July 24, 2008

Idle Running, 1999

With its rough hewn sequences of temps morts, odd length cuts, idiosyncratic characters, and sedate humor, Janez Burger's debut feature, Idle Running unfolds like a Jim Jarmusch film, an upended road movie of sorts chronicling a young man's proverbial journey (albeit in baby steps) towards self-discovery. As the film begins, perpetual university student and resident slacker, Dizzy (Jan Cvitkovic), offers up his own homegrown philosophy on the merits of remaining within life's sidelines, resisting artificial motion that could only result in zero displacement. Having comfortably settled in his dorm room over the last ten years, Dizzy wakes up to the sight of his newly assigned roommate, Marko (Janez Rus), a bookish freshman from the country, and immediately bristles at having to adjust his appropriated space by clearing a shelf to accommodate Marko's belongings. But even as Dizzy continues to live in complete denial of his roommate's existence by hosting late night card games and drinking parties, Marko would begin to assert his presence, first subtly, by assembling a remote control for Dizzy's handed down television set, then overtly, by bringing his pregnant girlfriend, Ana (Mojca Fatur) to stay with them. With his relationship with his girlfriend Marina (Natasa Burger) already strained by his inability to make a commitment and take on responsibility - often borrowing money to take her out on a date - Marko and Ana's relationship provides him with an unexpected glimpse into the road not taken, and with it, the possibility of life beyond the campus. Like Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise, Idle Running captures the intrinsic humor and pathos in the essential quest for a mundane ideal. Paralleling Dizzy's opening comments with a friend's closing anecdote of a recent saga involving the convoluted process of inflating what would turn out to be a miniature basketball, Burger creates a wry analogy for life as an interminable cycle of Sisyphean struggles that can only lead to wasted energy and deflated expectation.

Posted at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Slovenian Cinema

Beneath Her Window, 2003

Another pleasant surprise from the Slovenian cinema series was Metod Pevec's lovely, slow brewing Beneath Her Window, a film vaguely reminiscent of Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema (especially A Short Film About Love) in its interconnecting themes of obsession, missed connection, voyeurism, and chance, but played with the muted, idiosyncratic humor of a French romantic comedy. As in Kieslowski's films, the notion that subtle shifts in the alignment of fate lead to radically altered destinies also sets the tone for Beneath Her Window, an idea that is reinforced in the recurring episodes of Dusa (Polona Juh) ritualistically updating her astrological chart each morning and phoning her adviser to divine its meaning. Trained as a dancer, but making ends meet as a ballroom dance instructor, and stuck in a dead-end relationship with her married veterinarian, Boris (Robert Prebil), Dusa's life seems predictable even in its marginally controlled chaos. But Mars has now come into alignment, and change is bound to happen. Soon, her mother Vanda (Marijana Brecelj) breaks the news that her estranged father is returning home after abandoning the family on a spiritual quest to India, only to find out that officials have detained him, and now, only his pet king cobra will be released into their custody. Items have been disturbed inside the apartment - a clogged sink that now drains freely, a torn off ornament that has been reattached near the front door - reinforcing Dusa's suspicions that she is being stalked. Meanwhile, an amateur filmmaker named Jasha (Sasa Tabakovic) and his grandfather (Zlatko Sugman) have been working on an ornithological documentary on native birds, hoping to catch a sighting of a rare black moorhen believed to have made a nest with a white sparrow, unable to reproduce because of their speciological incompatibility, but immortalized in the romantic mythology of its enduring fidelity to its lost mate. In a sense, Dusa, too, is a lost sparrow, circling the wilderness, waiting to come home - a metaphor that is reflected in the juxtaposition of Jasha's blurred video footage of an apparent sighting of a moorhen in flight with the subsequent image of Dusa and Jasha walking back with his grandfather after the missed shot, the anxious, searching camera finally reaching its static equilibrium in the intimacy of their silent, passing glance.

