Trickster Magazine

Listed alphabetically, not in any order of importance, here are 10 film recommendations from this year’s Love & Anarchy Film Festival program in Helsinki. Love & Anarchy is an established festival run by fans and loved by the multitudes. It’s already their 37th (!) edition but who’s counting when you’re forever young. Our choices are directed to you, dear readers! Film fans, who can appreciate unique and quirky cinema and are ready to believe that cinema is an art form first and foremost but can also be damn entertaining and certainly socially relevant. For completists, I would first recommend checking out screenings of Asian films, because those travel notoriously badly, and are also rarely available in cinemas or VOD later. Love & Anarchy has always had a strong Asian selection, so this is of the notable strengths of their programming, and a chance to see stuff that will be very difficult to pick up later. Four awarded Cannes films – Sirat, The Sound of Falling, It Was Just an Accident and Sentimental Value – are all highly worth checking out, but as they only seem to have single gala screenings that are already sold out, they were left off this list.

R&A Trailblazers section seems to be focussed on classic European female filmmakers this year. Amongst the others, we find Adoption by Hungarian Márta Mészáros. This Berlinale Golden Bear winner from 1975 is exceptional in several respects. A black and white story of an unlikely friendship between an older woman and a teenage girl flows and weaves through sceneries, bringing the characters closer and then moving then further apart again. The camera inspects its subjects like a dreamy hand, Lajos Koltai’s camerawork is truly unique – check his unorthodox way to handle focus and framing in the wedding dance scene, amongst many others.

“Adoption” tackles heavy topics of loneliness and belonging but does so with grace and without any unnecessary enforcement of emotion. It’s all there, under our eyes. Quietly coming to life.

Another Berlinale title, this year’s audience award winner, Spanish “Deaf” makes a strong case against all those naysayers who claim that they have already seen it all and cinema has nothing new to offer. Think again. Depicting a relationship between a deaf woman and a hearing man, and their child that comes into their life to change everything, the director Eva Libertad utilizes remarkable sound design, exposing the everyday life to the viewers alternatively from the man’s and the woman’s perspective. Rarely has any film been so powerful in bringing the deaf experience to the screen. If a moving picture can make us better understand the life of the challenged around us, it can truly make the world a better place.

EXHUMA

Exhuma reminds us effectively that “civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness”, as spelled out by our favourite doomsayer Werner Herzog. So true. Scratch a bit further and all sorts of old spells and forces start to seep out to swallow us whole. This is what the protagonists of “Exhuma” – a band of paranormalists specializing in burial customs and crossing over – are going to find out the hard way. Sometimes it’s just best to let sleeping dogs lie. Or not really dogs … in this case.

“Exhuma” effortlessly blends modern Korean life with ancient mythology, resulting in a two-hour-plus imaginative nailbiter. It’s a horror film, a thriller, a social drama. And with a script as tight as a noose around your neck. Just like the Koreans know best.

LITTLE TROUBLE GIRLS

Daydreamer Lucia joins a Catholic school choir and in a rehearsal camp at the convent sees her unsteerable sensual impulses lose direction between her choirmate Ana-Maria, a construction worker, and God.

There have been quite a few notable coming-of-age films for girls, be it by Sofia Coppola, Céline Sciamma or even Greta Gerwig. Slovenian Urška Djukić has managed to weave together a film that will proudly (and probably somewhat bashfully) stand next to the best of the genre. The film amicably follows the golden rule of cinema – show don’t tell –  and manages to paint a rich tapestry of teenage budding sexuality, playing with shades and half-tones instead of bright colours. Makes the probability of understanding teenage girls seem… not totally impossible.

MEMOIR OF A SNAIL

Grace, who has been separated from her brother at birth, must overcome her insecurities and learn to love life despite misfortunes and bad luck.After “Harvey Krumpet“ and “Mary and Max”, the inimitable Australian stop-motion man Adam Elliot is back with his signature plasticine animation universe. The story is suitably quirky and told in supremely detail, both visually and verbally. Nobody can make us root for the misfits quite like Elliot does.

NOUVELLE VAGUE

Given that the French New Wave is prime nerd gatekeeper territory, it’s no wonder that “Nouvelle vague” has been accused of being “irreverential” to the greats like Godard, factually inaccurate, etc. Who cares. “Nouvelle vague” should be good fun to any fan of this revolutionary cinematic movement, charting the events of Godard making his feature film debut “Breathless” that most positively changed the course of the art of cinema forever. And I suppose it’s just as much fun for the novices – a sort of introductory piece to an era where a bunch of young critics decided that they want to start making films like no other has done before.

Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle vague” is a warm and respectful homage to the Frence New Wave movement. The whole film is also a sort of meta-commentary on the New Wave cinema, because it utilizes many of the same techniques and visual ideas than the original films.

LOVE / SEX / DREAMS

Sort of three-in-one recommendation, because it’s quite hard (and fruitless) to highlight any single title in Dag Johan Haugerud’s extremely hygge indie trilogy about life and love in contemporary Oslo. These films are so chilled out that from a certain angle they can seem like a daily soap opera. In the times of conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and wherever else, it’s startlingly refreshing to experience a cinematic world where the socio-political realities seemingly don’t exist at all. Haugerud’s films are prime “first world” material, with interpersonal problems and dilemmas that plague people who do not really have issues with survival. On the other hand, “Love”, “Sex” and “Dreams” form a remarkably strong and distinct aesthetical whole that should please the cinephiles everywhere. Case in point: Golden Bear from this year’s Berlinale to the last piece of the trilogy, “Dreams”.

THE SPARROW IN THE CHIMNEY

“The Sparrow in the Chimney” is essentially a recount of rising familial tension during a weekend in a country house – the family members have some deep resentments buried in the subconscious that start to bubble to the surface as things unravel. But the events or the plot is secondary to the way it is done. The Swiss Ramon Zürcher’s cinema is truly challenging even to the most dedicated cinema viewer, and his stuff is easy to dismiss or even hate, because of the way he constructs his films. Taking Bresson’s and Fassbinder’s awkward acting style to the extreme, his characters move around strangely, interact unnaturally, freeze in the middle of the scene, drag out the moments. Everything is off. You might walk away from the cinema with a big and disturbing question mark on your forehead, but it is a film you will most likely revisit in your head long after the screening. In the era of super-sleek mass entertainment powered by otherworldly special effects, this kind of a film almost seems like a one-man attack on everything sensible. The slowest harakiri.

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

Quebec filmmaker Matthew Rankin has described his wonderful “Universal Language” as “Ruin porn meets Hallmark Christmas movie”. Here, he has blended the deadpan small indie sensibility of Quebec cinema, and Iranian poetic cinema. The film takes place in makeshift “Iran” that is projected on the Quebequois bleak urban concrete cityscapes. Rankin embraces the surreal and follows his Iranian characters when they find a bunch of money in the ice and begin trying to come up with a way to get it out. Singular objective splinters into substories and smaller themes, until it all starts to resemble a Persian carpet where it is sometimes hard to understand where a pattern begins or ends.