THE 2014 LIVE-ACTION OSCAR SHORTS

Oscar season means many things to many people, but one of the best is that, thanks to the folks at Shorts HD, it's the only time all year that most of us have even the smallest opportunity to see short films on the big screen And that is something I look forward to every year with enormous enthusiasm. So without further ado, allow me to dive right into the matter of the five films nominated for Best Live-Action Short, and now screening here and there throughout the country, in advance of a VOD run sometime soon.

"But Tim," you are undoubtedly about to ask (irrespective of the fact that I do not live in your computer & cannot hear you), "you're such an animation buff. Why aren't you reviewing the animated shorts?" Well, don't forget, while I'm merely a lusty, amateur animation buff over here, I'm actually a professional animation buff over at the Film Experience. And that's where you can find my thoughts on the other slate.

Aya (Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis, Israel / France)

If I have it right, this is the current frontrunner to win in the eyes of most pundits. And I won't claim that I feel unmixedly good about that - it's one of the weaker films of a generally strong slate. That's less because of anything specific it does wrong, and more because it's simply not very focused or thoughtful about how it wants to tell its story: at 40 minutes, it's not only the longest of the nominees, it's also brushing against the Academy's definition of "short film" rather recklessly. Nor are all 40 of those minutes used to equally good effect. There's a lot of time spent on conversations that are a bit more indulgent than they frankly need to be.

The titular Aya (Sarah Adler) is waiting to pick someone up at the airport when she's mistaken by a Danish scholar named Overby (Ulrich Thomsen) as his driver; she refuses to correct him until miles into their drive to Jerusalem, at which point he doesn't seem to care much. The film eventually reveals itself as a parable of dissatisfied people seeking new connections, but it relies an awful lot on a kind-of twist ending to make most of that clear, which leaves a lot of scenes of talking about nothing in particular, all set in the front seat of a car. There's goodness and insight within the film, though it needs to be ferreted out of the bloat, and the characters who always feel a bit more like screenwriting conceits than psychologies. 6/10

* * *

Boogaloo and Graham (Michael Lennox and Ronan Blaney, UK)

Can't have the Oscars without darling children getting into light scrapes while something serious burbles on unseen in the background. "Something serious", in this case, is the Troubles; the 1970s Belfast-set film manages to wedge in a late scene involving a political prisoner and the violence of the region that is all the more garish for how much the film otherwise has not the smallest interest in the political or social ramifications of its setting. And boy, was I ever ready to go harsh on it.

But then, as darling children movies go, Boogaloo and Graham - named for the pet chickens given to a pair of young brothers (Riley Hamilton and Aaron Lynch) by their father (Martin McCann) in a fit of poor judgment - has the benefit of actual darlings, with just enough snarky spike in their personalities that it's not just the cloying sitcom nonsense it so readily could have been. Its insights into human behavior are trite, and the punchline at the end - if that's the word for something so calm and subdued and philosophically Irish - suggests that the film doesn't really know what it's trying to be about, either. But as a snapshot of a quirky family, it has its pleasures, even if it is undoubtedly the weakest thing here. 6/10

* * *

Butter Lamp (Hu Wei and Julien Féret, France / China)

Okay, we're starting to get to the really good stuff. Once again, we have here a film that doesn't announce its meaning until the final moments of the final shot, but in this case, it's a much more effective strategy, allowing the film to build up a sense of mystery along with its rather effective charm. We find a rarely-seen, but constantly chatting photographer (Genden Punstock) positioning groups and individuals from a Tibetan village in front of his portable backdrops (the film camera adopts the perspective of his still camera throughout: nothing but static frames with people staring into the lens, and it gains a weird energy as a result as it goes along), creating touristy snapshots of these people in towns, at religious sites, standing atop the Great Wall of China, and at Hong Kong Disneyland.

The latter two examples specifically foreshadow the film's ideas about the forcible homogenization of the Tibetan people into whatever the Chinese government says they have to be, but the bulk of that work is done by the modestly ominous suggestions of the final shot, which lands with a thud in the silent space left by the chatting and laughter of the rest of the film. For it is awfully funny, looking with its unforced observational candor at people being uncontainable messes no matter how badly the photographer tries to choreograph them. In truth, the whole thing is a bit concepty and editorially heavy-handed in the last moments, but the implicit humanism of the whole thing is so affecting that I can't really complain. 8/10

* * *

Parvaneh (Talkhon Hamzavi and Stefan Eichenberger, Switzerland)

I have a suspicion that I should find this to be corny bullshit, and yet somehow, it really works. Teenager Parvaneh (Nissa Kashani) is an Afghan refugee living in Switzerland, and she needs to send some money back home. The trip to Zurich to find a place to wire the money is daunting, but it's the easy part - Parvaneh's papers and age mean that she can do no such thing, which means she must hunt around for a kind stranger. The only one she finds is a slightly older punk, Emely (Cheryl Graf), who agrees to help for a small fee, but the store is closed by the time the girls get back there. On the spot, Emely proposes that Parvaneh should pal around with her and they can go back in the morning. In the meantime, it's a night of music, clubs, flirting with boys, and finding out that the two have a lot in common.

