A Trois, on y va (All About them) (三人行)

A third person in a relationship invariably creates problems. What happens when the third in a relationship is simultaneously in love with the two? This seems to be the theme explored by director Jérôme Bonnell, in A trois, on y va (literally "Three together, let's go") ("All About them")  (三人行)(2015) directed co-written by him with Maël Piriou.
A trois, on y va is a light comical look at the complicated romantic and at times erotic dilemmas that can result when the three are mixed up in such a complex games of musical chair, given the law of Newtonian physics that a person can only be at one place at any particular point in time.

Hardy in Film: Far From the Madding Crowd (哈代之[遠離塵囂]電影版)

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)  is one of the novelists we got to study in high school. I read his Trumpet Major (1880), the Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of D'Ubervilles (1891) . Although long winded, he has a wonderful knack in describing the beauty of nature, its silent, impersonal and elemental force, at once life-giving and destructive, which implacably propel the lives his women in directions they can hardly control. But I have never read his novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), a lack which was filled yesterday when I saw its surrogate in the form of a film of the same name adapted for the screen by David Nicholls, filmed by Charlotte Bruus Christensen and directed by Thomas Vinterberg. 

As in all his novels, the action took place in the hilly downs and cliffs of the beautifully fictionalised Wessex. Bathseba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), a good looking and headstrong girl inherits a farm from her uncle which she is determined to manage hands-on in the course of which she encounters three men: Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a strong, principled, competent and faithful shepherd, Sergeant Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge) a young, dashing soldier, a womanizer, a rake interested only in perfecting his swordsmanship and gambling and William Boldwood (Michael Sheen) a reserved, sturdy and dependable middle-aged, well to do owner of another farm adjacent to her own. All three fell in love with her, two truly and one just trying to take advantage of her wealth and young body.

Obce Cialo (Foreign Body)(色)

Fate is unpredictable. Ironically, the last may sometimes be the first.

My last film at this year's HKIFF,Obce (Foreign Body) (2014)(色) happens to be my first film from Krzysztof Zanussi (1939), an Italian-Polish director who studied physics, philosophy and film making in Poland and the maker and director of a large number of documentaries, TV drama and feature films some of which had won international awards at Moscow, Venice, Chicago, Valladolid, Locarno and is now a professor of film making at the European Graduate School in Switzerland and professor at the Silesian University in Katowice.

The film starts with a pair of young lovers Angelo (Riccardo Leonelli) and Katarzyna (Agata Buzek) ("Kassia") meeting in the hills and beaches of Italy. For some reasons, Kassia, who comes from Poland,  wants to have a go at being a nun and enters a convent there. Her father (Slawomir Orzechowski), probably someone with some influence in Poland, arranges for Angelo to work in a power company close to the convent, hoping thereby that Angelo will be near enough to convince her daughter to change her mind. As a devout Muslim, Angelo refrains from making love to Kassia before marriage, because he respect her decision as a devout Catholic. Since she is on trial for just one year, Angelo is prepared to wait until she changes her mind. In the meantime, he works under Kris Nilska ( Agnieszka Grochowska) his young and attractive new boss in the Polish division of a power company, a lady drunk with a different kind of "power", believing that with sufficient money, you can do practically anything and overcome all forms of resistance, a go-getter prepared to stop at nothing for corporate advancement, by hook or by crook.

The film is about their conflict. Angelo is straight and principled and is full of compassion and an ardent desire to relieve the suffering of those around him. We're shown how he helps a young man begging for money outside an opera house to buy a medical machine to help his bedridden father, first by applying on his behalf to the Polish government for the needed funds and when that fails, by setting up a corporate charity to help him do so and how he resists Kris' seduction. We are also shown how in order to win an important government contract for building a power station in Russia, Kris told her subordinates Mira Tkacz  (Agnieszka Grochowska) who shares her values, to seduce the engineer of their competitor to get information on the price and other conditions of their tender. She succeeds. Angelo knows about it but refuses to participate. He spends his spare time in small prayer groups and occasionally visits Kassia in the convent.

Maps to the Stars (墮落星圖)

Hollywood is often viewed by the uninitiated as a place of dreams of stardom, glamor and gossip. But if one may trust in David Cronenberg's portrayal of the Weiss family in Maps to the Stars (2014), its glittering chrome and glass surface lit by multi-color LED lights may well be a cover for a designer's hell full of incestuous demons, whose occupants are each desperate to escape from their unspeakably dark past and cut-throat present into fame, money, sex, drugs and verbal vitriol, driven largely by another incestuous circle of greed, lust and jealousy and mutual hypocrisy.

