JDIFF 2011
The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is nearly upon us, running from the 17th to the 27th of this month and boasting a wide range of films from around the world, public interviews with art-industry luminaries and providing the Irish public with a rare opportunity to view some films which may never get a commercial release over here. Highlights from last year included the only Irish screening of the festival cut of Gaspar Noé’s tour de force, Enter The Void; a first look at Martin Scorsese’s monument to film-classicism, Shutter Island; Werner Herzog’s majestic Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans; Giorgos Lanthimos’ eerie black-comedy, Dogtooth; Todd Solondz’ considered, touching sequel to Happiness, Life During Wartime; and Bong Joon-Ho’s sweeping tragedy, Mother. In anticipation of the curtain being lifted on JDIFF 2011, an overview of festival highlights is in order.
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari) – Fri 18th @ 6:30 – Screen
Tsangari’s second feature film as director (ten years after 2000’s The Slow Business Of Going) is representative of a Greek cinema’s wonderful tendency to self-examine. Following the success of 2009’s Dogtooth (of which Tsangari was co-producer), Attenberg is a study of a semi-abandoned industrial town and four of its inhabitants. With Greece’s more contemplative cinematic output chiefly defined on the international stage by the work of the brilliant Theo Angelopoulos, one holds out hope that Tsangari’s film might continue to increase the country’s visibility as a bastion of modern art cinema. A commercial release would seem unlikely, so this may be your only opportunity to see this most intriguing film on the big screen.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D (Werner Herzog) – Fri 18th @ 6:30 – Cineworld
Werner Herzog ‘doing’ 3-D might be one of the most exciting things to happen this year in film. That said experiment comes in the form of a documentary dealing with the Chauvet Cave, in which the earliest known examples of cave paintings are to be found, is doubly exciting, as far as a meta-examination of cinema is concerned. To study the very foundations of visual art is something Herzog would naturally gravitate towards, and the amount of restrictions and red-tape involved in gaining access to the sealed-off cave is astounding, so one imagines he has made the most of it. The great director’s range of cinematic skill is almost unparalleled, with his documentary output often calling into questions the linguistic boundaries posed by the term in the first instance. In this light, his exploration of the Chauvet Cave in three dimensions will make for extremely fascinating viewing and I’ll eat my own shoe if it doesn’t sell out.
Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowsky) – Sat 19th @ 8:40 – Screen
If you’re not excited to see a film with Vincent Gallo in it, then you ought to spend some time watching films with Vincent Gallo in them. Winner of the Special Jury prize at Venice (plus Gallo winning the Volpi Cup for best actor), Skolimowsky’s film sees a nameless, silent, Muslim ‘insurgent’ escape from American captivity in Europe and attempt to survive in extremely harsh physical conditions, forced to kill those he comes in contact with. Its depiction of waterboarding has courted controversy, along with the ambiguity surrounding the nature of Gallo’s character, though by all accounts the film is largely apolitical. Having the central character remain silent for the film’s duration is an interesting move by Skolimowsky, in a year where more formally pioneering products are straddling arthouse and mainstream success (Buried, 127 Hours, etc.), and Essential Killing certainly demands to be seen, whether you’re an admirer of ‘the legend’ Vincent Gallo’s or not.
The First Movie (Mark Cousins) – Sun 20th @ 6:30 – IFI Screen 1
Belfast-born Mark Cousins’ art-documentary, in which he provides cameras to children in Kurdish Iraq, encouraging them to film their lives while recounting tales of his own, has been in receipt of wide plaudits, along with scooping the Prix Italia for Best TV Arts Documentary last year. A wonderful concept, it promises to be an intriguing and illuminating study of the fundamental linguistics of cinema and its human power. Cousins claims to be ‘interested in the camera as an empathy machine’, an ambitious statement which by all accounts he delivers upon in this novel piece of work.
Submarino (Thomas Vintenberg) – Mon 21st @ 4:20 – Screen
Co-signatory, along with Lars von Trier, of the Dogme 95 manifesto now permanently ingrained in art-cinema folklore, Thomas Vintenberg’s output since the masterpiece that was Dogme #1: Festen, in 1998, has had a mixed reception on the international scene. Submarino is a return to familial themes through an anguished, social realist approach, and has earned the filmmaker wide acclaim following its premiere at Berlin last spring. Based on a Jonas T. Bengtsson novel from 2007, Vintenberg chooses this time to examine the lives of two extremely marginalised young men in Denmark with a distinct and remarkable lack of sentimentality which perhaps holds parallels with the recently released Neds (Peter Mullan, 2010). Regardless, the prospect of a Vintenberg project being screened on these shores is positively mouth-watering.
Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán) – Mon 21st @ 6:45 – Screen
Screening directly after Vintenberg’s latest is veteran documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s project on Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth. From there, due to its altitude and remoteness, astronomers conduct studies on the origins of the universe, while its lack of humidity provides the perfect environment for the preservation of historical artefacts, attracting the interest of archaeologists also. Guzmán questions the function of memory, of the past, for a Chilean society so traumatised by the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet and its attendant violence. Coming from one of the world’s most respected filmmakers, this contemplative documentary is bound to touch and illuminate audiences while providing a very human study of the importance of knowledge and memory.
