Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts

Saturday, 11 April 2009

HKIFF#3 - Hunger

Director Steve McQueen is a visual art artist. First debut movie and he demonstrated his personal touch and feel to it.

The entire move split into 3 phrases, the first phase is the background of the movie: 1980’s Britain does not admit they have political prisoners in North Ireland. The prisoners of the subject are on hunger strike: They do not take food of any kind, no bath or shower, only use rags to cover their body as a silence confrontation. As the terms silence confrontation suggested, the movie have very little dialogue, story telling thru acting.

The second phase of the movie is a twist and distinctive portion of the film: One scene is a long shot with 20 minutes straight of dialogue. The close friend of the hunger strike leader came visit his old friend. The leader’s friend is a priest himself, try to persuade his old friend to end this madness. The leader refused and they are so determine to fight till death...

The third phase of the movie is images of the hunger…For an individual, what kind of thoughts and believes he needs to have in order to starve to death? It is a very striking scene...

I always appreciate movies story telling thru visuals but not dialogues. Compare to narrative movies, this is quite a contrast and very unforgettable.

Hunger official website

Sunday, 5 April 2009

HKIFF#2 - Che

Another revolution in a week after “Burma VJ”

Both the topic and director attracted me to watch this 270 minutes duration movie. This is the very first time for me to watch such a long film.

Renounced director Steven Soderbergh telling the story of the Marxist idealist Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The film was split into 2 feature films. The first part of the movie narrates from this controversial figure in an interview and mixed with events in his life. Start as an ordinary pleasant, join Fidel Castro and start a revolution in Cuba and over thrown the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Met the love of his life and complete with the first part of the story. All this composed into powerful and full of surprise story telling. Lots of details and events and make it into an interesting movie, but it is somehow hard to follow in my opinion.

The second part of the movie started with Che Guevara went to Bolivia after he was married. He joined the guerilla and fight with the locals. His acceptance of the locals is not so good although he fight along side with them in great passion. Later he was captured and executed……The second part of the movie is relatively straight forwards. The beginning of the second part is mostly characters dialogue, the later part is the twist of the plot.
Che official website

HKIFF#1 - Burma VJ – reporting from a closed country

Burma VJ official website

Burma VJ – reporting from a closed country, a film by Anders Ostergaard, a documentary about the uprising from the Burmese people during September of 2007. Compare to other typical documentary, this particular one detour quite a bit. The entire movie compose of small clips from various ‘civilian reporters’ lives in Burma, reporters with no proper training but just click and snap image thru their digital image capture devices. Part of the film based on the civilian reporters’ memories and narration. In order to protect these reports, some scenes relayed to the reporters, places were deleted.

There is about 30 minutes after screening Q&A session. The film maker answered about 10 questions from the audiences.

Ostergaard wanted to film about Burma, but later on he feels the typical documentary maybe a bit too subjective and he rather choose to use the source from these civilian reporters.

Some audiences questioned the ‘re-composition’ is not exactly a filming documentary method. The re-composition refers to a conversion between the civilian reporter and the monk. This conversion never been filmed, and was re-composted afterwards. The audience opinion suggests it should give the reporters an interview, but the film maker thinks that the more important part to bring the audiences the info first, then analyze later. I don’t really agree with this point of view and I think the re-composition is necessary. This is not an ordinary documentary film, but to help these civilian reporters to send out the messages to other people. These reporters are in a very difficult position; they have to reuse their tapes a lot and for these little faults are very understandable.

The civilian reporters provided another definition of documentary film, a documentary film not driven by the film maker.