What do a girl with a scarred face and scarred arms from Florida, Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a rich middle aged woman movie star with fading charms Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) eager to get the part to play her deceased mother, another well known movie star Kayla (Emilia McCarthy) who died in a fire, a cab driver who earns his living as a part time actor and has hopes of becoming a screen writer, Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson ), a successful actress, novelist, screenwriter and an agent for actor and actresses who runs a blog, Carrie Fisher (who plays herself), a successful pop psycho-therapist who frequently gives talks, appears on TV shows, who treats people with various kinds of mental and emotional dysfunction at USD1,000 an hour and is about go on tour for his new 12 part self-help book Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), a 13-year-old boy star who is the principal character in a popular TV series called "Bad Babysitter" who dispenses non-stop verbal abuses to those who work with him and who's just back from a private de-tox program and shows absolutely no courtesy to pink press TV reporters Benjie (Evan Bird) and a mother who treats her son as a precious commodity to be exploited for maximum profit, Christina (Olivia Williams) have to do with each other? The link is Agatha. She falls in love with Jerome, through her internet connection with Carrie, becomes the personal assistant of Havana  and is in fact the daughter of Dr. Weiss and Christina, who themselves are brother and sister though they claim they only found that out after they are married. 

Une Nouvelle Amie (A New Girlfriend)(女朋友的女朋友)

I can't boast that I have seen very many gay or lesbian or transvestite films but I have yet to see a film dealing with such themes the way François Ozon does in Une Novelle Amie (A New Girlfriend) 2014. Adapted from a novel by Ruth Rendell of the same name, Ozon has transformed it into a romantic comedy with touching moments which seem to suggest a new kind of gender complexity: a man who likes to dress as a woman but still makes love with another woman as a man and a woman who loves a man as a woman! How gender roles can be rendered really complicated by biology!

The film has a most unusual beginning: we see a female body being made up and dressed as if for a wedding but it turns out that in fact, it's for a funeral at which the funeral-bride's best childhood friend Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) recounts how they became the best of friends since age 7, when they had a blood pact at a neighborhood wood in which they declared their friendship will be "for life". Claire is now happily married to Gilles (Raphaël Personnaz) and her best friend was Laura (Isild Le Besco) whose widow is David (Romain Duris)
As the film develops, we see how after the funeral, Claire could not concentrate on her work at the office and decided to take a break during which she visited Laura's house to see how David was doing. To her surprise, when she arrives, she finds David dressed as a woman with wig, nail polish and all, feeding their 6 month's old baby Lucie. Embarrassed, David explains that he has had this urge to dress as a woman since infancy but when he's with a woman he loves, he doesn't feel the urge to do so but even if he does so, he has never once gone into the street as a woman. Now that Laura is gone, the urge has come back and he asks her not to tell anyone. Claire promises.

Claire continues to help David and a close relation develops. She helps David appear in public dressed as a woman and spends a weekend at his country home where Claire shows him the heart enclosing the name of Laura and hers on a tree trunk at David's estate. Gilles finds out about their weekend rendezvous because David's mother calls and asks for Claire during that weekend. Claire then explains to Gilles David's unusual need and assures him that there's nothing between them. Gilles feels more comfortable and invites David to have dinner together and even helps to look after Lucie, the experience of which makes him suggest to Claire to have their own.

Everything seems fine until David has an accident on a busy street as a woman as a result of which he's turned into a human vegetable. David's father sheepishly tells Claire at the hospital bedside that at the time of the accident, his son was dressed as a woman. Claire feigns surprise. To help revive David, she first brings Lucie to the hospital and whispers in his ears that she is Claire with Lucie. David's eyelids flicker for a few seconds and then he reverts into coma. It isn't until later, when Claire addresses him as Virginia and sings a song written by a man who has transformed himself into a woman and who sings that he/she is not happy until he becomes a women, a song which both of them heard together earlier at a cabaret, when tears fell from David's eyes, that he finally wakes up. When the film ends, we see a pregnant Claire and Virginia, hand in hand, picking up the 7-year-old Lucie after class. We see how Lucie seems perfectly comfortable with them.

Ozon always tries to examine human relations under all sorts of situations in which partly through chance and partly through the personality of his characters, they find themselves in the most unpredictable kinds of social and personal situations.  Une Novelle Amie is his latest exploration in such a direction. Not only does he introduce some humor into the theme of what form transvestism can take, he  shows us some of the most unexpected and unusual effects such a form may have on the male-female relationship and plenty of food for thought.