Posted at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Slovenian Cinema

July 23, 2008

Paper Planes, 1967

During his introduction to the screening of Bostjan Hladnik's seminal film Dance in the Rain, Slovenian film scholar Joseph Valencic remarked that its modernist structure would serve as a blueprint for Slovenian filmmaking over the course of the next two decades, and this paradigm is clearly reflected in Matjaz Klopcic's inspired, yet maddeningly (and deliberately) opaque Paper Planes, a fractured tale of longing and modern love set against the vacuous, glossy, picture perfect world of commercial advertising. The disjunction between appearance and reality is foretold in the film's opening sequence, capturing the tense moments before an apparent assassination: a mysterious stranger intently pursuing a man and woman out for a leisurely stroll around town. The episode turns out to be a false construction, a commercial for a high-end tailoring company - the fateful encounter ending, not with a gunshot, but solicited advice on how to dress well. This sense of subverted expectation would also set the tone for the film, as the photographer, Marko (Polde Bibic), sorting through the outtakes of their location footage, spots a beautiful young woman, Vera (Snezana Niksic) looking into the store window, and immediately falls in love with her. Seeing her again by chance, first, at a restaurant, then subsequently, at an art museum, Marko is quick to seize the opportunity to come face to face with the object of his desire, an attraction that proves less than mutual when Vera politely rebuffs his advances. However, their story doesn't end with the rejection. The reality shifts, and in a subsequent episode, Marko and Vera have become inseparable, isolated from the rest of the world in a blanket of snow, seemingly absorbed in each other's identity. But is she only a figuration of his unrequited longing, a projection of his idealized image? Part Last Year at Marienbad styled permutations of reality, and part polemic on the vanity and exploitation of consumerism, Paper Planes is also a thoughtful exposition on the enigma of human desire. Using the artifice of the advertising industry as a metaphor for the creation (and realization) of desire, Paper Planes confronts the illusive nature of images, where intimacy is distilled to semblances of connection, and bliss is found in the delusion of flimsy, manufactured fairytales.

Posted at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Slovenian Cinema

Vesna, 1953

Composed as a lyrical comedy of errors, Frantisek Cáp's charming and whimsical Vesna chronicles the misadventures of handsome university student and glider pilot Samo (Franek Trefalt) and his mischievous friends Kristof (Jure Furlan) and Sandi (Janez Cuk) as they try to hatch a plan for passing their mathematics professor's (Stane Sever) final exam - that is, short of actually studying - by wooing his seemingly frumpy daughter. With their romantic and academic fates hinging on a coin toss, Samo's bad luck soon relegates him to the reluctant task of meeting "Vesna" (Metka Gabrijelcic) who, as it turns out, is an attractive young woman bearing little resemblance to the one his friends had spotted earlier with the professor. With his fortune now turned by a much welcomed case of mistaken identity, Samo and his friends quickly lose sight of their ulterior motive and are smitten by the lovely young woman, leaving Samo completely distracted from his studies with only days before the finals, and his friends scrambling to concoct their own schemes to win her heart. Representing only the sixth film to be made in Slovenia, Vesna would go on to become one of the country's most popular and beloved films of all time, widely regarded as capturing the essence of the Slovenian people in their gentility and easygoing manner, even during acts of mischief and adolescent rebellion. However, as Slovenian film scholar Joseph Valencic points out during the introduction for the film, the idea that the country's most quintessentially Slovenian film was actually directed by a Czech expatriate would also lead to its share of criticism, often painting the film as a nostalgic vision of Cáp's youth in Prague rather than an earnest attempt (albeit by an "outsider") to capture the spirit of the Slovenian people. In a way, Cáp's depiction is an idealization of youth itself, where romanticism and a sense of adventure converge to create a spirit of optimism and infinite possibility that, like the youthful idealism of Vesna, transcends all human borders.

