Leeds Film Festival 2024 - Day 4

Unfortunately my last day - boo.

Julie Keeps Quiet (Bel/Swe) (review)

A companion piece to Good One, Julie Keeps Quiet explores the theme of trust and boundaries between youngsters and the adults that they trust to take care of them.  Julie is promising student in a Belgian school with a passion for tennis - and is good at it too.  Her long-time coach, Jeremy is suddenly suspended for unknown reasons, but rumours abound it is for inappropriate behaviour around one of the players.  Julie, clearly tightly bonded to her coach, seeing him as getting her to the star player status she currently holds, finds herself deeply conflicted between her loyalty to the person she idolizes and her own experiences with him which she now begins to question.  As investigations begin and testimonies are requested from all involved, Julie's inner conflict begins to affect her work and her training; just how much can and should she be not speaking up about.

Though it handles the subject matter deftly and with a sensitive hand, Julie Keeps Quiet could have been tightened up a little; we see many many shots of Julie just practicing tennis, with the investigation happening almost as a secondary thing in the background - which I suppose from Julie's point of view is both her focus in life and exactly how she wants it to be.  Still, there are only so many times you can see tennis practice before you start to think it's padding the runtime a bit.

But that's my only complaint about the film; it is otherwise a contemplative examination of what can - and probably does - happen many times over, and how that can set up a young life on the back foot, hesitant to trust where adults have previously let them down. 8

The Killers (S.Kor) (imdb)

To round things off, we have an anthology film, made up of four segments by different Korean directors, around the short story by Ernest Hemingway of the same name, and the Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks.

Metamorphosis follows a low-level gangster who does wrong by his boss, and is earmarked for execution only to get away by the skin of his teeth.  Wounded from the confrontation and with his ex-team on his trail he collapses at the door of a high-class drinks bar, only to wake up shortly afterwards bolt upright awaiting his first drink.  The unassuming lady behind the bar is not all she seems and things begin to get weirder as other patrons arrive.

Contractors takes the ghoulish act of contract killing and gives it an absurd comedic twist, as the initial hit costing millions is subcontracted out further and further down the food chain (with the intermediaries taking a generous cut) until the bottom-feeders - a trio of not especially bright hustlers just trying to make some money until their real jobs come around - get some vague facsimile of the details of the hit, and a few hundred yuan each for their troubles.  Naturally, the wrong wrong things happen to the wrong people.

Everyone is Waiting for the Man is a dark thriller perhaps closest to the original text; a pair of cops on a stakeout are convinced that a murderer will appear at the doors of a drinkery at the dead of midnight, but it seems there are others out there after his head.  Who amongst the assembled crowd is the real killer?

Diaspora City, for me the weakest of the bunch is more of a bonus film where the filmmakers threw out the rules and just decided to have a bit of a laugh.  Again the theme of two assassins awaiting a man at the door of a drinking establishment is explored; but through the lens mixing film-noir and Tarantino-like artsy fight sequences, and an absurdist, almost childlike acting by the bartender and her clownish employees.  This juxtaposition between the deadly and the silly creates tension as the clock hits six, but it was just too out there and so jarring compared to the others.

As a whole, The Killers is a slick and enjoyable piece of cinema and there was definitely something there for everyone from the supernatural to comedy to thriller to the abstract and absurd, and didn't require any knowledge of the source material to appreciate (in fact, from other reviews I have read, familiarity of the original text may be a disadvantage).  I enjoyed it a lot although I would have moved Diaspora City to somewhere in the middle so the anthology could have ended on a higher note. 8

Leeds Film Festival 2024 - Day 3

Good One (US) (review)

The crossing of lines seems to be a theme of many films recently especially from a female perspective, perhaps encouraged by the highlighting in recent years of the daily crap that many women face just as part of their normal daily lives.  Good One is a good example of such a film.  Taking place in the Mountainous Catskills outside New York, Daughter Sam and her dad, Chris take what appears to be the latest of numerous trips from their downtown home to get away from it all.  As a teen, her mobile phone being well out of range causes anxiety but its clear that though she might not say it, Sam enjoys the father-daughter time enough to tear herself away from other relationships for a few days.