Clichés don't come any mustier, but the Euro-realist style and incredibly laid-back naturalistic acting on display help enormously to make Parvaneh seem more insightful and raw than it sounds. There's no sweetie-pie fun going on; the whole time, Parvaneh seems slightly dazed and alarmed at the speed and danger of life in the urban West, compared to her safe, rural enclave of fellow refugees, and though the connection she makes with Emely is clearly important and unprecedented, the film doesn't pretend to have solved The Immigrant Problem. Bless it for that.

Anyway, the acting is sharp, Kashani especially, and while the style is a bit Dardennes-light, director Hamzavi wields it with canny discipline for when it can heighten the narrative vs. when it can serve to accentuate the moments in between narrative. I would never want to see this as a feature, but it's a pretty thoughtful 25 minutes. 8/10

* * *

The Phone Call (Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, UK)

The other frontrunner, and I rather think the best of the five (though Parvaneh comes close). It's a sterling example of something that could never work so well except as a snug, 20-minute short: set up a single situation, play it out, get the hell out of there. Heather (Sally Hawkins) works at a virtually empty crisis call center, and she picks up early one shift to hear a very sad man identifying himself as Stan (Jim Broadbent, never seen). At first trying simply to cheer Stan up, Heather teases out after a few minutes that he's just taken a lethal dose of pills, having wanted to kill himself ever since his wife died. And he's not calling for help, but simply to have company while he drifts off into death.

It's an acting showcase: director Kikby rather sensibly understands that a film which consists of almost nothing other than a phone conversation in which we never see one of the two participants needs to have an immovable rock on the visible end of the line. The Phone Call would wither and die without having somebody that Kirkby could point his camera at for minutes, confident that whatever is happening on her face is bound to be interesting, and Hawkins is that somebody. She has to build a character using hardly any backstory, and then communicate a desire to be sympathetic, a steely determination to save Stan from himself, and flustered panic that she is by no means equipped to deal with this situation, and she does all of this so well that it doesn't even register as acting; the film gets to skip right ahead to the part where it asks us to consider what it would be like to be Heather, tossed into this horrible situation; but also to be Stan, that sad and empty. It's a lovely portrait of mental states in turmoil, concise and streamlined and driven enough that the lack of flash doesn't register till it's all over. 8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: LOVE AND DEATH IN THE WEST BANK

Hany Abu-Assad's Omar feels like the kind of movie that gets nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, which is exactly what happened to it. That's not a criticism, and it's certainly not a compliment, but the film's "type" is clear enough: a political story told through a personal drama, harsh enough in its themes that it feels like an art film, but straightforward enough in its aesthetic and storytelling that it's not hard to watch. All of which also apply to Abu-Assad's Paradise Now, which was also an Oscar nominee, and to which this film feels very much a spiritual sequel and companion piece.

Like that work, Omar is also quite a bit better than I've just made it sound: it's on the simple side, and it's a bit too hand-holding in its political philosophy, but it also tells a hell of of an interesting human story that has been fleshed out with considerable sophistication and insight by its creator and his mostly non-professional cast. At first blush, it feels like a variation on Romeo and Juliet in occupied Palestine: Omar (Adam Bakri) lives in one cordoned-off segment of the city, Nadia (Leem Lubany) lives in another, and he frequently scales the enormous concrete wall dividing them to be with his beloved. He also scales the wall to meet with her brother, Tarek (Iyad Hoorani), and their friend Amjad (Samer Bisharat), the other two-thirds of a very small, very amateur resistance cell that finds the young men plotting acts of violence against the Israeli soldiers who are one of the more unlikable aspects of their daily life. And this proves to be the start of his woes, when the three of them end up responsible for killing an Israeli soldier: Omar is captured by the authorities, who trick him into making a false confession and then using it as leverage to capture Tarek, who they assume to the killer and mastermind, when in fact it was Amjad who pulled the trigger. And Amjad who, while Omar finds himself turned into a paranoid, hunted animal, starts to move in close to Nadia.

