Montages blogg: Day 2 - Eloquent Peasant and Touki Bouki.
Av Nini Castañeda
10. okt 2010
For my second FFS day, I decided to check out films from the World Cinema Foundation, I come from a country ( Colombia) where the film conservation has started a bit too late, and some great cultural jewels might be lost forever, so I wanted to see how the restoration helped these films and also how wold be to see them under the times of today.
The Eloquent Peasant was a very interesting short, only 20 min long, it show us the visual interpretation, of one of the oldest texts from the classical Egyptian period. Is a refreshing film, even though the dialog is very present, the way the film develops it self is interesting, there is a lot of time ellipses, that are shown only by cutting the character's journey, from a place to another, from an action to another, but keeping the dialog intact, is in a way as if we were reading a book with moving illustrations, which didn't bother me at all.
The second film that I saw right after this one was Touki Bouki, from Senegal, it felt a bit too long, and too erratic, and maybe too hippie for my taste. The film tell us the story and misadventures of a couple of thieves, that dream about finding enough money to travel to Paris, with some elements of African witchcraft, and myths, the film is constructed in a very bumpy way.
In the beginning there was a clear intention of compare the life of humans with the slaughter of domestic animals, this match up cuts in very literal way, made me believe the film could propose an interesting point of view about how life in Dakar was in the 70's, but this was only used in the maybe first 15 minutes of the film, and then the film continued as if it was a fail attempt of doing a Senegalese version of "Pierrot le fou". Touki Bouki has weird characters popping in, with nothing to do with the story, just to disappear in the same way, some scenes with no head or end, and just events put together as if the print was maybe restore with tons of important pieces missing.
At the end the film goes back to this character of a postman, which was also shown in the beginning, but this character with maybe a big importance for the filmmaker, never speaks or does anything but walk around, so maybe there was a profound message I missed, but to me it was a film with very little to offer in a very long amount of time.
I'm glad anyway that I got to see in one day, such a different variety of story telling and culture.
Nini er distribusjonsansvarlig i Montages Shorts, et initativ etablert for å bistå filmskapere og produsenter i distribusjon av nordiske kortfilmer til festivaler og tv-stasjoner verden over.
Bloggenes innhold representerer skribentenes egne meninger, og ikke Film fra Sør Festivalen.
