It's Only the End of the World Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan's “It's Only the End of the World”, an adaptation of the eponymous play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, is a claustrophobic drama about a dysfunctional family that unfolds over one day. Louis (Gaspard Ulliel), a talented writer, decides to visit his family after 12 years of absence to tell them he is dying. Louis left to pursue his writing career but for one reason or another he hasn't visited or kept up with his family. Louis is welcomed by his mother (Nathalie Baye), his sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux) and his sister in law Catherine (Marion Cotillard), whose husband, Louis's brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel), is disrespectful and unpleasant. Suzanne, who has not seen Louis since she was very young, is overexcited about the character she has kept alive in her head, reading every published word by him and even keeping newspaper clippings about him on display in the room. Catherine, who is meeting Louis for the first time, tells him about her children trying to divert attention from Antoine's attitude. It's an exaggerated nightmare of a family reunion benefitting from closeups and histrionic acting, cut short only by a phone call from Louis's boyfriend asking if he has told them yet. Louis is racked by guilt, having caused his family pain by arriving in their midst, since his absence – as his mother tells him, suggesting that he should invite his siblings to spend weekends with him – has been hard to cope with. Quarrels and complications keep preventing him from imparting the bad news as the right moment just does not come and he finds his family unbearable so he decides to leave without telling them. Only when he and Antoine go on drive to buy cigarettes does Louis reveal that his former boyfriend died of cancer… Dolan's debut was “I Killed My Mother” (2009), which won the CICAE and Regards Jeunes Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It was followed by “Heartbeats” (2010), “Laurence Anyways” (2012), “Tom at the Farm” (2013) and “Mommy” (2014), which won the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival. “It's Only the End of the World” won the Grand Prize of the Jury, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It also received the Art Cinema Award at the Hamburg Film Festival and was nominated for Best Film Award at Sydney Film Festival. Complete Unknown “Complete Unknown” opens, somewhat confusingly, with is its heroine Alice (Rachel Weisz) working as an assistant magician in a seemingly Chinese cabaret, then as a nurse in a hospital and a formally dressed woman sleeping in a parked car. It is not clear whether this is a dream, flashbacks from previous professions or different lives. After this random sequence, American helmer Joshua Marston shows a New York office in which Tom (Michael Shannon) and Clyde (Michael Chernus) are discussing a work matter of seeming significance. At the same time, in another office, Alice researching the same Tom and Clyde online. The scene shifts to Alice eating her lunch with Clyde at the office cafeteria, where they have a brief chat and she says she likes the food. Alice remains a veiled character despite all that is revealed about her (when she tells Clyde she works with botanists, for example). At Tom's birthday party, to which Clyde takes Alice, she claims to Tom and his Persian wife Ramina (Azita Ghanizada) that she has just arrived from Tasmania where she was working with a newly discovered frog-like species, playing its sound for them on her cell phone. When Tom and Clyde are alone Tom questions Clyde about her suspiciously and they chat about his unstable relationship with Ramina. It seems Tom had known Alice and is now watching her as a new person, scanning the lies she is telling about herself. While they eat, consuming vast amounts of wine, people start questioning Alice's timeline of her life and the places she has been. Only when she is alone again with Tom does Alice explain how she has learned to shift her identity: “I could be anyone I want.” On the way to the bar where the party is to continue, Tom and Alice bump into an elderly lady (Kathy Bates) who has sprained her ankle while walking her dog, and while they help her home and meet her husband (Danny Glover), Tom follows Alice's instructions and impersonates and osteopath, managing wonderfully… With a screenplay co-written with Julian Sheppard, Marston creates a gripping philosophical drama with a number of compelling twists, following his “The Forgiveness of Blood” (2011), which was set in Albania and won the Silver Bear together with a Special Mention at the Berlinale. His debut, “Maria Full of Grace” (2004), won Best First Film at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. “Complete Unknown” was nominated for the Grand Special Prize at the Deauville Film Festival and the International Ecumenical Award at the Jameson CineFest-Miskolc International Film Festival.
