To shine a light on reality or flee from it,
christian louboutin site officielThis is the first in a series of articles on the recent Sydney Film Festival.
This year's Sydney Film Festival screened 156 titles from 51 countries with a total of 12 features in the official competition. Much is written in the local press about the $60,000 competition prize Australia's richest cash award for film most of it to promote the festival. Apart from the Taviana brothers' Caesar Must Die,
ray ban спб, Beasts of the Southern Wildand Monsieur Lazhar most of the competing features,
http://www.vancubz.org/replicalouisvuitton.php, including prize winner, the Greek absurdist drama Alps, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Aggeliki Papoulia, Aris Servetalis and Johnny Verkis, failed to impress.
What can be said about this year's winner, however, is that it further served to highlight a fundamental problem besetting many contemporary productions, that is, the inability of many filmmakers to base their artistic efforts on a serious exploration of the real world. Alps,
очки ray ban, in fact, appears to have done its utmost to flee social reality.
This is no doubt true but their movies have many common features. All are set in contemporary Greece but tell us little or nothing about it and are characterised by a demoralised dark humour, a rejection of visual lyricism cinematography is deliberately skewed obtuse plot lines, and various references to pop culture icons and movies.
Dogtooth (2009), Lanthimos's first major feature, which was acclaimed by numerous critics, is about three teenagers two girls and a boy who are kept captive by their parents in an isolated but comfortable country home. The repressive father manages a nearby factory. The teenagers have no real understanding of the outside world and the only person allowed into the family household is Christina,
louis vuitton schal, the factory security guard. She is paid to have sex with the son.
Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg, which was screened at last year's Sydney festival, centres around Marina,
купить очки ray ban, a sexually inexperienced young woman who lives with her dying father. Unable to relate to other human beings she is infatuated by the wildlife documentaries of British television personality David Attenborough and acts out animal roles with her friend Bella, who also gives her sex education lessons. Marina later asks Bella to sleep with her dying father.
Lanthimos's latest movie is about a small group of people known as the Alps, after the mountain range, who are hired to play the roles of dead children, spouses or lovers by their grieving relatives or friends. They wear the clothes of the dead person and attempt to recreate their previous habits and roles. This involves various unusual scenarios and includes enduring persecution, abuse and even sexual demands. Alps members recite their lines for the grieving relatives and friends in mainly a deadpan and unconvincing fashion. The group's motto is "By the time we leave, you won't even notice they're gone."
While Alps members are paid for their services, it soon becomes apparent that in taking on other personalities they are also motivated by a need to escape their own lives and that personal relations and all social life is essentially play acting. While Lanthimos's story unfolds cryptically via a series of short vignettes once the viewer grasps this basic and rather banal premise the movie quickly becomes a tedious experience.
While artistic and cultural endeavours always lag behind political and economic events, Alps is remarkable for its coldness and lack of any references even in a metaphorical fashion to contemporary Greek life, let alone the vast social changes that have occurred in that country in the past four years.
Not since the WWII Nazi occupation, has Greece undergone such a dramatic transformation. Under the dictates of the European financial aristocracy and the international banks, millions of Greeks have been driven into poverty, profoundly transforming all aspects of daily life and provoking mass resistance,
ray ban wayfarer купить, as well as discussions amongst sections of the ruling elite of a return to military rule. Alps tell us nothing about love,
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A sensitive and optimistic work Director Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar, which is set in contemporary Montreal, is also about the loss of loved ones and emotional healing. By contrast to Alps, director Falardeau's film is a sensitive and optimistic work that convincingly explores how its central protagonists overcome their problems and help each other to heal.
Sophie Nlisse and Mohamed Fellag in Monsieur Lazhar
The 90 minute French language feature centres on the plight of young school children traumatised by the death of their troubled teacher who had committed suicide at their school, and the difficulties facing the replacement teacher, Bashir Lazhar,
http://www.priho.ru/louisvuitton.php, a newly arrived Algerian refugee.
Lazhar not only has to overcome this tragic loss and his sense of guilt for having left Algeria without them but also how he can reach Simon (milien Nron) and Alice (Sophie Nlisse), the two most traumatised children in the class.
At the same time, Lazhar has to endure the frustration of navigating his way through the immigration bureaucracy in order to secure refugee status in Canada. While the students are puzzled and amused by his Algerian French and his old fashioned teaching methods, Lazhar is eventually able to make an emotional connection.
Developed from Bashir Lazhar (2002) velyne de la Chenelire's one character play, Falardeau has made an unsentimental but genuinely humane work, skilfully revealing the complexities of the central characters' lives and emotions. Sydney Film Festival audiences rightly voted it the most popular film at this year's event.
Some of the other competition features their strengths and weaknesses will be discussed in festival reviews.
Sexual repression and its consequences One of the noteworthy movies screened this year but not in competition was Oliver Hermanus's , an assured and unsettling work. Shirley Adams, the director's first feature, explored the plight of a working class Cape Town woman, whose entire life revolved around the care of her severely paralysed and suicidal adult son. Economically comfortable and on the surface a happily married man with adult children, Francois is unable to come to terms with his homosexuality,
louis vuitton france, which is anathema in the middle class and conservative Afrikaner community in which he lives. He engages in secretive homosexual orgies with other men from the regional city, all of them in denial. "Gays and blacks" are banned from these gloomy gatherings.
While Francois' is able to suppress his inner emotions and maintain appearances to some extent, his daughter's wedding brings him into contact with Christian (Charlie Keegan),
louis vuitton geldbörse, the handsome, 23 year old son of an old army friend. Francois is besotted and begins a desperate and tragic attempt to secure the young man's affections. When his overtures are predictably rejected, Francois erupts with shocking violence.
is a slow paced and troubling work with entirely convincing characterisations and an extraordinary performance by Deon Lotz. The first few minutes of the daughter's wedding contain some striking cinematography and perfectly capture Francois's infatuation with Christian,
louis vuitton táska ára. In one media interview Hermanus described Francois's repressed emotional state as "apartheid of the mind." (See: "Filmmaker Oliver Hermanus discusses ")
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