The Film Verdict: Oldenburg Review Dailies

13 - 17 September, 2023

Oldenburg Film Festival

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OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY

Oldenburg Redefines Edgy (Again)

INDEPENDENT IN THE BLIND SPOT VERDICT: A bold and chilling political thriller of shifting perspectives in which the weight of state-sanctioned terror begins to crush a security agent in eastern Turkey, where trauma and paranoia rip apart the social fabric.

Jay Weissberg, February 21, 2023

VERDICT: “The metaverse is nothing more than the transformation of the real world into a 3-dimensional interactive virtual world.”

TheFilmVerdict, September 4, 2023

Renowned for its innovation, for its 30th anniversary this year, the Oldenburg Film Festival has partnered with the MILC Platform and The Film Verdict to take its first virtual steps into the Metaverse. Users can immerse themselves in virtual Oldenburg and its rich history, attend panel discussions and discover a curated collection of films from the festival. Unveiled this September at metaverse.milc.global.

Before the Venice Film Festival began, The Film Verdict had a unique opportunity to have a quick chat with two men, who at the outset

couldn’t seem more different, but yet share the same passion and vision: Hendrik Hay, founder and CEO of MILC (Welt der Wunder) and Torsten Neumann, head of the Oldenburg Film Festival.

TFV: Torsten, you head up one of the most independent film festivals dealing with edgy and new filmmakers, as well as established filmmakers from around the world, and Hendrik, you are a born, at heart entrepreneur, who owned and ran televisions stations and now focuses on a vision that includes using micro-licensing utility tokens

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The brutal legacy of Turkey’s secret service casts a dark pall over a community in German-Kurdish writer-director Ayse Polat’s most accomplished feature to date, In the Blind Spot. A chilling tripart thriller that shifts perspectives as it plays with the inescapable pull of the past and its insidious legacy, the film dexterously links the story of a low-level security agent finding himself on the other side of the surveillance cameras to a deeper plot whose grip appears to reach from beyond the grave. With its bold take on state-sanctioned hit squads, In the Blind Spot is likely to create a firestorm at

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OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY Metaverse continued from page 1

that allows content owners to have their work be accessible to a global market. The question is, how is that the two of you are sitting down together with TFV for an interview?

Torsten: It seems like we do have a lot in common, and I would say it is mainly our love and passion for the things we’re doing that brings us together. Because it is not that common to find people who share the same ethics in their work, it feels very good to share a common goal with Hendrik, as he is a passionate man who keeps pursuing his dreams and fighting for ideas. I share those ideas. And how do we find the same idea of putting new media and edgy indie filmmaking together? Well, Hendrik’s vision is not designed to marginalize the old media, but only to introduce something that can put things back in balance – with regard to the field of interest I am dealing with, this seems to be the most important issue: the art of cinema is threatened by the ongoing development. Artistic variety has always been the most important detail to keep art and culture alive; what happens in the film industry is actually the opposite. It feels good to have people like Hendrik out there ready to stand strong.

TFV: Hendrik, you are in many

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ways a visionary. Last year you produced the first Short Film Festival, ALPHA on the Metaverse, in collaboration with The Film Verdict Inc. What was the feedback and how do you measure “success” on such a new platform?

Hendrik: Thank you! The Alpha Film Festival was one of the first festivals in the Metaverse. It was designed to show other festivals the possibilities of a virtual world.

We were very impressed with the communication around the event.

With around 450 million article impressions, we can assume that this first attempt did not go unnoticed.

We were approached not only by other film festivals, such as the Oldenburg Film Festival, but also by other events. The fashion and music industries in particular are working with us on really interesting concepts.

TFV: But Torsten, by and large, you are a “film guy,” how quickly did you embrace the idea of running Metaverse, a parallel festival universe, at the same time as the Oldenburg Film Festival? And how do you think your audience and sponsors will think of it?

Torsten: Of course, every new step into an unknown territory should be considered with care.

The Metaverse seems to oppose our goals to keep cinema as a real life experience where people

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Blind Spot continued from page 1

home but should find welcoming arms at international festivals.

Chapter 1 begins with a German film crew headed by Simone (Katja Bürkle), who’s making a documentary about the persistence of memory and the rituals used to keep loved ones close. They’ve come to eastern Turkey, in the area around Erzurum and Kars, to film Hatice Michael Crotto (Tudan Ürper), an elderly Kurdish

Mitosfilm

woman whose son was kidnapped 26 years earlier; in the hopes of bringing her son back, she makes his favorite soup every Friday, delivering it to the other villagers and waiting expectantly for her missing child to come through the door. Though just a small part of Polat’s film, this little story early on, shot with a sense of authenticity, gives a feeling of genuine emo-

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began surging through the “Balkan corridor” towards western Europe.

