Showing posts with label We All Want What's Best For Her. Show all posts
Showing posts with label We All Want What's Best For Her. Show all posts

Tuesday 18 October 2016

I’m less scared this way ~ Natàlia

This is a Festival preview of Awaiting (L’adopció) (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


5 October



This is a Festival preview of Awaiting (L’adopció) (2015) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2016)

Even down to the name Natàlia (originally meaning ‘Christmas Day’) and also when in the year the film is set, one could be tempted to make much of clear elements that parallel the account of The Nativity in Matthew’s gospel¹. Although acknowledging them, since they may inform one’s understanding of Awaiting (L’adopció) when reflecting on the film afterwards, what director Daniela Fejerman primarily seems to have on her mind (with her co-writer Alejo Flah) are questions of what, emotionally and otherwise, something is truly worth, and whom one trusts – and why.

Which is not to suggest that Awaiting conveys itself as applied moral philosophy (or sociology) : no more so than when those matters figure, in dramatic terms, in the films of Ken Loach (e.g. Jimmy’s Hall (2014)), or in the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit (2014)), which are also set in a different stratum of society – please see the following paragraph. Rather, these are questions in life that we can find ourselves asking at any time, such as :

What am I willing to continue to do, even given what I have already invested of myself ?


Daniel (Francesc Garrido) and Natàlia (Nora Navas)


Unlike Loach, which is perhaps typical of Catalan cinema, we are concerned with a middle-class couple, but we see still how pressures, both from within the wider family and from the situation to which Daniel (Dani) and Natàlia have committed themselves, feed each other, and affect them both. In a film such as We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella (2013), which director Mar Coll brought to Cambridge Film Festival in 2014²), some of us may already have had the chance to see the remarkable psychological insight that, then as now, Nora Navas (Natàlia) brings to her roles. (There, her life has been turned inside out by the emotional and relational consequences of (what we learn was) a car accident.)

For this quality, in Awaiting, Nora Navas is well matched by the portrayal of Dani by Francesc Garrido, who runs a gamut of emotions with her – in his case, from joy, desire, and impishness to angry frustration, resignation, and despair. We have a strong sense of a pair whose understanding of each other, and patience with and belief in Lila (whose local agency has arranged their visit), is put to severe strain by what happens after they have travelled to Lithuania in the expectation of being able to adopt a child (a son ?).



It has to be said, for those who need everything explained to them, that - in common with lacking a complete explanation of the world of Geni (Nora Navas) in We All Want What’s Best For Her - they will look in vain for anything other than what can be inferred or hazarded about that which we see : for example, what Dani and Natàlia’s positions in life are, back in Catalonia (Catalunya in Catalan), or why there is a difficult relationship between Natalia and her father (Jordi Banacolocha), which (as Geni also does) she is obliged to start addressing...


Uniquely, just after the visuals behind the credits have imparted a sense of passage into coldness and otherness, we are privileged with a knowledge of the sort of difficulties that have been left for Dani and Natàlia to face - momentarily, we are prepared for the symbolic emptiness that is conveyed to them by the slatted belt of the carousel at baggage reclamation. When it stops, all that is there – as they look into the hall behind them (and as Juan Carlos Gómez’s camera gradually pulls back to show us) – is a perfunctory Christmas tree : the principle is immediately established that perhaps they need to wait to see what is happening.

Even so, at first we see that they are trying to influence what is happening – despite the fact that the airport official and they are both uttering words that the hearer(s) do not understand – except that, just when we may be noticing the repetition, Natàlia identifies it to Dani³. There is then a sense of their stepping back, and reclaiming what they share – what they have together, as an outlook, a sense of humour, and so on.


I have a good feeling about this ~ Natàlia


So, after meeting Lila (Larisa Kalpokaitė), being driven to their flat, and, when they are alone, the playfulness of their interaction early on, they take drags on a cigarette that they smoke in common - there is a continuing lightness in the interplay (before going on to have more fun with what Lila said, telling them that they need to dress to impress) :

Dani : The coffee is disgusting.

Natàlia (echoing his tone) : Disgusting.


The adeptness of the cinematography is an essential ingredient in what makes this a film to cherish, but the camerawork is enmeshed in the other qualities of the film-making : so, Gómez edges in, or comes around, carefully and in order not to intrude on our attention except for effect – just as when editor Teresa Font, at a few significant moments, uses montages, with fast-cutting between shots, to reflect the changing contours of emotions as different as buoyant pleasure and trying to meet a need for consolation.


