European Union Film Festival
Lasting only 65 minutes, Erick Zonca’s lean and purposeful 1999 second feature (after The Dreamlife of Angels) confirms his talent while pointing it in a somewhat different direction. He continues to focus on the lower economic strata, but this time he explores the progress of a baker’s assistant who decides to join a band of thieves. The results are gripping. (JR) (6:00)
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This 1998 Portuguese film is a searing cri de coeur on behalf of Lisbon’s homeless children. Rejected by dysfunctional families, often escaping from heartless institutions, they’re victimized by others (Pedro and Ricardo by pornographers, Andreia by a boyfriend who leaves her pregnant) and not surprisingly victimize one another as well. Director Teresa Villaverde makes their plight come alive with a variety of isolating compositions: a boy arriving home appears framed in the front doorway against the landscape, his family invisible, and more than once a kid riding in a vehicle is shot from above, the character’s head backed by the moving roadway. In one terribly painful sequence a variety of unbalanced compositions show Andreia screaming as she gives birth to her child in a lavatory–where she then abandons it. These decontextualizations convey the children’s separation from society, making them the pained subjects of our gaze, and the film’s warped visual spaces make that separation seem unnatural, even wrong. (FC) (7:45)
These short animations from Luxembourg vary widely in subject and style while reflecting the themes of malleability, transformation, and animism common to the form. Silverware comes to life in Daniel Wiroth’s Crucifixion, its movement effectively creepy partly because it occurs in such a pristine kitchen. In Law of the Jungle, child filmmaker Thierry Beltrami uses sudden changes in the characters’ shapes and expressions to vivify a fable about creatures eating each other. In Armand Strainchamps’ Man . . . or the Adventurous Journey From Black to White, stark images resembling woodcuts suggest that all distinctions between black and white (e.g., Africans and Europeans) are arbitrary at best. I especially liked Bady Minck’s Mecanomagie, an almost gnostic fable in which humans can seem stone-faced, rocks are split apart to reveal living organs, clouds streaking across a pixilated sky seem to be alive, and young children sprout as if born from the soil. On the same program: films by Claude Grosch, Roger Leiner, and Paila Piozzi, another by Wiroth, and two more by children. (FC) (4:00)
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 17