Il capitale umano (Human Capital)(奪命保險金)

A tombola party is over. A waiterr Fabrizio (Gianluca Di Lauro) cleans up. He rides the bicycle home in the dark. He is knocked off the road by a vehicle. The driver does not stop. The worker is admitted to hospital in critical condition and later dies. That is the start of three separate but linked stories.The first relates to Dino Ossola (Fabrizio Bentivoglio  )("Dino"), the second to Carla Bernaschi (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) ("Carla")and the third to Serena Ossola (Matilde Gioli )(Serena). The "human capital"  in the title of the film, directed  by Paolo Virzi and adapted from Stephen Amidona's novel by Francesco Bruni, Francesco Piccolo and the director himself, relates to the insurance company's compensation to Fabrizio's family which sum includes recompense for loss of life, loss of consortium, loss of income and loss of amenities.

Jauja (巧黑)

In many ways, the film Jauja is one of a kind. It's made by a Dane who was born in Argentina: Lisandro Alonso with a script co-written by him with Fabian Casas about a little known region of the earth, Penatgonia, an enigmatic land full of mystery, myths and legends and for the Spanish, gold, a kind of Eldorado.("dorado" being a Spanish word meaning "gilded").  The name of the film "Jauja" is a Spanish word of Arabic origin, connoting "plenty". At the start of the film, we are given a quotation in a legend about a land dominated by Zulualaga, a lone hunter and the story of a captain dressed as a woman roaming in the wilderness of that land, apparently looking for someone. Is he really looking for someone or for something rather more ineffable?

As the film opens, we see two people, a young lady in an 18th century dress and a bonnet, Ingeborg (Villbjørk Malling Agger), her head against the shoulder of an older man in a bowler hat and suit Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), each facing a different direction, the man towards the sea, the girl towards the land. They are discussing about what they like or dislike. The father, an engineer, dislikes the land and wishes to return to Denmark as soon as possible, the daughter says she likes the land, the desert and feels comfortable there. Her father asks her what she most wants to have. She says a dog. He asks why. She says that she would like a dog which would always follow her around, wherever she goes. In the distance, we see a naked fat man in a rock pool, relaxing, his clothes at the edge of the pool, masturbating. All across the screen in the old 4:3 aspect ratio, we see tuft grass on clumps and clumps of volcanic rock.It looks spacious, calm, peaceful. Soon Dinesen changes clothes into those of an army captain, complete military uniform with sword, pistol, rife and long spurred riding boots but appears to have a slight difficulty mounting his horse. Another army officer Lieutenant Pittaluga (Adrian Fondari) approaches (the man observed earlier to be masturbating in the rock pool) asks if he would like to go to the governor's ball and asks for for permission to take her daughter to the up-coming ball. He offers to give her daughter a horse at his ranch. The father refuses. Unbeknown to her father, her eyes were set on a younger soldier Angel Milkibar (Esteban Bigliardi?) whom she meets earlier on the salt marshes. He has given her a wooden toy soldier found floating on the surface of a small rock pool which she carefully keeps with her. Later we see Dinesen inspecting some engineering works where some trenches are being dug. But soon after that, Ingeborg disappears with the young soldier. Dinesen embarks upon a search for her, alone, with hardly any preparation by ways of food and water. The film documents that search, in beautifully shot images, with hardly any dialogue to speak of. 

3 coeurs ( 3 Hearts) (三顆痴痴的心)

Blaise Pascal (1623-1622), mathematician, physicist, theologian and philosopher once said that the heart has reasons which the head knows not. And for Marc Beaulieu (Benoît Poelvoorde), an otherwise non-remarkable tax accountant, his heart probably has more reason that his head can never understand. Every time that he meets a girl he fancies, no matter where and when, his heart would pound so hard that he may suffer a heart attack or near heart attack. He met one, after he missed the last train to Paris after investigating a client's case there. It's a girl that his eyes just caught as he was walking off the train station in great frustration after he rushed to the train just in time for its doors to close on him. He went into a cafe bar to get a bottle of mineral water after asking the bar tender that it was still open, took it and then the girl he saw before crossing the street came in and bought a packet of cigarette. After she left, he felt a compulsion to follow her. He did. He asked her if she knew a hotel. She showed him first one, then another. He went into the second. But before he checked in, he left the reception counter and went back to the girl waiting outside, Sylvie Berger (Charlotte Gainsbourg). They smoke. They got talking. They talked all night. When it was time to leave. They decide they would meet in Paris at the Jardin des Tuileries, near the fountain but did not exchange telephone at 6 p.m. the following Friday. Sylvie went, waited until 7 p.m. and returned home to her beloved sister Sophie Berger (Chiara Mastroianni) and mother Madame Berger (Catherine Deneuve ) and her husband  (Patrick Mille), with whom relations were not ideal. Owing to two Chinese clients who never said anything in reply to his questions, he was later than usual when he left the office that Friday and suffered a heart attack at the garage in which he nearly fainted. He recovered, drove at breakneck speed to the rendezvous only to miss it again. he went to see a doctor who declared that his heart was normal and that the attack was probably due to too much excitement.