Paranoia is the key word there: Omar eventually turns into a political thriller of the "nobody can be trusted" variety, with Omar realising over the course of his adventures that he's managed to stuff himself into a situation where he either gets killed by the Israelis as a terrorist or by the Palestinians as a traitor and spy. The whole film is burdened with that kind of fatalistic feeling: with this movie, Abu-Assad seems less interested in indicting the specifics of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian populations they control, and thus not so interested in the psychology of terrorism (the theme of Paradise Now). Instead, the focus is on the toll of occupation, the sense of dragging despair of living in a heavily regimented, surveillance-dominated world where the simplest acts of human life are a potentially life-threatening chore, and no number of suicide bombers can budge that situation an inch.

We see this play out on Bakri's face, a mutable canvass for whatever Abu-Assad requires: the actor has the look of a cleanly-scrubbed model, up until he suddenly, shockingly doesn't, an adopts the beleaguered, weathered expression of someone who has suffered too much and run out of hope. The film doesn't hide from the opportunity to depict violence - there are torture scenes here that could be deeply horrifying if the director and cinematographer Ehab Assal didn't cloak them in a gloomy murk - but it's most cutting, disturbing effects aren't so visceral as that. The best and most sobering thing the movie can ever do is show us how emptiness starts to smother out Omar's personality and spark.

It's a smart piece of character-building that sidesteps the problem that limited Paradise Now somewhat: it isn't overly programmatic and over-eager to make sure we follow along every connection it's making. The way it steps out how this affects this affects this does feel a little overly precise and inorganic at times, but there are far more moments where things bubble up organically, just a matter of watching characters sloshing against each other, checking their reactions to see what that might tell us about their place in the world they inhabit. It's a naturalist film through and through, even when it has the plot details of a melodrama, and the unforced acting thrives in that setting.

As a direct extension of that naturalism, it's also, unfortunately a bit stiff and uncreative in the way it employs its camera, and I do wish that Abu-Assad's sense of visual storytelling was a bit more profound than "if you hold for a long time as people do things in a wide shot, it will make the moment feel more lived-in". I mean, that's true, but it's also a bit boring, and there are stretches where Omar feels a bit like a mass-produced European social realist film with only the thin overlay of novelty that it happens to involve Palestinians. There's nothing with that: social realism has a long and noble history in the employ of politically-motivated cinema, and even if Omar doesn't have quite the schematic morality of other films on the Israel-Palestine conflict, it certainly doesn't leave any doubt where the filmmakers stand on the issue. The aesthetic is a good fit for the topic, it simply feels a bit over-familiar, and that's never a great thing for any movie.

Still, familiar or not, Omar gets at some very impressive, discomfiting truths about the desperate life of young people in the West Bank, stripped of their youthful ebullience and forced to scrabble for survival. It never sacrifices story for being a social document, but it frequently manages to be both things simultaneously, and that mixture makes it a fine and moving piece of cinema no matter how little it tries to push the medium forward.

8/10

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JUST WRIGHT

The Congress, Ari Folman's first film since his international breakthrough with the animated pseudo-documentary Waltz with Bashir, is surely a broken-down disaster of a movie, barely able to function as an entire self-contained object. But I am absolutely confident that I wouldn't be half as thrilled by it if that wasn't the case: like far, far too few movies out there, it offers the sight of a filmmaker clearly working without a net, pursuing enormously challenging ideas, and experimenting with strictly visual means of expressing them. If the resulting film is a sometimes inscrutable mass of surreal, psychedelic moments strung along a narrative that feels like it's made out of at least three completely irreconcilable parts, oh well. I'd rather watch something with The Congress's absolute fearlessness to make every possible mistake than a polished, functionally flawless, but completely unimaginative stock character drama or popcorn action movie every day of the week.

The movie features Robin Wright as a heavily modulated version of herself, in a role that Folman initially intended for Cate Blanchett (the shift was critical, and correct: it requires a certain kind of "you used to be in pictures; you used to be big" backstory that Blanchett c. 2013 can't claim, but Wright absolutely can). And if Folman's bravery in his storytelling and artwork is admirable, Wright's bravery is incomparably more personal and affecting. She's anchoring a movie about the difficulties that come to women as they age, depicting herself as a prickly, unemployable, "difficult" actor, and allowing Folman and his international team of animators to render her as an exaggerated caricature for a great chunk of the second half. The movie's very first shot says it all: the camera is right in Wright's face, catching her distant, sad look, making her look heartbreakingly beautiful but also every day of 45 years old. I can't recall a single image in a long time that so perfectly sums up the sheer fact of what aging does: leaving a woman who is still remarkably pleasant to look at, but who's not the dewy ingenue that she sees a little while later staring out from a poster for The Princess Bride.

