What makes a good film festival? The number of Cannes revelations? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen so many good films on such a short period of time! CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' (ENDLESS) by Romanian director Cristian Nemescu was awarded the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes. Unfortunately, the 27 year old director was killed in an automobile accident last summer, just before the montage phase of the movie. The film however was left the way he edited and cut his work and although it’s length of 155 minutes, Nemescu’s first feature-length film doesn’t suffer at all from this rough cut. The plot is simple: during the war in Kosovo, in 1999, in a small Romanian village, the chief of the railway station, who happens to be the local gangster as well, stops a NATO train transporting military equipment. The transport, supervised by American soldiers, is crossing Romania without official documents, based only on verbal approval of the Romanian government. Their arrival changes the place into the village of all opportunities. Nemescu’s universal language is both very entertaining and compelling. A real festival hit!
Brand Upon The Brain! (Guy Maddin – Canada) **
Canadian film maverick Guy Maddin’s latest extravaganza ‘Brand Upon The Brain!’ has everything you would expect of Maddin: filmed in the style of the silent film and featuring major doses of memory loss, conflicts and romantic intrigues. This silent, semi-autobiographical tale tells the story of a young Maddin who lives with his teenage sister on a mysterious island that they are one day to inherit. They share this space with a group of orphans who have installed themselves in a lighthouse. From the top of this their every move is observed by Guy’s tyrannical mother, while his father – a scientist-cum-inventor – works away in secret day and night down in the cellar. When a series of strange wounds appears on the head of several orphans, Wendy and Chance Hale, a pair of teenage detectives, begin their investigation. A typical Maddin but far from spectacular.
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