3 posts tagged “sfiff”
Last night I watched "Stranded: I’ve come from a plane that crashed on the mountains" at the SFIFF. This is a documentary about the plane that crashed over the Andes in 1972, and was the source for the book and the movie 'Alive!"
There was no film footage from this crash, only a few snapshots that the survivors took with a found camera. Therefore the film told the story through recounts of the survivors along with dramatizations of some of the events that took place.
At the same time as telling the original story, the film follows the survivors as they fly back to the Argentinian border and hike up to the crash site for the first time since their rescue. Most of the interviews from the survivors are during this trip which made it a lot more interesting than if it were just in their homes or a studio.
Despite the shortage of original recorded material (film, photos, audio) I still felt the story was well told and kept a steady (though sometimes a tad lethargic) pace. I think the one thing that could have been improved a bit was the soundtrack. You know the very top keys of a piano? Apparently they're for playing dramatically, one at a time in the score of an airplane crash documentary. It definitely gave a sense of the cold and desolation, but after 30min of this two hour film, I think I was feeling as cold and deserted as I was going to get.
My second movie for the SFIFF was Just Like Home. This was a Danish comedy about a small town that has to come to grips with a mysterious man who has been sighted walking around naked at night.
Everyone in the town becomes obsessed with the identity of this man and this once trusting community begins to become suspicious of each other and daily life begins to break down. Work on the new town square comes to a halt when the construction crew goes on strike due to "lack of respect". The mayor is asked to step down because no progress is being made on the naked man issue.
At the same time several other stories are developed; a young girl has left home to take a new job in the town and is worried she's made a bad decision coming to the town. A 40 year old woman escapes from a religious commune to live and hide away in the town and begins to discover normal sexuality that has been repressed. A man who was orphaned as a child is reunited with his estranged sister who has been hospitalized.
All these serious topics are treated with respect yet have more humor than weightiness. The humor of the movie comes in how difficult these people make what should be easy decisions and how these decisions snowball. What keeps this from being exasperating is that the way they treat these situations is not clichéd and they do resolve themselves eventually.
In all I really enjoyed this movie. It had the right amount of humor and was well told.
So I saw "Frozen" last night, my first movie in the SF International Film Festival. It was an Indian movie about a small family living in the Himalayas with a kind of coming of age story tucked in. Shot in black and white, it had a beautiful almost Ansel Adams quality about it.
To match, the story was highly conceptual and never really dove into too many details; situations are setup for the characters to react to without much explaintion behind the cause of these events. The army suddenly commandeers this family's remote and desolate land to fight "rebels". A whole base is constructed but nothing more is given about who the rebels are or why they are fighting, and there are never any attacks. The army is there simply to provide tension with the family.
Almost as interesting was the audience for this film. They were mostly older and liberal in the way that they couldn't imagine anyone being as open minded as them. The director was there and spoke before the movie, asking if anyone had seen Bollywood films; most of us raised our hands. He then jokingly apologized that this wouldn't be a Bollywood film and there wouldn't be any dancing. Spontaneously, audience then clapped for themselves in self-congratulation that they were more educated than to think that. One woman even shouted out "Bollywood aren't the only kind of Indian films" as if addressing 'those' people who didn't know any better. The director politely replied, "Yes, of course, I know".
Overall, I thought the film was interesting and well shot but, at the risk of losing my liberal badge, I didn't think it was great. I'd say this is a good Netflix rental if it is released in the states.
