101 Chodyangal
Review: 101 Chodyangal follows a boy on a mission. His teacher asks him to frame 101 questions and he only needs to find the questions. His teacher would give answers as well as a rupee for each question the boy asks. Sidharth Siva, while making his debut film, comes up with a sweet tale and narrates it without complexities.
Minon - who plays the lead - is a boy with a natural curiosity perennially inscribed on his face. Hisfriends make fun of him for his queer name - Anil Kumar Bokaro. Each question supposedly evolves from his own life - a rather bleak one with a jobless but loving father, a bed-ridden little sister and a struggling mother. His questions are not ground-breaking ones, but simple queries that he stumbles upon every day.
Sidharth makes it happen without distorting his narrative. The pursuit of questions slowly becomes a frantic search for a meaning in his life. There is a coldness that gradually replaces curiosity on the boy's face; something that juts out of an otherwise simple narrative. What actually mars this seemingly sweet progression is the use of lengthy sequences that leisurely follow the boy walking on the road, running across by-lanes, holding his book carrying the questions.
Indrajith dons the role of his sympathetic, good-hearted teacher, who is slightly stereotyped but warm enough to strike the right chord. There is a struggle for existence which assumes equal significance even with its share of politics. 101 Chodyangal might be chided for the over-play of hazy sentimentalism but this movie stands out for a memorable debut by the director and a brilliant cast.
Arabani
SYNOPSIS:
Yoseph returns to his native Druze village after 17 years with his son and daughter, whose Jewish mother he has divorced, and plans to settle down. This leads to friction within the closed conservative Druze community. Despite the problems and difficulties, Semadar, Yoseph's daughter, unexpectedly finds love.
Arabani is a slang word that combines Hebrew and Arabic. Yoseph is a Druze who returns to his native village after having been estranged from it for 17 years. He arrives with his son and daughter, whose Jewish mother he has just divorced. Yoseph plans to settle down in this small Druze village. That decision leads to friction within the closed, conservative Druze community and also with his mother Afifa, who accepts him and his children as part of her family. The friction stems from the fact that to be a real Druze, both parents must be Druze. Despite the problems and difficulties, Semadar, Yoseph's daughter, unexpectedly finds love.
Awards:
Best Screenplay in a Full-Length Feature at the Jerusalem International Film Festival 2013
Festivals:
Cinema South Festival - Opening film
Jerusalem International Film Festival, July 2013
Capturing Dad (2012)
"Chihi o tori ni" (original title)
Director:
Ryota NakanoWriter:
Ryota Nakano (screenplay)
Sawa asks her two daughters, Hazuki and Koharu, to visit their dying father whom she divorced long time ago. She wants them to take a picture of his face on his death bed and brings it back.
Review:
A road movie/coming-of-ager that's so wondrously quirky and simpatico with its subjects, it'll hold auds' hearts captive long after its magical end.
A femme-centric family drama tenderly unfolds as two sisters travel to the Japanese countryside to attend their estranged father’s funeral in “Capturing Dad,” a road movie/coming-of-ager that’s so wondrously quirky and simpatico with its subjects, it’ll hold auds’ hearts captivelong after its magical end. Drawing on personal experience, highly promising tyro helmer Ryota Nakano proves that winsome characters, spontaneous cast chemistry and lightness of touch can go a long way toward ensuring a quality film. Thoughtful marketing could take this gem beyond festivals and family channels into niche theatrical play.
Twenty-year-old Hazuki (Erisa Yanagi) and 17-year-old sis Koharu (Nanoka Matsubara) live with their mother Sawa (Makiko Watanabe), a lottery ticketseller, in the serene town of Numazu, Shizuoka prefecture. On hearing that her ex-husband, Masataka (Satoshi Nikaido), is on his deathbed, Sawa hands her daughters an insanely bulky “get well soon” fruit basket and sends them off to bid their father farewell.
By the time they arrive in rural Ashigara, Masataka has passed away, and the girls find themselves outsiders at the funeral, fumbling to behave appropriately in front of their paternal relatives, whose attitudes range from batty to pushy to downright spiteful. Their blundering attempts to fulfill Sawa’s request — to take a photo of Masataka, so she can “laugh in his face” — provide much droll humor, and result in a charming, fantastical twist.
From Nagisa Oshima’s “The Ceremony” to Juzo Itami’s “The Funeral” and, to a degree, Yojiro Takita’s “Departures,” funerals have served as a wickedly ripe setting for family secrets and buried trauma to erupt despite the characters’ initially reserved, decorous surfaces. “Capturing Dad” retains that same bemused observer’s irony, but maintains a lighter tone and a more personal focus.
