Part 2: Presumed Guilty; Fluke; Freezer Fright; Prima Primavera; Puffball; Constantin and Elena

I have to come clean. Disaster in the form of a bad back meant I was unable to travel to Bradford for the second week of the festival. Aching as much with frustration as a troublesome disc, the best I can do is offer reviews of films which were on offer that I have already seen (some of which I recommended for the festival), or obtained on dvd, to give a flavour of it all.

Presumed Guilty

Directed by Roberto Hernandez, Geoffrey Smith (Seen at Black Nights Film Festival, Tallinn, December 2009 - recommended to the festival)

The startling statistics from Mexico tell their own story - 95% of trials there result in convictions. A highly efficient police force? No. The entire justice system is based on the idea that if you are picked up for a crime, you did it, and it's up to you to prove your innocence in a system that makes that as difficult as possible.

When young stallholder Jose Antonio Zuniga was sentenced to 20 years for a murder he knew nothing about, on the strength of one eyewitness (and he had three others to state he was elsewhere at the time), his friends and family were so determined to prove his innocence that they managed against the odds to secure the help of two remarkable Mexican lawyers living in the US to put forward an appeal. Amazingly, the pair were allowed to film both his life inside the prison, where he shared a cell with 19 others, and the retrial itself. This footage, moving and shocking, provides the raw material for this film, made by Mexican Roberto Hernandez and Australian Geoffrey Smith, award winner in 2007 for his documentary The English Surgeon. In their hands it becomes far more than merely a documentary account of a tremendous injustice, but an emotionally engaging, suspenseful and at times poetic experience, at once a horrifying glimpse into a world of banal corruption, where evil is done as much by omission as real intent (and is in a way all the more horrific for that), and a tribute to resilience and determination, and to the strength of ordinary people who know truth is on their side. Vitally for Jose Antonio, the footage provided proof of the corruption of the appeal process itself, but more universally it is an important witness to how easily terrible injustices can be perpetrated by a corrupt system.

Fluke

Directed by Tamas Kemenyffy (Seen at Transilvanian Film Festival Cluj, June 2009 - recommended to the festival)

  A crazy, cheerful comedy from Hungary that mixes a nice line in sharp political satire and knockabout humour with considerable warmth and an array of larger-than-life characters, to English audiences this is bound to bring affectionate memories of certain classic Ealing Comedies, such as Whisky Galore and Passport to Pimlico. The people of Ogyarmat, a scruffy, dead-end little village just on the Hungarian side of the border with prosperous Austria, are so downhearted about their lacklustre future as a community that they're on the point of selling off their land to an Austrian company.  Only stubborn farmer Istvan stands out against it. But then he's always been an awkward old cuss.
   But when he accidentally discovers that an oil pipeline runs under their churchyard, the villagers come together to tap and sell off the oil, and their future seems secure - that is until personal greed comes in and everyone, from local mini-capitalist to communist to church minister, begins to want the takings for themselves as individuals rather than putting them to the general good. Again, Istvan is the only opposing voice, and what with that and his troubles with his flighty daughter, he's just about had enough. The arrival of a delegation from the oil company, led by hapless executive Helmut (Felix Theissen), to sort things out in their own favour, followed by TV cameras and reluctant police, causes further zany chaos. Istvan is played with terrific brio by Andor Lukats, veteran stage and screen actor and theatre director. The clever and fast-moving screenplay won top award at the Hungarian Film week, 2009, and as a first feature from director Kemenyffy it's extremely impressive - beautifully paced, laugh-aloud funny, and full of surprises.

Freezer Fright

Directed by Nancy Silver (Seen on dvd)

I always reckoned that a film containing ventriloquists' dummies was guaranteed to scare me, but here's one that didn't. Freezer Fright is a tongue in cheek little oddity from America that nails its homemade colours to the mast as artist/musician/first time filmmaker Nancy Silver drives round the scrubby suburban streets of Hot Springs Arizona knocking on her (clearly forewarned) friends' doors in the guise of a government inspector and demands to inspect their freezers. Trouble is there's no surprises - a sex aid is the nearest we get to shocking, and the owners' attempts at spicing up their packs of out of date meat and crusty ice cream with the odd soft toy soon pall a bit. The real nasties - and they're not that nasty - appear at the last stop-off, where the fact that the freezer is standing in the middle of the front lawn is a bit of a giveaway as to the state of its contents. A truly eccentric little piece, whose homespun charm and warm characters almost make up for its all-too-soon running out of invention. And those dummies at the start - don't ask me!