We’ll leave it up to God ~ Dani





Xavier Capellas


Such contrasting aspects are implicit in Xavier Capellas’ score for the film (Capellas both directed the ensemble and played piano for the soundtrack, which is nominated for Best Original Music at the VIII Gaudí Awards, and the film for three other 'Gaudís'), and the way in which his original work of composition is used apart from, and yet in harmony with, the simplicity of solo piano - numbers from Béla Bartók’s Gyermekeknek (For Children⁵), feelingly played by Dani Espasa :

On the drive out of town, to the orphanage, there is the return of what is most easily characterized as the sadness-tinged theme of the title-music, except that – above sounds of what resembles cembalon or zither, but may well actually be that of a domra⁶ [the link is to YouTube (@YouTube)] – we hear how it is opening out into euphoria, led by violin (María Roca), but then through the accordion-playing of Josep Vila Campabadal.


In all of these deep changes and sometimes difficult plunges in the feelings, we are with – but fearful for (as we are for Nora Navas, as Geni, in Tots volem el millor per a ella [We All Want What's Best For Her]) – Natàlia and Dani, and whether what they want will heal them ; or harm them. What takes place with Bill Murray, or Scarlett Johansson, in Lost in Translation, is still a long way from being wholly dissimilar, as to cultures 'clashing', but the drama is somehow more akin to that within hearing what befalls the The Holy Family in Egypt (or Bethlehem)...



There are two scheduled screenings of L’adopció (2015) [the link is to the #CamFF web-page for the film] during Camera Catalonia (the links below are to the booking-pages for each screening) :

* Sunday 23 October at 8.45 p.m.

* Tuesday 25 October at 12.00 noon


* * * * *


The other four films in this Festival's Camera Catalonia are also warmly commended (the link is to the strand's own #CamFF page) - other previews to come very soon... but meanwhile there is :




End-notes :

¹ The Gospel According to Matthew 1:18-2:12 (link to the text at Bible Gateway (New International Version)) – also the basis of a masterpiece of film-making by Pasolini, Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew) (1964)).

² Mar Coll was the guest of Ramon Lamarca, who has now curated Camera Catalonia for five years running at Cambridge Film Festival (alongside his interests in 3-D and / or Retro cinema), for two Q&A sessions after screenings of her film at the Festival.


Ramon Lamarca and Mar Coll at Festival Central - image courtesy of Tom Catchesides


³ The first of several repetitions (and questions of who can follow the words of whom), which are a small hint at Lost in Translation (2003), but, except on the surface, this film goes on to speak of quite different experiences, and in its deepest moments.

⁴ This year, Camera Catalonia contains Sex, Maracas & Chihuahuas (Sexo, maracas y chihuahuas [a link to the film's IMDb page]) (2016), a documentary about 'the incredible life of the musician Xavier Cugat'. From Cugat’s era, by contrast with now, we may have heard accounts of how Gilda (1946) was put together ‘along the way’, or seen how the zaniness of Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) also provides evidence of his (in studio terms) ‘unconventional’ methods of developing the film on set.


For his talk during Cary Grant Comes Home For The Weekend Festival 2016 (@carycomeshome), Mark Glancy looked into some of the film's documentary and other sources from the production, gleaned from researches at RKO.

⁵ From Vol. 1 (Sz. 42, BB 53), seven or eight pieces from a set of eighty-five, written for those studying the pianoforte. (Unlike Mikrokosmos, Sz. 107, BB 105, which is probably more famous, these are not graded exercises, and the pieces are not technically very difficult.) Plus we significantly hear the Allegro molto e mesto [played on YouTube (@YouTube) by The Matangi Quartet] from Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1 (the set of three that are together often called ‘the Razumovsky quartets’).

⁶ As is hardly unusual with IMDb (@IMDb), the instrumentalists, or their instruments, are imperfectly credited in listing the ‘Music Department’, because Eduard Iniesta does not, according to L’adopció’s (Awaiting’s) closing credits, just play guitar (guitarra), but bouzouki and domra as well, which are listed first… (One could describe the domra [the link is to YouTube] as related to the lute, but from Russia, and with three or four metal strings.)





