MIFF Notes #5: Island Of The Hungry Ghosts, Fugue, Scary Mother, The Eyes Of Orson Welles

The heavenly bubble of MIFF couldn't last. Sooner or later, my exuberant idealization would be tarnished. It took five days, but it happened. 36 minutes into watching Indonesian film The Seen and Unseen at the Forum Theater, a fire alarm was alerted and everyone was evacuated from the venue. While it hadn't been my favorite film up to that point, I had only just begun to get attuned to its deliberately paced, almost hypnotic rhythm. I'd already established that I was going to discuss its connection with My Neighbor Totoro in this dispatch, noting the different ways the films portray children using fantasy as a means of dealing with traumatic events.

Having another film in less than an hour and a half, I wasn't able to stay to see what had happened and the MIFF socials have not provided any further explanations. It was an odd moment, shifting my understanding of MIFF, transforming it from a romanticized ideal to a more imperfect reality. It's still as close to heaven as I know though (apart from that one DVD rental place in Richmond). I hope that I'm able to see the rest of The Seen and Unseen one way or another. That's the thing about movies you can't watch, you just want to see it even more. But on with the dispatch.

The great thing about seeing so many movies in a concentrated period of time is the unintentionally perfect pairings of films. Over my last two days at the festival, I saw two pairs of films that act as perfect compliments to one another, using the same stylistic techniques or tackling similar themes. The first such double was Australian documentary Island Of The Hungry Ghosts and Dominican Republic film Cocote. Both films utilize a slow, dreamy, experimental style to tell their stories, but one was far more effective than the other.

Gabrielle Brady's Islands Of The Hungry Ghosts (A) doesn't initially appear to be a great film. It's about Christmas Island and the stark contrast between its natural beauty and the horrific detention center it hides. To demonstrate this, Brady pairs the island's famous red crab migration with the family and work of Poh Lin, a trauma counselor trying her best to help asylum seekers. But it does so in a way unusual for a documentary, with a clear narrative through line (so much so that, according to a Q&A I had to leave early, some people think the film consists of actors) and many dreamy, hypnotic close-up shots. Initially, this risked limiting the tragedy to something artsy and poetic, creating a remove from the hell these people are suffering through. I could not have been more wrong. In the film's close-ups it finds intimacy and raw emotional honesty, achieving something incredibly profound and deeply upsetting.

Island Of The Hungry Ghosts (2018)

Prior to MIFF, a friend of mine and I were discussing our shared anticipation for Hungry Ghosts, noting that maybe finding a new way to talk about the difficult and (strangely) controversial topic of Australia's treatment of asylum seekers may help the message reach a wider audience. In its emphasis on a more experimental form of storytelling, I doubt that will prove to be true but it does something much more complex and interesting. Brady has found a new way to depict trauma, using the cinematic mechanism to tell an misunderstood and upsetting story. It's treatment of a topic that is almost impossibly painful and hard to comprehend channels Resnais' Night and Fog and Lanzmann's Shoah, films that uses style to find new ways to talk about and cinematically depict inconceivable tragedy.

The film's most urgent scenes feature Poh Lin working with asylum seekers who have come from dangerous and war torn countries and now face indefinite limbo. In one case, a man in his 30s, Ahmed,  describes being separated from his mother and being powerless to watch as her health slowly detoriates, yet still she smiles whenever she sees him. The entirety of the scene is a close-up shot of the top half of his face, so we see his eyes well up with tears as we hear his voice catch. It's a scene of such incredibly beauty and bone deep pain that I cried. Not like a manipulative-soaring-music cry like in Hollywood cinema with tears streaming down my face. This was deeper, like my heart was giving out, pushing out tiny wracked sobs. Even writing about it is hard to do as I can still recall the emotion, the unending hell of the situation and the unbelievable cruelty. At one point, Poh Lin tells one client that "it's not illegal to seek asylum and you shouldn't be punished for it". There's controversy and politics around asylum seekers but what it boils down to, the undeniable fact, is simply that. We are publishing people who have done nothing wrong.

However, Hungry Ghosts has far more on its mind than just the experience of asylum seekers, it also examines how a person like Poh Lin manages to remain strong and sane while listening to these deeply upsetting stories. She is frustrated much of the time, quietly furious about the treatment of these people by a system that couldn't care less about the trauma it inflicts. Worse, it seems to actively work against her. How in the hell do you keep doing a job where your treatment isn't helping people, where everything is purposefully designed to make them feel worse? The many simple scenes of her family playing and enjoying life together initially feel indulgent, but I had the sudden realization that they help her keep going. That is, until they can't. Her final choice in an impossible situaton is a brave, gut wrenching one that will stay with me for a very long time.

And then there's the crabs and their unending march to the sea, providing a haunting, lyrical and savagely ironic counterpoint to the pain of the film's main narrative. Islands Of The Hungry Ghosts is an exceptional film, but will it reach a wider audience? In its poetry and lyrical beauty, its an easier film to watch than, say, Eva Orner's brutally sad (and utterly essential) Chasing Asylum, but that same stylised technique while also turn audiences away. The sad truth is the people who most need to see this and other films like it are the people who never will: members of the government like Peter Dutton who think it's ethically right to lock people up indefinitely for looking for a better life for their family. But for those of us willing, this is a poignant and deeply beautiful film that will stay with you for days.