Posted at 2:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Slovenian Cinema

July 22, 2008

Valley of Peace, 1956

Overtly influenced by René Clément's anti-war film Forbidden Games, France Stiglic's equally poignant and impassioned Valley of Peace captures the horrors of war as seen through the eyes of its most vulnerable victims - a young girl named Lotti (Evelyne Wohlfeiler) and a protective older boy, Marko (Tugo Stiglic). Taken into custody by German soldiers who are rounding up children orphaned by recent air raids for placement in foster homes, Lotti longs to go to the Valley of Peace that her late grandmother had often sung about, an idyllic place just beyond the trees and across a flowing river that remains untouched by war. Convinced that Lotti's description matched his uncle's farmhouse perfectly, Marko decides to run away with Lotti and, with little more than Lotti's doll in tow, make their way through the hinterlands where a buffer zone exists between the Germans who are still in the process of scouting the uncharted territory, and partisans who have fortified their positions along the foothills. Cornered by pursuing German soldiers, and frightened by the sight of low flying Allied planes on a reconnaissance mission, the children attempt to cross the river only to find themselves stranded in midstream by the deep waters, rescued by an American pilot, Jim who parachuted into safety after his plane was shot down (in a groundbreaking performance by African-American expatriate, John Kitzmiller who received the Award for Best Actor at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival). Determined to bring the children to the safety of the uncle's farm and seek assistance from the partisans hiding beyond the valley, Jim becomes a surrogate parent to the deeply traumatized children and, consequently, comes to embody all their pinned hopes for finding peace. As in Forbidden Games, Valley of Peace similarly wears its heart on its sleeve to create an unabashedly humanist moral tale on the folly of war and its toll on the innocent. Using the turning of the waterwheel as a metaphor for the children's return to normalcy, the image becomes one of inherent contradiction, signaling both a long-awaited homecoming and the impossibility of coming home.

Posted at 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Slovenian Cinema

Spare Parts, 2003

Like Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Damjan Kozole's Spare Parts is imbued with a metaphoric yellow haze, a contamination that has tainted the souls of those who move in the periphery of everyday inhumanity and despair. Opening with a seemingly mundane, bookending episode of a mentor meeting his assistant for the first time at a motocross racetrack, the dangerous, adrenaline-fueled setting serves as an appropriate backdrop for Rudi's (Aljosa Kovacic) initiation into the booming, risky enterprise of human trafficking, shuttling illegal immigrants from the Middle East, African subcontinent, and the "other" Europe across Slovenia and its border gateways into Italy and Austria at 1,000 euros per person. Riding alongside veteran trafficker, Ludvik (Peter Musevski), a somber widower who seems as equally resigned to the past as he is to imparting his knowledge on surviving the trade (and perhaps implicitly, its moral consequences), recounting fond memories of his glory days as a former motocross champion, as well as the logistics of transferring, camouflaging, and dropping off people at the border in a way that mitigates risk of detection for both parties. At times, the immigrants are detained soon after reaching the other side and are promptly returned to their native countries, only to try again when they have saved enough money for another trip. At other times, the travails of crossing into Europe is only a prelude to a more horrific journey, as these undocumented immigrants fall prey to other criminal enterprises and turned into prostitutes or reduced to organ harvested "spare parts". And still other times, they never reach the other side, succumbing to illness, accidental death, or simply unable to live with the guilt of the untold cost of their passage. Bracing in its unsentimentality and haunting in its implication, Spare Parts is a laudable addition to Slovenia's rich cultural history of social realist films. As in Crime and Punishment, Kozole reflects moral decay through the decay of the city - a man-made contamination of nature that is suggested in the opening image of a polluted, industrial landscape of nuclear power plants and billowing factories, and is also subsequently implied in the experimental, homemade elixir that Ludvik drinks to treat his cancer - a reflection of humanity's self-inflicted wound in the wake of rapidly transforming geopolitics and economic exploitation.