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

Monday 15 September 2014

Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 Part I : Q&A with Mar Coll, director and co-writer of We All Want What's Best For Her (2013)



More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


15 September

Summary account of a Q&A at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 with Mar Coll, director and co-writer of We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem il millor per a ella) (2013)


* Contains spoilers *

As detail fades already, this is necessarily an impressionistic account of a Q&A that followed the second screening, at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), of We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem il millor per a ella) (2013) with director and co-writer Mar Coll, and hosted by the curator of Camera Catalonia (for the third year running), Ramon Lamarca, at 1.00 p.m. on Friday 5 September


Next on the blog (the 1,000th posting), a write-up of Q&A2 from @camfilmfest with Mar Coll, director of We All Want What's Best For Her...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 13, 2014


The first screening of We All Want What’s Best For Her at Cambridge Film Festival, at 6.15 p.m. on Thursday 4 September, had been a UK premiere and so was also followed by a Q&A*.


Ramon Lamarca and Mar Coll at Festival Central - image courtesy of Tom Catchesides


To judge only by the end of that previous Q&A, this second one maybe gave a little too much weight to the question of Geni’s character (played beautifully by Nora Navas**) being a woman. That said, Ramon has since indicated that, because Birds Eye View is interested in and for exploring issues of gender and society (in relation to film-making), they had been very present in the discussion on Thursday evening – some might therefore be coincidentally interested in the following Tweet :



The reason for asking about Geni’s gender is that the main friend, on whom the film’s handling of the topic of recovery Mar Coll and her co-writer had based the premise, was a man called Eugènio (hence Eugènia, shortened to Geni) – maybe one of those slightly irritating facts that everyone wrongly thinks that they are alone in having heard and then so many people ask about it…

In fact, Mar did not think that it would have made much / any difference for Geni’s character to have stayed as a man (and, unfortunately, the reason that she gave for making the change has not registered mentally). [However, one is – only slightly – reminded of Cambridge Film Festival 2011, and confronting British actor and first-time director Paddy Considine with the possibility of such a reversal in his Tyrannosaur (2011), i.e. the idea of Peter Mullan’s character Joseph switching, say by becoming Josephine, with that of the now-everywhere Olivia Colman, so that we have a battered man (they exist), rather than a battered woman…]

For those who had seen Mar’s film before, this repeat screening was an opportunity to notice that, however ambiguously (and, of course, fully deliberately so) the question of paying the taxi-driver may have been left, we do not see Geni’s wedding ring after when she decided (after a hesitation) to leave it with him as a ransom,: the driver has been mean to her, and could she – on some level – have been acknowledging her husband Dani’s own meanness and have been making a symbolic sacrifice ? (For example, we soon see Dani (Pau Durà) criticizing Geni for stumbling in her speech, not talking in full sentences because she is upset, and how he patronizingly cajoles her, whilst all the time calling her ‘babe’.)

Mar acknowledged the possibility (which another audience member thought might even have been at the subconscious level of a Freudian slip) that parting with the ring is symbolic : as expected in the best of film-making, Mar wants the viewer to conclude what he or she thinks happened before / is happening on screen. (So when, after the Q&A, it was briefly mentioned that maybe Geni senses that Dani is attracted to Geni’s sister Raquel (Àgata Roca***), and perhaps has even been having an affair with her, Mar just agreed about the attraction, and left the rest as a possibility**** (although it is consistent with Dani’s lack of arousal when Geni, feeling close to him, tries to initiate sex on her return home, if he had been with Raquel earlier.))


Portrait of Mar Coll by, and image courtesy of, Tom Catchesides (@TomCatchesides)


As to future projects, Mar tempted us with mention of an exploration that she is doing with a group of film students, working on an adaptation of a Pinter play, and which your correspondent established to be Betrayal. When Mar asked, many of us knew the play, even the Jeremy Irons / Ben Kingsley / Patricia Hodge film (which Mar indicated that she was less keen on), so that sounds something to look forward to…


To come (when time / energies permit) : transcript / write-up of a interview that Mar Coll kindly gave about the film and its main character…

In the meantime, this is a link to a pre-Festival review (written with the kind assistance of Ramon, the producers of the film, and the Festival), which this account of the Q&A, and, in due course, the interview are intended to amplify (as the review had consciously been of a non-spoilery nature)


End-notes

* At which Tom Catchesides’ (@TomCatchesides’) striking double portrait of Mar and Ramon was taken, when Ramon interviewed Mar (together with Birds Eye View) :


** Whom we had seen before, in the Catalan strand at the Festival in 2012, as the mother in Black Bread (Pa negre) (2010).

