{The Delay (Director: Rodrigo Plà), screened with The Hosts (Director: Miguel Angel Moulet)}
{The Beauty From Nivernais (Director: Jean Epstein)}
{Mercy (Director: Matthias Glasner)}
{Sister (Director: Ursula Meier)}
{The Fall of the House of Usher (Director: Jean Epstein), screened with The Three-Sided Mirror (Director: Jean Epstein)}
{The Faithful Heart (Director: Jean Epstein), screened with The Sea of Ravens (Director: Jean Epstein)}
{Ernest & Célestine (Directors: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner)}
{Children of Sarajevo (Director: Aida Begić)}
{Tabu (Director: Miguel Gomes)}
There are some who choose to take their annual holidays on a beach somewhere in tropical majesty of Northern Queensland or Bali. There are some who choose to escape winter by heading elsewhere. I am not dissimilar in the escapism department (though winter is a beautiful season to me and I live for the snugness of a coat and scarf) for each year I head to the Melbourne International Film Festival to be transported, well, elsewhere. For it is like being transported, isn’t it, when you head to the cinema or the theatre or playhouse or gallery? It’s what we all say as we emerge from its dark interior and oft warm embrace. Back on the street once more, eyes blinking, where have I just been? What time is it? The bewildered remark mumbled as one sights the wet city ground: it has rained? Delicious, delirious immersion, who would be without it?
This year, over 17 days, I plan to see 47 films (though already I have booked another and the figure is 48 and rising. Can to 50 I make?). I have also, with Louise, become a MIFF member, owing to the figure in the bank earlier in the year having a zero or two the right side of the decimal point. So, where are we, four days in? Well, we’re already awaking crumpled, but happy and keen for more. This is proving some marathon, as remembered. As David Weir referred to today in The Age, it is a marathon that begins with a mad sprint; “With several hundred films to choose between and two or three sessions of each film, the cineathlete must select sessions artfully and avoid clashes.”
Yesterday we pinballed from Brittany in 1931 (Jean Epstein’s The Sea of Ravens) to Sarajevo present-day with its ghost looming large over a city (Aida Begić’s Children of Sarajevo) by way of the most beautiful and charming French animation (Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar and Benjamin Renner’s Ernest & Celestine), before landing in tale told one part in colonial Africa and the other in modern-day Lisbon (Tabu by Miguel Gomes). Abandonment, separation, and love lost seem the common thread linking all those seen thus far.
Seen: Tabu; Children of Sarajevo; Ernest & Célestine; The Faithful Heart (screened with The Sea of Ravens); The Fall of the House of Usher (screened with The Three-Sided Mirror); Sister; Mercy; The Beauty From Nivernais; and The Delay (screened with The Hosts)
(And for those who want to read a complete list updated daily, look here.)
Atop my list of favourites thus far, I think: The Delay; Ernest & Célestine; Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher and The Sea of Ravens; and Sister
Roll on, Monday sessions. I hanker for the sweet anticipation of waiting for a film to start, and my coat needs an outing.
Through the cinema, a revolver in a drawer, a broken bottle on the ground, an eye isolated by an iris, are elevated to the status of characters in the drama. Being dramatic, they seem alive, as though involved in the evolution of an emotion … To things and beings in their most frigid semblance, the cinema thus grants the greatest gift unto death: life. And it confers this life in its highest guise: personality. (Jean Epstein, Senses of Cinema)