But while it opens like a familiar migration-themed narrative, this Greek-Macedonian-German co-production soon shifts gear into a more timeless personal story about three members of the same family, each trapped by secrets and

lies, stifling social conventions and dubious ethical choices.

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INDEPENDENT BEHIND THE HAYSTACKS VERDICT: Writer-director Asimina Proedrou’s grimly compelling debut feature is a contemporary Greek tragedy about family conflicts and border tensions.

Stephen Dalton, November 11, 2022

Tragic events ripple across a small community on the border between Greece and North Macedonia in writer-director Asimina Proedrou’s bleakly compelling debut feature, Behind The Haystacks. Grounded in gutsy performances and downbeat social realism, this solemn ensemble drama takes place in 2015, when large numbers of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war-torn nations

Argonauts Productions

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Proedrou initially keeps tension on a low flame, but plants a suspenseful hook early with her prologue, in which a group of children stumble across a pair of dead bodies at the edge of Lake Doiran on Greece’s

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northern border. She then unravels the backstory to this macabre discovery across three overlapping chapters, a Rashomon-style splintering of subjective viewpoints that gradually come together into a cohesive jigsaw narrative.

Within its modest family framework, Behind The Haystacks makes some deeper state-of-the-nation points about injustice, hypocrisy and racism. World premiering this week at Thessaloniki International Film Festival, this contemporary Greek tragedy is a classic festival feature in theme and style, with a moral heft and novelistic texture that could give it wider art-house appeal and awards potential.

rying a heavy burden of guilt for past crimes and misdemeanours, notably an impending court case for historic tax fraud. Offered the opportunity pay down his debts in a desperate bid to avoid jail time, he strikes a Faustian deal with an illegal people-smuggling gang, who are bringing refugees from wartorn Syria across the nearby Macedonian border by boat. The second chapter turns its focus on Stergios’ wife Maria (Lena Ouzounidou), a devoutly religious woman active in the Greek Orthodox church, who is drawn into charitable work at a nearby refugee camp even though her haughty priest strictly forbids the “sinful” activity of helping Muslims.

daughter Anastasia (Evgenia Lavda), a free-spirited nurse and aspiring singer who is constantly clashing with her controlling, socially conservative father. She takes centre stage in the third act, which helps tie together the loose ends and unresolved questions of the story so far. Using extra shifts at the hospital as cover, Anastasia has been leading a double life of secret boyfriends, boozy parties and stage performances in sleazy nightclubs.

When Stergios stumbles across the truth, their overheated arguments take a tragic turn.

The opening act revolves around Stergios (Stathis Stamoulakatos), a grizzled veteran fisherman car-

A combustible background presence in these opening sections is the couple’s twenty-something

OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY Haystacks from previous page

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There is precious little mercy or redemption in Behind The Haystacks.

Innocents die, the wrong people are scapegoated, the guilty walk free, and nobody gets away with a clean conscience. These characters Full Review, click here

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FAST FACTS

OLDENBURG CELEBRATES 30 YEARS

1994 Festival Launch Festival Highlights: Romeo is Bleeding; Crooklyn

1997

Festival Friend John Gallagher comes to Oldenburg with "The Deli" Festival Highlights: Tim Hunter retrospective together with a tribute to lciar Bollain.

ORG IVE

12 SEPT 2023

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1997

Introduction of the German Independence Award Festival Highlights: The Closing Night Oscar­winner with "Gods and Monsters.

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OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY COMPETITION

VERDICT SHORT

LITTLE GIRL BLUE

CLEANER VERDICT: A tentative friendship begins between a cleaner and the woman who employs her in this delicately wrought drama about relationships and their boundaries.

Ben Nicholson, September 13, 2023

Lesley Conroy’s Cleaner is a film that hinges on its performances.

Oldenburg

VERDICT: Mona Achache brings invention, curiosity and raw vulnerability to excavate traces of three generations of female writers in her family and power abuses in France’s literary scene.

Carmen Gray, September 13, 2023

French-Moroccan filmmaker Mona Achache digs for knowledge to better understand the several generations of female writers in her family in the docufiction Little Girl Blue, and more specifically, to come to terms with her mother Carole Achache’s suicide, who died in 2016 at age 63.

