An Overview of the 31st Hamilton International Film Festival

Hamilton’s 31st International Film Festival came to a close on Sunday, bringing down the curtain on Rialto Cinema’s eleven years of hosting responsibility.  It was not a bad way to go out, with attendance numbers well up on 2007.  The general perception was that this year’s programme was a superior one. From the perspective of a viewer who took in eighteen films I can but agree.

If there was a weak link amongst those movies that I saw it was the French farces.  Both “L’Invite” and “Welcome to the Sticks” were genuine crowd pleases but for me the experience of watching such slight entertainments in the context of heavier and more worthy offerings was one which brought to mind the old truth that not everything in a language other than English is necessarily an art film.

“L’Invite” felt like a warmed over version of the classic “The Dinner Game”, its contrived plot and charmingly eccentric if not stupid characters falling well short of the credibility required even in physical comedy.  “Welcome to the Sticks”, was more satisfying, especially once it warmed up.  The tale of a big city middle manager relocated to a backwater of France, it eventually delivered some belly laughs in spite of the difficulties of translating a lot of the essentially verbal humour.  It also proved unexpectedly sentimental, the end dedication to the filmmaker’s mother - herself from the region being satirised - inducing the odd tear.

Altogether less moving was “Teeth”, the only film from the Incredibly Strange portion of the Festival that I managed to get to.  Drawing on the Freudian myth of vagina dentata to tell the story of a repressed christian school girl’s discovery that her private parts have fangs, it played like an amalgam of a 1970s b-grade horror film and a more contemporary feminist diatribe.  Blackly funny in parts, it had many a male in the audience crossing his legs and silently promising to show his girl friend a whole lot more respect.  Benefiting from an excellent performance from lead actress Jess Wiexler, it would have been better still if the tone was more consistent and the satire less scatter-shot.

Also falling short of its potential was “The Wave”, a German film which attempted to dramatise a real life incident which occurred in an American high school in the 1960s.  Transposing the action to a contemporary German school undermined the material.  It strained credibility that teenagers brought up on the horrors of the Nazi regime could so easily slip into fascist behaviour, still less so quickly and radically.   The melodramatic elements in the plot always threatened to obscure the film’s political message and the climax was ridiculous and unsatisfying.

Melodrama was something that you could not accuse “In Bruges” of.  A European variation on Tarantino, featuring two inept English hit men hiding out in the titular Belgium city, it certainly had its funny moments whilst never really escaping from Quentin’s shadow.

Notwithstanding a certain across the board nostalgic theme, the music documentaries on the programme were a real high light.  “Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer” and “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song” depicted two American originals who could not have been more different from one another.  O’Day suffered from race prejudice and drug addiction, transcending both through personality and sheer application of talent.  Seeger, a left wing activist whose politics were always part of his folk music message, was a victim of the black list.  Both films balanced interviews with their subjects and the subjects’ admirers with at times stunning performance footage.  They were social and historical documentaries as much as biographical and music ones.

At the tale end of the Seeger film we see Pete protesting the Iraq war.  Over its end credits a re-recording, with Billy Bragg, of one of his anti-Vietnam anthems, plays.  Such was also the agenda of “CSNY: Deja Vu”. Much like the concerts it showcased this film was a political polemic dressed up as musical entertainment.  Not that this was in any way a bad thing, it’s just that fans expecting something a bit more focused on the performers and their craft from the reunion tour of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young might have been surprised, and a minority even disappointed.  Any account of past animosity between the band mates was sidestepped in favour of a united, anti-Bush front.

An even more pointed and multi-faceted attack on the war came in “Taxi to the Darkside”, the best documentary of the Festival.  Exploring the circumstances under which American soldiers came to torture a completely innocent Afghan captive to death, Alex Gibney establishes how the Bush administration has been responsible for deliberately creating a culture of mass human rights abuse under the guise of its ‘war on terror’.  A real strength of the film were interviews with senior legal advisers to the presidency, leaving the audience in no doubt as to Bush’s moral bankruptcy. 

New Zealand’s own more modestly political documentary was “The Hollow Men”, an account by socialist director Alistair Barry of the National Party’s last electoral campaign.  Those looking for sleaze about Don Brash and the head of the Business Round Table were sadly let down by Barry’s scrupulously serious adaptation of Nicky Hauger’s book.  “The Hollow Men” was less an exclusive attack on National than a straightforward portrayal of the type of media strategy employed by any political party.  Sure this involved a certain amount of lying, deception and hidden agendas by the likes of Brash and Key, but anyone who thinks that Labour or New Zealand First or any other outfit doesn’t indulge in the same type of thing needs a history lesson.

More humanistic virtues were celebrated in three other documentaries: “Man on Wire”, “A Complete History of My Sexual Failure”, and “Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane that Crashed on the Mountains”.  Whether the subject matter involved illegal tightrope walking across the tallest man made structure in the world, getting your testicles squeezed on screen by a middle aged dominatrix or eating your best friend, these films were all fascinating, moving experiences.

Amongst the fictional work I saw four stood out for their originality.  I probably did not love “Persepolis” as much as most but its imaginative approach to contemporary Iranian history, blending the personal and political, set new standards in adult animation.

“Be Kind Rewind” was a wonderful wacky, heartfelt ode to low budget, do it yourself film-making by the king of in-camera effects, Michel Gondry.  While the cheerily inept remakes of commercial classics like “Ghostbusters” and “Driving Miss Daisy” provoked real laughs the movie’s soul lay in a representation of the early life of jazz pioneer Fats Waller.

“Hunger” was an impressive debut by the renowned installation artist with the too famous name, Steve McQueen.  Detailing, in at times painful detail, the prison experiences of IRA activist Bobby Sands, “Hunger” had a lean, disciplined structure and visceral technique, managing to be simultaneously revolting and riveting.

Finally, “The Counterfeiters” was pure European class.  A Holocaust drama with a wry sense humour it continued a recent trend of excellence in Germanic cinema: an insightful, honest account of the Nazi past.