Variety galore on my biggest festival day:
- Louise-Michel, a dark but comedic French satire directed by Gustave Kervern, is quirky fun that doesn’t always work (the ending is silly) but strikes a few ideological blows. 2½ stars.
- A doco about a psychologist in Gaza refugee camps, Pea Holmquist’s Young Freud in Gaza, is an eye opener. Holmquist doesn’t have heaps of material but organizes it well. I now know that Gaza is one of the world’s hellholes. And the film confirmed my view that people are the same everywhere, regardless of ideology or religion – in particular, ignorance and repression in Gaza are so familiar to western eyes. 4 stars.
- Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is a drama about an American bomb squad in Baghdad. I’ll review this in a little more depth but it’s beautifully done and asks questions as the best movies do. If Gaza is a hellhole we in the West are partly responsible for, Iraq is an even worse hellhole that we’re stage managing right now. 4 stars.
- Zift, directed by Bulgarian Javor Gardev, is a harsh noir thriller set in 1960s Sofia. Delightfully filmed in black and white, it overlays Communist repression with a strange hardboiled perspective. An outlandishly different movie experience that I really enjoyed. 3 stars.