*** Whom we also saw during the Catalan strand two years ago, in V.O.S. (2009), and also this year in Camera Catalonia, in the same director’s (Cesc Gay’s) earlier Fiction (Ficció) (2006), which screened at 2.30 p.m. on Saturday 6 September – review to come...

**** At Enric’s – Geni and Raquel’s father’s – lunch-table, we seem to gather that Dani and Raquel knew / shared with each other at university, which strengthens the parallel drawn in the review with that wonderful predecessor Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).

Mar was pleased with that link, and also with having spotted the design influence of Allen’s earlier, neglected drama Interiors (1978) (for making which he had to endure such criticism, even abuse, because it was a drama, not comedy :

A style of film to which, after Match Point (2005) and Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (a review that, implausibly, has more than 10,000 page-views on the blog…), he has only fully returned to great acclaim, in Blue Jasmine (2013).)




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

Sunday 24 August 2014

Planning Cambridge Film Festival 2014 : #CamFF - Work in Progress

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


24 August




Thursday 28 August

6.00 Peter Sellers : The Early Shorts (1957) : Emmanuel (90 mins) - Catch one film before...

7.00 The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (Opening Film) : Screen 1 (93 mins)

10.00 Magic in the Moonlight (Opening Film) : Screen 1 (97 mins)


Friday 29 August

12.30 Night Moves : Screen 1 (90 mins)

4.00 The White City (2014) : Screen 2 (running time not advised) If not on Sunday at 1.30...

6.00 Children of No Importance (Lamprecht) : Emmanuel (95 mins)

9.15 Cherry Tobacco : Screen 3 (97 mins)

11.00 House of Wax (Retro 3-D) : Screen 2 (86 mins)
or - when announced
11.00 TBC : Screen 3 (?? mins)


Saturday 30 August

11.00 Peter Sellers : The Early Shorts (1957) : Screen 3 (90 mins) - To catch the others...

1.30 Life of Crime (2013) : Screen 3 (94 mins)

4.00 I Believe in Unicorns (2014) : Screen 3 (80 mins)

6.45 Free Range / Ballad on Approving of the World (2013) : Screen 2 (104 mins) But if it drags...

7.30 Ida (2013) : Screen 1 (80 mins)

10.00 In Order of Disappearance : Screen 1 (116 mins)
or - decide on the night
10.30 Inferno (Retro 3-D) : Screen 2 (83 mins)
or - decide on the night
10.15 TBC: SCreen 3 (?? mins)


Sunday 31 August

1.30 The White City (2014) : Screen 1 (running time not advised)

4.00 Oh Boy (2013) (German) : Emmanuel (88 mins)

6.30 Home from Home (2013) (German) : Screen 1 (225 mins) But if it falters...

8.45 War Story (2013) : Screen 2 (90 mins)


Monday 1 September

1.30 A Most Wanted Man (2014) : Screen 1 (121 mins)

4.00 Four Corners (2014) : Screen 1 (114 mins)
or - decide on the day
4.00 In Order of Disappearance (2014) : Screen 2 (116 mins)

6.30 Under Milk Wood (1971) (Dylan Thomas 100) : Screen 1 (88 mins) If not on Tuesday at 1.00...

8.30 Finding Fela (2014) : St Philip's Church (119 mins)
or - decide on the day
9.00 Before I go to Sleep (2014) : Screen 1 (92 mins)
or - decide on the day
10.00 Love is All : 100 Years of Love and Courtship (2014) : Screen 3 (70 mins)


Tuesday 2 September

11.00 Under Milk Wood (1971) (Dylan Thomas 100) : Screen 1 (88 mins) If not on Monday at 6.30...

1.00 M : Screen 1 (1931) (117 mins)

3.30 Last Call (2013) : Screen 2 (91 mins)

6.00 How I Came to Hate Maths (2013) : Emmanuel (110 mins)

8.30 Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy (2013) : Emmanuel (127 mins)