Sound of Noise (Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stjärne Nilsson) – Tue 22nd @ 8:40 – Cineworld
It is with trepidation that I recommend a Swedish musical comedy helmed by a directorial team I have never heard of, though the plot of Sound of Noise is so preposterous it would be a shame to miss out on: tone-deaf, music-hating policeman Amadeus Warnebring pursues a gang of six ‘guerilla percussionists’ notorious for their anarchic, impromptu public performances through a scandalised city environment. The trailer (available on Youtube) suggests an absurd, ironic comedy aware of the established conventions of European crime romps, while an improvised musical performance in which the gang utilise the anaesthetised body of an elderly man in an operating theatre as percussion instrument could well be one of the more ludicrous images on offer at this year’s festival. A charming ‘Warnebring dislikes this video’ lies atop the comments section (at the time of writing, 111 likes vs. 1 dislike).
Poetry (Lee Chang-dong) – Wed 23rd @ 6:15 – Cineworld
Winner of Best Screenplay at Cannes last year, Lee Chang-dong’s story of an elderly woman struggling with Alzheimer’s has been praised for its near-comprehensive flouting of convention. Wholly unsentimental and resistant to the cheap dramaturgy that might be expected of a film with such a focus, Lee’s film is by all accounts an emotionally engaging and rigorous investigation of language and its human application, as sexagenarian Mija begins to lose her grip on the vocabulary that is so crucial to her love of poetry. Korean cinema’s return to international prominence is no accident, with a slew of extremely talented and original filmmakers having emerged from the region in the last decade or so. Poetry represents the country’s most esteemed offering of 2010 (via its Grand Bell awards) and will no doubt be an elegiac and provocative addition to the JDIFF schedule.
Morgen (Marian Crisan) – Thurs 24th @ 6:15 – The Lighthouse
Marian Crisan, winner of a Palme d’Or for best short film (Megatron in 2008), investigates the human significance of national borders in this Romanian/French/Hungarian co-production. Described by the director as ‘an immigrant story not from the immigrant point of view, but of the point of view of the people he meets on the way’, Morgen aims at a poetic but buoyant examination of an issue which has been so contentious and widely-explored in European cinema over the last two decades. Border cinema continues to thrive in the arthouse market, and the curious subject matter: a Romanian security guard fishes out of the water a Turkish immigrant on his way to Germany, bears particular relevance at present, when immigration policies in western Europe are being so hotly debated.
Holy Wars (Stephen Marshall) – Fri 25th @ 6:15 – The Lighthouse
Though its reception has been largely mixed, Holy Wars’ uniform focus on religious fundamentalism has been uniformly provocative, inciting both lively debate and furious denunciations from audiences and critics, commonly accusing the film of being ‘pro-Christian’. Centred around Khalid Kelly, Ireland’s most famous (extremely partisan) Muslim-convert, and Aaron Taylor, an evangelical Christian from Missouri, Marshall’s documentary is a rare opportunity to see two people of such contrasting religious and political opinions given celluloid space, and then placed into conversation with one another – whether accusations of bias or glibness prove to be founded or not, Holy Wars’ notoriety merits your audience, and must certainly be ‘food for thought’.
How I Ended This Summer (Alexei Popogrebsky) – Sat 26th @ 4:00 – Screen
Popogrebsky’s third feature as director, following the extensively praised Roads to Koktebel (2003) and 2007’s black comedy, Simple Things, is a psychological drama set on a research station in the Arctic circle. Very much in line with a contemplative tradition of Russian cinema concerning itself with the humanity of spaces, and humanity within spaces, the film has won wide acclaim on the festival circuit, including scooping the Best Film award at London Film Festival in October. Popogrebsky is, like any worthwhile filmmaker, a self-professed fan of Andrei Tarkovsky’s, and How I Ended This Summer seems to be very much in line with the great man’s fascination with our relationship to the various environments we inhabit. The trailer boasts dramatic visual landscapes and a rising tension between its two principal characters, its promise such that I have to consider it a must-see.
In The City Of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín) – Sun 22nd @ 4:00 – The Lighthouse
A cult favourite on the festival circuit in 2007, Guerín’s minimalistic tale of love and obsession follows a young man returning to the city of Strasbourg in search of a woman who captured his imagination six years previously. His needle-in-a-haystack quest is shared by the audience through a near-total immersion in the seemingly banal, quotidian cityscape. The scarcity of dialogue and character identification explore a dichotomous relationship between the city and the individual, allied with an attention-to-detail in composition which testifies to a great visual talent, with the majority of Guerín’s output up to this point having been in documentary. Such a formally inventive film is rare to behold on the big screen and this screening surely represents one’s final chance to experience the film in such a capacity.
An exceptionally important event in Dublin’s cultural calendar, JDIFF is Ireland’s biggest and best film festival, now in its eighth year. A selection of ‘classic’ films will also be screened over the course of the festival, the merits of which are manifest by virtue of their status and are certainly worth watching if you haven’t seen them already. The films listed above represent merely a fraction of the festival’s offerings, a microcosm of its broad scope, both commercially and geographically, and go some way to illustrating the wide range of brilliant films that have been attracted to Irish shores in 2011. Early booking is advised for all features.
Words: Oisín Murphy
