And so we are at twenty in the quiet of it all.

{Eight more, friends. And some real favourites.}

For Those in Peril (Director: Paul Wright)
Museum Hours (Director: Jem Cohen)
Closed Curtain (Director: Jafar Panahi)
Tenderness (Director: Marion Hänsel)
differently, Molussia (Director: Nicolas Rey)
The Attack (Director: Ziad Doueiri)
Cutie and the Boxer (Director: Zachary Heinzerling)
Jîn (Director: Reha Erdem)

Day six and the MIFF ad elicits now but a light twitter from the audience. We’ve seen the ad before and wear our familiarity like a badge of honour. It remains now the newcomers test. Six days in, but it feels longer, much longer than that, and I take great delight in watching the crowd between sessions. From the reluctant shuffle of the queue when asked to go two abreast on the staircase to the find-a-seat scramble, and the MIFF volunteer standing over the Premium seats in premium location uttering the same refrain over and over. Patrons start to look like they are from a film, just like the visitors to the museum that look like they could have stepped out from a painting. The chance to sit and watch and think things over is one I love. As snacks of all descriptions are pulled out from rucksacks and satchels and eaten in the liminal state between film screenings, it’s a pleasant pastime, the wait. A bag of nuts here. A sandwich in tinfoil casing over there. Someone has made cheese scones and their smell carries as the lid is lifted off their travelling container. Fragments of conversation overheard. As I talk to the poet usher who made one sentence from his MIFF guide, plucking out a word from each of the 300-odd film listings, an orange rolls down the steep Forum stairs. An orange? Boldly nutritious. I bite the head off a yellow snake, and mull over what I’ve seen. Behind me, someone disliked an ending I especially loved. Poet usher is bemused by the cinema patrons lit up by iPhones and iPads and other devices. He is especially enamoured by those who in bid to be courteous shield their illumination makers with a jumper or scarf only to make their forms look like little lamps in the half-light, and I decide that I’ll text my parents during the next break between films.

It is in this time that I like to mull over what I have seen. And I realise that what I like best in many films seen thus far is also this time, this space, this quiet. Freedom to assemble your own thoughts. And this I have found and appreciated in this recent MIFF crop that takes us to twenty. It is in Nicolas Rey's differently, Molussia with its 362,880 different versions possible that spins, surges, and shines like an automatic drawing. It is in Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours unfolding in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum, Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain smuggled out of Iran on a USB buried in a cake, and in Paul Wright’s feature-length debut, For Those in Peril. And it is in the mountains and high in the trees of Reha Erdem's Jîn (with a string score by composer Hildur Gudnadottir). Through a reduction of noise in its many forms, a simplification of the visual palette, clarity is the result and in the open field I can compose my own thoughts. Yes, pared back in such a way so as reveal something greater than one definitive meaning. I can decide what I will focus on, what I will feel. And this is a liberty not found in many films.

‘For some, the film will primarily be an engaging study of two adults whose relationship defies cinematic stereotypes; for others it will be a story-engendered portrait of the city of Vienna; for others, it will mostly serve as a meditation on the crossings between life and art and the museum as intermediary.... All of these interpretations are valid and encouraged.’
(Museum Hours synopsis)

Harvesting in the quiet, the walls of a bar covered with snapshots that recall the collection of miniatures in the gallery; the glorious creak, creak, creak of gallery floorboards underfoot; portraits that evoke paintings, and refuse on the ground that recall compositions; the junk store open at curious hour, one day of the week only (Museum Hours); the irregular undulations of asphalt in a car park owing to the fully grown trees reclaiming their space as everything returns to nature; the spin, spin, spin of a camera that lands askew, taking you with it; the postcards that in the end are sent from no-one and received by no-one, and the boat that goes untarred and the pear tree that goes unpropped (differently, Molussia). Gills made by four cuts to the neck, two either side, turn a boy into a fish; and the devil of the deep blue sea is as hard to bait as you’d expect, but it can be done, and perhaps, just perhaps, this huge, red, physical lump of a beast is what a mother’s grief and a town’s guilt looks like, there on the beach, unavoidable and unmistakable (For Those in Peril). The creative process is someone throwing your work about the room, interrupting you, and letting in fear and doubt (Closed Curtain), but it is to be pursued. What else is there (Cutie and the Boxer)? A suspended full moon high above; a soldier sings to a falcon; and just when you'd like to believe it is one thing, a horse whinnies during an attack. Nature and how we respond to it, the role we play and our place in it, and the mistakes we make, Jîn, is a film I will keep tucked in mind for long to come. Quiet is suddenly, easily, perpetually interrupted by war and violence (in a tale the director Reha Erdem believes could take place or be set anywhere, like a fairytale). Don’t unpack your belongings. Stay alert, ready to flee. Hide in a carved out space in the rocky face of the mountain. Trust is broken but it can be rebuilt. Can’t it? And nature and her creatures, the bear, the tortoise, the deer, the donkey and the lynx are beautiful (Jîn).

'The animals she closes ranks with, perhaps because they face similar threats, are her greatest source of strength and consolation. She shares a cave with a bear to escape a shelling, she finds an ally in a deer, she treats an injured donkey, she makes a pact with a savage bird whose egg she eats, she’s consoled by a wildcat, alerted by a snake and protected by a horse...'
(Jîn synopsis)

+ Reha Erdem, in interview
+ MIFF talk Jîn
+ MIFF talk Museum Hours
+ Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
+ foyer waiting
+ 'The camera finds the direction of the wind...', A Conversation with Nicolas Rey, Senses of Cinema