Nakano reveals his storytelling craft in the subtle way he intersperses the sisters’ attempt to make sense of how they feel about their father, who abandoned them for another woman when they were only kids, with flashbacks to a day at the park with their parents some 10 years earlier. First recalled hazily, the scene gains bittersweet resonance when replayed again from Sawa’s perspective.
Concisely structured to run a brisk 73 minutes, the screenplay’s most touching thread belongs to the girls’ sweetly awkward first meeting with their younger brother, Chihiro (Kaito Kobayashi, adorably mousy and stoical), which ripens into a blood-is-thicker-than-water bond.
Sawa remains the stalwart emotional center on and offscreen for the girls, whose moods, feelings and decisions always revolve around her, even in her absence. And the film’s real achievement is to show how two women on the cusp of adulthood learn to appreciate their free-spirited, sometimes worryingly childish mother’s virtues as a steadfast breadwinner and friend.
Without trying to steal the limelight, Watanabe (“Love Exposure”), who deservedly won the supporting actress prize at the Asia Pacific Film Festival, brings a spark to otherwise subdued scenes, as at a sushi dinner that epitomizes the family’s relaxed intimacy. Yanagi and Matsubara share an unforced rapport as the bickering siblings.
Tech credits are clean and effective, expertly integrating the sparse but beautiful Japanese rural backdrop into the protags’ journey.
Arabani
Israel 2013, Fiction, 84 min
Director: Adi AdwanSynopsis
Arabani is a slang word that combines Hebrew and Arabic. Yoseph is a Druze who returns to his native village after having been estranged from it for 17 years. He arrives with his son and daughter, whose Jewish mother he has just divorced, and plans to settle down in this small Druze village. That decision leads to friction within the closed, conservative Druze community and also with his mother Afifa, who accepts him and his children as part of her family. The friction stems from the fact that to be a real Druze, both parents must be Druze. Despite the problems and difficulties, Smadar, Yoseph's daughter, unexpectedly finds love.
Awards and Festivals | |||
Awards:
Best Screenplay in a Full-Length Feature at the Jerusalem International Film Festival 2013
Festivals:
Cinema South Festival - Opening film
Jerusalem International Film Festival, July 2013
"Arabani offers many beautiful and moving moments portraying a closed community with strict traditions which has only rarely been featured in cinema." Neta Alexander, Haaretz
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Club Sandwich
Dir: Fernando Eimbcke/Mexico/82min/2013|
A delightfully mannered and off-beat take on the oft-told ‘coming of age’ story, Fernando Eimbcke’s charming film is both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny as the relationship between a 15 year-old boy and his loving mother is tested by the arrival on the scene of a girl his own age.
A delightful twist adolescent coming-of-age story, brimming with subtle but extremely funny sequences and directed with compassion and delicacy.
It may all sound familiar, but in the safe hands of writer/director Eimbcke – whose films Duck Season(2004) and Lake Tahoe (2008) were firm festival favourites – it is a different take, and one which should appeal to savvy art house distributors, while further festival screenings will be a must.
The charm of Club Sandwich is that 35 year-old single mother Paloma (María Renée Prudencio) and her fifteen year-old son Hector (Lucio Giménez Cacho Goded), who are vacationing at a resort near the beach, are the very best of friends. They relish their warm and tender relationship, spending all of their time together – whether it be rubbing sun tan lotion into each others backs; bombing into the pool, playing rock-scissor-paper to decide who has the first shower, and simply laying quietly on their twin beds watching television in their hotel room.
But while their relationship is wonderfully close, Hector is also changing. Hair is faintly growing on his upper lip; he is keen to keep applying deodorant under his arms; he has started masturbating and – unusually for him – one day he opts to stay in hotel while his mother heads off to the beach.
The arrival of Jazmin (Danae Reynaud) at the resort complicates matters further. She there with her aged father and his new wife/nurse, but is more interested in getting to know Hector. With their facial expressions rarely changing, the teens start to spend time together – sat side-by-side on a bed, sat by the pool, basking in the water (until, rather amusingly, Paloma ‘bombs’ them – with the sexual chemistry between the two teenagers becoming more and more palpable.
The joy of the film is Paloma’s reaction to the prospect of her son/best friend being entranced by Jazmin. Reacting almost like a jealous lover, she seeks to gently sabotage their time together (her face a picture of mixed emotions, while the expressions in the teens’ faces rarely changes) but her best efforts come to nothing –especially funny is a game consequences that she sets up, but turns out to work against her - as the pair kiss and sexually explore, which is all handled in a very tasteful and funny way.
Mexican filmmaker Fernando Eimbcke’s third feature film is a delightful twist adolescent coming-of-age story, brimming with subtle but extremely funny sequences and directed with compassion and delicacy. Hector may be growing into adulthood but he is never the butt of any jokes, instead the humour comes from the gentle changes in the complex relationship between mother and son, with María Renée Prudencio a real delight as the gently needy Paloma.
