Good film - but what a load of rubbish

nospam@example.com (Lynden Barber) — Thu, 16 May 2013 04:20:22 +0200

The "paradise" part of Polluting Paradise

The festival has now wrapped up for the year, though of course it ended at slightly different times and with different films according to where you were in the country.

For this festival blog it ended last night in Sydney with a screening at the Palace Verona of the latest film from leading Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin (Head On; The Edge of Heaven), a late addition to the program courtesy of Sharmill Films.

Like Akin's vibrant 2005 film Crossing the Bridge about the Istanbul music scene, Polluting Paradise is a documentary set in Turkey, only this time, as the title suggests, its theme is environmental. The setting is the village of Camburnu, home to Akin's grandparents (as we only learn during the closing credits), which nestles in the picturesque Black Sea coastal hills where the locals work on tea plantations.

The location stopped being quite so idyllic following the establishment of a stinking refuse tip in the community's midst, a gigantic municipal facility servicing 80 towns and villages. The locals were given assurances the sprawling garbage heap would neither smell nor pollute the water table or local streams, all of which quickly turned out to be lies. The film follows the villagers' angry campaign against the dump, led by the local mayor, over a period of five or six years.

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A blindsider from Doris Dörrie

nospam@example.com (Lynden Barber) — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:08:09 +0200

Last night I attended a well-attended screening of veteran filmmaker Doris Dörrie's Bliss (Glück) at the Palace Verona in Sydney. How much difference can a viewing in a packed cinema make to a film? In cases like this, a lot.

Working from a Ferdinand von Schirach short story based on a true-life incident, Germany's most successful living female director takes the familiar story archetype of a pair of urban waifs or outsiders drawn together (viz. Chaplin's City Lights, Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy and Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge) and creates something utterly fresh and personal.

Irina (dyamic Italian up-and-comer Alba Rohrwacher) becomes a hooker in Berlin after fleeing from her family's farm in an unnamed country during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where she was raped by the soldiers who had just murdered her parents. Her companion is a homeless young man with piercings and weird hair who lives by begging and scavenging for scraps for his dog.

This makes the film sound like a tough sit, but Dorrie instead is interested - at least initially - in telling a charmingly warm and quirky story of a lost young couple in a hostile world who together seek transcendence.

The film has settled into a nice groove when at around the two thirds mark, Dorrie pulls a narrative shock from her hat.

Continue reading "A blindsider from Doris Dörrie"

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Good film - but what a load of rubbish

A blindsider from Doris Dörrie