Film Journey

By Robert Koehler

From the traces of suicidal young in Listorti’s debut to the presence of suicidal young who won’t go away in Esmir Filho’s The Famous and the Dead/Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte (another debut, in the Ibero American competition)—death is in the air in Guadalajara. Slippery as a fish and defying any brief description, Filho’s work at first appears to be just another tale of dissolute youth whose lives are in flux and meaning seems uncertain. The familiar concoction of weed, wandering, crazy moms and the rest. (Filho flirts with profound cliché early on when depicting …

By Robert Koehler
 
It’s a bit surprising that the Guadalajara International Film Festival isn’t screening the competing non-fiction films for the press, especially at a time when non-fiction programming is proving to be the life blood of many festivals, and when festivals devoted to non-fiction—from IDFA to True-False—are on the rise. So, naturally, on the first day of screenings, I sought out the non-fiction.

After dipping in for tastes of Carlos Manuel Aguilar’s Curb Creatures (with Aguilar’s video camera allowed into the often drug-addled lives of homeless people in Hollywood) and Renzo Martens’ subversive-looking Episode III—Enjoy Poverty (in which he …

By Robert Koehler

Forum is looking shaky. At least, that’s the impression from the third day, with a bunch of films that are either slight or bad or unwatchable. The slight is, at least, modestly entertaining: USC grad Arvin Chen’s Au revoir Taipei (above) takes a penniless young man, determined to leave his native Taipei and follow his love to Paris, and slot him into a situation involving an attractive bookstore clerk, an aging real estate shyster, a giant, doe-eyed convenience store worker, and a group of would-be crooks dressed in orange suits. Plus the regulation bumbling cops, sniffing out …

By Robert Koehler

As a member of the Berlinale FIPRESCI jury—concentrated on Forum–my first week in Berlinale is almost entirely devoted to Forum films. That was by choice: Forum is, in the roughest terms, Berlin’s Quinzaine, created 40 years ago out of the same impulse that created the Quinzaine, as a revolutionary-minded alternative to the stodgy establishment festival, a safe harbor for radical cinema. Each has softened its original militant stance, though Quinzaine remains as independent of Festival de Cannes as possible, while Forum is now thoroughly integrated with the Berlinale as a whole.

Every year, there are “Forum films,” …