This matters - both the fact that Wright has visibly aged, and the fact that she still looks better than most of us on the most beautiful day of our life - because The Congress is in large part an exploration of the ways that people try to avoid acknowledging the aging process, in some increasingly metaphorical and deranged ways. Opening in live action in something very close to the present, Robin and her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) field inquiries from the slick Jeff Green (Danny Huston), a high-level executive at Miramount Studio, to buy her digital likeness rights. That is, to scan every inch her her body and her every facial expression to make a computer-based Robin puppet to be placed into any movie they like. And Robin can no longer perform anywhere: not in movies, not on TV, not onstage, not on open mike night. The very idea appalls and infuriates Robin, but the increasing sickness of her son Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee), suffering from a rare disorder that is slowly destroying his eyesight and corrupting his ability to process auditory information, and the unexpected, uncharacteristic support of her daughter Sarah (Sami Gayle) nudges her into reconsidering.

20 years later, at the very end of the exclusivity contract she signed, Robin drives into the desert to attend Miramount's grand Futurism Congress. Here, she is forced to snort a drug that alters her perception to believe that herself and everything around her are animated; and it's in this bizarre alternate world that she learns of Miramount's new plans for an interactive new storytelling medium, in which persons can ingest chemicals that will allow them to experience other person's lives from the inside out, not just mimicking their outward appearance, as many of the Congress attendees enjoy doing. And even that's not the last enormous narrative leap that The Congress makes, but the last one that I can describe without collapsing into spoilers, and also spouting out random nouns that might suggest the shape of the increasingly convoluted, metaphorical narrative, but certainly couldn't spell it out in a useful way.

Folman based his script on Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress from 1971, a book I have never read; though some elements that feel like vintage anti-Soviet symbolism creep through, in bits like the description of Miramount's new chemical experiments as allowing people to experience the free will they are actively denied, or creation of persons forced to do any job the studio wants, with absolutely no choice in the matter. Mostly, though, it's a free-for-all of themes and interests and styles. How people interact with an increasingly synthetic world of screens and people whose chosen identity elides their real one? The Congress looks at that from both pro- and anti- stances. The degree to which new film technologies count as "acting", and what happens as computer filmmaking replaces real flesh and blood people, I mean, that's obvious. The value of fantastic lies versus miserable, filthy realities - not developed very well, but it's vividly presented in film's final sequence.

The effect is less of being presented with an argument and its supporting evidence, than being blasted with ideas at a nonstop pace, and realising only after it's all done how very random and arbitrary some of the shifts between those ideas actually were. Still, ideas are better than the absence of ideas.

And what really matters about the film is the language and style through which those ideas are expressed: after Waltz with Bashir, Folman needs to prove nothing else about his control of animation style, but I was pleased by the frequently gorgeous images that he and cinematographer Michael Englert and production designer David Polonsky were able to concoct. The scene of Robin being scanned is one of the most beautiful sequences of science-fiction I've seen lately, with dramatic, flashy lighting and sets contrasting with Keitel's soft monologue in a simply terrific way.

Of course, the animation that takes up a good half of the two-hour movie is more of an obvious, overt standout. Taking his cues from the animation of the '30s, the Fleischer brothers especially, Folman and his teams create a bright world of shiny grotesques, morphing and slipping and looking inhuman and warped but also soft and round and appealing. And the wildly old-fashioned style makes the highly un-'30s intrusion of moral blackness and violence far more startling than they might otherwise be. There's plenty of overreach - some of the LSD fantasylands of the last portion of the film feel like lazy '70s album cover design - but the fludity and creativity of the animation is a top-notch example of the medium being used in an apparently standard way to achieve entirely deranged goals.

For all that, though, this is Wright's movie. She's only seen in her own flesh for a little while, but the impact she makes with that time is enormous: stiff and stern and defensive most of the time, but melting in calmness or self-doubt in moments that hit with explosive force. It's not just the bravest work of Wright's career, but surely among the best performances she has given, even when she's just providing the reflective, regretful voice to a weird caricature of herself as an old woman. There is steel-like human strength and frantic animal terror flowing into each other throughout her work in The Congress, and while it's certainly a great if wildly inconclusive work of style, Wright always pulls it back to being, ultimately, about what human beings feel, and that's what makes it, through all it's indescribable weirdness, a marvelous and compelling piece of cinema.

