INT 4: Ever After
Two films in the INT 4: Ever After programme contrast in their exploring the ambiguities of the viewer's relationship with the characters on screen, challenging preconceptions about how appearances may make things look. David Easteal's film The Father (2011) opens with a sinister looking man purposefully spying on a family through the windows of their house before fleeing on his discovery but, as the title makes clear, the parameters of his relationship to them is closer than initial appearances might suggest, and John Brumpton's strident central performance captures both a sense of menace and emotional depth in this contradictory character.
Image: The Father
In almost antithetical contrast, Borkur Sigthorsson's Come To Harm (2011) begins with respectable businessman Stefan returning home from work to meet his family, only suddenly to sense that unseen intruders may have broken into his house. Taking the home invasion thriller format so overly familiar in recent years, the director skilfully drives the generic formula into unexpected territory, in turn allowing a more nuanced exploration of the interrelated emotions of guilt, paranoia and selective amnesia. Meanwhile in Jennifer Leacey's Connection (2011), one solitary perspective is possibly fatally inadequate when a tentative video date across webcams develops into a more dramatic situation. Lightly blending urgency and farce, it also becomes a wider satire of the apparent dangers of the functional impersonality of modern dating.
Image: Come to Harm
Shifting perspectives in a very literal way is Meagan Kelly's Grace (2010), a documentary focusing on a young girl living and working on a garbage dump in the Philippines. While mostly shot in a conventional style, it also makes striking use of a camera attached to her head, offering a direct window into her life scavenging for items of value strewn in amongst the mountainous piles of rubbish. While the subject matter is shockingly eye-opening, the tone is upbeat, influenced by Grace's own positive outlook on her situation and her ambitious plans for the future.
Image: Grace
Also screening in the programme is Malou Reymann's 13 (2010), in which a young girl travels across town on her birthday to visit her estranged father, only to be met by his new lover. Eschewing melodrama, the film instead paints a naturalistic picture of the faint fault lines between families which, if left untended, can develop into wider, more permanent rifts. Finally, Manuela Moreno's Camas (Beds) (2010), a series of post-coital conversations between lovers whose emotional compatibility is perhaps not quite as snug a fit as their physical one.
