{With red accents, scenes from The Man Who Came With the Snow.}
Ah, my helter-skelter life has had me travelling far. The festival may now be over but I still have a few films recently seen to share with you here, a few more before my weary head hits the pillow in exhaustion. Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Marzieh Meshkini’s brilliant film The Man Who Came With the Snow took me to a darkened bar somewhere in the former Soviet Union. A bar inhabited by a varying chorus line of locals who sing, just a little, and recount great hardship in your ear, if you’ll listen. It is a place you’d be best advised to keep your feet on your bag resting beneath your stool. The Man Who Came With the Snow unfolded before my eyes like a play performed beautifully upon stage, and it was one of my favourite films (alongside Aida Begić's Snow and Alexei German Jr's Paper Soldier) seen throughout the entire festival.
Along the way I have been introduced to a Russian poet I knew little of previously, Boris Ryzhy, and I want to know more, and I have seen artful footage collaged to weave a tale of suspense in Johan Grimonperez’s Double Take. Monkeys in space, stray dogs too, we are looking back at the space race this time through the eyes of American television and newsreel footage. Hitchcock and his doubles, and birds, plenty of birds, seen before shooting across to Bulgaria in glorious black and white (Zift). I have tasted complete and delicious freedom and escaped to Villa Amalia and I have experienced the opposite in the utterly disturbing confines of Dogtooth. Yes, it has been great! Twenty-nine films seen and for the main my high hopes of where I would be taken were more than met.
{Films seen, the last handful.}
Roy Andersson Shorts Retrospective (including Någonting har hänt and Härlig är jorden)
Baek Seung-bin's Members of the Funeral
Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette
Boris Ryzhy
Double Take
Zift
Villa Amalia
Dogtooth
Amreeka
The Maid (La Nana)