Im Keller (In the Basement) (地窖天堂)

Blaise Pascal once said that the heart has its reasons which the head will seldom know. Indeed we know hardly anything about what passes at the inner most layers of our heart. If one may borrow an analogy from Carl Jung, the co-founder of analytic psychology, all sorts of surprising things lie deep within the cellar of the edifice called the human psyche, formerly called the "heart". I do not know whether or not Veronika Franz and Ulrich Seidl who co-scripted Im Keller ( In the Basement) (2014), directed by the latter, knew about what either Pascal or Jung had to say about the kind of dark matter lurking in the depths of the human heart, but if one may judge by what they did in the quasi-documentary about what some Austrians are doing in their basements, then I'm quite sure it's turning their camera lenses upon that mysterious region of the human psyche through showing us what some marginal Austrians most desire, away from the gaze of the more conventional section of their society.

When the film opens, we see a man staring intently at a huge white serpent in a glass case in front of which is a sniffing guinea pig which gradually approaches the snout of the apparent immobile white reptilian until it gets too close, when it swung at lightning speed at the guinea pig and had it in the grips of a fatal squeeze.

Mita Tova (Farewell Party) (安樂死派對)

The second film of the evening is also about death, a most weighty subject. But from the way Tal Granit and Sharon-Maymon treated the subject, Mita Tova (Farewell Party) (安樂死派對), co-written and co-directed by them, it does seem that it's at quite some distance from heaviness. This is evident from the very first scene. An old man in front of a table full of paraphernalia for welding is speaking on a phone to someone else. He says, in an obviously machine-produced low frequency voice that he is Elohim (Jewish for God) and that there is no vacancy in heaven for the party at the other end of the line and that despite her difficulties and suffering, she must try her best to hold on and receive the treatment and adds that her husband says hello to her from heaven, when she's single! On the other side of the line, we see an old lady who says that she has been diagnosed with cancer and doesn't want to live. But there's a hiccup. In the middle of the conversation, the old lady hears what appears to be a woman's voice asking Elohim where she placed her things.Then it hung up. The old woman dialed up Elohim's number asking to speak to God. A female voice told her to wait because Elohim was at the toilet! After the hiccups, Elohim resumed the telephone conversation and continued to pep talk the old lady.

Timbuktu (在地圖結束的地方/在世界盡頭喚自由)

Good Friday evening turned out to be good to me, not religiously as Jesus was said to have died on the cross on Good Friday night for the redemption of the sins of man and in that sense "good" for mankind but because I saw two good films in a row.  Both of them concern death but in quite different contexts. The first is Timbuktu, a film screenplayed, directed and co-written by Abderrahmane Sissako with Kessen Tall.

What or where is Timbuktu? It's the name of a place which my Form 1 teacher threatened he would send me to whenever I became unruly in class. But according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's a city in the western African country of Mali at the southern edge of the Sahara, 8 miles north of River Niger which was historically important as a trading post on the trans-Sahara caravan route and a centre of Islamic culture (c. 1400-1600), which became a French colony in late 19th century (forming part of the French Sudan) but which became independent in 1960 when the Republic of Mali was established. The city was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1988 but because of armed conflicts in the region, in 2012, it was declared a World Heritage in Danger.
As the film opens, we see a blind-folded man (Abel Jafri) being taken in a military jeep, with a fluttering flag with some Arabic words written on it, being taken to a tiny courtyard in a small town. There he was greeted and became one of the soldiers of the local jihadists controlling the town and the surrounding area. Then we see another jeep with a number of soldiers inside, one of whom in military uniform and a turban on his head, Abdelkerim, was aiming his rifle at a running gazelle. He kept firing shots at it but the gazelle kept running and we hear someone advise the hunter, "Don't waste your bullet, tire it". Then the screen switches to a target practice. The targets were some traditional African sculpture of local deities made of either either wood or clay. They were all shot down, one by one. In the last one, we see gun smoke rising from the mouth of the broken head of a local deity. Next we see a herd of cattle being tended to by a small boy Issan ( Mehdi A.G. Mohamed) watched by a couple Kidane ( Ibrahem Ahmed) and Satima ( Toulou Kiki ) and their daughter Toya ( Layla Walet Mohamed ) lying on their rug under a tent, far from the town, but close to each other, discussing how when Kidane dies, he would like to give the herd to Issan, his adopted son. When the film ends, we see two children, both running on the desert dunes, one a boy, Issan the other a girl Toyla.  A lot has happened in the meantime.