After going through The Seen and Unseen chaos and Hungry Ghosts' emotional devastation, I really just wanted to go home. However, MIFF can be unforgiving sometimes so I trudged over to the Kino for my next film, the Dominican Republic's Cocote (C). After that level of sadness, I wouldn't have wanted to see a side-splitting comedy or a mindless action movie let alone being another poetic, experimental feature. After the death of his father, Alberto returns home and must face five days of death rituals and guilt. I realized that this was not what I needed fairly quickly and would've left if I wasn't in the middle of a row (rookie mistake). Instead, I sat through the whole thing, wanting desperately for it to end. It wasn't just my mood, I also found it increasingly frustrating.

Cocote (2017)

Where Hungry Ghosts had used its frequent close-ups to create intimacy, Cocote uses the same technique with an oddly opposing affect, distancing us from Alberto and his journey. That the film keeps swapping cinematic methods (square/widescreen, color/black-and-white) for no discernible reason just adds to the detachment. Instead of focusing on the characters, I was noticing the ways the frame had changed, which was extremely distracting. Also, the film's death rituals are interesting but overlong and should've been edited down, as could all of the scenes which feature characters shouting at one another which quickly grow exhausting.

Cocote's final scenes allude to ideas of identity and the cycles of violence and corruption, which are intriguing but underdeveloped. I regret staying because this clearly not a film for me, especially in the headspace I was in. However, there was one moment that almost made me glad I stuck it out. The screen is black but slowly pinpricks of light shine through. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the darkness becomes a starry night sky, a moment of almost transcendent beauty. Even in films that don't do anything for me, there are still moments of greatness to be found.

The other accidentally perfect double feature I watched was centered around theme rather than style, with both Polish film Fugue and Georgian-Estonian film, Scary Mother tackling ideas of motherhood and the monstrous feminine in similar yet intriguingly different ways. Fugue (C+) tells the story of amnesiac Alicja who returns, after two years,  to a family that she doesn't remember nor particularly care for. Coming from Agnieszka Smoczynska, director of the deliriously OTT cannibal mermaid musical The Lure, its a strangely muted affair. At the end, I turned to my friend and asked, "are we totally sure they're by the same person?"

Fugue (2018)

Where her earlier film had an almost exhausting abundance of ideas and style to spare, Fugue hammers the same idea over and over again. The film ponders what is Alicja's responsibility to her family and questons if she is a 'bad mother' because she is distant and wants to pursue her own life? In this way, it acts as almost an inverse of Goodnight Mommy, turning a figure of love and compassion into a figure of unease and mistrust. But Fugue falls short of examining those ideas. Despite a great actress and a memorably disinterested dance sequence, Alicja is ultimately too impenetrable to fully get a handle on. It doesn't help that the film betrays the one thing we do know about her. She frequently states that she doesn't care who she was or why she forgot, which was a nice enigmatic note of unsolved mystery. Naturally, the film doesn't stay like that, eventually mutating into an exploration of her past, which has a very unsatisfying resolution. What had the potential to be a great film becomes empty and forgettable.

My next film at MIFF was a more interesting and incisive portrait of the same thematic ideas. The lead character in Scary Mother (B+) is Manana, a wannabee writer trapped in a loveless marriage with a hateful husband who expects her to be the perfect woman and mother. So she does what any writer would and writes a scathing critique of everyone she knows in the form of fiction. The moment she reads out a section of the novel to her gobsmacked family is savagely funny, describing her children as weeds and her husband as a man with bulging, fishy eyes. This obviously doesn't sit well with them, and she must soon choose between her writing and her family. What follows is a brilliant and often bitingly funny evisceration of motherhood and expectations of women. While it's far from perfect (there's a notable lull in the middle section), almost all of its mistakes are forgiven in its final moments.

Scary Mother (2017)

The scene initially reminded me of the weakest moment in Molly's Game, with a man explaining a woman's life to her face. However, as it continues, the conversation reveals itself to be something much more interesting, adding a deliciously meta element and forcing us to rethink everything we've just witnessed. It peaks on an unexpected moment of tension, a question of scene order, free will and narrative structure, that is quite unlike anything I've ever seen. It makes waiting for a cut almost impossibly tense. I only saw Scary Mother because I needed to fill a gap in my schedule, but I'm so glad I did. It's the sort of unexpected treat that could only be found at a place like MIFF.

Of course, viewing often can't be divided into neat thematic or stylistic categories, as demonstrated by my fifth film. I must admit to not knowing a lot about the subject of Mark Cousins' documentary The Eyes Of Orson Welles (B). Welles' films are one of my greatest cinematic blind spots, having only seen Compulsion (which he had a memorably meaty cameo) and F For Fake, so I was eager to learn more about him and the way he worked. Cousins is an intelligent and likable guide, bringing the same depth of knowledge and soothing Belfast accent that made his television series, The Story Of Film: An Odyssey such a delight. His take on Welles is deeply personal, taking the form of a letter to Welles, a technique that owes more to visual essay than documentary.

The Eyes Of Orson Welles (2018)

For those who know of Welles and his work, I imagine the opportunity to see some of his rare drawings will be interesting, as will Cousins' incisive analysis of the way that his artistic eye is manifested in his cinema. But they'd probably rile up against the distracting and very odd 'cameo', which pushes the film into the realm of fantasy and doesn't sit right. Eyes is also, perhaps, too enamored with its subject to examine some of the more unsavory aspects of the way he treated women, reducing it to a little quirk which feels problematic. That said, the clips Cousins chose are incredibly intriguing, and I'm now desperate to see everything Welles has ever done (The Trial looked particularly good!).

In my next dispatch I'll be discussing Milla, another interesting take on womanhood, queer doco Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex, Fashion, Disco, buzzy South Korean film Burning (which apparently features a very important cat, or does it?) and Guy Maddin's Vertigo-inspired San Francisco patchwork The Green Fog.