The film, which screens at Old-

enburg International Film Festival after its premiere at Cannes, is a highly personal, frank and emotionally vulnerable departure from her comedies The Hedgehog (2009) and Les Gazelles (2014), with prospects for international interest heightened by an intense, gripping performance from star Marion Co-

It was made as part of the Actor as Creator initiative, run as a collaboration between Screen Ireland and the Bow Street Academy, that is intended to allow actors to produce a short film that expresses their creative vision. In this instance, Lesley Conroy wrote Cleaner, and while handsomely directed, it bears the hallmarks of a work intended Continues next page

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OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY Cleaner from page 1

to showcase its on-screen talent.

The story follows Angela (played by Conroy), who builds up an unexpected rapport with the woman whose home she is paid to maintain. Told as much through gesture and body language as through dialogue, the film crafts an impressively naturalistic camaraderie while remaining cognisant of the unspoken boundaries being crossed.

The plot is deftly charted through the changing way that Mairead (Carolyn Bracken) addresses Angela on the envelope she leaves on the countertop with her wages in.

In the film’s opening sequence, it merely says ‘Cleaner’ demarcating the transactional nature of their relationship. However, when Angela steps in to look after Mairead’s children in an emergency, the professional line between them becomes blurred and a friendship emerges – before long the envelope goes from saying ‘Angela’ to being adorned with embellishments like a smiley face or a kiss. Despite this, as the two women grow closer, the audience becomes painfully aware of the potential reality check that looms on the horizon.

Conroy’s script, and the two women’s performances, do a great job of conveying this tension. As they interact with increasing ease and intimacy, the lopsidedness of their

Full review, click here

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Little Girl Blue from page 1

tillard, signed on to embody the director’s late mother in re-enacted conversations.

The tragedy of a suicide in a family colours and reshapes everything that went before.

Little Girl Blue shows the director, appearing as herself and addressing us and the departed in voiceover, in a Parisian apartment. She sifts through stacks of old photos of her relatives and letters in crates, fixing some to the wall. These traces are recast as evidence, as remembering takes on the form of an existential investigation. Recorded conversations with “surviving witnesses” of her mother’s childhood are exhumed and played back, considered as clues to the seeds of her final act.

Mona’s father had implored her not to waste her energies on something intrinsically incomprehensible and direct them instead to the living. But for the women in the family, who wrote about their mothers and reproduced their ambiguities and psychological struggles across generations, the mystery of who their predecessors really were has been all-consuming and defining. Trauma as well as talent are their legacies.

The film consciously examines

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what it is to retell a story and mythologise it. Existing in a family in which numerous dramatic, clandestine tales were floating around warped one’s sense of self, what it meant to be interesting, and one’s conception of purpose. Among the swirl of tales, in which the generations blur, is one about a gang rape in Pamplona during a bullfight. A sense of gendered violence as an inevitability was planted in the women of the family, who considered themselves cursed.

Central to these reflections is the figure of famed avant-garde writer and one-time vagabond Jean Genet, who was a close friend of Monique Lange, Mona’s grandmother and an editor at the publishing house Gallimard as well as a writer in her own right.

That closeness extended to Carole, with her mother’s complicity, and when she was only eleven, she would skip class to visit him. Genet, always controversial, does not come off well in the film. He’s characterised as a perverse influence who hated the “banal” above all else, and would break people by pushing them as far as he could into their own contradictions, simply for a kick (his tightrope-walker lover Abdallah also died by suicide).

Full article, click here

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the Spotless Mind (2004), The Science of Sleep (2006) and Be Kind, Rewind (2007), his new feature is leavened by ironic humour, off-beat charm, hand-crafted special effects, jaunty music and inventively quirky visuals. Whether these factors save it from sinking into a special-pleading apologia for asshole artists is arguable, but they go a long way to making The Book of Solutions more fun than most navel-gazing geniusis-pain movies. World premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar

in Cannes, this slender comeback is too uneven and self-pitying to rank among Gondry’s best work, and is likely headed for limited art-house play outside France. But the director has carved a unique stylistic niche in European cinema, and it is good to see him back on the big screen.

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INTERNATIONAL THE BOOK OF SOLUTIONS VERDICT: Back after a long hiatus, French writer-director Michel Gondry’s most personal film to date is a scrappy, self-indulgent but entertaining love letter to asshole artists.

Stephen Dalton, May 21, 2023

Film-makers are needy, narcissistic, bullying egotists with every right to demand the impossible from the lowly underlings who work for them. If they were not, they would never get any films made, and certainly none that qualify as Great Art. This seems to be the dubious take-home message of Michel Gondry’s first feature in eight years, The Book of Solutions, the visionary French writer-director’s most nakedly autobiographical work to date.

