Podcasts
Podcast: Lynden Barber's Top Picks - 2nd Weekend
Lynden's top recommendations for the second weekend of screenings:
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Return of the Poet: Armenia's leading living filmmaker, Harutyun Khachatryan, chose his nation's 19th century poet, Ashugh Jivani, as his new film's central spirit. This is hardly accidental, for nothing here is prosaic. Here is a dazzling, alternative vision of a cinema that is essentially poetic, metaphorical and allusive. A work of tactile sensuality, it nominally depicts the step-by-step creation of a monumental statue of the poet that ends up travelling on the back of a truck through the Armenian countryside. From this Khachatryan conjures a transcendental cinematic experience, employing a sublime fusion of sound, image and music to evoke the soul of the director's beloved country and its people.
SCREENS SATURDAY AND SUNDAY -
The Great Match:
They call soccer 'the world game', a point that has never been made so convincingly - or pleasurably - as it is in this visually stunning, warmly comical feature. The film revolves around the Herculean quests by indigenous communities in three of the world's most remote spots (the Amazon, the Tenere desert of Niger, and Mongolia) to find TVs, electricity and aerials to watch the 2002 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil. Directed by veteran Spanish filmmaker Gerardo Olivares, the film features a generous spirit and magnificent cinematography, making for splendid entertainment - not just for soccer fans but anyone.
SCREENS SATURDAY AND SUNDAY -
ABDUCTION The Megumi Yokota Story:
This amazing story began as a routine missing persons case. A 13-year-old Japanese girl leaves school but never arrives home. Gradually it becomes clear that something very strange is happening on the streets of Japan. Aliens? Shifts in the space-time continuum? No, arguably weirder still. Megumi's distraught parents discover that North Korean agents have kidnapped their daughter and spirited her away to the world's last pure Red republic, apparently to help the North Koreans learn about the daily habits of the Japanese. Executive produced by Jane Campion, this beautifully crafted doco starts as personal tragedy and assumes wider dimensions as the Yokota family meet others whose children have disappeared in equally bizarre circumstances.
Directors Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim, and Executive Producer Jane Campion, will introduce the film and take questions afterwards.
SCREENS SATURDAY AND SUNDAY -
A Soap: When is a soap opera not a soap opera? This compelling drama implicitly asks and then answers that question. Divided into episodes featuring self-parodic, TV-style voiceovers, the film portrays a young woman trying to break free of a relationship and assert her independence. Her gradually developing relationship with the sensitive pre-op transsexual in the flat below shows her supposedly tough independence to be based on shakier ground that she would readily admit. The film, a distant cousin of Denmark's Dogme movement, draws attention to the fleeting complexities and give-away moments of humans in self-denial (which is to say, all of us). It's less the story than the style of its telling that makes this not a soap but smart filmmaking from a promising new name on the impressively energetic Danish scene.
Winner - Silver Bear, Berlin Film Festival, for Best Debut Film
SCREENS SUNDAY AND TUESDAY
