better at filmmaking, and I was telling a story about somebody who loves music and wants only to become better at music for the sake of becoming better at music.

Is train-hopping something very common in the USA and how has it acquired a place in your film?

I don’t know how common train-hopping is in the US, I am not sure. The way it influenced the film is that in the beginning we meet Ryan and we are identifying with him and then he comes into our “normal town”. I wanted to have a perspective on your average small American town that was an Is there any autobiographical element in Jackie outsider’s perspective so that we could look at & Ryan?

review Music has always had a rather strong place in film, sporadically appearing on big and small screens alike. After big hits such as Walk the Line, Crazy Heart or Nashville, it is now the turn of Jackie & Ryan, the sophomore feature film of the daughter of the legendary director Michael Mann, Ami Canaan Mann, who returns to the Lido and the Orizzonti competition after Texas Killing Fields, screened in that very section three years ago.

waste time on idealizing the setting or its characters, and neither does Maan for that matter. But, the vast empty and snowy plains of Utah and its sunsets and sunrises do look appealing, as seen through his sharp lensing. The street musician Nick Hans is responsible for the excellent music and melodious songs while Heigl and Barnes sing themselves, based on traditional American tunes and reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen early work.

Jackie & Ryan follows Ryan (Ben Barnes), a young and handsome freight-hopping musician, a happy-go-lucky vagabond, who returns to the small town of Ogden, Utahto look for his old friend, Cowboy. There, he meets by chance Jackie (Katherine Heigl), a single mother with a very successful musical past and caught up in a messy divorce and battle for the custody of her daughter Lia (Emily Alyn Lind). And, as life would have it, they eventually, and predictably, fall in love.

Jackie & Ryan gives Barnes and Heigl – reunited onscreen after The Big Wedding – the opportunity to act sensibly and truthfully and show their singing skills. Katherine Heigl is not her usual rom-com self and thus steps out of her comfort zone. As for Barnes, he certainly shows maturity, versatility and potential. We do not however see enough of Clea DuVall and this is certainly a pity.

Their love story could not be simpler, which actually works because of the actors’ light touch and the extremely low-key characteristic of it all.

Maan uses a fast-paced yet unaffected and delicate style that depicts ordinary people in ordinary life situations and hits the right chords – literally. And, in spite of some clichés scattered here and there, there are no self-pity, tears or excessive drama, which is quite refreshing indeed. However, the subplot involving Virginia (Clea Duvall), Cowboy’s girlfriend, is unfortunately underused as it might have brought more depth to the film.

Duane Manwiller’s unadorned camera work does not seem keen to

the concerns of Jackie – that I think many of us share – that we could look at all those concerns from a distant perspective. That was one of the reasons why it was important that the character of Ryan be somebody who lives outside of that way of life so that we could look at it with fresh eyes.

What about the music? Are there any personal ties to that type of music? And why does it have such a big place in the film?

Well, for a couple reasons. There are definitely personal ties to me. It’s music that was played a lot when I was a kid in Indiana so I have a lot of memories of that kind of music. There’s a couple different genres of train-hoppers and the genre that we’re focusing on in the film, they are all musicians and they play pretty much early American blues and folk written before 1930. So, I wanted it, out of respect for that subculture, to be very true to what they play and how they play it. We tried very hard to make sure that that was completely authentic. I

All in all, Jackie & Ryan is a marvelously crafted and poignant romance film about slump-stricken America, the life-changing power of a serendipitous meeting, music, human relationships and the simple things in life. Its unassuming nature, unalloyed story telling and undisguised and aboveboard emotions blend together in a positive, merry and entertaining whole. The light and positive characters and an absolutely utopian message may not be everybody’s cup of tea or the ingredients of a great film, but if you like love stories, romance films and folk/country music, you will be in heaven with this very little yet very big film. You’ll want to watch it with a cup of tea, a blanket and the cozy and warm company of your significant other. And the music will definitely put a smile on your face.

love music and I wanted also to give way to as many different kinds of musicians as I could. So, in keeping with the theme of the film – of people who just do it because they love it – I wanted musicians and music to be coming from that place.

Did your father [Michael Mann] have any influence on your filmmaking?

I was terribly lucky to have had the inclination to do film because I wanted to do something that was visual, musical and narrative. And, to also have had access to someone who is doing that kind of work via my father was the best of both worlds. I think that film is an interesting job because much of what you need to know isn’t really in a book; people tell you; it’s sort of like a medieval craft guild. I have been terribly lucky to have been able to work with my dad, Robert Redford and Jon Avnet and to get a little bit of what they know and what they’ve learned passed on to me.

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review

Cymbeline Michael Almereyda, USA - Orizzonti Michael Almereyda, after Hamlet 2000, directs another Shakespearean adaptation. This time he chose Cymbeline, a very dynamic and intertwined work, focused on the British king Cymbeline, fighting against the Roman Empire and having issues with his daughter, Imogene. The American director, in giving his own interpretation of the story, pushes the narrative far beyond the borders of the classical play.

In a gloomy contemporary America, Cymbeline (Ed Harris) is a drug kingpin who controls the gang known as The Britons with a large arsenal and a brutal fist. When the story begins, he is under pressure from different sides. His wife, known as The Queen (Milla Jovovich), encourages him to refuse to pay a debt to corrupted police officers that subsequently swear to move a turf war against his gang. At the same time, his daughter Imogene (Dakota Johnson) refuses to get married with The Queen’s son, chosen by Cymbeline as the right suitor for her, because she’s in love with the handsome skateboarder and member of the gang Posthumus (Penn Badgley). This dramatic setting leads to Imogene’s disappearance, to the devastating anger of Cymbeline and to a bloody and unpredictable escalation of violence and unsorted questions.

Between ruthless gangsters, betrayals, promises of love and revenge, the plot unfolds as a cryptic spiral, which at times confuses the viewer who is played in doubt up to the very last scene, when the maze depicted throughout the film finally finds its solution.

It’s interesting to see affecting characters who speak in a Shakespearean way (Cymbeline is called the king, the bad cops are the Roman Empire in war with the Britons), though inserted in a nowadays environment. The dialogues are juicy, sharp and theatrically poetic, especially considering the fact that they’re pronounced by modern drug dealers and killers equipped with Iphones and sporty cars.

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This is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant inventions of Almereyda and, rather than sounding as pretentious or out of context, it adds an original layer to the entire picture. Unfortunately the overall acting, despite the great cast, is utterly lame and doesn’t give proper justice to the stunning characters of the story.

The aspect that hooks most is probably the photography, which designs a tense atmosphere by making advantage of the vivid and full colours, mainly yellow and white, that perfectly fit this human and criminal tragedy. Visually Almereyda’s camera avoids being invasive and, while alternating camera movements and static optics, leaves a large space for the characters and their twisting dynamics. The only problem is that Almereyda looks like concentrated only on his shots, forgetting to direct his cast the way he should.

The film is often very obscure and fragmented in its rhythm and progression, allowing the audience to understand it fully only at the end.

This fact might turn awkward and make the film hard to follow, sometimes boring the viewer or having his attention lost in a haze of shadows and turning points that are hard to pinpoint with precision.

Cymbeline is a disturbing yet dark dissection of the human struggle for power, acceptance and control. The tribal alliance of the American gangs, the background of violent bikers slaughtering corrupted cops as well as damned lovers looking for freedom, perhaps offer a fair match to this primitive and alive work by Shakespeare. Sadly this is not enough to arouse a powerful emotion.

