The view from the middle.

{A Respectable Family}


{Student}


{Two Years at Sea}


{The Minister}

I have seen:
A Respectable Family (Director: Massoud Bakhshi)
Student (Director: Darezhan Omirbayev)
Two Years at Sea (Director: Ben Rivers)
The Minister (Director: Pierre Schoeller)

In Two Years at Sea, a filmgoer cracked and rudely yelled out in vain to the hermit on screen quietly fishing on a still lake, "just do SOMETHING!" The hermit he continued to fish, oblivious to Loud Man, for he knew he'd a tranquil life and was happy with his lot in a filmic landscape that was so grainy it looked as I imaged it would from within a Georges Seurat pointillist landscape, were colour reduction his aim. All images made up of little tiny dots by dots, from trees far off to waterery mass, and black cat washing within cabin.

In The Minister, my Mum found the car crash scene too much, and spent the final third of the film lying as close to horizontal in her Greater Union Uncomfort seat. With her legs out in the aisle, she thought she would faint, and I wondered how I would be able to get her out of the cinema if the need arose.

In the poetic Student and A Respectable Family, I wished I had greater stamina, but my eyelids grew heavy. (This was owed solely to my lack of festival endurance, not either film. I must train more.)

In between screenings, I saw a man eating hot chips in the grey Sunday light and I thought I would offer him $4 for 4 perfect salty and golden chips, such was my fatigue.

I am now halfway plus one.

Twenty-four films remain.

+ Onward to 50