Wednesday 3 September

1.30 Iranian (2014) : Screen 1 (105 mins)

4.00 Eastern Boys (2013) : Screen 1 (128 mins)

6.30 Stations of the Cross (2014) (German) : Screen 2 (104 mins)

9.00 Tasting Menu (2013) : Screen 2 (85 mins)

11.00 Short Fusion : Life Lessons : Screen 2 (79 mins)


Thursday 4 September

11.00 Night will Fall (2014) : Screen 1 (75 mins)

1.30 Le Jour se Lève (Daybreak) (1939) : Screen 1 (93 mins)

4.00 German Short Films (German) : Screen 1 (~70 mins) (all 2013) Will have to miss the end to get to...

6.00 Still the Enemy Within (2014) : St Philip's Church (112 mins)

8.30 Under the Lantern (1928) (Lamprecht) : St Philip's Church (129 mins)
Stay for this - or head to Festival Central for...
9.00 We Are Many (2014) : Screen 1 (104 mins)


Friday 5 September

1.00 We All Want What's Best for Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 1 (105 mins)

4.00 People on Sunday (Lamprecht) : Emmanuel (73 mins)

5.00 Energized : Screen 1 (91 mins)

8.30 Hosting Q&A for A Curious Life (no date advised) : St Philip's Church (78 mins)

10.30 The Mad Magician (Retro 3-D) : Screen 2 (72) If possibly back in time...


Saturday 6 September

1.00 Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (Lamprecht) : Screen 3 (74 mins)

2.30 Fiction (Ficció) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 3 (107 mins)

5.00 Amour Fou : Screen 1 (96 mins)

7.30 Tony Benn : Will and Testament : Screen 1 (running-time not advised)
Not likely to finish in time for...
9.00 West (Lagerfeuer) (German) : Screen 2 (102 mins)


Sunday 7 September

1.00 Othello (Otel.lo) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 2 (69 mins)

4.00 A Poem in Exile (Camera Catalonia) : Emmanuel (77 mins)

5.30 Set Fire to the Stars (Dylan Thomas 100) : Screen 1 (90 mins)

8.00 Surprise Film : Screen 1 (?? mins)


All of the above translates here into what was actually seen / missed and done...




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

Tuesday 19 August 2014

Overlooked in all the care

This is a Festival review of We All Want What's Best for Her
(Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


19 August

This is a Festival review of We All Want What's Best for Her
(Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013)

Chances to see during Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2014:

Presently, on Thursday 4 September at 6.15 p.m. (Screen 1), and on Friday 5 September at 1.00 p.m. (Screen 1) (please see the note on screenings below)


This film concerns itself with the sort of overlooked type of person who does not – or fails to – make a full recovery.

In a very polished way, which never feels like imitation, it seems closest to the frailty and fragility of Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) (in particular, the pale, almost monochrome shades, into which the significant colour in the film erupts). Yet we are in an underlying family ambience that (not just because of the three daughters that all three films share) more closely resembles that of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) (but with maybe a hint of Dorrie’s (Charlotte Rampling’s) less-manic moments of insecurity from Stardust Memories (1980) to heighten the sororial bitchiness of Hannah (Mia Farrow)).

We quickly learn that Eugenia (Geni) had had a serious road-traffic accident around a year before the start of the film, and we were immediately placed in her world in the opening shot, with no mise-en-scène, as she walks through a door on the left of the screen into a plush ante-room. She asks, and is told that she can go straight in to see the doctor – then we are in there with her, and looking at her, with a full view of the doctor kept back from us.

Maybe Geni (Nora Navas) is actually on time for the appointment (and, as one goes off, she reports to the doctor that she is using alarms on her phone to tell her where she should be), but what we notice most is that she seems too serene, almost over-eager to please : from what happens later, just with the long slow sweep past the city through the taxi’s window as she slumps, it is clear that she had been pretending, and that the doctor does not seem to have looked behind appearances. (So, if Geni says that ‘The important thing is the knee’, that is what the doctor hears and has noted.)

Yet we will see her family require Geni to pretend according to their pattern (at which point, we are sharply reminded of the subjective element in the title’s What’s Best For Her), and we also see how uneasily their encouraging phrases, which aim to re-frame her experience, fit on her lips. So, as she repeats her husband Dani’s (Pau Durà’s) words, we feel them become as dust, or meal, in her mouth :

All this is non-negotiable

I must make… an effort


Compared with Rust and Bone (2012), another (but very different) film about what happens after a trauma (to Marion Cotillard as Stéphanie), it is a bourgeois life in which Geni is living (typified by the flat, and its easy interiors and choice in art). However, in terms of what she is experiencing, looking interestedly at advertising in the surgery for a medication that seems to be an anti-depressant (Happiness is in the little things), her problems seem out of place and unwelcome there (and they are arguably greater than those of Stéphanie) :

Geni’s world / family seems to have a work ethic that does not begin to understand duvet days, and it is one whose pressures, although not always explicit, are inescapable. The assumption, which is everyone’s starting-point (both for themselves and on the others’ behalf), is that you can get back what you had. Which includes, as we hear when Geni’s more similar sister suggests a thoughtful, individual exercise at New Year (to round off the previous twelve months for everyone), not only that her father expects a return on the therapy that he has bought for Geni's sister, but also, in how the exercise gets subverted, greater disrespect for what therapy says, does and is for.

