The 18th Edition of the Festival Cinema Africano, Asia and Latino Americano returns this 7-13 April. And like last year (which included Benji Garcia's BATAD...for the pics, click HERE), another Filipino film is to be presented to the Italian public - Brillante Mendoza's TIRADOR as part of the Competition Segment "FInestre sul Mondo".As I have yet to watch it, (and hopefully, i DO get to watch it, I'm still waiting for my Press Pass!!! fingers crossed!) I post here some of the reviews about the film, which apparently has already done a signifcant orbit around various international film festivals.
NOTES ON TIRADOR (film by Brillante Mendoza)
"Rapidly emerging as an important new talent, young Filipino director Brillante Mendoza delivers his second feature of the year, a wickedly energetic portrait of Manila street life shot on the fly with a digital camera." JA, Eye Weekly, Toronto
"From the opening police raid to the closing political rally, director Mendoza takes his hand-held camera into the heart of Manila to create a remarkable, lively, intimate and realistic portrayal of life in a slum!Not one moment looks staged, and the cast performs flawlessly. Mendoza never plays to our sympathy or editorializes. He lets his stories tell themselves and weaves sharp social observation into his frantic and often funny action." Now Magazine
"Superb drama "Slingshot" makes the streets, alleys and crushing deprivations of Manila come to wrenching life. Shot like a mini-"Bourne" film with lightweight high-def video cameras, it darts from one acutely observed vignette to another! Some of the details break your heart, without the trappings or musical cues of melodrama." Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
"(The) biggest discovery of the (Vancouver film) festival! Mendoza's most audacious inspiration is shooting the film on location during the election season, where the politicians have done his set dressing for him...(While) the title Slingshot...(is) a literal translation of the street slang for thief, (it) is oddly appropriate for a film that moves with such whiplash momentum and (with) characters who rush and ricochet through their worldâ” Sean Axmaker, Green Cine Daily Vancouver Dispatch
"Mendoza's breathless account of desperate lives in the mean streets of Manila is a pummeling and visceral experience!A highly impressive technical exercise, yet at heart offers a penetrating glimpse into lives lived on instinct, predation, and reaction alone”Doug Cummings, Film Journey
"not so much a movie as a moving portrait ”complex and complete, hopeless and honest " into the underbelly of a society that could be as at home beneath a city as within...The feat of (the) film lies with its ability to deftly deliver us to a world we haven't seen before and demonstrate that the lowest denominators in society are common the globe over. The film delivers slogans, substantiated by our own daily news, that democracies are definitely not infallible.” Elliot V. Kotek, Moving Pictures
"(Reminding one) of Los Olvidados, both in its unsentimental treatment of the poor and its political critique!The final shot, showing an anonymous petty crime accompanied by a crowd singing. How Great Is Our God,would have had Buñuel smiling.” David Bordwell,
davidbordwell.net
"(Director) Brillante Mendoza…has come a long way in a few years!The many vignettes in the film have an additive effect, contributing to a larger picture. Like City of God, (the film) is relentless."”Bruce, Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film
"The film finds Mendoza once again taking his camera into the teeming streets to capture life as it flows right now. This is a fiction film, but Mendoza's impressive skill is to impose a calculated narrative onto Manila's constant unpredictability, shaping its ground-level chaos into art.It shows Mendoza's rapidly maturing abilities with digital cinema. What is more (is his) novelist's eye for the full range of human behaviour, especially the ironies of greed and vanity.” Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival
"No disrespect to the late Robert Altman (well, not much), but you ain't seen multi-strand plotting or heard overlapping dialogue until you've watched Slingshot. From the opening scene of a night-time police raid on the building, the film plunges us into a world of non-stop noise and chaos.(The film provides an) angry but heart-breaking picture of a corner of society with no obvious way forward.” Tony Rayns, Vancouver International Film Festival
"The most stunning film at the Vancouver (filmfest) was Slingshot, by the prolific Filipino Brillante Mendoza. With its skin-tight realism, the movie positions us right in (a) Filipino slum where the everyday existence of the characters is as squalid as the sludge-filled gutters of their ghetto.Urgent, powerful and devoid of sensationalism, this is one of the year's best films to come out of anywhere.” Kong Rithdee, Bangkok Post
Here are glimpses at other films in the category:
ANDALUCIA
Regia: Alain Gomis
Nazionalità: Senegal / Francia / Spagna 2007
Enthusiastic young thirty year old, both funny and violent, Yacine lives in a caravan, on the margins of reality, gets by with little jobs. Attracted by the unknown man but without flowing with it, he one day meets a woman who looks like him. And so reappears in among people he had so carefully avoided: Djibril, a childhood friend from the city, then his Algerian family headed by his, formerly in the FLN converted to Catholicism. This community brings back easily to the surface memories of exclusion, desire for recognition, boyhood frustration, and, in order to move forward, Yacine will have to rid himself of it forever and take-off.
