RESTORING FAMILY HONOR IN KYRGYZSTAN

MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL, September 1, 2016 --  An Airbus jetliner touches down in an airport in Kyrgyzstan.  Azat, a 20-something Kyrgyz who has been living in the United States for 15 years, has returned to his native country to fulfill an obligation – and to restore his family’s honor.

Azat’s father, Murat, died in the U.S. a year ago. It was his last wish that money he borrowed from people in his village be repaid. But when Azat arrives at the house that his family had occupied, he finds the house abandoned and in disrepair.

Directed by Bakyt Mukul and Dastan Zhapar Uulu, “A Father’s Will” is a story of family, friendship, changing demographics, and ancient custom. After his arrival at the family home and as he goes about contacting those who had lent money to his father, Azat discovers a village nearly frozen in time, with dirt roads and horse-drawn wagons and many young people determined to leave and create a better future.

At first, Azat is met with some hostility from those who lent money to his father. And his initial contact with his father’s brother, Choro, is met with indifference. But Azat persists, and in parallel he begins to restore the family home, an effort which becomes a metaphor for restoring his family’s integrity. He later meets with the elders of the village and explains that his father had been cremated, an unprecedented situation that leaves the elders unsure of what to do. They resolve the situation by giving Murat’s ashes a proper Kyrgyz funeral and burial.

The 114-minute film is both bleak, in its depiction of a tribal society that seems to have not progressed, and beautiful, especially the vistas of snow-capped mountains. Western viewers will find its pacing slow, but perhaps this was a deliberate decision by the directors to reflect how time seems to have stood still in this Kyrgyz village. What’s left unresolved is whether Azat stays or returns to the U.S.

A FAMILY ODYSSEY IN THE WAR-TORN MIDDLE EAST

MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL, August 31, 2016 – “House Without Roof”, set in Iraqi Kurdistan and Germany, is a deeply felt and moving story of three siblings who journey to Kurdistan to fulfill their mother’s last wish to be buried next to their father.

The film opens with a clip of Jan, Alan and Liya as children cavorting during a photo shoot with their parents. The happiness and joy of that time quickly fades as the story picks up in present day Germany with the mother’s controversial decision to return to Kurdistan.

That decision comes as a surprise to Alan and Liya, but not to the elder Jan, who knew about it but did not tell his siblings. This creates a rift among the three, but the sudden death of their mother forces them to come together again and to honor her last request.

But the rift among the siblings only grows as more family secrets are revealed about their father’s past during the regime of Saddam Hussein, a past that bitterly divides the extended family.

The siblings’ journey to bury their mother next to their father runs a gamut of emotions, from anger and division to reconciliation and love. The three principal actors – Mina Ozlem Sagdic, Sasun Sayan and Murat Seven – are superb in their roles as the siblings as is the supporting cast.

The film was written and directed by Soleen Yusef, who was born in Duhok in Iraqi Kurdistan. According to the website Filmfest Munchen, Yusef’s family fled to Germany when she was nine years old. She trained as a singer and actress in Berlin – in the film Liya is a singer in a German night club – and enrolled at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in the dramatic directing department. “House Without Roof” is her graduating film.

“House Without Roof” won the Best Production award at Filmfest Munchen earlier this year. 

WHERE NO GOVERNMENT SHOULD EVER GO

MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL, August 30, 2016 --  Kreso and Sikic are the Croatian equivalent of the odd couple, two government workers who couldn’t be more different in personality and behavior. The two men are paired together, under the auspices of a new Croatian government department called the State Family Inspectorate, to find widows of Croatian soldiers who are living in extra-marital unions so that their late husbands’ pensions can be revoked.

The film, called the Ministry of Love, stars Stjepan Peric as Kreso, an unemployed biologist who takes the job at the new government department reluctantly. His attitude draws the ire of the sandwich-chomping Sikic, who is determined to identify cheating widows and earn a bonus for himself. Sikic is played by Drazen Kuhn. After some misfires with widows that mark the duo as losers in the eyes of the new department, Kreso figures out a ruse that begins to work and eventually puts them at the top of the investigative unit.

But Kreso, who is having his own troubles with his wife, falls for one of the widows, and he begins to question the morality of the Croatian law authorizing the attempt to deprive the war windows of their husbands’ pensions. At the same time, his young son begins to ask his father about his job and what defines what Kreso tells him is the “common good”.