Of course, as with previous Gondry comedies like Eternal Sunshine of

Partizan

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The Book of Solutions is loosely inspired by Gondry’s bruising post-production battles on the surrealist literary rom-com Mood

Full review, click here

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for his wild experimentation, feels at home in. Não Sou Nada — The Nothingness Club, screening in the Big Screen Competition at Rotterdam, and termed by Pera a “cinenigma”, is a radical, outlandish and gorgeously realised noir-style mystery and trip into the mind of

the Lisbon-born poet and philosopher, who wrote under a number of different personae (which he called “heteronyms”). Perhaps too bizarre and conceptual for wide release, this film will nevertheless have no trouble finding its audi-

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MIDNITE XPRESS THE NOTHINGNESS CLUB VERDICT: An outlandish, radical trip inside Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s mind, gorgeously realised as a mysterious office of alter-egos and clacking typewriters.

Carmen Gray, January 31, 2023

To adapt any beloved author’s novel for the screen is notoriously difficult. But to be so bold as to base a film on the fragmentary and esoteric outpourings of Fernando Pessoa, famed for The Book of Disquiet and other works that made him a giant of twentieth-century literature, might just be approaching madness. Luckily, madness is a terrain that Portugal’s Edgar Pera, an idiosyncratic director known

AFM23 ®

Rotterdam

Full review, click here

LE MÉRIDIEN DELFINA NOW TAKING RESERVATIONS.

SANTA MONICA OCT. 31 – NOV. 5

AMERICANFILMMARKET.COM PHOTO: DYLAN PATRICK PHOTOGRAPHY INC

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FAST FACTS

OLDENBURG CELEBRATES 30 YEARS

1999

Director Harry Kuemel is the guest of honor.

Festival Highlights: the German Independence Award went to "The Invisibles."

2001

18-year-old Keira Knightley presents the German Premiere of "The Hole". " Anam" becomes the first German film to win the German Independence Award.

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1997 Oldenburg celebrates its 10th anniversary with an abundance of films and parties. Festival Highlights: "Northfork" wins the German Audience Award.

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OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY

Full review, click here Oldenburg Film Festival

INTERNATIONAL MAESTRA VERDICT: Maggie Contreras reveals workplace realities for female orchestra conductors as global candidates vie for a Paris contest title, in a warm, glossy doc with surprising political bite.

Carmen Gray, September 14, 2023

Female conductors are a rare breed: fewer than three percent of the world’s top orchestras have women leading their ensembles. Little-known insights about the realities of this career are set out in documentary

Maestra, the directorial debut of Maggie Contreras, which is screening at Oldenburg International Film Festival, after its Tribeca premiere.

Glossily conventional in form, the film is buoyed by an empathetic warmth, as it challenges the norms of a profession that has traditionally been rigidly male-dominated.

It closely follows five very likeable, vastly different candidates (of French, American, Polish, Greek and Ukrainian nationalities) of a total fourteen, as they converge in Paris for knock-out rounds of the 2022 edition of La Maestra, the only global conducting contest exclusively for women. Contests

are important for launching conductors’ careers — especially for female hopefuls, who are otherwise sidelined from exposure for big roles. Though the contest setup adheres to a standard doc formula to amp up suspense through

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METAVERSE ENTRY

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VERDICT SHORTS

can be customised and uploaded back into his head.

DREAM MAKER

The unnerving potential of such a narrative might seem a million miles from the early scenes of Dream Maker, which are laden with the golden hour sunshine and saccharine aesthetics of nostalgia. But this is exactly what those images are – they are the memories of a father, thinking about his young daughter. Now, he lives in what can only be described as a bunker, his only connection to the outside world coming through time spent in a headset, reliving happier times. It transpires that the man was – accidentally – responsible for a terrible accident that saw his daughter killed. His VR sessions are the dreamier moments of her final

VERDICT: A man uses virtual reality to experience and retouch the memory of his deceased daughter in this poignant, thought-provoking Iranian sci-fi.

Ben Nicholson, September 14, 2023

Memory is not just unreliable but amendable in Mohsen Mehri Darouei and Milad Kiaei’s Dream Maker.

