Revelation Film Festival 2020 - Wrap up (plus podcast summary)

 

Right, that was a fun four days. I'm going to run through the nine films I saw with some brief notes and a rating on each. Here goes.

My Rembrandt 

This documentary is a bit of a love letter to Rembrandt with the makings of a controversy bubbling underneath. The director, Oeke Hoogendijk, introduces us to Jan Six (pictured left) and his possible new discovery of a hitherto unknown Rembrandt. The story flicks around various eccentric collectors and it all looks fantastic but the film could have been a bit more focussed on the central issue - namely the veracity of the 'new' painting. For more on this film, see the longer review here.

Desert One 

This documentary, by esteemed filmmaker Barbara Kopple, tells the story of the failed attempt to rescue American hostages from the U.S. embassy in Tehran after the Iranian revolution in 1979. There are some good moments here (notably interviews with U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his Vice-President, Walter Mondale) and the animation is pretty good. The issues I had are more to do with the way Kopple glorifies the cock-up and vilifies almost anyone not in a U.S. forces uniform. It also got fairly boring, which should have been easy to avoid with such a gripping real life tale.

iHuman 

There's a lot to recommend in this doco about the future of AI. It starts with Jürgen Schmidhuber, an absolute bellend who is supposed to be the 'father of modern AI' and jumps about to other talking head geniuses expounding on the possibilities of where the world is heading. Some highlights (?) include the Chinese cities that use massive levels of surveillance and Project Maven, Google's hush-hush military connection. The visual effects are brilliant, as is the moment when a data analyst talks about managing our lives in the 'post-privacy age'.

The Trouble with Being Born 

This is the film that was booed in Berlin and banned in Melbourne but I struggled to find why people would be so agitated by it. It's the story of an android built to replace a lost daughter, and the film leaves so much out that it's almost anti-exposition. It has some scenes that are slightly questionable (suggestive posing, erotic moaning) but these are handled in a sensitive, even otherworldly way. It's a film choc-filled with grief and loneliness, sewn together with mysterious time shifts and odd people and places. It's how I imagine Spielberg's AI would have turned out were it any good. 

Atlantis 

Well, this was a hard slog. Ukraine have won a war with Russia but things are still bleak, and this film revels in the misery, in theme AND form. Most of the shots are locked off wides with vehicles or people appearing in the foreground and then departing. Some of these feel like they go on for north of ten minutes, but surely that can't be. I wonder if it's the film I've seen with the fewest cuts. It reminded me of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but that film had more style and humour and it took me along with it. This one seemed to challenge the viewer to enjoy it. There's one scene of a mortician reporting on a corpse that was mind-numbing. Strangely, I'm glad I saw Atlantis.

Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan 

This is a great documentary on the life of legendary Pogue's singer/songwriter, Shane MacGowan. As more of an appreciator than a fan, I wasn't really super-psyched to see it, but it's one of the best of its kind. It's edited like a fairground ride with found footage, film from MacGowan's youth, TV spots, live gigs, even clips of old films (I noticed James Mason in Odd Man Out in there) and different styles of animation. Director Julian Temple is very much at home with this stuff. MacGowan is just past 60 but he's seen better days and, sure, it's a cautionary tale of the effects of booze and drugs but it also celebrates MacGowan and his Irish heritage. For the 'few rounds', he's joined by his wife Victoria, Pogue's biographer, Ann Scanlon, Johnny Depp and former Sinn Fin President, Gerry Adams. 

The Jump ★★★½

Here's a well-tuned doco about a Lithuanian sailor in the Soviet fishing fleet and his attempt to defect one day in November 1970. The film's success is primarily down to the central character of Simas Kudirka - he's an extremely watchable old geezer, who has clearly been through a lot of shit, yet still manages to be positive. The director, Giedre Kickyte, has balanced his film well (a lesson to Desert One) by finding nuance in all parties, even the KGB interrogator. For a more detailed write-up, check this out.

