To sparkle brightly.

{Silent Sonata}


{Innocent Saturday}


{Sleeping Sickness}


{A Useful Life}


{The Little Tailor (Le Petit Tailleur)}

The film festival may be over for another year, but in my mind, I am still travelling. I have seen at final tally, 28 films over the 17-day period. 28 films plus one short (44 minutes) and an illustrated talk. I have seen classics on the glorious big screen alongside films new.

Over the weekend, another clutch I saw. Six more before calling it time to rest. I fell for the beauty of Cameroon as I watched Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness (Schlafkrankheit). Ebbo (Pierre Bokma), a German doctor, seemed so at home in the place that I trusted him completely as my guide, perhaps all the more so for his shortcomings. It seems not only fair but also utterly plausible that he should, at films close, transform into a hippopotamus. This transformation from human to animal world is so subtle a depiction that had you fallen asleep, you might have missed it. Europa into a bull, Óttar into a boar, Leda a swan, and Arachne a spider, why not Ebbo into a hippo?

I have seen a few films where the ending was quiet and subtle, and one that required you to work for it. In Federico Veiro’s A Useful Life (which screened with Louis Garrel’s The Little Tailor), it is only once the Cinemateca Uruguaya (at which he is a programmer) closes that we see Jorge become the beautiful protagonist of his own film, that we see Montevideo, and that leading man quiet dance shuffle on stairs.

+ Uruguayan Cinema in a nutshell

The final MIFF shuffle
The Mill and the Cross
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
A Useful Life (La Vida Útil) (screening with The Little Tailor)
Life in Movement
Familiar Ground (En Terrains Connus)