Bradford Film Festival: Day 2 (Friday 19th)
The 16th Bradford International Film Festival began on Thursday night with a premiere of Perrier's Bounty, but Friday was the first full day of the festival. Taking place primarily at the National Media Museum, but incorporating venues across Bradford, I went along to view a select number of films throughout the day. Here is my review.
Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl was the first screening of the day, a tale of a Portuguese accountant that falls in love with a mysterious blonde woman. Made with the kind of po-faced seriousness that would be ripe for spoofing, Eccentricities was straight-up, embarrassingly bad, but it was made by a 100 year-old director, so I'll be respectful and not start laying into it.
Moving on, Fish Eyes was an improvement on Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities, but was still somewhat held back by its uber-serious tone. An average example of low budget indie filmmaking, Fish Eyes's plot revolves around a father, son and the strange woman they take in living out a sparse existence in a poverty-stricken area of China. There is an affecting story in here, but the picture just screams "I'm different, I'm difficult, I'm arthouse!" Of course it is: hardly anybody speaks, mysterious characters come and go without explanation and it's a social-realist document of hardship. The scenery looks beautiful and a couple of shocks are in store, but I like dialogue and 75 minutes of mostly silence felt somewhat laborious to me.
Shortly after Fish Eyes came the documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno. The story of French director Henri-Georges Clouzot's ill-fated attempt to make L'Enfer, a film he envisioned as a re-invention of cinema, this was the most pleasant surprise of the day. Although a documentary, the format is used sparingly as directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea let Clouzot's vision of his aborted project do the talking. Clouzot's dazzling test footage and whole blocks of completed scenes (or incomplete scenes featuring modern day recreations) are fascinating to watch - the documentary isn't necessarily good because it's well made but because the subject matter is so compelling. Inferno was clearly destined to be a revolutionary film and Bromberg and Medrea's best achievement here is making you lament the fact that Clouzot couldn't put his eccentricities and obsessions aside momentarily and complete it.
Undoubtedly the event of the day was the first Screentalk of the festival, a question and answer session with one of the best directors working in the world today, Fernando Meirelles. The Brazilian filmmaker was warm and witty talking about his three post-stardom films, City of God, The Constant Gardener and, probably my favourite Meirelles film, Blindness.
Following on straight after the talk was the final screening of the day, a showing of Meirelles' breakthrough movie, Brazilian crime epic City of God. The film appeared more flawed to me than the last time I watched it, its breath-taking energy occasionally offset by some rambling subplots and a yo-yoing tone, but it remains a gangster classic. What it sometimes lacks in focus it more than makes up for in gritty realism and impact. Meirelles has a real knack for conjuring up feeling from his audience in all of his films, and City of God's raw emotional sensibility is the perfect example of this - murder here is sickening, horrifying stuff and when characters die it is genuinely upsetting, leaving us feeling as though we've lost a lifelong friend.
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Karl Benecke - is a third year Film Journalism student at the University of Huddersfield.
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Brogan Morris - is also a third year Film Journalism student at the University of Huddersfield.
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