Official Section

 

In a year of restrictions such as this one, the traditional array of fourteen titles in the Official Section in competition has been reduced to ten, although the essential characteristics of our selection remain in place: they are all films that have not yet been screened anywhere in Spain, they come from a broad geographic spectrum and they show the strong mark of the author in most cases. Some are by well-established filmmakers, such as the Chinese Ann Hui (Night and Fog) and Wang Qunan, who inaugurated our festival with his previous film, Tuya’s Marriage, and who competes with Apart Together;  or the Palestinian-Israeli Elia Suleiman (The Time That Remains). Others are surprises, such as Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Others Stories by the Iranian Shahram Mokri, a crime comedy in a cinema not very inclined towards this genre, or the Brazilian The Famous and the Dead, in which Esmir Filho draws a disturbing sketch of the unrootedness of youth.

 

No less surprising is the Israeli Yael Hersonski, whose powerful documentary, A Film Unfinished, mixes the memory of the Holocaust with the historical-cinematic manipulation of the German soldiers in the Warsaw ghetto. Mercilessly radical proposals are found in the South African film Shirley Adams by Oliver Hermanus, the Lebanese Every Day is a Holiday by Duna El-Horr, the Egyptian Heliopolis by Ahmad Abadía or the Vietnamese Adrift by Thac Chuyen Bui, the first film of this nationality to appear in our festival.

 

  • A Film Unfinished

    A Film Unfinished (Shtikat haarchion)

    Yael Hersonski

    This documentary is the quest for the truth behind one of the most mysterious Nazi propaganda films ever filmed in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazi-made film, which was shot just a short time before the deportation of the Ghetto’s residents, is a rough draft of a silent film that juxtaposes meticulously staged scenes of Jews enjoying a life of luxury in the Ghetto with other, chilling images that required no staging at all. Ironically, after the war, filmmakers and museums used images from the film as objective illustrations of the narratives they had collected from witnesses and from written sources.
    By juxtaposing the filmed scenes with behind-the-scenes testimony, this documentary reveals how the Nazis used the Ghetto as a film-set, the inhabitants as actors, and the decaying bodies as exhibits.
    A Film Unfinished shakes our confidence in the photographic image and the way we think we know our history.

    ISRAEL/GERMANY 2010. HDCAM. Color. 89’

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  • Adrift

    Adrift (Choi Voi)

    Bui Thac Chuyen

    In a country shaped by the strict observance of morality and respect for ancestral values, Adrift explores the life of Duyen, a young woman who has just married a taxi-driver named Hai. With a relationship more like a friendship than a romance, the marriage soon suffers from solitude and the lack of intimacy. This situation is further complicated by the presence of Cam, a writer-friend of the young woman who for some time has been concealing the fact that she is in love with Duyen. Moved by jealousy and sadness, Cam devises a plan which will lead Duyen into an illicit relationship with a man that will bring about the young woman’s sexual initiation.
    This poetic and sensual tale about tortuous love affairs in modern-day Vietnam is also about the changes occurring in society’s values, while at the same time exploring sexual awakening, lesbian desire and infidelity.

    VIETNAM /FRANCE 2009. 35 MM. Color. 110’

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  • Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories

    Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories (Ashkan, angoshtar-e motebarek va dastan-haye digar)

    Shahram Mokri

    At times, the world is filled with things we cannot understand. This film reveals the complicated interlinking chains of the world that people cannot comprehend. Shahrooz and Reza try to rob a jewelry shop despite their blindness. Hotel employee Ashkan tries again and again to kill himself. He meets Shahrooz and Reza and joins in their crime. To Ashkan, this is only another means of suicide.
    The various threads of the narrative cross each other in unexpected ways, while the film leaps backwards and forwards in time - but all the pieces of the puzzle fall into exactly the right place at the end, even though it is not in the way one might expect. Filled with black humour, delivered at breakneck speed and with an endlessly surprising plot, Mokri playfully presents a small act of genius.
    The fact that it takes place in an Iranian social context makes it even more remarkable.

    IRAN 2009. 35 MM. COLOR. 92’

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  • Every Day Is a Holiday

    Every Day Is a Holiday (Chaque jour est une fête)

    Dima El-Horr

    The streets of Beirut are packed with people and demonstrators, and three women who do not know each other get on the same bus. They are all travelling to the same place, Mermel prison, where their men are locked up, but they have different aims in mind. The journey towards their destination seems fairly trouble free, but all of a sudden an accident changes the situation. The three women are prey to their anxieties and obsessions, lost in the middle of nowhere: they are surrounded by the arid desert landscape and experience a surreal vision, following dunes, mirages and the evocation of the revolution's martyrs.
    And yet they go on, pushing further into what eventually turns into an interior journey, where individual life and collective memory blur and blend into one another. Is this a dream, a nightmare, a fantasy or each woman’s own reality?

