Fables and poems.

The Day of the Crows (Director: Jean-Christophe Dessaint)
A Hijacking (Director: Tobias Lindholm)
Shirley — Visions of Reality (Director: Gustav Deutsch)
The Selfish Giant (Director: Clio Barnard)
Rhino Season (Director: Bahman Ghobadi)
The Major (Director: Yuri Bykov)

"My own garden is my own garden," said the Giant; "anyone can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself."
(Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant)

A secular fable unfolds in the seemingly perpetual winter landscape in Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant, one of many great films I’ve seen these past days. Oscar Wilde’s secular short story about the power of redemption has been shifted to a present day Bradford housing estate. Our fable now in our hands, we get to decide whom we will crown the Selfish Giant, and like all fables it could be today, it could be long ago. It is both of its time and timeless. It is, in this sense, like a painting. It speaks of the reality of the day but it also transcends time and, to some extent, place. Amidst the dark and hardship, a friendship between two boys, Arbor and Swifty. Meld for me social realism to a fairytale and I am hooked. Parts of the dialogue shoot so fast that to decipher and follow, listen for the rhythm. Drop your Hs from ‘horse’ and ‘house’, take out your joining words, and set your needle to ‘your’ wrong speed and away you go. An anthropologist like Mathieu Amalric’s Georges Devereau (Jimmy P.), looking at humanity and its pattern? No, one of the group. We’re not looking from outside in. This is up close. You’re up on the torn trampoline too.

Timeless and yet of its time, like an Edward Hopper painting. This is how Shirley could sound. This is Gustav Deutsch’s look at a game many play in galleries and museums. Looking closely at the scene and wondering whom the characters are. Will someone walk into the composition and pick up that letter on the table, that cup by the sink. Has someone just left or are those boots by the door theirs? Sometimes you might look to see the artist reflected in the sitter’s eye. Clue hunting in the gallery. Playing make-believe. Whilst I initially resisted Shirley — Visions of Reality for the reason that my own Hopper cast sound and think differently, once I pushed aside my ownership of the paintings and went with the film being a look at how someone else, in this case Deutsch, imagines these characters to be, I slipped easily into the tempo. At this end of the festival, as fatigue kicks in, it is this giving of yourself over to the film that ensures the preferred ride. The wireless plays in the moments before each of the thirteen paintings are reveled.  It, too, ensures a smooth ride as we move chronologically through thirteen paintings, beginning in the 1930s before landing in the mid-‘60s. Ever-neat, timeless, ageless Shirley and her partner creaseless Stephen show us "history is made up of personal stories". They show us what it could look like inside a painting. Peering from the inside out. Peering out from Night Windows (1938) and Intermission (1963). Peering out at you.

And in Bahman Ghobadi’s Rhino Season, here is what a poet’s soul could look like. Here, again, the animal is given beautiful weight, as with A Time for Drunken Horses. In the morning before this session, I was thinking about the man who spent years creating a form that autocorrects itself to upright position when tipped on its side or placed upside down. He gave the form, the shape he made, a name, but I cannot recall it now. He then discovered that his creation, his marvellous self-correcting form already existed in nature. It was created long ago now. It is the shell of the tortoise. Place one upside-down and it is not stuck. It can maneuver itself upright. And indeed it does in the scene of quiet revelation in Rhino Season. The tortoise that can flip over and begin anew as a metaphor for life is something I will store in my MIFF 2013 full pockets. This year, I have harvested much gold. And I need to find room to save, too, the black inky waters of the Bosphorus. Water as a device for recalling memory, rare was the scene without it. Rain. Snow. Puddles. Tubs. Submerged. Every frame like a painting. From those droplets of water on the car windscreen to waves crashing upon rocks. I saw this film after The Selfish Giant and two favourites have I found. Both in their own way showed me how things feel, from prison life to scrapping. This is how a broken soul can look.

Along the way we’ve also seen how the afterlife might look (The Day of the Crows animation by Jean-Christophe Dessaint which presents figures in block colour against a tonal wilderness), been held hostage on the high seas (A Hijacking), and learned how to roll a snowball in Russia in a tale of bad decisions rising (The Major). And we’ve still several more, too, until 54, our magical target, we reach. Let's go!

+ A coffee pause between MIFF 2013 sessions with a sparrow.
+ MIFF 2013 queue waiting. (Image credit: detail from Champes of the Champs-Elysses)
+ With wistful yearning she cried, "Missing you already, MIFF 2013". (The Origins of Nostalgia captured in yesterday's line)