Directed by Croatia’s Pavo Marinkovic, this 103-minute film is funny and touching, with solid performances by Peric and Kuhn.


    Director Pavo Marinkovic at the Imperial Theater in Montreal

Marinkovic, who introduced the film at the Montreal festival, said the deeply unpopular law to revoke the pensions was never put into effect. Ministry of Love is a Croatian-Czech-Romanian co-production.

THE JAPANESE REMARRIAGE MARKET: BUYERS SHOULD BEWARE

MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL, August 30, 2016 – “Black Widow Business”, a film by 76-year old Japanese director Yasuo Tsuruhashi, is the story of two deadly scam artists who are in the business of stealing the life savings of elderly men lured into marriage.

Toru Kashiwagi, played by the actor Etsushi Toyokawa, runs a corrupt “marriage agency” that caters to widowers looking to remarry. Toru’s 50/50 partner in the schemes is Sayoko Takeuchi, played by the actress Shinobu Otake, a 60-ish widow who charms the older men with her compliant attitude and musings about looking at the stars in the sky. According to the film’s production notes, there are more than 4,000 marriage agencies in Japan that are used by more than 600,000 people each year, and fraud is on the rise.


   Shinobu Otake at the Imperial Theater in Montreal

At the start of the film, Sayoko’s latest prey is 80-year old Kozo Nakase, a former professor, who has two grown daughters, Komomi and Naoko. Kozo falls for Sayoko and marries her, but then Sayoko plots to kill Kozo by tampering with his medication. Kozo eventually dies, and at the funeral Sayoko informs Kozo’s daughters that she will be inheriting all of his large estate.

This outrages Komomi and she contacts a college classmate who is a lawyer. They hire a private investigator and begin to learn the awful truth about Sayoko – the many men she has married have gone missing.

From here, the film unfortunately becomes slapstick and falls apart. The private investigator tries to blackmail Toru, who then manipulates Sayoko’s hyper son into killing the investigator, who botches the assassination attempt and accidentally “kills” Sayoko in a fight. Toru and the son stuff what they think is the dead Sayoko in a suitcase but as they try to load the luggage into a car are tripped up by a police patrol.

In the end, however, no police action is taken and Toru and Sayoko continue to go about their heinous business.

For their parts, stars Shinobu Otake and Etsushi Toyokawa are well cast and convincing in their roles. But they can’t overcome the faults in the plot. A more convincing, and satisfying, ending would have been to have the scheme exposed when the police came on the scene and the two perpetrators brought to justice.

IN BOSNIA, A DISAPPEARANCE OF MORE THAN ONE KIND

MONTREAL FILM FESTIVAL, August 31, 2014 – The Bosnian War, which was fought between 1992 and 1995, resulted in the formation of Bosnia and Herzegovina but the conflict cost the inhabitants of that war-torn land and surrounding nations such as Croatia dearly. It has been estimated that nearly a quarter of the Croatian economy, for example, was devastated, with much of the country’s physical infrastructure in ruins as well as thousands of people displaced as refugees.

But a new film from Bosnia, called The Bridge at the End of the World, makes the case that the damage went far beyond the physical. The emotional and spiritual toll was enormous, too, leaving many without much work, despondent, and almost hopeless. Many of the scenes in the film, for example, depict burned out and decrepit Bosnian homes and buildings and the equally burned out people who exist – live would be too strong a word – in them. The film leaves one wondering whether the people have any future at all.

This context forms the basis of the mystery at the heart of The Bridge at the End of the World. The story starts with the return of Serbs who were forced to leave their homes during the war. Bosnian Croats whose villages had been destroyed during the fighting were forced to relocate as refugees in the homes of the fleeing Croatian Serbs. With the return of the Serbs, the Bosnian Croats start to feel uneasy about their future.

In the midst of this, an elderly Bosnian Croat named Jozo disappears. Local police officer Filip is charged with investigating the old man’s disappearance. Filip interviews relatives and acquaintances of the old man, traces his most recent movements, and, in the process, compiles conflicting views of the events and the people involved.

But a seemingly obscure clue signals a breakthrough, which enables Filip to discover the real reason the old man has disappeared.