Stefano Raspa

review

Hill of Freedom Hong Sang-Soo, South Korea - Orizzonti Hill of Freedom is the 16th feature length film of South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo, which is set in Korea and is depicting a love story between a Japanese man and a Korean woman. The film follows the minimalist approach of the director’s previous work and this minimalism is also true regarding the length of the movie, making it a surprisingly short piece for a feature film, with no more than 66 minutes.

The title of the picture refers to the setting of the love story, a Japanese café house in Seoul, which turns out to be the most important location of the whole film. These international connections result in the language used throughout the film being English, which is a somewhat unusual experience for English-speaking viewers used to keeping their eyes on the subtitles while watching Asian films. Since English is not the native language of either of the speakers this also results in the use of a somewhat broken language which becomes an important element of the film. Language barriers also define the main protagonist as a foreigner within a spatial context that is somewhat alien to him.

These language issues are often put into play during the movie, for instance, the hero is often involved in conversations discussing national stereotypes regarding both national physiognomies and other generalized characteristics, like politeness or cleanliness. The absurdity of these concepts is expressed through the use of extremely minimalistic and simplistic dialogues which are the defining characteristic of the whole movie.

The acting style also follows this simplistic approach, the actors are distanced, and the conversations and scenes end without reaching a dramatic peaking point, but unfortunately the application of distinctive style remains only slightly interesting.

In terms of visual style Hong San-Soo’s Hill of Freedom can be cha-

racterized by the lack of camera movement and a repetitive sequence of the same scenes appearing again and again, like the Japanese café house, interiors of restaurants and the motel where the main protagonist is staying. These returning features and plot element provide an irregular rhythm to the film that never really becomes systematic in any respect and only serves to underline the drifting movements of the hero in space.

On the level of the plot the love story later evolves into a love triangle without having any further consequences on the lives of the characters. The Japanese main protagonist keeps on writing his love letters to his ill Korean lover, who only appears on the passive, receiving side reading these letters.

The main philosophical concept of the film revolves around a different approach to time: the hero is reading a book on time and claims that time, as we know it, does not exist. Time becomes jumbled for the heroine because she mixes up the pages of the letters she receives, which is reflected on the level of the whole film by the randomly nonlinear order of individual scenes, but the plot remains easily understandable without challenging the viewer to start working on putting together a time puzzle or figuring out alternative storylines.

Hang San-Soon’s minimalist Hill of Freedom is a consumable work, in a large part due to the extremely short playing time for a feature film, but the lack of truly memorable moments won’t be able to make this de-dramatized love story of the main characters and the episodic appearance of other minor characters stick with the viewers after leaving the movie theatre.

Reka Holman 31

review

Nabat Elchin Musaoglu, Azerbaijan

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Having vast experience in the field of documentaries, Elchin Musaoglu constructed, with Nabat, a fiction feature that stays very close to reality. We met up to the director to discuss the challenges he encountered while making this movie on the struggles to carry on in the middle of a war.

Orizzonti

Until now, you’ve made 30 documentaries. How did your experience in documentary filmmaking help you in your transition to fiction?

Review and Interview by Lilla Puskas

Documentary filmmaking taught me to be disciplined. Sometimes I feel like a soldier who is always ready to do what he has to. My experiences helped me the most when I was working on the characters and the dialogues.

I told to my friend, Abdulrahim Besharat, who is the director of photography that I would like to create harmony between nature and Nabat’s characters. For that, long shots are the most

suitable. Six years ago, we already worked together on my first feature film, The 40th Door and we knew exactly how to work together.

How did you come up with the story of Nabat?

I saw a documentary on TV about a village where everyone left during the Soviet war in 1991, except one woman. She wanted to stay where her family was buried. I found this story very touching and I started to work it out as a script. I feel very lucky that I found Fatemeh Mohamed-Arya (actress of the film), because she felt Nabat’s character close to herself from the beginning.

How did you find her?

It was a very hard and long process. First I was looking for actresses in Turkey, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan but I didn’t find the perfect one. At some point someone suggested me an Iranian actress, Fatemeh. First I saw some of

review With storytelling kept to the minimum, the second feature by documentary filmmaker Elchin Musaoglu, Nabat, is more an atmospheric drama with extreme long shots, minimal dialogues and in fact, one single protagonist. Though the film goes sometimes too sentimental and nostalgic, it does offer an extraordinary visual experience.

We are in a small village in the western mountains of Azerbaijan, in 1991, right before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The inhabitants of the village were either all evacuated or died. The Iranian actress, Fatemeh Mohamed-Arya plays Nabat, an old woman who decides to stay with her husband, the bed ridden Iskender (depicted by Vidadi Aliyev).

The bombardments keep going, they live in danger and persistent fear, but they are not willing to leave the village. When Iskander dies and Nabat if left alone, she aims to keep the memory of the victims alive.

She embarks on a search of a photo of her murdered son, to be able to remember him and roam round the village.

As one can expect, the plot is dominated by mourning, which is never easy to watch. Especially not if it is expressed by clichés, such as flashbacks, dream sequences, black and white photos, candles and headstones in the cemetery. Luckily, a few scenes show a more unconventional and refined way to express loneliness with cinematographic tools and symbols, and save the movie from going excessively kitschy.

Lack is expressed by amplified sound effects as well: the unusually loud noise of the wind, raindrops and other natural elements, make the viewer notice the lack of human sound. In contrast to these, the howling of the wolves and gunfire create tension. The movie is rich in background sound effects and uses off screen sound on a creative way.

Musaoglu uses many dramatic elements to emphasize emotions, but sometimes its excessive use makes the experience being too theatrical. One may feel that the classical pieces of Bach are too deep for

her photos and I got worried that maybe she’s too young for this role. But then I got known that in Gilane, one of her previous movies, she played an 80 years old woman.

I watched the movie and it convinced me to travel to Iran to meet her personally, which turned out to be a good decision.

Where did you build the set for the shooting?

We shot the film near Garabau, in the mountains, in a beautiful and primitive village where people live very simply and calm. We built Nabat’s house as the part of the set, and after the shooting, the mayor wanted it to stay there. Now it’s used as a residence house for scriptwriters. The rest of the buildings appear in the movie are the houses of the locals.

How did you get through the difficulties of

this story. The scenery is equally theatre-like: in the family houses left behind, their personal belongings tell their stories: children clothes on a clothesline, an open book, forgotten cups of tea on the table, some houses are not more than ruins and destroyed furniture. It is a typical way to depict war, making Nabat somewhat conventional.

Luckily clichés are compensated by the extraordinary cinematography. Abdulrahim Besharat’s professional and very complex camerawork is dominated by extremely long crane shots, moving both horizontally and vertically. Throughout the movie, the camera follows Nabat, who is a kind of a guide for the viewer in the abandoned village. One can observe an interesting, mostly perpendicular, relation between her movements and the camera motion. We mostly see her in harmonic relation to her environment, the foggy autumn landscape in extreme wide shots. We also see marvellous takes in counter light, like when Nabat’s silhouette is visible on the amazingly yellow sky.

Babak Shirinsefat’s editing gives a special rhythm to the movie: sequences with extremely long shots vary with scenes of fast cutting, and both refer to the different emotional states of Nabat. Though this leads to a stylistic incoherence, as if we could be watching different movies, afact that is interesting enough not to be disturbing.

