PICTURE-PERFECT
Reflections on the silver screen
by Christine K. Zarb
 In Locarno festivalgoers are referred to with the term: Festivalieri. It’s easy to spot a typical film fest groupie. Regardless of where we’re from, we wear tee shirts and usually carry a backpack. Many of us are armed with bicycles because this makes us faster at beating the ever-increasing queues at the cinemas. But what is it that attracts us to the movies, like moths to a flame?
During Festival time, Locarno is like a lagoon that ebbs and flows with the rhythm of the screening tides. The throng of visitors breaks up into groups and as the projectors begin to roll, the streets empty out. Then, at regular intervals, rivulets of people come flowing out of the movie theatres, back into the streets, flooding the main square again.
At the presentation of his latest film Baby Boy, John Singleton said that it was films that kept him out of the streets. “I ditched school to go to the movies,” he smiled and the audience nodded in appreciation. After the screening Singleton stood outside the cinema for a while; people approached him to say hello and have their picture taken. That’s what celebrities are like in Locarno, really down-to-earth.
My girlfriend and I ended up sitting through the entire series of Japanese trash movies: Love Cinema, just for a chance to see P.J. Harvey who was a member of the video jury. We did end up sitting right next to her; funny thing was she was very reserved and we were too chicken to ask her about the European tour.
The video Pretty Colors was by a young Local director, Jesse Amirouche Alloua, who was touched when we told him we’d queued an hour early just to get in. Afterwards, we hung around the bar for free wine and cheese and Jesse flirted with my girlfriend.
A fil rouge in most of the movies seemed to be the issue of relationship. Our concern with relationship has become ever consuming. So much so that we never seem to tire of stories about human interaction. The relationships explored on screen however, were quite distorted, extreme and often absurd. In the documentary about L.A. ravers, Pretty Colors, the teenage protagonist complains to her mother that: “Dad left us per e-mail.” And in the video Tokyo Gomi-Onna (Tokyo Trash Baby) a young woman in love with her neighbor, decorates her flat with his trash.
On the other hand, food seemed very important on screen. Food like love is essential to our survival so it seeps into our story telling. But when food appears side by side with scenarios of love gone-wrong, it becomes charged with meaning. Food then unlike love, becomes the one thing that is readily available, which we can control and share with others more easily than our feelings. Especially in times of crisis, like in the film The Lawless Heart by Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger, where the fulcrum of the story takes place in a restaurant scene.
Of a more food-specific topic was the documentary Big Mac Small World by Peter Guyer, a tongue-in-cheek close-up at Mac Donald multinational corporate culture. Here too as the documentary takes us on a journey around the globe, questions are raised about the meaning of food and its role in contemporary society.
Then, there were stories of journeys. Journeys that took place within a character and journeys that were physical. Of course a movie, intrinsically, is always a kind of journey. But of all the journeys embarked on in Locarno, Delbaran by Abolfazl Jalili was the one that most strongly resonated with me. This tale of a 14-year-old Afghan refugee in Iran is told with a bare-boned sparseness, which is strongly poetic.
Let’s not forget the journeys back in time. The retrospective Out of the Shadows—Asians in American Cinema, gave us such an opportunity as well as the chance to interact with director Wayne Wang as he presented the audience with a selection of previously unreleased material.
As I sat back in the armchair and followed Wang’s Chinese Box Home Movies (a 24 hour tour of Hong Kong) it occurred to me. The most magical aspect of film is, undoubtedly, its ability to transport us to another place anywhere around the world with such immediacy. Movies enable us to glimpse other cultures and to look at life from new perspectives. Through them, we unravel mysteries.
Certainly moving pictures are instrumental in helping bridge differences. Movies open us up to the endless possibilities of life. And through storytelling, they help us embrace ‘the other’. But most significantly, movies remind us of the importance of still being able to dream.
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