Rays of Hope (In a World of Prostitution, Rape and Incest) By Caroline M. Buck

in 17th Stockholm Film Festival

by Caroline M. Buck

Lots of good things are to be said for a festival where even the three recurring ads preceding the films proper — ads for Sweden’s biggest crispbread exporting company, for the world–leader in global parcel shipping, and for a free monthly entertainment calendar respectively — were consistently entertaining, even at the twentieth viewing, and where, to top even that considerable achievement, the selection of short films in competition had been co-ordinated to perfection with the feature films they were screened alongside.

And better still, the main features held the promises made by the ads and shorts: aesthetic standards were high at the 16th Stockholm International Film Festival, the width of stylistic choices broad, the interesting films many. If one could stomach the violence, that is. In the International Competition the rule of thumb seemed to be that the more violent and implicitly misogynistic a film became, the less interesting it turned out to be. In the Northern Lights section, with its focus on Scandinavian, Finnish and Baltic films having their Swedish, Nordic or even international premieres, the opposite held true.

Northern Lights

In Northern Lights, eight films vied for audience attention and a FIPRESCI award: a rather charming if slight comedy of errors set among lovelorn girls in their mid-twenties (Silja Hauksdóttir’s Icelandic debut film Dís), and a modernised, ecologically-minded version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (En folkefiende) by Erik Skjoldbjærg, promising director of the 1997 original Norwegian Insomnia, later prominently remade in the US by Christopher Nolan, and the scandal movie Prozac Nation. A partly improvised farcical comedy about sexual mores and the work ethic in a Finnish small town in TV-director Janne Kuusi’s feature film debut Flowers and Binding (Kukkia ja sidontaa). An autobiographically inspired Swedish immigration comedy, Made in YU, by second generation immigrant Miko Laziç, and its Norwegian pendant in Khalid Hussain’s second feature Import-Export about a Norwegian boy’s tortuous way into his prospective Pakistani father-in-law’s good graces.

Finally, an insightful look from the Baltics into the havoc wrought by post-partum depression with the beautifully written and shot Land of Glass (Stiklo salis) by Lithuanian first-timer Janina Lapinskaité (Director of Photography: Algimantas Mikutênas), and last, but far from least, Accused (Anklaget) by Danish feature film debutant Jacob Thuesen and Finnish director Petri Kotwica’s slightly stylised Homesick (Koti-ikävä), set to a noteworthy punk soundtrack by up-and-coming local bands — two unsparing dramas about incest, one as seen through the reactions of the victim, the other from the side of the perpetrator.

The FIPRESCI award to a feature film in the Northern Lights section went to Accused, “for its pointed portrayal of a family that falls apart after a troubled teenager accuses her father of incest. The film’s tight and terrifying screenplay gels with a thoughtful [approach to] cinematography and outstanding performances to create a disturbing, multi-layered atmosphere of accusation and counter-accusation. Accused is a film that puts appearances and the audiences’ perceptions to the test, a film one won’t easily forget”, to quote the semi-official jury motivation as read at the awards ceremony.

Even more than the unflinchingly precise direction and editing, the excellent script by Kim Fupz Aakeson (Okay, Forbrydelser — In Your Hands, Chinaman), the casual and stark cinematography by director of photography Sebastian Blenkov and the well-chosen cast (Sofie Gråbøl, Kristine Rosenkrands Mikkelsen), it is actor Troels Lyby in the part of the at first shocked, then ever angrier father with his mounting self-pity and hostility against friends, family and a possibly over-zealous psychologist who might or might not have planted the idea in the teenager’s head in the first place that carries the film to an outstanding level. Firmly rooted in the mundane details of family life, never anything but realistic and all the more shocking when the unthinkable disruption is suddenly forced onto the family as a new element of routine everyday-life, Thuesen’s debut promises exceedingly well for the future.

International Competition

In the International Competition where violence against women was recurring and casual and sexual imagery never far removed from exploitative rather than narratively motivated explicitness, the FIPRESCI award-winner was Be With Me by Eric Khoo, which in contrast, stood out for its compassion and relevant humanity.

Be With Me portrays “the true life story of a deaf and blind woman (played by herself) intertwined with the story of three fictional characters looking for love. The film is an interesting attempt to visualise the isolation of a double handicap and how to overcome it. Also, it tells a story — about loss, pain and longing — as deeply rooted in its multi-national Singaporean community as it is universal. A truly sensitive movie translating words and images into grace and hope”, to quote the (semi-official) jury motivation.