The film is uncompromising in its depiction of the Bosnian Croats and the world in which they now live. Idle, listless, seemingly without motivation to rebuild their homes and their lives, powerless over their fate, the Bosnians drink hard liquor and smoke endlessly as they stare into the void. The photography, with its tight close-ups, seems to suggest that most of the people exist only in a moment in time, that they have no better future.

The exception is a woman named Sanja who Filip connects with, a waitress who appears on the edge of becoming a prostitute but who wants to find a way to a better life. Filip helps the young woman, providing the film’s singular ray of hope.

The director of the film is Branko Istvancic. The actors include Aleksander Bogdanovic as Filip; Slaven Knezovic, as Jozo’s nephew Dragan; and Sanja Radisic as Filip’s friend Sanja. The film’s running time is 115 minutes.

FINDING NEW MEANING IN LIFE

MONTREAL FILM FESTIVAL, August 30, 2014 – To Life!, a new German film making its world premiere here, is the story of Ruth, a former cabaret singer who experienced the Nazi occupation in Poland during World War II, and Jonas, a young drifter who is living in his van in Berlin.

Ruth is being relocated into a government-run housing project in the city. Jonas gets a day job helping to move Ruth into her new apartment in the project. When Ruth refuses to ride in the moving company’s truck, Jonas offers to drive her to the new apartment in his van.

The ride is the beginning of a remarkable connection between the 60+ Polish Jew, who has increasing difficulty in dealing with the past, and the 20-something Jonas, who has his own present-day demons. When Ruth attempts suicide shortly after moving into the apartment, Jonas rescues her, and later discovers in her apartment a film collection of Ruth’s cabaret performances made after the war. The connection between Ruth and Jonas deepens as Jonas becomes increasingly curious about how the talented Ruth ended up alone in a housing project and as Ruth realizes that Jonas, who she learns is suffering from multiple sclerosis, is avoiding his adoring girlfriend Emily in order to shield her from his disease.

To Life! Is the story of two people of different ages from very different backgrounds helping each other to emerge from despair and embrace life again. It is a touching, inspiring film with excellent performances by Hannelore Elsner as Ruth, Max Riemelt as Jonas, and Ayline Tezel as Emily,

The film, in German with English subtitles, was directed by Uwe Janson, who has made more than 70 films. The writing is credited to Stephen Glantz and Thorsten Wettcke. The film’s running time is 86 minutes.

THE SUMMER HOUSE: A MAN'S BI-SEXUALITY ENDS IN TRAGEDY

With the director, Curtis Burz.

MONTREAL FILM FESTIVAL, August 29, 2014 – The Summer House, a new German film making its North American debut here, is the story of Markus, a successful architect whose unchecked bi-sexual desires end in ruin for two families.

Markus has liaisons with other bi-sexual men which he keeps secret from his wife and 11-year old daughter, who unwittingly idolizes him. But when Johannes, the young son of a close friend of Markus’s, overhears his father confess to Markus that he is having financial difficulties, the relationship between Markus and the young boy goes down a dangerous and ultimately fatal path.

Markus can’t control his increasing desire for the boy, but little does he know that he’s being manipulated by the sandy-haired Johannes, who is determined to help his financially strapped father. At the same time, Markus’s relationship with his wife Christine, who already had doubts about Markus’s sexual orientation, continues to deteriorate, although she tries to hold on to what is clearly a failed marriage.

Needless to say, this film doesn’t end well. In fact, the shock of the ending, which I won’t reveal, is so great that I initially felt that perhaps the director, Curtis Burz, had gone too far.

In a question and answer session after the film, I asked Burz, who also wrote the screenplay, what motivated him to make the film and what he thought the film’s message was. Burz, who in addition to being a film maker is also a practicing psychologist in Berlin, says he has encountered so many instances of sexual and intimacy problems in marriages, women who hang on to relationships far too long, and victimized children that he had to finally tell the story. The message of the film, he said, is that children need to be protected.

The Summer House is Burz’s third film. The running time is 95 minutes.

The cast includes Sten Jacobs as Markus; Jaspar Fuld as Johannes, the young boy; Anna Altmann as Christine; and Nina Splettstober (Altmann’s real-life daughter) as Elisabeth, Markus’s daughter.