Lucia de B (Accused) (製造死亡天使)

Murders are always interesting. Social psychologists tell us that people have a tendency to be more alert to "bad" things than to "good" things and that the former strike them with much greater intensity than the latter. Evolution psychologists tell us why: the risk of not paying attention to things which may threaten our life is much more serious than the risk of not taking advantage of good things which may benefit us. Whilst we may have a second bite of the cherry if we miss the first one, ignoring a threat to our life may prove fatal because death is irreversible: we only got one life! Perhaps for this reason, bad things makes good news story but seldom good things, which we tend to take for granted. Perhaps for the same reason, news of "serial killing" always makes a sensationally "good" news story. One such is the case of Lucia de Berk (more commonly called "Lucia de B"), a licensed pediatric nurse in the Juliana Child Hospital ("JKH") in Hague, Holland, who was sentenced on 24th March 2003 to life imprisonment with an order that she receive psychiatric treatment for 7 murders and 3 attempted murders of babies under her care, not only in JKH but in two other hospitals where she previously worked. She lodged an appeal and on 18th June, 2004 the original verdict was upheld. However, in 2008, her case was reopened by the Dutch Supreme Court because of new evidence proving her innocence and the order that she receive psychiatric treatment was rescinded because the psychiatrist found that there is no evidence of her suffering any psychiatric problem at all and on a re-trial, she was acquitted of all charges against her in April, 2010.

Everything started with the unexpected death of a baby (Amber) in the JKH on 4th September, 2001. The hospital authorities then checked through its records on the number of deaths of babies occurring whilst they were under her care and discovered a total of 9 such deaths between September 2000 and September 2001. Although previously, such deaths were considered unfortunate but not unexpected and the cause of death was labeled "natural", it now considered them suspicious because in all those case, Lucia de B was given the task of giving medicine to the babies under her care when such deaths occurred. To protect its reputation, the hospital decided to inform the police to start an investigation. It was big news and Lucia de B was called "the angel of death" by the press.

El Complejo de dinero (The Money Complex) (金錢綜合症)

From snapshots of the difficulties ijn the lives of the small guys at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean in Gheese-ha, we move in my next film in the HKIFF to those of the Bohemian set of the rich but not the famous at the the western tip of the Mediterranean in El Complejo de dinero (The Money Complex), which took place in Southern Spain. There we find Raphael (Rafael Lamata), his wife Francisca (Lola Rubio) and his group of friends Henry (Gianfranco Poddighe) a gold prospector, Domingo (Juan Rodrigáñez ) who is preparing to get 3 million Euros from a certain Herr Müller of Düsseldorf, Lucas (Eduard Mont de Palol) who is fond of reading all kinds of books about economics and culture, Cecilia (Cecilia Molano), a singer (Julia de Castro), another musician (Michel Rodrigáñez) and the idiot  (Pablo Herranz) spending their vacation at Rafael's huge estate. To Rafael's surprise, his son (Jorge Dutor)  brought with him a German girlfriend (Katrin Memmer) who turned out to be a very accomplished pianist.

Ghesse-ha (Tales) (德克蘭人間傳奇)

My 6th film at the HKIFF is again different from all the other films seen so far. It's “Ghesse-ha”(Tales) (2014) by Rakhshan Bani-Etemadby, the first lady among Iranian female directors with a whole string of films under her direction from 1986 on : Kharej az Mahdudeh (1986 aka Off-Limits), Zard-e Ghanari (1988, aka Canary Yellow), Pul-e Khareji (1989, aka Foreign Currency), Nargess (1992), Rusari Abi (1995, aka The Blue-Veiled), Banoo-ye Ordibehesht (1998,aka The May Lady), Baran-O-Bumi (1999, aka Baran and the Native, a short), Zir-e Pust-e Shahr (2001, aka Under the Skin of the City), Ruzegar-e ma (2002, aka Our Times , a documentary), Gilane (2004,)Khoon Bazi (2006, aka Mainline) and We Are Half of Iran's Population (2009).