The Visitor Romanian helmer Jamil Hendi started his career with a horror film. In “The Visitor”, Luca (Ionut Grama) and Otilia (Oana-Irina Dutu), a young couple, move to Bucharest with the help of their childhood friend Vlad (Oleg Apostol). They rent a cheap apartment in an old building with only one other tenant, Felix (Ion Haiduc), which as it is later revealed used to be occupied by a girl named Irina (Andreea Bosneag) who mysteriously disappeared. While Vlad visits them and they reminisce over wine, there is a knock on the door but when Luca opens it there is no sign of anyone. The scene shifts to a few years later in the same apartment: Luca and Otilia now have a daughter, Eva; Otilia is working for Vlad, who it is revealed has always had feelings for her. It is at this point that strange things start to happen: they feel a presence, occasionally seeing a young woman; one night Luca hears Otilia screaming in the bedroom and by the time he gets there she is nowhere to be found. Luca's mother arrives to stay with him and Eva, and only then does she reveal his propensity for attracting ghosts all his life; she describes to him how he had a psychic erase all those memories to help with his heart condition. But is Luca really beset by the supernatural or did Felix kidnap both Irina and Otilia? A low-budget production, shot over 15 days, “The Visitor” is one of several examples of Romanian New Wave cinema being screened at the CIFF this year. Others include Cãtãlin Mitulescu's “By the Rails” and Cristian Mungiu's “Graduation”.
Blanka Set in Manila, the Philippines although it is made by Japanese artists, “Blanka” focuses on its eponymous protagonist, a 15-year-old girl who begs and picks pockets to stay alive. Benefitting from cinematographer Onishi Takeyuki's bittersweet, greyish view of the slums and the streets of the city, filmmaker Kohki Hasei show how Blanka befriends the blind busker Peter (Peter Millari), how she employs other children to divert the attention of her tourist victims and how she resolutely distributes the money, keeping her share in a secret tin can. When Blanka sees a woman on television talking about how she found a child to adopt, she determines to “buy a mother” – she even has a specific sum in mind – and so she works harder than ever to collect the money, taking Peter and his guitar to San Fernando Plaza, a busier neighbourhood where she advertises her request for a mother. A bar owner (Dido Dela Paz) lets the duo perform on his premises, with Peter playing the guitar and Blanka singing, and things look up for a while until Blanka is framed for theft, falls out with Peter and returns to sleeping on the street, joining forces with two young thieves, Raul (Raymond Camacho) and Sebastian (Jomar Bisuyo) and encounters a woman involved in human trafficking (Ruby Ruiz) who had noticed her mother ads. Gabutero's performance is flawless, alternating world weariness and childishness, but the film ends on a conventional if not cliched note: Raul tries to sell Blanka to the woman, and at the last minute she is saved by Sebastian and Peter. She asks Peter to take her to an orphanage, but she runs away and returns to him. The triple collaboration between the Philippines, Italy and Japan won the Laterna Magic Prize and Best Film in a Foreign Language Award at the Venice Film Festival as well as the Audience Award at the Fribourg International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Grand Prix . “Blanka” also received the Best Film Award at the Kolkata International Film Festival.
We Are Never Alone The small town in the middle of a forest where this film is set has a two-lane road and a nondescript housing area on the outskirts. Its main attractions are a prison, a nightclub and the minimart at the gas station, and it is populated with seemingly miserable people unconsciously driven by desperation. They include a paranoid prison guard (Miroslav Hanus) who locks all the room doors in his apartment, forcing his wife and sons to knock every time they enter a room. The minimart attendant (Lenka Vlasakova) is unhappily married to an unemployed man (Karel Roden) and (like the prison guard's wife) has a sexual obsession with the nightclub bouncer Milan (Zdenek Godla), who in turn likes the stripper Sylva (Klaudia Dudova), but despite her hard drinking Sylva remains faithful to her jailed boyfriend. One of the prison guard's sons drives the man hysterical by bringing broken dolls and dead animals to their doorstep every night, while the wife starts an affair with Milan who (though he does sleep with her) ruthlessly compares her to Sylva. The bleak, claustrophobic world with overtones of sarcasm and nihilism begins to emerge… “We Are Never Alone” won the the Tagesspiegel Reader Jury award at the Berlinale. For Petr Vaclav, who won every Czech film award for his 2014 social critique of anti-Roma prejudice, “The Way Out”, this exaggerated look at Czech desperation hankers back to his second film, “Parallel Worlds” (2002), in which Roden and Vlasakova play another unhappy couple. Roma issues were the subject of Vaclav's first (and, for many, still his best) feature, “Marian” (1996). In “We Are Never Alone” he continues to benefit from the photography of Stepan Kucera, which highlights the claustrophobic spaces and contrasts them with the openness of the forest, as well as non-professional Roma actors. He is working on a new feature “Skokan” as well as his ambitious period piece “Il Boemo” about a friend and teacher of Mozart's.
