The grand jury of the fest consisted of Alamo Drafthouse CEO Tim League, Russian filmmaker Angelina Nikonova, Icelandic-American actor, producer and screenwriter Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, the founder and president of Celluloid Dreams, Hengameh Panahi and Senior Vice President for HBO Europe, Ondřej Zach. They awarded the Grand Prix - Crystal Globe to the American independent film Bob and the Trees by Diego Ongaro. The film follows the titular 50 year old logger and rap aficionado trying to make his way in life. The Special Jury Prize went to Austrian director Peter Brunner´s drama about mourning, Those Who Fall Have Wings.
The Rest Of The Awards
Kosovo-born director Visar Morina left the Czech spa town with the Best Director Award for his feature debut Babai. The film was also given the Europa Cinemas Label Award for its "moving yet brutally honest story of a ten year old boy searching for his father who has abandoned him for a new life in Germany." Curiously enough, the two awards for the best performance went to local Czech films. Alena Mihulová won the Best Actress Award for Home Care, about a self-sacrificing nurse coming to terms with her illness. Kryštof Hádek took the Best Actor Award for his portrayal of the irresponsible Cobra in Jan Prušinovský´s drama The Snake Brothers. The second entry in Anca Damian´s heroic trilogy, Magic Mountain and Italian biopic Antonia by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino both earned special jury mentions.
The debut feature by Hungarian director Lilly Horváth, The Wednesday Child, came on top of the East of the West competition while sharing the FEDEORA Award with Mirlan Abdykalykov´s Heavenly Nomadic. The Wednesday Child revolves around Maja who " is in debt, has just lost her new job and the custody of her son. Only her self-confidence and street smartness keep her from loosing faith and going crazy." Heavenly Nomadic was praised by the FEDEORA jury as "a film in the great tradition of ecological masterpieces, it depicts a family in a far-off country trying to survive the encroachment of so-called civilization with humor, warmth and perception." Romanian drama The World is Mine by debutant Nicolae Constantin Tănase received special jury mention, the film tells the story "of Larisa, a teenager who lives in a small town near the Black Sea. She is expelled from school after getting into a fight with the ex-girlfriend of the boy she's madly in love with, Florin, the town's Don Juan. Running away from home, Larisa will soon be forced to make a decision regarding her future."
Domestic production excelled again in the documentary section as the award for the best documentary film over 60 minutes went to lauded Czech filmmaker Helena Třeštíková for her latest outing, the time-lapse documentary Mallory, a 13 year study of the titular protagonist struggling with drug addiction, pregnancy and homelessness. Chilean director Roberto Collío won the best documentary under 30 minutes for White Death, "the impressionist portrait of a landscape marked by tragedy. A ghostly stroll among the vestiges of a story where forty-four young soldiers and one sergeant were pushed to their deaths in the mountainous Antuco."
Shot entirely on the iPhone, Sean Baker´s micro-budgeted miracle Tangerine, about transgender prostitutes in L.A. won the Forum of Independents Award while festival attendees decided to that Paolo Sorrentino´s latest, Youth, deserved the Audience Award. The FIPRESCI jury praised Romanian director Florin Şerban´s drama Box for „precisely expressed state of mind of his characters in our non-predictable presence and future and contributed again perfectly to the new Romanian cinema" before handing him the Award of International Film Critics.
Home Care (dir. Slávek Horák)
Czech commercial director Slávek Horák turns to feature filmmaking in his mature debut Home Care. Inspired by the director's mother's profession – home care nurse -- the film follows nurse Vlasta on her selflessly dedicated mission. Tables turn after an accident, and Vlasta wakes up in a hospital bed. Though the accident did not cause serious injury, she is told that she has an already advanced form of cancer. After classical medicine fails her, she retorts to alternative, more esoteric, kind of treatment.
