Current mood:	tired
Entry tags:	film festival, outtakes

Outtakes Film Festival - 4 more
I saw three films and 5 shorts over the weekend.



Was am Ende Zählt is about streetkids - Carla is a runaway heading for a fashion school when her bag and money are stolen, the construction job she falls into working for local drug thugs means she meets Lucie, a tough ex-orphanage kid whose only ambition is to keep her older brother off drugs and in her life. When Carla's dream of earning enough money to go on to fashion school is destroyed by discoovering she is pregnant, Lucie, well used to manipulating social workers, comes up with a scheme to make everyone think the baby is hers.

It's a film about two girls trying to build a future from a very marginal existence and the relationship that develops between them, and I really, really enjoyed it.





Mein Freund Aus Faro* was also really brilliant. Mel, a young woman who would much prefer to be male, works in a factory and dreams of one day traveling the world with her older brother. A Portuguese coworker arrives just as everything is closing in on her, and she ends up using him at the centre of two different constructed realities - she pays him to act as her boyfriend to keep her family happy, while using details from his life to play the part of a teenage boy with a couple of girls she meets hitchhiking. Of course this attempt to explore who she really wants to be is never going to end well.

I was impressed by how real this film was, the plot should have seemed contrived, but wasn't, even the bullying older brother/boyfriend to the two teenage girls was something other than the usual ruffian or jock. A film with no easy answers, but like Was am Ende Zählt it ended with an open future.

The translation is, I presume, "My Boyfriend From Faro" which means the English title, "To Faro", misses so much that it's not funny.



Five short films

Pages of a girl was about a Brazilian film about a girl getting a job in a bookshop and developing a relationship with an older woman there. Set in the sixties?, very film as art, poetic and pretty.

Somewhere Only We Know was a NZ one on a similar theme - remembering a relationship from the 1940s, this one had no dialogue. Might have beens.

Spark was a Danish short about making similar choices in the present time.

A Domicilio, or love as well was probably the most interesting one, a Spanish film that used split screens and an inital section without dialogue to explore why an older woman has hired a young prostitute.

Gravedigger, about a French father dealing badly with his wife's new partner and his place in his young daughter's life probably worked least well for me. The opening and closing conceit annoyed me, and I wasn't in the mood for it, though it wasn't a bad film.



The World Unseen was the film I'd heard the most about going in, including fairly mixed reviews, so I was set to just enjoy it. It's set in the Indian community in 1950s apartheid South Africa, so it has some good perspectives on stories we know. I was amused that the film it kept bringing to mind was Fried Green Tomatoes.

I liked the ending. I don't think it was the best lesbian film I've ever seen, but I'm thinking I might get a ticket for tomorrow to see "I Can't Think Straight" after all, even thought it's going to mean leaving a meeting that finishes at 8:30pm, driving into town, parking and getting into the theatre for a film that starts at 8:35pm. Given that I normally don't get home from these meetings til just before 9pm, yeah, it'll be a scramble, but the films haven't been stsrting on time, so I can probably make it, and who cares if I miss a few minutes at the start.


And



Yes, Desti got Crystal onto Twitter, and yes it really is really her:
http://twitter.com/crystalchappell

Which means I now have a twitter account. And I really don't want to use it yet, the last thing I need is another social media time sink, though that may change when I next upgrade my
phone. For the meantime I've set up a lj syndicated feed to read Crystal's tweets:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/ccontwitter/
If you add it, go set up a twitter account and add her as well, so she knows you are following her, since I don't think rss feeds get counted.

And there's a bunch of other Otalia stuff happening on twitter if you're interested:

http://twitter.com/bigpurpledreams
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23otalia
http://twitter.com/#search?q=@crystalchappell
http://twitter.com/officialgl
http://wefollow.com/tag/Otalia

http://twitter.com/oliviaspencer
http://twitter.com/TheRealNatalia
http://twitter.com/ESpencer007



http://jessica-leccia.istotallyawesome.com/

Crossposted.