BIFF (Bergen International Film Festival)

10 years they say, happy birthday I may add, and at the peak of they celebration I decided to join in, for the first time visit the known festival that started last week. So I took to the task to get the program read it and eventually pick something out the 129 films that were to be showed in Bergen's Cinema and the Cinematec. I ended up with a pick of 24 films which I pretended to see in between 6 days of school and gym, I must say, it wasn't the healthiest week ever.

But at the end, even though the non-avoidable technical and logistical failures, I enjoyed each and everyone of the handpicked films, which I may describe right now.

A SERIOUS MAN

Oh dear, oh dear, The Coens are back, and this time the two-headed monster brings us a sneak peek into the slowly crumbling life of Larry Glopnik, a jew college teacher who is in search of a little guidance from the locar rabbi, when his wife decides to leave him and pretends to get married with another man. This a few days away from his teenage-pot-smoking son's bar-mitzva, while his also teenager daughter steals money from his wallet in order to get a nose job, not to mention the addition of his sick-gambling-and-also-genius brother to the already dysfunctional family. Very much in the Coens comedy style the movie introduces a wide set of particular characters with more flaws than your average human being, and seemingly able to get into the most ridiculous, yet very real, situations.  

I'm not going to go very much around this movie since for instance we are introduced to a world hardly understandable for you average goy, and pointing the fact that the first minutes where in Hebrew, and we lacked the sufficient subtitles, the film came indeed to a very very unexplainable ending.

9

Burton-Bekmambetov holding Shane Acker's back with this post-apocaliptic tale of not surviving humans, but toys? Stuffed robots? Given the “dark arts” background of the story I would call the 9 characters homunculus, as in for the supposedly alchemy that brings them alive. We are then put in a world were apparently Second World War went pretty wrong and it ended up in a man against machine war, where of course, machines won. The story as little original as it may seem, is indeed pretty straight forward, it does not introduce a “the One” character, as a matter of fact we only have the new guy (9) learning the steps of an already started revolution, he is just filling the gaps. So even though the background story may seem weak, the storyline really does manage to keep the audience entertained. It really doesn't add anything to the common storytelling but it mixes it so that it doesn't get tiresome. All in all it's a fun and entertaining movie.

500 DAYS OF SUMMER

Nowadays you can't really get your heart broken without anything reminding you of how love's supposed to go ... but it really doesn't, and mostly they are either love songs, tv series and love comedies. And by I hate love comedies, specially the american-pink-tainted-sweet-pucking-failures that give us the same dumb stuff over and over again. So with that in mind I intended NOT to see this movie, until I got my heart broken, and a friend just wouldn't stop bitching about it. So I decided to give it a chance, and by I was impressed.

“This is not a story about a boy meets a girl” says a dark deep voice at the start of the movie, as he introduces us to the two main characters, there's Tom and there's Summer, and even though Tom does meet Summer, things don't go so great, at least not in the usual romantic comedy style, and that is great. So we are delivered with story of how fortunate and eventually unfortunate can love be, how we try to deal with something that is beyond our comprehension, but that we have to deal with anyway, 500 days of Summer does get you and reminds you of how crappy the whole thing is, it feels real, it feels close to the audience.  

ART & COPY

Advertisement, what can you say about it? What can't you say? It is all over the place, and you just can't deny it, as director Doug Pray said “you don't see advertisement, because you don't have a tv, or listen to the radio, or ... live”. Advertisement is indeed there and what Art & Copy present us with is an insight into the industry behind it, the movers and indeed, the shakers. More than a boring documentary throwing facts, the movie focuses more into the creative minds behind the business, and where does that creativity comes from, illustrating a more personal relation with those great minds behind all those adds we so easily recognize. A must see if you consider yourself a creative soul, it may give you that extra push you need to actually do something about it, you see we all seem to be in the same boat.

CAPTURING REALITY: THE ART OF DOCUMENTARY

Pepita Ferrani alongside with the National Film Board of Canada sat to the task to figure out “what makes a good documentary”. To find that answer they decided to interview several filmmakers so they would talk about their experiences doing some of the most recognized documentaries in the world, and share their wisdom with the viewer, expecting to be able to define the gender and bring more light into the art of documentary.

Get the whole experience visiting Capturing Reality's Website, where you can watch all of the interviews featured on the film, and more.

DANIEL & ANA (video is in spanish, sorry, but your brain can do up to 2 million calculations, use it and learn a language)

One of the three Mexican movies featured on the festival, Daniel & Ana tells the story of two siblings brought to the most extreme of experiences, when they are kidnapped and forced to have sex with each other. Although technically speaking the director does try to make the shocking announcement in the story, long and open takes, barely any sound, forcing the inconformity of the characters to the audience, yet it seems wrongly managed, since during the first minutes the director, Michel Franco, fails to create a credible brother-sister relationship between the two actors, relationship that he indeed manages to explore in a more psychological level right after the dreadful event, it is then that the movie gains class and takes us to a scary and dark corner in the human mind, just as a scary and dark corner of the Mexican society the movie tries to bring to the light, that of the clandestine pornography.  

FOOD INC.

“Ol' McDonald had a farm” ... and along came the Food Industry and took it away just to turn it into an assembly line, just like the one that makes your car, the only problem is that this is no car, this is food, this is what makes us human beings keep going, this is what keep us alive.

This documentary film, made by the same people that showed the world where American food comes from, throws a serious spotlight onto the ever growing food industry and how it has managed to burn millions of dollars defending the right to experiment and create new food products out of sick animals and grown in-vitro vegetables. They have shield themselves, but it is in the choice of the costumer to bring that fantasy ideal of a farm back to reality.

More to come ;)