Prima Primavera

Directed by Janos Edélenyi (Seen on dvd - recommended to the festival)

Andor Lukáts is Gábor, a middle-aged simple-minded savant whose life is suddenly thrown into chaos when his mother, his carer, is shot in a bizarre bank robbery, which he witnesses. He forms an unlikely alliance with Joli, a no-nonsense Ukrainian girl from the underworld, and out of this dark beginning the film blossoms into a charming yet unsentimental journey of escape from their old lives through the gorgeous countryside of southern Hungary, as Gábor seeks a place he remembers from his childhood as a sanctuary. Each discovers an unaccustomed freedom, but the bad old world they've left behind is always threatening to catch up with them and destroy their sometimes lyrical, sometimes comical idyll. Up-and-coming Bulgarian actress, the unconventionally beautiful Veseva Kazakova, as Joli, speaks not a word of Hungarian and learned her script phonetically. It was worth it. She's a great foil to Lukáts, seen here for the second time at Bradford (see Fluke, above), again proving what a versatile actor he is.

Puffball

Directed by Nicolas Roeg (Seen at Tyneside Cinema 2009)

Lukewarm reports, and the fact that it had only made a few appearances in the UK, damped the keen anticipation I wanted to feel about this film by 80-year-old Roeg, director of a film I rate as one of the best British films ever: Don't Look Now. For the first 5 minutes, as we were introduced to the beguiling Irish landscape complete with sinister/wistful mists, it seemed it might have potential. Then the plot kicked in.

Architect Liffey (Kelly Reilly) arrives at a house she is renovating in the muddy countryside of Ireland with lacklustre boyfriend Richard (Oscar Pearce) in tow. But who's that peering malevolently through the bushes like Wee Willie Winkie? Oh God, Rita Tushingham, sporting mad eyes and ginger wig, horribly reminiscent of those wig/hat combos worn by Scottish football supporters.

Up the lane lives Mabs (Miranda Richardson) with her three daughters and put upon husband Tucker, with mad granny Tush in the caravan in the yard. When Liffey gets inadvertently pregnant, despite using a condom (yes, I agree, too much information), bonkers Mabs decides Liffey's somehow stolen the boy baby she is trying for, and all kinds of would-be witchery and supernatural fol-de-rols ensue: the eponymous puffballs, lurking in the undergrowth and twinkling with a kind of glowing foetus within; an ancient tumbled standing stone with a suggestive hole in it ; hex dolls; and the most horrible potions, made of unspeakable ingredients - well, here's one: the aforementioned condom contents - quaffed as dinner wine. ‘Tastes funny...' notes the well-meaning Tucker. There's lots of very dodgy obstetric stuff which I didn't believe for a minute, and the sex is mostly nasty, brutish and short, with too many shots of thrusting buttocks, and, something new in film I believe, intra-vaginal views of sexual congress. Hmm.

Poor Kelly Reilly, recently seen covered in blood and mud and harassed by weird locals recently in Eden Lake, goes through it all again, this time with the wafty disengagement of a haughty model tempered with occasional potion-fuelled sexual voracity. Miranda Richardson does her dotty thing, and Tina Kellegher as her sister gives us a malevolent version of Mrs Doyle from Father Ted. A little ray of sunlight comes in the always welcome form of Donald Sutherland, as architect mentor of Liffey, dropping in to look wise and spout the odd philosophical apercu, with that quizzical smile on his face to let on he kind of knows he's talking bollocks.  

In truth it is entertaining, however inadvertently - I would have liked to laugh out loud at several points. But my predominant feelings were sadness- that a once great director might have lost it - the ability to do narrative, character, sex, suspense, and to stand outside his creation and see it objectively - all things of which he was once such a master.

Constantin and Elena

Directed by Andrei Dascalescu (Seen at Transilvanian Film Festival Cluj June 2009)

A very likeable, very warm documentary made by debut director Dascalescu about his ageing grandparents who live in a village in the Romanian countryside. Fifty-four years into their marriage the couple reminisce, sing, josh each other, and get on with their daily, essential tasks, smoking the sausages, weaving, and singing in the church choir. She can no longer get about very well beyond the house, but he still plays an active life in the village church and reports back about activities, after she has sent him off looking suitably smart. Like a young wife she stays awake to hear what he's got to tell. A wonderful hymn to contentment and sassiness in old age, the film looks gorgeous too, the couple's home with its vibrant colour and mix of the exquisite - the wall-hangings Elena has made over the decades - and the banal, worn, basic household utensils. It's notoriously trickier to express joy, optimism, love, in art than the darker side of life. This triumphantly succeeds.

Part 1, click here...