Showing posts with label Cambridge Film Festival 2017. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cambridge Film Festival 2017. Show all posts

Friday 27 October 2017

What happens on the inside of transgressions...

This is a Festival response to Etage X (#CamFF Tiger Shorts programme)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


This is a Festival response (work in progress) to Francy Fabritz's Etage X in the Tiger Shorts programme of Cambridge Film Festival 2017, as screened from 10.30 a.m. on Thursday 26 October 2017 (Day 8 of 8)


As was suggested in writing a preview for La propera pell (The Next Skin) (2016), the best of cinema appears to us through our senses, but – with contemplation and time – extends and opens outwards in our head : the preview has yet to be completed (and, throughout #CameraCatalonia, has remained ‘a work in progress’), but this is certainly true also of Incerta glòria (2017), which is not just or only ‘about’ its apparent subject…

The apparent subject here, without (until below – in an overtly ‘spoilery’ section) saying too much about it, is about an apparent encounter between two women, who apparently did not know each other before, in a space that ends up both confining and liberating them. The film, however, is not really about this at all, but about that notion of the liberation of being confined (or, put another way, finding confinement liberating) – what that means and what stems from it in the generality, and in no way rooted to or in this encounter.

One can state this view with assurance, almost dogmatically, because - from the film-making perspective, and, within short-form horizons, given a careful and detailed treatment here - no one invests that energy in what some could see, enjoy and think of just as a shocking quip : if a viewer reduces Etage X to such a quip, which is, at best, to be narrated to someone as a piece of boundary-pushing humour that he or she saw at Cambridge Film Festival, then that understanding almost wholly misses the ambition(s) of the creative crew and cast.


So, the fictive space of a lift – we watch too little film, and not because the space is not well created, if we do not credit it for what it is – has ever been inviting as well to covert lovers as to those who wish, as Emily Kuhnke does in the ambiguous setting and time of Der Aufzug (2012), to juxtapose the tics and personal façades by which, whether that is what we will, we mark ourselves out in the world. Kuhnke’s film, though, has far more of what Beckettt, in Malone Dies, calls the ‘come and go’ of life (he was later to call what he styled ‘a dramaticule’ by this name), whereas Fabritz locates changing positions of power within a cast of barely three : the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, by virtue both of the vertices of what may, without thought, seem a slender conceit, and how Morgana Muses and Eva Medusa Gühne (superb names) have been guided and led to play out the internal logic of its interior.


[...]

Click here [when the link is activated] only if you seek a spoilery, post-Freudian, LGBTQ+ consideration of the sub-textual in Etage X




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 17 October 2017

Camera Catalonia - the Catalan strand - at Cambridge Film Festival 2017

This year's previews of Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


16 October


This year's previews of Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival, comprising four films (one preview - of Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) (2017) - is still in progress...)


NB The title of each film is a link to the #UCFF preview for that film



El reí borni (The One-Eyed King) (2016) - Love, friendship and politics in contemporary Barcelona


It's dangerous to think too much ~ Lydia


The synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here






* * * * *


Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) (2017) - Brotherhood and allegiance in the Aragon of the Civil War


Subtle resonances with Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) (work in progress)


The synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here




* * * * *


In the Same Boat (2016) - documentary about problems of our global economy


Breaking the ice at a film festival...


The synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here





* * * * *


La propera pell (The Next Skin) (2015)


Captured in amber - or Skin, touching skin - The mysteries of the past in the silent Pyrenees

The synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 6 October 2017

A taste of India in a Day (2016) [from Sheffield Doc / Fest 2016]

Tweets to encourage watching India in a Day (2016) at Cambridge Film Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


6 October

Some Festival Tweets to encourage you to watch India in a Day (2016) at Cambridge Film Festival 2017





A pretty insane place ~ director of India on Film, Richie Mehta






From jokes, with people pretending to be asleep and then waking up to find the camera there, to a tender scene of putting cake in another's mouth...










Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sunday 1 October 2017

Threads from Twitter about this year's Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2017

#UCFF's 'insider' Tweets about this year's Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


1 October

#UCFF's 'insider' Tweets (an aggregating collection) about this year's Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival

What is Catalan cinema? :





[...]





[...]





[...]


NB For trailers and descriptions that are more spoilery than #UCFF likes to be, see below...









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 5 September 2017

What more is Catalan cinema ?¹

What more is Catalan cinema ?¹ :


More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


4 September (revised 4 October)

What more is Catalan cinema ?¹ :



It's the inevitable filmic follow-up to What is Catalan cinema ?... !