    LEBANON / FRANCE / GERMANY 2009. 35 MM. COLOR. 87’

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  • Heliopolis

    Heliopolis (Masr el Gedida)

    Ahmad Abdalla

    In this auspicious debut, Ahmad Abdalla exhibits a gift for deriving profound meaning from the seemingly mundane. Criss-crossing Cairo’s historical Heliopolis neighbourhood over the course of a day, this film follows the trials and tribulations of various players. Hany, a Coptic Christian doctor, wants to procure a visa in order to go abroad and join his family. Ali and Maha want to buy Hany’s apartment but first need to negotiate. The graduate student Ibrahim wants to interview an uncooperative subject. And Engy, a hotel receptionist, simply wants to be anywhere other than Egypt. Each is trying to resolve a difficulty, mundane or serious, and none succeeds.
    As their paths cross, they are oblivious to one another, but we discover the neighborhood’s beauty, its glamorous past fading day after day, as the weight of Cairo’s daily events becomes greater.
    As they each fail to achieve their respective goals, director Ahmad Abdalla suggests that their individual frustrations stem from an underlying discontent endemic to Egyptian society.

    EGYPT 2009. 35 MM. COLOR. 97’

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  • Night and Fog

    Night and Fog (Tin shui wai dik ye yu mo)

    Ann Hui

    The most recent feature film by the Hong King-based filmmaker Ann Hui offers viewers a crude and realistic presentation of the murder of a young Chinese woman by her husband. Using flashback narrative, Night and Fog tells the story of Wong Hui-ling, who lives with her unemployed husband, quite a bit older than herself, and their two daughters, in the impoverished Tin Shui Wai district of northern Hong Kong. The young woman, who was originally from mainland China, gets by thanks to social benefits and to her job as a waitress, which she hides from her husband.
    Based on a true story, the atrocious unfolding of events is used by Hui to explore a gruesome reality and to look into two of the director’s preferred themes: the complex reality surrounding immigration and the hostility with which women are treated in Chinese society.

    HONG KONG 2009. 35 MM. Color. 122’

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  • Shirley Adams

    Shirley Adams (Shirley Adams)

    Oliver Hermanus

    In a Cape Town slum, Shirley Adams spends her days taking care of her disabled son Donovan, caught by a stray bullet in crossfire between two gangs. Having been left by her husband, the woman can barely make ends meet after seeing all of her possessions disappear. With no means of support, Shirley finds herself forced to survive on handouts and by occasional shoplifting at the supermarket. When Tamsin Ranger, a young therapist, comes into their lives, Shirley grasps the hope that her son may recover his emotional well-being.
    Shot in Mitchell’s Plain, twenty kilometres from Cape Town, Shirley Adams is a portrait of the link between violence and poverty. Profound, moving and totally free of narrative excesses, this film looks at the irreparable destruction of a family following a simple act of violence.

    SOUTH AFRICA 2009. DIGIBETA. COLOR. 92’

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  • The Famous and the Dead

    The Famous and the Dead (Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte)

    Esmir Filho

    Mr. Tambourine Man, a sixteen-year-old Bob Dylan fan who has chosen this nickname for himself, lives in a remote village in Brazil. His habits and lifestyle have made him an outcast at school. So he kills time writing a blog, smoking weed with his only friend, Diego, and looking at the pictures and films posted on Internet by a girl he doesn’t know.
    His dream is to travel from his hometown to the Brazilian city where Dylan will soon be playing. But Mr. Tambourine Man’s trip is closer to delirium than to reality; it is a fantasy that takes him away from his own loneliness.
    In The Famous and the Dead, music, drugs and culture give rise to a universe in which nostalgia, fantasy, loneliness, banality and death blend to compose a lovely melody.

    Brazil / France 2009. 35 MM. Color. 95’

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  • The Time that remains

    The Time that remains (The Time that remains)

    Elia Suleiman

    Around the time of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, during the final hours before the surrender of Nazareth, Fuad - a member of the Palestinian resistance - is separated from Thurayya, the love of his life. She flees the conflict, travelling to Jordan with her family, but Fuad is captured before he is finally able to escape.
    Years pass. Nazareth is under martial law. Fuad, like the rest of the city's population, is under surveillance by the secret services. Arrested and accused of smuggling arms, he encounters Thurayya again at the police station. She has been granted permission to return to visit her sick father. She and Fuad exchange small talk and wish each other well.
    The Time that Remain incorporates the intimate memories the director has of his own family and attempts to portray the daily life of those Palestinians who remained and were labelled "Israeli-Arabs", living as a minority in their own homeland.

    PALESTINE / FRANCE / BELGIUM / ITALY / UNITED KINGDOM 2009. 35 MM. COLOR. 109’

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