Science fiction is a genre famed for its ability to hold up a mirror to humanity in a way that recontextualises private and social conundrums through high-concept drama. In this instance, notions of simulation and virtual reality meld with questions of memory and subjec-

Oldenburg Film Festival

tivity to create a quietly challenging film about the potential role of technology in recording personal history. For the unnamed man at the centre of Darouei and Kiaei’s short (played by Rez Robatiazi), a deep-seated personal trauma can be slowly massaged from his mind through the use of VR memory that

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IMPRESSIONS & MEMORIES OLDENBURG CELEBRATES 30 YEARS

Melanie Miller

Producer, “Maestra” (2023) “My favorite memory of Oldenburg is from 2006, and I don’t know if they still do it; they used to do this volunteer party at the end of the festival, where instead of the volunteers waiting on us hand and foot, we actually wait on them. I ended up being the bartender for about two hours that night. I hope they still do that because I would love to do that again.”

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the appealing animation, stay for a love letter to falling hard for someone and all of the joys and disasters that entails.

dialogue – much like the graphic novel it is based on – the loneliness of its protagonist pooch is palpable. Suddenly, an advertisement explodes onto the TV in front of him offering a cure for loneliness in the form of the Amica 2000, a new metallic mate. Their friendship flourishes immediately and they race around the city having a whale of a time. One day, however, after they fall asleep on the beach, Robot finds that he can’t move,

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INTERNATIONAL ROBOT DREAMS VERDICT: A friendship between a dog and a robot in 80s New York provides the foundation for a beautiful and touching exploration of relationships.

Ben Nicholson, September 14, 2023

At the beginning of Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams, Dog is lonely.

His evenings are spent channel-surfing in his pokey New York apartment until one day he sees a television advert for a robotic buddy. What ensues begins as a freewheeling but deeply felt meditation on the nature of relationships. Based on Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel of the same name, Berger’s dialogue-free animated feature is an exceptionally nuanced comedy-drama that premiered in Cannes before going on to understandably win the Contrechamp Grand Prix for Best Film at Annecy. Come for

Oldenburg Film Festival

When the film joins him, Dog’s life is one of microwave mac’n’cheese while sat in the glow of the TV, flicking through soulless comedies and infomercials. In the apartment block across the street, Dog hears and then sees a couple cuddled on the sofa, giggling and joking, enjoying companionship. Although Robot Dreams eschews spoken

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IMPRESSIONS & MEMORIES OLDENBURG CELEBRATES 30 YEARS

Edwin Mullane

Director, “Cleaner” (2023) “I just arrived in Oldenburg, it’s my first day and so far, first impressions, it’s all about people – from the industry, from different countries, filmmakers, and it’s such a lovely atmosphere.

Everybody is mixing together.

It’s quite unique for a festival really. Generally, you have different spheres of the festival pulled to other venues or other VIP events so to have everybody together is really lovely. There is something very special about that. I can’t wait for the next few days.”

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FAST FACTS

OLDENBURG CELEBRATES 30 YEARS

2004

The German Independence Award –- Best German Film was presented by an international jury for the first time. The winner is Andreas Struck’s “Sugar Orange”. The audience award went to the Greek production “Hardcore” by Dennis llliadis.

2005

Producer/director Christopher Coppola used the festival to tour Oldenburg’s surroundings for an episode of his “Biker Chef”-series.

Awards went to Catharina Deus for “Die Boxerin” and Marcos Siega’s “Pretty Persuasion”

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2006

The selection included Richard Linklater’s Philip K. Dick adaptation “A Scanner Darkly” with Closing Night offering the German premiere of Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain.” Jerry Schatzberg received retrospective honors

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OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY MIDNITE XPRESS

INDEPENDENT

ENTER THE CLONES OF BRUCE

FROM DAWN TILL NOON ON THE SEA VERDICT: A kidnapping sees the lives and fates of three troubled youths become entwined in Takayuki Hayashi’s serene and solemn feature debut.

Ben Nicholson, September 15, 2023

There is a haunting beauty to Takayuki Hayashi’s From Dawn Till Noon on the Sea.

Severin Films

VERDICT: David Gregory’s lively, affectionate documentary chronicles the bizarre explosion in Bruce Lee lookalikes and copycat films that followed the martial arts superstar’s death.

Stephen Dalton, September 15, 2023

Exploring a bizarre and under-reported chapter in pulp cinema history, Enter the Clones of Bruce turns an expert eye on the avalanche of copycat action films and lookalike actors that followed kickass screen legend Bruce Lee’s untimely death 50 years ago. Directed

by David Gregory of Severin Films, an LA-based company that specialises in restoring and repackaging vintage cult movies, this highly engaging documentary has sufficient production polish, human interest and broader cultural resonance

for general audience appeal beyond narrow fan-boy circles. Premiered in Tribeca, it makes its German debut in Oldenburg this week, with a string of more genre-friendly festival bookings to follow.