8/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: CLOSED CURTAIN (JAFAR PANAHI & KAMBUZIA PARTOVI, IRAN)

Screens at CIFF: 10/20 & 10/22
World premiere: 12 February, 2013, Berlin International Film Festival

Firstly, Jafar Panahi isn't supposed to be making films at all. This is something that everybody knows who cares about Iranian film at all, of course, and it doesn't need repeating, but I think it's important to keep in mind that for the director to release anything requires a degree of secrecy and compromise and political daring that would daunt any artist. The same rules don't apply to other directors who can, for example, be seen outside in broad daylight with a camera, and not be subject to immediate legal reprisals. So while Closed Curtain, co-directed by Panahi and the long-dormant Kambuzia Partovi (whose last film was Border Cafe in 2005) might have its share of problems and then some, we're still talking about a movie that had to be conceived and executed to take advantage of an insuperably difficult life situation. For any film at all to have come out of those circumstances is impressive; for it to be a work of such complicated ambition as this is absolutely miraculous.

Still, we should also not do Panahi the disservice of acting like he's untouchable as a result, his movies beyond criticism - and Closed Curtain certainly has things worth criticising, though not nearly as many things as it has worth praising. That the film is a thematic re-tread of the director's last project, This Is Not a Film, is slightly vexing but really quite impossible to consider an unexpected shock, given the limitations of the life he's living right now, and while "the frustrations of a storyteller who can't tell stories" is a much less probing and socially-minded area to mine than Panahi's politically outspoken films from earlier in the career, he's still exploring this topic with the same depth and insight.

Closed Curtain begins by telling a story of a writer (Partovi) with dog named Boy - giving one of the most engaging animal performances I have ever seen, by the way, so giant kudos to Panahi, Partovi, or whatever trainer was responsible for it - who sneaks into an empty house on a beach, immediately closing all the curtains to make sure that nobody can see him, and shaving his head. Here he plans to finish his latest work, but he's interrupted by a young woman (Maryam Moqadam) and her brother (Hadi Saeedi), hiding from the police after a party gone wrong. The brother leaves, and the sister stays behind, driving the writer into a fit of paranoia with her actions, which include pulling down the thick, light-blocking curtains, and not acting nearly enough like she's not a government spy.

This is all very overtly symbolic and cryptic, but it's an interesting attempt to dramatise the tension felt by the isolated victim of repressive politics: the desire to be able to curl up and hide warring with the desire to stand up and scream about how unjust this is and thus be open to further abuse. The directors, and cinematographer Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah do a fantastic job of making the house (Panahi's own, the only place he could safely assemble a crew) into an Expressionist playground of acute angles, blind corners, and rooms that do not flow into each other with any obvious geography, perfectly capturing a sense of displaced paranoia that suits the film tremendously well.

Then the movie enters its second phase, and things get unbelievably weird. It's hard to attack the film for what happens next, because it is certainly not wanting for ambition or complexity, but it's also strangely out-of-balance, and I haven't decided yet if I think that it "works" on any level. But let's cut to the chase, and tread lightly around SPOILERS: Panahi himself enters the house, and we find that the characters we've spend so much time with are in fact the subjects of a script he hasn't been able to complete. Which doesn't mean that their story is done, for the young woman in particular is still hanging around, apparently developing a life of her own quite separate from her creator's awareness of what's going on.

One of the words that has been thrown at Panahi's two post-arrest films by some intelligent critics has been "indulgent", and while I think that's a profoundly unfair way to categorise This Is Not a Film, it comes a lot closer to the mark with Closed Curtain, a movie started during a period of intense depression for the filmmaker and produced at least in part as therapy. It plays that way, certainly: Panahi is pissed and frustrated and feeling artistically plugged-up, and his onscreen self (clearly scripted and "artificial" to a greater degree than the onscreen Panahi-character in This Is Not a Film) gives open voice to those feelings. A lot of people have also used the word "Pirandello" in this context, which isn't completely apt, though it does suggest the degree to which Closed Curtain feels like a game more than a statement, and this has not ever been true of the director's work; it's not a mode that fits his aesthetic terribly well, either, and Closed Curtain, befitting its title, feels a bit too hermetically sealed for its own. Good. The barred gate that dominates the opening and closing shots are perhaps meant to suggest being prevented from accessing the outside world, but they also imply being unable to engage with it, and that limits this film to a degree that it did not limit his last film (which came from a place of anger more than depression and has more life because of it).