Part of the Tales is supposed to be the work of a video-journalist just returned from abroad who enjoys documenting on his small digital camera whatever he comes across he finds of interest in his real everyday life. He shoots everything from the window of the taxi whose driver complains that he never feels the urge to shoot him and is given the wry response that the taxi driver never asked him to! But the most important of such videos is the one he took  in a mini van full of half a dozen unhappy people from all parts of Teheran each with his own complaints against the Iranian government for failing to help: an old woman (the taxi driver's mother) seeking to recover her unpaid wages from her boss whose factory closed down because of Chinese competition and whose workers have already lodged a futile protest to the government official who was seen more interested in talking to his mistress than of dealing with their problem  and which when he does, take the form of asking the security guards to drive them out; another complains of rising food prices no longer matched by  wages; a third, a retiree who easily breaks into tears complains that he is not reimbursed his hospital expenses under his medical insurance long after they were due; a fourth complains about taxes being too high and a fifth, who has been out of job for two years because of a work injury and is now forced to rely upon his wife to support him, something which constitutes a terrible shame and humiliation for a man in Iran, complains about the bureaucratic delays in giving him the relevant employee compensation.

There is a second line which follows a day in the life of a fully recovered drug addict who had previously committed suicide but is now helping the very same Centre for addicted women which previously helped her. Through her, we meet some of the people she encounters including first, the conversation she overhears on her subway journey to the Centre between a young married woman meeting her lover behind her husband's back and toying with the idea of a fake kidnapping on her subway journey; secondly a woman whose face was burned by boiling water thrown at her by her husband and who is seeking free medical treatment at the Centre on the pretext that it was caused by an exploding boiler. We are shown how her husband made a big fuss outside the Centre because he wanted her back and who when met by workers from the Centre said, tears in his eyes, that apart from her wife, he's got nothing. Then we see how another full time employee deal with an old woman who wants financial assistance to get bail for his son put in jail a year for speaking out against the government but was rejected because that was not covered by the scheme at the Centre. When we follow that employee home, we see how she gets a letter from her former husband who is about to die saying that as his last wish, he wants her to have his house and how suspicious and jealous his illiterate husband is, her husband being one of the protesters in the mini-van on their way to demonstrate against the red tape and bureaucratic delays of the relevant Iranian government department to pay the overdue employee compensation. We also see how on their way to lodge the protest against the government, their van was stopped by some government agents and the ensuing altercations and scuffles between them.The link to all the different stories are skilfully tied together as passengers of the taxi driver as he goes about his work.

A third line concentrates on the relation between the recovered suicidee and the taxi driver, a university dropout which takes the form of the dialogue/argument between them whilst the taxi driver was driving the van hired by the Centre to take home another middle aged drug addict who has just received some medical treatment at the Centre after she slashed her own wrist. We hear the tortuous verbal exchanges between the taxi driver and the obviously sharp and quick witted young volunteer worker around the question whether he has feelings for her and she for him. In the end, the taxi driver was forced to admit that he does but is told point blank that his feelings for her are not reciprocated. The intense exchanges last for about a quarter of an hour without a break, as the camera constantly switches to and fro  between the face of the taxi driver and that of the young volunteer worker. In the meantime, as the taxi continues its journey, life continues as usual in Teheran with all its social, economic and domestic problems, just like in any other modern metropolis.  

Because in Iran, one must get ministerial permission before one can produce a long feature film, Rakhshan Bani-Etemadby has skilfully evaded the restrictions by weaving together half a dozen different short documentaries, which do not require such permission,  into one long  Tales which gives us a taste of what it's like to live as as a small potato in present day Teheran. That taste is delicious: it creates a rich tapestry of some of the problems faced by  contemporary Teheran: its economic tensions, its changing social mores, conflicts between the government bureaucracy and the people and the shifting but subtle changes in the traditional relations between men and women in Iran: the women in the film being generally portrayed as much stronger than the men. The film feels authentic because many of the "actors" in the quasi-documentary are amateurs doing so for free. And the final sequence of exchanges between the young taxi driver and the volunteer worker documents exquisitely the kind of shy, evasive and round about way many Iranian men have to resort to in letting the woman of their dream have an idea of how they truly feel about her and give us the full flavor of the subterfuges engaged by the taxi driver for such purpose.

Credit must be given to Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Farid Mostafavi the wonderful script they have written together for this film and for the brilliant "candid camera" approach to create that sense of flesh and blood feel of social reality portrayed through the pretext of the same being done by a returning video journalist, masterfully captured for us by cinematographer Koohyar Kalari. It's not just a social quasi-documentary, it's also a documentary about a subject of universal interest: the changing relations between man and woman in a rapidly developing world. It is not for no reason that the film got the Best Screenplay Award at the last Cannes International Film Festival. At the time she got her award at Cannes, Rakhshan Bani-Etema said that many people are suffering in present day Iran because of the UN sanctions against her country and asked: "When will people realise that it is the people who suffer the consequences of international decisions?” Certainly food for thought.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (鴿子在樹上反思存在意義)

