Film Shapes

Time to run down the 13 films I saw at this year's Revelation Film Festival. It was a great edition for the 25th anniversary, with some excellent films on show. Here are my thoughts, in ascending order of quality. After Blue   ★ This was quite hard going. It reminded me of struggling through Aleksei German's impenetrably muddy Hard to Be a God (2013). After Blue shares much of that film's aesthetic, with amateur looking sets, foggy darkness and animalistic performances. Director Bertrand Mandico is one of the creators of the Incoherence Manifesto and it certainly shows in this film, which follows a young woman and her mother on the hunt for wanted killer, Kate Bush (not that one). It's set on a planet peopled only by women (the men have died off after growing hair internally) and the story, if you can call it that, sends the mother and daughter to a mountain lair and back again. There are worthy feminist and environmental messages here but I didn't have the stamina...

When I read the blurb about  Freaks Out in the Revelation Film Festival programme I earmarked it as the one to watch for this year. Usually, this kind of anticipation results in disappointment but it wasn't to be here. This is a blast. You might think a film with a bunch of circus freaks and Nazis (both with super-powers), as well as a gang of amputee partisans might be a bit ironic, with a nudge and a wink to the audience. But Freaks Out plays it very straight, very sincere, almost in the vein of a neo-realist war film. The gist is that four Italian circus performers, seemingly left in the lurch by their ringleader, decide to join the Zircus Berlin, which is headlined by the erratically psychotic Franz, (Franz Rogowski). Our special quad are Fulvio (Claudio Santamaria), a grumpy, super-strong Chewbacca who can bend metal; Cencio (Pietro Castellitto), a weedy insect overlord; Mario (Giancarlo Martini), a magnetic, masturbating dwarf; and the heart of the film, Matilde (Aurora Gio...