BFI London Film Festival 2011 – Round Up: World Cinema

With week two of the 55th London Film Festival almost done, it’s time to reflect on the most talked about films from the World Cinema strand, the most intriguing and illuminating of which came from the Middle East.

Where Do We Go Now?

As the follow-up to Nadine Labaki’s first director/actor project, Caramel, Where Do We Go Now? is fun and energetic, oozing with femininity by its orange-lit landscapes and soft camera motions. Set to a dynamic jazz/soul score, we find ourselves in the middle on the Lebanon Civil War, where national politics have brushed off on a remote communal village where the local mosque and church sit side by side.

The women of the village pool together to come up with quirky plans to keep the temperamental men at peace. They hire Eastern European dancers to distract them, communicating with the Virgin Mary to tell them that they ought to be ashamed of their volatile behavior and cutting the radio wires to keep them from becoming agitated by news reports.

Labaki throws in a trans-religion love interest and a tragic death of one of the women’s sons, but both subplots never hit second gear. A refreshingly upbeat movie, but worthy of a bit more depth.

This is Not a Film

This is a not a film, not one with a conventional narrative, at least. It’s a self-reflexive, observational piece made as a result of its director being banned, by his own government, from making films. Jafar Panahi has been sentenced to six years in prison and 20-year ban from making movies, talking to the media or even travelling. In this unique film, he, with his peer and co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, set about dealing with the fact that Panahi can’t make films. He records himself engaged in his daily activities, talking into the camera at times, pondering his situation.

At certain points in the ‘film’, he looks to his new script, reciting it to camera, effectively directing the actors’ actions: how the girl will touch her face, her mood, tone of voice and so on – only to realise his position, get frustrated and remark, “If we could talk movies, why would we make movies?” This frustration, however, is never allowed to boil over and he continues nurturing his ideas and anxieties, his thoughts about his work, all while feeding his pet iguana and sipping black tea with plenty of sugar.

This is Not a Film is thoughtful, inviting and not at all preachy or didactic. It is truly a video postcard, though a potentially contentious one having been smuggled to the LFF via a memory stick. Still, it stands up a testimony to the defiance against censorship and towards this man’s desire to tell stories, in whatever format he is able to.

Chicken with Plums

With the fantastical dream quality of Tim Burton, the peculiar playful pace of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the colourful motion of Wes Anderson, Chicken with Plums, the second feature by the duo that brought us Persepolis, is yet another rich adaptation of Marjan Satrapi’s graphic novels.

Satrapi and co-director Vincent Paronnaud ensure that the child-like quality of this movie is not lost to its heavyhearted themes: heartbreak and death. Compared to 2007’s Persepolis, this is a far more engrossing affair, with its brilliant rose-kissed colour scheme, live action stitched together by various forms of animation and exquisite stylisation.

Nasser Ali is a violinist with a wife he doesn’t love, two kids of whom he really only cares for one and a bitter memory of a marriage denied many years ago. Today, he has decided to die for his unanswered passions; his wife has broken his violin (known to be the best in the country) while his longing for his old love has not faded.

Every frame is filled with colour and intensity that the monochrome cartoon strips of the original format simply aren’t able to convey. In translating her graphic novels to the screen Satrapi allows the magical and dreamlike qualities of the cinema pore from every frame.

BFI London Film Festival 2011 – Round Up: World Cinema (text) by Sheyma Buali is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.