Category Archives: MIFF

Journey to the Shore (Kishibe no tabi) (2015)

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Oh Lordy. I should have left half way through this Japanese film. I’d just seen a really delightful Japanese film, Wonderful World End, and this one started well. We see a women, Mizuki, drifting in and out of her day. She teaches piano, lives alone. Then a man appears in her apartment and we soon realise he is her dead husband Yusuke, who drowned himself three years before. She’s not surprised to see him and when they begin a journey together, others can see and talk to him too. I liked this quirk of the film and I wondered whether it says something about Japanese culture and how they view death. Continue reading →

Wonderful World End (2015)

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What a kooky and delightful film. I knew it would be different. The synopsis said it was about a 17-year-old Gothic-Lolita cosplaying model who twitcasts for her fans. This one is part of the Next Gen program, I’ve seen a few – Being 14, My Skinny Sister, Gayby Baby, Me Romantic Romani – not by design so much as being interested in adolescence and female identity. I have had a glimpse of life for teens in France, Sweden, Australia, Italy and now Japan. The thread that has run through just about all of them is that adolescence is hard and parents don’t listen. Continue reading →

The Chosen Ones (2015)

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I keep thinking about this film. Like Mediterranea, it is about a current crisis and it seems impossible that this could be happening and nothing can be done about it.

Set in Tijuana in Mexico, we see Ulises, sweet, maybe 17 years old, dating Sofia, an engaging 14 year old. They sleep together, talk, ride bikes, do all the things that teenagers in love do. Then he takes her home to meet his family and it is a picture of domestic normality, his dad is celebrating a birthday, his brother arrives with his wife and baby, his mother cuts the cake. What we don’t know, is that Ulises is part of a family that entices young women with romance, separates them from their family, and then imprisons them in brothels, forcing them into slavery. Sofia is Ulises’s first. Continue reading →

Day thirteen – hitting the wall

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Okay, I know you all think I have amazing stamina but it honestly hasn’t been hard. Every day is a new and exciting experience, every film potentially the best film I have ever seen. I love the community of fellow film-goers, I love all the walking in the cold, I love it that I know interesting places to eat and the best place to sit in every venue. Continue reading →

Mediterranea (2015)

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Another multinational production – even Qatar gets a look in on this one – but I think it would be classified as Italian. It’s about Africans looking for a better life in Europe, though, so you feel as if you have been immersed in a melting pot of cultures, all looking for something better. Continue reading →

Louder Than Bombs (2015)

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This is listed as a Norwegian film, as the director Joachim Trier is from Norway, but it’s set in the US with mainly Hollywood actors so it feels American. It has an interesting and promising premise. A widower struggles to communicate with his two sons after the death of their mother, Isabelle. She was a celebrated war photographer and it soon becomes apparent that she took her own life. Continue reading →

Pioneer Heroes (Pionery-geroi) (2015)

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I got lost in this Russian film. Not lost as in ‘so absorbed with the story I lost sight of myself’, lost as in ‘I have no idea what’s happening’. It started well. We are in the 1980s Soviet Union watching children practicing to become Pioneer Heroes, the youth movement modelled on Lenin and the values of the Soviet Union. Three in particular we get to know – Sergeyev who wants to be like all the other kids but also wants to be a hero, Katya, who struggles to keep her grandfather’s bootlegging a secret as it is against the rules of the PH, and Olga, an anxious girl who relies heavily on Katya’s confidence and decisiveness. Continue reading →

Me Romantic Romani (2015)

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I added this film late to make up my 50 films and because I had a morning with no films booked. It looked like a light one, part of the Next Gen program aimed at teens and so there were the usual rows of uniformed school kids in front of me. It’s an Italian film and is set in the down-at-heel suburb of Falchera on the outskirts of Torino but it’s not really about Italians, it’s about Romani, or gypsies as we might know them. Continue reading →

The Club (2015)

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The lights went up at the end of this black Chilean drama and Alex said, “That’s my film of the festival, I loved it!” and I said, “That was crap. What on earth was that film about?” It just shows you, doesn’t it? No, not that Alex has bad taste in films (although it is possible…) but that our film experiences are as much about ourselves as the film. Okay. so maybe I didn’t think it was crap, but I didn’t get what it was trying to say. It was a bleak film, and although there were small moments of warmth and humanity, the topic perhaps ensures that these were overwhelmed by darkness. Continue reading →