Nabat is a movie with a varying standard in artistic quality, it has great qualities in cinematography, but a more elaborated script and less dramatic elements could have helped to keep a balance. The weak point of the movie is the plot: it tells a story without any turns or character developments. There’s no real conflict, therefore there’s nothing to wait for. In addition, it is unnecessarily lengthened. In the very last moment a potentially new protagonist appears, but then it’s already too late to come up with a new storyline.

shooting in such a specific location?

We had many difficulties, but the locals helped us a lot. They were not only our generous hosts, but some of them also assisted us during the shooting. They live very isolated, therefore they were happy that we made their village alive again. We also felt just like their family members. And besides, we were also surrounded by miracles. I really mean it! Just let me tell you an example. In the area, where we shot, it usually snows a lot in November. We prayed every day that the snow wouldn’t come, because it would have ruined the whole shooting. As long as we worked there we had sunny bright days, it didn’t snow, not even once. But then, on the very day we finished the shooting and left the village, the snow arrived. I don’t think it’s only because we had the weather on our side. I believe it was a real miracle!

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Line of Credit Salomé Alexi, Georgia - Orizzonti With Georgian cinema becoming a new favourite in festivals, a number of emerging, mainly female, directors from the Caucasian country are presenting their work to an international audience. Salomé Alexi, who worked as a costume designer before turning into directing, came to Venice with her debut feature film, Line of Credit, dealing with the sensitive issue of Georgia’s financial crisis, seen by a female point of view.

Nino (Nino Kasradze) is in her 40’s. She lives in Tbilisi, where she owns a small shop, and she comes from an ex-nomenclaturist family. In her life she did not ever had any financial problems but now she is really struggling to get over her evergrowing debts. Nino wants to live an easy life and satisfy all the materialistic needs that she and her family have. For that reason she gets one loan after the other, from almost everyone, even when the rates are extremely high. It is clear that she got herself and everyone she knows into a deep vicious cycle and there is no hope to overcome her problems.

“Nino’s story is one among 172,300 families, who lost their abode as a result of mortgage loans in 2009-2013. The number of the households makes 14% of Georgia’s population.” This film’s statement sums up the concept behind it. Alexi is trying to depict the bleak reality of modern day Tbilisi, a city and eventually a whole country that remains under the financial crisis’ attack. Literally, the exchange offices and the pawnshops are popping up everywhere and you can find one around each corner. That image alone could be the basis for a deeper research on the causes of the depression but the director does not follow that path and she observes the results as they occur.

Nino portrays a typical example of the first post-Soviet generation and it is suggested that her problems are based on her 34

financial naivety. As a result she is an easy victim to the market created needs and she remains detached from reality. Her female crowded environment can’t really influence her since they have a pure decorative role, with no active participation in any kind of decision. The few male characters are depicted as weak and unimportant, a source of controversy for the conservative Georgian society. The film implies that the abrupt introduction to capitalism could be the main reason for today’s crisis and Nino’s character is a proof.

Despite the narrative flaws, the film is quite appealing on approaching the theme. Following the Georgian’s cinema tradition of subcutaneous comedies, Alexi did not create a dreary drama, but instead her film feels extremely lightweight and even happy. She breaks the moments of real drama with almost comedic episodes that do not aggravate the topic. Jean-Louis Padis’ cinematography, with vivid colours and almost pop aesthetic, helps towards that feel-good sensation. In addition, all the individual scenes are shot from a distance and with no close-ups, so every episode has its own image. That really helps the rhythm but sometimes it gets quite dull.

Line of Credit is dealing with a key issue that could have an impact on Georgian society, but Alexi’s decision not to evolve her initial idea to the right extent makes it a bit repetitive.

Furthermore, the monothematic perspective leads to generalization and does not really help the viewer to understand the current situation as a whole. A bolder and less stylized direction could probably bring the film to a more challenging level, without losing its originality.

Vassilis Economou

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The President Mohsen Makhmalbaf, IRAN - Orizzonti Makhmalbaf, as a prominent member of the Iranian New Wave of the 90`s, become recognised with his film The Cyclist.

Since then he created an ouvre that made him one of the most versatile directors of contemporary Iranian cinema. The art of Makhmalbaf diverges from documentarism to ornamentalism, from non-professional actors to theatrical stylization. In his films, political issues go hand in hand with self-reflexivity and with the problematic of art and filmmaking. With his latest film, The President, Makhmalbaf left behind almost all of the aspects that characterised his previous works. The film engages with a political subject, but in the means of style and storytelling the director chooses a more classical and consumable approach.

The story takes place in an imaginary country, somewhere in East-Europe, in which the aging president reigns over the country. In the first scene, as he entertains his grandson by switching on and off the lights of the city, they find themselves in the middle of a political coup. The family of the president leaves the country while he stays with his beloved grandson to fix the situation. However, when the military forces and the government turn against them, the duo has to cross the country in disguise. The first twenty minutes of the film suggest a witty and satirical tone which turns into suspense as the whole country searching for the escaping president and grandson.

The director’s aim was to create a political parable about peace and violence. As he stated: “after the collapse of a regime, whether it be a king or a president or a despot, the violence used against them by the people of these countries will re-

sult in new violence later on.” The President, after its original satirical opening gradually loses the charm of stylization and becomes a didactic tale. The film could be related to the Arab Spring as well as the east European dictatorships, while the ending shows a strong resemblance with the last days of Saddam. The dictator meets, during his trip, with political prisoners who all possess different opinions, but due to the lack of subtlety in the representation, the inherent complexity of the situations is completely missing.

The only viewpoint from which the film can be considered as an appreciable piece is the rapport between the president and his grandson. As we watch the doting grandfather with the fearful child Makhmalbaf plays an interesting game with us: by revealing the ‘human face’ of the tyrant we are getting closer to the character and as a result of this, secretly we are hoping for his successful escape. The unexpected turns in the journey and the different ways how the protagonist tries to disguise his identity are the moments which are able to turn the film into a hooking road-movie, but on the narrative level of the political parable it’s obvious and moralizing.

Makhmalbaf`s film grasps too much but holds little. The picturesque starkness of the Caucasian landscape with the two fleeing figures could have been used in a more enigmatic and resourceful way in order to say something new about over discussed issues.

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Heaven knows what Joshua Safdie, Benny Safdie, USA

Orizzonti

Review and Interview by Tara Karajica 38

Heaven Knows What, a tale of junkie life in New York city, caused quite a sensation at this year`s Orizzonti competition. As such the directors, brothers Joshua and Benny Safdie, quickly became primary “targets” for our team to interview. We sat down with both brothers to try to understand the complexity of covering such a theme.

How did you become interested in Arielle Holmes’ story?

J: She had a really nice vibe. She’s a very original person. She was on the streets since she was 15, technically in this world of drug use since she was 12. But, I didn’t know that when I was initially attracted to her. I was more interested in her. I was confused and intrigued by her and she seemed like the type of story that doesn’t happen anymore.

Why no background to her story is presented in the film?

J: I didn’t know her background for seven

months. That’s when we started filming and that’s when I started learning and it doesn’t change my perspective of things. I don’t need to know that. And I don’t think the audience needs to know that either.

B: So it’s much more interesting to see somebody and have to understand what they are, who they are as it’s how life happens. When you meet somebody, you don’t know everything about them right away although sometimes now you do, because of the Internet...

How do you think this particular story falls in a wider drug use context?

J: When I was looking into rehab facilities for Arielle, they were going to give us financial assistance and they have a list of questions that they ask you in order to obtain the financial assistance, to see how serious her addiction is, and to each question, she said yes: suicide attempt, jail, dishonesty, sickness… To me, it’s more what the psychology of a drug addict is.

