South America hasn’t been too good to me at this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival: I left a Chilean film that might have been interesting but I suspect not, and a Venezuelan film that was just horrible. Colombia’s official Oscar submission Los viajes del viento (by Ciro Guerra) however, was a little bit better, even if it was a terribly unrewarding experience.
South Korea is kicking ass at this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival, with Bong Joon-Ho’s marvelous Madeo, the funny, sweet and hugely enjoyable Castaway on the Moon and the rollicking Private Eye, a remarkably assured debut from Park Dae-Min. It’s a detective story, set in early twentieth century Seoul, and I won’t spoil too much about the plot except to say that it opens in good atmospheric style with the removal of a body from a wooded clearing.
This year viewers got another satisfying showing from South Korea at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Hae-Jun Lee’s Castaway on the Moon was introduced to us as “crowd-pleasing”, and that it certainly is. The film presents humor with an interesting and unusual plot that taps into the world of isolation and independence.
With a 37-year career behind him, André Forcier is one of the more veteran directors represented in the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Quebecois Cinema strand, with his strange autobiographical tale of union unrest, marital jealousy, grief and national liberation in a remote snow-covered mining community in 1949. It’s entitled, Je me souviens (“I remember”).
This year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival boasts a healthy number of US premieres, providing an opportunity to see movies that might otherwise never reach these shores. Zero from Poland, the second feature from writer/director Pawel Borowski (after 2003’s I Love You), might stand a better chance of returning than most. It’s certainly the glossiest-looking Polish film I can recall seeing, with stylish photography, a good rock score and a fiendishly intricate set of interlocking stories that unfold over 24 hours in Warsaw.
One of the big name auteur’s at this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival is Atom Egoyan (not in person), with his latest Chloe. A sexual drama that bears a dubious reputation from its round on the festival circuit last year, it was adapted from 2003’s star-studded Nathalie (Depardieu, Ardent, Béart) and turns out to have been described quite accurately as a misfire.
One of the films to which I was most looking forward at this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival was the Romanian Katalin Varga and I’m very pleased to report that it did not disappoint.
The film has a fascinating (and borderline depressing) production history too involved to recount here, but suffice to say that it is the remarkable debut of writer/director Peter Strickland, who spent much of his twenties as a musician before traveling to Romania in his mid-thirties to make his first feature with entirely local cast and crew in a language with which he was not familiar (NB not quite true – see comment below). Even without this background, however, the result would be extremely impressive.
The Santa Barbara Film Festival has a strong tradition of promoting Eastern European cinema, with movies from the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Poland and elsewhere; this year, from Slovenian writer/director Damjan Kozole (best known for 2003’s Spare Parts) comes Slovenka. Shuttling between the capital Ljubljana and a nearby small town, the Slovenian girl of the title is an ad codename used by 23-year old student/prostitute Sasha (Nina Ivanisin), who starts the film by seeing her grotesquely fat hotel john keel over from a Viagra-induced heart attack.
When he turns out to be a German MEP the police take an interest in speaking to her, but she’s found first by a pair of (unexpectedly handsome) prospective pimps and has to abandon her newly-purchased flat, go into hiding with her genial dad Edo (Peter Musevski), maintain the lie in face of questions from her cute red-head friend and slightly obsessed but married ex, and watch her life rapidly unravel.
One of the pleasures of the Santa Barbara Film Festival is that the programme throws up films that seem to have come from nowhere and vanish without trace, but which are a real pleasure to catch on their brief appearance (cf last year’s Zift, Poppy Shakespeare, 20th Century Boys). One such title this year is the Iranian Ashkan (Ashkan, angoshta-e motebarek va dastan-haye digar), a US premiere from debutant Shahram Mokri that I bet through no fault of its own will prove hard to find again. Which is a shame, since its fuzzy black and white video photography, jittery camera and obviously tiny budget are fully balanced by an inventiveness, small-scale intimacy and dry humour all too lacking in more widely-seen cinema.
