And lo! the homeward MIFF 2013 dash.

The Villiage at the End of the World (Directors: Sarah Gavron/David Katznelson) (Screening with Pablo's Villa (Director: Matthew Salleh))
Gebo and the Shadow (Director: Manoel de Oliveira)
My Sweet Pepper Land (Director: Hiner Saleem)
Vic+Flo Saw a Bear (Director:Denis Côté)
Blackfish (Director:Gabriela Cowperthwaite)

Whether it is the fatigue that naturally sets in seeing film after film after film or the genius of a scene as it plays out, I’ve noticed in a few films I’ve seen of late, and please bear in mind we are at 40-something now, that a certain effect like synesthesia occurs. Perhaps it is just down to chance, a scene on screen in time with the rotations of the air conditioner, but I’m sure I felt in Manoel de Oliveira’s painterly Gebo and the Shadow (adapted from a Portuguese play) that cool blast of night air as our wayward-son-returned opened the window of our claustrophobic stage set. Making my body as small as it could go, I felt cold in the car as we hurtled towards only conceivable outcome in Bastards (Claire Denis’ film to gut you like a fish). And I am sure I could smell the rain as it dropped down heavy, plop, plop, plop, on Vic and Flo in their trapped agony as they lay on the forest floor. I guess it is no surprise that we watch film with more than our eyes. We hear, we feel, we respond, we bristle, we emphasise, we dream. We some of us doze (even when bear traps abound). We some of us wait for quietest moment to crunch down on a handful of crisps or unwrap slowly a lolly from its wrapper. (Note to self: a zine about theatre etiquette soon to make)

At this end of the festival, clear favourites are emerging, and I enjoy chatting with others in the queue about what they have seen. Familiar faces from other sessions emerge. We either have similar taste, or they are going to everything a schedule will permit. There once more, the woman with a sore back who stands in small alcove unobtrusively at the Forum. There, too, the woman who misheard Louise’s remark of ‘see you in the next queue’ to be ‘see you in the next life’. ‘I’m terribly ill, my dear’ she explained. There is the man who lives around the corner from us whom last year in our more organised state we saw on the same city bound tram. In the half-light between sessions, we discuss the abundance of the letter Q in the names for seasonal shift in the previous film David Katznelson and Sarah Gravons’ Village at the End of the World. And with the poet usher, we talk of the sound of ice before leaping to magic lanterns with their impressive coloured beauty.

In this recent crop of films, the natural elements, nature and our place in it has been the link I’ve found from Niaqornat in north-western Greenland to the inevitable sadness of human nature that steals from others for own gain (Gebo and the Shadow) and plunders for entertainment (Blackfish). Respecting the land and taking only that which you need to survive was the beautiful message I’m pocket-tucking from Village at the End of the World. The survival of small village comprising of 59 residents dependent upon a fish factory bookended by our greed and destruction in Gabriela Cowperthwaite's Blackfish, I, like many, like all, enjoy making threads between films in the pause. In Blackfish, we look at how we’ve cruelly hunted and separated pods of orcas to meet our own lust for barbaric entertainments. SeaWorld presents nature as entertainment from which to profit, reducing majestic and intelligent animals to circus-type performers. Yes, seems we’ve been doing this for centuries (think: Pietro Longhi's The Rhinoceros, 1751) and seems unlikely, to me, ever to stop. I watched footage of these animals in captivity with a lump in my throat. Before me, several girls have come dressed in orca costume.

The natural world is celebrated in Hiner Saleem’s My Sweet Pepper Land, western style. Such a landscape! Such beautiful people. Such eyes like liquid amber. To say little of Baran’s hat, this film oozed beauty and style amidst its darker elements and shootouts. A Kurdish near-romcom with its impossibly handsome leads was a charm that gave way to Denis Côté’s Vic+Flo Saw a Bear across the road. A session I’d booked based on last year’s Bestiaire brilliance and Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights used in the trailer. Bestiaire and Romeo and Juliet, two favourites of mine. This time around, we’re looking at the human animal, not those in zoo’s confine, and the things it is capable of doing. The cruelty it is capable of inflicting, but also the love. The relationship between Vic and Flo was one I believed in utterly, for me, none more so as when they become the wind.

Figuring out relationships once outside of the confines of prison. Figuring out nature in captivity. The great muddling along stumble of all things! Mankind can do great and terrible things Stephan Schesch’s Moon Man (an adaptation of Tomi Ungerer’s 1967 children’s book of same name) tells us. We can separate a mother from her calf in the knowledge that orca families live together until the very end, and we can live with her anguish. Yes, one moment hope is dashed and a dark, grim world appears, only to be rebuilt in the next session where a small girl in Saudi Arabia finds a pocket of freedom in an oppressive system (Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadja). To MIFF 2013, the great emotional mangler. Here’s to the last days of the fest!

+ Village at the End of the World where ice shifting can sound like old people moaning and young people playing
+ MIFF 2013 shift change
+ Curious? The Orca circus-cum-prison that is SeaWorld
+ "Elvis, Bach and Mozart..." (My Sweet Pepper Land trailer)
+ Finalising 70 labels for next week's install at Geelong Gallery (Life after MIFF 2013)
+ Those seventeen days