It’s getting cold outside but thank God the theaters are only a stone throw away from each other with a warm pub in between. Today has been a great day of film watching. It started off with some great international films from countries like Argentina, Hungary and Australia. The strongest film of the morning went to the Mexican film Dolls (Muñecas). This is maybe not the best film of the festival but without a doubt one of the heaviest and darkest. It’s impossible not to be affected by it and truly is a great piece of film making.
After that block of films I gave myself a nice two hour break. Gave myself a chance to look around and breath a little Uppsala air and one thing’s for sure. It’s small! I’ve been in bigger shopping malls during my visits in USA. But that doesn’t take away the fact that Uppsala really is a beautiful city. Actually, my “walkabout” wasn’t really to play tourist for a few hours. I was using the time to prepare for my next mission, to sit through 8 hours of film. And since I missed some Swedish films yesterday I felt this was my chance for redemption. I was going to watch 8 hours of SWEDISH film.
I need to clear something up with everybody. I can have a hard time with films that try too much to be something they’re not. In other words, pretentious films can really rub me the wrong way. However, since I’m not a hater I will instead focus on the better films (and hate the bad ones in silent).
The first Swedish film that really stood out for me was Tussilago by Jonas Odell. It’s the best animated film of the festival so far in my eyes and it tells a very interesting story about the west german terrorist Norbert Kröcher. The whole film is told from his girlfriends point of view. It’s very well made and feeds you information and animation constantly.
Another great one was Incident By A Bank (Händelse vid bank) by the director Ruben Östlund. The whole film is in one shoot and covers a bank robbery. In this film we have over 90 extras all doing different things so as a director Östlund really shows that he knows what he’s doing. It’s really impressive. I understand why he won the Gold Bear for best short at the Berlin film festival. It’s easy to say that this is a strong contender in winning Best Film here in Uppsala as well.
One film that I personally think no one should miss is I’m Painting Some Imagination (Jag målar lite fantasi). It’s a documentary about two mentally disabled people expressing themselves through art. One of them, Anette, does very basic drawings but gives away the different emotions she’s going through. The other artist, Johannes, really does amazing things. He paints and sculpts. One of the things he likes to do is paint his interpretation of classic pieces from artists like Da Vinci or Munch. The film is truly fascinating
To go through all of the greats and not so greats would result in a text of epic proportion so instead I thought why not divide it into two posts? So be patient. It will be continued.