When Lee died of a cerebral oedema in 1973, aged just 32, he was on the cusp of global superstar fame, a virtual one-man film industry who had elevated kung fu movies from local phenomenon to global brand. His sudden demise left

Following the fortunes of three young people in a coastal town in Japan, it is a quite earnest example of the familiar genre of high-school dramas at which the country’s filmmakers excel.

Adapted from an episode in Shun Umezawa’s manga anthology One and Ninety-Nine, Hayashi’s film is an exploration of detachment, using the kidnapping of a schoolgirl as a

Full review, click here

Full review, click here Oldenburg Film Festival

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of Alicia world premieres this week in Oldenburg, underscoring the German festival’s reputation for launching raw indie talent.

connection more than career opportunity, wandering Copenhagen’s parks in a boozy haze looking for company, or flirting awkwardly with casual acquaintances.

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INDEPENDENT FRAMES OF ALICIA VERDICT: A troubled young Swedish woman finds Copenhagen to be town without pity in Danish director Adam Benjamin Mikkelsen’s slight but emotionally powerful debut feature.

Stephen Dalton, September 15, 2023

Danish male directors have always loved their female sacrificial victims, from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Lars Von Trier to Nicolas Winding Refn. Charting the grim daily struggles and downward spirals of a troubled young woman on the streets of Copenhagen, Frames of Alicia initially seems to be aiming itself directly at this relentlessly bleak national canon, but it veers off into something a little more intimate and open-ended.

An immersive first-person portrait of urban loneliness, hunger for love and spirited resilience, writer-director Adam Benjamin Mikkelsen’s feature debut was made on a micro-budget, a poverty of resources which is sometimes all too evident. Even so, this slender contemporary drama punches above its weight in emotional impact, largely thanks to a gripping, nerve-jangling, intense central performance

by Swedish novice actor Tuva Alfredsson, who is on screen for virtually every second. Frames

Oldenburg Film Festival

Alfredsson stars as the eponymous heroine, an aspiring R&B singer from Sweden who has just relocated to the Danish capital to try and kickstart her career. After dyeing her Nordic blonde hair a more exotic chemical red, and renting a room in a cheap shared apartment, she begins to hustle herself around town, but meets mostly indifference and rejection. A minor studio producer compliments her woozy voice, “like you just popped a Xanax or something”, while a shy young photographer helps her out with a promotional shoot. But music-making ultimately appears secondary to Alicia, who seems to be desperately seeking human

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This walking-wounded aura inevitably makes Alicia vulnerable, especially to lowlife predators masquerading as well-connected music industry players. An extended scene in which a smooth-

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METAVERSE ENTRY

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VERDICT SHORT OUR MALES AND FEMALES VERDICT: A mother and father are confronted with an agonising dilemma as they attempt to prepare the body of their young transgender child for burial.

Ben Nicholson, September 15, 2023

Disapproval persists after death in Our Males and Females.

Ahmad Alyaseer’s film tells the story of a young transgender woman over whose body her two confused parents grieve.

Unable to accept the gender reassignment that she was undergoing while living abroad, they find themselves unable to clean her body and that neither male nor female washers are willing to aid them. It’s a moment of perfect dramatic tension, that makes it ideal for a succinct short film that is limited in scale, but far more significant in scope

Oldenburg Film Festival

of its emotional resonance.

The quandary they face is evident straightway as the father (Kamel El Basha) and mother (Shafeqa Al-Tal) keep referring to their “son” and “him.” It’s unclear whether they were completely unaware of the struggle their transgender daughter had been through – she was living abroad – or just found it unconscionable, but they certainly can’t accept it now. As they try to prepare her body for cleansing and shrouding before burial, they

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are incapable of even looking at her. They try first to bring a male cleanser in, but he decries them – the subsequent female washer shrieks that they have brought shame on their country.

The heart of the tension lies less in who will clean the body and more in when and if either of the parents will come to any form of acceptance and tolerance towards what they are struggling to comprehend.

As it becomes clear that both faFull review, click here

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IMPRESSIONS & MEMORIES OLDENBURG CELEBRATES 30 YEARS

Sara Michael

Friend of the Festival “I know the festival from both sides. From the side of working for the festival, for Torsten, and it’s always a huge experience.

Every year is so different, and I love the people, I love the guests – especially the film guests because they are so different, so multi-cultured.

We always have space to get in touch, to talk with the filmmakers. There is no difference between us. That is the most wonderful thing.”

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OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY

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IMPRESSIONS & MEMORIES OLDENBURG CELEBRATES 30 YEARS

Patrycja Planik Filmmaker

“My favorite thing about this festival is that it is a well of Independent Cinema.