Posted at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Slovenian Cinema

Rooster's Breakfast, 2007

During the introduction for the film, Marko Nabersnik mentioned that he had graduated from the New York Film Academy fourteen years earlier and, to some extent, the screening of his film in Lincoln Center was a culmination of that journey. In a way, that experience would also shape his well constructed, entertaining, and pleasant, if light and formulaic Rooster's Breakfast, a film that plays more within the realm of independent rather than indigenous cinema with its chronicle of life in a small town rife with eccentric characters, perennially drunken friends, a local mob boss, and a neighborhood sex bomb (who, not surprisingly, is the wife of aforementioned mob boss), and even includes a requisite love scene of the photogenic couple making... hay. The film is an amalgam of several interweaving stories surrounding a rural garage: the owner, a gregarious, aging mechanic, Gajas (Vlado Novak) who continues to indulge in his heyday (or is it, hay day?) stories as a lauded model worker who often saved the production day and got the girl, his young apprentice, Djuro (Primoz Bezjak), an orphan and recently laid-off junior mechanic who has traveled to the bucolic town to start a new life, low rent party entertainer, Roki (Davor Janjic) who introduces Gajas to the soulful music of Severina (in a cameo by Slovenian pop star Severina Vuckovic), perennial customer and strip club owner, Lepec (Dario Varga) and his wife Bronja (Pia Zemljic) whose cars always seem to be in need of body repair, and a trio of layabouts including university professor and henpecked husband, Zobar (Matija Rozman) who converge in Gajas's repair shop after hours to play cards and drink their sorrows (and the night) away. Ever hovering between romantic comedy and thriller, the persistent tonal ambiguity impedes the film from reaching its figurative climax, even in the wake of a profoundly life-changing (if expected) denouement, making the sun-drenched, picture perfect ending seem all the more cynical and naïve.

Posted at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Slovenian Cinema

July 21, 2008

Raft of the Medusa, 1980

One of the highlights from the Slovenian Cinema program is Karpo Godina's insightful dark comedy, Raft of the Medusa, a film that captures the infectious energy, irreverence, and idealism of the assorted avant-garde isms that defined the art movements of the 1920s. Told from the perspective of a pair of rural teachers, Kristina (Olga Kacijan) and Ljiljana (Vladislava Milosavljevic) struggling to single-handedly run the school after the headmaster's extended absence, their thirst for adventure is foretold in the film's surreal opening sequence, as Ljiljana meets a nebulous character, later revealed to be her brother (Predrag Panic) at a hotel to take a series of erotic art photographs that will be used for the dual purpose of marketing business equipment and setting up discreet rendezvous with interested suitors. Visited by her brother's newfound friends from Belgrade, a band of traveling artists led by Micić (Boris Komnenic) who has set out to promote zenithism - his own homegrown movement that combines dadaist performance with Marxist agitation - Ljiljana is soon seduced by the call of Art and, together with her friend and colleague Kristina, decide to abandon the school and join Micić's call to cultural revolution. Delivering equal doses of vaudeville, performance art, burlesque, and propaganda to a bemused, but often captivated audience, the itinerant performers make their way through the newly formed, united "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes", until rivalries, romantic entanglements, and political instability gradually take their toll. Evocatively titled after the grisly account of the shipwrecked French frigate Medusa whose survivors, floating on a raft, resorted to cannibalism and throwing the weak and the injured overboard as a means of conserving provisions, the film is also a potent deconstruction on the failure of the movement, where the ideal of art as a medium for provocation and social change is lost in the infighting, myopia, and self-absorption of its anointed messiahs. Concluding with the newsreel-like coda featuring blind schoolchildren - an aesthetic divergence from the formalism of the rest of the film - Godina not only reinforces his roots in documentary filmmaking, but also alludes to the discarded souls of the Medusa, recovered in the aftermath of tragedy and disillusionment, the dislocation of an inextinguishable fire.