Of course, there’s the sadness of having to do this or that and it gets much worse: she’s young,

review For the Safdie brothers, Arielle Holmes seemed the “most uniquely beautiful girl” they had ever seen. She intrigued them with her strong Jersey accent and unique vibe. A week later, they met her again and realized she was a 19-year-old homeless and drug addicted girl. Seeing her regularly, they learned more about her self-induced dramatic and simultaneously exciting yet difficult life. They then commissioned her to write about it, something she did in different Apple stores in New York City, which resulted in a forthcoming memoir entitled Mad Love in New York City, and now an adaptation by Joshua and Benny Safdie and Ronald Bronstein.

Heaven Knows What is a raw, realistic and almost documentary-like account on New York City’s junkie subculture and what it is like to live on the streets of the Big Apple today with a drug addiction and an untamed boyfriend. Holmes plays a homeless junkie in an obsessive on/off relationship with Ilya, whose unruly indifference finally encourages her suicidal impulses. And so, Harley tries to get by without Ilya, befriending Mike, a tender yet hostile addict and dealer who mistakes her attachment for deeper feelings. We follow her in a contorted and tangled journey of begging, drinking and getting high whenever and wherever it is possible.

The Safdies care, in fact, less about the love story than about their wish to fully engross us in this particular environment that most people would prefer to keep turning a blind eye to. And, in that sense, from the beginning to the end, Arielle’s story is solely constrained to this particular world. Also, even if none of the characters is entirely sober and the film concentrates on pathetic demeanour, it actually abstains from any condemnation whatsoever. We root for these characters and want them to get clean and sort their lives.

What is the most impactful quality of Heaven Knows What is the directors’ use of bold, sub textual music by Wendy Carlos and Isao To-

she’ll start prostituting, she’ll lose her looks… The movie is more the why behind a certain personality and psychology of an addict; they’re self-destructive, everything is self-destructive and it doesn’t stop with the drug, it goes all the way to the end of the behavior...

Is the film the starting point of her getting better?

J: Yes, she’s going to act in other movies.

She found a talent and it gave her life a purpose. I think a lot of drug addicts use drugs because they feel they have no purpose or they are very depressed. She still will battle depression her whole life but I think she’s found her calling and I know she’s already been cast in a couple films. Her book is fantastic and when it comes out, I think it will just present more opportunities for her.

Were you intimidated, scared by this subculture during the shooting? Were they

mita. Along the same lines, Sean Price’s cinematography is queasy and alternatively disturbingly close to the characters or entirely detached, capturing them in the hustle of the city, the cameras hidden far away.

In that sense, the directors cast all the street kids they could find and they all portray their characters with absolute conviction and deliver explosive performances. As far as the acting is concerned, the only real actor cast in Heaven Knows What is Caleb Landry Jones, who gives such a realistic and truthfully outstanding turn as the elusive and mysterious Ilya. It was precisely for his reputation of obsessive immersion into the characters he plays that that he was chosen. The directors therefore succeed in blending real actors with street legends and in doing so, give the rawness and roughness of it all the final perfect touch.

Nevertheless – and unfortunately – we are never provided a backstory for Harley and for that matter Ilya and their past. In choosing to omit these details and thus remaining rather vague, the directors strip us from the context of their life’s tragedy and a somewhat better understanding thereof. But, the film also shows with heartbreaking sadness the paradox of the brothers’ subjects’ existence: they have the ability to survive on the margins of society but not the will to change the course of their lives because of their paralyzing, addictive habits.

Drenched in the purposelessness and despondency of its dissolute characters, Heaven Knows What feels alive, crude, captivating and almost visceral in its graphic portrayal of the New York City junkie underworld, ceaselessly and courageously abiding to sketch today’s social issues with sharp attention and determination. With a powerful atmosphere, a strong emotional impact, clever distance and a resolute refusal to put any gloss on that grim reality, the Safdie brothers tell yet another heart-breaking and disarming story among the million untold ones of the city that never sleeps.

high during that period?

J: I don’t want to comment on that.

B: It wasn’t scary working with her. It was a very dark world and I think that was where the fear was. The whole world was very dark.

Can you comment on the shooting process?

J: We worked with some actors that we cast but a lot were people who have never acted before. We would do auditions and sometimes it was extremely difficult because we had people who were major addicts and major alcoholics and I didn’t even know if they would show up. They did show up and I didn’t know which one of them was going show up, which side of their brain…

B: Some of these people, their whole personality is based on doing exactly what you don’t want them to do.

J: It was such a breath of fresh air for us to bring in someone like Caleb or Necro and to mix them in the real life of the streets.

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Senza nessuna pietà Michele Alhaique, ITALY - Orizzonti You want it? You take it. You have it? You use it. Don’t you care about right or wrong, it doesn’t matter when it comes to power. That’s what Manuel Santili was taught, but not Mimmo, his cousin, raised in a family where the concept of good and evil, right or wrong dance in the balance of a knife blade. In this universe, violence – or its threat - is the only possible way to keep a balance and settle the scores.

Mimmo (Pierfrancesco Favino) works as a bricklayer and a henchman for his uncle, who runs a construction company and, in his spare time, plays at the loan shark surrounded by lackeys. Despite his majestic stature, Mimmo feels overwhelmed by a contrived sense of gratitude towards his uncle, who took him into custody after his father’s death.

His height is huge and a has a gloomy, scary look. But his eyes and attitudes suggest something completely different: he is a good man, a suburban hero whose strenght is about to set him free from the chains that kept him nailed to his family.

This might be a fresh start for Michele Alhaique’s first feature film, but he knows how to put some drama in a noir kept up by the stature of an amazing actor: Pierfrancesco Favino. Senza nessuna pietà is somehow a dychotomical drama on the internal journey of a man who suddenly overturns his life as he decides to stand out and make the right choice by saving an escort he falls for, Tanya (Greta Scarano), from being raped at his cousin’s whim.

Alhaique takes us to a trip along Rome’s gangland suburbs ruled by small clans, following the redemption of a man who takes the chance to turn his back to the ruthless values cultivated by his family and finally embrace the benevolent nature hidden behind a majestic height (Favino had actually had to put on some weight in order to identify with the sense of constraint owing to his condition).

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Yet, even if the setting and the plot is that of a noir movie, it predictably turns into love story between two fragile and lonely people stuck in a sort of endlessly manhunt in search of a safe place. The chocking atmosphere is built up by the closed, oppressive and suffocating urban spaces, portrayed like psychedelic labyrinths of concrete where the characters risk to stifle. The hardness of buildings is sweetened by the sounds and the sights of the sea, that on the contrary suggest abandonment, freedom, relief and the deep breath of life.

The use of handy-camera and the frequent close-ups silently capture the most subtle nuances of Mimmo and Tanya’s turmoils and you can almost read their thoughts. Communication is therefore exclusively based upon body gestures: the dialogues are essential and effective, reduced to a minimum. Silence seals a pact of trust and loyalty between the two lovers, and in any case it tunefully blends with the performances of the actors, who drag the viewer into a genuine and spontaneous participation. Music goes along with the story and supplies to the lack of dialogues, becoming the wire that links every scene to another, as if coming from Mimmo’s beating heart.

Directing, photography, music, and performances reveal that Alhaique is considerably confident about his technical choices and they eventually end up being functional and remarkable. Although it might be said that the major sore point is a weak and predictable plot, it is clear that Alhaique is still looking for his own visual language and the movie itself is to be considered a starting point for this reaserch. Nonetheless, despite being a first feature, it suggests that we should keep our eyes open on a young filmmaker at the dawn of his career.