Along for the ride is Matt, Chris's longtime friend.  Similarly aged but not nearly so successful with the important things in life, his son keffled at the last minute leaving the three of them on their own and Sam without a chat buddy for the duration of the holiday, which means she's relegated to listening to the two old men bickering about how to pack a backpack.

For the most part, Good One is just a buddy movie - two friends, and father and daughter spend a bit of time away from it all to bond and mend a few fences.  But you know there is something coming on the horizon, and the film injects a few red herrings along the way to keep you interested.  When it finally comes, it is muted in it's execution such that many people might wonder what the fuss is about, although many of those I suspect would be male.  

This is a film that tries to centre in on a single, stupid but seemingly small incident and asks the viewer to think, discuss and ruminate on it's effect for a while. 7.5

U Are the Universe (Ukr) (review)

You might conclude, given the horrendous situation that the Ukraine has been in for the last couple of years, that their cultural output may be affected.  Perhaps in a similar way to how Japan processed the fallout of World War II by creating stories around the theme of annihilation, so too may this film be seen as the product of potentially being wiped from the face of the earth in the still escalating conflict.

We are introduced to Andriy, a low-key grunt worker ferrying nuclear waste to one of the moons of Jupiter, when the earth - packed solid with nuclear waste until someone realized that might have something to do with all the new earthquakes - catastrophically explodes, killing everyone instantly - except Andriy and his overly attentive robot companion Maxim.

Unsure how to come to terms with this sudden rise in the human rankings - to the top no less - he hits the several stages of acceptance pretty hard, before his crashing down is met with a distress call from across the galaxy - another person - a mysterious woman - has also survived but needs rescuing.

Equal parts deadpan end of the world humour and a genuine exploration of the best and worst of human spirit, U Are the Universe is surprisingly both entertaining and touching, and I found myself affected somewhat by it's ending which brings quite the lump to the throat  Another example - if one were needed where my lowish expectation of a film going in was pleasantly surpassed. 8

Leeds Film Festival 2024 - Day 2

Sadly my time at Leeds this year was curtailed by home and work commitments so my time at the cinema this year is less than I had hoped.  The prices have also skyrocketed which doesn't help.  Back around 2008 when I first started going a bit silly and watching as many films as I could, there would be LIFF passes available for something around £70.  These days a full pass will knock you back £340, and that's before 2 weeks of train travel on top.

And one of my £10 purchased tickets was wasted anyway due to a run of traffic jams, delayed trains and missed connections making me over an hour late for the first film on my list, Stranger Eyes.  I keffled and had a bowl of hot ramen instead at the nearby Bento Box.

LIFF Shorts - Winning Films

So I coseyed down in Everyman for a curated selection of the supposed best short films of the festival, as voted on by the judges.  

The Rider not the Horse - Chile

Utilizing an orchestra as a backing track, The Rider shows the Doma India technique of bonding with horses; a man skilled in the art gets very up close and personal to a pack of wild horses, taming them completely and then leading them on a gallop into the sunset.  It moved from abstract to wierd to really quite touching in the course of five minutes. 7

This Madness of Loving - Leb

Abstract and overly-long, a simple film animating the dance moves of a man in a darkened room somewhere, occasionally lighting up the drab with traced chalk lines.  It didn't move me much. 4

Beso de Lengua - Mex

Two young gay men hit it off just a bit too much on their first date, somehow ending up in hospital from making too many facial clicking sounds, or perhaps just sucking each other's faces off.  Its difficult to tell. 7

Paula Says Hi - UK

Paula - or Paul when not in her alter-ego form lives quietly and alone in a care-worn flat.  Seemingly with little contact to the outside world and living with cerebral palsy, they show us a glimpse of the thing that brings passion to their life.  Sometimes Paul and Paula appear side by side as two people discussing their love of cosplaying, and how it helps them bring meaning to their lives. Heartwarming cinema.  8