Posted at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Slovenian Cinema

Dance in the Rain, 1961

Considered to be among the best Slovenian films ever made (that, according to author and Slovenian film and culture scholar Joseph Valencic, often ranks first in national film polls), maverick filmmaker Bostjan Hladnik's dense and atmospheric Dance in the Rain finds greater kinship with the experimental narrative, fragmentation, and interiorization of Erik Lochen's The Hunt than with the advent of the French new wave (an association often cited for having worked as an assistant to Claude Chabrol), where anxieties and desires are revealed in the strangeness of projected mental landscapes. A portrait of a disintegrating relationship between the mercurial Peter (Miha Baloh) a struggling, indecisive painter, and his insecure older lover, a stage actress named Marusa (Dusa Pockaj), their increasing sense of desolation is reflected through a repeating series of familiar, yet increasingly alienating places of encounter: Peter's unkempt room at a derelict boarding house where neighbors often spy through unpatched holes in the door; the silhouette of an elusive woman from a window, a bar where Peter and Marusa meet for a drink, and where Marusa's devoted co-worker (Ali Raner) has starting visiting in an attempt to win over her affection, a restaurant where Peter shows his cruelty towards Marusa in order to drive her away. Hladnik's use of interweaving dream sequences and exaggerated sounds to convey heightened emotional states serve to increasingly blur the bounds between reality and fantasy, where patterns of recurrence reflect not only the inescapable truth that exists beneath the characters' strained conversations and consuming introspection, but also prescribes the corrosive cycle of their doomed love.

Posted at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Slovenian Cinema

June 26, 2008

Sari Soldiers, 2008

The national unrest and confusion following the massacre of King Birendra and the Nepalese royal family by his son, Crown Prince Dipendra in 2001, and the subsequent dissolution of parliament by the ascended king, Gyanendra in response to an escalating Maoist insurgency, set the tone for Julie Bridgham's compelling and incisive portrait of a broad spectrum of women who collectively embody the country's cross-cultural struggle for peace, justice, freedom, representation, and accountability. In Kathmandu, a poor, uneducated, middle-aged woman from the province named Devi lives in self-imposed exile from her village after speaking out publicly against the rape and execution of her teenaged niece by royal army soldiers and, in the process, also becomes a victim when her daughter is taken away by soldiers in retaliation for her outspoken criticism. Having worked with representatives from international organizations such as human rights lawyer, Mandira to document the atrocities committed by the government in their campaign to root out Maoist insurgents from their strongholds in the countryside, Devi's traumatic experience only galvanizes her resolve in exposing the truth at all cost.

However, the face of the royal army is also changing in response to the Maoists' large number of women recruits, a transformation towards a more disciplined, regimented (and implicitly, more humane) one that Officer Rajani represents, as motivated equally by a desire for peace as she is to commemorating her brother who died fighting the decade-long insurgency. For a Maoist insurgent commander who assumed the pseudonym Kranti ("Revolution"), true humanity lies in dismantling the socially entrenched caste system, and the deep-rooted discrimination, arbitrary privilege, and oppression that it engenders. Nevertheless, despite the egalitarian values espoused by the Maoists, their ideological radicalism still proves to be a source of friction within the villages that they seek to convert, often using strong-arm tactics to recruit people into their campaign, and resorting to intimidation, brutality, and even assassinations against those who refuse to take up their cause. In one community, village elder and monarchist, Krishna defies the insurgents and stages her own rebellion to successfully drive away the Maoist agitators. In contrast, for nursing student turned activist Ram Kumari, the only way to move the country forward beyond the cycle of violence is by joining the daily, street level demonstrations organized by the pro-democracy movement. Interweaving the stories of these women into an intimate cultural mosaic of national struggle, Sari Soldiers is also an indelible image of national and personal transformation, the renewed hope of a figurative rebirth that Devi's husband eloquently expresses in their mutual grief: the idea that people are born twice, once when they enter the world, and again when they make a difference in it.

