Rotterdam 2015 Review: ANOTHER TRIP TO THE MOON Is Both Sedate And Trippy

(Once upon a time, there were two beautiful young women, hunting in a forest...)

What is the border between still photography and moving pictures? Footage shot by a camera pointed at a waterfall or a fireplace may technically be the latter, but art-wise has more in common with the former. Getting close to that blurred line is Ismail Basbeth's Tiger Award nominated film Another Trip to the Moon, which had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year. For with its slow pacing and careful shot composition, Basbeth's film is more akin to a picture-book full of beautiful stills, than to a motion picture.

Its story is based on an old Indonesian myth: Ana's mother is the village's seer and Ana is expected to replace her eventually. To avoid this fate, Ana has run off into the jungle with a girlfriend, and happily lives a feral life there.
When Ana's mother feels her own end approach, she sends a dog to fetch Ana. Over time, the dog changes into a man, Ana marries him and they get a child together.

All this is shown in the aforementioned long, beautiful shots. For example: the first quarter of the film is almost entirely filled with showing two young women hunting, sleeping, bathing, and eating, in a beautiful dark green forest straight out of a fairy tale. Throughout the movie no word is spoken, no explanation given. It's definitely not a silent film though: nature itself provides a constant wall of noise, and sometimes songs are hummed, a very pleasant sound indeed.

It all makes for an extremely sedate film, hypnotizing almost, and would lull most people to sleep if not for some well-timed distractions. One lightning bolt literally made everybody in the theater jump up, suddenly wide awake again. Other bits and pieces are a lot weirder, like the plastic animals roaming through the forest alongside the regular ones.

I liked Another Trip to the Moon, and as I saw it between a few hectic entries at this year's Rotterdam Festival, it provided me with a temporary oasis of sorts. Would I recommend it to others though? Hmm... Whether anyone will like Another Trip to the Moon is entirely up to whether he/she can stomach such a strange and slow film, and I'm sure what I called sedate, many will judge to be boring instead. The trailers posted last week give a good impression of what you can expect.

Audiences in Rotterdam gave Another Trip to the Moon a mean rating of 3.4 out of 5, and I'm guessing the votes were all in the extreme end as this is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of film.