That's a lot of harshness directed at a film that is completely, hypnotically fascinating, and if I am judgmental of Closed Curtain, it is only because I hold Panahi to such a high standard. It is, in and of itself, still quite a great piece of cinema, complicating its layers of meaning and asking questions about how cinema tells stories about real life in ways far too intellectual for most filmmakers to dare. How successful it is at carrying all its ideas off is something I can't quite say; my sense is that the film is a messy wreck, but in a way far more valuable than a thousand "better" films will ever know.

7/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: TRUCKER AND THE FOX (ARASH LAHOOTI, IRAN)

Screens at CIFF: 10/13 & 10/15
World premiere: 26 April, 2013, HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival

Winner of the Gold Hugo for Best Documentary

There is an Iranian man, Mahmood Kiyani Falavarjani, whose life in even the most succinct terms is so unbelievably interesting that a whole series of feature length documentaries might just about be enough to start covering it, but for right now, we have to make do with the single 73-minute Trucker and the Fox.

That most succinct way of putting it, for me, would be along the lines of, "When he's not driving a truck, Falavarjani makes semi-experimental short films." We can add a few details just to sweeten the pot: "When he's not driving a dilated truck held together more by the sheer power of hope than its own structural integrity, Falavarjani makes semi-experimental short films in which cagey editing is used to make animals look like they're acting out complex dramatic narratives". And in case that still doesn't make it sound like this dude is one of the most colorful people that you will ever find inhabiting a motion picture, fictional or otherwise, the guiding structure behind Trucker and Fox involves his recovery from a bout of depression severe enough to land him in a sanitarium, brought on by the death of his favorite star, a desert fox.

Now, having proposed that Falavarjani is thus so compelling as a human interest subject, I will concede that for all its immense charm, Trucker and the Fox is surely not the best film that could be made about this man's life. It is short as hell, for a start, and while I guess that three, three-and-a-half hours might be a lot of time to follow him in one go, 73 minutes is barely enough to finish establishing who he is, before the time comes to say goodbye. It's also really hard to argue that director Arash Lahooti is using even that 73 minutes as efficiently as possible, for there is quite a lot of raggedy material on display here, and the film is much too willing to shore up audience goodwill by ditching its actual content for a display of animals being cute, or at least being abused in cute ways. And this is appreciated, of course, because who doesn't want to watch an indignant fox being given a bath and then blown dry? But that has the benefit of being directly tied to the organising narrative, which concerns Falavarjani's attempts to find a new fox for his latest opus, in which a pair of donkeys in love are separated by the craftiness of a fox and a crow. Whereas other scenes are spurious at best: you'd have to be made of cast stone not to be charmed by a little girl playing with a kitten and observing that it looks like he's wearing eyeliner, but you'd also have to be much more forgiving of both little girls and kittens than I can imagine being to claim that the scene adds anything of real value to a film that simply does not have room to screw around.

It's a shallow movie, really. The thing that you'd expect - anyway, I expected it - to be the driving force of the whole feature absolutely isn't: while it's surely the case that Falavarjani's desire to immediately fling himself into a new project and especially his single-minded obsession with finding a new fox are methods of coping with his recent, crippling depression, and funnel his energies into something constructive, Trucker and the Fox isn't remotely interested in actually grappling with the challenges of clinical depression. At times, Falavarjani visits with his doctor, updating him on the progress of the movie as a way of explaining how he's working to be healthy, and this is absolutely the only time where the film even seems to recall that it opened with the subject stuck in a hospital; the scenes are so untethered from the rest of the film that the second time it happened, I'd honestly forgotten that he even had a doctor. This is not a serious film about depression; it is a film, literally, about how depression can be cured by cute animals. And while this thesis fuels the entire internet, it's not really true.

Still, it's easy to grip about what the film isn't so enthusiastically that you lose sight of all the immensely charming things that the film is. And though I have certainly not made it sound that way, I actively enjoyed Trucker and the Fox: it is a wonderful chance to spend time with one of the most idiosyncratic film directors this side of Werner Herzog, and the small snatches of his movies that we get to see suggest that Falavarjani is indeed a pretty savvy, intuitive filmmaker. That's when he's not bemoaning the state of the trucking industry in modern Iran, or spending so much energy looking for animal actors that the quest for the animal becomes a bigger thing than the nominal goal in gathering them together.

The film is light, and silly, but it is not mocking; while openly allowing Falavarjani his quirks and eccentricities, it's also genuinely interested in the things he's doing and what he has to say. It's not a film that digs, either into psychology or the process of making these films (which, at two years for a ten minute short, would probably be dull to watch in real-time, anyway), but for an audience-pleasing truffle of a personality profile, it could hardly be more delightful, warm-hearted, and cute.