[Here's where I ran into trouble patching in the star ratings, hence the change in style☺]

Collective ★★★★

What an excellent film. A nightclub fire in Bucharest kicks off a spiral of deceit and malignant corruption. We begin by hearing that, though the number of immediate deaths was terrible, many other young people died in the days and weeks following, due to bacteria filled hospitals. The way the dominoes fall here is astounding and the structure is just as good as the story. It plays out like a 70s political thriller from Alan J. Pakula. The film switches focus around half way through, from a no-nonsense journalist to the new Minister for Health and both these guys find the levels of ingrained villainy disheartening. Their final moments on screen are proper kicks in the bread basket. Highly recommended.

Archive ★★★★

Going in not knowing too much about this film was a good idea. It's pretty much a two-hander, an AI designer and his prototype, alone in a high security facility. The themes of grief, loss & loneliness aren't too heavy handed and hints of a war, maybe intergalactic (?), keep things obtuse. A kind of deadline from the corporation for the AI fella (Theo James) lends a degree of peril to proceedings. I don't want to say too much here, only that there are rubbings of Metropolis, Ghost in the Shell, Moon and a Nicole Kidman film that would be a giveaway if I mentioned it. First time director Gavin Rothery nails this one. Catch it if you get a chance.

A FEW SPOILERS IN PODCAST!

The Jump

This was the 7th film I saw at Revelation and it's a pretty amazing story. I reckon it shows Desert One how to take a balanced view of a historical event (but more of that later). The plan is to do a summary blog and pod of the festival in the coming days but for now, here's a full size review of The Jump.

The story of Simas Kudirka plays out like a made for TV, cold war potboiler and would be hard to believe if it wasn’t historical fact. In November 1970, Kudirka, a Lithuanian sailor on a Soviet fishing boat, jumped onto a U.S. Coast Guard vessel while crew members of the two ships were conducting high level fishing discussions. Claiming asylum, Kudirka was initially hidden by the American crew, until orders came to hand him back to the Soviets. And this is only the beginning of the story. After Simas is returned to his vessel, his fate unknown to the West, word gets out and protests spark up throughout the U.S. These are led by the Lithuanian-American diaspora, who maintain that the U.S. doesn’t turn away refugees, and that they, in fact, may have breached international law in doing so with Kudirka. U.S. Presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford make appearances in archive footage and Henry Kissinger is actually interviewed for the film. Some of the most affecting segments are the statements given by the crew of the Coast Guard ship, especially the captain, who has had to live with his decision to follow those questionable orders.

The film reconstructs the ‘jump’ in a novel way, by having 85 year old Kudirka retrace his steps on the actual ship involved, the USCGC Vigilant. He’s a charming, sincere man and his fearlessness and determination to be treated fairly shine through all the political machinations. He mentions that when he decided to defect, he had no thoughts about his family, his friends, any repercussions, just that he had to get away. It’s a salient point that, by sheer coincidence, a member of his family proves instrumental in gaining his eventual freedom from the gulags.

The Jump has relevance today, as it shows the ideal of an American society that is morally sound in principle, one that allows the freedom to protest, the existence of many strands of activism and the framework to accept refugees. The director, Giedre Zickyte, balances his politics well, showing that Kudirka’s desperate need was not necessarily to get to the U.S., but to get away from the U.S.S.R. There’s one significant sequence that shows a TV news report of Kudirka raising the U.S. flag at his apartment in New York. The news voice-over announces that he does this every day, yet an old friend he ‘meets’ on the street intimates that they only did that for the cameras. Mirroring this, Kudirka is later seen raising a Lithuanian flag back in his home country after noting that the U.S. is “beautiful, but it’s not for me.” Later, we see a simple scene that neatly encapsulates the film. Kudirka watches the actual TV film of his life, The Defection of Simas Kudirka, and half-complains, through teary eyes, that it’s “so American in style”.

See also:

Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965) is fantastically bleak (and based on a John le Carre novel - RIP). And it might be fun to check out the dramatised version of Kudirka's story, with Alan Arkin in the lead, The Defection of Simas Kudirka (1978), directed by David Lowell Rich. I haven't seen it but I'm guessing it's bobbins.

[This review was also published on the Film Ink website - https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/the-jump/]

My Rembrandt

This is one of six films I've seen so far at the Revelation Film Festival; four Thursday and two today, Friday. Yesterday was a hard slog, with the quality fluctuating between films but I'd say this was (just) the pick of them. I'm planning on a summary for the rest of the films I see (some animation tomorrow and three more films on Sunday). Anyway, carry on.