Posted at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Human Rights Watch

China's Stolen Children, 2007

A thoughtful and remarkably comprehensive examination of modern day human trafficking, Jezza Neumann's China's Stolen Children opens to a portrait of Detective Zhu, an overworked, former police officer who left his post in order to dedicate his time trying to find some of the 70,000 children who are abducted each year. With a predominantly poor clientele from remote villages, and a dispiriting child recovery rate of one in 20, Zhu's caseload is equally overwhelming and heartbreaking. One of Zhu's clients is a young couple from Kunming, migrant worker Chen Lung and his wife Chen Li who, years earlier, hid from the authorities in the farm of Chen Li's mother to have their son, Chen Jie, unable to pay the fine for conceiving without a birth permit. Having only recently paid off their son's compounding birth penalty fee after five years, their lives seemed destined for better times until Chen Jie is kidnapped from a farmer's market while his grandmother sold vegetables nearby. Chen Jie's story proves to be an all too familiar one for Zhu, as young boys, usually between the ages of five and six years old (an age considered to be optimal for fetching the best prices on the black market, where the children would require less care and attention than an infant, but would not be old enough to remember their way home) are abducted from rural villages and transported to larger, affluent cities where they are registered by new families. The bureaucracy involved in applying for a birth permit (which requires a marriage certificate and which, in turn, enforces the marrying age at 20 for women and 22 for men) has also led to unmarried couples like Way Ling and her boyfriend into seeking the assistance of traffickers like Wang Li in order to help place their children into good homes. Having given birth to a daughter, Wang Li reassures them of the good potential for selling girls as well, a thriving market created by rampant gender selection that has left a shortage of marriage-aged women. With an eye towards their sons' future prospects, families have also begun investing in girls as a means of ensuring that their sons will have a wife when he is ready for marriage. At the core of Neumann's bracing and unforgettable documentary is an unprecedented - though perhaps, not unforeseen - social catastrophe caused by the confluence of China's "one child" birth control policy, its cultural preference for sons (who can provide for his parents in their old age, unlike a daughter who will marry and help care for her husband's parents), and rapid modernization that has led to deep socioeconomic division between rural areas and industrialized cities. Framed within the context of China's aggressive development, the harrowing stories of lost children and exploitation reflect a society disoriented by its dramatic transformation, precariously struggling between tradition and ideology, where humanity is reduced to a marketable commodity.

Posted at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Human Rights Watch

June 24, 2008

Project Kashmir, 2008

The specter of the Partition of Bengal in 1947 continues to haunt the modern day consciousness of a divided Kashmir in Senain Kheshgi and Geeta Patel's provocative and acutely observed Project Kashmir. Propelled by the idea of capturing the Kashmir conflict from a Hindu and Muslim perspective, Southeast Asian-American friends Kheshgi and Patel attempt to navigate the murky waters of occupation and a deeply factionalized insurgency - often fueled by extremists - that define the volatile dynamics of everyday life in Kashmir. Guided on their journey by a Muslim newspaper journalist, Muzamil Jaleel (who immediately cautions them against taking anyone's perspective as truth, including his own), his friend and colleague, Aarti Tikoo Singh, a displaced Pandit Hindu now living in Jammu, and human rights activist, Khurram Parvez, who lost his leg in a car bombing, the filmmakers witness first hand the incalculable toll of the corrosive 60 year war: the almost ritualistic, random detention of local villagers at a detention facility each morning to root out possible insurgents, the profound distrust not only between the majority Muslim population and the Indian military who administer the region, but also within the population itself, the ruins of a destroyed Hindu temple and abandoned Pandit village after the intimidation and forced expulsion of the Pandit minority a decade earlier from the Kashmiri Valley. But as the filmmakers begin to struggle with the human tendency to gravitate towards the familiarity of their own culture, Patel becomes increasingly conscious of her identity as an Indian and Hindu woman in a Muslim society, and Kheshgi, the daughter of parents who lived through the trauma of the Partition, finds kinship with the struggle to end the occupation. In hindsight, the filmmakers' unorthodox contact with an anonymous guide who offers his candid, protective advice solely by telephone provides an insightful glimpse into the necessary first steps towards breaking the impasse, a bridging of broken bonds through communication and gestures of humanity that is poignantly captured during Singh's emotional return to her decimated childhood home where she is eagerly invited to tea by a persistent villager, who responds to the question of his immediate recognition of his former neighbor by remarking, "the scent of Kashmiri is the scent of one."

Posted at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Filed under 2008, Human Rights Watch