I mean, fuck. There's a short he made where a kitten wrestles with a crow. You cannot imagine what cute even means if you haven't seen that.

7/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: INFILTRATORS (KHALED JARRAR, PALESTINE-UAE-LEBANON

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14
World Premiere: 11 September, 2012, Dubai International Film Festival

The first shots of Infiltrators end up having very little to do with the rest of the film, aesthetically at least, but they do make for an awfully compelling introduction to an awfully compelling documentary. Briefly, the opening introduces us to the bare fact of panicked running: just before dawn, there is noise, there are bodies moving and Khaled Jarrar's camera is jerking about violently, hardly able to keep up with the action at all. In fact, it can't keep up with the action; most of what we see is fragmentary and static, individuals frames holding for a half a second or longer, the whole thing skipping. The most immediately recognizable visual element of the whole are lights in the distance, rendered in the smudgy, low-fi digital camera and its grossly reduced framerate as jagged streaks of color floating in space. It is so abstract that it is, in the end, quite beautiful; poetry made out of shitty cinematography and hectic confusion.

As for what that running is all about: it turns out to be an attempt to smuggle people across the wall built by the Israeli government to keep the Palestinians in their place. Infiltrators, as we find after this in medias res opening turns into something a little bit more subdued, is about the difficult task of entering Jerusalem when one is Palestinian: difficult and dangerous when it's done illegally, and practically impossible to be done through the proper channels. The film is as broad an attempt can be made in a mere 70 minutes to cover all the angles of this subject from within the Palestinian community; Jarrar himself never enters, nor attempts to enter Jerusalem, instead holding back with the groups attempting to surreptitiously sneak around Israeli security officers at all hours of the night, and even a few times in broad daylight.

The subject matter, by itself, is interesting if not necessarily the freshest thing imaginable at this point: at any rate, the exact focus of the documentary is so specific and so limited in scope to the on-the-ground, moment-by-moment reality of the people trying to leave the carefully circumscribed space where they're meant to stay that it doesn't rehash the same arguments familiar from so many movies and documentaries about the occupation of Palestine. Jarrar's interviews reveal little details that I, at least, would never have really thought of; the frustrated impasse between human smugglers charging a healthy fee for the dangerous service they offer and the everyday people who want to see a decent doctor or the like, and who find those same fees to be the next thing to usury.

What's truly special about Infiltrators, though, is not the the situation being depicted, but the manner in which it is depicted. Jarrar's camera may not be very rugged and it certainly doesn't capture very high-quality footage, but the film's resolute lack of polish absolutely works to its benefit: above and beyond the usual tricks of cinéma vérité, handheld shakiness and significant graininess and overmixed ambient sound and such, things that contribute to a sense of perceived realism, Infiltrators looks and feels so unprofessional from its first shot onward, that one's eyes almost refuse to judge it to be a movie. It resembles home movies taken on the spur of the moment, archived and edited as a way of preserving the special in-the-moment perspective accidentally captured. I have absolutely no way of knowing whether this was how Jarrar happened to record these events; I strongly doubt so, given the number of interviews that populate the film. But the reality of how the film was made isn't as essential as the feeling the film has, and between the consumer-grade video and the obviously surreptitious way that many of the shots had to be filmed, that feeling is one of considerable grubby authenticity.

This ends up being, in fact, a film about how it was filmed as much as about the acts happening in front of the lens; not because there are any self-referential or autobiographical notes, but because the intimacy and flexibility of the camera end up being so inseparable from the events within the movie: if it's not quite the case that camera ends up feeling like a character, as in the similar (and mostly, more sophisticated and effective) 5 Broken Cameras, it nevertheless feels present in a way that even documentary cameras often do not. It is, yes, that whole "you are there" feeling, though I don't love that particular cliché, given added emphasis by the tangibility of the filmmaker in the same space as the people he shows us.

Realism isn't the only aesthetic idea that Jarrar has: some of the material is presented in a specifically non-real register, particularly a sequence where the sound cuts out completely, leaving us to watch Palestinians milling aimlessly through an Israeli border check as a pure visual experience; it's the most openly editorial moment in the film, forcing our attention to the images, which are those of petty control over weary people. Not that the film lacks an editorial point of view; without the director ever having to say it aloud, Infiltrators depicts the Palestinian people as desperate and frustrated, with every movement they make tense as fraught as in any thriller. And this also belies the impression that it is some kind of found-footage recording of events: Jarrar and editor Gaetan Harem have clearly shaped the material to make a point, it's just that the point is left for the viewer to stumble into, rather than be told by the autocratic filmmaker. But just because it's not overt doesn't make it subdued: this is a loud, angry yell of a movie, depicting a broken system with focused rage and refusing to pretend that this situation is anything but ineffective and intolerable.

