I attended the Leeds Internation Film Festival. Again. It's a great festival. This time around I didn't get to see that many films. Life, you know? Also didn't enjoy it that much. Also life? A festival that wasn't so good? Not so much luck choosing the films? Or just not that great a year for film?

Don't know. If you want an altogether more enhtusiastic group of reviews, click here.

Day 1

World Animation Shorts Competiton 2

Started the festival with a session of five or so animation shorts. Always nice to see some animation. It's amazing to see all the different styles. Animation has such an expressive potential, and the output here was varied and of really high quality. A supernatural story (Devil's Beacon) merging the folklores and music of electronic and folk, of city and contryside. Ultimately, of good and evil, I s'pose. Well done and enterntaining. Then a really funny short film, Progress Mining, a satire of I suppose modern working life, with tremendous dry wit and a sense of place, which unfortunately goes nowhere - not the worst of sins in a short film. DESK BUGS was wild and I was happy to have it there. It only lasted 3 minutes and was out of control. A palate cleanser if there ever was one. Don't expect a story. God is Shy is another standout, a film ultimately about fear, bored illustrators on a train have the things they draw come to life, in a way, and give them more than they expected. Very well done, thrilling. Sappho is an homage to the lesbian poet of antiquity, very beautifully rendered on the page, in a harkening to the great places of joy and culture we have lost to extremism. Ouais is a bit dull, in my opinion, though well made. Things depicted are not particularly entertaining - loneliness? depression? - so perhaps we are looking at faithfulness to its subject matter? Finally Murmuration shows the transformation that takes place in an old folks' home. Very to the heart, the depiction of its subject matter is beautiful, respectful, funny. Cool.

Fantasy

Fantasy is a film about people living very boxed-in lives who find someone who broadens their horizons. A mentor, older of course, who initiates them, and how they react to this initiation. Its backdrop is the different communities of what was once Yugoslavia. Slovenia, I think, and then Macedonia, I'm sure. I should say North Macedonia, lest I get in trouble with the Greeks. Names are important, I guess. The borders between worlds, and how worlds can live side by side. How different their awakening is, but how important. It's an altogether charming film from a young director, well made, interesting, with no discernable faff. It also didn't blow my mind. I don't know why. It depicts a tension between the traditional and the modern, and its view of the traditional is uncharitable. That's as well as it may be, those are the views of the director/writers, etc. That that is what comes accross is to be expected, and I don't expect creators to be absolutely neutral. But I do like to see nuance, and there was very little to be found. Which is a shame. Nuance is needed more than ever, and makes for more interesting films. Without nuance, one feels in the presence of mere propaganda. And, if you are watching propaganda, you had better be on the level of Battleship Potemkin, which this film isn't. That's my view, anyway. There's also nothing wrong with it, and I don't want to appear to be overly harsh. Why don't I like it that much? Because there's a traditionalist in me who sees in this story the corruption of the youth? Surely. I wished that part of me had something to chew on, too. Alcohol, for one, is not an exclusively good presence in the world. Propaganda brings out an moral instinct, I guess.

Celtic Utopia

Speaking of two sides, how abot Ireland? So this one has a lot more to recommend it. It's ostensibly a documentary on folk music in Ireland - though it is less a panoramic view than a documentary about a few groups with a smattering of others at the edges. But they're interesting, fun, and revealing. On the twin demons haunting Ireland, the English and the Catholic Church, which the folk tradition appears as breaking from. Though the real picture, one might imagine, is quite different. But the music is really great. The hangout element of it is really great. The eternal quest for the nuanced view of Ireland continues, and doesn't end at Celtic Utopia. One feels the demons of fanaticism rearing their heads within us too, demanding a final answer to the question: who is right? who are the goodies and who are the baddies? Also, why do we need to know? And also, the suffering is ongoing. As is the idealized future. Oh that one where all is perfect, a post-apocalyptic irish utopia. Makes the suffering bearable, perhaps? The winners write history, the losers write the songs, it is said. Something like that. Maybe it overshoots, maybe it attempts something like that overarching view. I'd have preferred it if it was more of a documentary about the two or three bands? How can one speak of the folk tradition, which is one of song but also of storytelling, without telling some of the story of Ireland - particularly colonization, partition, religious extremism, violence? Then what more do I want of the filmmakers? I think I know my frustration. I'm frustrated less with the filmmakers for not having a definitive take on Ireland than on Ireland for being so undefinitive.

