Sometimes, it’s terrible to be a kid. It’s terrible when you are treated in a way that you certainly know isn’t right in the moral sense of being. Watching Konkona Sen Sharma’s A Death in the Gunj is like reading your personal diary from the days of childhood and discovering a beautiful butterfly stuck between the pages of rusted memories. The sad thing is, the butterfly was burnt with a magnifying glass just to become a bookmark in your life. A terrific, understated debut.
The world of the internet is supposed to be a hub that enhances the potential of information and connectivity to a simpler and more cohesive phase. Instead, it has been crowded with memes & viral videos that simply blur the line between performance art and a redundant source of bizarre pleasure. In Kristoffer Borgli’s DRIB – a meta-mockumentary that centers around a weird yet hilarious ad-campaign, we see the lines blurring to an extent of viral value. Kristoffer Borgli sells his film as one big advertisement of a snake driving fire into the gas tank. Does it burn things up? No, not really. But it will sure make you wonder what made the snake get into that liquid filled source in the first place.
German visual artist Julian Rosefeldt lifts, copies and deconstructs the true essence of an experimental-art-house-film to develop something truly fascinating. Hinging on the meaning, presentation, representation, and making of what and how true art is to be construed, Rosefeldt’s film is a ticking time bomb that explodes multiple times and baffles your incomprehensible sensibility. Featuring the uber-talented chameleon – Cate Blanchett, who plays 13 different characters in this 95 mins showcase of enthralling visuals and sharply observed insights, Manifesto is one of its kind.
The 50 Most Anticipated Films Of 2017.
I think the toughest task for a film-maker is to get truly understated and moving performances out of a cast of young people. Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 is essentially a story of an orphaned six-year-old battling loneliness, confusion, isolation and instant change in her life. The feelings and emotions that are almost alien to her at this point and day in her age and the changes are too on the face for her. Simón shows her film through the eyes of two children and their daily play-routine in this beautiful, semi-autobiographical family drama. Achieving great emotional earnestness without succumbing to sentimentality.
Ana Urushadze’s Scary Mother is undoubtedly one of the most unsettling, freakishly bleak, sordidly surreal and uncompromising film of the year. Showcasing midlife crises in an unexplainable hysteria, Urushadze’s film is about a middle-aged Georgian housewife who’s sudden decision to write a novel changes her entire life and existence with her family. Considered to be filthy by the general consensus, the novel and the film in question have supposedly meta connections to each other. It is incredible daring of Ana Urushadze to makes such a film as her first feature.
20 Must-See Films At IFFI – Goa, 2017.