That Khoo, apart from writing, producing and at times scoring and editing his own (short) films, also trained as a cinematographer in Sydney, might go some way towards explaining the extraordinary quality of Be With Me’s static, slightly bleached HD digital cinematography by first-timer Adrian Tan (blown up to 35mm for exhibition prints) that prompted Stockholm’s main festival jury also to attribute its award for Best Cinematography to the film.

Since it would seem that 2001’s One Leg Kicking, officially co-written and executive produced by Khoo, was actually co-directed by him with Wei Koh, the other half of the joint-pseudonym Khoo Koh, Be With Me might be Khoo’s fourth feature film, not his third as the Stockholm catalogue and some filmographies would have it — a circumstance that might have given him at a slight advantage in experience over his 17 competitors in the Stockholm competition, a selection otherwise restricted to first to third feature film outings by their directors.

Poor in dialogue, but rich in sensory detail, laconic rather than minimalistic, Be With Me deals with some recurring themes in Khoo’s body of work, themes such as the battle between pain and hope, the casual appearance of ghosts of departed beloved ones that linger on in the lives of the bereaved, the equal importance of a task in life and of good, home-cooked food as a life-enhancer, and the potential fatality of love to either the unrequited lover or the obsessively loved one as in Khoo’s rather macabre 1995 feature film debut Mee Pok Man.

In Be With Me, it is Chiew Sung Ching, first seen in a similar role in the 1993 short Symphony 92.4 FM, as an aged Chinese shopkeeper who has difficulty in letting go of his recently deceased wife’s ghost that still maintains her place at the dinner table. Intercut with this wordless enacting of bereavement and longing is the risqué, by Singaporean standards, and ultimately doomed love-affair of two teenaged schoolgirls who meet via an Internet chatroom and a series of girlish shopping outings, and the ethnically diverse, if otherwise rather trite tale of the obsessional love-at-a-distance of an overweight security guard for a glamorous young woman from the managerial staff.

All three story strands gain weight and perspective by the surprise intrusion, two thirds into the film, of the inspirational life story of a real blind and deaf teacher, Theresa Poh Lin Chan, as read from her unpublished memoirs. That this “reading” is just that and has to be done by the spectator himself since the film translates Chan’s text into subtitles and images of her everyday life and interactions with her pupils, instead of using the more traditional voice-over narration the deaf woman herself would not be able to hear, is part of the attraction and at the same time a minor flaw of the film. But if the attempt to convey Chan’s exclusion from some of the sensory perceptions most of us take for granted may ultimately have to be considered a partial failure, it is certainly an interesting failure.

Asian Sidebar

Other Asian Images in the festival’s traditional Asian-themed sidebar included political education films like The President’s Last Bang (Geuddae geusaramdeul) by Im Sang-soo, about the assassination of Korea’s dictatorial president Park Chun-Hee by members of his own secret services in October 1979, action-fuelled entertainment with the Jackie Chan-costume epic The Myth (Shen hua) by Stanley Tong and a mixture of both lush production values and a precise political message in Yash Chopra’s Bollywood-style reconciliation movie Veer-Zaara, as well as the most recent chapter in Kim Ki-duk’s ongoing portrayal of the war of the sexes with The Bow (Hwal) — rather surprisingly his second film in a row where the young heroine is actually allowed to break free more or less unscathed from male domination.

At the end of the festival, a greater number than ever before of filmmakers and actors had put in a personal appearance to present their films, and a remarkably high percentage of the 160 films from 40 countries shown in the course of Stockholm Film Festival’s eleven day run had met with local distributor interest — always a crucial criterion to establish a festival’s relative importance in its territory. Lifetime Achievement Award recipient David Cronenberg had been to Stockholm to cut the celluloid ribbon on its opening evening, and Terry Gilliam, honoured for his pioneering vision and iconoclastic approach to the cinematographic art, had answered the public’s questions during what was to be literally the last night of Stockholm’s oldest cinema, Röda Kvarn, dating back to 1915 and now being demolished to make room for a shopping mall. Gunnar Asplund’s Skandia on the other hand, another beautiful 1923 gem of a cinema with its boxes and balconies and embroidered red velvet tapestry under a dark blue ceiling, has been closed and re-opened twice within the last ten years and will now, with the festival’s help, remain intact as a cinema till 2010 at least.