Note: an index of full reviews can be found at the bottom of this post.
Bradford is just about small enough to get lost in. With its landmarks situated in an area so concentrated you can view them all from a single vantage point, any visiting critic may enjoy the city’s annual film festival without ever needing to venture beyond that approximate triangle on which sit train station, main venue and the hotel in which festival guests are accommodated.
Bradford is just about small enough to get lost in. With its landmarks situated in an area so concentrated you can view them all from a single vantage point, any visiting critic may enjoy the city’s annual film festival without ever needing to venture beyond that approximate triangle on which sit train station, main venue and the hotel in which festival guests are accommodated.
Whereas a bigger city will spread films across multiple venues, Bradford’s National Media Museum has three auditoriums in one building, and so a critic whose daily itinerary comprises breakfast and at least four feature films thereafter with little else will be pushed to find need or time to do much exploring. The one time I did just this – in pursuit of batteries for the camera on which the above picture was taken – I found myself navigating identical banked streets that seemed to carry some vague suggestion that, should I continue any further down or up any of them, I might never see another film at the festival.
Perhaps I’m just a clumsy navigator. Fitting, then, that my favourite film of the 19th Bradford International Film Festival was Alexey Balabanov’s Me Too (2012), a film in which all of its pilgrims seem to slip or bump into something at one point or another. I blinked and missed such moments when I first watched the film last year, but seeing it on the National Media Museum’s IMAX screen heightened my attention – and the film in general was transformed from a likeable but otherwise throwaway comedy with pretensions of social relevance to a subtly layered masterpiece that effortlessly manages that difficult shift from deadpan comedy to somehow poignant morality tale.
No other film left me as stunned as Cargo 200, but a few did move me in different ways. Though Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead’s Resolution (2012) throws in as many cabin in the woods clichés as it can to heighten the chemistry and tension between two old school pals, its sustained unease had me gripped throughout; I seem to be alone in thinking its third-act turn into self-commenting metafiction is not only unproblematic but logical. But these disagreements find their balance: Magpie (which received here its international premiere), Marc Price’s ambitious follow-up to debut feature Colin (2008), appears to have been well received by others, while I was unable to make the necessary leaps of faith demanded by firstly its premise and secondly its emotional contrivances, and was left thoroughly cold.
Forced displacement is also one of many concerns in I Have Always Been a Dreamer (2012), Sabine Gruffat’s quietly remarkable essay film on Detroit’s bust and Dubai’s boom, and is at the very heart of Gone Wild (2012), Dan Curean’s documentary on the unresolved fate of humans and horses alike on Romania’s Danube Delta, suffering the prolonged economic and social uncertainties that followed the fall of communism in 1989 and the collapse of collective farming with it. The idea of humans coexisting with animals is a theme also shared by Tokyo Waka (2012), meanwhile, which examines the ways in which the Japanese capital’s upward and outward expansion has influenced its increase in wild crows, which feed off the garbage left daily by the city’s 13 million human residents.
As a result of its one-venue set-up – though there were a few screenings at different sites around Bradford – it’s important for BIFF to showcase enough films and filmmakers from untapped locales so that its “International” status is not merely a pretence. I’ll leave it to others to report on its tribute to Indian Cinema, which celebrates its centenary this year, but it’s clear from both the programme itself and the introductions given before each film that BIFF is in the hands of people with a detailed knowledge of those films whose distribution beyond the international festival circuit appears to be unlikely. In the interests of full disclosure, I’m fortunate enough to have counted festival co-director Neil Young as a friend since meeting him at AV Festival last year, and met his fellow-director Tom Vincent for the first time this week; both imbue this festival with an infectious appreciation of the undervalued and the rarely-seen – and are dedicated in this digital age to preserving, where possible, a film culture that values and emphasises the unmatched richness of projected celluloid.
