INT 6: Home Ground
INT 6: Home Ground is perhaps the very strongest of all of this year's festival's programmes, no better exemplified than with opening film Deklaracja Nieśmiertelności (Declaration of Immortality) (2010). Marcin Koszalka's documentary focuses on Polish mountain climber Piotr “Mad” Korczak and his daredevil ascents, breathtakingly captured with equally-hazardous precision. As a viewing experience it is staggeringly visceral, and its extroverted, single-minded star and his philosophical pronouncements make for a profound, Herzog-like existential meditation on the transience of beauty, mortality, and the creation of meaning in the individual.
Image: Declaration of Immortality
Inspired by the life and death of Canadian First Nations artist Kyle Morrisseau, Michelle Latimer's stop-motion animation Choke (2011), also examines ideas about identity and its creation. Appropriately set to David Lynch's haunting song Dark Night of the Soul, it tells of teenager regretfully leaving home only to discover the cold, unwelcoming streets of the city, all the while burdened with a sense of the inescapably of his own familial heritage. Sombre, nightmarish, with a Brothers Quay-like air of dark menace, it also speaks of the wider experience of First Nations people struggling to adapt to urban life.
Image: Choke
Similarly ethereal is Elina Talvensaari's Miten marjoja poimitaan (How To Pick Berries) (2010), which descends through the clouds to an other-worldly mist-strewn Finnish countryside, shot with a Malickian eye for the mysterious beauty of the natural world. By contrast, in a series of dry, matter-of-fact pieces of voice-over, disgruntled local berry pickers tell of how their livelihood is being taken over by cheaper Thai immigrants, all the while intercut with shots of rhythmical, precise machinery in action. The ambience is mysterious, but the tone is mischievous, adding sonic touches from 1950s sci-fi movies to suggest that, for the culturally-misunderstood locals, the interlopers may as well be alien invaders coming to harvest their land.
Image: Miten Marjoja Poimitaan
In Tomás Sheridan's Radiostan (2010) we 'tune in' and 'tune out' of a variety people telling of their experiences living in the vast continent-spanning territory of the former Soviet Union. Giving equal weight to its subjects, filming them in exactly the same framing, the film tellingly allows both the contrasting of their words and the landscape which surrounds them, but also identifying similarities between them, universal not only to them but to us all.
Image: Radiostan
Also screening is Johannes Leistner's Opfer (Submerged) (2011), in which a well-to-do father and his daughter's new boyfriend meet each other with hostility. In a Haneke-like fashion, simmering tensions bubble underneath the surface of respectability, and mutual antagonisms and differences in class mores intimate towards what seems an inevitable conflict.
