Intimate, poetic, touching

I have to admit that my boyfriend’s film taste is outstanding. No matter what he borrows from the video shop, it’s always a good choice. This time he picked out a British film “Dear Frankie”, a beautiful tale of mother’s and child’s love taking place in magical surroundings of the Scottish coast.

Frankie, a nine year old death-mute boy, his mother Lizzy and grandmother are changing addresses every few months in order to escape Lizzy’s husband. The boy doesn’t know this and so he believes that his father works on a ship and is on the sea the whole year round. That’s why he has never seen him. To keep in touch with his father Frankie writes to him frequently. In reply his father sends him letters with descriptions of his adventures. However, this is Frankie’s mother who writes those letters in order to bring some joy in the boy’s life and to maintain a positive picture of the father’s figure in his life. The problem occurs when the ship “Accra” which Frankie’s father apparently sails with is supposed to arrive to their town. Lizzy suddenly has to find somebody who would imitate her son’s father for a day. She wants to protect him in this way. Finally she makes a deal with a Stranger who is gradually getting closer to Frankie and herself. After all he doesn’t accept any money for his favour.

Why do I like this film? It’s a modest, but a charming story. My personal best is Jack McElhone in Frankie’s role giving a very touching performance as a very sensitive, loving and talented child. We often see in the film how he struggles with his handicap trying to express his feelings through his drawings and written words. Furthermore, there’s his loving mother who is trying to do everything to protect him from an inconvenient truth about his father. “Dear Frankie” is a simple story of love and devotion that keeps your breath away till the very last moment. And this unbelievable Scottish accent!

A mummy attacks!

I sometimes wonder where screenwriters get their ideas from… „Bubba Ho-tep“ is one of such bizarre screenplays. Let’s imagine an elderly resident of a nursing home who thinks he’s Elvis Presley. He claims that he switched roles with his imitator many years ago and that’s how he landed at this place in East Texas. Together with his “best friend”, a black J.F. Kennedy, he faces a mission of rescuing the nursing home from an evil Egyptian mummy which prowls the corridors of the house in search of the residents’ souls. It’s worth mentioning that this mummy sucks souls from their bodies through their… arseholes. If you add to this that one of the residents thinks he’s actually a cowboy from the Wild West who sleeps with his toy guns and the mummy itself is a ridiculous tacky shape from E class films you can more or less get a picture what kind of a parody this film is. I couldn’t help laughing all the time, because the whole idea of this piece was utterly ridiculous. Although I’m usually not into such kinds of films, I really enjoyed this one. You just have to treat it like a kind of simple entertainment which doesn’t lack imagination and has a more sophisticated plot than typical American mainstream comedies.

Among some highlights of this film I’d mention first of all the heavy Southern accent of Mr Presley which honestly made me switch on subtitles. This made me think of us, possible future interpreters, having to be extremely flexible and prepared for hundreds of different accents (which isn’t an easy task). Furthermore, I loved the atmosphere of the dark, half-dead nursing home where people were “disposed of” and now only wait for their death, living only from meal to meal. In one scene Elvis’s roommate dies and his daughter comes after a few days to take away his belongings. Elvis asks why she hadn’t visited his father within three years of his stay in the nursing home. She answers that she had been busy. That’s in lots of cases the essence of sending elderly relatives to such institutions. Last but not least I’d like to point out a very good performance of Bruce Campbell who played “Elvis”. He managed to convince me as a tired bored guy who seeks for something that would revive his life at last.
To sum up, if you need a big laugh, just grab for „Bubba Ho-tep“.

DIAGONALE sounds familiar, doesn't it?

The DIAGONALE Film Festival is a very special event to me. I’ve been to it for the third time this year, which practically means that I’ve been participating in it on a frequent basis since I came to Graz. Although DIAGONALE is supposed to be a festival of the Austrian films, it’s becoming more and more international every year. Consequently I always try to pick some non-Austrian film to watch (not that I have anything against Austrians, but I’m just looking for something “exotic” staying in Austria). Three years ago I even had a stoke of luck and found a film with Polish co-production on displaced people from the East who were made to live in contemporary West Poland after our country had lost its right to this land after the Second World War. That’s e.g. how I learned something new about the history of my home land.

This year I picked a series of three documentary films telling about children in different, to some extent extreme, life situations. An important point of my choice was that they scratch the surface of our summer semester’s topic – immigration.

In the first one of the films, “being u.m.f.”, we get to know about the legal situation of minor refugees in the Austrian refugee camp in Hall, Tirol. The director focuses mainly on the African refugees, almost all of whom flee alone to Europe. While they wait for the decision about (not) granting them political asylum, they often attend school or work for the community to kill the time. The biggest issues of this piece are whether it’s moral to get refugees to work in professions nobody else wants to do while paying them only 2 € per hour and how difficult it is to be in foreign surroundings without relatives, being dependent only on yourself. You can feel only sympathy for people in such circumstances.

“Gemma Kürtelkäfig” is a story of some emigrant kids from the second generation living in Vienna. We can see that they’re somewhere in between – they belong neither totally to the Austrian nor to their parents’ cultural circle. They speak the native language of their parents at home and German everywhere else. What struck me the most was the sheer idea of the Kürtelkäfig – a kind of fenced sports fields and small park surfaces around the Viennese inner city circle. These awful, tiny, prison-like places situated between streets with heavy traffic become an everyday shelter for the characters form the documentary. It’s where you encounter a mix of different backgrounds and learn how it is to be an Ausländer.

“In den Straßen von Delhi” distinguished itself from other two films as the most professional project. This co-production of ORF and SAT1 documents everyday struggle of a young street child in Delhi. Abandoned by his uncle at the age of nine, Sumid learns fast how to take care of himself. At the time of filming he can’t be older than twelve, but we get the impression that he thinks in adult terms. In specific he works in the streets collecting paper and saves the money in a children bank. However, he doesn’t neglect his school attendance and we can see that he’s one of the more talented kids. His dream is to start his own clothes shop one day and seeing his efforts and his “adult behaviour” we start to believe that he’ll make it one day.
The only doubts I had watching this beautiful documentary were about the morality of making such a film while you know that you’re making use of the topic and there are millions of street kids in India who you can’t help.