Three years ago, leading up to the third season of Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival [then in its 34th season], the question was posed What is Catalan cinema ? - in answering which, some of the defining features seemed to be :



Yet, as well as all these things (which, along with the Catalan films from 2012 to that date, are considered in more detail in What is Catalan cinema ?), succeeding seasons of Camera Catalonia have shown that the autonomous region in Spain called Catalunya – which, as with Scotland, some would see have a greater, independent status [highly relevant at the time of revising this piece...] – gives us cinema that :

* Remembers its history, right back to when Spain took control of Catalunya, in Claudio Zulian's (claudiozulian1's) thoughtful Born (2014) (@Bornfilm), reconstructing a few connected lives at the time of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), with Vicky Luengo a most desirable mistress to Josep Julien and the sister of Marc Martínez (Julien’s wealthy debtor, until Julien proves to back the wrong side in the war…)


* In the Catalan people, presents ones as reserved as the British, who - in two films that star the radiant Nora Navas (Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013) and L’adopció (Awaiting) (2015)) – manage to avoid talking to each other, but try to make happen what they assume should happen. In doing so, do they seem to lose sight of who is getting hurt, and for what real reason... ?



* Looks to literature such as Shakespeare, either in the feel - in Barcelona Summer Night (Barcelona, nit d'estiu) (2013) - of A Midsummer Night's Dream...


Or, in Hammudi al-Rahmoun Font's shocking telling of a classic tragedy, in Otel.lo (Othello) (2012) : 'OTHELLO is a cinematographic essay about power, desire, jealousy and deceit ; a thought on the boundaries between fiction and real life' (from IMDb)


Hammudi (with The Agent) at Cambridge Film Festival 2014

* Films as diverse as Ficció (Fiction) (2006), Fill de Caín (Son of Cain) (2013), and Menú degustació (Tasting Menu) (2013) are, in their quite different ways, further evidence² of flexibility in, and of creative thinking about, employing conventional elements of story-telling - and of both the expectations to which their nature gives rise and what writers and / or directors do to subvert them



* Or they do not subvert them - but surprisingly please, in Traces of Sandalwood (Rastres de sàndal) (2014) [this link is to TAKE ONE’s (@ TakeOneCinema's) review], with its Bollywood-infused tale of the (in)credulity of a loved and lost young girl, who is adopted into a Catalan family, and cannot believe that an Indian film-star knew her as a child - because she is her sister !


Aina Clotet, as Paula (Sita) - meeting her sister Mina (Nandita Das), and, later, reflecting on herself, and her identity


* Those living at the extremes of experience, in both Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014) and El camí més llarg per tornar a casa (The Long Way Home) (2014)


Upper : Marc Garcia Coté in Tots els camins de Déu (2014)
Lower : Borja Espinosa in El camí més llarg per tornar a casa (2014)


* Adapts stage-plays very cinematically, whether Sílvia Munt [interviewed here], making a film of Josep María Sagarra's classic work El Cafè de la Marina (2014), or Ventura Pons of a contemporary writer in El virus de la por (The Virus of Fear) (2015)


Marina Salas in El cafè de la Marina (2014)


(Upper) Rubén de Eguia and (Lower) Albert Ausellé and Diana Gómez in El virus de la por (2015)

* Finally, documentaries by Catalan directors - although now listed in the Festival's main sequence (alphabetically with the others and the feature films) - tend to explore identity and connections to Catalan history, whether telling of the band-leader Xavier Cugat's career in film and music, during which he introduced Latin orchestration and rhythms to dance-music and Hollywood films and t.v. (although, which was probably little known, Cugat had been born in Catalunya, but had been an emigrée to Cuba with his family when young), in Diego Mas Trelles' Sexo, maracas y Chihuahuas (Sex, Maracas & Chihuahuas) (2016)


Or - in another realm of translocation - telling of how much better treated and regarded Americans of Afro-Caribbean descent were during their time in Spain (fighting the fascist forces of General Franco) than in the States - especially after going there. So #CamFF 2015 guest Jordi Torrent (with his co-writer / director Alfonso Domingo) showed in Héroes invisibles : Afroamericanos en la guerra de España (Invisible Heroes) (2015) [for which #UCFF interprets the sub-title as ‘The part played by Afro-Americans in The Spanish Civil War’], to the extent even that records that proved their participation hardly (were meant to) be available / survive





Ramon Lamarca (left), with Festival guest Jesús Monllaó (before the poster for Monllaó's
Fill de Caín (2013)) - by and courtesy of David Riley


Catalan cinema - to judge by the films that Camera Catalonia programmer Ramon Lamarca (pictured above) brings to Cambridge (and also the ICA (@ICALondon)) - is high-quality work that values its audiences enough to respect them :

Join us for the sixth year of a Catalan strand at Cambridge Film Festival, Camera Catalonia, to see why he and #UCFF give it due regard


End-notes :

¹ A deliberate nod to the inelegance of following up Analyze This (1999) with Analyze That (2002) (fairly criminally unwatchable, unless being very kind - for their other, better work - to Crystal and De Niro ?)... [Cristina Roures, pictured, is the Festival's Operations and Hospitality Manager (and, of course, is Catalan).]

² Camera Catalonia in 2012 (its first appearance at #CamFF) had included V.O.S. (2009), which is also – along with Ficció (2006) - the work of director Cesc Gay.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)