Did anyone watch these? (I’m not sure anyone did - there were two people in the theater when I saw them.)
Animated:
Hair Love
Kitbull
Memorable
Sister
Daughter
Hair Love won, but I thought it was only OK. Not very deep. Young daddy learns to fix daughter’s hair, wife has cancer and no hair. Heartwarming but not deep. Nice animation.
Kitbull. Pixar looking like they are trying to copy Feast. Abused dogs, even if they get happy endings, is kind of a downer.
Memorable. A French painter with dementia begins to forget everything. Or so I thought - the official description is “Painter Louis and his wife Michelle are experiencing strange events. Their world seems to be mutating. Slowly, furniture, objects, and people lose their realism. They are “destructuring,” sometimes disintegrating.” That sounds like a science fiction film. Ah those wacky French. Either way, it should have won, IMO. Excellent animation.
Sister. A film about a sister that never was. Also an attack on China’s one child policy. A cute film.
Daughter. A Czech film about a daughter, her dying dad, and an injured bird. Or so it seems. There is no dialog, but I found in unintelligible in any language. Interesting animation style. Creepy, but cool.
The collection also had four “highly commended” films.
One was Henrietta Bulkowski, a film about a woman with a humpback who longs to fly but can’t get past medical (or see out the window), who repairs a plane in a dump. She ultimately gets to fly in a manner unexpected, but all I can say is “you can’t fly on those short wings”, and “life doesn’t work that way.” In the real world, disabilities can actually be a hindrance, whether we like that or not.
One called Hors Piste, what a stupid slapstick about an inept pair of mountain rescue people. I’m not even sure how to take the ending - it just stopped rather than ended.
The third was “The Bird and the Whale” about a different kind of humpback. I’m not sure I think that was the happy ending the filmmaker must have thought it was. Poor bird!
The last was more of a animation calling card than a film. Maestro was along the same lines and from the same people as Garden party from two years ago, but even more pointless.
Live action:
Brotherhood
Nefta Football Club
Saria
A Sister
The Neighbor’s Window
Both Brotherhood and Nefta Football Club take place in Tunisia, but they couldn’t be more different. Brotherhood starts out as a nice family tale about a family of farmers and the prodigal son, but it takes a turn I didn’t see coming and don’t know why they did it. The film should tell more. It just stopped
Nefta Football Club is a cute story about kids, soccer, a literal drug mule and the uses desperate people find for many bags of a white powdery substance.
Saria is what I would call recreational outrage. it’s the true story of a Guatemalan orphanage, abuse, rape and murder. Yes, I’m outraged. But I can’t do anything about it.
A Sister is a very tight, claustrophobic film about a desperate kidnapped woman in a car calling French 911 and getting help right under the nose of her kidnapper.
The Neighbor’s Window. The winner, and IMO rightly so. It’s about the affect on a thirty-something couple’s relationship from an amorous uninhibited twenty-something couple with no curtains that lives across the courtyard. Another Rear Window in NYC with a different tragic ending. The penultimate scene is very poignant, and the last shot puts it all in perspective, so to speak. However, the NYT, maybe being too close to the problem, called it “a stale voyeurism parable”.