There is nothing like this in the world. A festival that supports and truly falls in love with independent filmmakers.”

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FAST FACTS

OLDENBURG CELEBRATES 30 YEARS

2011

A record-breaking 1,300 audience members attended opening night. The star on the OLB Walk of Fame went to Matthew Modine. Festival Highlight: “The Way” becomes the first festival film to be screened in Oldenburg’s Lamberti-Church

2013

To celebrate the 20th year, an exhibition “People & Places” with portraits of past guests and honorees plus a Collector’s Edition photo book of the same name, chronicling years of Festival highlight were offered.

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2016

Nicolas Cage was celebrated as the 2016 Tribute Honoree and recipient of the tenth Star of Excellence on the OLB Walk of Fame. Festival Highlight: The world premiere of Benjamin Teske’s debut feature “Strawberry Bubblegums” opened the Festival.

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OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY INTERNATIONAL

Oldenburg Film Festival

CHARCOAL VERDICT: A dark, absurdist farce of wicked schemes bred of hardship in smalltown Brazil reveals helmer Carolina Markowicz as a bold talent.

Carmen Gray, September 16, 2023

Surviving isn’t easy, and dignity is far out of reach, for the colourful cast of characters of Brazilian filmmaker Carolina Markowicz’s feature debut Charcoal. The offbeat, irreverent and suspenseful dark farce, which screens at the

Oldenburg International Film Festival, turns on the desperate opportunism bred of relentless poverty, and heralds a bold new directorial voice in Latin American cinema. It portrays the small settlement of Joanopolis in Brazil’s southeast as a place where amorality has permeated the population, church-going having provided no comfort to alleviate their struggles, and wild risk-taking seeming the only route to even temporary relief.

In the cramped, grimy bedroom of a family home, nine-year-old Jean

(Jean Costa) has been allotted the top bunk of a bed, while his ailing grandfather Firmino (Bendito Alves) sees out his last days below.

The old man is at a stage of physical breakdown where his bodily fluids are hard to contain, his mobility is severely limited by the large oxygen canister he has to lug around, and any zest for existence he once had has dissipated. Jean’s parents Irene (Maeve Jinkings) and Jairo (Romulo Braga) struggle to keep the family afloat, but times are tough, and the money they earn producing charcoal from the furnace of a small factory is scarcely enough.

Submitting to God’s will is the only guidance the Church can offer. The family rejects it in favour of taking fate into their own hands, when Juracy (Aline Marta), a new nurse, proposes a shady deal. If they agree to euthanise Firmino, then

Full review, click here

METAVERSE ENTRY

OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY

MIDNITE EXPRESS THE BELGIAN WAVE VERDICT: Belgian cult director Jérôme Vandewattyne uses a spate of real UFO sightings as the launchpad for his incoherent but highly entertaining acid-punk sci-fi road movie about close encounters of the surreal kind.

Stephen Dalton, September 16, 2023

A riotous rollercoaster ride of grossout horror comedy, sci-fi conspiracy theory and psychedelic acid-trip derangement, The Belgian Wave is one of the most unusual and entertaining world premieres at this year’s Oldenburg Film Festival. It is also one of the most incoherent, but petit bourgeois concerns like narrative logic and plausible characters clearly do not interest Belgian writer-director Jérôme Vandewattyne, whose default style is maximalist splatterpunk surrealism.

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Part-time rock musician Vandewattyne was last in Oldenburg to premiere his debut feature Spit’N’Split (2017), a band-on-tour mockumentary which morphs into a gonzo horror bloodbath midway through.

The Belgian Wave feels bigger and more ambitious, boasting highgloss visuals and slick production design elements that defy its reportedly modest budget of 300,000 Euros. Peppered with knowingly retro homages to the scratchy VHS look and saturated neon palette of vintage 1980s and 1990s cult cinema, this delirious Midnight Movie is plainly not pitched at fans of tastefully restrained art-house fare. Even so, it is made with more polish and wit than its pulpy surface aesthetic might suggest, and is way too inventively weird to ever become boring. Genre-friendly festivals and psychotronic movie connoisseurs should take an interFull review, click here

Take Five

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INDEPENDENT THE WAIT VERDICT: Spanish director F. Javier Gutiérrez’s atmospheric but underpowered horror western offers a fistful of familiar supernatural tropes.

