telling Human tales

The recently concluded 42nd International Film Festival of India had its share of good and bad films. While the Iranian, French and Polish films received wide acclaim, a refreshing feature of the festival was the large section of youth attending it, especially students of cinema, writes Ervell E. Menezes

So another film festival is done with, the eighth in Goa. The 42nd International Film Festival of India had its share of good films, and some bad ones. There were some good filmmakers like Frenchman Bertrand Tavernier, who deservedly got the Lifetime Achievement Award but failed to get a retrospective of his films. It must be said that to its credit, the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) managed to get some of the latest films on board.

Sasson Gabai (centre) got the Best Actor (male) Award for Restoration (Israel) directed by Joseph Madmony

Rutger Hauer in Lech Majewski’s Mill and the Cross, which deals with Polish painter Peter Bruegal’s masterpiece The Way of the Cross

It were the Iranian, French and Polish films that received a wide acclaim. A refreshing feature of the festival was the large section of youth attending it, especially film students. After seeing the 20-odd films, the best three would be Oranges and Sunshine (Ireland), National Alley (Iran) and The Mill and the Cross (Poland). Though there were a few others, too, that came close.

Jim Loach’s Oranges and Sunshine is an expose of the inhumane manner in which illegitimate youths were promised oranges and sunshine but only received hard labour and alienation, thanks to the tacit agreement between the British and Commonwealth countries, especially Australia.

It is the untiring efforts of an English social worker Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson) that took the lid off the social scandal in which 1,30,000 children went through organised deportation, and were confined to the dustbins of history. Some were swabbing floors for 40 years, others worked in mining dumps. This was all done to avoid the social scandal of illegitimate birth in a Catholic country like Ireland.

The emotional and psychological turmoil Mrs Humphreys’ experiences comes across loud and clear, especially powerful is the sequence in which one of the victims, an Australian lawyer, takes them to visit some Christian brothers happily breakfasting, oblivious of the damage they have caused until Humphreys tells them a few hometruths.

Mehrshad Karkhani’s National Alley is a glowing tribute to cinema, per se, that is both Iranian and Hollywood, and is set in the area known for its 30-odd cinemas in the 1950s and 1960s. It is passionate and irreverent, but quite an enthralling experience, as director Karkhani juxtaposes anecdotes with the main story, of a woman cinema ticket-seller, who is in love with another cinema worker. It is a chance meeting of two youths, the man recovering a stolen handbag of a woman, only to realise that the woman ticket-seller is the man’s mother and the cinema worker is the woman’s uncle.

Director Salim Ahamed's Adaminte Makan Abu (Malayalam) got the Special Jury Award. It has also been chosen as India's official entry to the Oscars.The film is a family drama about an elderly Muslim couple struggling to find money to fulfil their dream of going on a pilgrimage to Haj

But the real story recedes into the background, as the director gets lost in cinema lore. We have black and white silent film footage. There’s an amusing sequence in which a man asks his neighbour for a match only to realise later that he is dead. He, then, seats the dead man on the floor to be more comfortable himself and the sub-title reads ‘there are many ways of dying."

As the couple visits different defunct cinemas, one can see posters of Gary Cooper in High Noon, James Dean in East of Eden and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. We also come to know that BB Films stand for former sex bomb Brigitte Bardot, since long forgotten. The good thing about Karkhani’s work is that much is implied, like the couple getting closer. It also ends at the right time, when it comes as a climax and without the laborious spelling out of what is unexpressed but understood.

Lech Majewski’s Mill and the Cross deals with renowned Polish painter Peter Bruegal’s epic masterpiece The Way of the Cross. Majewski, himself being a theatre director, writer, painter and poet, is well equipped to visually bring out the effect of the paintings — the shots are like paintings with moving figures.

There are two stories running parallel. One is of a heretic, who is, one day, eulogised by the vast multitude listening to him, and, another day is whipped to death by the red-coated Spanish army men and put up on a cross for birds to feed on. The other is of Christ on the road to Calvary with asides of Judas (flinging the 30 pieces of silver and then hanging himself), Simon of Cyrene carrying the Cross and the soldiers at the foot of the Cross gambling for Christ’s shroud.

The Spanish penchant for torture comes across strongly, sadly all in the name of religion. Rutger Hauer plays the painter Bruegel while Charlotte Rampling, yesteryear sex siren plays his wife and the Virgin Mary.

There are some very telling shots of rustic life of couples having their breakfast by the roadside, cattle out to graze that put his paintings in perspective.

The other films that come close to these three is Claudio Capellini’s A Quiet Life (Italy) about a hounded man living a new life in a different country till he is again hounded by his enemies. For the Kazakh film Mother’s Paradise by Aktan Abdykalykov, well-known Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi has written the script. It is the story of shedding of innocence as two brothers learn of their mother’s illicit sexual escapades to keep the home fires burning`85till it becomes unbearable.

Daniel Mann’s Butterfield 8 is a very watchable film even after five decades and some lines as good as the best of today. It also won Elizabeth Taylor her first Best Actress Oscar. The second one was for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?

The opening film The Consul of Bordeaux is, however, way below festival standards and the link with the Portuguese was not reason enough for it to make the grade. The others that are substandard include Madam X (Indonesia), which is almost puerile.

As usual, there were those wanabees entering the theatres when the film is ending and causing much disturbances to regulars, 80 per cent of whom have fallen in line with the festival ambience. And there is a special lot of film society folk, all above 60, some widowers but all retired, who visit most festivals as films are the reason de etre — they are Satish Parker, Srikant Talway, Rohinton Master (Mumbai) and Venkatraman (Hyderabad). May their tribe increase.

IFFI awards Golden Peacock for Best Picture: Porfirio (Colombia) by Alejandro Landes, a true-life account of Porfirio Ramirez Aldana (playing himself), who foiled the 2005 hijacking of a Bogota-bound plane. Best Director: Asghar Farhadi, A Separation Best Actor (male): Sasson Gabai, Restoration (Israel) Best Actor (female): Nadezhda Markina, Elena (Russia) Special Jury Award: Adaminte Makan Abu (Malayalam)