8/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: YEMA (DJAMILA SAHRAOUI, ALGERIA-FRANCE)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/20 & 10/22
World premiere: 5 September, 2012, Venice Film Festival

The title of Yema, I will begin by pointing out, is the Arabic word for "mother" or at least this is what I intuit from the movie itself. I gather that it has been put on the festival circuit under this transliteration instead of its actual translation because, let's face it, we don't need another damn movie called Mother.

That being said, the content of Yema is also "mother",; and this is clearly the case from its hypnotic opening sequence in which a woman (Djamila Sahraoui, the writer and director as well), prepares the body of a young man (Nabil Oudihat) for burial. We watch as she slowly and methodically drags water to her isolated desert home, digs a hole, and cleans him and dresses the corpse of what we understand more because of the precision with which Sahraoui stages this action and how much she lingers over every step, than because the film goes out of its way to clarify it, is a young man who was dearly loved. For all that the long, unblinking takes are set at a steadily objective distance away from the action, the cumulative effect of watching this patient, silent woman moving fixedly about her task is unrelentingly tender and pathetic.

As it progresses, Yema starts to feel like a film built entirely out of ellipses. There's actually a very simple plot that spins out, but it is built almost entirely in despite of the things the characters go out of their way to avoid saying. Let it suffice, for now, to note that the mother (her name is given in all the press material as "Ouardia", but I didn't catch that in the movie itself) is put under guard by a one-armed man (Samir Yahia), a failed bombmaker, we find out, for breaking Islamic law, which decrees that only a man may bury another man. The woman has a history with the rebel commander (Ali Zarif) who issues this order, noting that he betrayed the dead soldier, Tarek, that she has just been tending to; it is revealed in methodical bits and pieces that this man is also her son, and she blames him for perpetrating the attack that left his brother dead, the two of them fighting on opposites side of the civil conflict taking place in whatever unnamed (but probably Algerian?) North African land where this all plays out.

Central metaphors don't get a lot noisier than that, but Yema saves itself a lot of trouble by revealing this situation so cautiously, to the point where huge portions of the first half don't make much sense as narrative, that by the time we understand that the conflict is about a mother whose family has been torn asunder by civil war, the barbaric obviousness of the "brother vs. brother" motif really doesn't register. It is, first and above all, a severe and heartbreaking family drama, and whatever great meaning it imports comes in after that. Which is, I think, for the best, given that Yema is already flirting quite enough with a kind of schematic misery-by-numbers filmmaking, to have to bear the weight of being an overt metaphor, on top of it.

Flirts with it; never quite becomes it. There is definitely a concern in the first third or even half of the 90-minute feature that this is all playing a little bit too much by the handbook for meaningfully slow-moving domestic cinema set in the underdeveloped world; though Sahraoui and her cinematographer, Raphaël O'Byrne, frame the scrubby landscape particularly well, with an eye toward fixing the people within the context of that landscape (and very near the end of the movie is a specific composition of the mother, bunched up in a ball on the ground, that's as flawlessly executed as I can imagine), the stillness of the images, the slowness with which they are cut together, and the hardness of the color scheme all feel awfully familiar from a lot of movies. It's a good version of the thing it is; but the thing it is has become a bit played out.

So it's all the more rewarding to watch the film adopt its domestic focus as it moves along, for as the focus shifts from "the hardscrabble life of a taciturn Arab woman" to "the fabulistic story of a war-rent family", Yema becomes both more personal and more interesting: the mother herself emerges as not just an icon but a feeling, suffering being, and that shift alone is enough to bump the movie into a far more effective register. That this all happens so slowly is frustrating (the strain to keep the opening sequence from developing too quickly palpable at times), but that much more rewarding once we're actually plunged into the meat of the film, and Sahraoui can explore her scenario instead of just her location. And this she does with great richness and humanity.

It is, ultimately, the very definition of a festival film: the kind that is probably not special enough or interesting enough to register as an essential piece of world cinema, but much too good not to find an audience outside of its homeland. It feels deep and fully, in its penetrating depiction of the way that human beings can cause hurt to other beings and also atone for that hurt; it presents its particular family and their home with clarity and intelligence, and within the limits it sets for itself, it's hard to imagine that it could be any more rewarding.

8/10

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