Marta Tudisco

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Io sto con la sposa Gabriele Del Grande, Antonio Augugliaro, Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry, ITALY/PALESTINE - Orizzonti Lampedusa is the prime transit point for immigrants, and the setting for tragic events, raising much controversy in the Italian media. In order to react to this problem, Gabriele Del Grande, Antonio Augugliaro and Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry decided to embark on a journey to help five Palestinian refugees. The aim was to reach Sweden, where they could ask for political asylum. To make this dream come true 23 people met at the Milan Central Station for a wedding, and alongside a fake bride they started their journey to Stockholm.

The described events are extremely interesting for two reasons. The first: On the Bride´s Side is the direct presentation of the actual events.

The second: the film was financed by crowdfunding, with the help of 2500 people, which is so far the biggest project in Italy. The two facts clearly show the intention of the directors to represent the film as a collective “Film Manifesto”: if we are on the side of the bride, we are on the side of those who break down the boundaries and strive for a Transnational Europe. In this sense the film is not just an art piece, but a political act which could result in 15 years of prison for the creators.

The film could also be described as an unusual road-movie. The stops in different countries provide an episodic structure. The rhythm gives time for the viewer to gradually get to know the characters, their memories, plans and lives, as we immerse ourselves in the slowly developing plot. However, underneath the long discussions, the singing and the dancing there is the smouldering tension about the outcome of the journey.

The film as a documentary is strongly related to the method of the cinema vérité, in which the interaction between the filmmaker and the subject is explicitly present. This is essential in order to put the cha-

racters into a position of reflecting on their situation. This approach has an influence on the cinematic style and theme. As the major part of the story takes place in the tight space of a car, the main focus is on the dialogues, the gestures, the exchanged looks. The interactions between the characters are followed by a single handheld camera. as they are telling their stories surpassing the kilometres.

As the cinema vérité aim was to bring up social-political issues and to represent the events in a confrontational way, Del Grande triggers out the most current issues concerning the situation illegal immigrants in Europe. The creator’s biggest merit is that he managed to convey these questions in the most natural way, simply relying on the streamline of the events: the suddenly received citizenship of one of the characters confronts us with the subject of rootlessness and belonging. An abandoned house in the Italian-French borderline, with its Arabic signatures on the walls, becomes a site of collective recollection as they write up the names of those friends who were lost in Lampedusa. Ultimately, the idea of shooting a film such as On the Bride´s Side brings us closer to the issue of responsibility and assistance. The film is the positive imprint of that denied help that thousands of refugees experience on a daily basis arriving to the coasts of Italy.

In the climax of the film, when the group passes the Danish-Swedish border and their faces shine up with restrained happiness, the intention of the directors meets side by side with the viewers feelings. This film is a collective warning that needs to be shared, not just because of its political relevance, but also for that original cinematic approach that is rarely seen on the Italian screens nowadays.

Zorka Varga 41

In focus

The touch and the influence People’s reaction to motion pictures

In the dark of a movie theatre there is a little nest, a space where if you look attentively, you can see the reactions of the people attending the screening. What emotion or thought is drawn on the few hundreds faces gathered around to be part of the film experience. It is the case now, at 10pm screening of The Sound and the Fury by James Franco.

perfect for a night of cuddles and popcorn in the movie theatre or on the couch. Possibly, these American products are suitable for both genders because the context is easy, frivolous and most people can remain hooked till the end, either through the dynamic and twisting pace or through the comical and scaring sketches.

Some people leave, tired and spiritless. Others stay and keep their eyes glued to the screen appealed, asleep, distracted or dragged in. Franco’s picture is the perfect occasion to start talking about the audience’s reaction and influence for a movie, and when it comes to these terms it’s always better to start marking the territory. The discussion will be guided through two different groups: gender and age. Why women often perceive a film differently than men? Is it only a question of gender or also cultural factors are involved? Is the different age, and consequently the different experience of life, affect anyhow the process of enjoyment of a film?

For Pasolini by Abel Ferrara, the lens to use is more the age one. Almost everyone found the film poor of content, lacking to capture the real essence of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Though, the different age groups perhaps found it bad for different reasons.

For the oldest group, assisting to the representation given by Ferrara was not convincing and slightly disturbing, because many of these viewers lived in the years of Pasolini, and they couldn’t be attracted by a picture, that missed to tell the scent of their youth and the value of Pasolini’s art. They couldn’t find any of their experience inside it. For the youngest generations the dislike might be due to the superficial knowledge about the themes explored, or to an unfaithful reconstruction compared to the one they listened in school or they found in books, sold in some hipster and alternative book slum. Pasolini, at least in Italy, is a hipster and alternative myth for many young and welleducated guys.

With these few questions in mind, it’s possible to try to give a speculative, aware, but not exhaustive answer, and reflect on how a movie establishes a relationship with people, giving a touch into their hearts. To do that, what is better way to proceed than an analytic trip through some of the movies presented at the 71° Venice Film Festival?

First of all, there’s James Franco’s film, an adaptation of the famous novel by William Faulkner, describing the decline of a family in Mississippi at the turn of the 20th century. The non-linear approach, through which Franco tried to seize Faulkner’s style, didn’t impression the male audience, who in general found the film boring, pretentious and disrespectful of Faulkner’s work. Women seemed intrigued and synchronized with the story, mainly impressed by Franco’s performance as a retarded man. Probably here the reason is simple: a sex symbol like James Franco may create more empathy with a bunch of young women rather than with a crowd of annoyed guys at the end of a long day in a film festival.

Continuing our short reel through the films, we find Burying the Ex, a horror comedy directed by Joe Dante. This is the classical kind of film where the two genders are easily in accord.

The splatter and teen-dark atmosphere is pure entertaining, 42

There are also movies that elicited the same reactions in all the categories considered. Good Kill by Andrew Niccol was stereotypical and banal in describing the “drone war”, and this was too trivial, primitive, and blockbuster type to touch the audience of a film festival. Italy in a Day by Gabriele Salvatores convinced unanimously, because on the screen each of the viewer could find a familiar situation, random footages of men and women struggling against their life as well as daily routine.

The topic itself could speak to everyone, and create a bridge across viewer’s perspectives.

Indeed, what really happens between an audience and a film is an exchange of emotions and hopes. Empathy and pleasure always go together in building the chemistry that takes throngs from the outside world into the raid theatre of cinema, where their inner dreams finally get a kick to begin.

Stefano Raspa

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9째 EDITION

EUROPEAN SHORT PITCH 2015 Call for short film projects

Send your application to: europeanshortpitch@nisimasa.com

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“Sketched or real, perfect or not, the different faces of Venice will fascinate you.�

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La bambina

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SHORT MOVIES

Ali Asgari, ITALY/IRAN - Orizzonti

After the Islamic revolution in 1979 the rules of censorship have been changed in its core. The aspect which has been influenced the most concerned is the representation of women in Iranian cinema. The female characters after the revolution could be represented as obedient, passive figures who eagerly follow the man’s orders. Some directors in order to evade the taboos of representation started to use child actors for their films.

Others tried to experiment with the boundaries as the political climate of the 90`s became a bit milder. New issues appeared in the films related to women: the female identity, the woman’s position in society, questions of career and family and the relationship with cultural tradition. The simple topics which are rooted in daily life bring up much controversy in the means of cultural-political conventions. In this sense the films of Majid Majidi (Baran), Maryam Shahriar (Daughters of the Sun) and Jafar Panahi (The Circle) could be read as a feminist manifesto which is a call for change.