My Rembrandt is a fascinating documentary about the first discovery of a painting from the Dutch master in decades. The director, Oeke Hoogendijk, has form in this field. Her films The New Rijksmuseum and Marten & Oopjen: Portrait of a Marriage deal with Dutch art in general, the latter film delving deeper into one thread from My Rembrandt. And here’s where the film suffers – the central storyline involving art dealer Jan Six and his ‘new’ find is shunted to the margins at times, the film showing us the admittedly beautiful Scottish landholding of the Duke of Buccleuch or the glitzy world of American collector, Thomas Kaplan. The aforementioned Marten & Oopjen paintings are also clearly additions from another film, as is the wrangle between the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum over their purchase. These deviations add colour to the story and flesh out the world of Rembrandt devotees but they’re just that – deviations.

Jan Six is a descendant of another Jan Six, subject of one of Rembrandt’s most famous works. Flicking through a Christies catalogue, he happens upon a painting that states it is from the ‘circle’ of Rembrandt (i.e. from one of his disciples). Six realises that this is too good to be an inspired work and gambles on the purchase. The following attempts to have ‘Portrait of a Young Gentleman’ authenticated, and thus validate Six himself, make up the body of the film. Six comes across as a man trying to prove to his father, and the art world perhaps, that he is not just the scion of an important, respected family. His scenes with Six senior are really the meat of the film. They’re full of tenderness, yet also irritation and a kind of child-like quest for endorsement.

The film begins with two fellow dealers visiting Six and being shown a Rembrandt that is probably not all it seems to be. The decision is made to restore this work and it is handed over to an expert. This set-up is neatly paid off at the end of the film where the expert is revealed to be the father of a dealer who accuses Six of nefarious goings-on relating to the purchase of ‘Portrait of a Young Gentleman’. Another expert, Ernst Van de Wetering, who had previously verified the discovery as a legitimate Rembrandt, is also caught up in the intrigue. Six and Van de Wetering appear on Dutch TV talk shows and eventually become irreparably estranged. This angle of losing a mentor, perhaps another father figure, is not explored as thoroughly as it could have been, and it feels like an opportunity missed. 

Hoogendijk has made a gorgeous film with an array of funny, immensely watchable characters. The close-ups of the artworks alone are worth the ticket price. It’s just a shame the story drifted away occasionally and wasn’t more focussed on Six and his efforts to prove himself.

See also:

Look, there are plenty of films about art but, hands up, I haven't liked that many, or seen enough of them. So my picks would be Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) and Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner (2014). These two are great.

[This review was also published on the Film Ink website - https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/my-rembrandt/]

Revelation Film Festival 2020 - Preview (plus podcast interview with Richard Sowada)

The 23rd Revelation Film Festival runs from Thursday 10th to Sunday 13th Dec and there are some tasty looking films on offer. They mostly screen at the Luna in Leederville with some down in Freo at Luna on SX, and a couple at the Windsor in Nedlands. The Backlot in West Perth and Johnny Ma Studios in Maylands have a few things on the Saturday. The complete schedule can been found on the Revelation website (link above).

I'm filling my card with some interesting looking features and docos, as well as an outing to the (FREE) Family Animation Explosion!, which is on at 10:30 every morning of the fest. It should be mentioned that all screenings are COVID restricted this year, so it's going to be a case of 'first in, first served'.

It has taken me a fecking long time to choose which ones to see, but that's part of the fun of something like this. There are really too many to talk about here but especially notable films include locally (WA) produced, An Ideal Host and a 1969 Mexican film, Night of the Bloody Apes (Friday double bill), the controversial, The Trouble with Being Born (pulled from the Melbourne International Film Festival), another local film, The Xrossing, and Atlantis from the Ukraine. 

There are a bunch of great looking documentaries too: Collective, Desert One, My Rembrandt and The Jump could all be peaches. Throw in the numerous shorts on offer and there's a wealth of goodies to get your peepers on.

Listen below for a pod interview with festival director, Richard Sowada.

Listen to "Revelation Film Festival 2020" on Spreaker.