At that very moment - Arg

An intriguing experimental film where a young Argantinian girl is trusted with a video camera and so uses it to narrate the small but growing world around her; brother and parents, toys, bedrooms, house, and the little village where it resides.  A nice way to see what is important to you when you are that age. 7

Sleepyhead - UK

Following some of the most important developmental years of her life, Rae can't get out of bed.  Not due to teenage sulkiness but a mystery chronic illness that renders her with no energy.  As it worsens and she imagines her useless doctors in a variety of gruesome endings, she finds out who she can really rely on in the world. 8

Shadows - Jor

A scruffy but no less beautiful animation about a young girl negotiating the maze-like structure of an airport as she flees her arranged marriage and uncaring in-laws, wrestling with her conscience at the heartache of leaving her baby behind. 8

An Orange from Jaffa - Fra

Nice little film about a chance meeting of strangers.  Mohammed, a young Palestinian man with a Polish passport is making his way through Gaza (the film seems to have been made pre-war but in an unsettled region) towards Israel, where he has to pick his checkpoints wisely.  After several failed requests, Farouk. an ageing taxi driver agrees to take him where he needs to go.  But attempts to get through border checks, manned by young, bored and heavily armed soldiers blessed with a crumb of power leads to an escalating situation where they could both lose their liveilihoods. 8

Leeds Film Festival 2024 - Day 1 (ish)

Yes its the film festival again, no I haven't posted in the year since the last one.  Don't you know how busy my days are?  I made a wall, if thats an excuse.  It's probably not.

Anyway, desperate not to miss a LIFF for one year and slightly buoyed by the news that the dried and picked clean bones of the Bradford Film Festival has actually rattled back into life again - albeit in a much leaner, low-budget form - gives me hope that maybe after several years of general decline things may be looking up.

Flow (Lat) (wiki)

I started with my kids 10th birthday party, which we used as an excuse to take him and some similarly noisy friends to the newly refurbished Hyde Park Picture House to see Flow, the quite lovely new film from Latvia about a cat in a world strangely vacated by humans but still showing signs of their footprints on the world.  Cat the cat lives happily in what appears to be his owners old house, experiencing daily hi-jinx with the similarly feral animals living nearby, until a flood of water takes him on a journey across the waves in a handily passing boat occupied by a capybara.  As capybaras do, he's pretty relaxed about the new passenger but as they journey together through the echoes of the past, new animals appear that aren't so easy to get on with.

 

Flow is the project of Gints Zilbalodis over several years after pricking up ears with his debut film Away, which he created pretty much by himself.  Flow has a similar look that shows its not from a big budget animation house, yet still looks pretty gorgeous, doing the best it has with a perhaps limited pool of object models.  Refreshingly, it sidesteps the goofy route taken by many other films of its type by retaining as much 'animal-ness' to the creatures as possible, minimizing any anthropomorphic behaviour that would lead to, say a pigeon wearing shades that acted like an Italian mafia don.  Its hard to remove entirely or there would be little story here other than some animals tearing each other apart for food, but it's pleasingly kept on a tight leash. 

This in itself is refreshing and should be applauded.  Many has been the animated film in recent times that have just been [american] people but they're animals because kids love animals and theyre wacky because kids love wacky - I'm looking in your general direction, Under the Boardwalk.   So to see the animals of Flow acting for the most part like animals would feels like there's a different direction being explored in how filmmakers approach storytelling for a younger audience.

Flow does take a couple of small leaps of faith by the viewer; quite how a cat understands the finer points of how to steer a sailboat after only a few hours onboard is a bit of a stretch; and the biblical levels of water does require a bit of boxing away at the back of your mind just where it came from and how it goes away just as mysteriously.  But as a visual spectacle to wow the kids it kept a group of them quiet and agog for a good 90 minutes, and I enjoyed it too. 8