The young Iranian director Ali Asgari is a worthy heir of the above mentioned artists. His short films More Than Two Hours, Barbie and The Baby all revolve around the problems of young Iranian girls. In More Than Two Hours a couple is wandering in the night looking for a hospital where the girl, who just lost her virginity, can receive proper care. However, without the marriage license their situation is hopeless. In Barbie a little girl is preparing with excitement for her first day in school till she realizes that wearing veil is obligatory for every student. The Baby’s protagonist is a young mother who urgently has to find someone who can take care of her baby for one night, when her parents are visiting her, who are obviously have no idea about the existence of the child.

The Iranian cinema is in some ways the revival of the Italian neorealism not just because of the political aspects, but also for its stylistic traits. The Baby, as Asgari’s previous films, continues the latter documentary tradition: the actors are non-professional, the hand held camera is used in a wandering –observing way and the storyline highly relies on the rhythm of real life and accidentality.

In this sense the film of Asgari is a quintessential Iranian piece which pursuit is not to renew the conventions but to reinforce the already existing traditions. The biggest merit of Asgari’s films are the compelling basic situations which are all life like, yet, we have never seen these stories before. In his short films the director grips 15 minutes from his characters life, but he does it such intensity that we feel the personality and the whole past of the protagonist. The genuine approach of Asgari however wouldn’t be complete without the right actors. For the role of the protagonist Asgari have chosen Sahar Sotoodeh. In her persona we see the worrying mother and the fragile deer with frightened eyes. With her presence she gives a double meaning for the title, as ’the baby’ can be referred to her child, but also to herself.

The story of The baby, along with More Than Two Hours and Barbie could have happened to any Iranian woman. With his films Asgari emphasize the problematic of cultural taboos: in order to make real change in the politics cultural conventions should be changed and for this it’s necessary to go back to the basics, namely to the everyday life.

Zorka Varga

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review Interview with

Ali Asgari director of La Bambina, Orizzonti (short movies)

Ali Asgari is fast becoming a rising star in Middle Eastern cinema, and his impressive talent has not gone unnoticed in the film world. Last year we had a chance to talk to the young Iranian in Cannes, and as he now returns to the big stage with his latest short film in competition in Venice, we jumped into the opportunity to once again hear his interesting views on Iranian cinema.

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I saw your previous works, which are all dealing with female issues in some way. Why do you choose female characters as the focus of your films? Does the inspiration came from real life situations?

Maybe the reason is that I live in a family with six older sisters. With my mother there are seven women in my family. Sometimes [inspiration] comes from what I hear, sometimes what other people are telling me about their life. When I was thinking about this story, first I wanted to make it in Italy. With foreign characters, but who are living in Italy. After that I thought that this kind of story cannot be true in an Italian context, because of cultural factors. In Italy it wouldn’t be difficult to find a solution for the girl’s problem. The idea of this film came when I was talking to one of my friends in Iran. She is a twenty five year old girl and she said to me: “How I would love to have a baby!” When I asked, what stops you, she said “I don’t want to get married.” She wanted to have a baby, without getting married. But in Iran it’s impossible. So the story came from this, apart from a few pictures that I had in my mind about a girl who is putting her baby in the bag.

What I loved in your films are the actors. I think they are the heart of the film. How do you find these people?

For my last film I choose two girls amongst my friends. They are not professional actors, but they do work in an amateur theatre company. For short films I prefer to work with non- professional actors.

They give you more time to develop an idea and they have real motivation to shoot a film together.

What is really interesting for me in your films that you have your life in Italy yet you are observing Iranian issues and characters.

I make my films in Iran because I am in Italy just for five years. And in order to make real social dramas you should be really connected with the culture of that country. I’ve been living in Iran for twenty five years and I know the country very well. I can’t say the same about Italy and about Italian people. I was afraid that I would make a film which is not correct. For instance there are many Iranian-American that have never been to Iran, but they want to make a film about it.

And when I see their film I feel that it’s a really fake one, because they don’t know the culture and the civilization.

Do you think that the new government in Iran has a different approach towards the film industry?

The situation is a bit easier but still not ideal. The problem is that we don’t have restrictions only by the government, but we have many taboos in our culture and the two things go hand in hand. It’s a bit better than it was two years ago because the government is more open. Many films were prohibited during the time of the previous government and now these films are out in the world. The film Tales was blocked for four years and now it’s in program here in Venice for example. But my film could never be screened in Iran.

Zorka Varga

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SHORT MOVIES

Arta Adrian Sitaru, ROMANIA - Orizzonti

Adrian Sitaru is one of the prominent members of the Romanian New Wave. During his career he has been mainly focused towards short films, his most successful being Waves (2007). His first appearance in Venice was with his first feature Hooked (2008) which participated in Venice Days. Sitaru now returns to Venice with a short film entitled Art (Artã).

The film opens with a casting interview where the director Emi (Emanuel Parvu) and his casting director Andrei (Andrei Rus) are watching Anca (Iulia Crisan), a 13-year-old girl, performing the role of an underage prostitute. Along with them sits her mother (Ioana Steam) who has strong objections towards the nature of the film and her daughter’s role in it. Emi and Andrei must use any possible way in order to persuade her that her concerns are totally wrong since their film is art and “where there’s art, there’s no obscenity”.

Sitaru created one sublimely sharp almost personal film that could slightly considered as a reenacted mockumentary. Being also the scriptwriter, he based his story on his own discussions for his upcoming film Fixeur which is dealing with trafficking and prostitution of minors. During these discussions the director questioned where art ends and where the real abuse starts. He also tried to find what are the limits between filming the reality and the real pornography and if the moral issues should be placed beneath the artistic creation. In Art he still has the same serious concerns but his approach is quite amusingly lightweight.

Emi and Andrei are using the most provocative and even unconventional methods to persuade the mother. On one hand they mention films like Nymphomaniac, Taxi Driver, or even Empire of the Senses as innocent examples where pornography is considered art. On the other hand they use the vanity’s power – Anca could become immortal – of a possible Cannes or Oscar award as a way to get a positive

answer. Their methods clearly prove that even in art-house cinema you can still be the same ruthless person as in any other job. The theory that art could sanctify everything it is once again proven a myth. There are no moral rules when you need to do your business and Sitaru is just depicting that. Everybody seems innocent and guilty at the same time and equally responsible for each decision. Emi is just trying to do his artistic social awareness job, the mother wants to protect her daughter and Anca thinks of her future career. You can’t really blame anyone.

Since Art is a highly self-referential film it creates unavoidably a peculiar and humorous subconscious vicious cycle of manipulation. The audience is manipulated by Sitaru in order to watch how the fictional artists manipulate their fictional heroes who in their case are just illustrating how manipulating the reality could theoretically be. What is more interesting is that this whole procedure is carried along with simple and natural dialogues that with no exaggerations are presenting this provoking and disturbing truth in the most ordinary almost theatrical way. With that in mind Sitaru is balancing between reality and fantasy as he usually does in his films. He will go even further by touching the edges of surrealism with his finale.

Adrian Sitaru has the talent to encapsulate in a short film all the behind-the-scenes ethical issues that could evoke in a director’s mind. Also by exposing his own concerns and fears he also exposes how counterfeit is the innocence that protects his cinema. Art is not trying to solve the existing problems and evidently the initial question on the rightfulness to abuse people for your art remains unanswered.