Horák delivers a warm, humane story not about dying but living. Home Care eschews heartbreaking drama in favor of light-hearted humor. Alena Mihulová as the protagonist delivers an extraordinary performance which did not go unnoticed as the jury handed her Best Actress Award. She believably portrayed a person trying to help others no matter what while adamantly preventing to be helped even in a dire state. In one particularly strong scene, Vlasta writhes from pain in a vineyard while her unaware husband tastes wine and chitchats. She keeps all her pain to herself. Opposed to Mihulová stands veteran actor Bolek Polívka displaying his more serious acting face while not neglecting his comedy talent though in more grounded performance. Despite the central premise Home Care is not the usual European depresso flick, and the equilibrium between tragedy and comedy makes it suitable for larger audience outside the arthouse circuit.
The Snake Brothers (dir. Jan Prušinovský)
Jan Prušinovský has built himself a reputation of being a funny man with television and feature film work on his Czech home turf. That perception is not going to be challenged after his third feature work, The Snake Brothers... despite marking a bit of a detour.
Viper and Cobra are brothers trapped in a maze of aimless life. Where Viper drifts from low-paid factory job to a local pub on a daily basis, Cobra´s routine consists of getting money (i.e. stealing and pawning) in order to get coked up out of his head. The love/hate fraternal relationship serves as foundation for a story about struggle to find a way out of the labyrinth of hopelessness.
Prušinovský, along with young scriptwriter Jaroslav Žváček, delivers a highly believable and succinct drama with all the grey nuances that make life a life; nothing is entirely white and nothing is entirely black. And as the humor is inseparable part of life, so it is in The Snake Brothers, mainly channeled through Cobra´s wild antics. The siblings are played by real life brothers Matěj (Viper) and Kryštof Hádek (Cobra) and while the story develops through the perspective of Viper with Cobra´s frequent forays, Kryštof Hádek took home the Best Actor Award for truly remarkable performance. The Snake Brothers are so far the best the Czech cinema has to offer this year.
Bridgend (dir. Jeppe Rønde)
“Over a 5-year period in Bridgend, Wales, 79 people, many of them teenagers, committed suicide without leaving any clue as to why.” This is the factoid and the premise behind the docudrama Bridgend by Danish director Jeppe Rønde.
Hannah Murray stars as Sara, a newcomer in the eponymous mountain town with ever-present mist. Her widowed father is tasked to investigate mysterious suicides. Sara soon blends and continuously adapts to the mindscape of Bridgend´s peers. First and foremost, Bridgend is a mood piece relying heavily on Magnus Nordenhof Jonck´s atmospheric cinematography, eerie sound and observation foregrounding Rønde´s sensibilities of documentarian. The narrative comes just second in line, with its anemic form sketching a coming-of-age as Sara becomes the witness to pagan-like rituals of local youngsters. The synopsis proclaims the film does not try to solve the mystery of teenage suicides still looming in the city, though in case of Sara´s character, the scriptwriters (the director himself, Torben Bech and Peter Asmussen) did some unsophisticated hinting on Oedipal anger and teenage rebellion, an unnecessary red herring.
Intriguing as a visual wanderlust in amidst mysterious and dreary woods, Bridgend does no function well as a drama, coming up short in its psychology and the motifs of its characters. Rønde should have distanced from the real life event and its associations, and rather tweaked the film to suit the fall into a teenager´s soul he seems to be more interested in.
Impressions of a Drowned Man (dir. Kostas Karyotakis)
As headlines about yet another Greek crisis fills the news on an hourly basis, Greek cinema keeps churning out new films zealously. Though maybe Lanthimos´ long eagerly awaited absurd sci-fi dystopian drama The Lobster was the highlight on expectation list, there are other Hellenic filmmakers riding the wave as well. One is Kyros Papavassiliou, who made his directorial feature debut with the lyrically titled drama Impressions of a Drowned Man unveiled this year at Rotterdam´s competition. Yet the title is not the only thing lyrical. The film opens according to puzzle film genre, an amnesiac trying to find who he is which soon turns into more mysterious foray as he is Kostas Karyotakis, a poet who committed suicide in 1928 and keeps returning among living. The glacial pacing almost erases the time as the protagonist looms the space in a surrealistic attempt to construct his identity of which looping pattern remains Michel Butor´s time-maze in the novel Passing Time.
