by ·Comments Off on T/F 2020 Shorts: Rouge

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (Giacconi & Pennuti & Fabbri)

Does different things with colored stage lights, including flashing fullscreen in a mesmeric flicker, story of a musician’s vision loss added at the end to explain the visual scheme.

Secret Screening Short 1

Passing strangely through space and process, works popping into empty spaces, contextual history at the end.

The Sea, The Stars, A Landscape (Alison O’Daniel)

L.A. smog, small groups around the hideous city. Mostly I was engaged by wondering how this short work ties into the filmmaker’s larger project about tuba theft.

Lost Three Make One Found (Atsushi Kuwayama)

Quirky guy drives through Portugal looking for a mythical fountain that can bring peace after a breakup. Funny movie, good translation humor in the subtitles. They interview a hitchhiker about his own life and outlook, then play the interview back for him the next day while filming his reaction – this turns out to have been a genius idea, one of the best scenes of the fest.

by ·Comments Off on The Metamorphosis of Birds (2020, Catarina Vasconcelos)

Long, and feels long. Few living birds, glimpsed in the distance, two dead ones, some feathers, sounds of owls and peacocks. Life and death of parents and grandparents, becoming trees and birds. Imagery of water, using mirrors and photos, watching a photo develop, brings to mind Strong Island until I realized Oliveira must be an influence. Reversing (adding leaves to the trees), time-lapse (flowers opening). Dad reads the movie’s script and quibbles with the details. They burn their grandparents’ letters, she says they’re the private words of a couple who happens to be their grandparents, but we are free to imagine their words – and so we do. She asserts her right to imagine her own family stories, connects to historical artworks, seeing her family in an unrelated painting. Katy compares to Beaches of Agnes – ways to structure memory, using frames + mirrors, life as theater or frames artworks.

My favorite movie of the fest. Tortoise-lite trio Square Peg Round Hole opened, we both liked. The Butch Jones at Cafe Berlin combines their apples + sausage with pancake/egg/bacon, and is the best conceivable breakfast. Overall a good morning in Columbia.

by ·Comments Off on Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020, Bill & Turner Ross)

A constructed doc of real-ish people in a fake bar on its closing night. This movie should have been a dream – arriving in town tipsy and dramamine-woozy, sitting up front at the Missouri Theater for a packed screening of a boozy bar movie, but I probably saw 60% and dozed through the rest. Nobody gets a bloody nose, no pockets are empty, nobody even pays. I’m wary of archness from the very start, the opening titles in a 1980’s TV-sitcom font. We talk about finding truth and empathy in these things, but is it a documentary, or a goof on documentaries, or a fascinating hybrid? Katy is suspicious of the constructed nature of the thing… taking addicts and unfortunates and laughing at them… putting real people in artificial situations, the definition of reality TV (The Real World: Las Vegas Bar). Clunky-sounding indie rockers Cowgirl Jordy opened.