Day 2

Little Forest

Young adult comes back to her hometown from the big city. A film about a mother-daughter relation? Definitely, but the mother isn't home. so it's abot food as well. It's about small town life, independece, the kind of lives people live when everyone knows each other and people's judgment of each other is fixed, or maybe it can change? You also have to see the film, and even so the answers might not all be there. Make sure you like food. It's a coming-of-age film, for sure, with the necessary reframing of who your parents are, what stature they have. Perhaps that's even what defines it. Seeing through their ways, from the way the world is to the quirks of an individual, that sort of thing. If any of the above appeals, it's very enjoyable film

Compensation

Very interesting is the thing film critics say about films they didn't like but don't want to be mean to. However, in the case of a film like compensation, it's apt. It's interesting because it delves into the deaf experience, the black american experience, love, miscommunication. No it isn't interesting because of these things, it's interesting because it handles them well, that's the key. It's a black and white, silent film, made in the nineties, with a twin plot which takes place in both present-day film and the early twentieth century. I call it a twin plot because there is a deliberate mirroring. It centers on the relationship between a deaf young woman and a non-def young man. He is illeterate in the early twentieth century and has a different kind of illeteracy in the second plot, in that he doesn't know Sign Language. The mirrorings continue. The film is structured so to make its points. It speaks through the experience of film as a mirror for the experiences of characters caught in these crossroads. Why it isn't better known is beyond me. It really deserves to be. But it is a low budget film which lives by the importance of the points it makes, and how compellingly it makes them. That's of worth, it's an experience that will add to you, complementing your knowledge, and making you more aware (I suppose I'm gearing this review to non-deaf people). That's it, it's great in what it is trying to achieve, which is quite explicit, it works, and there's nothing wrong with it. I hope this doesn't read like a scathing review, but hopefully it's an honest portrail. It is actually very interesting.

The Testament of Ann Lee

Another thing film critics say when they don't want to be mean to a film they didn't like is that the performances were brave. The testament of Ann Lee does a very fine job of delivering a slice of history, in the form of a biopic of the leader of the Shakers, a religious movement which started in Manchester and moved to what was then the American Colonies. There's incredible commitment to the acting, and a real desire to empathise and understand the people who lived in times that were so different to ours, especially as it relates to the beliefs they held. And boy did they hold them! Heterodox and mainstream alike, did really did believe, fight, die, sacrifice, etc., for these beliefs, in a manner we would consider, at the very least, quaint, if not outright weird. Or maybe that's just me. It does make one wonder what other things we are willing to die for today that future generations (not even that far removed) would consider quaint. But anyhoodles, enough of recommending this film. Ritual is choreographed for your viewing pleasure, so that you might not consider them even more weird than you probably already do. If you are willing to move into musical-like levels of suspension of disbelief and right back down, you'll be alright. But that's the thing with this film - it's long, it requires a lot of audience gymnastics and the end result of it is ... alright? Better than alright. Good, then? Good, as in it's a good film? Well... it's alright, innit?

The Love that Remains

Note to self - always end your festival with an icelandic film. Does Iceland even know how to make a bad film? Or do they keep them contained inside the country, a pile of rubbish films inside a film prison? Perhaps there's special border guards policing every boat and plane coming off the island for any reel or cassette tape. Perhaps it's the kind of thing you can get away with if you are an affluent and remote island. Anyway, back to the film. It's great, in case you were wondering, and it's icelandic. It's about family, familial love, care and it's the most absolutely lovely, loving depiction of incompatibility, or relationship having broken down when there's all this love that remains. Love unrequitted, sometimes, love indeed, love living, in the form of children and the desire to raise them in a loving familial environment. I don't know, the whole thing's infused with love, but not a sentimental love with its passions, nor a rosy-coloured love of perfection, but simply love-as-is: messy and imperfect. And how compelling a film, how beautiful, what a world to step into. How you don't want to leave when it's done, how it leaves in precisely that fine-tuned edge. It's a transformation of things we've learned to love in film: desire, cliff edges, but in such soft pallete - I mean the narrative pallete here, though it is also shot in soft colours. Slow, confident of itself, there's no need to rush, the story and the performances will carry us through. Oh, and how beautiful the goddamn place is. And it experiments with time compression and some dream/dream-like sequences, but never in a way that leaves you behind, beffuddled, or leaving you having to use the "I'm watching an art-house film" pass to overlook it. Never too long, never too on the nose, a balanced film. Better than balanced, poised. Why read my ramblings any further? Just go see it.