Leeds International Film Festival
LIFF25 - Convento, Battenberg and Architects of Harmonic Rooms
Aaaaand the Leeds International Film Festival has kicked off. The opening gala of Wuthering Heights was not really the thing for me so, skipping over the first day, my festival started on day 2. There were lots of exciting sounding bits and pieces on today, including Human Centipede 2, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, 22nd May and The Beat is the Law - Pulp and the Sheffield music scene. I saw…
Battenberg
This was an incredibly fun animated short, a crazy magpie battling a squirrel armed with a fishknife in a scary guesthouse. With a train that brings battenberg cake. It’s about as cool as that sounds.
Convento
This was a “poetic documentary” about a curious Dutch family who, part-way through a ballet career, moved out and bought a shabby old convent in Portugal. The (now ex-)
ballerina and her two sons live a quiet, happy life in this convent. One of them attaches motors to various animal skulls to make mechanised creepy sculptures whilst the other is er… best friends with his horse.
It’s a beautifully shot and gently paced documentary but its long, lingering shots are, I thought, a weak point in the end. The three people have so many interesting things to say when they do get to speak that I left thinking it was a shame we heard so little from them. For all that, it is utterly gorgeous and definitely worth a watch.
Architects of Harmonic Rooms & Records
This was a selection of six short films put together by the same people, exploring a handful of different underground artists and their thoughts on their work. So we get the (unbelievably naïve) Josephine Foster singing re-arranged Spanish folk, avant-garde screaming noisesmiths debating the merits of playing naked and punching pianos, and and Costa and Nero, a pair who re-work Greek folk tunes on guitar and bouzouki.
The pick of the bunch though was the much longer, completely mad experimental noise trip through salvaged-from-VHS 70s and 80s Asian horror. We had bass drones accompanying vampire bats, Frankenstein-esque experiments scored with throbbing guitar and a jangling crescendo of other living-dead far Eastern monsters. I just wish they’d given out a list of the films they’d culled their clips from! Great fun!
LIFF25!
Last weekend, the 25th annual Leeds International Film Festival launched its programme, ahead of the festival in November. There’s heaps and heaps of exciting things to look forward to in what is, surely, one of the UK’s premiere film festivals, so I thought I’d do a (very) brief preview here.
The Official Selection is the home of the big names, high-art and gruelling drama but really does host all sorts of things. It’s nice to see the festival score the coup of a whole bunch of UK premier showings of European and World cinema as well as a handful of very exciting retrospectives. Psycho on the big screen is surely one not to be missed and, though I’ve seen them before, Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis are both great and worth a cinema trip. For the more hardy, Bela Tarr’s epic Sátántangó - which is seven and a half hours long! - is screening in the Hyde Park Picture House. Thankfully it comes with two interval breaks!
In the gleefully brutal and bloody Fanomenon strand, meanwhile, there are also a few exciting treats to look forward to. Heading up the classic genre film retrospectives are Alien, Aliens and Invasion of the Body Snatchers but even these treats don’t seem so tasty when compared to the bounties on offer in the new films selection. Monster Brawl, which pitches all the horror favourites against each other, looks too-good-to-miss whilst _Exit Humanity’_s American Civil War zombie apocalypse would surely be the most gloriously insane zombie adventure imaginable, were it not for it being partnered up with Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Hell Driver and Cuba’s very first zombie film, Juan of the Dead. Oh my! That’s three slices of very different but very exciting ZOMBIE ACTION! Hurrah!
Thirdly, and no less excitingly, comes the fabulous news that all Cherry Kino film screenings are FREE (!) this year! Cherry Kino is the semi-independent experimental film strand of the festival and hosts screenings and workshops of ‘wondermental’ films all year round. CK has it’s own web presence in a blog (HERE!) and should bring some reliably curious, strangely beautiful experimentation to the screen. And it’s FREEEEEE!
This is, obviously, a brief and over-excited preview. I didn’t even find space to squeeze in a mention of the exquisitely bonkers-looking Japanese sub-section of the Fanomenon strand (hint: it’ll be weird!), the Cinema Versa documentary strand or the short films strand. And the Official Selection definitely demands some more attention too. More to come soon!
Huacho
[as these films were all seen on cinema screens rather than DVD, screenshots are much harder to include. I’ll stick to poster/cover images and trailers where possible]
One of my first films of the festival was the Chilean film-cum-documentary Huacho. I describe it as such because, the film is so very ‘real-life’ as to feel as if we are watching the reality of their existence - an idea only supported by the cast only being credited with a single name.
The basic premise of Huacho is that we enter into the world of one poor Chilean family, living in very rural setting, as they struggle on through their lives. The film takes place over the course of a day; the opening scene is breakfast; the closing scene is the family all heading off to bed. Between these scenes we follow each member of the family in turn.
It’s a decidedly minimal venture in film making. There are scarcely any named characters outside of the central family and we’re shown them in happiness and in sadness. What’s crucial to the film - and what makes it so interesting - is apparent lack of agenda. Although their lives are certainly difficult and you could easily read all sorts of criticisms into it (rural-urban poverty gap etc) there is no escaping from the fact that, at the end of the day, each of them is smiling. This might not sound much, but in a film quite as subtle as this it certainly is. We are invited into their lives to see how they cope with a normal day; there is no heavy handed, dramatic plot-line that, by a stroke of luck, sees them all become rich and famous. Nor, to the other extreme, are we lead to believe that their existence is impossible or too miserable to cope with. Rather than either of these false creations, we see how people simply get on with life, even if it is hard.
Huacho is an incredibly sensitive film which takes us on a journey through lives we would otherwise not see and, thankfully, never uses them to make a point or send a message. It’s not a thrilling watch but it’s definitely worthwhile.
The only trailer I found is only in Spanish but it does give a sense of the film:
Some time later...
Ok, ok, it’s been a while. This blog hasn’t been updated in faaaar too long.
Not to worry though. Half of the reason for this is that, in volunteering at the Leeds International Film Festival (the UK’s biggest outside London, apparently), I’ve been way too busy watching films towrite much about them!
So, coming very, very soon will be reviews of every single film I’ve seen as part of the festival. Let’s go! Dr Strangelove, Huacho, A Town Called Panic and many many more to come!
Starts tomorrow, stay tuned!