The vast and tiny empty spaces form a canvas compositionally alluring to pittura metafisica movement. Mesmerizingly shot debut paves the way for filmmaker Kyros Papavassiliou whose name could brightly shine on the map of contemporary Greek cinema as the newcomer whose next endeavor will be eagerly anticipated.
The Lesson (dir. Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov)
In Kristina Grozeva & Peter Valchanov´s The Lesson, schoolteacher Nadezhda (Margita Gosheva) discovers that there is a thief in her class and decides to not let this petty offense go unpunished. Unfortunately, as soon as she returns home, she finds a creditor ready to seize her family's house because of unpaid debt. Nadezhda has three days to find a large amount of money to save the house.
The downward spiral that this young teacher faces, knocks down the door of her own moral and ethical system, forcing her to trespass boundaries she would normally not dare to cross, while struggling to maintain a personal integrity and honor.
Even though the main ingredients are quite familiar, The Lesson is not the usual social drama. Grozeva and Valchanov use plot components as the time ticks down the high stakes, lending to the dead-end situation for what could be called their poverty thriller. What distinguishes The Lesson from similarly themed dramas is the fact that Grozeva and Valchanov are not afraid to throw some genre spice, and even self-parodying elements, into the boiling social drama pot.
Superworld (dir. Karl Markovics)
Karl Markovics, supporting favorite from the Austrian television police series Komisar Rex took to directing with his 2011 feature debut Breathing, a curiously sympathetic portrait about juvenile prisoner finding new purpose as mortuary worker. Equally sympathetic is his sophomore feature Superworld, premiered at this year´s Berlinale, focusing on a middle-age supermarket worker Gabi Kovanda living in a routine limbo of a life starting with her marriage. However, her behavior suddenly changes, she doesn´t pay attention, forgets and murmurs to herself blocking the outside world as if sinking into a deep hole of psychosis. It´s not the psychosis however, Gabi just experiences divine intervention, a dialogue with God. Bemused cashier finds the connection more frustrating, questions surpassing answers as her life entangles even more as mostly marriage threatens to fall apart. Markovics asked the most fundamental and recently popular question what is the happiness nowadays as he investigates its common day form.
Superworld is not the usual dramedy. While it shares the general features with Markovics' debut mostly in terms of uplifting aura it radiates despite not explicitly jolly subject. Clocking 120 minutes, the film is bit too long for general audience and even the built up is pretty solidly structured, the denouement does not offer enough satisfaction considering the heavenly calls which seem to be more of a device to steer the story wherever director need it to flow.
Besides that long running time, Superworld should be enjoyed by a larger public as Markovics´ overall style treats the theme delicately with a gentle melancholia.
Reality (dir. Quentin Dupieux)
The ironically titled Reality, is the most mature film by French DJ-cum-filmmaker Quentin Dupieux to date. Dupieux has been working on Reality on and off since Rubber, constantly tweaking the script until achieving its final version, a labour quite visible on the perfectly seamless juncture of realities in the film, despite the director´s heavy use of dream logic. He himself apparently considers Reality to be an achievement enveloping all of his other films, which he keeps referencing in his own self-contained phantasmagoria.
These Are the Rules (dir. Ognjen Sviličić)
Dramas which keep the tension tightly under the lid while eschewing a boiling melodramatic outburst can be challenging.
On the other hand, de-dramatized dramas with smoother edges are easier to chew on for laid-back, cerebral viewers. Croatian director Ognjen Sviličić demonstrates the mastery of combining both approaches in his fifth feature, These Are the Rules.
LUCIFER (dir.Gust van den Berghe)
Belgian director Gust Van den Berghe concludes his triptych on the emergence of human consciousness that began with Little Baby Jesus of Flanders and continued with Blue Bird. Speaking of consciousness, a better-suited mythological figure in the Western canon would be hard to find than Lucifer. The script is adapted from a 1645 play of the same name written by Joost van den Vondel, from which, supposedly, John Milton drew inspiration for his Paradise Lost. Van den Berghe's previous indigo-tinged film was also an adaptation of 1908's symbolist play by Belgian literature Nobel Prize laureate Maurice Maeterlinck.