Roy Anderson (b. 1943) is a film maker from Sweden known by very few people in Hong Kong but in fact, he already made a very successful first film in 1970: A Swedish Love Story which won 4 awards at the 20th Berlin Film Festival, then went on to make a black comedy: Giliap(1975), a critical and financial flop, after which he quit cinema for a quarter of a century and concentrated on making commercials. He returned to film making only in 2000 with his Songs from the Second Floor, an absurdist comedy consisting of 46 surrealist tableaux caricaturing Swedish life and culture which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and which was followed by You, the Living (2007) examining the lives of an overweight woman, a disgruntled psychiatrist, a heartbroken groupie, a carpenter, a business consultant, and a school teacher and her rug-selling husband. 

At this year's HKIFF, we have his latest film: A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence ( (Swedish: En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron)(2014) as the third part what's been called his "living"-trilogy,(the two previous being Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living). Anderson names this film after a 1565 painting by  elder Pieter Bruegel: The Hunters in the Snow depicting the winter countryside with some birds perched on tree branches, watching the people below and to him, probably wondering what they are doing. He says at the 71th Venice International Film Festival in which he won the Golden Lion award, that he was inspired by the 1948 Italian film Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica and describes it as "a deep and fantastic, humorous and tragic, philosophical, Dostoyevsky film."

The film opens with a fat man examining some specimens of bird on a branch in a museum enclosed in a glass case, his wife waiting impatiently. Then we are shown 3 deaths: the man in the museum dies whilst trying to uncork a bottle of wine at the door of a kitchen whilst his wife is totally engaged doing something or other in that kitchen, her back towards his back; a thin old dying woman on a hospital bed clinging to her handbag containing her wedding ring, some jewelry and cash whilst both her sons fight to snatch it from her tight grasp on the ground that she can't and doesn't need to bring that to heaven and the captain of a ferry having to decide what to do with an already paid but unconsumed meal left behind by another fat man who had just suffered a fatal heart attack, Then the film continues with a kaleidoscopic tour in a series of tableaux or sketches of the kinds of things that people do in their daily life, mostly through the eyes of two comical door-to-door salesman Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom) the junior of whom is always complaining that his superior is angry with him and the latter of whom always has always to console him, such sequences always shot from a fixed angle at a distance from what is happening on the screen. What joins all the scenes, often grotesque and surrealist, is the theme of how absurd, how fragile and how vulnerable human existence really is: how we are always exposed to the risk of being ignored, insulted, exploited and cheated by others or subjugated to their authority, of our need to earn our living, of our need of having always to rely upon others and being exposed to the injustices and cruelty they may inflict upon us and how meaningless are the contents of a lot of what we regard as instant communication through the digital phone and finally how we are all exposed to the ultimate risk of death. Through such exploration, Anderson makes us reflect as the birds in Breugel's painting of winter, two eternal questions which have plagued all philosophers and all religious leaders and all of us lesser mortals for as long as man has started to think: what we are doing and where we are going to.

Cavallo Dinheiro (Horse Money )(馬錢)

Cavallo Dinheiro (Horse Money )(馬錢) must count as one of the most enigmatic films I saw at this year's HKIFF so far. It's a film by Portuguese film director Pedro Costa (b. 1959), a history student turned film maker who learned cinema from the famous Portuguese director António Reis, Paulo Rocha and Alberto Seixas Santos who first won international recognition with his "In Vanda's Room" (2000) and then Colossal Youth (2006) after having made O Sangre (1989), Casa de Lava (1995) and Ossos (1997). He is known for his spare almost expressionist images about marginalized people in desperate situations shot as quasi documentary fiction, where in a Proust-like manner, the boundaries between reality and imagination, between fact and fiction, between the past and the present have become irretrievably blurred in the human mind or consciousness.   

In many ways, Horse Money is truly indescribable in words. Like many artistic genres such as music and painting, in which if the artist can fully express what he/she wishes to express in words, it would not have been necessary to do so in their musical or pictorial form in the first place, what Costa may wish to express in Horse Money can only be expressed in the film as it is, as completed and in that sense, something which has become independent of what Costa might have intended, something which has a life of its own, linked to but separate from Costa.

Party Girl (舞吧! 夜遊天使)

Making a film about one's mother can never be easy. The difficulty would probably triple if it were to be made by three of the children of that same mother who share all the ideas about how such a film is to be made, who is responsible for what and who should have the final say in doing or not doing certain things or the way those things are to be done and the film is their very first. Yet that is exactly what Samuel Theis, Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq and Claire Burger did in a documentary-like feature film about their mother, a 60-year-old hard drinking self-centred cabaret dancer with bags below her eyes, loads of thick rings around her fingers living at a hotel room above the local pole dance club who somehow couldn't quite get used to the idea that she is not longer the star attraction there suddenly announced her desire to her children to get married (Sonia Angélique Theis-Litzemburger).