Vassilis Economou

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Interview with

Adrian Sitaru director of ARTA, Orizzonti (short movies) You are preparing to shoot a feature film that deals with a similar topic to that tackled in Arta. Is the short a preparation for that?

Not necessarily; it derives from the many discussions we had about working with children while developing the feature which is about an underaged prostitute. We started discussing the ethical issues we might face. They took us to various directions, as we were actually four people working on this script- Adrian Silisteanu, the DOP that I've worked with on most of my films, his wife, with whom I've worked on a short film, me as a director, being interested in the subject, and from a certain point on, Razvan Radulescu. We've had clashes of doctrines on what child abuse is, and not just in these clear and radical stances such as prostitution and human trafficking.

You've often worked with children in other films. Did you encounter before this issue of abuse ?

No, because there was never the case for something similar- involving sexual positions. The issue appeared here more connected to how we act with our children thinking we're doing them good. This was both my theme and my fear- that we abuse in the name of art or of quality journalism. It's the case of a character in the feature, a reporter, who ends up abusing precisely in the context of a piece on the abuse of minors. In the name of art we can find many motives to cover the guilt.

'We're making an art film'. I believe we're doing that to children and their parents, but there is auto-manipulation hidden under the mask of art, or that of journalism. The discussion got to how we treat our own children, which also appears in Arta. Why do we send them to piano lessons? Do they want that? Are they old enough to know? Yes, we live in a competitive world, where if you're not the first you are nobody- a social issue that forces us as parents to pressure them. But when does it border abuse? This was the area of those many discussions that gave birth to this short film.. fairly easy, I would say. We also touched upon how we would do the casting for this film, what does it mean to abuse a child in that context. But the subject of the short is not connected to that of the feature. And it's not a preparation in the sense of testing

the style of shooting or anything. They are complementary more than anything.

Does the film reflect the typical casting process you use?

I haven't had these types of subjects before.. I think it started from an imaginative matter. I imagined, or rather actually had to think about, how I would do the casting for this film. For the short we've seen girls of various ages, some as small as 12, coming in with the mom to whom we spoke before about what the girls would have to act. I surprised myself being the advocate of the film, while also trying to be abusive in the least possible. But you inevitably take that role when you care about a thing that you don't do for money, which is not of another kind but art, for festivals and so on. I found myself talking like the director's character in the film. And yes, that is innate to the casting process, being persuasive. It's a matter of human nature how manipulative or correct you present things and what will really happen while shooting. I don't know how much you're interested in how it will affect their lives. No matter how much it will impact it, arguments such as “but wait, this is going to be in Venice or in Cannes� come up. They are quite subjective and this got me thinking. Otherwise, yes, the casting process is roughly this. I was helped for the casting of this short by somebody who works in advertising. He really liked the subject and he was touched by it, precisely because in advertising, where they work a lot with children, he has dealt with this, and it made him feel very manipulative and, ultimately, very... lousy. Especially because there we're talking about a lot of money, and even very loving parents tend to turn a blind eye. Everything has a price, and this is a problem.

In Arta there is never a question of money.

Yes, and I didn't want to go in that direction, which would have been easily at hand. The mom could have been a poor one, and not the most educated, and she would have been tempted to sacrifice her daughter for money's sake. We turned into not a matter of something even more dangerous- of fame, and other earthly things that distract you from seeing what and where harm is.

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review The film also touches upon the question of what is art and why it is so.

Yes, well.. I think these questions should be asked by anybody who makes films, or paints etc. In the films where it's best tackled it's clear that you present whatever you want, in a very beautiful, esthetic form, but with the aim to contrive. Now.. how much of it is the fault of the creators of any kind is less important. I think that wanting to be manipulated is intrinsic to human nature. You pay money to go into a museum, to go see a film- you want to be tricked on an emotional level, whether it's positively or negatively.

There are directors that see shorts as an intermediary step, an exercise. For you it's a format you periodically go back to. Why is that?

It's not really a matter of going back. In general, shorts, the one in question included, are a lot easier to make. But the question of 'why would you go back to shorts after making features' is like a asking a writer why he still writes short stories after having written a novel. You make shorts because that is the format you can express a certain idea. If you feel like whistling on the street, you just go ahead and whistle. It's not necessarily a melody, but more of a process that enriches you. There are many available forms. There are films that last 12 hours or more; maybe I'll find a subject which I will only feel I can express in too many hours. But it's true I feel good in this length of the short, maybe also because this is what I've done most. But overall it's just nice to make them. It doesn't even have to be about how much money you have, or could have.

Speaking of money, Arta makes some comments about that, as well as about who makes films in Romania, why, who sees them... What's your take on the status quo? Is the 'new wave' still there?

I think that whether we're still on the wave, or whether the wave is gone, it doesn't make much of a difference- people don't watch Romanian films. But they don't watch European ones either. There is no culture of film of any other “nature� than the American one.

I also believe there were many disappointments for the Romanian public. We don't even know exactly what these films are, we didn't learn about it in school, like they do in other countries, and we expect all of them to be entertainment. And films like The Death of Mr Lazarescu or 4,3,2 didn't necessarily stir positive emotions. Others were down right bad. But, like everywhere in Europe actually, it's also about the fact that people don't go to the cinema. While in Romania they do go more to the cinema in general, and to a certain extent that is good, the bulk of the box office is ensured by commercial American movies.

Is there anything that can be done to improve things?

if it didn't win any major festival prize) does not get the best screening days and hours. These are cinemas that simply don't need these filmsthey ensure their revenue with commercial productions. A simple law that would stipulate that the smallest screening room in a multiplex should be destined daily, within a certain time frame, to screen Romanian films could be a step in the right direction. It's disconcerting that there are big cities not reached by these films. It's not normal that there are so many cinemas and you can't find a place there; it's not normal that, as filmmakers, have to organise screenings ourselves charging insignificant amounts, or even nothing at all, just so the film can be seen.

It's a matter of legislation, which could function as a sort of protection of local productions.

The situation is even more dire for shorts.

Yes.. We were thinking what to do in order to ensure that Arta is seen, and we thought of the option of simply uploading it to You Tube. Because, otherwise, the option in Romania are festivals, which are not that many, and not many people get to attend. But there are people who would want to see it and they can have access to it at least online.

Even on TV, it's not the public television the one that supports and broadcasts shorts (and Romanian films in general), but HBO. They pay for the diffusion rights, so they offer a source of revenue for the producer, and they also actively promote Romanian film.

Why is Arta in the Orizzonti section?

I think the answer is simple here: is there any other section for shorts at this festival? There isn't.

Still, do you think it would be fair to say that the film does have an original touch, and distances itself to a certain degree from what would be expected from a Romanian film?

Unfortunately, me, being on the inside, I find it hard to discern that.

I'm waiting for feedback from those on the side. I didn't make a conscious choice for it to be 'something else'. I was simply interested in the subject and in bringing it into art territory- reflecting on why and how I do films. I've seen other films selected here, this year and before, and it does seem that they actively seek innovation. I'm glad to be considered thus and be selected. But it's an uncomfortable position- being on the inside; it's very difficult to see your own product. Anyway, the fact that it's in Venice can't be bad, can it?

Mirona Nicola

Laws always have some power to change things for the better. I've clashed, in a very frustrating and disappointing process, with the private distribution network in Romania. I'm sure they don't have something particularly against domestic films, but a Romanian feature (especially

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Cams Carl-Johan Westregård, sweden - Orizzonti Carl-Johann Westregard is a young filmmaker – or to put it more precisely a video artist – born in 1984, who has all of his works – most likely with the exception of his short screened in Venice – uploaded to his Vimeo page. Here the viewers can get an insight into the activities of the creator of Cams, an extremely disturbing short that has the sheer characteristics of a somewhat crazy genius. Westregard has directed three short films so far, but has been responsible for the visual effects in several other productions. His latest work Cams is a 13 minutes long short film that consists of several scenes showing images with 360° of camera movement.