You do not need to have a notion of the recovery model in UK mental health to notice the number of times people say to Geni that 'You used to...’, and, at such times, there is something about Navas’ mouth that registers a barely visible disquiet. (At other times, we see her disassociate from that with which she simply cannot cope.) Navas is on screen almost without a break, and looking properly at what her look says pays dividends for feeling the richness and depth of how the film explores this situation.

In the event, when Geni is trying to follow up a lead for a job via someone known to her other sister (whom everyone must think of as mature and responsible), we and she have suddenly have Mariana, waving and laughing at Geni in the interview. Afterwards, though, Geni closes down all of Mariana’s (Valeria Bertuccelli’s) suggestions for renewing contact, but it is about feelings from the past that the rest of the film’s short internal timescale addresses.

This is a powerful film, sharply edited and clearly shot. It has a different trajectory and premise from the highly honest Chilean film Gloria (2013), but it, too, shows a person looking for what matters, and causing us to admire – but also fear for – her.


This is just one of six Catalan films (Camera Catalonia) that can be seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) - Thursday 28 August to Sunday 7 September (both inclusive). Three others are reviewed here, and What is Catalan cinema ? is also about the Catalan strand at the Festivals in 2012 and 2013...



Note on screenings :

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens





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

The Catalan strand 2014 : Parts I and II

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


19 August (updated 20 August, 4 September)

The author of What is Catalan cinema ?, otherwise known as @THEAGENTAPSLEY (reviewer of films, amongst other things), is now at liberty to share four links to reviews of films in the Catalan strand of this year's Cambridge Film Festival (@CamFilmFest), or #CamFF 2014 - please find below !


But, if you require less detail, read these paragraphs, for there is a quiet, gentle theme that meanders through all of these films, in their different ways :

* A woman who nearly died in a road-traffic accident last year (We All Want What's Best For Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella)

* Some amateur actors who have been invited to act together the main roles of Othello in a film (Otel.lo)

* A restaurant on which unrelated people converge for what is – for reasons not truly given – its last evening (Tasting Menu (Menú degustació)), and


* A teenage male devotes his energies to chess, but does his behaviour indicate that he needs a psychological intervention - and can one reach him through chess... ? (Son of Cain (Fill de Caín))

Respectively, she is married, they are a couple, there are at least three couples, and, lastly, we have 'a nuclear family', but the theme is only incidental to the couples, which is how the past informs where we are – and, more importantly, what we expect from the present.

For good or ill, the connections, decisions, mistakes and suspicions of the past come into view, or are brought there, and shape the immediate connections, decisions, mistakes and suspicions…


Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

Showing as follows :

Only one screening presently scheduled (please see below), at 1.00 p.m. (Screen 2) on Sunday 7 September

Tasting Menu (Menú degustació) (2013)

Showing as follows :

On Wednesday 3 September only at Festival Central (please see next paragraph) and for general admission only at 9.00 p.m. (Screen 2), because the screening at 11.00 a.m. (Screen 3) that day is a Big Scream screening* - a sold-out screening on the night

Also screening (as are some other Festival films) at Abbeygate Cinema, 4 Hatter Street, Bury St Edmunds IP33 1NZ (abbeygatecinema.co.uk) : Tuesday 2 September at 6.45 p.m.

We All Want What's Best For Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013)

Showing as follows :

On Thursday 4 September at 6.15 p.m. (Screen 1), and on Friday 5 September at 1.00 p.m. (Screen 1)


Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013)

Showing as follows :

On Friday 5 September at 7.50 p.m. (Screen 2)


Two more reviews to come... However, at least one (that of Fiction (Ficcion)) will not be until after the screening - on Saturday 6 September at 2.30 p.m. (Screen 3) - so you might like to read what TAKE ONE's (the Festival's in-house publication's) Rebecca Naughten has to say



Notes on screenings

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens



End-notes

* The Arts Picturehouse's club exclusively for parents / carers accompanied by babies under one year old.




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