The film Party Girl (2014), selected as the opening film of Un Certain Regard for films which are "different and original" at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, was co-written, co-directed, co-acted by Theis, Amachoukeli-Barsacq and Burger. It's a film which took them 4 years from hatching to completion, using mostly amateur actors and actresses who play themselves at a town at the French-German border.

The President (總统大人着草了)

My second film at the HKIFF is not the kind of film that one finds easily in Hong Kong: it's not a tear jerking tragedy, nor a gag comedy. It is neither an action movie nor a romance. It's not a Chinese movie. Nor is it a Hollywood movie. It's a movie by a film director who is Iranian but who could not make that movie in his country about a subject which not very many film deals with. It's a very personal film about something which touches the director very deeply. He spent five and a half year in an Iranian prison for throwing a bomb at a government leader. He tried to fight for political reform and did not hesitate to use physical violence. Since then, he has had some second thoughts about its use for a noble political cause.The film is called "The President" (2014) and the director is Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a self-taught Iranian film maker living with his family in Paris. 

As the film opens, we see a 5-year old kid in military uniform sitting on the lap of an old man also in military uniform. He was looking out from his office on to the city below his feet. It was night time. There were city lights everywhere. The child was asking for an icecream. The old man said he could not have it because it's not good for him. But the child insisted. To appease the child, he asked him if he would like to see the lights go out. The child nodded. The old man made a telephone call. The lights were off. Then he asked the child if he would like to try. The child nodded vigorously. He passed the telephone to the child. The child then gave a few orders and the lights were on and off. But when the child tried a third time for the lights to be turned on again, the city remained dark. Then the sound of a few bomb explosion could be heard.

To see the Sea (男孩子自導日記)

One doesn't get a lot of chance to see any films from Czechoslovakia, which split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. Previously most of the films from that country are about its recent turbulent past: occupation by Nazi Germany, life under Communist rule etc. But its entry in this year's European Union Film Festival HK 2015 is a most unusual film: Pojedeme k moři ( To See the Sea), a film by 28-year-old actor turned director Jiří Mádl, who took a 6--month crash course on film making at the New York Film Academy just before making the film, shot with a Nikon digital SLR, purportedly from the point of view of one of its two protagonists, Tomáš Hrobský( Petr Simcák ), an 11-year-old school boy who boldly declared with typical childish bravado that he wanted to become the next Miloš Forman and his buddy Haris Kubálek  (Jan Marsál ). Tomáš got the camera as a birthday present from his internet furniture dealer father (táta) (Ondrej Vetchý) and he started first with the idea of making a film on a subject with which he thought he is most familiar and closest to him viz. his own family in the southern Bohemian city of České Budějovice and then as the film develops, it spills off into episodes about the family of his best friend Haris, an immigrant from nearby Croatia. .

Tomáš was intrigued by one fact: recorded by his secretly hidden camera trained on his father before the computer on his work desk:  every Tuesday and Thursday morning, he would suddenly stop work and start talking secretly to someone on the telephone shortly after which he would leave the house and drive off to some unknown destination. Tomáš suspected his father of having an affair with another woman. But when he asked his father about it, his father would strenuously deny that he had ever left the house and when he asked his mother (máma) (Lucie Trmíková) if she noticed if she found anything unusual about the behavior of his father, she would look very puzzled at his question and would deny any such suggestion.

Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) (蜂蜜之夏)

The Chinese title of the Italian contribution to this year's EU Film Festival (6th) in Hong Kong Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) (2014) translates into "The Summer of Honey"(蜂蜜之夏) misled me into thinking that it's all about how one garners honey in summer but it turns out that it is much much more than that. It's a very personal film by the new Italian woman screen writer and director Alice Rohrwacher (b. 1980), daughter of a German bee-keeping father and an Italian mother and featuring her experienced actress sister Alba Caterina Rohrwacher (b. 1982). Alice studied philosophy at the University of Turin and then screen writing at the Holden School and first took part in making the documentary Checosamanca in  2006 as a co-director, having written the script for another documentary Un piccolo spettacolo the previous year. But she got into making feature film only in 2011 (Corpo Celeste )(Heavenly Body) about the emotional struggles of a resteless13- year-old girl who just moved back to live with her mother and elder sister in conservative Catholic southern Italy. Le Meraviglie, her second feature film, whose script she wrote, won the Grand Prize at the  2014 Cannes Film Festival.