Review: Waiting for the Clouds (SIFF 2005)

Waiting for the Clouds is a combination history lesson and personal story. The movie depicts an elderly woman who lives with her ailing sister in a small Turkish village. The woman, with an almost perpetual forlorn look on her face, is somewhat recluse and perceived as a bit off by her fellow villagers. A stranger visits the town one day, and jogs her memory. From this encounter, the woman sets off on a trip to connect with her familial roots. We leave the woman at the end of the film only as she's opened the door to her past.

While slow to get off the ground, the movie captures village life in Northern Turkey alongside a woman's conflicted past with her present. The events the movie base on were real, yet little known or understood about this time period overseas. The acting in the movie is excellent, and the scenery is shot superbly; the eponymous "clouds" scenes in the mountains were truly haunting.

Overall rating: 8.0 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Countries: France / Germany / Greece / Turkey
Languages: Turkish / Greek

Review: Night of the Living Dorks (SIFF 2005)

Before watching Night of the Living Dorks, I admit I hadn't been exposed to much German comedy before. I think I chose the right entrance in the genre. This is an excellent, light-hearted comedy that plays off of themes in zombie and teenage-high-school movies at the same time.

The basic premise revolves around three dorky high school students who don't get any respect. After a night in a graveyard with some Goth kids and a spell gone bad, the trio ends up in a morgue, zombified. They're not your George Romero zombies, mind you; their personalities are intact, and in fact they've gained a few skills:
- They don't feel pain, and are pretty strong
- They like raw meat
- Their body parts are more easily detachable

The movie is much more bent on teen comedy; it's the zombie premise that puts the twist in the expected scenes (with a girl, against a bully, attending a party, in a class, etc.). The jokes are frequent and consistently funny; there are quite a few laugh-out-loud lines and images in the movie. All in all, a movie worth your time if you're in the mood for a film that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Overall rating: 7.5/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Country: Germany
Language: German

Review: Hostage (SIFF 2005)

SIFF 2005's only (mostly) Greek film was another fine offering from Constantine Giannaris (director of One Day in August, a SIFF offering from a couple of years ago). Hostage is a fictional story based on a true event of an Albanian who holds a Greek bus hostage in northern Greece in 1999.

The film almost immediately plunges into the conflict: very soon after the opening credits, we see a young man climbing into a bus, and a few minutes later he is holding it hostage. Soon after, he lets most of the passengers go, but holds seven of them hostage. His demands: 500,000 Euros and passage to Albania. His threats: an automatic gun and a live hand grenade.

Greek authorities tail the bus, and approach the hostages and the Albanian when he stops. The scenes are markedly conversational: the hostages talk to the police, asking them to fulfill the Albanian's demands. The police do indeed bargain. The hostages also ask for cigarettes and pizza, as if they're holed up somewhere, cramming to finish a project. These scenes between hostages, hostage-taker, and police are much less tense than one would expect see in a American action movie.

But these scenes serve the film's core theme: the hostage-taker is seeking freedom from prior failings (and framings) in a foreign land. He first and foremost wants to clear his name; he's not interested in the news cameras that follow the bus, nor does he get overly aggressive with any of the hostages (considering the circumstances, of course). Rather, the hostages begin to become somewhat compassionate with the hostage-taker (I'll leave it up to you to decide whether they were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome).

Giannaris does a good job keeping the momentum and tension up in the movie, and he delves below the surface with more than one character on the bus; only a handful remain relatively flat (predictably for sake of time, though everyone gets at least a few lines for us to paint a sketch of their personality from).

Once the bus crosses the Albanian border (much to the disagreement of the Greek police chief), the movie takes a dark turn. Giannaris casts Albania as a Wild West compared to northern Greece, and it is here where, sooner or later, we expect the bus to come to a halt.

Giannaris was at the screening I attended, and answered a few questions after the movie. He mentioned that the film didn't do well in Greece, noting that Greeks didn't like the way it portrayed themselves. Granted, Albanian/Greek relations haven't been the best of late, but as a Greek living outside of Greece, I think it was a fairly accurate portrayal. It's these kinds of movies that bring forth an artistic version of the truth that will help two countries and cultures come together over their differences, so I applaud Giannaris in his efforts in making what he must have known would be an unpopular movie in his native land.

Overall rating: 8.5/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Countries: Greece / Turkey
Languages: Greek / Albanian

Review: Warsaw (SIFF 2005)

On the heels of Hawaii, Oslo comes another movie involving characters of separate trajectories bound together by relationships and events. Warsaw shares the theme of love as a unifying (and destructive) force with Hawaii, Oslo, but I believe the similarities fall away from there.

Warsaw depicts a day in the life of different characters with different goals. A woman stops in Warsaw on the way to Andalusia with the hopes of finding love. A man leaves an orphanage he has lived in for most of his life to find a job. A fruit farmer arrives in the capital with the hopes of finding his long-lost daughter. A confused, aged war veteran can't find his way home.

Director Dariusz Gajewski places these characters together only at the very end. The audience sees the interconnections between the characters slowly uncover themselves, but the characters are not as quick to catch on; they pass each other on the street, unknowingly.

The character development and storyline was reasonably good in this film, albeit with a somewhat weak tying-together of the storylines at the end. But, the most striking part of this film for me was the portrayal of Warsaw as a new, modern Eastern European city, versus the Warsaw at the conclusion of World War II that we've all seen in film footage. The film depicts modern Europeans going about their lives in a modern (and snowy) capital city, with scenes that could play out just as well in Berlin or Edinburgh. For those of us who haven't traveled to Poland (myself included), the film becomes a peek into modern life in the city and challenges viewers to remake Warsaw in their (potentially stereotyped) minds.

Overall rating: 6.5/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 104m
Country: Poland
Language: Polish