Speaking of which, I was sure not to miss an opportunity to catch Sans Soleil (1982, above), Chris Marker’s seminal essay film, on 35mm. Having classed it as an instant favourite upon a first viewing seven or so years ago – and having not revisited it since – I found it surprisingly enervating; whereas I had remembered, correctly or otherwise, an English-language voice-over, this screening was in French with subtitles, which demanded more concentration than I had prepared myself for. At the opposite end of the spectrum, after four other features on Friday 19th April, I allowed myself the privilege of forgoing my notepad in order to sit back and take in Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012), which following a straight-to-home entertainment release earlier this year received its first UK cinema screenings at this year’s festival. It’s not as cohesive as John Hyams’ own Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009), but it’s still a bonkers and intermittently thrilling comic-book videogame mystery action horror noir, all in 3D, which takes the Kurtz-like trajectory of Dolph Lundgren’s Andrew Scott, first set up in the 1992 original, to its logical conclusion.
If Marker’s palpable fascination with Tokyo as demonstrated in Sans Soleil chimed well with the aforementioned Tokyo Waka, though, the short that preceded it – also on film – chimed well with Gone Wild. This was Dream of the Wild Horses (1960), Denys Colomb Daunant’s strange and wonderful hymn to a group of untamed horses galloping along a shoreline. And what of that I in BIFF? Between them, Sans Soleil and Dream of the Wild Horses cover Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, Paris, San Francisco and the marshlands of Camargue in South West France. That’s a good start.
Over the Atlantic, meanwhile, I was taken across New Mexico by The Rambler (2013), Calvin Lee Reeder’s rambling, anything-goes road trip horror movie; twice to Canada, by Kazik Radwanksi’s edgy character study Tower (2012) and Antoine Bourges’s impressive mid-lengther East Hastings Pharmacy (2012), a days-in-the-life-of depiction of a methadone clinic in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side; to the northeast of America by Nor’easter (2012), an original if uneven exploration of a close-knit community shocked by the return of one of its missing youths, and of a novice priest’s moral dilemmas relating to this; and to Austin, Texas by Bob Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me (2012), a fast, furious and occasionally hilarious film that managed to charm me even with a style and premise that might on a different day have sent me running.
Much the same can be said of Tuesday (2012), a short US film by Fantavious Fritz, whose generally cutesy tone was elevated by recurrent hints of dark comedy. A word too on other shorts: the best of those I saw was Out of Frame (2012), Yorgos Zois’s landscape film on Greece’s abandoned giant billboards; Doctor Bucketman (2012), Carlos Carcas’s documentary on a street drummer in Madrid, was a close second. Short of Breath (2012) showed Frenchman Guillaume Legrand’s impressive skill at eliciting and sustaining curiosity and emotional investment with an ambiguous and minimalist crime tale; Bellum (2011) is Danish director David B. Sørensen’s beautifully shot portrait of the economically-conscribed soldier as a young man; Will Herbert’s Inertia (2012) makes a meal of one young Mancunian’s clumsy attempts to return his ex-girlfriend’s keys through her letterbox, helped feebly by his pal; Return (2012) shows Israeli filmmaker Shay Levi’s aesthetic confidence, though it’s the kind of festival-ready short whose programme notes tell us more than the film itself.
Likewise, it probes spatial problems too: “What do upwards and downwards mean?” asks one of its two characters. What indeed? Perhaps because I endured a packed bladder for what seemed like the final two thirds of Fata Morgana, this line, heard an hour before my departure from the festival, conjured unwelcome if amusing memories of my first day there: on my way out of the National Media Museum’s ground-floor toilets, I had stretched a leg out to keep a closing door open when somehow, to my horror, I went my full length: rendered horizontal in a flash, and immediately shocked and embarrassed, I shot up to full verticality faster than I’d gone down.
It wouldn’t have been out of place in a Balabanov film.
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Eye For Film Reviews
- An Anthropological Television Myth -
- Babylon -
- Cargo 200 -
- A Dream's Merchant -
- East Hastings Pharmacy -
- Faith, Love and Whiskey -
- Fata Morgana -
- Gone Wild -
- I Have Always Been a Dreamer -
- La Playa D.C. -
- The Love Songs of Tiedan -
- Magpie -
- Me Too -
- My House Without Me -
- The Rambler -
- Resolution -
- Somebody Up There Likes Me -
- The Stoker -
- Tokyo Waka -
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Scoped Capsules
- Babylon - East Hastings Pharmacy - Faith, Love and Whiskey - I Have Always Been a Dreamer - La Playa D.C. - The Love Songs of Tiedan - Out of Frame - The Rambler - The Resolution - Tokyo Waka - Tower - Under the Weight of Clouds -