Stephen Dalton, September 16, 2023

Set on a sweltering desert ranch in early 1970s Spain, The Wait is a handsome exercise in old-fashioned supernatural horror, feeling at times like a spaghetti western remake of The Shining (1980). The latest nerve-jangler from director F. Javier Gutiérrez, returning to his native tongue following his poorly received English-language franchise flop Rings (2017), is visually strong and reliably creepy, with promising hints of the politically charged subtext that Guillermo Del Toro brings to his Spanish period pieces. But this noir-ish thriller never quite delivers the killer twists and shock revelations it promises, remaining firmly in its superior B-movie lane. Following its world premiere in Oldenburg his week, it should draw healthy crowds at Full review, click here

OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY

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INDEPENDENT BEAUTIFUL FRIEND VERDICT: A sociopathic amateur filmmaker kidnaps the woman he wants to play his fantasy girlfriend role in Truman Kewley’s quietly chilling psycho-thriller debut.

Stephen Dalton, September 16, 2023

An immersive first-person dive into the mind of a sociopath, Beautiful Friend is a quietly powerful first feature from US indie writer-director Truman Kewley. Shot with crisp formal precision and leavened by hints of darkly ironic humour, this lean two-hander involves a mentally fragile young man abducting a woman and holding her captive, hoping she will fall in love with him. There are distant echoes here of William Wyler’s classic psychological thriller The Collector (1965), but also more recent domestic-prison dramas like Room (2015) and Girl in the Basement (2021). Following its world premiere this week in Oldenburg, Kewley’s disquieting debut should generate further festival buzz, particularity for

Oldenburg Film Festival

its timely depiction of toxic masculinity and beta-male misogyny.

Daniel (Adam Jones) is an “incel”, an involuntary celibate whose loneliness and sexual frustration has curdled into a festering, self-pitying, all-consuming obsession. He has come to bitterly resent women for not giving him the attention he craves. “I am a good man, I am a strong man,” he assures himself in the hypnotic, chillingly calm voiceover that runs through Beautiful Friend like music. “All I want is

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what everybody else has.” No screen narration has sounded this soothingly sinister since HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

With a triumphant tone, Daniel announces he has finally come up with a world-shaking master plan to fix his problems with the opposite sex. Alarmingly, it involves stalking women on the street with the aim of kidnap, imprisonment and worse. After a series of failed approaches, which look like dis-

Full review, click here

OLDENBURG REVIEW DAILY

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IMPRESSIONS & MEMORIES OLDENBURG CELEBRATES 30 YEARS

Tim Breuning Photographer

“What makes this festival so special is there are no specific bubbles of different movies.

At different festivals, everybody just hangs with their crew whereas, at Oldenburg, everybody meets, and connects and new friendships are started.

And that’s pretty unique from what I experienced at other film festivals.

For me, that is pretty outstanding.”

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VERDICT SHORT GRILL VERDICT: The cruelty of an uncaring welfare state is brought into sharp relief in Jade Hærem Aksnes’s stomach-churning satirical drama about poverty.

Ben Nicholson, September 16, 2023

Jade Hærem Aksnes’ Grill was inspired by an outrageous story in the newspaper.

A person in Norway was rejected for support with their utility bills and advised by the social services to avail themselves of a barbeque grill on a freecycle website to avoid needing to use electricity to cook.

Aksnes takes this premise as the catalyst for her pointed critique by following the efforts of a person

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VERDICT SHORT

access to of his mother’s voice, so he re-dials her number and listens again. Understandably, the boy misses his recently deceased mother and finds the thought of letting the final vestiges of her fade away too much to bear. Liel Simon’s short takes the framework and aspects of the coming-of-age film but channels them into a piece concerned with grief and acceptance.

This handsomely mounted drama is about the process of mourning and what it means to remember.

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living on the breadline to follow that unsympathetic recommendation. The result is a film that expertly conveys the anxiety of navigating the modern world when there is no money in your bank account and takes that situation to drastic extremes.

The crux of the film rests with its lead actress, Birgitte Larsen, who plays Tara. With no money at all available to her, even travelling to collect a free grill is an ordeal – she cannot pay for the bus, so needs to sneak on through the rear doors. Larsen is brilliant at translating the unease that Tara Full review, click here

Oldenburg Film Festival

SEAWEED VERDICT: A young boy grieving the loss of his mother forms a bond with a desert drifter in this heart-warming Israeli drama.

Ben Nicholson, September 16, 2023

Seaweed begins with a young boy listening repeatedly to a voicemail message.

Oldenburg Film Festival

It soon becomes evident that this is the only recording the boy has

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Full review, click here

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AFM23 ®

LE MÉRIDIEN DELFINA NOW TAKING RESERVATIONS.

SANTA MONICA OCT. 31 – NOV. 5

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