The visual style of Cams is minimalistic and extremely reductive. What we see are panning shots, rotating 360° as they move around their axes horizontally, covering space from left to right. This direction of filming follows the direction of reading in western cultures and the viewer is indeed compelled to read the images seen, to explore the environment as thoroughly as possible. These images are completely void of human presence, but animals appear within the frames from time to time, although the camera doesn’t follow their movement, but keeps on panning ruthlessly, stripping the viewer of the visual pleasure of watching the activities of living creatures – initially the only remainders of a plot in the film. After watching what seems to be a nature film for a while, gigantic spider-like creatures appear setting the mood for a post-apocalyptic dystopia that never truly unfolds, leaving behind several questions and a feeling of unease in the viewers.

Cams appears to be an exercise in panning because what the viewer sees is that a camera had been put down on various locations – on a meadow, in a forest or on an empty street – and then it slowly started panning around. The 1 hour and 16 minu-

tes long Making ‘Cams’ film reveals that this is actually not the case: the film consists of stills melded together to form moving images, so the filming process never included panning on a tripod and the animals – squirrels and a dog – seen on the images where never actually there at the given location, but were animated during post-production; which took an incredible 11 months.

Making ‘Cams’ follows the process of creating the film in great detail and in chronological order of the making: we first see how the images of the film were captured, but the longer part of the film consist of a detailed introduction to the process of applying after effects to the images. We get an insight into how the spider-like creatures were created using the director’s lower legs in black stockings and avocados and all this background information is thoroughly entertaining. Making ‘Cams’ also serves as a detailed introduction to the After Effects software – even though the author himself later admitted that he should’ve used Nuke instead.

Cams is a one-man-show with Westregard in charge of directing, writing and editing, introducing himself as a real outsider in the over-politicized world of international filmmaking, claiming that if there was one thing he was sick of it’s the antiquated notion that filmmaking has to be expensive, emphasizing that for him making a short film without funding is not the last resort, making it with funding is. Cams is a stunning and suspenseful short reflecting a very peculiar world view in 13 minutes while Making of ‘Cams’ also reveals the painstaking efforts of post-production, the precision and sparkling creativity of the animation process.

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Maryam

ORIZZONTI shorts winner

Lift you Up

Sidi Saleh, Indonesia - Orizzonti

Ramin Bahrani, USA - Orizzonti

A well dressed woman, cell phone in hand, bracelets rattling on her wrist, gives instructions to the maid: she should not be disturbed during her upcoming holidays. Her body posture and voice are unnecessarily imposing for dealing with the obviously shy and obedient maid. This entire scene is in sharp focus, yet our eye is drawn to the out of focus area at the forefront of the screen- a tight close up of a person’s head, covered with a chicken mask; the head is perpetually in a convulsive moving, but the two women are not distracted by it. The shot goes on for long enough to keep us wondering- is the person in the mask chocking? Is is it just a kid playing?

The Persian- American director, Ramin Bahrani is a returning guest at the Venice Film Festival: 99 Homes is his 4th feature film in competition, and his latest documentary short also premiered here. In only 8 minutes, Lift you Up shows a way one can get through hard times by positive thinking -and some volunteer work on a chicken farm. It also offers an answer to the classical question: which came first, the chicken or the egg?

It turns out that it’s in fact it’s the bosses adult brother, who is autistic. The maid, Maryam, is stuck with watching him and the house over the Christmas holiday. During a hushed phone conversation we find out that Maryam is pregnant. It seems that she has not disclosed this information to her employer- maybe for fear of being fired. There is also no mention of who the father is, suggesting that Maryam- a practicing muslim, as indicated by her wearing a veil and covering clothes- is in a bit of a spiritual conundrum. This is only deepened by the man’s sudden request to be taken to church for Christmas mass, which means Maryan needs to accompany him to a Catholic church which she has to enter, as he can’t be left by himself.

The scene in and outside the church is key in the film, and seems to have been a difficult one to shoot. The camera is often quite far from the characters and it’s obvious the actors’ lines have been re-added in post production. The people around are puzzled by the presence of the camera, their gaze often wandering directly into the lens. All indicates that this was shot in a real situation. This was meant to be a key scene in the film, where Maryam struggles to reconcile her faith and her duty. Unfortunately the scenes are based on either over-explanatory dialogue or, when conditions didn’t permit it, attempting to suggest all this through mimicry and gestures. The overall impression is that the film struggles to convey its message without managing to find the right balance.

Maryam tries to tackle religion, social classes, autism, all in a short time span. While the result might not be perfectly rounded off, it’s nevertheless a bold attempt. Sidi Saleh makes a compelling argument for his ambition as a filmmaker- with the right support and resources he could help establish Indonesian cinema firmer in the festival landscape.

Mirona Nicola

The movie starts with a quote from Nelson Mandela, which calls the viewer’s attention on the importance of little things in life. The mottokind of statement is attached to the story of Glyn Stewart, the protagonist of the movie, a retired man from Northern Carolina. He opens himself with rarely seen honesty, but the story itself is not extraordinary.

He had difficulties in his life, such as losing his greatest love and failing to find a job after his heart attack at the age of 55. By the time he saw no goals in his life any more, he tried to commit suicide. With the help and emotional support of his friend, he succeeded in finding a voluntary job on a chicken farm, which helped him to find his life’s purpose.

Lift you Up is simple in content and form. It is an ordinary documentary with an usual structure: talking heads, presentation of Glyn’s past through old photographs and descriptive shots which show his everyday life activities. This classic documentary form is completed by a highly agreeable, but very didactic content which could be summarized in one single sentence: “keep your chin up!” The movie was made in frame of “The power of words’ project, which was launched by Nelson Mandela’s grandsons, with the aim of encouraging filmmakers to spread the word of important personalities. Films have a great educational potential indeed, but the idea behind the initiative necessarily leads to instructive movies and explicitly made big messages. As the quote appears on screen, the movie becomes a cinematographic illustration of it.

For Bahrani, whose filmography shows his wide interest in different film forms, a restriction like this is probably a new challenge. Earlier he made fictions and documentaries, features and shorts, and also a music video for the Icelandic band, Sigur Rós. The music composer of Lift you Up, M.Lo previously made soundtracks for his two previous features. This time he found a tranquil melody which gives the feeling of harmony and optimism to the viewer, in coherence with the other elements of the movie.

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Credits Director of Publication Fernando Vasquez (Portugal)

Design and Layout Francesca Merlo (Italy)

Editors Fernando Vasquez (Portugal) Mirona Nicola (Romania)

Special Thanks to Alberto Barbera and Michela Lazzarin

Writers Vasilis Ecomomou (Greece), Vicky Griva (Greece), Reka Holman (Hungary), Martin I. Petrov (UK), Tara Kasalijka (Italy), Mirona Nicola (Romania), Lilla Puskรกs (Hungary), Stefano Raspa (Italy), Marta Tudisco (Italy), Zorka Varga (Italy), Fernando Vasquez (Portugal)

This is a publication of NISI MASA

Photographer Elena Aya Bountouraki (Greece) Francesca Merlo (Italy)

With the support of

With the support of the Youth in Action of the European Union. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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