EL BANO DEL PAPA - (IL BAGNO DEL PAPA)
Regia: Enrique Fernandez, César Charlone
Nazionalità: Uruguay / Brasile / Francia
A small South American village is in a flurry over the Pope's 1988 visit.
GETTING HOME - (ANDARE A CASA)Regia: Zhang Yang
Nazionalità: Cina
A black comedy about a farmer who tries to bring home the body of his friend, who died far from their town.
LA MAISON JAUNE - (LA CASA GIALLA)Regia: Amor Hakkar
Nazionalità: Algeria / Francia
In the arid mountainous landscapes of Algeria, Aya, a young girl of twelve, is digging a plot of land when a police car pulls up. The policemen hands her a letter describing the accidental death of her elder brother who was doing his military service. As soon as the rest of the family is informed, the father, Mouloud, sets off to collect his son’s body. Determined to do right by his family, he braves all sorts of dangers to bring back his son's remains.
MUNYURANGABO - GIORNO DELLA LIBERAZIONERegia: Lee Isaac Chung
Nazionalità: Ruanda / Usa
An orphan of the Rwandan genocide travels from Kigali to the countryside on a quest for justice.
MUTUM
Regia: Sandra Kogut
Nazionalità: Brasile
"Mutum" is a coming of age story seen through the eyes of a ten year old boy. Thiago lives with his family on an isolated farm in the arid backlands of Minas Gerais, Brazil. As the story unfolds and Thiago is forced to confront separations and betrayal within the home, Thiago begins, little by little, to see and understand a place that he had never been able to before, thus slowly letting go of his innocence. "Mutum" is an adaptation of the novel "Manuelzão e Miguilim" by João Guimarães Rosa
OUT OF COVERAGE - (FUORI COPERTURA)
Regia: Abdullatif Abdulhamid
Nazionalità: Siria
Amer and Zohair are friends. While Zohair spends time in prison for a crime he did not commit, Amer devotes his time, energy and own family’s needs towards Zohair’s wife and little daughter. Now, as Zohair, is about to be released, Amer faces an unexpected conflict between good and bad - a classic duel between him and his devil. Will Zohair’s return lead Amer back to his small family life?
POR SUS PROPIOS OJOS - (ATTRAVERSO I SUOI OCCHI)Regia: Liliana Paolinelli
Nazionalità: Argentina
Two students would like to make a film on women who have family in prison. It turns out to be quite difficult to get in touch in the first place and to build up confidence. Elsa, the mother of one prisoner, eventually agrees but under condition that her son in prison is being interviewed as well. Pretending to be the son’s girlfriend, Alicia has to undergo the humiliating controls in prison and understands that the elder woman plays a double game in order to pull her son out of his despair and lethargic state. She has used Alicia like Alicia used her as a protagonist in her film. But then everything becomes different. Turning a documentary makes you learn a lot about yourself. Although he is proven guilty and the prison cell is small and depressing, Alicia falls in love with the prisoner and herself becomes a “wife of a prisoner”. Films as a medium of participating observation, the responsibility of a filmmaker, the wretchedness of the convicts and the co-punishment of the relatives.
BUDDHA COLLAPSED OUT OF SHAME -(BUDDA CROLLÒ PER LA VERGOGNA)
Regia: Hana Makhmalbaf
Nazionalità: Iran
This unusual film, directed by a 19-year-old, is shot on Afghan locations very close to the spot where the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban destroyed the centuries-old gigantic statue of Buddha.
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