IFFR 2009 (the lower range)

La Mujer sin Cabeza (AR 87')
A middle-aged woman is driving on the highway. She becomes distracted and runs over something. It could have been anything. A dog, a child or something else. Shocked, she drives on, but on the days following this incident, she fails to recognise the feelings that bond her to things and people. She just lets herself be taken by the events of her social life. One night she tells her husband that she killed someone on the highway. They go back to the road only to find a dead dog. Friends close to the police confirm that there were no accident reports. Everything returns to normal and the bad moment seems to be over until the news of a gruesome discovery again worries everyone.
With her unusual talent in dissecting suppressed emotions and their social context, Martel focuses on an event that makes a crack in the existing world, in a manner of speaking. With a frighteningly intimate, formal approach and above all through the stunning soundtrack, the viewer is slowly but surely introduced to a life in which something goes gruesomely wrong. In the beautiful details of the world around the protagonist, hence in the out-of-focus background, the worrying social message of the film can be read. Because somewhere, someone has to pay the price for denial, silence and repression.

Better Things (GB 93')
After two prize-winning short films, Duane Hopkins made his début as a feature director with Better Things (previously a CineMart project in Rotterdam), with which he pursued a long British tradition of cinematographic social realism. At the same time, he gives his very own take on it.
Hopkins shows three relationships of inconspicuous lovers who are all in a crisis. There's a schoolgirl who is pestered by her jealous ex-boyfriend. There's the older married couple who are still tormented by an event from the past they cannot discuss, living in a permanent state of cold war with each other. And there are the two young lovers who are in danger of succumbing to their inability to resist the seduction of hard drugs.
Hopkins avoids melodramatic or politically charged class consciousness. He does not tell a story from A to Z, but zooms in on the moments that are decisive in life. With determined precision, he seeks in each of his characters the emotional price that is paid for deeds of which they have not estimated the impact in advance. The observations do not seek a classical climax, but form more of an unprejudiced 'close study' of mutual dependence and the lack of an individual course. And is it far-fetched to compare the heroin intoxication of some of the protagonists with the languid, subtle, warmly photographed style of the film?
Outside of the UK, this movie can not be prize-winning without proper subtitles. My god that English was non understandable.

Tony Manero (CL 98')
The beautiful and gritty film takes its title from John Travolta’s character in the worldwide hit Saturday Night Fever (1977), and is a critical, occasionally gruesome, yet also very funny film. (Personally I think this isn't true at all).
Santiago, 1978. A Chilean TV show organises a contest for a local Tony Manero, while anyone who reveals a contrary opinion is arrested, tortured or murdered by the Pinochet regime. The poor Raúl (beautifully played by Alfredo Castro) is convinced that he'll win this contest as the only real Tony Manero. Certainly if he can have a dance floor with flashing lights under the tiles. Armed with this obsession and the aggrieved tunnel vision of the putdown loser, the immoral opportunist Raúl wants to realise his dream in front of the whole Chilean people .
Tony Manero shows that Chile, about 20 years after the end of the dictatorship, is still coming to terms with its past. Larraín's film does not focus on the dictatorship, but with its idolisation of Tony Manero provides a parallel with today's Chilean society. According to Larraín, the country has forgotten its original culture and traditions, and Chile now functions entirely in America's wake.
The story sounds funny, but I didn't think the movie was catchy or funny at all.

Zara (CH 85')
In an expanse of stony Turkish landscape, two women roam around looking for the village of Zara. The Kurdish Mirka is returning to her birthplace after 12 years, accompanied by her ignorant German-speaking blonde girlfriend. On the way, reality, memory and fantasy increasingly become entangled as they are confronted with people and nightmares from the past.
Zara - literally 'birth of the road' - portrays Mirka’s quest to find the right way back to a wild past she hasn't come to terms with, and, she seems to hope, to a bearable present. Her Western companion wants to mirror her own traumas in those of Mirka and that's why she came with her.
This début by Ayten Mutlu Saray is a poetic meditation about the deep grievances of exile and the history of the Kurdish community that was forced to give up its own language and roots. Not only does the landscape seem to be filled with metaphors, the director shows important rituals and myths that underline the bond between the Kurds and their homeland and express his historic convictions. The gap between East and West turns out to be irreconcilable. Mirka’s companion dies, and burying her Western girlfriend turns out to be the first step on the way to the catharsis Mirka was hoping for. This serves to break through part of the isolation.
I was hoping that I would learn more about the history and the present problems of Kurdistan, but for me the movie was a big disappointment.

Liverpool (AR 84')
Liverpool starts on board a large ship on its way to the Argentine Ushuaia, the most southern city in the world. One of the sailors is Farrel, who tells the captain that he wants to take some leave there in order to visit his mother, whom he hasn't seen for 20 years. He disembarks and, like earlier heroes in Alonso’s films, sets off on his journey. On foot or in the back of a truck, he treks deep into the freezing mountains of Tierra del Fuego. The alcoholic Farrel keeps himself warm with booze - lots of booze - and falls asleep occasionally in strange places. Once he arrives in the hamlet at the end of the world, he finds his mother needy and dying, and he turns out to have a daughter too.
Liverpool has a rather more complex narrative structure than Alonso’s earlier films. The film doesn't end when Farrel reaches his destination. Nor does it end when the protagonist leaves again. And the sketch of the microcosm of the remote village is very hectic in Alonso’s terms.
It is apt that in the case of the apparently minimal narratives of directors like Lisandro Alonso, an endless amount can be written, said and, even better, thought, about issues that are not answered or shown - or not explicitly at least. Where is the daughter's mother? What does the title mean? Where does Farrel end up?
Though the story could have a lot of potential, I think that the movie is rather boring. The characters are way too far from my imagination. The pictures of the landscape are nice but for me that isn't enough for a good movie.