the young teacher

Director: Wang Junzheng (China)

Innocent and inspired, is what describes the young Miao Miao, a young teacher assigned to teach at Experiment Primary School. It doesn’t take her long to win the hearts of the students, and the audience, but not all the parents are so easily bowled over. A feel-good film, with a story of triumph, little too simplistic perhaps, but with sensitive handling of the dreams of the young children.

About sara

Director: Othman Karim (Sweden)

Begins beautifully, as the narrative picks up the tale of a girl who grows up as her dad’s little princess, the dream which lies shattered with her father dead and a mother to look after. Sara stumbles from one relationship to another, looking for love, security, a child, but in her heart still nurturing that little, lost daddy’s girl. High point was when she gets dead drunk in her gorgeous white wedding gown.

costa

Director: Johan Nijenhuis (Netherlands)

A lot in Costa will look very familiar to those who have seen Pooja Bhatt-produced Holiday, which sank without making much of a splash. Costa with its sun, sand, and the sea and the spirited dance sequences on the beaches of Spain would have worked great with the young crowd, had it been present. But the guess is, this fast paced, feel-good fairytale was well enjoyed by the audience, irrespective of age.

Skin

Director: Fernando Vendrell (Portugal)

The bold and the beautiful Olga is in search of her identity. In spite of possessing everything, she still faces rejection because of her colour and her inability to answer questions about her mother. Her search leads her to the stage, after her bedroom fiasco with their driver kills her father of a heart attack. And you thought that’s something that happened only to dads in Bollywood films?

Damnation

Director: Bela Tarr (Hungary)

For those who like their films really slow and languorous, Damnation is perfect. Begins with a very foggy morning, which never really seems to clear, followed by rain and conversation about raindrops and beauty, by which time one can hear a lot of impatient sighs suggesting that it’s time things moved!

Samsara

Director: Pan Nalin (India)

Sex and spirituality both score high in international film festivals, all the more if some Eastern exotica is thrown in as well. Samsara comes with the tag of scoring high on the awards list in film festivals abroad. Though one’s not sure how many were drawn to it to enjoy the great scenic shots of breathtaking Ladakh, and how many to enjoy the shots of the other kind. Didn’t have as many of them as one had heard of, anyway, at least going by festival standards.

The zero years

Director: Nikos Nikolaidis (Greece)

Surreal and really scary. Some in the audience actually looked anywhere but at the screen as the gut-wrenching scenes scrolled endlessly, with no relief. But no one walked out, as if hypnotised by the story of four young women, confined to a house that was rapidly being gnawed away by mice, in which they live out their nightmarish existence, where they have nothing but their bodies to give vent to their pent up frustrations. No danger of the plot ‘inspiring’ the Bhatt or any other camp. For one can’t imagine even the boldest of our actresses being able to do any of the scenes in the film.

Gabrielle

Director: Patrice Chereau (France)

Has a very interesting beginning with Jean Harvey discovering a letter saying that his wife Gabrielle, his pride possession, has left him for another man. But, as he puts it, even before the ink has dried, she returns. After that the narrative picks up the tale of their 10 years of marriage, how it started, and why it refused to take off. As they reflect on the 10 years of grand parties, their growing aloofness, and finally the desperate step of Gabrielle, makes for good cinema, but the audience starts to first shuffle restlessly, before they start to leave one by one. One turns to look at the man who had angrily hushed someone opening a packet of chips during the screening of The Zero Hours. He was snoring.

Angel’s fall

Director: Semih Kaplanoglu (Turkey/Greece)

A young girl keeps waiting for something to happen. So does the audience. It takes really long to get somewhere, but in between there are very interesting shots and use of lights, which make for great visual impact.

In the shadow of the dog

Director: Girish Kasaravalli (India/Kannada)

Best part of the film is the mother-daughter relationship. The touching moments between them are played up, so when later when the rift comes, one can feel their pain. The film’s title symbolically refers to the dog in the Mahabharata, which follows Yudhishtra till the end in the Swargarohana Parva. But as Kasavaralli warned the audience in his speech (the film was the inaugural of the International Forum), please don’t wait for the entry of any dog! Beautifully shot, the story is set in a traditional village where Achchannaiah lives with his wife and their widowed daughter-in-law Venkatalaxmi and their grand-daughter Rajalaxmi. Venkatalaxmi lives the restricted, ritualistic life of a widow, till a man appears, who claims to be her husband, reborn. The complications never end after that. It’s long by festival standards, but that didn’t seem to matter to the audience.

Rome open city

Director: Roberto Rossellini (Italy)

An early morning (Retrospective) film, not too many people turned up to watch this Rossellini film (maybe again). Which was a pity. The struggle of Manfredi, a communist rebel, haunted by Gestapo, made for a great and moving film.

ontarjatra

Director: Tareque Masud and Catherine Masud (Bangladesh)

The screening of ntarjatra was a celebration by itself. Masud’s earlier film, Matir Moyna, had struck a chord with Calcutta film lovers, and they turned up in full force for Ontarjatra, which had been slotted as the closing film of the festival. The simple story of a divorced women’s return to Bangladesh from England with her son, after several years, won applause from the audience. They were heard murmuring that Matir Moyna was better, but aloud they were all praise and smile as they surrounded Masud to congratulate him.

Delicate crime

Director: Beto Brant (Brazil)

Intense and intriguing, Delicate Crime keeps one focused on the lives of Antonio Martins, a respected theatre critic, the young and beautiful Ines, and painter Jose Torres Campana, which get disastrously entangled. Takes time to build up, but once it does, keeps the audience rooted. Helps that Torres takes his own sweet time to paint the nude Ines.

Familia

Director: Louise Archambault (Canada)

Nothing brilliant here, but captures well the plight of the 14-year-old daughter of Mimi, an aerobic instructor, always on the run, after messing up every possible situation by her irresponsibility. A modernday story of any teen, anywhere in the world, grappling with a broken home, online sex, and a pregnancy that seems to have no explanation. Clicks.

Devrai

Director: Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar (India)

It has its moments, and though it has been dragged a bit too much, even becoming repetitive in parts, the story manages to hold itself. Starring Atul Kulkarni and Sonali Kulkarni, Devrai is the story of a young man, his dreams and aspirations, all of which are lost as his family fails to recognise his early symptoms of schizophrenia, which with time becomes severe. The story of how his family learns to deal with it, and the solutions it looks for, was appreciated.

hawaii, oslo

Director: Erik Poppe (Norway)

There’s a father who is shattered to discover that his newborn son has a rare heart disease. There’s Vidar who can see things in his dreams which actually come true, and there’s Leon, a young man who is under his care. Leon is waiting for the return of Asa, a girl he made a pact with 10 years ago to get married. Sounds familiar? Yes, very Bollywoodish. Don’t be surprised if you find its Indian copy playing some day in the hall next door.

UNO

Director: Aksel Hennie (Norway)

One doesn’t connect immediately. One is even put off by too many violent scenes. But by the end, one is glued to this film about family ties and friendships, betrayals and trust, and the fate of David, who must now take on new responsibilities after the death of his father. Even as he comes to terms with the accusations of his friends about his betraying them to the police, it ends with a gory twist about who betrayed whom.

So close, so far

Director: Reza Mirkarimi (Iran)

Little could a wealthy, busy Tehran doctor, who has every material comfort, imagine where his search for his son would lead him. Not just him, the audience, too, is sucked into the horrifying desert sand, as he leaves behind every trace of human life and finds himself buried in his car under the sand. With only a camera that plays back for him his past life for company. The scenes stand out starkly and memorably.